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We’re crowd funding!
I can’t tell you how young and funky I feel saying that; all the fashionable and trendy types are crowd funding their great ideas and well, so are we!
As a small business we really understand the importance of listening to our customers; to us, customers are kings and queens and we do all we can to agree with you (although we did draw the line at a dinner party game for 37 people, all with a speaking part that needed to be done and dusted in 30 minutes. Not a chance!).
As you know…we support you to find the right products for your party… and, from time to time a chance conversation in the office to find a solution to a customers’ conundrum leads to a great new idea.
And CosyKiller is the result of one of those chance conversations!
We think CosyKiller is a Great New Idea and judging by the response we’ve had so far we’re confident you all think so too.
What is it? – let us explain:
Want to support this? Just click HERE to make a pledge. There are lots of options available to you. And if we don’t get the full support of kickstarter – no one loses any money – so it’s a win:win scenario for backers. If the project goes ahead you’ll get the latest murder mystery to hit the market at a fraction of the cost, with lots of extras; and if it doesn’t – you don’t pay a penny!
What is crowdfunding all about?
That’s a whole other blog… and if you’re thinking about doing it – and want some advice – we should be in the position to help in 30 days…
What we can tell you is that there are a number of crowd funding platforms out there and we did our research. We spent hours looking at projects on other sights (Research again. Did we mention distraction?!) to see what sort of projects were attracted to the various sites and we watched endless hours of crowd funding videos to see what we liked and what we didn’t.
I’m not even going to start making recommendations about which site is best for you, there are so many variables and I wouldn’t even claim to understand one tenth of the opportunities that are available. All I will say, is think carefully, research and pick wisely. We believe we’ve picked the right site for us and you’ll find us on Kickstarter.com
The other issue that we became very aware of very quickly was the quality of the video pitches. We knew that we needed to film ours professionally and although only one of us is a professional actress I don’t think we did too badly. Having our film company come in and film for us, as well as sourcing all the additional clips and supporting our voice-over artists too has, we hope, stood us out from the rest of the crowd. Certainly not as cheap as the DIY version we did consider, but we do believe it’ll prove to be money well spent when we’ve finished this journey.
And what a journey it’s proving to be. Less than a week in and we’ve already had questions from all over the world, a fabulous enquiry from Canada, plenty of backers all cheering us on and spreading the word. We couldn’t be more thankful. Plenty of international press have picked up on the story too, so watch this space as news of our crowd funded project really starts to roll out across the globe.
If I was going to spout advice to you I think I’d say this:
1. Be absolutely sure that the project you’ve picked to crowd fund is the right one for your business now. Crowd funding isn’t a quick fix / quick launch, so don’t take your eye off your core business.
2. Be absolutely certain of the message you’re taking to your backers; we’ve found lots of stories about projects that failed…
3. Be bold with your video story; it pays to have someone film it professionally for you as you’ll stand out from the crowd.
4. Be prepared for the adventure to cost you; we are crowd funding the end result, but to get it to this stage we have spent thousands of our own money.
5. Be ready to shout. Loudly. Call in all the favours you can think of, compile a list of press people to speak to, bloggers, customers…get your lists ready before you launch and just keep on shouting. And shouting!
Overall though, our advice is come on in and join us…crowd funding is proving to be great fun and we can’t recommend it enough.
Good luck!