Thank You Project Update #4: What People Say in Thank You Cards
(Cross-posted from the Thank You Project)
Dear backers,
It’s been awhile. :) I hope this update finds you well. I thought I’d share a few observations from all the cards I have written so far.
- I have sent cards to people all over the globe - India, Germany, Canada, Singapore (my hometown!), and an APO in Japan.
- I had to write one card in a language I don’t speak - Portuguese. I had to write that one extra carefully to make sure I spelled everything correctly.
- It’s funny how accustomed we are to typing smiley faces. It actually feels kinda weird to have to write a smiley face.
- Most of you sent cards to family members or close friends. One of you sent a card to someone who was more or less a stranger, because the stranger did a kind favor.
- A lot of you are very fortunate to have inspiring people in your lives. I know this because I wrote the word “inspiring” a lot.
- The single most common word that people say in these cards? “Love.”
If you haven’t sent me your messages yet, it’s not too late. Just fill out the Google form. I will be sending the thank you postcards to each of you when all the recipient cards have gone out.
If you have a story behind your thank you note that you’d like me to share with the other backers, please drop me a note. A lot of people are very curious about other people’s cards!
Thank You Project Update #3: Last Call
(Cross-posted from update to the Thank You Project)
Dear backers,
We have 4 days of fundraising to go! We are now 541% funded by 49 of you. Wow. This has totally exceeded my expectations.
Some stats and observations:
- 65% of you know me in person; 35% of you were total strangers to me before this project. The stranger % is much higher than I had expected. The Kickstarter “discover” function has worked surprisingly well. My new day job is all about enabling the discovery of good content. When I look at the number of you who have backed multiple projects, it’s really interesting to me that Kickstarter has solved a version of the content discovery problem by building a very special kind of community.
- 51% of you chose 1 card; 31% chose 3 cards; 17% chose no reward. This means I will be making 70+ cards. !!
- I continue to be really curious about why people back this project. Some of you like sending thank you cards (“Southern tradition” came up). Some of you just love the idea of “thank you”, regardless of the card part. Some of you think it’s “good value”. One of you is running a Tumblr to document all the cards you’re sending via snail mail to people this year. (How cool is that!) And some of you are just really sweet and generous to back this because you know me and I’ve bugged you about it. :)
What happens next:
- Next week, I will be sending you a survey to get your recipient message, address, etc. Once the surveys go out, you can fill out the survey any time in the next 30 days. As your replies come in, I will make and send your cards.
- There will be a brief note enclosed with the cards to explain to recipients what the Thank You Project is about.
- You’ll get a confirmation when your cards have been mailed.
Thanks a huge bunch for being part of this! I’ve actually drawn all the cupcake covers. Yes, many baker dozens of them. I’m super excited to start writing your messages soon.
If you know of anyone who might like to back the Thank You Project, tell them it’s last call - just 4 days left!
*
If you’re reading this from the blog, send a card through the Thank You Project here.
Other ways to unwind
The beginning of a new job is always exhausting. Everything is new. You’re always on alert. You’re constantly processing.
You’d think that after spending the day thinking about all things internet, the last thing I’d want to do when I get home is spend more time on the internet. But that’s exactly what I do. In fact, I’ve found a very odd thing to help me unwind.
Design philosophy.
Isn’t that weird? I thought I’d just want to come home and watch mindless TV on Hulu, but instead I crave something intense at the other end of the spectrum. I spend all day locked into execution mode - how do I learn to do this faster, how do I do this in the first place, what do I need to know to do anything - and at the end of the day, my mind just wants to relax by wondering (wandering?) about something entirely different. Something expansive, the very opposite of a to-do, something in metaphor.
For instance, I’ve been thinking about this. There is this wonderful interview of Frank Chimero and Rob Giampietro about their project, The Mavenist. It’s about dialogue as gift. Yeah, dialogue as gift. You really need to read the original post on it. Mind blowingly good.
All this has heavily influenced how I think about the Thank You Project. The extreme generosity from a couple of backers has got me thinking about this concept of outsized gifts, undeserved kindness, and how such gifts make me feel compelled to pay it forward. I want someone else to experience this receiving of an outsized gift. And what it really means when you give that kind of gift to the world.
