Editing The Pen Addict 450/transcript (section)

== Kickstarter Overview ==


'''Myke:''' Perfect way of putting it. This really is the good, bad, and ugly of Kickstarter. Because there has been a lot of that just in the stationary community. I'm on some Kickstarters right now in the stationary community that get a bit ugly, Brad. But we're not going to talk about those today.

'''Brad:''' You'll have to tell me offline because I don't think I'm in any active dumpster fires right now.

'''Myke:''' Oh, I am, man. I'm in a real bad one. It's bad.

'''Brad:''' We'll take that. Just put a dollar on every campaign and run up these numbers. These are all to get something from the project. Six of those unsuccessfully funded. Two were canceled for various reasons. 95 of the 120, Myke, were stationary related or adjacent. Wow. That's crazy. That's crazy. Yeah. Like, then the other stuff is like a lot of other Kickstarter creative stuff, books, music, games, whatever products, things like that, bags, all that stuff. But yeah, like a full, like practically 80% of my 120 projects that I backed were stationary related. And boy, are we going to talk about them. How about you? What did your numbers look like? I was a little bit shocked.

'''Myke:''' 74 back projects.

'''Brad:''' That's a ton. Like, that's a ton. Like, I know I had a bunch, but that's a lot.

'''Myke:''' I have been and continue to be a big Kickstarter backer. Three were unsuccessful for me and one canceled. 28 of my 74 were stationary related or adjacent, which is obviously a huge difference in our makeup there because yours is like three quarters and mine is less than a half. The rest of my projects are a mixture of games, a back to a couple of events, movies, apps, and just general tech hardware stuff, which tends to be. And really, like, I think it's kind of funny when you look at it, those are kind of, those statistics and their makeup is actually a makeup of us as people, really. Where, like, you are primarily stationary and I am a mixture of different things.

'''Brad:''' Yeah, I go to Kickstarter for the pens and then I might find something else, right? And then you're tended to be drawn there. It's probably generated mostly from tech and, you know, related to that. And then, you know, you'll pick up some stationary stuff. Like, if we talk about it or if we cover it and it seems interesting, things like that. So, yeah, it is very telling the percentages of the categories that we're involved in. But it makes complete and total sense. I couldn't believe that it's been since 2011. June 2011 was my first project I backed. It was not a stationary project, one of the few. It was for Molly Crabapple's Week in Hell, which she's an artist I follow. Now she's an artist, activist, popular figure. But she basically, it was kind of stationary related in that she locked herself in a hotel room for a week, covered the walls in white paper, and drew the entire room. And then she would cut up different sizes based on your backer level of the drawings. So, you would back whatever, like, my backing was for, like, a six by six, you know, cut out of the wall. And, like, I still have that, you know, sitting in my closet. So, it's just kind of funny that it wasn't necessarily stationary related. But I found her because, at the time, like, we had talked about stationary. That was when I was working with Jetpens, and I had contact with her. And we were talking about, like, Sharpies and how they worked with this paper and for this project and things like that. I remember doing all that stuff back at the time. So, I guess it was kind of stationary related. But, yeah, 2011. When was yours?

'''Myke:''' 2012. July of 2012. 2012. And it was a book, like, an e-book called The Professional's Guide to Podcast Production. And it's made by a guy by the name of Jim Metzendorf, who we now work with at RelayFM. I saw this. I was like, wait a minute. Jim is an editor of a large selection of our shows, some of mine and some other shows as well. So, Jim, I've known of Jim for a long time, and I was a fan of his work, if you would call it that. You know, like, in the sense of, like, I listened to and appreciated his editing on a bunch of shows I was listening to at the time. And, obviously, back in July of 2012, I mean, I've been into podcasting for a couple of years. So, I was still very new, and I actually still had a lot to learn of editing. And I backed Jim's project to get, I think it was not just the book, but I think I also ended up getting some EQs. So, I would send him, like, my audio, and he created an EQ setting for me, for my voice.

'''Brad:''' This is funny because the friendships we made along the way are a very consistent theme of this. And it's funny to see that very first one. And I laughed when I saw that link in there. It had Jim's name in it. And I was like, you've got to be kidding me. Because a lot of this is, you know, a lot of friends that, you know, we made through the stationary world, through these projects.

