Upmarket Magazine

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Powerful Questions To Ensure Best Use Of Your Time And Maximum Impact Posted: 03 Sep 2012 08:00 AM PDT Jonathan Fields wrote a brief, to-the-point blog post called Be Fierce With Your Time that led me to reflect on how well I’ve been doing what he suggests. Jonathan is a former SEC lawyer turned serial successful entrepreneur, best-selling author, blogger, speaker and creator of the recently launched Good Life Project. Super smart, all-around cool guy. Jonathan asks some powerful questions in his post, the entirety of which you can find here. The bolds below are mine for emphasis: Life's not about getting everything done. It's about exalting the tasks, activities and relationships that hold the greatest potential for leverage and impact. Ask yourself… Can I do this once and have it ripple out 10X? Will this one thing move the impact needle in a meaningful way, for me or for someone I care deeply about reaching? Will I get a disproportionate return on the investment in this person, activity or idea? As I checked out how I was doing against these questions, I found that there were a number of places where I could make adjustments for far greater impact. While this post immediately made me think about the actions I’ve been taking (or not taking) in my business and how I could take those to another level, it also made me think about another critical dimension besides actions that I want to highlight: who I am being as I’m taking those actions. What do I mean by that? If I am rushed, stressed and irritable, I know the ideas don’t flow as well, my communication is not as clear, and there is a labored quality to what I do. If I’m focused, centered and enjoying myself as I’m taking my actions, my vision expands, my creativity increases, my ability to connect with people increases expoentially…it all works better, which increases my impact. It is as important to be as fierce about your energy as you are with your time. So turbo-charge Jonathan’s powerful questions with this one: What state of mind and being am I in as I take these actions? Photo: Wendy Piersall

Tips From A Tripled Kickstarter Goal: The Versalette Posted: 03 Sep 2012 05:00 AM PDT Editor’s note: Last week, Derrick Jones told us about crowdfunding’s unexpected industry connections bonus. Today, Kristin Glenn and Shannon Whitehead, the founders of {r}evolution apparel, share their lessons learned from their extremely successful Kickstarter campaign. In November 2011, we launched a Kickstarter campaign for our clothing company's signature piece, The Versalette. We sat on Skype together, Kristin in Denver and Shannon in Austin, and clicked the "launch" button with overwhelming anxiety and nerves. We had set a goal of raising $20,000 in 35 days, which in our eyes, seemed like an exorbitant amount of money. By Day 3 of our campaign, we were halfway there. By Day 13, we had hit our goal. And by the final day, we had tripled it, finishing at $64,246 with 796 total backers — and becoming Kickstarter's most-funded fashion project of the time. There are a lot of things we did right. There are also some things we would have done differently. For anyone looking to launch a crowdfunding campaign, this is what we've learned after going through it ourselves: Start spreading the word about your project months before you're ready to launch. There's something to be said for a slow debut. We put in the leg-work for our campaign a full year in advance by building a small following through our blog. Those 800-1,000 readers, many of them bloggers themselves, contributed greatly to our success by helping us spread the word throughout our campaign. Our feature on Forbes.com came from a friendship we had built on Twitter months before. Research other successful campaigns. Kickstarter is even bigger now than when we ran our project, and there are a plethora of articles out there that analyze the road to crowdfunding success. Put in the time to really get to know this space. Also, read the Kickstarter School, from front to back. Set your rewards fairly. Make sure your backers are being offered value. Kickstarter is not a charity or loan-based platform. If you expect to get support from more than just friends and family, then you need to make sure your price points are appealing and your rewards are enticing. Also, be sure that the math makes sense. (We set the price of one Versalette at $75 but then offered two Versalettes for $200. We got some emails asking why you couldn't get two for $150… Duh.) Don't be hasty about setting your rewards — think hard about price positioning and what you're offering. Seek out any and all press and publicity. Before we launched, we set up guest posts and interviews with blogs in our social media circle. As our campaign picked up traction and started gaining attention, we said "yes" to anyone and everyone who asked us for an interview. It didn't matter if the blog had five readers or 5,000. You never know where you're going to gain just one more backer. Use the updates. Kickstarter is great about providing ways to stay in touch with your backers. We didn't use the 'updates' resource to its full potential, because we already had our blog. Looking back, it would have been much more useful to have Kickstarter send all of our backers an automatic email with our update, rather than tweeting out a blog post every hour… These email updates are an easy way for backers to spread the word about your campaign with one click of the "Forward" button. Be prepared to put in the time. If you're serious about hitting your goal, then you'll need to be a social media monster for the duration of your campaign. Make sure you have a Twitter account, Facebook page, Pinterest, Instagram, and so on. These social spheres are the only sure-fire way to get your message out. Do whatever it takes to make an outstanding video. You have eight seconds to pull a backer in. Dream big. Before we launched, we wrote a number on a piece of paper that was far larger than our goal of $20K. We taped it to our mirrors and kept that number in our minds. There comes up a point when you simply have to push fear away, and think big. Take away lessons. The best thing about Kickstarter is that you have nothing to lose — whether your project is successful or not, you'll learn a ton about your market and business idea, and can either run with your funded project or revamp for future successes. Image credit: {r}evolution apparel

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