After my posts last week about Chris Guillebeau‘s new book The $100 Startup, I’ve had a lot of questions about the intersection of money and music. One of the main requests I hear is regarding the hugely popular crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. The mission of Kickstarter is to help creative people — artists, musicians, filmmakers, designers and the like — fund their own creative projects. Musicians have survived for hundreds of years by the sums they earned from patrons and grants. Kickstarter has challenged these traditional models of funding by allowing artists of all kinds to solicit donations, ranging from $1-$10,000, from the crowd. The crowd in this case is usually made up of friends, family, and acquaintances. The deeper your connections on social media; the better your reach in a Kickstarter campaign.
Planning a Kickstarter campaign can be difficult for many artists who are unaccustomed to fundraising. This is where Kevin Clark, friend of the Sybaritic Singer, comes in to save the day! He has developed a series of posts to help artists successfully navigate their first Kickstarter campaign. I wholeheartedly recommend this to you all. He even provides you with a planning spreadsheet free of charge. This is a great resource.
Check out what Kevin has to say about the series:
This is the first in a series of posts that should help you get a firmer grasp on how to plan your first Kickstarter, how much money you really need to raise, and how much money should expect to raise before launch the project. If you’ve got a great idea for a project, but don’t have a lot of experience with business, budgets, and revenue projections, you’ve come to the right place. This approach should be most helpful for arts and creative projects that have funding goals not much higher than $10,000, though it can be of use for any crowdfunding project.
This series of posts will teach you how to use this spreadsheet, which has all the formulas in place along with some dummy data so that you can tweak numbers and get a feel for just how many people you need for this sort of thing. If you want to just play with the spreadsheet, go right ahead.
Thanks, Megan! I hope the spreadsheet turns out to be really useful to your Sybaritic Readers. I want to help people get in control of the money and business sides of their artistic lives, and I think this work can be a big help. If any of you have questions, anything is confusing, or you have anything else on your mind, get in touch or comment on my post about it – I’ll try to release updated versions of the sheet to answer people’s concerns.
Thanks again!