Tuesday night we hosted a cocktail party at the home of Sandra Slater and Drew Maran, to officially kick-off our campaign to crowd-fund Worse Than Poop! We had grown-up cocktails, and "poop cocktails" for the kids. (Annie Talbot even brought "pee-pee syrup" - oh-so-realistic-looking orange-flavored simple syrup - to mix in with the CO2 spritzer. I'm not sure if she had any takers.)
Sven Thesen the Biking MC, and our first two guests: Hamid Saadat and Gary Hedden
Sven Thesen played Master of Ceremonies. We showed the Kickstarter video, and Maddi Hausmann (EV aficionado and Leaf sales rep for Nissan Sunnyvale) interviewed Elliot about his involvement in the project. We set up a pledge station, and people cycled through, making pledges to the project.
Sven and Elliot toast to launching Worse Than Poop!
Note to all you future crowdfunders out there: if you decide to set up a pledge station, at which multiple people will be pledging, be sure to station someone super tech-savvy at the station ALL NIGHT to supervise the process. Don't let this be you:
Towards the end of the evening, we were up to $3300, and feeling really good. Then, suddenly the amount dropped to $600. WTF?!
It turned out that a lot of people didn't understand Kickstarter's double-log-in procedure - which requires backers to log in, and OUT, of both Kickstarter AND Amazon. So several people thought they were pledging, when in fact they were simply undoing someone else's pledge, and attributing it to their own account. Suffice to say, it's taken us three days to sort this out, and I'm still not sure it's completely resolved. Lesson learned!
The good news is, even without all the pledges from Tuesday night entered into the system yet, we have already raised $2790, and I expect we'll be over $5000 by the weekend. So we're off to a strong start!
Sandra & Drew's beautiful home filled with supporters of Worse Than Poop!
And the even better news is that so many people have been coming out of the woodwork to support this project. We have 41 backers already on Kickstarter - and more every few hours. It's awkward putting yourself out there, asking everyone you know to back your film - but sometimes people really surprise you with their kindness and generosity. It sounds corny - but looking around on Tuesday night at the loving and supportive community around me, all there to help us make a difference in the world (and have some fun in the process), I felt truly blessed.