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Crowdfunding: Anyone try it?

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MillionDollar Belt Sander:
Ok I'll go through and highlight some passages, and move some fluff around.

http://igg.me/p/311086/x/2091965

I am THIS CLOSE to making this about not being able to hold a "real" job because of kidney issues OH WOE IS ME FUND MY DREAM.      Some of the stuff I see getting funded on here is just beyond the pale.    I think I need to hire an emo to write for me.    :-D

nekowafer:
That looks a lot better, I think.

MillionDollar Belt Sander:
Well I officially give up on this.

I just watched another sick pet raise more money than I paid for my house,  and the lazy student with "odds stacked against him" is going to raise enough money to buy himself an education.

Clearly my project is not indie or emo enough for this fundraising platform.

Pilchard123:
Is there any reason why you haven't used Kickstarter? It's better known than Indiegogo, I think.

If it doesn't work out, give it a while and try again later.

MillionDollar Belt Sander:
Part of the problem is the platform.  I chose Indiegogo because several friends had successful projects on here.

Problem is out of the 400 traceable invites I sent out,  only 60 people viewed the site. 

Some of these people I have regular contact with,  I'd ask them if they'd seen my latest blog post or if they had seen the new video.   Of course they had.   It was WONDERFUL.  The metrics indicate that only three people who are not me viewed the blog.  ZERO people checked the FAQ I had up.   Most of the hits on my video came from random youtube searches,  not link-follows.

I got suspicious when I asked a contact if he saw the picture of the machine I had in the video.   He commented of course he had, nothing like a Cincinnati Roboshot yes?   There is no Roboshot machine anywhere in my video.  Two other people who claimed to have read the FAQ I provided asked incredibly basic questions about the project.  Questions that would have been answered by the video or the FAQ.  The last straw was this evening:  one person who claims to have participated told me "you know what you should do?  figure out a way to make building blocks on the printer,  everyone loves those."   Uh, hello.

Of the 400 invites I sent out, 60 people visited the site directly. Of those 60, one person donated. The rest of the folks I have interacted with lied about participating.   Lied about reading the FAQ, lied about watching the video.  I called several of them on this and they laughed it off as "it's just a silly internet thing don't get so angry about it."

It would be one thing if the "big names" I asked to help me initially came through and helped me expand beyond my circle.  That was the first blow.  The second blow is finding out that people couldn't even bother to tell me the truth about their participation.   If you aren't interested in what I am doing just say so,  rather than string me along.

It's been 10 days,  I have yet to achieve more than a hundred hits.  No one is reading the attached blog.  No one that visits Indiegogo clicks on my project.

Why put any more effort into something that is going nowhere?  If I had a base of followers it would be one thing.   If I could get donors beyond one person who donated out of a sense of obligation rather than true interest...   See where this is going?

I'm going to let this fizzle out over the next 36 days.  I don't know if I'll try another fundraiser attempt... I may just build this community out of my own back pocket on a much smaller scale.

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