Launch Day
Despite being separated by three states, Cody and I worked on the pitch for a month and a half solid, cramming to the very last weekend to get everything down. It verged on stressful as we ran full speed toward the 10AM Monday release date, a time that most everyone agreed was a great way to pick up good initial steam considering it was when many east coasters were surfing the web before preparing for their week. When Kickstarter approved our pitch the previous Thursday, that vibrant green Launch button was a magnetic sight and I was tempted a half-dozen times to click on it just to see what would happen (it doesn’t launch right away, thankfully). We were both exhausted come launch time, but for opposite reasons. Cody had been up all evening after sleeping in the previous day and I got very little sleep. MANEATER is a project of passion and it can be very unnerving to expose something to air that you’ve worked on for so long. What would people think?
Click. Launched.
As other articles described it, comments and questions would come flooding in and the success of your campaign would hinge on how well you’d respond to those inquiries, but for the first hour, the campaign was a virtual ghost town as I watched our project drift down the Newly Launched section on Kickstarter. Oh no. Had we created something so revolting that no one would support us? The next 30 days looked like they’d be nearly impossible.
Then a message popped up! Oh, some guy was just soliciting for Doctor Who fan art. Who does that?
The campaign total sat at $0 for nearly 45 minutes before the first $50 contribution came in. As the afternoon and subsequent day rolled on, the total leapt to the $1,995 total you see above, an amount that’s still crazy to see. Just over a week into the campaign and I’m learning the hardest lesson that I hadn’t learned yet: if you’re not building a game or manufacturing titanium guitar picks, you better have a fanbase.
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