Stuff like that. Is relaxing.
You know what else is cool? Reading about what Maria Popova, curator extraordinaire, reads. Utterly fascinating. Ok, it’s somewhat more fascinating if you are as enchanted by her tweeting as I am.
You know what else is good? Rebekah Cox’s take on the New Yorker Sheryl Sandberg profile. Hidden in the comments is someone who wrote, “You are not your feelings, you are your choices.” So true.
Thank You Project Update #2: What people respond to
(Cross-posted from update to the Thank You Project)
As of this morning, we are 315% funded. Woohoo! Still 23 more days to go.
One of the neat things about running this project is learning what people respond to. Even though this is a project about greeting cards, people generally don’t mention the craft. Which is a good thing, because I’m not a professional crafts person. There is Hallmark and Etsy if you want to get fancy on craft.
Instead, what people talk about is:
1. Simplicity. The project is straightforward. Most of us have made / sent / received cards at some point, so you know how it feels to be part of this exchange. There is nothing fancy about the card technology here. In fact, some people mentioned tradition. Kickstarter also makes it really easy to pledge.
2. Interaction of the virtual and the real. You type a bunch of stuff on your end, and out pops a real card on the other end. If you know me personally, you know I live on the internet. :) And yet here I am doing a project that has a very tactile, very old school back end. But this is one of my favorite aspects of the internet. It’s not all virtual. It makes new things possible in the physical world. I will be mailing a whole bunch of cards to people that you know, but that I don’t know.
3. Being part of something bigger. Someone asked, “Does a handwritten note lose some of its meaning when it’s handwritten and sent by someone else?” My response was, “I think what you lose in the handwritten-by-proxy you gain in being part of a project designed to send gratitude to lots of people.” It’s not just you sending a card to your friend, which you could do on your own. It’s you and your friend being part of a project where lots of people are getting surprise thank yous.
One of you asked if I had any $10,000 ideas yet. Not yet. But I like what I’ve learned from #3. Whatever it is I dream up, I want it to draw people in because they can be part of something bigger.
**
If you’re reading this from the blog, send a card through the Thank You Project here.
How it feels to launch on Kickstarter
(Cross posted from my first update to backers of the Thank You Project.)
When I hit “launch” on the Thank You Project on Friday, I expected to feel relief. Shipped! Out the door! In reality, I can tell you the feeling is less like relief and more like the sensation of… jumping off a cliff. My first thought? “OMG what if no one backs my project.” So I started tweeting and emailing friends personally just as I had planned, but I could not shake the feeling that each moment that my project sat at $0.00 funded made me think the lizard brain was right after all. What if no one backs my project. Then the very first one of you backers showed up. Getting that first notification email is an amazing feeling. Relief, excitement, and pure delight! Roughly in that order. THANK YOU. My next thought was, oh man, $5 is an awfully long way away from $100. I had set the funding target low so that people could surely get their cards. One of you said I’ll be funded in no time. Well, “no time” feels like a really long time when you’re at $5. Perhaps this fundraising thing becomes scalable at some point, but in the initial stages you really have to earn each and every backer’s support. Think about it from the backer’s (your!) point of view. To back a project that 10, 20 other people have backed is not such a huge deal. The project is likely to be funded or already funded. Other people validate your belief that this project is a cool idea. To be one of the earliest, that’s a bit of a leap of faith. THANK YOU. So I emailed a few more people, and over the next couple of hours more people back it, $5, $10 at a time. Every notification email made me want to cheer. Or to use one of my favorite phrases, *throws confetti*. In my mind, anyone who has ever set a fundraising goal of any size is brave. If my $100 goal can seem daunting, I can only imagine what it must feel like to set it at $1,000 or $10,000. When people set out to fundraise a few million for a startup or $50 million for a fund, that is incredible to me. (And some of you backers are doing exactly this!) With the creation of any boldly defined goal comes the creation of the very real possibility of failure. There are some who say that it takes as much effort to execute a $10,000 dollar idea as it does to execute a $1 billion dollar idea. While that may be true, all these journeys are amazing to me because it takes such an act of courage to put yourself out there. You are telling the world that you believe your idea is worth their attention, your work is worth their money. Every single sale is a huge deal. As of this morning, 3 days after launch, we have… $103. WE ARE FUNDED!!! You are all getting cards!! :) THANK YOU so much for making this leap off the cliff an enjoyable ride. Tell your friends about this! We have 26 days more to go for more people to be backers and send more cards. I shall start making cards. I am also accepting ideas for a $10,000 project. :) ** If you are reading this on my blog and want to be a backer of this project, join us! You are now definitely getting cards.
