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The ThoughtScape Comics #1 Kickstarter: Post-Mortem, Part Two.
Check out part one here if you are joining us in progress.
Alright, let’s pick up where we left off after a quick go around the conference table to see how everyone’s doing…
Yeah, that seems about right.
Alright, alright, alright… let’s get to it. Post-mortem Part Two!
Project Challenges
What elements of the project went wrong?
Hmm… I don’t know if anything went outright wrong. The biggest stress was waiting for the books once they hit the open waters of mighty Pacific. International shipping tip: You don’t get a lot of updates as your comics cross the ocean on a giant ship. Or any updates. It’s just how it works. The stress came once it was clear that there were boxes of ThoughtScape Comics sitting in a container which was sitting in a ship that, due to COVID-related worldwide freight backups, was likely sitting off the coast of California in a giant line of similar ships, all of which were waiting to be unloaded because there are now not enough dock workers to fill all the port jobs. The supply chain breakdown is wild.
Anyway, fingers crossed in case something still arises, but so far, nothing went WRONG with the project. Also helps, of course, to be a company of one.
What specific processes need improvement?
Ah, but this I’ve got something for!
Kickstarter pumps backer data out in a single spreadsheet. No pre-sorting or anything. That’s up to you. I don’t LOVE spreadsheets, so I found myself creating multiple versions of fulfillment sheets trying to find the right approach that worked for me personally in terms of packing, importing into my shipping software (the awesome Pirate Ship, thank you very much Matt Emmons for the recommendation) labeling/postage creation, and the like. I never did come up with a solid round-trip approach, a one-spreadsheet-to-rule-them-all deal that efficiently tracked each backer through each step of the process down to ending up with a spreadsheet that included all their KS data, PLUS their shipment tracking number. Now the thing is, though, that you don’t really need this, because with Pirate Ship you can very easily search all your shipments… but is this lazy?
How can these processes be improved in the future?
Ease of searching aside, I would still like to end up with a more tick-all-the-boxes checklist approach that suits my triple-checking nature. I think the answer might just be PAPER. Something I can actually write a checkmark on. I fucking LOVE checking things off on lists. I’ll definitely be sending this to a subcommittee for further brainstorming.
What were the key problems areas (i.e. budgeting, scheduling, etc.)?
See above. I’m pretty great and not much went wrong.
I jest.
The key problem area was campaign drag. No, I didn’t mention it above as a process that went wrong, because it is not really a process, but more a state of mind.
Campaign Drag is feeling bad even while you are watching your campaign doing well. It’s doubting your campaign half-way through even though the analytics sites (did you know there are sites like Bigger Cake that just scrape KS data and make predictions and have graphs and such for each project? A little weird, a little cool) are projecting that you will hit your target.
Most importantly, though, campaign drag was, for me, the constant social media push. Living and dying by Twitter and how much you post about your comic book while the world is burning down is a mindfuck. Couple that with the general unease of relentless self-promotion and your tumultuous emotions soon turn to a very real queasy feeling in your stomach.
Anyway, this made me seriously consider just outright cancelling the campaign around the midpoint, when the mid-campaign fundraising lag was at its peak and so was the campaign drag. I wondered why I was even doing it.
Strangely, our corporate post-mortem format doesn’t follow this question up with any questions on how to improve key problem areas for next time, so I guess I’ll save my thoughts there for Lessons Learned later on.
List any technical challenges.
I discovered that while my ancient MacBook is a workhorse and I love it (and Apple can take that ridiculous dynamic touch bar on newer models and hurl it into the sun), it doesn’t have enough juice to truly handle video editing.
Some learning was required as far as my part understanding of the intricacies of color conversion when dealing with InDesign and exporting the final files. It’s been a minute since Magazine Production class at the U of O J-School (anyone remember PageMaker?). Anyway, this led to needing to reproof one time (electronic proof stage only, thankfully).
Post Project Tasks / Future Considerations
List any continuing development and maintenance objectives
Locking down and managing the final versions of all files in a clean and consistent manner is a goal moving forward. I get a bit too excited sometimes and just want to see how the issue is coming together, so I just download the files, place them directly from the DOWNLOADS folder into the InDesign doc, etc. Amateur hour file management behavior. It feels so right in the moment, but only leads to heartache. No more! This I pledge to you. Or to myself. Or to whomever cares or is still reading.
