Laser: What it basically is is this beautiful leap of faith towards I believe this art is awesome and that there's an audience for it and it deserves to be created. And if you believe that too, then it can exist. And so Kickstarter is sort of this world where art can exist that would never otherwise exist.

Michael Walker: It's easy to get lost in today's music industry with constantly changing technology and where anyone with a computer can release their own music. I'm going to share with you why this is the best time to be an independent musician and it's only getting better. If you have high quality music, but you just don't know the best way to promote yourself so that you can reach the right people and generate a sustainable income with your music, we're going to show you the best strategies that we're using right now to reach millions of new listeners every month without spending 10 hours a day on social media. We're creating a revolution in today's music industry and this is your invitation to join me. I'm your host, Michael Walker.

Michael Walker: All right, so I'm really excited to be here with my new friend, Laser Malena-Webber. They're awesome. So they started a band called The Doubleclicks and have written over three or not over three, you've written three Billboard charting musical comedy albums and in the process have raised over $100,000, hundreds of thousands of dollars in Kickstarter campaigns for the music and have also helped other artists to make over $1 million on Kickstarter and 100% of the campaigns that they've worked on have gotten funded.

Michael Walker: And so today, I thought it would be a good idea to maybe peel back the curtain a little bit and talk about the Kickstarter success that you've seen and some tips for artists that are watching this right now who might be interested in running a crowdfunding campaign and are interested in learning more about it. Laser, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today.

Laser: It is so much fun to talk to you. Thank you so much for chatting. I love talking about this stuff.

Michael Walker: So the first question for you, because we met pretty recently and we're still getting to know each other and I'd love to hear a little bit more about your story, just how you got started with The Doubleclicks and how you've been able to achieve this massive success on Kickstarter.

Laser: Yeah, absolutely. My band started as kind of a mistake. I grew up really musical, but I wasn't intending to start a band. But I started writing angsty poetry and then picked up a guitar. I realized it wasn't quite as difficult as I thought it was. And then my sister encouraged me to start going out to a weekly open mic night. We were playing together, she plays cello which if you don't know this, is a really good hack for how to start a band.

Laser: If you just have a cello, it sounds amazing. It was a really great way to also just to get us going because we had this weekly open mic and we tried to have a new song every week because it was basically the same 15 people every week and since we were writing kind of comedic music, it kind of gets old. You don't want to play the same song...

Laser: So we would write a new song every week for this open mic. And then eventually we started getting booked and realizing we needed more songs and so we started writing songs for the internet as well as a way to just motivate ourselves to create more stuff. We started a weekly song a week project on YouTube inspired by people like They Might Be Giants and Jonathan Coulton who have done these weekly song a week kind of projects.

Laser: From there, we started getting a bit of an internet following, which was really cool. This was back in 2011. That blossomed into a world of beginning to do shows and beginning to have people follow us on Twitter and beginning to want to record an album. All this while, I was working as a newspaper reporter where I became very obsessed with communication.

Laser: Everybody has a bunch of aspects to themselves and the thing that I was super obsessed with was being able to stay in touch with people. As a newspaper reporter, one of my jobs was to write three... I had to write two to three newspaper articles a day. I had to constantly...

Laser: Yeah, it was about architecture and stuff. My main job was I have to find people and have to interview them. And so I have to be able to get in touch with them. When we started the band, one of the main things I wanted to do is be like I want to be able to always stay in touch with our fans. As soon as they discover us, I want to never lose touch with them. When we started our YouTube channel, I did so that people could join our mailing list as soon as they... As soon as we posted a song, they could download it for free as long as we got their email address and whenever they discovered us on Twitter, we were like, "Okay, awesome, great. How do we capture you so we never lose you?" Like a Pokemon.

Laser: And then a couple of years later, we decided we were going to make our first album. We did kind of our own DIY crowdfunding for it where we set up a pre-order, put together a few packages where people could buy the CD and a shirt with a custom membership number on it according to how early they had discovered the band.

Laser: My husband was number three, I think. Then we put that out and that was really successful. And then, in 2014, we launched our first Kickstarter. I asked for $18,000 to make the first album with a different producer. We made $80,000 and we were both able to quit our jobs and become a full-time band. That's how The Doubleclicks got started.

Michael Walker: Wow, that's awesome. I really love that idea to have the number on the merchandise is really cool, to really reward the people or to have the number in place of when they discovered you. Man, I bet that that moment that $80,000 in Kickstarter campaign and you were able to say, "Wow! We can actually do this full time, which there's been an amazing moment."

Laser: It was wild. It was so exciting, my sister literally spilled an entire glass of water on her laptop. It was like, well, there goes on with the money. That happens.