From $100 business idea to Kickstarter project
(Or, how to squash your lizard brain.)
Remember the $100 business idea? Yeah, that one. I actually got pretty far along back in January. I had card designs, sent out a survey, bought materials. I even signed up for Shopify and built a site. I spent hours and hours trying to figure out liquid (their template language) to customize the site to what I wanted.
Then my lizard brain won. And I stopped.
The lizard brain, if you’re not familiar with it, is what Seth Godin uses to describe the resistance, that internal force that makes us get scared, be careful, back away from taking risks, and be too terrified to ship.
It makes no sense, except that if you’ve ever tried to do a large project just because you wanted to - not because it’s homework, or you’re supposed to, or you really need some other end result. If you’ve ever done something big (and many small things can seem big) motivated by nothing but this vision that you want the world to have this, you will know the sound of that little voice that says, “I’m not sure this is such a great idea…”
So as school picked up in the spring and recruiting pressures became stronger, I stopped. Excuses. And the lizard brain.
**
Last Friday afternoon, it occurred to me that my card idea could be a Kickstarter project. I love browsing Kickstarter. Every time I meet a friend who’s into launching artsy projects, I say, “Hey you should use Kickstarter.” But me, do my own Kickstarter project? Hmm, how hard is this really…
So I looked it up. It seems you need to submit a proposal first. Turns out the proposal is really short. So I think, “I can write this, in fact, I can I write it now.” So I did. And I hit submit.
It was only after that that the lizard brain started to kick in. Wait a minute, did I put in enough effort? Should I have shot pictures of the cards and linked to them? I’m not even an artist. I should have done more research. I should have checked their blog for guidelines or found examples or… Quora! I bet someone on Quora has asked how to get your proposal accepted.
On and on. Then I was glad I had hit submit before I had time to think all these thoughts. Because if I went down that route, the lizard brain would probably have won. Again.
As it turns out, this Monday morning, I got an email that said, “Your Kickstarter project has been accepted!” Wow. Woohoo! I am throwing confetti. My $100 card business idea is being reborn as a Kickstarter project. I guess this is what they call a pivot!
**
And then the real work begins.
This time the lizard brain will not win. To defeat it, I am going to keep going and not think. Well, no, not not think. I need to think obviously. But I am going to tell myself that… that shipping trumps perfection. The point is to ship. Real artists ship.
How’s it going? I am discovering that it is the unobvious things that are hard.
Knowing what to do next is hard. I know I need a project page, with a video and write up and reward levels and I need to promote it. But it’s not easy figuring out where to start, what to do next, and how to pull it all together.
Making a video is really hard. (All you people who work in video - respect!) I wanted to do cut-outs, so ok, I picked something pretty tedious. But it’s tiring to shoot frame by frame. It’s even harder if you’ve never done this before, and you have no video editing equipment, and you kinda want to make the whole thing for free.
In the end, I made the cut-outs for the video using scraps of card stock. I went for a stop motion look because I don’t even have a tripod. I shot it off the floor of this apartment, because it happens to have nice hardwood floors. I tried to use iMovie, couldn’t get it to cooperate, and in the end, because I know photography better, made the entire thing in Picasa (which has a movie function!). And then I ripped off a soundtrack in the most ghetto way possible using Windows Movie Maker. Yep, this is pretty scrappy video-making.