Paper checklists for backer shipment tracking.
What actions still need to be completed, and who is responsible for completing them?
It would be me, but the only task outstanding is to get cracking on subsequent issues and Kickstarters (see below).
Lessons Learned
Project Plans and Scheduling were well-documented, complete with adequate structure and detail
More or less. Planning for some more EASILY repeatable social media post creation would be beneficial next time, with the goal of decreasing the amount of time spent directly engaging with Twitter (the app, I mean… the people are great… er, I mean, the people I know whom I interact with directly on Twitter are great…)
Project Schedule contained all elements of the project
No real scheduling issues, the benefit of managing yourself.
Alright, the format is breaking down, I see, since corporate projects are neither comics nor Kickstarters. I’m going off the page here then to wrap this all up by talking about…
Improving Key Problem Areas
Dealing with/Accepting Campaign Drag… as this was by far the least enjoyable aspect of the entire project, I would love to find a way to circumvent it, but is that possible? I have a few thoughts on this that I may try to put into action. Or maybe I should try to put them all into the mix and see what succeeds:
Employ someone else to handle a large chunk of social media: A GREAT concept, but the employ part is tough on a bootstrap-level budget, and when there is art to be paid for.
Schedule posts via Hootsuite or similar: Ahead of the Kickstarter I generated all, or most, of the graphic assets I needed for the campaign. Perhaps with the next project, it would make sense to pre-bake a lot of the content and schedule the posts, only heading into Twitter, etc. in order to interact with and boost posts from others and such.
Schedule social media times vs. a free-for-all: Establish times of day to engage the socials, vs. just doing it whenever. This one requires a lot of discipline that I’m not sure I’ve got. Maybe if I queued up a couple scripts to be working on specifically during the campaign, so that it was abundantly clear to me that if I just willy-nilly hop on Twitter it is at the expense of actually writing comics, it would help me be more disciplined.
Last, the big one… consolidate my Kickstarter approach. The campaign took a lot of energy, and a lot of energy away from my real end goal of actually making comics. So, thinking about trying to knock out multiple campaigns a year is daunting. Instead, how about using Kickstarter to essentially fund an entire years worth of comics? Bonkers, you say? You may be right, but if it worked, how glorious.
Which brings us to the end of the Post-Mortem…
(I’ll give you a moment to shake off any drowsy conference room vibes)
[ A MOMENT ]
… and to…
A TSC.FLASH FORWARD SECRET MISSION!
Efforts at TSC HQ have turned to the future and to the bonkers notion mentioned above and therein lies the purpose of this, your secret mission: A single TSC Kickstarter for THREE ISSUES (numbers 2, 3 and 4, naturally) to be released quarterly in 2022, is now in stealth COMING SOON mode, and I seek your assistance in helping me make it a big, nay, a phenomenal success.
YOUR MISSION, should you choose to accept it: Click here or on the image below to head to the COMING SOON page and HIT THE NOTIFY button so that we can drive the follower count sky high before I even let anyone else know about this thing.
STEALTH PROTOCOL: My aim is to NOT share this out and to the wide world yet, but to keep it amongst a small, shady cabal of you folks, the most dedicated of TSC supporters, and push that follower number WAY, WAY UP ahead of an announcement. That said, if you have a friend you want to personally recruit to the cause, go for it. Our goals and objectives this time out will be epic, and we'll need all the help we can get, especially when we ARE ready to let everyone know about it (probably in late October).
[ Wrong Magnetic Poles ]
Alert! A new book featuring ThoughtScape 2319’s Dave Law!
Wrong Magnetic Poles, a fictional three-piece alternative rock band from the 1990's. On the eve of a new century, WMP is on the verge of playing their biggest concert to date as each band member struggles with their own personal demons. Three stories of nostalgia, hallucination, and surrealism brought to you by four creative minds.
Pick up a copy here.
NS.PLAYLIST #2!
MORE of the fall-vibes songs in rotation here at TSC HQ…
Have a great weekend!
Matt