Tell Us What You Really Think About Crowdfunding

Fine! I’m in the process of disentangling myself from crowdfunding and third party platforms in general and I should really report back on my findings and reasoning in case it can save anyone else some time.

Culture

This is something that has changed over time, but the current crowdfunding culture is liable to give you whiplash. It’s like a terrible parent, piling on the love one minute and accusing you of ruining their life the next. This is in the form of more than one person, but the faceless amalgamate of BACKERS can seem monolithic. This wasn’t so bad in the early days, when there was a genuine sense of people helping people, but as I’ll explain later, that’s gone.

Kayfabe

This might be deeply obvious to everyone, but the days of plucky underdogs funding their dreams is dead. Long dead, at least 5+ years dead, never coming back, dead. I’m not knowledgeable enough to say exactly what the shift event was but everyone on crowdfunding, on both sides, are agreeing to maintain a weird kayfabe of cute creatives and benevolent patrons. It’s bizarre and is only getting weirder as the obvious truth gets harder to hide. Today crowdfunding is a pre-order platform where the consumers buy-now-pay-later on a product that the creators can quite comfortably turn around and just not release.

Predation

There are three parties involved in crowdfunding: customers, creators, and the platform. What’s in it for them?

Customers:

Sometimes pay less than retail to back something.
Supposedly get an insight into how the sausage is made but I would bet good money on creators either only showing people things that amount to marketing, or they try to stay away ’cos of the general hostility they’ll receive for perceived failures.
Buy-now-pay-later is convenient. It lets us spend money we don’t have yet on something that might not exist. It kinda reminds me of how pachinko parlours operate in Japan: you buy the little balls in a shop across the road which only buys and sells the little balls, which you then take to the parlour which is a totally-not-related business. You make a distance between spending and losing the money and that’s somehow fun. It is undeniably effective! We make way less money when we don’t let the crowdfunding platforms bamboozle people, but it feels gross, and it also makes me feel like we as the creator somehow deserve the low level hostility we receive from backers for engaging in it. It’s not true of course, people need to take a chill-pill, but there is always a moment of doubt.
Get stuff early. Eh, barely? I am a model crowdfunding backer, I never say a word, I don’t remember to check on things, I am pleasantly surprised when a package comes that I forgot I ordered. But they never come early, almost never. Maybe it’s just me. We’ll leave this one as speculative.

Creators:

All the boring things can come in one. You get a platform, guidance, rules, a small amount of discoverablility, and customers who sort of know the deal.
Plausible deniability. Fail to deliver? Well you can just swan off without much repercussion. I’ve never done that ’cos my weak psyche would be too riddled with shame, but there is almost nothing stopping anyone from doing it. Weird. It is a nice little bump for people who are only just starting out, knowing that they won’t be ruined if they fail, but I don’t think those people get any attention any more. Crowdfunding has been gentrified, it’s for big boys to get bigger.
You can leverage a purchasing model that is like catnip to our dumb brains. I’m not excluding myself in this! See above where I self-declare as the best crowdfunding backer. But it is pernicious.
So yea, you get a platform, but if you have been doing this elsewhere for any amount of time it’s gonna be really annoying having this weird crowdfunding annex existing outside your current infastructure. Good luck monitoring an infinite number of new inboxes that you can’t centralise into your email pile!
People who crowdfund are identified firstly as People Who Like Crowdfunding, and People Who Like X Thing You Are Making second. No normal person is going to suddenly get on Kickstarter just ’cos they saw your advert somewhere. I’ve never known what to do with this fact, really, but it does make me want to not use crowdfunding.

Platform:

LOADSA MONEY! Creators, we work for them, we feed them our audience, we turn people into that I Like Crowdfunding lot for them. We do all the work in exchange for…

Just use Shopify

Or whatever. Though you should just use Shopify, I wasted a long time resisting it but it is just better. They’re Canadian, so they can’t be pure evil right? Anyway, just get a crowdfunding app on the shopify app marketplace. It does everything the platforms do but for $20 a month rather than 15% of your money (including the postage you raise, btw, which is such a cheeky thing to do). Let’s face it, no one is this economy, in this new fashy world, is buying dreams, they want photos of the finished product in your hands with a photo of today’s paper. Just commit to making it and figure it out later. What’s the worst that can happen? I always think I’m at best a couple of weeks away from living under a bridge, but so far so good. Just keep your feet under you and avoid eating pavement.

Fulfilment

Holy. Shit. It is the bane of my existence. If I give it to a third party they fuck it up and/or charge me more money than I have ever seen in one place before. If I do it myself I have to do it myself and it never ends AND about 0.5% of the people waiting are going to be furious. They don’t care what a cute, messy creative you are, they want their fucking books, and can we say that’s not fair? I wish they’d lay off a bit but I get it. All this and more awaits you. I’d think carefully about fulfilment. I’ve had people help me and comment on how it’s not so bad and I make it look so much worse BUT that’s the point. I’m not good at it, it makes my soul leave my body, pretty much anyone is better at it than me (except almost every third party fulfillment provider). I’ll stop talking about post now, I do it too often. Maybe you’ll like it?

The Economy

No not that economy. Kickstarter economy! As a publisher, we make books, right? Every year we put out several. However, crowdfunders don’t like that. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?! “I can’t believe you would move on to another project while those of us who supported you previously are still waiting”. It’s all part of the kayfabe. I don’t think the idea that we work on one thing at a time would survive much scrutiny if they stopped and thought about it, but they’re frustrated and that’s a the avenue. I understand. But it’s largely just me sticking my head above the ramparts and I’m super tired. Have I mentioned 10 or 20 times in previous posts how I have several books of my own almost finished? I don’t need a perfect environment to work, i’m not a panda, but I do need just a dash of peace. More like a budgie than a panda. This is the main drive behind leaving these platforms if I’m honest, I can’t let the fear of financial ruin keep pushing us to the kickstarter mines. Those mines are rich though! You must have seen X recent campaign do a billionty dollars. They likely wouldn’t have done that well if they followed our system. We’re cutting ourselves off from that kind of “success” but the reality of it is that that has never been something available to us (any of us) since the very earliest days of crowdfunding. Desire is the root of suffering. It is certainly unrealistic to believe this will be better than crowdfunding financially, but it can’t be worse creatively. And besides, the hungry maws of The Platforms are always open and my fear of the wolves at my door can definitely outpace my pride in an endurance race!

Confusion

I have to make sense for a living, and these blog posts are for fun so I refuse to compute. This has been my first day off (even if it was unplanned) in ages and this is me relaxing. I did take a mid afternoon nap though, and that was pretty great. I hope something here is useful for someone, and I hope people don’t take me the wrong way and consider me unapproachable on account of these posts. I am, if anything, unusually nice.

Posted on September 6, 2025

Previous post London Defaultism I was just sitting in St James Square considering if a very posh child sitting nearby had more expensive socks than me. I concluded that they might.

Daniel Sell