What Crowdfunding taught me about my personal burn rate

From my career vault: I learned a lot about my personal burn rate while running this crowdfunding campaign in 2013. More than any other experience, it taught me about the pace of startup life and high-visibility marketing campaigns. See my portfolio for more context. This essay was originally published on Medium.

At 3 am EST on December 5, 2013, the crowdfunding project that sparks and haunts my dreams will formally end.

Last August, I started working on WaveCheck’s campaign to fund breast cancer research, which promises to change the way we tell whether a breast tumor is responding to chemotherapy.

We launched on October 9. As I write this, we’ve been live for 56 days.

Most of what follows best applies to crowdfunding campaigns that don’t hit 100 percent of their target during the first day or week. It will probably resonate most with people crowdfunding a cause or social innovation as opposed to a product or artistic outcome.

But I also suspect it will resonate with people who have drunk their project’s Kool-Aid so deeply that it is oozing out of their pores.

Crowdfunding engenders that all-or-nothing mindset, even when you’ve got the option to take the funds you raise no matter what your green bar indicates.

First: A lot of good things happened

• 500+ people all over the world heard about the campaign and support it . More importantly, they trusted our team to help WaveCheck reach women and men everywhere. That’s powerful.
• We raised over $53,000 (55 per cent of our goal), to advance WaveCheck’s research to the next development stage. That involves testing and refining its technology at other locations.
• Some lovely people from the media covered WaveCheck. We also have a TV episode for a new crowdfunding show and a feature with CTV’s Avis Favaro that haven’t aired yet (update: watch the TV spot here).
• We had the freedom to run with the campaign. We’re grateful for their trust and have done our very best to honour it.
• We worked with an amazing team, both within MaRS Innovation and beyond its walls. Their wholehearted enthusiasm carried us through a lot of challenges.
• Our personal and professional networks rallied each time they were asked, giving us their attention, feedback and money. It’s one thing to know people are your friends. It’s another to watch them show up for you time and again. We’re so grateful.
• We learned a mountain about crowdfunding, philanthropy, the mechanics of online giving, and the vulnerability that comes from being public about your work in ways that you normally are not.
• We found answering passion in others. From the patients who participated in both the original study and our pitch video to the artists who donated their original works as perks to the partners who came through for us, everyone has been unfailingly generous.

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. . . but the personal burn rate is immense

I’ve delivered several major projects over my 10-year career. By far, crowdfunding is the most intense, demanding and scary thing I have ever done.

It’s easy to do some figures on a napkin at the outset and figure out what a project like this one will cost you in terms of cash flow (in start-up world, we call this the burn rate).

It’s a lot harder to figure out what it’s going to cost you personally. I call this your personal burn rate.

And it’s even more difficult to replenish.

What I didn’t know about my personal burn rate going in

Here’s what I didn’t learn through background research:

• My phone, if set to register donations and social interactions, was the barometer that drove my day. If it’s buzzing, I was happy. If it was silent, I was perturbed. You can say you’ll know better than me: that you’ll turn it off or step away. You won’t.
• Besides being physically tired, I got tired of people telling me I looked tired, stressed, or both.
• I became a mono-conversational buzzkill at parties, family dinners and other gatherings. My friends tried to tell me that just because I was living the adventure, I don’t need to preach it. I ignored them.
• My family will become so accustomed to your intense hours that they periodically waved me off with cries of, “Bye, Mommy, see you tomorrow!” I felt guilty. I kept going.
• I never felt there was enough time.
• Besides fuelling my dreams, the campaign haunted my sleep. When this happened, I talked to my patient spouse and Fazila, my campaign co-director. Being candid and open helped.
• As the campaign rolled on, the physical tension never left because there were always three things I had to do and 10 things I should do. I needed an evolving plan for tackling the tasks and expectations.
• I indulged in more daydreams than usual about winning the lottery.
• The days where we raised $0, and we had a couple, are terrible. Crowdfunding involves wild activity at the beginning and the end, and a lot of troughs in between. They come with the territory, but knowing that doesn’t make them much easier to endure or escape.
• At times, I felt we couldn’t get it right. Sometimes, we weren’t. Reflection and action were needed. We tested messaging with live people to figure out what perspective we were missing.
• Other times, I had to accept there are things you just can’t control or compete against. In Toronto, that was Rob Ford’s international media dominance. Globally, events like the hurricane in the Philippines, the U.S. government shutdown, and Breast Cancer Awareness Month commanded competing media and donor attention.
• Donor fatigue was a pretty abstract concept until I experienced the reality of fundraising. There are a lot of demands on people’s wallets. At the end of the day, no matter what your relationship, my ask was no different.

Crowdfunding campaigns are short; their long-tails are infinite

I don’t know how much money we’ll have raised when we close. As I write this, my phone continues to sporadically chime.

I hope to see the spike we’re told comes in a campaign’s closing day or hours. At this point, it’s unclear what kind of difference it will make to our overall goal.

What I do know is that crowdfunding is a lot like standing on the edge of the lake.

You choose the best stones you can find, feel their weight in your hands, and then throw as many as you can as far and wide and fast as you can.

Some of the ripples, the nearest ones, are easy to see and measure.

The others aren’t.

But you have to trust that the lake has changed, and will make its changes known to you in time.

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Appendix: The Long Tail

You can’t tell what kind of ripples a project will create until you try. While WaveCheck didn’t reach its ultimate goal while we were live, we had a strong long-tail in follow-on results and funding.

Update 1: WaveCheck received a $100,000 catalyst grant from the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, which means the first partner site will open in May 2014 at MD Anderson Cancer Centre.

Update 2: WaveCheck’s crowdfunding data was part of a Canadian-led study on crowdfunding medical research.

Update 3: Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and MaRS Innovation have announced a partnership with GE Healthcare to co-develop WaveCheck as a clinical product.