Finding Financing Online

[etnad0]

After reading this forum for a while, I learned about Kick Starter and a few other places. I know they are just a middle man.

I went ahead and set up a Kick Starter page for my project, The Fall: Retribution. If you click the link, I'd love for anyone here to invest in my project, even if it's only $5 and I'm going to start doing the same now that I know how it works.

My question about Kick Starter and the websites like it is, where do I find websites with people that want to invest? I have a mailing list from my personal website with close to 1,000 people. I've learned that you can really only expect about a 10% response when it comes to financial transactions from subscribers.

Is there a website that is known to have a lot of investors on it at least willing to look at a project?

 

[directorik]

I have a mailing list from my personal website with close to 1,000 people. I've learned that you can really only expect about a 10% response when it comes to financial transactions from subscribers.

So if you ask 1,000 people to invest $10,000 and you get
10% return you have $100,000. That seems pretty good
to me. What's the problem?

Is there a website that is known to have a lot of investors on it at least willing to look at a project?

I don't know of one. I suspect if there were such a website
that the ratio of filmmakers to investors would be 200,000
to 1.

The reality is, it take much more work and is much harder to
find the money than to make the movie. Filmmaker are always
looking for an easy way - like setting up a website or going to
a website set up for them - but finding the right investors will
take much more than sitting at home clicking on links.

But I get it, there have been some successes on those web
sites. I know if I knew how to attract several thousand investors
with enough capital to invest in movies I would set up a web site
to put them together with filmmakers. And charge a nice percentage.

Good luck with your KickStarter campaign. I've bookmarked it and
will follow your success.

 

[etnad0]

So if you ask 1,000 people to invest $10,000 and you get
10% return you have $100,000. That seems pretty good
to me. What's the problem?

The problem is those 100 people are likely only to invest $25 or so each, putting me at $2,500 which is great, but still under my goal. It would be great if the entire list responded, but that's not how real life works lol.

I don't know of one. I suspect if there were such a website
that the ratio of filmmakers to investors would be 200,000
to 1.

The reality is, it take much more work and is much harder to
find the money than to make the movie. Filmmaker are always
looking for an easy way - like setting up a website or going to
a website set up for them - but finding the right investors will
take much more than sitting at home clicking on links.

But I get it, there have been some successes on those web
sites. I know if I knew how to attract several thousand investors
with enough capital to invest in movies I would set up a web site
to put them together with filmmakers. And charge a nice percentage.

Good luck with your KickStarter campaign. I've bookmarked it and
will follow your success.

Thanks very much. I appreciate it. I'm going to work on figuring out where to find investors online. I'm sure there has to be a site with normal people that will invest $5 or more. LOL.

 

[ItDonnedOnMe]

There are a ton of sites out there with normal people who might invest $5 or more - but that's a much different thing than finding a site full of "people who want to invest", and it's never going to be a question of just posting your kickstarter to a page and watching the investors show up. You need to start with figuring out who your audience is for the film - and the answer is never 'everybody' or 'anybody'. If there isn't something that appeals directly to the interests of a core audience you'll have a hard time convincing anyone to chip in. Once you've figured that out you can start looking for online sites and forums where those people hang out - the equivalent of indietalk for whatever key subject(s) your audience is interested in. Now that you've found those sites the hard part actually begins. If you sign up in a forum and your first and/or only post is "Hi, give me money for my movie" you are basically spamming them. So you hang out in the forum. You read the posts, get to know the people there, you contribute to the discussions, you become part of the community. Then, once you are no longer an outsider spamming their community - it's your community too now - start discussing your project, get people's feedback on it, get them involved in some way, and let them know about your upcoming kickstarter campaign. Ask them to contribute, and ask them to spread the word -most people will be part of several different online communities, and if you can get them invested in your project they are more likely to reach out to their other communities, far more than you have time to become part of.

Unfortunately this isn't a quick or easy process. I'd say you need to start this six months before you even consider launching your kickstarter if you expect it to work, and you'll need to stick at it daily in order to actually become an active member of these communities. Of course in the long run it'll be worth it because the same people who might contribute to your film are also likely the ones who will buy it in the end, so this is really a part of marketing & distribution as well.

 

[etnad0]

Thanks for the advice. I'm already a member of several forums that I've been on for over a year and all of them reach my core audience. I'm going to try to see if I can find the appropriate forums and post the project, hopefully that might help.

I also think I figured out a way narrow down my search, and I'll let everyone know if it works.

 

[DeGrande]

One thing I noticed right away with kickstarter is that the people that reach their goal or get a lot of interest already have some of their film made or have made considerable progress. I don't think kickstarter is the way to go if you are raising the initial money. Just my opinion. Good luck with it.

 

[etnad0]

Somewhat true. I've also seen projects that have nothing but a video from the person talking about what they want to do. We will be filming starting Monday. I can fund it out of pocket, but I figured I'd go for it and see.

 

[ItDonnedOnMe]

I've also noticed that many of the successful film projects don't have a huge number of backers. That tells me that while the idea of raising say $25k by having 5,000 people send you $5 each sounds great, the reality is more often that you need to find 200 people to give you an average of $125 each - which is a much different proposition in terms of how you market and where you will find the people.

I know it seems a little counter-intuitive, but it's probably harder to get someone to give you $5 than $100+. Think of it this way - if someone is only interested enough in your project to commit $5, they aren't particularly interested in it at all. So for them the time and effort it actually takes to make the donation through kickstarter becomes a barrier - even though it's not a lot of effort it probably exceeds their level of interest and commitment to the project so they just won't bother. On the other hand, for someone who is excited enough about your project to commit $100+ the actual time and process of doing so is relatively minor compared to their enthusiasm.

Now compound the difficulty of convincing someone to donate a small amount of money by the fact that you need to reach a lot more people with the small donations - so for every one enthusiastic $100 donor you need to convince 20 people who aren't particularly interested to go to the trouble of donating $5. That's a lot of work, and even assuming a 10% response rate - which in most cases is probably unrealistically high, 1-2% is more likely if you are reaching out to strangers - it means you have to somehow get your project in front of a pretty huge number of people.

 

[etnad0]

I definitely agree with you on the numbers. My 10% response rate is based on my website mailing list of people that have bought my books or read my site on a regular basis. Not necessarily complete strangers that don't know who I am.

I have about 20 radio hosts that I associate with, so I'm calling in some favors over the next 30 days to do some internet radio shows. The first one is booked for this coming Saturday. I'm also calling in favors from about 100 people on YouTube that have over 1,000 subscribers each, one with over 100k subscribers by herself, so we'll see how this turns out. At the very least I'll get a ton of free advertising and publicity for the project.