Michael Walker: Yeah. That's one of those things that you always need to budget for in the Kickstarter campaign, is like computer breaking down because you'd spill water on it.

Laser: That's happened twice for clients of mine. People just... I don't know what it is about running a crowdfunding campaign, but you're definitely going to spill an entire Diet Pepsi into your laptop keyboard. So just keep that in mind. From that crowdfunding campaign, I found myself completely unable to stop thinking about how Kickstarter works and people were constantly asking us for advice like, "How did you do this thing?" Or they would launch a crowdfunding campaign and it wouldn't go anywhere and they'd asked us for advice.

Laser: And so I was like well, what did make us successful? And thinking about that a lot. We launched another campaign and it was successful for the next album wanted to make. And we did that again. And eventually, I started helping our friends launch their own campaigns and then I started a consulting business where I could help even more people launch their own campaigns and came up with kind of a program that took all the lessons that I've learned from all of these things to make a crowdfunding campaign that is going to be successful, because of all the work you do beforehand, not just launching it.

Laser: There's work beforehand, as all of those things, those obsessive weird things that I talked about makes the campaign successful but it's one of my favorite things that it makes me very, very happy.

Michael Walker: That's so awesome. I feel I understand what you mentioned briefly there about like you can't just put it out and then just hope that everything is going to work. It's not a build it and they will come necessarily kind of thing. The analogy that I usually think of with artists releasing their music on Spotify or something is that it's kind of like starting a fire. Even if you just have the logs for the fire and you put them on the fire, nothing happens unless you know how to drive traffic and generate flames for it.

Michael Walker: I think you can talk a little bit about your Kickstarter, what would you say are kind of the biggest benefits behind Kickstarter? What's your perspective on why anyone should consider even creating a Kickstarter?

Laser: I love Kickstarter. Thank you very much for this, my favorite question. Kickstarter is not familiar, it's a system where people can come and pledge for a project. You set a goal like $10,000. If I make $10,000, I get to make this album. And if you don't raise $10,000, you don't get any money and that means that album isn't going to get made. But what it basically is, is this beautiful leap of faith towards I believe this art is awesome and that there's an audience for it and it deserves to be created. I think that. If you believe that too, then it can exist.

Laser: And so Kickstarter is sort of this world where art can exist that would never otherwise exist. So it's a world where maybe your stuff is too weird or too different or too specific or just that you know you're not huge enough yet or you have your... You and your audience want to exist outside a world of gatekeepers. You can still make something. I think that's amazing. For example my band, we write weird songs about dinosaurs and cats and queer identity and being a non-binary and having a lot of anxiety and board games. That's my whole thing.

Laser: That's just who I am and what I do and we have a cello and a ukulele and it's fine. We don't ever try to change who we are and we are super honest about it. And we lean into the things that make us unique, and that is one of the things that makes us so successful on Kickstarter is that we can lean into the uniqueness of us and the people who work at Kickstarter really embrace that as well. They love the idea of just be your weird self and that's great. That's one of the things I love about crowdfunding. But even if you don't think you're a super weirdo, it's great because you can work directly with your community and your community could be part of creating the art that you want to make.

Laser: It's also you get to launch your art, your album with excitement. You basically get 20 to 30 days of a pre-order campaign for your album that has this kind of built in thermometer of fundraising, of a system for you to tell stories about your album and people are excited and they get excited about the track names and they get excited about... We just Kickstarted a musical earlier this year. And people are excited about the characters and excited about the song for this album that they haven't even heard yet. But they know more about it than I do because it's been on Kickstarter and my fans are just like, "Yeah, I'm psyched about it." People love being excited about new things, especially now when they just like...

Laser: We want to support something positive and it's really cool because your community gets to be excited about something with you for a full month. I think especially right now, where albums don't have a long cycle of excitement, Kickstarter gives them an opportunity to have that moment to really be exciting. Also, if you finagle it right through the right channels, it gives you a chance to have a whole bunch of pre-orders for an album in a world where people don't actually buy albums, they go on Spotify. We've been able to top the Billboard company charts and break the digital albums charts and any charts and full charts in a world where my band perhaps wouldn't be able to do that without Kickstarter. So it's really, really cool.

Laser: And you get to control all of it. And that's another thing that I really love. Obviously, you have to do all the work because you are the indie artist, unless you assemble a team, but nobody gets to tell you what to do. It's just you and your community. And as a person who loves to control things, but also loves to just make the art that I want to make, Kickstarter is really ideal for me in that way.

Michael Walker: That was such a good answer.

Laser:
Thank you.

