We originally planned to offer the lowest price only to our earliest backers, but after receiving so much more support than we ever imagined in the first week, we felt that extending the early-backer pricing for the duration of the Kickstarter was the right thing to do. You want to make sure those who give you the benefit of the doubt get something for their trust - a super-low price. There are no guarantees with Kickstarter, so folks are going to be skeptical about supporting. Now what? Price your product at a ridiculous value. So now you’ve got an Awesome video and a product people are going to want. But a really great video can easily take 8 weeks. From posting our project on Videopixie to receiving the final cut took 5 weeks. We had a really aggressive timelime for the whole video creation process. It took more than 12 solid hours to get 2:46 seconds of footage! One of the many takes pulling off the flannel shirt. Then Knox worked their magic editing the whole thing together. We spent 12 hours on site, filming at night from 6pm to 6am and had a blast. The filming process was super fun and super quick! They found this amazing little bakery in Burbank called Half Baked that was absolutely perfect for what we wanted. We went back and forth with Knox Avenue several times on script revisions and tried to inject as much of our personality as we possibily could into the video. We wanted to do something different and more fun.
#FORT KICKSTARTER HOW TO#
The real challenge for our video was how to talk about a software product without resorting to the tried-and-true explainer video. (After we launched we were told that comedy is VERY risky on Kickstarter. (And yes, we absolutely took inspiration from Dollar Shave Club’s seminal video!) We wanted something folks would share with their friends. For us, we knew we wanted something funny and offbeat.
They have quite the quirky vibe and clearly some serious talent. Knox Avenue & Side of Fries (their comedy directing duo) are Awesome.Īfter sorting through several bids, we settled on Knox Avenue Films ( Vimeo) out of Los Angeles. It works fantastically well, and you get some excellent options really quickly.
#FORT KICKSTARTER PROFESSIONAL#
Basically, Videopixie has you describe your project and 20–30 professional video production companies will bid for your business.
And a great video goes a long way in telling your story - we knew we couldn’t tell the Font Awesome story without an awesome video.Īfter talking with some other YC startups, we found Videopixie (YC S11). This sounded like a lot to spend on a video, but we were pretty sure we’d be able to make back our investment. To work with a fantastic production company and get the quality we wanted was going to run somewhere around $15k. Googled “ how much does a kickstarter video cost”). So we did some research into how much a great Kickstarter video should cost (i.e. But we learned we needed to work with folks who actually know how to make phenomenal videos. In spite of that, the campaign did raise a bit over 200% our goal, which was great. The video quality is off, the whole thing had to be overdubbed because we didn’t know how to do audio, the background music is just terrible, and I am absurdly awkward on camera. We wrote, directed, shot, and edited it ourselves. A couple of years ago, we launched the Kickstarter for Black Tie, a multi-weight icon set. But Kickstarter videos are tough to make. Your video is the very first thing people see when visiting your project. Making an Awesome Video Work with professionals.ĭon’t do this. Talking to users helped us form the main premise for the Kickstarter: that people would pay for more icons and a modernized framework using SVG. While we don’t agree with all of the conclusions, SVG is definitely the new hotness. Chris Coyier’s seminal article Inline SVG vs Icon Fonts well summarizes the occasional downsides to icon fonts. We’ve also noticed a lot of folks really prefer SVG. But explicitly asking made sure we took the hint. We have almost 4,000 open issues on the FA GitHub project, almost all of which are requesting new icons. In the end, the survey drove home one key take-away for us: our users want more icons.įolks wanting more icons should have been obvious to us already. We learned about the folks using Font Awesome and how they are using it. In a week’s time, 6,000 people completed the in-depth, 45-minute survey. So we went back to basics: talking to users.Ībout 6 months ago, we asked Font Awesome visitors to fill out a survey. We’ve tried a few things we’re really proud of (like Fort Awesome and Font Awesome CDN), but they aren’t enough to be sustainable. But figuring out how to commercialize an open source project is no simple task. It’s still amazing to us how many folks use Font Awesome.
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