The final tally is in…
(drum roll please)
… WE RAISED $13,180! 🙏🏼
Crazy. 300% funded is no joke. A MILLION THANK YOUS to everyone that believed in us and had a hand in this in whatever way. We see each and every one of you. Believe that. 💯
The whole end purpose of even doing this whole Kickstarter campaign was to make noise and connect with a larger audience. Ultimately that is what the funds are being used for: to create better art and to launch and release it in ways that connect us with more people. AND NOW WE WILL.
But I got to say, I never doubted it for one second – since we first set forth on this ambitious undertaking – that we were going to have achieved the level of success that we have. We finished our campaign off at exactly 329.5% FUNDED and 300% was what I had envisioned for this project from the start.
It was October 2017 when we started recording the interviews that would later become our pitch video. This was a such a long time coming and we needed to make sure that we had everything done right. So initially, we reached out to only our friends and family looking for feedback and assistance in editing our proposal; we made significant changes to our write-up, the order of our ideas, the language, our angle even our pitch video in hopes of proceeding with the most well-rounded, authentic, concise and inclusive proposal possible.
One week later we launched publicly. It was mad nerve-racking to walk back out on the court after years of absence, one year of planning, and especially in this manner with the crowdfunding, asking for something from our audience when in their perspective we hadn’t done shit for years. So we worked damn hard to make sure that we came across as openly and authentically as possible. We felt we owed people and explanation. A thorough one.
The response was overwhelmingly large; words of encouragement and pledges started flying in faster than we had expected. We were beside ourselves happy. We felt loved and warm and shit. Of course there was the odd idiot who came through with a response like “Oh I see you guys are harvesting money.” “Oceans 11 eh?” “Real artists don’t need crowdfunding” “Where are you going to run off to when you get your money?” “Why can’t you work hard like everyone else?” But these narrow-sighted haters were drowned out by the loud and immense love and support we received.
We were off to a super respectable start, however, our peers were slow to catch on. We dropped our first video – Snake Pond, directed by motherfucking Stuey Kubrick – and people still watched us like a cat from out a tree. Didn’t matter, we had a plan and we stuck with it, and the results came. As the social proof stacked up and the numbers literally racked up, the doubters began to believe, the side-ways looks began to subside and give way to words of encouragement, the hesitant began to speak up.
Finally, our vision came to fruition. In the last week of our campaign we dropped another video on ’em – BOOGIE – and raised more funds than in any of the previous weeks of our campaign, but more importantly had a greater number of backers (50% in the last week) and so drew more awareness than we had in a long while. It felt like we were back.
Now the campaign is over, the clock struck midnight and it’s done, and while we getting everyone’s rewards packages ready things are coming full circle. Reflections are flying at me.
At the end of the day, everything said, the hidden reward in this whole experience was actually the reconnecting itself, achieving our end objective directly, without funds, with so many homies and fam that we hadn’t had the opportunity to holler at in a while. The Kickstarter itself was a great excuse to reach out and let our people know we’re back and to show off the new material we’ve been working hard on. The convos we had, the insight we got, that was the real magic. So good to hear from so many people. All the words of encouragement, the shares, likes, advice at the start of the campaign… we’ve never clicked so many heart emojis before. We are grateful, humbled and motivated.
Thanks to you, we now have a FULL ALBUM coming fully mixed and mastered in HQ and a beautifully added skit by Nicky Scarfo, we have 2 more dope videos coming and more.
I can speak for the whole team in saying we’re proud of this achievement and look forward to driving forward full steam ahead with our mission.
Much much much love,
Anon