Welcome back to the blog mini-series where I write about my experience running a Kickstarter campaign to help release an album.
Wooo!
Things are going amazing! We’re more than 2/3 of the way there and it’s been less than two weeks! We’ve received over one hundred pledges! We got selected as a staff pick (a KickPick, I wish they’d call it, but for some humorless corporate reason they don’t) and the generosity of people pledging and posting about the project has totally blown me away! I am feeling the Big Love!
And we’ve hit a brick wall.
Perhaps what’s most amazing is my utter lack of faith. What I need most now is patience and persistence. What I have instead is doubt.
The sloggy middle weeks in a Kickstarter campaign are widely known as a kind of celebratory doldrums. You’re like a party boat set adrift so far from shore you become a fuzzy smudge on the horizon. Everyone on Facebook is now officially immune to your posts. Your hardcore supporters have all re-tweeted and shared to the degree that you could rationally expect them to. It’s too soon to start going berserk with a fever-pitch rally, as you need to keep something in reserve for the final push. But you still have to maintain an Everything-Is-Awesome presence or the dawdlers, the distracteds, and the well-intentioned souls who are just too busy to pledge at the moment will be lulled into thinking you’ve gone away, you’ve met your goal, you don’t need them anymore.
The challenge now is to keep up the high-kicking, pinwheeling, doo-dah without bugging the shit out of everyone you’ve ever crossed paths with.
I won’t pretend I have a clue what I’m doing or that I’m anywhere near getting it right. Hence the doubt.
I try not to dwell on the doubt. I’m aware there’s nothing more dull or cliché than a Jewish guy wrangling with his neuroses. And there’s no worse fate for a Gen X-er than scanning as cliché. The old logical double bind.
So I’ll just soft-shoe out of here, pearly whites ablaze, donning my star-spangled satin unitard, twirling my roman-candle-launching baton to the sound of my own music blaring at air-raid volume, and catch up with you next week.
