Coming To Peace With Potential Failure

A Campaign Autopsy: Part One

It’s a strange balance that anyone who works in an artistic field must maintain between creativity and commerce. It’s not enough to just have talent, you’ve to got have a certain amount of hustle too. This last month I took something I created, a piece that was particularly personal to me and started a campaign to finance it. Technically, the album (the art in question) is already recorded, what I was raising money for was to manufacture and promote it. In my limited understanding of the world of investing it seems to be not unlike an IPO or applying for a loan. Maybe it’s more like going on Shark Tank, regardless I was attempting to raise money to release my album and thankfully, it was successful. What follows are my takeaways from the experience so far.

The twenty eight day campaign seems like phase one of the process but actually it’s phase three or four. Phase one was to write and record the record this took six months which is fairly quick for an album. I started writing essays in October of last year that became songs I demo-ed in November. In January I booked studio time and we tracked drums and piano in Kansas City. That same month I tracked all the guitars and vocals at home. My youngest progeny, Jerzy, played bass and I sent the tracks off to be mixed. In March I did a photo shoot that would end up being the album cover and the promotional pictures for the album. Grammy award winning producer (I love that I get to call my friend that) Peter Katis mixed the record and added some keyboards to round out the whole thing. Once it was mixed we sent the record to Joe Lambert to master it and then we were ready to launch the Kickstarter campaign.

Everything up until this point went relatively smoothly because I had done all of these elements before. The Kickstarter on the other hand was a relatively novel concept to me. I did a campaign on a much smaller scale in twenty twelve and I didn’t do a very good job managing it. Everyone got what they had ordered and the album was released but the fulfillment of the orders was significantly more expensive than I had expected it to be. So, I ended up losing money on that deal. I was determined not to do that again. The mistake I made this time was rushing to get the campaign launched. I wanted to be sure that I would not be on tour until the twenty eight days of the campaign were over. I knew I needed to give this my full attention and that I would not be able to do from the road. So, I hurried to get it launched during the window between STWHA euro tours in July and August, timing it to end two days before I left for Germany (where I write this now). Could-a, would-a, should-a waited, but I didn’t.

During this stage I also should have done some more research on crowd funding campaigns. I did not know that traditionally there is a period that I referred to as “The Stall” but I’ve heard it named “The Valley Of Death” in several YouTube tutorials. Essentially there is usually a big bump at the start because people are excited for the new project but then it dies off for weeks after that. Hopefully there is another big jump in sales at the end, like the post gig rush at the merch table. But, at least with Kickstarter, it’s all or nothing and you won’t get that rush at the end if the perception is there is no chance of hitting the goal. Nobody wants to surrender their credit card to a project that is going to fail.

During this period I was really worried that this wasn’t going to work out. I had prepared myself mentally and even wrote a Substack about how this might not reach it’s goal. It’s easier to admit this now that the campaign was successful but I really had made my peace with the possibility that this might be a very public failure. I thought maybe it was a teaching moment, for myself as much as anyone. Everything had gone so well with the project to this point and this was possibly going to be the first real hurdle to get over. It’s not like the record wouldn’t come out at all, it was already recorded. It just would have had to have been a much much smaller release since I hadn’t been able to raise the capital for what I had envisioned. I was attempting to use the tools I had learned in recovery and apply them to this situation. It all comes down to acceptance, that’s a word that keeps coming up. If the campaign wasn’t a success that is some something I could not change, something I had no control over. Best to accept that, pivot and figure out a new way forward.

Though I still agree with the sentiment I’m glad I deleted that post before I sent it out. It was kind of surrendering before the battle was even over, that would have tanked the campaign for sure. Instead I decided to go online as much as possible to host AMA’s and play songs from the record. People asked me very interesting questions about life, recovery, songwriting, gear, everything. It was really rewarding for me to just talk to people and play for them, it honestly took my mind off my concerns about the campaign. Somewhere during this period the tide seemed to turn, people from the live streams started to contribute and it seemed like the project might actually stay alive. With two days left we crossed over the finish line and even raised fifteen percent more than I had hoped.

All this is to say that I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who supported the campaign. I’m even grateful that it came close enough to the edge that I thought it wasn’t going to survive. In that moment I realized that it wasn’t going to kill me and that I could accept that. That feels like maybe the most important thing I’ve learned on this journey so far. So it goes.