Michael Walker: You're just exuding love for Kickstarter. To kind of recap what I was getting there is that one, Kickstarter is just a beautiful platform that allows you to rely on yourself, where you don't have to rely on your kind of changing who you are. You can really lean into your uniqueness and be able to really connect with your community in a direct and authentic way that without Kickstarter or without any crowdfunding campaigns like that can be really difficult to do.

Michael Walker: And then two, I really like this idea that you brought up the fact that it's almost a teaser or it's a pre-thing leading up to your release. That really builds excitement for it even before it's out and there's something really powerful about the anticipation that can be built up around something before it actually happens.

Michael Walker: I know like for me, I'm a geek and I love video games and there's been plenty of times there's a new video game that's coming out in a week. And that week leading up to it, I spend so much time watching the previews and kind of digging into it. I was like, "I want this to be out now."

Laser: Yeah.

Michael Walker: And so it sounds like with Kickstarter, it kind of has a built-in, a way to kind of generate some of that anticipation. And so people are really digging in and getting involved with the artwork even before it's happened and kind of gives you this co-creative collaborative way that you can connect with your audience and they can really support you and you can take this leap of faith together. That's awesome. What would you say is... I know you've worked with a lot of artists at this point who are running Kickstarter campaigns. You've seen quite a few campaigns succeed in a big way. And you've seen quite a few probably fail and fail is kind of a strong word, but they didn't reach their goal.

Michael Walker: What would you say are some of the biggest challenges that you've seen when it comes to artists getting started and running Kickstarter campaigns?

Laser: I think there are a few different ways that people can approach Kickstarter that are maybe not the way that I just described, that kind of will make you hit a wall. One of them is sometimes people just say, "Okay, Kickstarter, that's where you go to get money for your thing." Or, "Okay, I should make a thing. And so I should go to Kickstarter."

Laser: And so when you approach it in that way, where maybe you think that money just comes out of Kickstarter and you don't have your community already, that's a mistake because it is a place to go with your community to fundraise, not a place to go to find your community. You need to do the work ahead of time and also Kickstarter is really a place where you should know why you're doing what you're doing. And it shouldn't be, "Okay, I think I should spend $50,000 to make my EP hiring this really expensive producer because that's what everybody else I went to music school is doing or that's what this one guy told me I should do."

Laser: You should really do what you're doing because you love it and it's all about what you truly believe in because the Kickstarter audience and your audience when they're crowdfunding with you really has to be in this world of authenticity and community as opposed to a commercial world of, "This is what I think is going to work," or, "This is what I think is going to sell."

Laser: So for both of those things, I would say that's why the first thing that I have anybody who works with me do is create a mission statement. Sounds pretty dorky and me 10 years ago would be rolling their eyes like, "What?" But it's one of those things that I've found usually three meetings in to a conversation, I figure out what somebody really cares about. It's like, I see what you actually want to do is, you actually care about is changing the way people think about marimba or you want to make people happy or you want an album you can sell on tour or you want to be able to support your children. Whatever it is that you actually care about doing, that should be what you bring to Kickstarter.

Laser: It shouldn't be like, "Well, I am doing it because I think I should be doing it," or, "I'm just going here because I want to get a bunch of money." Neither of those things work. The approach is really important. I would say. I have so many other pieces of advice. But that's I think the main one that I see when a page is up and people come to me and they're like, "My Kickstarter isn't working. I only have one backer, what's wrong? Can you fix it?" And it's like, "No, it's way too late." That's a me problem.

Michael Walker: Yeah. That totally makes sense. It sounds like one of the biggest challenges that you see people struggling with is or maybe mistakes is that maybe they haven't built a community beforehand and they're sort of relying on Kickstarter, they think that that's going to be their place where they kind of get discovered. And that's not necessarily the proper use case for Kickstarter. Sounds like Kickstarter is most powerful when you do you have... At least as an artist, you've built a really great connection with a community of people. And so that's one thing you mentioned.

Michael Walker: Another thing is just having the wrong mindset around it in general and maybe kind of focusing a little bit too much on the commercial aspect of it and thinking about it in a way where it's just about making money, which about just collecting money for the project as opposed to really looking at it as a way to connect with your community and to create artwork for them. How big of an audience would you recommend? I know that this is a tricky question, because it's not necessarily the size of the audience. It's also about the connection with them and a lot of different factors. But when is it the right time for someone to look at Kickstarter?

Laser: That's a super good question. Obviously, say you know the answer is it's a super depends. Because I truly believe anybody can launch a successful Kickstarter depending on how much money you want, because maybe you want $100 and maybe you want $100,000. Those are two different projects. It depends on what you want to do. Any project is totally legit. If you want to do a $2,000 project just to be able to print 50 CDs, that's awesome. That is a really cool product that will get that amount of fans really excited to be part of it. I've put together a couple of calculators and I'll put that in the package that we can send out to your crowd.

