The Kickstarter Diaries, Part II: More Robots, In Space

 

The second entry in my diary of life behind the scenes in a Kickstarter campaign. The first entry recounted being attacked by bots as soon as the campaign started. Now read on…

On the second day of the campaign, whose total was actually falling farther and farther from its goal as the fake bot pledges (as I explained in the last diary entry) were withdrawn one by one, help seemed to arrive.

I got an email, ostensibly on Kickstarter e-stationery, ostensibly from the head of Kickstarter’s film division, telling me that my project is so significant they had selected me for individual mentoring by a major Kickstarter creator (so major he was actually called a Creator)—in my case Joel Hodgson, creator of the cult TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000. They even gave me what seemed to be his personal email and invited me to contact him right away.

The choice of Hodgson and this show in particular is important (though also a bit odd, as my campaign is not trying to raise money for a film or TV show), so I need to describe it for you in case you haven’t seen it.

The show as conceived in its early days, when I used to watch it, starred Hodgson as Joel Robinson, a janitor trapped by mad scientists on a satellite orbiting the Earth and forced to watch a series of ghastly old sci-fi movies. To stay sane, Joel crafts robot companions Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot to keep him company and help him mock and jeer at each movie, watching in silhouette from a row of theater seats at the bottom of the screen.

Okay. Back to the Kickstarter.

I emailed at once, as follows:

As a longtime watcher of MST3K I am astonished and delighted that Kickstarter has invited me to contact you. 

(I’m also a little wary, as since my most recent campaign began yesterday I’ve been bombarded with dozens of bots trying to mine data and salespeople trying to sell me their fundraising services, but at the moment I’m inclined to believe you are in fact a real person!) 

Thanks for offering to share your knowledge and experience. 

Within a couple of hours I got an email back, at the head of which was a little person thumbnail of Joel H himself. I know because I googled him and there was that very same thumbnail. He asked for the link to my Kickstarter campaign home page and said he’d check it out.

Meanwhile, literally every half an hour I was getting emails from people claiming to be crowdfunding experts offering their services to boost the success of my own campaign, which had now deflated like a balloon—or to put it another way, now finally represented the actual pledges by actual people, many of whom I know to have backed me time and again over the years, without whom nothing I do would be possible. Let’s not forget that.

Remarkably soon, Joel (or perhaps Tom Servo and Crow T Robot) got back to me, but his response was curiously unhelpful. It told me my content wasn’t aligning as well as it might with the Kickstarter algorithms, whatever that means, and that the most successful campaigns reach their funding goals within 48 hours.

My first thought was, Joel, you managed to raise a ton of money in 48 hours, but you had an already-popular comedy show to build on. I have endangered alphabets.

My second thought was, Hey, wait a minute. The email was almost identical, phrase for phrase, with all the pitches I was getting from the supposed crowdfunding experts. It was not, I’m 90% sure, Joel H. It was AI and the space robots.

So here we are. I am not going to pay to have my algorithms aligned, as if by a financial chiropractor. I am going to do what I always do and say to you:

Hey, my faithful friends and supporters, I need your help. Please back my campaign if you can afford to do so, given these strange times. Please encourage your friends to do likewise. I’m not trying to meet my goal in 48 hours, I’m trying to meet it in 29, now 26 days so I can do some good in the world, and I can’t do it without you. Thanks for your time and attention.

Oh, and to prove I am not a bot, each diary entry will contain one entirely random five-syllable word. A code. A clue. Today’s is aristocracy.

Hang in there, everyone.

 

P.S. If you are a human being, I welcome your pledge to my campaign. Thankyouverymuch.