On this episode Alex Hillman returns to see how the advice he gave in season one worked out. Spoiler alert: It worked. We discuss how pre-crowdfunding seeded the ground for a successful $60k Kickstarter campaign for White Meat: Appetizer and what lessons we learned along the way.
Listen to “The White Meat Podcast” on Spreaker.Here’s the transcript:
David Dylan Thomas: Hey everybody. Welcome to the White Meat Podcast. I’m your host, David Dylan Thomas, and I’m the writer and director of White Meat, a movie with the following premise: Underneath Washington Square Park in Philadelphia, and this is true, are buried the bodies of hundreds of enslaved people. What if one night they all came back from the dead as zombies, but they only ate white people?
So we have a short film version of that now called White Meat: Appetizer. We just won third place at the Media Film Festival. We’re very proud of that. There’s gonna be another screening upcoming on April 4th at Vox Populi in Philadelphia. You can go to our Instagram @whitemeatmovie to learn more about that.
And just to let you know, we are gonna take a little hiatus here. We’re releasing this episode around Tuesday, the 25th of March. Yeah, and we recorded this episode by the way, back in January. So we’re gonna be talking about some stuff happening in February, like it hasn’t happened yet, so that’s weird.
But anyway. But no, we’re gonna take a little break. I’d say, for like maybe two or three months. We’ll probably come back in the summer with some new episodes just to free up some time for all these festivals we’re going to. But you can check out back episodes on all of the podcast platforms you love.
This final episode of the season, wow, season three. The final episode of the season is with Alex Hillman. So we’ve had Alex Hillman on before. He’s a good friend. He founded Indy Hall, which is a coworking space and he’s been a huge advisor to me. We had him on before to talk about this idea of pre-crowdfunding, which is a way to build up interest in your Kickstarter, and at the time it was just a theory about how we should make the movie and we talked about that.
Since then, we put it into practice and it was completely successful. We raised enough money to make the movie and we talk a lot about that on this episode, sort of like the post-mortem, hey, now that it’s actually happened, let’s review what happened.
So it’s a really fun conversation and like I said, we’ll be back in a few months with new episodes. But let’s enjoy the season finale with Alex Hillman.
[musical interlude]
David Dylan Thomas: I wanna welcome back our wonderful guest, Alex Hillman. Alex, for the folks who might not remember or who are, this is their first episode tell us what it is you get up to.
Alex Hillman: Yeah, so, hi, Dave. It’s good to be back. So I’m the co-founder of a coworking community called Indy Hall. Something Dave’s been a part of since, quite literally the very beginning. Been a fun way to stay on top of and in touch with each other’s work. That is a coworking community that I started back in 2006.
This is our 20th year we’re heading into, so that’s how long we’ve known each other, Dave. That’s pretty amazing.
David Dylan Thomas: That is.
Alex Hillman: And I also have an education business where I help creative people build product-based businesses. And that is essentially teaching sales and marketing to people who are allergic to sales and marketing.
And the reason our approach tends to work is because we put a heavy focus on earning trust and community building. Which is really at the heart of all the work that we’ve done. And I believe that those things are not orthogonal to business. We could argue that they may be orthogonal to capitalism, but I do believe they can cohabitate in certain ways that, again, we’re still here 20 years later.
So I think there’s something to be said for that. And then the third is, and we were just talking about this a little bit before we, we started rolling, is the 10,000 Independents project, which is a combination of education, community, and advocacy for one-person businesses here in the city of Philadelphia, and so that is multi-industry, multidisciplinary.
People think of gig workers and they go straight to Uber drivers, Lyft drivers, DoorDash drivers and stuff like that. Obviously those folks need support and protections. We’re thinking more about, frankly, everybody else. And that includes the white collar workers and creatives. But also the people who have a side business because they’re underemployed or the workforce basically told them, we don’t want you here and so starting a business is not about entrepreneurship for them, but it is about survival.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Alex Hillman: And talking about the intersectionality of capitalism there, but the reality is in the system they’re working in right now, this is the largest invisible workforce in America, is people who are self-employed, either completely self-employed or partially self-employed.