But 36 hours later, I have a video! It astounds me that I do, but I have a video.
You will see it when I launch. Now, back to work.
How to start a business for $100
This is NOT how they teach you to start a business in b school.
How (not) to do it
You’re supposed to write a business plan, do some market research, market sizing, financials, draw revenue projections that go up and to the right. The thought process can be very helpful, but that also seems to me how you end up NOT starting a business. By the time you put the finishing touches on that business plan, you’ve drained yourself of the adrenalin rush of launching a new and great thing into the world.
So I wanted to build something. With Askapade, we built a product. After about 7 months of work, we shipped a product. We also built something incredibly hard to monetize. Can we make money from it? Sure, but we’d probably need 50 million users.
Launching the $100 business: Make My Day Cards
This time, I wanted to start a business on the opposite end of the spectrum. I wanted to build something that was really quick to launch. I’ve also been reading Chris Guillebeau’s The Art of Non-Conformity blog. (Getting the urge to start a venture in the middle of winter break is apparently one of side effects of reading blogs.) He makes a case that businesses can be started for less than $100. There is no need for a 50-page business plan, or venture money, or anyone’s approval. Just get it out the door. Ship fast and start learning.
The idea hit me on Sat night. That’s right - New Year’s Day 2011. Greeting cards for no occasion! Handwritten, handmade, stamped and mailed on your behalf. Think of this as the anti-Christmas-ecard. I’m calling it: Make My Day Cards.
This was not an idea to take over the world. The point was to start a business for less than $100. That said, greeting cards are apparently a $7.5 billion industry. So a tiny, tiny slice of that… Also, before they made it big, once upon a time the founders of Airbnb sold Obama Os and Cap’n McCain cereal.
Getting it off the ground
In the last few days, I did all of the things below. Many of these I learned to do for the first time:
- Bought a domain - www.makemydaycards.com. I really wanted No Occasion Cards, but my straw poll told me “occasion” is a difficult word to spell, even for highly educated people.
- Set up various email accounts for the domain (also threw in a@ailiangan.com!)
- Sourced for platform(s) to host this site. I checked out Shopify, Flying Cart, Volusion, Wordpress, Wufoo, and Weebly. Most of these are too complicated for a business that was going to sell just ONE item.
- Set up forms to collect data
- Created a simple mockup page
- Got the forms to integrate into the webpage
- Set up Twitter and blogging accounts. I even added Olark for live chat help. You will actually msg me if you try it on the site.
- Figured out how to buy cardstock. I visited a couple of brick-n-mortar stores to get a sense for what’s out there. (How am I supposed to know what 80 lb paper feels like otherwise?) Then I went online to find cheaper, better quality options. In about 10 hours, I learned more about the world of cardstock than I ever thought possible. I am not a crafts person, so I was starting from a knowledge base of zero. I learned about weights, cover vs. text, vellum vs. linen, A5 vs. A7 envelopes, and why standard paper is 8.5 x 11. To think I was just trying to make some simple cards…
- Set up a Paypal business account. Yes, you can pay me! This is very exciting. Kudos to Paypal for making payments pretty easy. It’s actually kind of scary how easy it was to almost pay myself while testing. (Let’s see how easy it is to get money out later.)
Now the main thing left is to, well, make cards! Ok, there’s more than that. I’ve probably hit the 80/20 point where the last 20% will take 80% of my effort, but a week ago, NONE of this existed.
How to manage self-doubt
One of the huge challenges of launching any kind of business (or similarly crazy venture) is staying convinced that your idea will work. It is incredibly helpful to have friends give you ideas and feedback and encouragement (please keep them coming!).
But the most reaffirming moment I’ve had was when I called Paypal for technical help. The rep was confirming my info and she said, “Are you… Ailian at Make My Day Cards dot com?” Yes! Yes, I am. There is nothing quite like hearing a total stranger say your business name that you made up out of thin air just days ago. She made it sound legit. So if you find yourself struggling with self-doubt, find a stranger who will boost your ego this way.
Sign up for the beta over at Make My Day Cards. I’ll let you know when I’m ready to ship some cards.