Laser: Basically, you need to figure out... I've done a lot of work on this because you need to figure out what your goal is and what your goal really is, not just like, "I want to make as much money as possible." What is your goal? What do you really need to do with this project? And then how much can you actually raise with your audience and do those things match each other? And if they don't, then let's make sure we can get your audience to that size.

Laser: So if your goal is, "I really want to make a really amazing album, and I know it's going to cost $15,000," then you need to have an audience that's big enough to get to that point. 100% of the audience doesn't need to come from your existing audience. Some people will if you have a successful project add on because they will see a successful project and join it. But I would say you want to make sure that your project is going to have the momentum before you launch it. But there's definitely some calculations you can do that are literal math that I've done, that I'll put this together in a packet for anybody who's listening, that you want to do before you launch just to make sure because it's not going to be 100% of your audience that backs the project, obviously, and they're not all going to give you $100 and they're not all going to give you $5.

Laser: But you can kind of predict where your audience is going to fall and you can do that by looking at other projects who have similar bands in your genre and seeing not just how cool the Kickstarter page is, but where their audience size was when they launched and stuff that. But it's okay if your first project isn't an $80,000 project. Your first project could be $5,000 and that's super great. That gets your audience excited and you might use that project to build momentum for the next thing.

Michael Walker: Awesome.

Laser: Not a number, but I have numbers that I could give.

Michael Walker: No, that's great. I was the weird kid in high school that liked math. So I love math, I love the calculations. I appreciate you sharing that with everyone watching. What we'll do to make it as simple as possible is we'll just include it in a link or something that you'll be able to see and go directly so that you can get the packet with the super cool calculation so you can see, because-

Laser: I have spreadsheets, I got everything. You're going to be like, "Laser is nerd. They are such a weirdo."

Michael Walker: That's what I'm talking about.

Laser: I'm like, "Yes, yes, yes!" Michael, we are not so different.

Michael Walker: Yep. Yeah, we're both spreadsheet fans. I can tell. Cool. It sounds like while it depends, but there is sort of a predictive framework. You don't want to aim really high if you don't have any sort of audience at all and then feel embarrassed if you don't come close to your goal. And so it is nice to have a little bit of an idea of, "You know what? Maybe what could you be aiming for?" But it sounds also what you're saying is that there's not necessarily a right or wrong answer in terms of the size of the Kickstarter campaign. That you can get started, and if it's $500, or $5,000 or $50,000, then it's not really a right or wrong way to do it, it's just about kind of finding out where you're at right now and getting started from there.

Laser: Yeah, absolutely. The size of your audience will affect it. Also, being able to access your audience, if you're the kind of been to tours a lot, but you don't have a mailing list or you don't actually... If people don't actually follow you on social media or don't actually know how to get your information and you don't know how to get that information for you, this is my obsessive contacting thing.

Laser: That's so important for crowdfunding, you need to be able to tell people that you just launched a project. So important. I have the data on that. You've got to know. And then you need to have the audience not just big, but also... That actually cares about you in a genuine way. Because the crowdfunding audience is audience that's putting faith in you. They're actually, kind of investing in you in a way emotionally and monetarily. They have to care. They can't just be a bunch of people, 5 million people that you got from a Facebook ad or something like that. They actually have to care and actually want you to succeed. That's why being super genuine and sharing the unique weirdo parts of yourself is so important.

Michael Walker: What's up, guys, so quick intermission, from podcasts so I can tell you about an awesome free gift that I have for you. I wanted to share something that's not normally available to the public, they normally reserved for our $5,000 clients that we have personally. This is a presentation called Six Steps to Explode Your Fan Base and Make a Profit With Your Music Online.

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Michael Walker: I think it's going to be hugely valuable for you. If that's something you're interested in, in the description, there should be a little link that you can click on to go get that. And the other thing I want to mention is if you want to do us a huge favor, one thing that really makes a big difference early on when you're creating a new podcast, is if people click subscribe, then it basically lets the algorithm know that this is something that's new and noteworthy and that people actually want to hear. And so that'll help us reach a lot more people. So if you're getting value from this, and you get value from the free trainings, then if you want to do us a favor, I'd really appreciate you clicking the subscribe button. All right, let's get back to the podcast.

Michael Walker: So another thing that you mentioned that is really important that sometimes people struggle with is creating a mission statement or kind of having a clear purpose behind why they're launching the campaign. Could you speak a little bit more to that? And specifically what are a few things that someone could do to sort of reflect and come up with that for themselves in a way that makes it... Because it sounds for you, communication is something that you've really mastered in your life and you really are passionate about the act of being able to communicate. I also want to reiterate what you said too, about having a contact list, like an email list, because that is a mistake a lot is just not having that at all and the analogy that we use for it is that it's like you if you're doing all these shows where you have some exposure come in, it's kind of like a storm and it's raining outside and it's all storming.