And so we find ways to gather those people, help them learn from each other, and when there’s opportunities to advocate for them in the systems that either allow us to grow or prevent us from growing, we try to show up and raise our hand and say, what about the one person businesses? Don’t forget us. And try to affect policy and change there.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah. And before we get too into it, I do want you to repeat a statistic you told me earlier about who, when we’re talking about the solo single person owned business, like who we’re actually talking about at the majority level.
Alex Hillman: Yeah. And I’ll say, I’m not sure if this is a statistical majority, but a notable number in the city of Philadelphia, which is known as the largest poor city in America. Or the poorest large city. I’m not sure. I’m never sure what the right way to say that is, but older black women are disproportionately affected by the intersection of ageism, sexism, and racism, and told by the workforce sometimes explicitly, you don’t belong here, we don’t want you. And so they’re not choosing entrepreneurship. They’re out of survival needs, using skills and abilities and creativity that they have to serve their community in a way that allows that money to stay in that community. But more importantly for them to put food on their table and support their families.
And when policies come through that threaten the small business community, people often think of, the small business owner who’s not so great to their employees. That’s not who we’re talking about here. We’re talking about the person who, the business they started is a means of caring for themselves, their family, and their community. And that’s really for me, the definition of success and entrepreneurship. If you can take care of yourself, your family, and your community, whatever that means to you, you won.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Alex Hillman: You don’t need to be a billion dollar company. You don’t need to create the next Facebook. Please God, don’t create the next Facebook. We do not need another one. But I think things like that are illuminating when people realize that the, just the landscape of business. This is not new, but it is accelerated.
Obviously the pandemic accelerated a lot of things. The current economic and political climate has accelerated things and the things that we’ve been doing and saying for a long time have never been more true and the need for support and coalition-based work has also never been greater.
So it is a thing that I wish I had more time to do honestly, ‘cause I have to fit this in between all of the other businesses that I listed that I do. That is not a moneymaking venture if that’s not crystal clear. That is passion work. That is community work. The other work is effectively what subsidizes our ability to put real time, energy and resources into that.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah. So I just wanted to get that out there ’cause I want people, like you said, in their imagination when they think about a, what is business in America is numerically mostly small business. Whereas, and then who they’re picturing when they think about the business owner, there are a lot of them that are older Black women, which I don’t think is what people initially like pops into their heads. I just, I want that landscape to start to change.
There is an intersection here though, with White Meat. So a year, no, two years ago-ish, I had you on the podcast to talk about our ideas for how to raise money for White Meat: Appetizer, the short that’s now completed. So I kinda wanna and now that, that, that has happened, the movie is in theaters. I can announce now that it is in the Pan-African Film Festival in February. That’s official.
Alex Hillman: That’s so cool. Congratulations.
David Dylan Thomas: Thank you. Thank you. So all of this has happened, I’d say remarkably fast amount of time for movies, although we’re talking about a year and a half long process at least.
Now that that’s happened, I wanna walk back through what we did, what we learned with the person who inspired one of the, one of the key strategies. So the last time we talked about this idea of pre-crowdfunding that kind of became a core strategy in raising money for White Meat.
And to tell you the end first, we raised $60,000 out of a Kickstarter a nd then an additional $23,000 in various grants after that. But that 60,000, one of the core strategies-
Alex Hillman: From, how many people, do you know?
David Dylan Thomas: From 365.
Alex Hillman: See, that’s beautiful. That’s the beautiful part.
David Dylan Thomas: It just happened to be the same number of days in year, so that’s why I remember the number so well.
So 365 people. 60,000 in a month, I say quote unquote because it took a lot longer than that to actually make that happen. But the amount of time in which the money came in was a month. So going back, like I said, two years you and I started talking about this idea of pre-crowdfunding and you introduced me to the concept, reintroduce our audience now to what is pre-crowdfunding.
