# 8 on Kicktraq!

[David Bovill]

Kevin - my take on the KickStarter marketing is that it is squarely
targeted at the HyperCard, and perhaps more traditional educational
markets. I think this is strong - and there is still a good deal of mileage
to get with this group. The big "problem" with that aspect of the pitch is
the perception of a good chunk of the audience with "projects like Scratch
are free and do this".

Still I think teaming up with the "make programming easier and teach it in
schools" movement is a strong one. I'd emphasise new markets though - the
recent TED talk on making education easier, and groups in the UK (
www.rewiredstate.org) and other countries in the free and online education
markets - Kahn academy etc My instinct would be that the KickStarter energy
is more pronounced in these more evangelical education movements than the
softer educational pitch that is up there at the moment.

More important, in my opinion, is the lack of appeal to the open source
community, and the nature of the prizes. The current pitch is not appealing
to existing projects that would like to combine LiveCode with their
projects, or see some advantage in utilising the source code. For these
groups there needs to be rewards and incentives more directly software
related - training on specific high value features - say 10 people learning
to hack the "open language module" - or 20 people learning how to set up
cross platform compiling, or 200 people given a free place on porting code
to the Raspberry Pi. Specific pitches, worth money to people, and targetted
at existing open source communities. I feel these pitches could be made in
tandem with teaming up with the open educational movement....

My 2 cents

On 1 February 2013 22:34, Kevin Miller <kevin at runrev.com> wrote:

> This is good analysis. Our existing community is quite a bit bigger so
> plenty more to be convinced there. But you're right we need to reach a
> broader community. Millions remember HyperCard which is our strongest card
> (pardon the pun).
>
> Question: how good do you think the video really is for those outside the
> community? We were very pleased with it when we launched it but I wonder if
> we are a little close to it and there is more we could do to make it
> connect better? Would be great to get some more objective feedback.
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On 1 Feb 2013, at 20:39, Ben Rubinstein <benr_mc at cogapp.com> wrote:
>
> > On 31/01/2013 19:33, Monte Goulding wrote:
> >> Dropping back and the funding is coming in too slow.
> >>
> >> If you multiply yesterday's pledges by 29 and add the 32002 from the
> first day then we are looking at 282,446. Kicktraq still says we are
> trending above target but it won't in a few days if we don't pick things up.
> >
> > Yep.  Overall, Kickstarter analysis (see Michael Wolf) is that 20%-30%
> is the tipping point - most projects that fail, fail with less than 20% of
> their goal; almost all that get past about 30%, succeed.
> >
> > But I'm not sure that analysis, or Kicktraq's trends and projections,
> really apply or help here, because of our unusual situation: there's a
> certain community that already knows and loves LiveCode, most can be
> convinced that this would be a good thing, and a certain proportion are
> prepared to donate to help it happen - and almost all the members of that
> community are easily reached, and probably already have been.
> >
> > So that first heady rush that took it to 10% wasn't really indicative of
> the same kind of progress as it would if made by some random new bright
> idea from some new bunch of bright people that hardly anyone's heard of -
> ie the typical at least tech Kickstarter project.  Rather, that represented
> the easy bit - tapping the existing community.  I'm not saying that's over
> - many people are still thinking about it, or still to be convinced, who
> may yet decide to contribute; and some people who have contributed, may be
> prepared to contribute more.  I'll expect more emails from Kevin like the
> one today at regularly intervals over the next month.  But I'd guess a
> large proportion of the funding that's available from the community has
> been tapped.
> >
> > So now the hard part starts - the remaining 88% or whatever has to be
> beaten out of the people who've mostly never heard of LiveCode (although
> some of them have at least heard of HyperCard, and they should be the next
> softest target).  In many ways the situation more closely resembles
> starting from zero to raise £305K, than it does being 12% of the way
> towards £350K.
> >
> > So fun though all the Kicktraq graphs, and stacks that go ping* are:
> what we really need to do be doing is not watching the meter, but getting
> out on the street and shouting the news.  If you have a following, shouting
> it to them; and if you know someone with a bigger following, persuading
> that person to shout it to their following.
> >
> > How I wish I had a following.
> >
> > Ben
> >
> > *although, if the stack that went ping was easily distributable as an
> example of the power of the language...
> >
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