How to fund your dream project on Kickstarter with “M is for Money” author Rob Phelan

 
 

How To Fund Your Dream Project

Learn how to optimize a kickstarter campaign, and the big mistake that slipped through the cracks for entrepreneur and personal finance teacher Rob Phelan- including how he raised more than double his goal and published his children’s book with almost no financial risk.

 
 

Follow Rob!


Follow Bobbi!


Did you enjoy the show? We would love your support!

Leave a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. We love reading what our listeners think of the show!

  1. Subscribe to the podcast, so you never miss an episode.

  2. Share the podcast with your family, friends, and co-workers.

  3. Tag me on Instagram @bobbirebell1 and you’ll automatically be entered to win books by our favorite guests and merch from our Grownup Gear shop.


Full Transcript:

Bobbi Rebell:
I hope you guys are all celebrating some big adulting milestones this season. And you know what? Finding the perfect gift for those celebrations can be kind of tough. I have the solution over at grownupgear.com. We have adorable hats, totes, mugs, pillows, tees, and seriously, the most cozy and comfortable sweatshirts. They're all on grownupgear.com and all at affordable prices. We even now have digital gift certificates, if you can't decide. Use code GROWNUP for 15% off your first order. Buying from our small business helps to support this free podcast. And you know what? We really appreciate it. Thanks guys.

Rob Phelan:
All people need to see sometimes is that somebody else is doing it before they'll jump in and do it themselves. We love to do what other people are doing.

Bobbi Rebell:
You're listening to Money Tips for Financial Grownups with me, certified financial planner, Bobbi Rebell, author of How to Be a Financial Grownup. And you know what, when it comes to money, being a grown up is hard, but together we got this.

Bobbi Rebell:
Hi, friends. Who among us doesn't have that dream project. We'd love to make time for, but we also need to make sure we've got the funds to pay for it ideally in advance. Well, in the opening clip, you heard entrepreneur and personal finance teacher, Rob Phelan, talking about the fact that he used, well, not quite peer pressure. Let's call it peer influence to get donors like myself on board his dream project before even the official Kickstarter campaign started. I have to say I was impressed, but as I've gotten to know, Rob, I'm not that surprised. After all he teaches this stuff. He has The Simple Startup, which teaches teens how to start a business. And his day job includes teaching high school kids about personal finance.

Bobbi Rebell:
But raising money on Kickstarter is not for the faint of heart. You need to know what you're doing. So we're going to get you there. Remember no need to take notes. I know you'll be tempted, but you can always just go to my website. It's just my name, bobbirebell.com for show notes, including a full transcript. We've got you covered. Here is Rob Phelan. Rob Phelan, You're a financial grownup. Welcome to the podcast.

Rob Phelan:
Thank you so much for having me.

Bobbi Rebell:
I actually invited you on. I've been trying to get you on. I think this is our third attempt because you have a book coming out called M is for Money. It's a fantastic book for children. We're going to talk a little bit about the book, but then we're going to get to what I really want to talk about, which is that this was a dream project. And I want people to hear how you got this dream project funded, but first tell us about M is for Money.

Rob Phelan:
Yeah, M is for Money is a dream project that I brought to life over this past year. It is a children's book. So I'm a high school personal finance teacher, but I wrote a children's book targeted at three to eight year olds that is an ABCs of money book. So it's going to introduce kids to a new letter, a new focus word that has to do with money. And then it's also going to give them illustration and a mini story on every page that shows the money word in action. And the whole goal behind the book is to try and get kids to build a positive relationship with money and to start having conversations about it from a young age. So breaking this idea that money is something shameful, or embarrassing, or taboo, or not a table conversation. We're going to try and change that because if we get kids who are confident about money and confident in their ability to ask questions and find answers, they're by default going to make better money decisions as they get older and turn into adults.

