Day 46/60: Positive vibes only.. but this isn’t going as well as we hoped.. yet?
😑😞
Last week we launched..
I’m very worried we aren’t going to hit our goal. We are at $250 so far.
Mostly worried because we did get the page featured on the Kickstarter Homepage (the KS team has been amazing and literally hopped on 5 calls with me over the past month), which means it’s as good of exposure as we will ever get from the platform. But I don’t think we performed well considering we hardly raised anything more than $0.
One challenge we have here is that we are selling a location based experience on Kickstarter. Which is a much better platform for packages that ship or digital goods.
We’re targeting only a segment of the overall US population by narrowing it to people who live in Atl/Dal, and-or are able to travel to those cities on the concert dates.
One question I’m asking myself on how to get better, should we have tried to raise with a different story?
I found out towards the end of the Kickstarter creation that Toni (their CEO, and founder of 30 years) was helping launch a new org.
She had previously helped thousands of people who have HIV/AIDS in the Appalachia state region (sorry if I’m getting that spelling wrong).
That’s a very localized area, and not a location with big Pride events like Dallas, ATL, nyc, etc.
So her thought was to create a new organization, one that she felt extremely passionate about and close to, and use this as her vehicle to support Bulldaggers. And so bulldaggerchronicles.com was born.
What is normally considered a negative term by some, is not at ALL how Toni considers it.
When asked, “why ‘Bulldagger’ Chronicles? and not lesbian, stud, or any other term?”
Toni and her team at Bulldagger respond; Many consider the term "bulldagger" as negative. which we do not here.”
“Bulldaggers are associated with physical strength, sexual prowess, emotional reserve, and butch chivalry. The word comes from African-American communities in the early 20th century, especially in Harlem in the 1920s, when sexual and gender norms were less strict,” reads the Bulldagger Chronicles website.
Toni REALLY cares about this stuff, because it touches home to who she is, and she’s willing to defend her ground.
Look how much she truly cares about learning about the health of lesbian women.. she has a 43 question survey on her website!! 43!!
Toni cares. This is a passionate amazing person who had a dream a year ago to launch a new brand, specific for women like her. After 30 years of helping people with HIV/AIDS, she deserves a shot here to now help women who are masculine of center, or in her words, “bulldaggers.”
I wish that I had told this story in the Kickstarter to begin with, I think this one is the right way to truly convey the full picture.
I woke up the morning of the Kickstarter launch and had this idea for the first time, so now I need to see if we can raise this capital another way (corporate sponsors). At the same time Toni’s team is working the circuit for influencers who can help promote our KS for us.
Ps. I LOVE Kickstarter — they’ve been amazing, can’t thank them enough for featuring us and giving us a chance
Prayers up,
Don
»» IF you know a potential corporate sponsors, please intro me so I can introduce you to Toni ❤️