Our Kickstarter campaign for a companion video series to our book High Performance Django ended today just shy of its target. We consider it a great success!
That’s right… a success. When we started the campaign, our internal goal was to determine if there was enough demand to justify creating new learning content. We talked to enough people to know there was some interest, but how much exactly? Our campaign accomplished its goal and gave us the answer we needed: not enough.
As with our funded campaign for the book, it was never about the money. Lincoln Loop could easily fund the initial content creation. In fact, we could have just kicked in the remaining funds at the last minute, but that would go against our goal. There wasn’t enough interest, so why would we commit ourselves to creating it?
As a side note, reaching 85% of our funding goal puts us in a rare club. According to today’s Kickstarter’s stats, less than one half of one percent of projects (1,244 out of 265,732) finish above 80% funding without hitting their goal. My hunch is most creators are willing to open up their wallet with the goal that close.
What’s Next?
We learned there’s not enough interest in this content, but we don’t exactly know why. We could come up with hundreds of reasons, but it probably boils down to one of the following: price, subject matter, or medium. Our campaign showed us we need to go back to the drawing board.
And that’s why we need your feedback. If you’re interested in learning more about High Performance Django, DevOps, or web development in general, please fill out our short multiple-choice survey.
Thank you!
