We rolled out a Kickstarter campaign for our upcoming series AzTech Games on Thursday. Now, this marked out third Kickstarter campaign, so I knew what I was getting myself into. But we’re also further along as a company than we were the first two times, so it’s also very different in many ways. We’ve weathered the ups and downs, seen startups come and go. From our first Kickstarter to now, we’ve evolved from this idea we wanted to do to a full blown company with full-time staff and investors. And we’re more invested and more deeply committed to what we’re doing everyday.
To say that we want to see this campaign succeed is to put it mildly. So I decided to reach out to everyone – as in EVERYONE, emailing every single contact in my personal email account, or more than a decade’s worth of contacts.
But what’s the proper way to write someone and say, “Perhaps, it’s been 8 years, please give me money”? I figured some people might roll their eyes and delete my email, but I could live with that as a worst-case scenario – especially if it meant some people might back us. The email came to me pretty easily, but the ever-elusive perfect subject line did not. So I just went with this:
Subject line: Let’s pretend this is the perfect subject line…
Hi!
I figure you get to do this once ever, so I am taking this as my opportunity to do this once ever (I promise) — and that is sending an email to literally everyone in my 12-plus years of personal email contacts. You may be seeing my name and thinking, “I haven’t heard from her in years!” or you might even be thinking, “Wait, who is this?” But to all of you from my stops in Santa Monica/New York/Fort Wayne/Connecticut/Cambridge/Stanford/(now again) Santa Monica, I have a favor to ask, which I would love for you to do, but I totally understand if you are like, “I haven’t talked to you in years” and delete my email.
It may have been so long ago that you didn’t even know that I run an educational video game company – but that’s what I’m up to now, and we are doing a Kickstarter to campaign to raise money for our upcoming bilingual math adventure game series, AzTech Games: http://kck.st/2vKfOyK
Our goal is twofold: We want to have a large number of backers and hit our target, so even backing $1 helps.
We’ve done a couple of successful Kickstarters before, but this one is especially near and dear to my heart, and I really want to see it succeed. As I encouraged my staff to ask everyone they know — friends, family, their grandma’s neighbor’s mechanic — to support us, I realized that I had to lead by example.
If you back our campaign, that would be amazing. If not, no worries, and I hope that wherever you are these days, all is well.
Thanks!
Maria
(P.S. If you backed us already, thanks a million!)
And you know what? It worked. Several people backed! (P.S. You can too!)