Michael Walker: But if you're just sitting out there holding out your hands, then as soon as the storm passes, then most of the rain just kind of goes into the ground. You can't do anything with it. But if you have some sort of rain catcher like a funnel, then you can capture that rain and then boom, you can turn around and then you can stay connected with those people and then you can build a relationship with them and then when you have a Kickstarter campaign, it's kind of thing where two or three years later, "Oh, that's interesting. I thought they were... I didn't know that they did a Kickstarter campaign." But you're actually able to reach those people. Sorry, I went on a little bit of tangent there, because I like that analogy with the rain.

Laser: No. I love it. It's very... Yeah, in terms of examples of mission statements and how to build it, I would say, I tell people to do two. One is what is the mission statement of your art? So for example, the mission statement of my art is we take things that make us angry and then make songs that when you repeat them make you happy, which is very specific to us, but makes sense when you do it.

Laser: I've had artists where the song... Literally one of my clients, their statement was they want to change the way people think about marimba, which was amazing. I love that very much. People want to make classical music more accessible to a wider range of people who haven't been educated on the concept of classical music. They want to make people cry with the beauty of their words, they want to make people rock out and lose themselves for a moment, whatever that mission statement is for the art.

Laser: And then the second mission statement is for the project, right? So the mission statement for that project might be, I want an album that can make my business sustainable for the next year, because I will have a CD that I can sell on tour or I want an album that will be so good that I can pitch myself to radio stations and the classical music gatekeepers or I want something that exemplifies the best of what my music is right now or maybe I just want something that shows, I just want to collect as many of my songs as possible, in one place.

Laser: Whatever it is that you really need to do right now, there are so many different things that a project can be. A project could just be I want to spend as much time as possible with my community or I want to make something that builds my community as big as possible. These are all things that I've seen, and they're all completely different, they look completely different as projects. Because if your idea is I want an album that makes my songs sound as polished as possible, that's a lot more expensive in the production end than I want a project that is something that helps my band sustain ourselves for a year because we're going on tour. That album could be something that you record at your house for $2,000 and then you can sell it on tour and all the rest of the Kickstarter money goes directly to you. Whereas the expensive album that is supposed to be super polished might cost $12,000 to record and you don't get any money.

Laser: Those are both projects that raised $20,000, the budget looks totally different and the result is extremely, extremely different. And it's something that a lot of... It really affects every single decision that you make in the Kickstarter, and also how broke you're going to be at the end of it.

Laser: So it's a really important thing to think about. Because if you're running things on your own, you don't realize a Kickstarter could be a thing that makes you money and that makes you an independent musician full-time. Or it could be something that employs a lot of other people and gets you a really cool final product, but doesn't actually make you any money. Knowing what your actual goal is so important from the very beginning. Not only does it affect your budget, but it also affects your rewards, how much time do you want to spend fulfilling things? Do you want to have a reward where people can pay $200 for you to cover their favorite song, because that's awesome but it also might take a ton of time for you to do. We have spent six months of three songs for people, which was really fun. It was a job, but it was, "Well, we certainly aren't writing songs right now." There's just all kinds of stuff that that mission statement affects.

Michael Walker: Awesome. Sounds the mission statement is beneficial for the campaign succeeding but it's also really beneficial for you in kind of clarifying what's the real goal of the project and one mistake that sometimes people can make is just totally forgetting about themselves and maybe just focusing in fundraising for the money and then there's nothing left over or maybe with the different tiers that they offer, it's over delivering a ton of stuff without realizing, "Oh, man. I'm going to spend the next six months recording all these cover songs."

Michael Walker: Would you recommend... I guess yeah, it depends on the project and what your goal is specifically, but it sounds like that's just maybe something to take into account for anyone that's considering doing a Kickstarter is really thinking about how much time is it really going to take you to fulfill all these different things and what are you exactly trying to raise money for. This is one thing I'm just kind of curious about is and I'm sure you get this question all the time from people you're working with is what should we include for the tiers? What should the rewards be and how should we structure those?

Michael Walker: So what are some general tips or advice you'd have for people are there any like... That you know it's a guarantee, like always include this every single time. Are there any kind of cool ones that you're like, "This works really well. This is a great one for people to include."

Laser: Yes, well, first of all, a great one to include is a digital discography tier, if this is not your first album. Putting a digital discography tier is great. My whole back catalog including demos and previous CDs, everything is great, because if it's digital, then it's free to fulfill. We put those out at the 50 or $80 level or something like that.