Alex Hillman: Yeah. When you came to me with this idea and I said, I wanna raise a bunch of money, and I, and you asked me specifically for fundraising advice, the first thing I said is, that’s not my strength, Dave, I’m pretty sure is what I said. Because when people think fundraising, they think, investor-based fundraising and that I know a lot about it. It is not my network strength. It is not my skillset.
What is my skillset, as I hopefully was clear from a bit of the intro, is the community building side of things. And I like to say I’m a bit of a crowdfunding hipster in that before things like Kickstarter and Indiegogo and whatnot, became popular, like Indy Hall was started effectively by crowdfunding.
It was, we had built a community who wanted a thing to happen and I turned to them and I said, I don’t have the money to start this by myself. I have a little bit of money, but here’s the budget and here’s what hap like I have a lease negotiated. I even know roughly what our costs are gonna be. We figured out a membership model, but I’m not gonna sign that lease and put myself on the hook for that money every month unless I know you guys are in, too.
And so in a way that was a version of pre-crowdfunding that got the very first version of the Indy Hall, like the first coworking space in Philadelphia, one of the first in the world, off the ground. And so that’s where a lot of this comes from, was not me thinking about crowdfunding, but thinking about what crowdfunding actually is.
I think people have this vision in their head of it’s a button you press and a crowd shows up and gives you money ’cause that’s kind of what the illusion of the internet provides. When in reality, most successful crowdfunding campaigns are one of two things. They are an orchestrated performance where the money was locked up from the beginning and it was more about marketing and promotion than about the money fundraising itself, which is, like, I don’t have anything against that. I think it’s actually a pretty clever way to use a platform, but it’s a very different thing that we were talking about.
The goal here is I don’t have this money in order to do the thing, I do need this money, and I believe that I have a large enough pool of people that I already know and who know me and trust me that if I asked them for a little bit of money, that little bit of money would add up to a big amount of money.
That’s the version of crowdfunding that we’re talking about. And so we started having that conversation, it was, we started getting to the mechanics of it. Some of it’s the decision between something like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, but the other part of it is how do you make a campaign successful in the first place?
And the analogy I like to use about crowdfunding is, I should say the thing about crowdfunding is it is a game of momentum. I think most of business is a game of momentum. I think most creative work is a game of momentum.
Crowdfunding is especially a game of momentum. The mistake most people make is they put all the work into the campaign, they launch it, and on day one is the first time anybody outside of themselves or maybe their close friends or a team or whatever, hears about it and if they do not get lucky the odds or just have a inherently massive network to their advantage, the most likely thing that happens is the first couple of days are pretty quiet, and the problem with the first couple of days being quiet is nobody wants to jump on a thing that has no momentum.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Alex Hillman: People see that as a negative signal, whether it’s conscious or not, right? And so one of the things you can do strategically to stack the deck in your favor is to make it so that on launch day, whatever your total goal is, let’s say the goal is $60 grand like yours. I said, all that means that on launch day, our goal is to get as close to $20,000 in because that momentum is what will carry us through the real slow middle, and I’m sure we’ll come back to talking about that. And there’s this thing that I, this is from my experience in sales as well is, I call it the heavy metal curve ’cause it’s like throwing a heavy metal fork with your fingers.
You have a big spike at the middle’s, a big spike at the beginning if you do it right and if you do it right, a proportionally big spike at the end. I say proportionally ’cause sometimes it is a little bigger, sometimes a little smaller, depending on what it is, but roughly the same. So the thing that is actually in your control is day one.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Alex Hillman: And that’s where pre-crowdfunding comes in. The strategy here is to long before you’ve even built the campaign, strategically and systematically reach out to your network of people who already know you and trust you and say, hey, I’m launching this thing on this date. In order for this to be a success, our goal is to have this amount of money show up on day one.
I’m not just asking you to commit to supporting me. I’m asking you to commit at any dollar amount to be a day one donor and to keep track of that so you know how many of those people will actually say yes. And you have to factor in the fact that not everybody’s gonna do what they say they’re gonna do. Not everyone will be able to put in as much, some will be put in more. That’s fine too. But you have to calibrate your expectations for that. And that’s the idea. It’s pretty, it’s simple. It’s just a lot of work.
