"There was an attempt..."

Needless to say, SketchyReq's KickStarter didn't go as planned...

I'm not going to pretend like it was all a part of my plan, to hit 10% KickStarter funding in the first week and not get a single cent more for weeks and weeks afterward.

This will be kind of a stream of consciousness breakdown on how I feel about failing to meet my funding goal, what went wrong, and what I would do if I were to re-wind back to the beginning of my funding phase. Then I'll talk about what I'm going to do now that I'm definitely not going to hit my funding goal.

The Feels...

Honestly, I'm not all that upset. As I explained on Twitter (can't find the tweet now) I didn't need the funding. The cost of running the front- and back-end servers and the nodes only total up to about $200 USD a month, and I kept my full-time job, so I'm able to pay for this fine at its current scale. I was looking for 6 months of funding to run it at a larger scale so I could test it with everything running as if it were in prod (and to give myself a bit of compensation for the amount of time I put into it) but I can still test it at a smaller scale until I'm ready to push to prod. I've also spent some time thinking about ways to scale the cost up alongside the customer base while in beta in a way that isn't going to wreck my bank account, so it's basically just going to take a bit longer and will take a bit more focus on scaling.

It was pretty exhilerating to see over $1k come in to the KickStarter in the first week or two. That was cool seeing people come in to support the project monetarily. I'm also pretty psyched at how far the KickStarter spread in terms of awareness: loads of people sent me messages about it being a cool idea and such.

Any negative feelings I had really were overridden by seeing people get psyched about the project, getting feedback and writing code in languages I've never learned. I've learned a ton over the process and I really do think I can turn this into a profitable thing with a bit of elbow grease and attention.

All in all, it was a valuable learning experience. Running a KickStarter is hard work, or it doesn't work. For me, it was the latter. I didn't put near enough effort into marketing material and such, so I'm the only one to blame there. If I could sum up the feels, it's basically a shrug.

What Went Wrong and How I Should Have Done It

I could write a book on what I did wrong with the KickStarter and what I'd do differently, but I'll try to keep it concise here.

Launching with very little marketing material

Since realizing that the KickStarter wasn't likely to get funded, I checked out a couple others in my space (information security) and I was struck with how much marketing material they had at launch. Logos, promotional videos, explainers, stretch goals, tons of different, well-researched and high-quality marketing pieces.

I had... a really shitty landing page and an even shittier launch video, and a logo that isn't great either.

I think this was a bit of laziness on my end ("the idea is so cool that people won't need cool videos!") and a bit of underestimation on what's needed for funding. Since I'm... not great at artsy things, if I could go back I would save up some money to pay someone who is good at marketing, graphic design and creating video advertisements to handle that quite a while before I launched. I should have had tons of material for the initial launch as well as marketing material for the rest of the funding period.

Not sticking to a marketing schedule

This is due to a combination of laziness and the craziness of the current world.

I had planned to do development livestreams on my Twitch channel, and did them for a while... until I just stopped. It required me to work on the project for 2 or three hours at a time, 3-5 times a week, on a schedule. If you've followed me on Twitch or YouTube, you know I'm... not great at a schedule. I have a full time job, a baby and (before COVID) a social life, as well as a general reluctance to sticking to a schedule... so I fell off. I also didn't work near as hard as I should have at releasing video updates and demos, only releasing one in the full 60 day period.

If I could go back, I'd slap myself for not forcing a schedule to work on SketchyReq on stream and I'd force myself to hire an editor so that I could release demos and such more often.

Not lining up 'amplifiers' earlier

I hit some people up the day of the launch, asking if they'd be interested in funding the project or at least amplifying it... most left me on read, which is to be expected, and others "checked it out" with very few of them funding or sharing outside of a close group of friends. In hindsight, that's kind of a "duh" moment, and something I should have handled way earlier.

Launching with a really bad landing page

Like I said earlier... I'm not very artsy. I'm not great at the design side of web design, and it's something I've done some research on since I launched. I threw a... really really really ugly site up as a landing page, literally just showing a logo and the launch video, as well as a sign-up form that... didn't work at launch (why did I not fully test that in prod before launch????) and I put pretty minimal effort into designing the landing page before launch. That's a lot of laziness and a general fear of design stuff.

If I could go back, I'd pay someone to do the landing page for me or spend a couple months learning design and making it look pretty first.

Not lining up the demo earlier

Honestly, I should have launched with a PoC demo. I didn't put one up until like 30 days after launch (halfway through) and it didn't get much traction. A lot of people were asking how it would work early on and a PoC demo would have been a better idea.

Shooting for too much $$$

I wanted 6 months of full funding. I think I broke down the budget well, and I don't think I was asking for too much if I was going to go for full funding... but considering how cheap the project is to run, I could have gone lower (50% of funding) to just offset the cost a bit. That way I could split the difference and scale up just a bit instead of asking for the full cost to be covered. Since KickStarter is all-or-nothing, asking for too much is a pretty bad idea... I only got 10% funding, but if I had ask for half of what I did I might have been able to push for funding a bit easier. Asking for funding when you're 50% of the way to a smaller goal is a lot easier than asking for funding when you're 10% of the way to a huge goal.

What's next?

Well, I'm going to basically do a restart. I'm going to scale down a bit and host most of the testing infrastructure at my house on virtual machines. I'm also going to go back to Twitch streaming development, as a way to market the project, chat with potential future customers and potentially build a new stream of revenue. I'm going to shoot for launching by the end of the year, hopefully by October, and put out as many updates as possible on my YouTube channel. Like I said before, I can launch this project without funding, I'm just going to have to do it a bit slower and scale up a bit slower as well.

I'm going to focus on learning the artsy bits I'm bad at to make the site look a bit more polished and get things functional ASAP.