Laser: Digital rewards in general are awesome on Kickstarter, because you don't have to ship them, shipping is going to be a huge thing. Once you get into Kickstarter and they're like a high price reward. It's really great, because you'll have some people who come into a Kickstarter who have never bought any of your stuff before, because they've always listened on Spotify or they actually haven't heard of you, but their friends are posting about it or whatever. And the digital discography, it's just $80 of profit right there, which is awesome. And people get to listen to all your music, which is amazing.

Laser: But in general about rewards, what I tell people is don't think so much about the things... People get really caught up in, "I need to make a sticker and a key chain and a shirt and a sweatshirt and a cup and whatever." Think about the different price points and the people at those price points. If you can imagine a specific fan at the $10, 30, 50, 75, 150, 300 and 1000, who are those specific fans and then or fewer than those numbers, but craft something cool for them. But try to keep it super simple. Because it doesn't need to be really complicated. You don't need to make a bunch of different things. At Kickstarter, it really doesn't for the most part matter what you're getting. They're here to support you. And they're here to be excited about whatever you're excited about.

Laser: So whether your $50 level is one shirt and a CD, or one shirt and vinyl or winter dotdigital, whatever. Or it's like a shirt and I got you a cool sticker, and I got you a hat and I got you a thing. Those two things are going to sell exactly equally well because these people... It's just like, "Okay, this is a band that I like and I want to give them $50."

Laser: That fan doesn't necessarily care about the difference between those two things. So find something really cool and elegant and keep it simple. Something that I found is really powerful is a really cool package at the 250 $300 level that genuinely does matter, we've done a couple things where that is thematically related to the album, we did one album called The Book is Better, which was all about disconnecting from the internet. So it was a package of things where you opened it and there was a velvet bag and you put your phone in the bag and it was all just stuff you had to do without your phone. So it was like one of those old disposable cameras and a book of crossword puzzles that we've made. And a rock, you could hit open with a hammer that had a crystal inside.

Laser: That kind of stuff was the package that you could get at 250. That might be a cool idea for a reward is a cool package at that level. Make sure when you design a shirt, and this is just good advice that everyone should know, that it looks good. A lot of people have this tendency to just... Okay, I have a friend who's an artist, I'm going to hire them and just make a shirt and whatever I don't know. Hiring artists is hard. There are so many amazing artists in the world. There are a few really, really cool places to find them on the internet. There's a directory called Drawing While Black. There's a hashtag called #VisibleWomen on the internet, on Twitter, where you can go find amazing artists that will make you a shirt that is not only cool related to your band, but just a shirt that people want to wear or an enamel pin.

Laser: Oh gosh, I didn't even mention enamel pins. Enamel pins are amazing. You don't have to do sizes. You want the design to be something that people will buy even if it had nothing to do with your band. So please, for the love of all that is holy, get a good design for your merch.

Michael Walker: [crosstalk 00:34:25] Thank you. Thank you for that. That's really good. There's something about... Gosh. What is it? I forget what the name of it is. But I think it's owner's bias basically where if we're the ones that create something, then we tend to think that it's better than it is kind of because we're biased. Yeah, and I think that's a that really applies a lot to , if we're not a graphic artist, and then we pull up Microsoft Paint and then create something where like, "This is awesome." When it's maybe a professional could get a little better.

Laser: There's so many amazing artists those worlds and they all are under-employed and you can just hire them. They're so great. I art direct all of my husband's projects. He's right on the other side of that as well. He does a lot of Kickstarter shoot because I'm just you don't know enough good artists and it's so easy to find somebody who makes exactly what you want. Just troll through those hashtags, Drawing While Black, #VisibleWomen. There are a million had good hashtags on Twitter and you'll find exactly the style you're looking for and exactly the thing you want and just hire somebody who's amazing and it's not that expensive and you will sell a billion more pieces of March.

Michael Walker: A billion with a B.

Laser: Exactly. A billion more pieces of merchandise.

Michael Walker: I've got the stats. That's exactly 1 billion.

Laser: Exactly.

Michael Walker: Well, one thing I wanted to come back to because I didn't quite understand what you said was instead of T-shirts, you said what? Enamel pins.

Laser: Enamel pins. Yeah.

Michael Walker: Enamel pins.

Laser: Do you do enamel pins?

Michael Walker: What are enamel pens? I don't yet.

Laser: Oh my gosh!

Michael Walker: Your enthusiasm makes me think I probably do want these.

Laser: Can I grab one?

Michael Walker: Yeah.