Bobbi Rebell:
This was a dream of yours and you got really creative with the funding. You went to Kickstarter. I'm very proud to say I was someone that helped to fund this dream of yours. Tell us about how you funded it, why you went that way, and the dos and don'ts. Well, that was a lot. So start with just the beginning.

Rob Phelan:
In my other, other, other, other job, I'm a person who's a big proponent in multiple streams of income. So I have my own company called the Simple Startup where I have 10 to 18 year old young entrepreneurs start their first businesses. And one of the things that I preach to them, or I talk to them about is how do you start a business for free? And we think most 10 to 18 year olds, you don't have a ton of capital available. You're not getting a loan from anyone unless your parents are feeling bad for you. So we need to start for free, or we need to start really cheap. And one of the ways to do that is to pre-sell your value. And Kickstarter is one of these companies out there that allows you to do that. I had the idea, I came up with my first draft and then some very crew graphics.

Rob Phelan:
And I started with that and I started telling people, look, I'm going to do this Kickstarter. It's where you pre-sell the book, or the game, or whatever it is you're creating. And people come on and say, I'm really interested in seeing this thing come to life. I'm going to back this project. There's usually multiple tiers that they can back at. So the lowest being just a hard cover copy of the book. And then it goes up to donating multiple copies of the book to different title one schools or public libraries. You are one of the backers who came in at a very special secret reward tier. So that was by invitation only. Where you came in and your, I guess, what are we going to call it? Your merchandise, your brand is somewhere inside,

Bobbi Rebell:
Grownup gear.

Rob Phelan:
The book. It's yes, it is a Easter egg inside of the book. So it's a secret kind of in the background kind of thing, but people will eventually notice it. And that was a big thank you for the wonderful support you showed me at the beginning. But yeah, Kickstarter is the way that I chose to fund this book. So I didn't want to put a ton of my own money into this. I wanted to first test out the idea and see do people actually want it, so they don't give you their true opinion until you actually ask them for money.

Rob Phelan:
And then also could I raise enough to cover the illustration costs and the printing costs of getting an offset run done and then be able to donate. I wanted to donate at least 300 books to title one schools and public libraries. And I think we hit all of those goals. We smashed our goals. Our goal was $6,000 and we hit 13,704. So it was,

Bobbi Rebell:
Wow.

Rob Phelan:
Phenomenal success and really gave me the, I guess, courage to go forward and say like, yes, people want this. Go for it. Let's bring it to life. Let's make it happen.

Bobbi Rebell:
Now it's interesting. So you say you needed $6,000. How did you come up with that figure? What was the backend budgeting ahead of time? How did you even know what this project would cost?

Rob Phelan:
So back in budgeting, it was pretty much predicting out costs. So I was able to figure out, okay, this is what printing would cost. And that's kind of, one of the ones that you have to think about is like, how much does it cost to print a book? And then you have to do it in quantities usually of like 500 or 1,000. So I knew at the very minimum, I was going to have to print 500 of these things and that was going to cost me about $3,000. And if I go up to $1,000, it would cost me five. So the economies of scale was great. You could do more books. And then the illustrator was a flat fee and I interviewed a couple of illustrators. And so I knew I needed about 1500 to cover illustrations. And then there's just like getting an ISBN number for a book, which I didn't realize was a cost, thing that you had to do and registering the Library of Congress.

Bobbi Rebell:
Well, how does all this work? How did you find out what a illustrator costs, what the printing costs? I mean, what were your sources for this? Were you tapping into a network? Were you just Googling? I have a traditional publisher. I know nothing about any of this and I'm very curious.

Rob Phelan:
So I cheated a little bit and I hired an author coach for an independent author.

Bobbi Rebell:
That's not cheating, that's your strategy. You hired an... I know, but its true. That is the answer. You hired someone to create a shortcut to give you the information in a more efficient way than if you had spent the time kind of scrounging around looking for stuff. So that might be a good tip for people, is find an expert and then use that person's expertise to limit the amount of time you have to spend, because time is a currency. So you were able to do them. You have a two year old, you have a full time job, you have stuff going on.

