lauantai 30. elokuuta 2014

Doing the things you love

Hello All! A short update here would be in place. It's been a few weeks since we released our indiegogo-campaign and there's been a lot of e-mail typing etcetera, my typing brain has been exhausted many times over but here we go again.

Maybe a lot of people have written reports about their crowdfunding campaigns but here is ours I guess. One thing that happens immediately after releasing the campaign out to the wild are the spammers that contact you and offer their services to boost your campaing, starting from 5 bucks and going up from there. In an attention economy, these services make sense I think. But it's all very shady and vague, the spammers don't show much data or metrics about the effectiveness of their efforts. Promising to spam people and making 5E sounds like an easy way to make money. I think many people fall for that kind of scam when their campaign hits a standstill.

I had a good chat with the creator of Asmo-charger, they ran a crowdfunding campaign on kickstarter a while ago. Asmo got really nice publicity thru their campaign and almost reached their goal. Of course they had a way longer preparation period, a physical product and marketing power behind them so that is natural. We chatted about why their campaign didn't quite get there and the reasons were obvious: A bit too high price for the gadget (postage costs from Finland were 17E a piece).

Another factor is that they're from Finland (strange foreigners selling their wares to the american market). Makes perfect sense, if I turn the table around, a strange Turkish guy trying to sell some stuff with a weird Finnish accent, hmm, I don't think he made too many sales over here. Selling shit is all about making appearances in the modern world. No way around that.

Our campaign has become to a bit of a standstill after weeks of spamming, that was expected. Insofar we have contacted a big number of 'industry professionals' including the Pope, Lady Gaga, Ron Jeremy, Pepe Deluxe and everybody who's on our Facebook and the names on the stacks and stacks of business cards from the previous events we've attended. Not getting a response from the Pope was a bit of a disappointment, the guy's got 4 million followers on twitter, come on, tweet about our campaign!

Besides messing about with the campaign we've also messing with code. We got a deal with the night of the arts in Oulu and spend a week building some new features for Hoodownr. The adventure/notification thing took many steps ahead and the game stabilized with many bugs squashed. We had a good time at the night of the arts despite not being able to leave the booth for a long time to see all the action. Got a bit tired with the gargantuan push towards the arts-build, I think on the pictures taken from the booth we look like zombies..

Another fun happening was the visit by three Graffiti artists, Ruskig (Sweden), Clean (Denmark) and Tasso (Germany). They came to Oulu for almost a week to partake to the street art project and painted 3 really magnificient walls here. Ruskig and Clean camped at our place and we got a glimpse of all the hard work involved making the pieces. No boozing or staying up late, oh no, the guys left early in the morning and came back when it was dark, covered in paint and dirt and fell asleep in like 3 minutes after the evening tea. I went out to film the painting process on few of the days and I got all this guilt-inducing footage on my hard drive waiting to be edited.

Since last year when we begun our wild parade with Hoodownr, quite a lot of film footage was captured. I'm planning to make a short video about the things we love in case anybody gives a shit =)

Ok, gotta move on. THE CAMPAIGN IS STILL ON guys. MAKE A PLEDGE, SPREAD THE WORD!

Move lovely things later,

Sami
Hoodownr

A design meeting with Clean,Ruskig & Flop

Encouragement from Friends during Night of arts

Building our demo Booth

Tasso painting horses




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