Laser: Do you have a second for me. Okay. This is an enamel pin. It says sensitive badass on it. I don't know if it's going to focus. But this is one for my band designed by Megan Murphy. We have done, I think four re printings of this pen because we keep selling out of them. We did a Kickstarter specifically to reprint this pin. This is another one from another Kickstarter, I ran of Luciano Fasano on a unicorn cat which is amazing.

Michael Walker: That's cool.

Laser: If you aren't on the enamel pin game-

Michael Walker: So how much does one of those costs to fulfill?

Laser: To fulfill? Okay, well, they cost between one and $2 to print and between one and $2 to ship.

Michael Walker: That's so good. That's super cool too.

Laser: Yeah. And then and you can sell them for 15 to $20. They're great. Like I said, you don't have to print different sizes of them, which is really awesome. And at least in our audience, they are becoming very popular. But our audience is hipster women and queer folks between the ages of 18 and 30. So maybe that's a slightly different crowd than you have but highly recommended enamel pins.

Michael Walker: Heck yeah. I like it a lot. In fact, that's something that I'm probably going to introduce to our community of artists that we're working with. Is like, "Hey, this is a cool merge idea. Try this out, see what happens." Because that's great. It's a few dollars to print them and fulfill them and it looks super cool and it's a nice collectible kind of thing.

Laser: I convinced the President of the United States of America to do and elephants on their latest Kickstarter. I was just like, "No, you have to do it." Just kept yelling at them until they did it and they were like, "We did it. And we don't regret it. Thank you very much."

Michael Walker: Nice. Cool. To kind of recap to bring everything that you just brought back in and do a quick summary. But in terms of rewards, you mentioned that one way of looking at it that sometimes people don't don't realize is that the stuff isn't nearly as important as the people that you're creating it for.

Michael Walker: And that a lot of times, it's not even necessarily the things, aren't necessarily the reason that they're going to be supporting you your artwork on Kickstarter. It's really because they have connected with you and they want to support you. And so keeping it as simple and elegant and streamlined as possible is great, as opposed to over complicating and kind of creating all these crazy, crazy different things. It's not really about the stuff.

Michael Walker: One thing to keep in mind as well it sounds is that anything that's super easy to fulfill is great to consider, especially at the end. If you do a $50,000 crowdfunding campaign, you have all this stuff to ship out, then that's something that is really important to really prioritize things that are valuable, but are also easy to fulfill. For example, the idea that you gave was a $60 Digital Deluxe, or a discography. Like the entire complete edition, which is really cool. Then things like the enamel pins, because those you don't necessarily have to create all these different sizes for. You just have the one size for the enamel pin. What do you say is kind of the upper range? The higher ticket things on the Kickstarter? How important are those? And what are some things that you see working really well for things at that higher level?

Laser: That comes back a little bit to the discussion of making sure that you are budgeting your time well, because it's very easy to sign yourself up for too many custom things. But there's a balance between making sure you have stuff there for people who might buy it and then also not having so many high level rewards that are never purchased and you kind of look like... You're like, "Well, I don't know, maybe somebody will give me 5000 and 10000 and 20,000." Yet you look a little bit out of touch.

Laser: So let me tell you some things that we have done and how they went. And perhaps you can learn from this lesson. Our first Kickstarter, we did a $300 level where you could buy you could request a cover song. Those were really fun. Actually, we learned a lot from it because it was back in the day, which is still kind of this case where I didn't really know how to play guitar very well and I was still kind of learning how to songwriter. And so I was learning a lot of songs, which was like it's a really good way to learn how to write music is let's cover this song by The Cure, let's cover the song by ELO and learn a whole lot about song structure and all of this stuff.

Laser: But it did mean that for a full six months, all we were doing was covering songs. We kept adding more of those it because they were selling so well. And we just wanted to make as much money as possible, which is a super easy thing to get carried away with when you're running a Kickstarter is stretch goals, stretch goals, stretch goals, let's just keep going until we climb the mountain of making as much money as possible. And then you get stuck in the hole that we did, where you run out of money, you spend the money on whatever, but you still have to keep fulfilling all these rewards that you promised you were going to do.

Laser: So don't recommend that. Don't get carried away with stretch goals. Make your plan ahead of time, set yourself a hard limit and trust your past self on why you made those limits. What we do now for that high level reward is we have a reward where you can play a game of D&D with us. So five people get together in either LA or Portland, and we all hang out and we have pizza, and we play a game of Dungeons and Dragons which is really fun, really good customer reward for us because we have a portion of our audience that's definitely in that zone. We know we have some techie nerds. And again, that's like about knowing your audience that want to do that and we have really good time doing it. So that's a recommended thing what kind of community thing can you do?

