The Kickstarter Diaries 15: The Avalanche
The latest episode in my tragicomic behind-the-scenes account of life during a crowdfunding campaign.
First loves and first Kickstarter campaigns are the same: clumsy, enthusiastic, uninformed, unforgettable.
My first campaign set out to raise $8000 to travel around the world carving indigenous scripts. Think about that for a moment. Around the world, stopping countless times for several days, for $8000? Well, didn’t I say “uninformed”?
After maybe three weeks my total stood at a couple of thousand. In retrospect, I’m surprised that much had been pledged: I had no follower base, no campaign strategy, no way of helping potentially interested people to find me. And a subject nobody knew anything about.
Everything changed in Forks, Maine (a sentence I am sure has never been written in the history of the world). Forks is a tiny town in the middle of the endless dark forests of Maine, trying to brand itself as a resort. My family and I went there for white-water rafting, which I love. It’s incredible to me, now, that I should have gone off on a trip in the middle of a Kickstarter, but as I say, clumsy, enthusiastic, uninformed.
On the first evening, at a large log cabin that was billing itself as fine dining, my phone buzzed. I looked at it in surprise: Forks is the last place where you would expect to have signal. I had an email—no, half-a-dozen emails—from Kickstarter. In those days, whenever a pledge came in, you’d automatically get the details, and not one but several had arrived.
I was surprised and delighted, but even as I scrolled through them, my email refreshed and another half-dozen appeared. Person X had pledged $15. Person Y had pledged $1. Person Z had pledged $25.
I had to apologise to everyone else—I’m not an email-at-the-table kind of guy. But this was incredible: literally every 45 seconds, more money was coming in. And on, and on. It was the moment every crowdfunder dreams of: The Avalanche.
What had happened, I guessed, was the Kickstarter had picked my campaign out and featured it as one of the Projects We Love—and as the platform was much less used in those days, it really stood out.
All that afternoon and evening the pledges poured in. I reached my goal in a matter of hours, and still the avalanche roared. Then, gradually, things began to change—not in the funding, but in me.
I had grown up poor, so this was a dream I had never dared to dream: people coming from every direction to give me money. Utterly intoxicating. But having grown up poor, I had also been groomed in modest expectations. I had passed my goal—wasn’t this enough? Wasn’t there someone else who needed the money more? But yet again—free money! I had a Kickstarter angel on one shoulder, a Kickstarter devil on the other.
In some respects, the episode was brief: The Avalanche lasted perhaps two days before tapering off, but not before it had more than doubled my goal and I ended up with over $17,000—which, I explained in a previous episode of these diaries, I spent mostly on fulfilling rewards that I had set at levels that were too low.
But really, that experience has never ended. Whenever I see the total start to spin, part of me half-rises from its seat in excitement, hoping it will never stop. And even when it stops, that same absurdly optimistic self watches for a minute, two minutes, thinking that another pledge will come in, and another, haunted by the ghost of an avalanche.
You can start your own avalanche by pledging HERE.