David Dylan Thomas: Yes.
Alex Hillman: And you took that idea, you asked some good questions, you ran with it, and what was the day one total?
David Dylan Thomas: $21,000 and let’s talk about why $20,000. So we want, my understanding was like if you can raise a third of your goal on day one, or within the first like 24 or so hours, you’re much more likely to succeed. So $60,000, a third of that $20,000. So that became the number. And I wanna back up a little bit because in my head I’m constructing a step by step for, listeners if they want to do something like this.
Alex Hillman: Sure.
David Dylan Thomas: I would say the first step, I was gonna say first step is make up a budget. But I would say before that make up, come up with your values. And the reason I’m gonna say that is because part of the reason the movie cost as much as it did, and in the end it came to maybe a hundred grand total. But the reason the movie cost as much as it did, and this is understand like a 10 minute effects laden, practical effects laden horror short with one location. So there’s parts of that should be expensive. Parts of that where you’re like, why does it cost so much? The reason it costs so much is because we decided we want to pay everybody, even if they’re not union, at near or at union rates.
In other words, one of our values is paying people for their time. We’re not trying to get people to work for exposure or whatever it is. We’re trying to get people, pay them what they’re worth, give them, a good, decent living. So that bumps up the budget. And so then once you’ve decided things like that, you make up your budget so you know how much money you’re gonna need, and then from there, right?
So once I had that conversation or several really conversations with Alex about all of this, I literally, so this is June of 2024.
Alex Hillman: So long ago, right?
David Dylan Thomas: I go to a coffee shop. Nevermind all the shit that’s happened in the past, I don’t know, 10 years at this point. That’s just gonna be a just table setting. That’s just like the way it is, right?
That’s, but anyway, sit down at a coffee shop like June or so of 2024 and I just start sending emails and I think that day I sent at least a hundred, maybe 150. So I had this list. So you could say the campaign, quote unquote, the work started in June of 2024 and when, and the Kickstarter itself didn’t happen until February 2025.
So six months of telling people, this is happening, this is what I’m asking for. Tell all your friends, this is what’s happening. This is what I’m asking for. Tell all your friends. And then to be fair, after a certain point, it’s copy and paste, right? Like you’re not writing bespoke emails to everybody.
Alex Hillman: But it’s still a grind
David Dylan Thomas: You’re still sending, and I’m not saying like a big mass, no. One by one, right?
Alex Hillman: Yep. The goal here, again, there are ways to speed this up, but there’s a cost to speeding it up. And with the currency that you’re basically communicating in here is trust.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah. That, yeah. And I wanna focus in on that ’cause that’s one of the things. So again, to back up a bit, so you could say it took six months. There’s another way you could say it took a lifetime because the people on that list I have met throughout my entire life. I was emailing people I knew from high school. I was emailing family from way back when. I was emailing people I had met two weeks before.
Like everybody and anybody who might remember who I am, who like set me up on LinkedIn after meeting them for five seconds at a conference, right? Everybody who might, just might, and I start of course with the people I’m closest to who are most likely to pledge, and then you sort of move out in concentric circles from there.
But I was asking people all six months. I mean a week before it launched, I’m still like, hey, I haven’t asked this person yet. Type out a LinkedIn message. Hey, this is happening, blah, blah, blah. And what it does also, I think in a good way force you to do is start to think through the campaign early because I didn’t just send out, hey, this is happening. I sent out, hey, this is happening and here’s a rough idea what the rewards are gonna be like because people when they’re donating, the more concreteness you can give around that donation, the better. You just say, hey, can I have some money? Okay. You don’t know what you’re gonna get.
And the person on the other end is now they, honestly, there is cognitive labor and figuring out how much am I gonna give you. On the other hand if I give you a menu.
Alex Hillman: Yep.