Rob Phelan:
And I say cheated in the sense that I threw some of my own money at that first, but then I made it back in the Kickstarter. So I didn't do it totally for free upfront. I did throw some of my own money in, in the beginning to get started, knowing that I would make it back on the back end if the Kickstarter was successful, which I was very confident it would be.

Rob Phelan:
But the person I hired was M.K. Williams. She's the author of the Author Your Ambition series. So she's very big on helping independent authors just kind of go through the steps, kind of like I do with Simple Startup and helping people start the businesses, she helps independent authors to navigate the idea of like registering for ISBN numbers, registering with the Library of Congress. How do you get your book from the printer, so you can print your own copies, but how do you get it on like Amazon, or Target, or Barnes & Noble? How does that process work? She was the one who was kind of walking me through all those steps and just for a flat fee, which was great. So it's not like I've lost part of the ownership of the book or royalties or anything like that. It was a wonderful arrangement that really helped me a lot and-

Bobbi Rebell:
Yeah. No. Yeah, that's a big money tip is, if you do hire someone, make a proactive decision, are you going to pay them a flat fee? And then you retain ownership. And I'm sure some people, if they believe in a project, might be willing to work for free, but take a percentage. So that's a decision that someone would make if they have a project like this. Tell me, I want to hear what went right, but first we're going to go through some missteps. Because I know it wasn't all smooth sailing.

Rob Phelan:
No, definitely not. So I'm not a marketing major by any stretch. I help kids learn to start their businesses. I'm not someone who's going to help you become a multi-million dollar business. That's the next step up for me. So I'm your first entry into entrepreneurship. And that's what I like to talk to my students about in schools. Like here's how you get started. And then there are multiple courses, degrees, things you can do for marketing. So marketing was something that I had to learn a lot about as I went. Did some good things, did some not great things. Overall, we got the Kickstarter going, it got over the line, which was the big thing. The hardest one for me was after I had finished the Kickstarter I put in the order for the books, they had arrived. I had packaged them up nicely. I sent them to everyone.

Bobbi Rebell:
So you wait, wait, let me just stop. You handled the actual shipping and delivery to each of your Kickstarter contributors.

Rob Phelan:
Yes.

Bobbi Rebell:
Like I received a book. You packed my book.

Rob Phelan:
Me or my mother-in-law. My mother-in-law has been my like fulfillment center.

Bobbi Rebell:
Family. Okay. So getting family to work for free. There's another money tip. Okay. So you did the physical labor of actually taking the time. You didn't outsource that at all. That's a lot. A lot of people don't realize like entrepreneurship, when you're starting out, you're doing everything.

Rob Phelan:
Yeah. And there was the option of having a fulfillment center do it. So Kickstarter, as soon as you run one, you'll start getting plagued by emails of people being like, Hey, I want to run your campaign for you. I want to do your fulfillment for you. And you'll lose about another 10 to 15% of the money you make just doing fulfillment if you hire somebody to do it, because they're going to take quite a significant cut to do that. And I figured for the, I ended up doing 739 books. So 340 were donated and then the rest were going to backers. So I was like, okay, it's a lot, but I can handle this. I can do it. My mother-in-law was very willing to be like a home base for it. So she's letting me take an entire room in her house at the moment where there's just boxes of books sitting and envelopes and bookmarks and stickers and all this other stuff that was going in there.

Rob Phelan:
But yeah, using your family, super good idea if they're willing to help out and she did not want any payment for it. I offered, she said, no. She just wanted to help. So that was a great thing to have. And I know not all of us have that network to fall back on, but if you do, don't be afraid to use it. But the mistake, the mistake we have to talk about. So no sooner had I sent all of these books out like 300 plus books had gone their Merry way. I dropped one off to my local library and I was like, Hey, I would love to use some of my allocation of donated books to give some to my local library. She emailed me back. She's like, oh, I love the book. Everything looks great. You can see how it's to be a wonderful resource for kids.

