Friday, March 15, 2013
Crowdfunding
Some interesting examples of crowd-funding, and low-price-selling.
The one with the software sounds like the standard "shareware" model, that you can use it for free, but the creator asks for donations. If you have 250,000 users and 2% donate, that sounds like a typical conversion rate.
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We kind of did our own "Kickstarter" for The Book, before there even was a Kickstarter. As some of you know, we self-published, and had decided on "pre-sales" in order to fund the initial printing costs. At the quantity we were printing, we needed about 6$ a book, I think like 3000$. We could have funded that ourselves, but it also allowed us to guage interest in The Book. I mean, why spend 3000$, if we're only going to sell 100 books? We offered I think it was a 2$ discount, if you pre-ordered. Anyway, we got enough interest to go ahead and at least breakeven. And then we just kept reprinting as more sales came in.?
(I should note that we had already spent 1000+ man-hours in the research, writing, production, etc. So, we were not going to "break-even" on that, just on the printing and shipping costs.)
A musician I’m a big fan of, Kevin Devine, recently had his Kickstarter end. He was asking for $50K to record two full length albums this spring/summer and the Kickstarter raised $115K and he’d reached his goal in 12 hours or so.
What I find most interesting is that there are a lot of musicians or bands out there that are completely opposed to Kickstarter and so it’s become sort of taboo (at least in the independent music scene). I don’t understand that line of thinking at all.