Laser: Some people offer house concerts. You really have to know your audience to know whether that's going to work. Sometimes those work. More often than not, nobody buys those. But sometimes they do, some people will offer executive producer credit that sometimes... Like their name goes in the liner notes and that sometimes sells. Like I was saying, the like $300 cool Deluxe box package works pretty well. Just try to figure out what kind of time you actually want to dedicate to it and actually schedule it on your calendar before you launch your project and limit those rewards because you can limit how many.

Michael Walker: Awesome. Well, one thing I kind of got from just looking at your example, on some of the things that you described really came out of the fact that you really know your audience well and you know who you are and some of the things that make you unique, like you said, you lean into them. Like the D&D game, where people get to come hang out, play D&D, that's awesome. That sounds like fun.

Michael Walker: In so maybe one way to think about it too for people is just like thinking, it sounds like all the different things that you create, you're genuinely really excited about them and there's something that you think is fun and that probably makes a big impact on people because it's not just about the stuff that they're getting, but about the experience and about the energy behind it. And so it sounds like a few of those higher ticket things that people could consider.

Michael Walker: One thing for them to take into account, too is just again, don't put themselves like in, I don't want to say like a jail cell, but to over-deliver and everything takes... It might take a lot longer. After the money comes in, and you invested the songs, you could be doing this for a year out if you don't structure it. You're really thinking about what can you actually deliver and scheduling out beforehand and holding yourself to it. So that way, if you're feeling tempted after you launch it to kind of add more to stretch your goals and maybe really considering is that something we can really maintain.

Laser: That's reminding me that we did a thing on I think it was our Patreon last year, where if people backed it, like the highest level, we said, "We will call you on your birthday and sing you a song. And your birthday is July 14." So we called every... It was like we don't want to keep track of your birthdays, we're going to call you on this day. And we called I think it was like five people. And we called them all in a row because we don't even live in the same city. So we had to be together.

Laser: It was great. They were all... And we really like, "So how's your birthday? Are you go into birthday dinner? How's it going?" They were all like, "Yep, it's my birthday. It was fine." We wrote them little birthday songs and it was really silly. But you can totally control your own boundaries and people get it. I think a lot of musicians I work with are very concerned about pleasing their fans and making sure that they are constantly like supplicating themselves to their fans and like, "Am I doing enough? Am I pleasing you? I can't be happy. I have to make them happy." And it's like, just set your boundaries. People will really respect that and are totally like... They totally understand and they want you to be happy.

Laser: They're fans of you. Just set your own boundaries and people love it. It's great.

Michael Walker: I love that piece of advice. That sounds like you're really just make sure that if you're just transparent, if you're transparent with yourself and with your fans, then they'll they want to support you. That's why they're your fans. Cool. Well, Laser. Thank you again, so much for taking the time to be here today. This has been super valuable. Before before we wrap up, I know you mentioned that you've created a goodie pack for the audience watching this right now.

Laser: Yes.

Michael Walker: Calculator. So could you tell us a little bit more about what you created for us?

Laser: Yeah, absolutely. So I put something together for your folks specifically which is going to have... I'll put that calculator in there where you can put in like kind of where your audience is now, how much I think you can raise on Kickstarter, which will be a range and then how to grow your audience like what makes a good Kickstarter audience and also a timeline of how many weeks and months it takes to build a Kickstarter and the whole checklist that goes up to making the Kickstarter. So like every step of the way, when you need to make rewards. When do you need to hire artists, when you need to make a promotion plan, when you have to submit things, all of that stuff, it's a whole lot.

Laser: But when you put it into a really beautiful checklist and a fillable PDF, which is my boyfriend, it's not that hard. So it'll be a good, good 20 pages of excellent content for you. That will be, I guess, in the description of this and also at success.lasercampaigns.com. I hope you enjoy it. I'll throw some discount codes in there as well if anybody wants to check out the courses that I make and I really appreciate you having me here because I really like what you do. You impress me every day. So thank you so much for having me.

Michael Walker: Well, as someone who has been very impressed with you throughout this interview, I appreciate that. And thank you again, for taking the time to be here and $1 million of successful Kickstarters for the artist you're working with. That's the numbers. The numbers don't lie. I really appreciate you just sharing all this. And as musicians, this is a big need for a lot of us, I think is that we need someone like you to kind of sharing these examples so that we can continue to create artwork in a sustainable way.

Michael Walker: So really appreciate you being here and sharing all that and for the awesome goodie pack that you just created. We'll make sure that we'll have it in the description a link that people click on and you're awesome.

Laser: Awesome, thanks.

Michael Walker: Hey, it's Michael here. I hope that you got a ton of value out of this episode. Make sure to check out the show notes to learn more about our guest today and you can support the podcast but there's a few ways to help us grow.

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