What do a 9 year old and 93 year old have in common? Each of them marks the youngest and oldest user of LiveCode’s open source coding platform.
Similar to his 9 year old nephew, LiveCode’s Kevin Miller embraced the internet early. Coding by 12 years old, selling software four years later, and building the company he still works at today, Kevin’s achievements at 16 surpass most adults.
Nearly 20 years later, Kevin’s witnessing his 12 year old dreams come true with LiveCode, especially the company’s life-changing achievement to make their coding platform open source and their recent success crowd funding to allow users to build web applications with HTML5.
After discussing LiveCode 8.0 and the plan for HTML 5, Kevin sat down with us to share the key lessons he learned crowd funding for a second time.
- Prioritize brevity. People opt out of long videos- Capture your backers with a short and to the point description video.- Simplify your reward system.
- Try electronic rewards that don’t require shipping or significant physical effort from your team.
- Regardless of your fundraising goals, all crowd funding campaigns need to be short. 30 days appears to be the magic number to survive the dead zone (the middle period).
- If you have an engaged community you can successfully crowd fund on your site. – Go big or go home. Even if you don’t use Kickstarter, adopt the all or nothing mentality to reassure your backers that you’re 100% ready to produce.