David Dylan Thomas: And the menu covers all sorts of different price ranges and there’s sort of little, and the rewards, if you’ve done Kickstarter as often as not, you’re not doing it for the reward, it’s more just like the good feeling and if you’re getting a t-shirt or something.
Alex Hillman: I think the rewards are part of the storytelling, basically.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.
Alex Hillman: It’s like the whole idea and I think what you’re getting to here that is super, super right, and I think you executed very well is a combination of choice architecture.
David Dylan Thomas: Yes. Yes.
Alex Hillman: So you are designing a set of choices that makes any choice easier, right?
The only bad choice is no choice. You can choose in this menu and there’s a bunch of different reasons and methods someone might choose, but the, I have made it so that if you are here to choose, it is easier to choose something than to walk away.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Alex Hillman: That’s number one. And number two is storytelling. And in the case of a Kickstarter, I think it’s opportunities to invite people into the narrative and or I think the rewards can help them write themselves into the story you’re telling, which in this case is not the story of the movie. This’s the story of the creation of the movie.
David Dylan Thomas: Yes, very much.
Alex Hillman: And that’s that narrative for the right audience. And now I’m looking at the numbers and I’m going, what is my price threshold? And then I look at it through the lens of maybe I’ll pay a little bit more ’cause that sounds cool. I’d like to be known for that. I want being in the credits would mean something to me. And like I think that both aspects to that, what the price points are and how close or far away they are from each other, and what the things themselves they receive are. Again, it’s not about maximum value because if anything it’s the opposite.
David Dylan Thomas: Oh, no. It’s way too much to pay for a t-shirt.
Alex Hillman: That’s what I’m saying is like the value of the thing is completely disproportionate. So that’s not it.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Alex Hillman: It is more of the, what is a thing, like how confident am I that at least one person wants this thing?
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Alex Hillman: And your dialogue with those folks opens the door for ideas you haven’t thought of.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Alex Hillman: As well as maybe the realization a couple of my things are not resonating, let’s yank those and make room for something else.
David Dylan Thomas: Totally. And what you do, it’s interesting too, like what you do. So I’ll give you an example of that one. I’ve been telling, so I started the actual work in June, 2024, but at least for a year prior, or maybe two years ’cause the idea for the feature came first. The idea for the short came later. I’d been telling people about the movie and the most common response was, could I be a zombie? So I’m like, okay, one of the rewards has to be, you can be. Or can I be eaten? That was the thing. Can I be eaten by a zombie?
That was what people wanted. And so that has to be one of the rewards. But the truth is that reward, which should have been the most, I priced it very high, mind you, but that reward is the nobody bid. Even the people who contributed a lot were like, I want that. I wanna contribute a lot, but I don’t want that reward.
And it’s like one of those like difference between what people say and what people will do. You know what I mean? On the other hand, I did have a set visit, and this was a reward that prior to this, we already had an email newsletter for I think at least a year to six months prior.
And so in the a White Meat newsletter, and so in the newsletter I sent out, hey, here are the rewards we’re thinking about. Are there any rewards you think we should add? So that’d be another step is to take advice, right? And someone wrote in, hey, why don’t you make a set visit an option? And so I threw that in at what I thought was an appropriate price point and someone actually, we had one taker and that taker was from New Zealand.
Alex Hillman: That’s crazy.
David Dylan Thomas: They happened to be able to come in because the thing is that particular award, ’cause it’s only a three day shoot. So it’s like hitting a bullet with a bullet you gotta be available. I was expecting if anyone to go be someone from Philly, but you gotta, and, but she happened to have a business trip to Boston and she took the train down for that one day.
We talked and we, and she’s one of our super fans. Like she shows up for everything.
Alex Hillman: That’s so cool.
