Dear people who kickstart,

[jack]

Dear people who start a kickstarter project, I am really not an expert at this, so if you have expert advice you probably know better than me already. But as someone who occasionally sees links to cool-looking kickstarters, I can tell you what seems good to me.

On the front page, try to have some sort of prominent summary, ideally two sentences, saying WHAT IT IS and WHY IT'S COOL. Um, maybe that's supposed to be obvious. But seriously, "We have an awesome webcomic, we made an rpg boardgame of it" or "we made an isometric computer game with detailed wizard duels" or "I wrote about about vampires living in london" or "here's a gadget that makes your bike sound like a horse", all of those make me think "oh, cool, can I see more". Even if I've never heard of it before. And many other pitches would make me think "good luck, but not for me".

But I seem to see so many kickstarters that say "here is a brand new BRANDNAME which is exciting and ADJECTIVE and lets you experience ADJECTIVE and ADVERBITY and here's a video for more information". That's fine. Unless you want me to give you money, in which case it has the disadvantage that all that coy non-information doesn't make me think "Yes, THIS random twitter link is the one I must track down the backstory for" it makes me think "why was I here again? *back* "

I'm assured, videos are great for persuading people. But I assume that only applies if people watch them?

To me, a video is saying "Dear technocrats, busy people, people with full-time jobs, people with children, people with smartphones, people under 25 with short attention spans, people with disabilities, methodical people and googlebot, get out of here, we don't want your money or your interest." Fine, you can sell to whoever you want to sell to, but that's excluding a LOT of desirable market shares...

Comments

[simont]

here's a gadget that makes your bike sound like a horse

As in just clip-clop noises, or the whole deal with occasional snorts and whinnies and periodic unpleasant-sounding splatters on the ground at the hind end? :-)

The other day I walked past an 8-year-old (or thereabouts) on what sounded startlingly like a motorbike – actually an ordinary unpowered bicycle, with a big metal cylinder attached to the rear wheel which was some kind of deliberate noise-generating gimmick. But it sounded right enough (and also was styled to look like the right kind of giant exhaust pipe) that I had to double-take to convince myself he really was pedalling :-)

[danohu]

this, presumably.

[which is a nice idea, screwed up by the fact that mass production is Really Really Hard, so they've never been able to sell them at a profit]

[jack]

Yes, exactly.

Some of the examples I made up, but that one I was thinking of trotify (which did have an awesome pitch, and ALSO an awesome video I actually watched because people said "you have to watch this" :)).

[danohu]

I instinctively agree on the videos. I'd really love to see an explanation of why you and I are wrong -- presumably somebody, somewhere has hard data on how all-the-people-I-don't-know love to watch videos.

[jack]

Yeah, I'd be interested to know. I assume there's a combination of "many people DO watch videos" and "videos look snazzier" and "people selling things find it hard to remember not everyone does" and "the conversion rate of people who are not already interested is fairly low anyway".

[simont]

I wonder if it's about reading speed, partly – the faster you read (or, even more so, the faster you can skim looking for the interesting bits), the more you perceive a time differential between consuming the same information in written form where you can zoom through it as fast as you like, or in video form where it has a fixed duration. If you read at something closer to video speed, perhaps it doesn't strike you as nearly such a significant difference. I don't know about you, but I'm fairly sure Jack and I are both in the category of 'read very fast, hence perceive the switch to video as a huge slowdown'.

Or it could be value of time. It struck me reading this post that when I do choose to watch a video, I'm making what's essentially a buying decision, only instead of deciding on the available information that some object is worth spending my money on, I'm deciding that the video is worth spending time on. In fact, I budget my time more carefully than my money, because as I perceive it, I have less of it to spare; so it seems obviously backwards to me that I should have to choose to commit my very scarce time to a promotional video (often on less information than I use for monetary buying decisions) before I can find out whether I want to commit my less scarce money to the thing itself. But if my relative value judgment of time and money was biased in the opposite direction, perhaps that might seem a lot less silly!

[rmc28]

I find it is both that I read *fast* but I also find it easier to retain and consider number detail when written than when heard. (this is also why I hate phone conversations to consider payment plans for *anything* - I want it written).

Also, there are many times where I can read something but not easily listen to something without disruption (e.g. sitting with children, browsing in my lunchbreak at work, etc). It's not just the time to watch a video, but the time to find my headphones, put them on, faff with volume, etc etc.

[damerell]

This seems like the modern version of the naughties software project (usually IME videogame related) where the front page is a newsfeed and it takes considerable work to find out what it _is_.

[jack]

I still see a lot of smartphone games like this, someone mentions it, I go to look it up, there's a play store which just has reviews of people saying "I enjoyed it" and "it didn't work for me", and a website somewhere with news about the development of the 2.0 version, and NOTHING about what it ACTUALLY IS...