Rob Phelan:
But I can't put a book on the shelf that has a spelling error in it. And my heart stopped. I was like, what? No, there's no way. How does a children's book author have a spelling error? There's only like 300 words in the whole book. But yeah, sure enough I found the page and the word P-A-Y, so pay had an X instead of the Y. So the letters kind of look similar. I'm going with this, that everyone's brain was simply just reading over it the way the word was supposed to be understood in our heads. And all of us missed this. I read this book cover to cover 20, 30 times to spell check it. My wife did, a couple of other people were in focus groups for me and they did it too. None of us saw this spelling error until the librarian was like, Nope, can't put this on the shelf.

Rob Phelan:
So I had to email all of my Kickstarter backers and be like, I am so sorry. I sent you a book with a spelling error. If you would like a replacement copy, please let me know. I'll send you one for free. So that was a big, expensive learning lesson, but I think it was very important to acknowledge it and address it upfront and offered at least to fix the problem for people. And a lot of people are like, Nope, I want the collector edition of the book. So I've got something now that's a very limited edition. Then there were plenty who were like, yeah, I want to give this book away as a gift or I want to donate it. So I would like a corrected copy. So it's been a mixed result, but everyone has been very nice about it, which been the great part.

Bobbi Rebell:
Well, I think that's a good lesson for all the focus groups and everything you did. We're all human and things do happen and you have to just acknowledge it and figure out the best solution that you can and move on. Let's talk about what went right. When you look back now, what are you like yeah, that was genius.

Rob Phelan:
I'm going to do a little pat on the back for the secret reward tier. So like reaching out to you and a couple of other personal finance influencers. I handpicked the people I wanted to work with because I liked their brands. I liked who they were as a person, the message they were putting out there. And I wanted to be associated with them basically for all time, because your names were all printed in the back of the book, as well as having your stuff in the book somewhere as well. And that was a huge needle mover for getting initial backers in. So yours was in exchange for backing at least five books donated. So anyone who did the secret reward tier donated at least five books towards my 300. And then they also usually went on and shared it with their audiences.

Rob Phelan:
So like, Hey, I'm appearing in this book or my brand's appearing in this book. So you guys should go check out this book. I thought that was a great way to get some ownership from other people who are much bigger, wiser, more experienced than I was in terms of the personal finance world. It caused the Kickstarter to have a huge kickstart on day one. So like a lot of pledges came in day one, because I had lined up all of you secret reward tier backers to be like, please go in on day one, get your pledge in so I can add the illustrations in and keep this moving forward. But it caused the Kickstarter to like be 50%, 60% funded on the first day. All people need to see sometimes is that somebody else is doing it before they'll jump in and do it themselves. We love to do what other people are doing.

Rob Phelan:
The hardest part for a Kickstarter sometimes if you don't have a strong start, people kind of sit on the sidelines and they wait to see, is this going to get funded? Is it not? Should I jump in this? Should I not? Because if a Kickstarter does not reach its funding goal, nobody gets charged. So everyone has their credit card kind of like sitting on the side, they've pledged the money, but you don't get charged for it until the Kickstarter ends and the goal has been achieved.

Rob Phelan:
So I think a lot of people, they'll look at these projects and like, oh, it's got like 5,000 to go. It seems to be moving really slowly. I don't know if I'm even going to bother with this one because it doesn't look like it's going to meet its goal. And I could see a lot of great ideas don't make it over line because of that. They just don't have a strong start. And I think the secret reward tier was something that really allowed me to have that strong start and give people kind of that feeling of everybody else is doing it. I better do it too.

Bobbi Rebell:
Well, I am honored to have been selected to participate in the secret tier. How can people learn more about you? I know the book is now available or will be soon on Amazon, M is for Money. Where else can people be in touch with you?

