Crowd Funding My Small Business

Singer/songwriter/musician Amanda Palmer went to college and then worked as a self-employed "human statue" for years while getting her music career going.  She's now one of the best known musician/entrepreneurs out there.  She has a really hardcore following of around 25,000 people.  That makes her a loser to most major record companies.  Yet she did a crowdfunding campaign to produce an album a couple years ago and raised a record $ 1 million+.  She encourages people to download and torrent her music.  Yet she's doing better than most musicians out there, and doing it on her own terms.  If you are an artist, have any kind of business (or even a non-profit), I highly recommend taking 14 minutes to listen to her TED Talk above.  It's a great insight into how to be a working artist these days.

A couple weeks ago, I started a GoFundMe campaign to raise $1,000 to get my small business going.  For the most part, I'm hitting up old friends from the BMX world, and other people in my Facebook world.  I had no idea when I started if this would actually work.  To my old friends and acquaintances, this raises a bunch of questions.  Why didn't I start a business 25 or 30 years ago like so many of my friends did?  Why don't I have a "normal" job at age 49?  Why did I suddenly decide to become an artist?  Why not go drive for Uber since I used to be a taxi driver?  Why am I broke at my age?  Why would anyone give money to a guy who used to be homeless?  Why don't I borrow money from my local friends and neighbors here in North Carolina?  I'm sure it goes on and on. 

So here are some of those answers.  I wanted to start a business 30 years ago, but I was way too shy to be a good salesman.  I've learned over the years that, like it or not, selling is a huge part of running a business.  That sounds obvious, I know.  But a lot of people, especially in creative work, work on an idea but aren't able to sell it.  Either you have to be your own salesperson, or you have to hire one.  That's why my 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend didn't turn into my own business.  I wound up teaming up with Chris Moeller, one of the best salespeople I've ever met, and producing the first couple S&M bikes videos.  The Ultimate Weekend, my 1990 personal project, sold about 500 copies in the U.S. and an unknown amount overseas.  I sold the world rights to it.  In 1993, the S&M Bikes video 44 Something went on to sell around 8,000 copies, making it one of the best-selling BMX videos of the 1990's, and possible all time.  I made a decent low-budget video, and Moeller sold the hell out of it for years.  But I wasn't able to sell on my own then.

Why am I broke and starting over at age 49?  After an injury in 1999, I left my good paying job as a lighting tech in Hollywood and became a taxi driver.  Taxi driving isn't a job, it's a small business.  We had to pay lease on our cabs every day or every week, ranging from $550 to $875 a week.  On top of that, we had to pay for gas, another $300 a week on average.  Keep in mind that the average ride was about $12, and we normally got one ride every two hours from dispatch.  If you do the numbers, they don't add up.  In the good times, a taxi driver had to really know the area and the bar and club scene, AND had to hustle like crazy.  I earned a great reputation of always paying my taxi lease, even when many other drivers were getting behind.  Then, like so many other industries, new technology entered the picture.  Taxi companies went from radio dispatching to computer dispatching.  In one day, literally, a single day, the whole business changed.  The companies put a lot more cabs on the road, and it became harder and harder to scrape by.  I gained a ton of weight working those crazy hours, and started having serious health problems.  I had to walk away because of the poor business and health issues. 

Ultimately I wound up in the small town of Kernersville, North Carolina, right when the Great Recession hit.  I couldn't find ANY job.  Here, in this highly conservative part of the country, backgrounds like mine, with a wide variety of jobs, don't play well.  By one estimate, there are about 30 MILLION unemployed and under employed people in the U.S. right now.  I'm one of those people.  I decide to take matters into my own hands and put my full effort into art and writing.  Those are both things I've made some money at in the past, and I've actually made my living writing at times.  Instead of fighting for the handful of factory jobs left or fighting everyone else for a low pay service job, I'm creating my own job.  To do that, I need some help.  This is where the crowd funding campaign comes in. 

I've learned there are different ways to use crowd funding in today's world.  One example is a guy named Cat Man, the Carolina Panthers self-proclaimed #1 fan, who gets on TV and the jumbo tron nearly every game.  But he didn't have the money to go to the Super Bowl to watch his beloved Panthers this weekend.  So he launched a GoFundMe campaign to ask for donations.  Last I heard, he raised something like $8,000 in a couple of days.  Good for him. It wouldn't be a Panthers game without Cat Man there.  He's that much a part of the scene.

I'm taking a different tack, similar to the way start-ups use Kickstarter.  I'm not asking for donations, I'm asking for orders.  For $25 I'll draw you an original picture that I usually sell for $30.  And I'll throw in a zine, too.  Why?  To jump start the business and get it going quite a bit quicker.  I've been doing a few drawings, but I need to find work on a much more consistent basis.  It's working, slowly but steadily.  I'm far from making a living at this, but I'm on my way. 

The biggest thing I've learned about crowd funding, from books, online sources, and Amanda Palmer herself, is that you need a following of some kind for this kind of fund raising to work.  My network online is limited mostly to old school BMXers, but that's where I have to start.  In this new blog, I'm working to set an example for the other 30 million unemployed/underemployed people out there as to what's possible in today's world.  Things don't work the way they did 20 or 30 years ago.  It's a whole new game, and a lot of people are having trouble adapting, myself included.  This blog is a chronicle of my journey from a former homeless man to someone able to thrive in today's world.  You're along for the ride if you keep following.