One more time, what do you want from me?
Your support. There are lots of ways you can help, but the simplest would just be to pass the word on somehow once the Kickstarter goes live. Your audience is bigger than ours, and we believe your audience is made up of the kind of people who we want to make this network for.
What happens if the Kickstarter is funded?
It depends in part on how much funding we receive. Obviously, this is not a one-and-done sort of thing. This will require a full-time staff, a business plan, and active growth. We’ve got the people ready to hop on board. The amount of funding received will determine our initial moves, and we’re already discussing bids with several firms to get the bones of the site in place before anything else. Basic functionality for the beta phase won’t actually require much money to do well (again, the site’s won’t be very technically complicated), even though adding a lot of the features we want will take time—it will have to happen in stages. But if we can get things into a position where the shape of it is easy to see, we’re confident we’ll be able to secure additional funding through the development stages. This is another benefit of doing the first round of development through Kickstarter; everyone who backs the project is essentially saying that Make Machine is something they’d like to use, which serves to demonstrate an audience for it. It’s proof that it’s a worthwhile endeavor.
What happens if the Kickstarter isn’t funded?
We’ll try something else. We’re based in Memphis, which is a surprisingly okay place for a start-up to be in terms of access to venture capitalists, incubators, etc. We’d like to see this more grassroots approach work (it feels more natural), but if it doesn’t, we’re not out in the cold.
How will Make Machine keep generating revenue once it’s up and running?
We’re keeping it all small, so we won’t actually need to make much money for a while. But we’ve got plans for other ways to keep income coming, some of which include:
- Premium membership upgrades. A standard account gives you virtually everything—we’d never want to make the kind of service that’s useless to people without extra cash, but if frequent users want to upgrade for a few extra bucks, some perks will come their way: increased portfolio storage space, a badge displayed when they’re listing projects or making contact with other creatives, etc.
- Strategic partnerships, sponsorships, and advertising. We hate when sites get too heavy-handed with this sort of thing, but it does seem like natural partnership opportunities exist with everyone from arts supply retailers to software companies.
- Publishing community work. We envision putting together compilations of the coolest work the community comes up with—from books to audio to video—and making it available for sale. Proceeds will go back to those artists, with Make Machine taking a small percentage.
- Merchandise. Would you wear a t-shirt with our logo on it? Someone would.