Rob Phelan:
Yeah. So I am on Instagram @misformoneybook, Facebook @misformoneybook, Twitter it's @fieducator, F-I-educator. If you're on LinkedIn, you're more than welcome to reach out to me, Rob Phelan. You'll find me there. And you can check out the website, misformoneybook.com. As you said, M is for Money is available for pre-order at the moment up until November 13th, 2021. So if you're hearing this after November 13th, you can just go buy the book right now. If it's before November 13th, you can pre-order your book at Amazon, Target, Barnes & Noble, or bookshop.org. And I do encourage you to pre-order or order as soon as you can, if you are thinking about trying to get the book for the holidays, just because what we're hearing from the printers is that books are going to have a lot of supply chain problems and logistics problems over the winter holidays. And I know last year, even we had some where like I was ordering books and they were taking a month to get to where they were supposed to be. So highly encourage you if you are ordering books, whether it's my book or any other book, order them soon.

Bobbi Rebell:
So great. Thank you so much.

Rob Phelan:
Thank you.

Bobbi Rebell:
Okay. My friends that was a lot, but a lot of great stuff, right? What stood out to me was that Rob really needed to figure out ahead of time, how much the whole shebang would cost to make sure he didn't dig himself into a hole. So we need to research our costs including things like who is packing the boxes. I love the idea of having your family pitch in, but we don't always all have that available. So if they can't and you need to hire someone, just knowing what it would cost to outsource things like fulfillment is good business. You have options and you can make informed choices. Also, there is no such thing as proofreading too much. When Rob told me there was a typo, I tried to find it myself and I couldn't. Things do slip through the cracks. Really take those details seriously. We all need to be as detail oriented as possible.

Bobbi Rebell:
Also don't apologize for getting help if it gets you to your goal. Rob did hire a consultant, but even if the project didn't work out, it would have saved him so many wasted hours of research. In his case, he felt he had the green light after he had the information from the consultant. But you know what, if you bring in a consultant for a potential project and that helps you see that the numbers won't work on the project, that has a lot of value too.

Bobbi Rebell:
I hope you got a lot of value from this podcast. I say this all the time but you know what, it's really true. You guys get used to it, but please do take a screenshot and do share it on social media. And please tag me so I can share it from there and bring in more grownups to this community. On Instagram, I'm @bobbirebell1, the number one and on Twitter, it's just Bobbi Rebell. M is for Money makes a great holiday gift. Order it now so it gets there when you need it on time. Lots of shipping delays these days. So don't hesitate. Big thanks to Rob Phelan for helping us all be financial grownups

Bobbi Rebell:
Money Tips for Financial Grownups is a production of BRK Media, LLC. Editing and production by Steve Stewart, guest coordination, content creation, social media support, and show notes by Ashley Wall. You can find the podcast show notes, which include links to resources mentioned in the show as well as show transcripts, by going to my website, bobbirebell.com. You can also find an incredible library of hundreds of previous episodes to help you on your journey as a financial grownup. The podcast and tons of complimentary resources associated with the podcast is brought to you for free, but I need to have your support in return. Here's how you can do that. First connect with me on social media @bobbirebell1 on Instagram and Bobbi Rebell on both Twitter and on Clubhouse where you can join my money tips for grownups club. Second, share this podcast on social media and tag me so I can thank you.

Bobbi Rebell:
You can also leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Reading each one means the world to me and you know what? It really motivates others to subscribe. You can also support our merch shop, grownupgear.com by picking up fun gifts for your grownup friends and treating yourself as well. And most of all, help your friends on their journey to being financial grownups by encouraging them to subscribe to the podcast. Together, we got this. Thank you for your time and for the kind words so many of you send my way. See you next time and thank you for supporting Money Tips for Financial Grownups.

 
Authors, Family + Relationships, Personal Finance, Money, StartupBobbi Rebell KaufmanRob Phelan, M is for Money, Author, Personal Finance Author, Children, Children's Book