'''Myke:''' I haven't mentioned this to him. I kind of feel like it, I don't know, something like that. I want to embarrass him, you know? So, I kind of just put it out there in the world.

'''Brad:''' Well, I'm not above embarrassing my friends. And I'm going to do that right out the gate, Myke. The second project, number two project, right after the Molly Crabapple one, that I backed, was the CWNT Pen Type A. Which turned out to be one of the most... Historic. Historic, famous, infamous projects in Kickstarter history. Or even just in the stationary world. But I think it crossed over some lines to where it was making, like, articles on, like, tech sites and news sites and things like that.

'''Myke:''' It was important to note... I'm sorry if I'm spoiling for you here. So, it raised $281,989 on a $2,500 goal in August of 2011. Now, this is particularly significant because of the date. So, back in August of 2011, Kickstarter was very, very new. And the idea of a $2,500 goal makes a lot of sense. Right? So, like, if you go back to your first one, Molly Crabapple's campaign was, like, $4,500 goal. And she raised $25,000, which is amazing then. But Kickstarter at that point was much more a, hey, I'm an artist. Here's my music.

'''Brad:''' And this is when the goals meant something, right? The goals have lost all meaning. Yes. Now. Yes. Back then, goals meant something. Molly took her, said, look, it's going to cost me this much in, you know, nights at a hotel, food, and product to do this project. And CWT says, we've made this pen. We think we can prototype it. And we think we can sell it. This is how much it's going to cost us to get us going. It's not some made-up number so you can run a huge percentage over goal completion number. So you can't have, like, a, you know, funded, you know, 15,000% funded, right? Which is what modern Kickstarter is. So, yeah, it was important at the time that, I guess, to make the point that it kind of blew up and got away from them. And I don't mean that in a bad way. It turned out to be rough for many reasons. There were articles you can find, if you just search it up, about the manufacturing processes that they went through, the failures of the manufacturing processes, the bringing it in-house, the intellectual property theft that took place, and just on and on. Like, right out the gate, I can't think of any project that has superseded this as far as if it could go wrong it did in this one. Like, we've had repeats of this, right? But I'm not sure, like, at least in the projects that I've backed, there's been, like, million-dollar projects that have been, you know, that have gone sideways on a lot of people. But just from our perspective, it was crazy. And, you know, I was fortunate to get to talk to Saewe and Taylor, the people behind CW&T early on, had, like, an early prototype of the pen type A because I love the Pilot High Tech C, which is what it was made for. And I didn't think this pen would do that good, right? Because it wasn't a great design just for, like, day-to-day use of a pen. It's like a desk pen, the way it was built with this basically brick metal ruler, which was the pen holder for people who aren't familiar with it. But it did. And it's telling, as we'll get to later in this episode, that they didn't let this destroy them. Because not everyone, I think, would have handled this, you know, in the future as well as they have. Yeah. And that's also a theme. And that's also a theme.

'''Myke:''' And that's also a theme. It was one of those things where it got coverage, and then it was getting coverage because it was doing so well, which then ended up pushing it further. You know, like, we're going to talk about Studio Neat in a little bit, but the original Glyph was like this, too. Like, the Glyph was one of the biggest early Kickstarter campaigns. And it was like, oh, this is a cool product, so people will start buying it. And then it gets coverage because it's cool, but then it starts getting coverage because it's such a success when that was new for Kickstarter.

'''Brad:''' Yep. And then, unlike the Glyph, this one ended up getting, like, soap opera-y. Yeah. Before the end, which just, you know, exacerbated any news that had come out before. It just kept going on and on. Like, it was a couple, it was, I didn't look at the end date, like, the final, like, closeout date of, hey, we shipped the last pen. Had to be a year and a half, would be my guess. Like, an 18-month, if not longer, time frame. It was very, very long, so. But, yeah, like, this.

'''Myke:''' It was October of 2012 was the update where they'd posted all of them.

'''Brad:''' Okay. So, that's not that bad. It was, you know, what's that, 14 months? So. 14 months. So, I mean, I've had projects run that long, you know, with delays. But, yeah, it was crazy. And it dragged on for years afterwards, the fallout from that.