🚀 Day 18: What Technology Do You Use?

My Lump Dog™ Kickstarter Campaign Journal

The dead zone can be a lonely place unless you have “launch buddies.” Having a circle of fellow creators to commiserate with and bounce ideas off during a campaign is invaluable. Fortunately for me, I have support from other creators with their own active campaigns in a couple of Discord servers as well as a special Comics Launch Pro Facebook Messenger “back channel” (set up for this exact purpose).

I recently reached out to them and asked, “Besides the Kickstarter site, BackerKit, and Canva, what tech tool has helped you the most this campaign?”

What follows are their replies. For the record, for me, it has been Canva (which is why I asked the others for something different. Ha!), Adobe Premiere, Apple Preview (mostly for cropping images), and Descript.

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Stephanie Nina Pitsirilos - Event Horizon

“Adobe Express and always Microsoft Clipchamp (videos).”

GT: Very cool. I had never even heard of Clipchamp until today. Is anyone else using it?

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Karim Ahmad - Divide

“Thanks so much for reaching out! Honestly, the thing that has, hands down, been the most responsive and generative for me is my email list. I've been focusing on sending direct emails to the audiences & communities I've been cultivating for a long while. This was advice given to me by a friend and longtime crowdfunder, who told me that crowdfunding mainly helps you make the most of the audience you already have. That still rings very true to me years later. So, while this is not a particularly sexy answer, haha... MailChimp has been the most useful tech tool for me!”

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AndyXJenkins - Blood n Concrete

“In the course of making the comics, getting them print-ready, collaborating with the editor etc., I use - Photoshop (for web graphics and automations), Illustrator, Google Docs and Drive so I can easily share folders with editor, artist, colorist, letterer, I use Scrivener for note creation and snippet curation and I use OneDrive local and remote for local working and backup and Google drive for extra backup and sharing rewards. For the video side of things, I'll use Adobe Animate, Premiere Pro, and OBS. I have Adobe Creative Suite for work as I'm in that ecosphere - if I wasn't, I'd be using OS stuff.”

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Roberto Viacava - NATHANIEL FOX #1/4

“I'll say Chat GPT for checking grammar and spelling. Specially since English is not my first spelling! First language, sorry. I should use my own advice!”

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I didn’t hear from George O’Connor in time to add his tools to the list, but he is probably busy with the last hours of his campaign! I had to give him a shout-out because he is a helpful comic community member, and I love to see him taking a huge swing in a completely new direction. Vampires on Mars is very different from the work I know him for most - Charlie’s Spot.

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My Kickstarter Journal

It’s been a while since I’ve posted as I got a little distracted by non-Kickstarter things, most notably the announcement of my new collaboration with Viktor Farro. I still can’t believe I get to work with such a talented artist.

Tasks I remember doing

• Created new images, text, and posts for when we reached the 50-backer level. Which reminds me! There is another graphic I need to update.

• I populated the site with Viktor’s space JoJo covers. There is a new tier and a new add-on.

• I created a couple of different project images to test. Shortly after I posted a project image that included Marina, someone pledged. I am going to change back to a similar image in a couple of days to see if that was just a coincidence. Currently, I am testing a JoJo image.

  

What I am waiting for

• A further reply from an artist I am trying to recruit for another project. I actually got an apologetic message letting me know that they had been busy prepping for C2E2. Finding out I hadn’t been ghosted was a big relief.

Gratitude

• I am grateful for the Internet. No, really. The kinds of collaborations I am doing right now would have been impossible even 30 years ago.

Lessons learned

• Depending on your ad material, your promotional efforts might actually generate sales in your online store. The dead zone may not be so dead.

Hypothesis

• Kickstarter is morphing into a platform where it is hard to sell comics that are perceived as kid-friendly.

Feature Request

• I’d love to see Shopify integrated with Kickstarter in a way that would facilitate the dropshipping of products like t-shirts and mugs.

Snapshot (What I’m currently monitoring)

• KingSumo Campaign: 516 contestants, 10,021 Entries, 11.18% conversion rate

• All other advertising is currently paused.