David Dylan Thomas: But that was like, holy crap. So that’s the thing, like you do, you’re right you have an idea of what rewards are gonna resonate and then you find out the truth. But that, that, again, having to work those out early made things so much easier later. And working those out. And this, I should say is another critical step. Have friends. Have people you can talk to. So Alex and I-
Alex Hillman: Hear that folks? Good advice. Have friends.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah. And it is like I and what I love about that, like I was thinking about that ’cause I was thinking about what are the steps? And I’m like, that’s one of those I don’t know, you have so much control over, but if you do have friends, use them. I’ll put it that way. And if you have a community that you have access to that seems willing to help, there’s a lot of community resources. Again, depending on where you are.
Like for example, Philadelphia has a business, well there’s Alex’s business. There’s also a a business advisory function at the Free Library which does amazing work and that nobody fricking knows about.
Alex Hillman: The universities have great resources too. If I can offer a reframe here, ask for help.
David Dylan Thomas: Yes. That’s exactly-
Alex Hillman: You have you when people are so afraid, and I’m guilty of this too.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Alex Hillman: So people are afraid to say what they need out loud. And the thing that I’ve admired about the way you’ve approached all of this is how consistently you have gone out of your way to say, this is what I need.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Alex Hillman: Who can help? And sometimes it’s pointed and directed at a person, but sometimes it’s just I open talking about the coalition building work that we’re doing. And I feel like you didn’t just build a community, you built a coalition of people who were like, we’re here for Dave, we’re here for the movie.
I might not even be the best person to ask, but I’d rather you ask and me say I can’t help than you not ask when I could. Or when I, and maybe I’m not the person, but I could connect you to somebody who could. So so often we choose for other people whether or not they can help us.
David Dylan Thomas: Yes.
Alex Hillman: Instead of giving them the opportunity and the satisfaction, we know how good it feels to help somebody, especially someone we care about this.
David Dylan Thomas: I gotta be honest, this is one of the most important reframes in making money or just asking for support, whether it’s monetary or not, is this idea of, instead of thinking it in terms of you with your hand out, demanding something valuable from somebody that they don’t wanna give you, think of it instead as giving them the opportunity to do a thing they want to do.
Alex Hillman: That’s right.
David Dylan Thomas: And it’s true, as I would talk to people, as I would, as we were making-
Alex Hillman: And it’s okay if they say no, by the way.
David Dylan Thomas: Oh yeah.
Alex Hillman: But that also I think disarms that whole thing.
David Dylan Thomas: Oh yeah, totally. In fact, I go, I love the, I forget who it was, but someone was like my, my goal is to get 10 rejections a week for, it was like either job hunting or fundraising. And I’m like, yes. That’s the way to think about it’s, ’cause now it’s oh, I’m hitting quota.
Alex Hillman: That’s right.
David Dylan Thomas: But yeah. But I think it’s important to think of it again, we’re going back to community. Think of it as a community. In a community you don’t, a real community, people aren’t afraid of asking each other for help. In fact, it’s weird if you don’t.
Alex Hillman: That’s what I’m saying.
David Dylan Thomas: It’s like, I’m right here. What are you talking about? So I wanna get, so I wanna get to the, so that’s this sort of all the background setting. Six months of sending emails and crafting tiers of rewards and stuff like that. So that’s the behind the scenes.
Alex Hillman: Can I add one more thing you haven’t specifically said that I thought was really smart? You, and I’m curious actually where this came from. Because I don’t remember where it originated, but you started sending weekly updates
David Dylan Thomas: Oh yes.
Alex Hillman: To a collection of people that were involved in the production, including myself, where like my involvement really was giving Dave advice almost two years ago and then following that advice. That’s it. But I think, I imagine there’s an element of accountability in there.
David Dylan Thomas: Uh-huh.
Alex Hillman: But I think there was more to it where I think that I. It’s more I think people look at something like that and they think accountability. And when I look at it, I look at it as you creating a feedback loop in a project where there’s these long stretches where you’re doing a bunch and hearing nothing.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Alex Hillman: And so like I tried to respond. I don’t know if other people responded privately to you. I didn’t see a whole lot of responses all the time, occasionally. And especially when a lot of your emails didn’t explicitly ask for something, it was just an update. I would still go outta my way to respond because I know sending a thing into the ether and hearing nothing doesn’t feel great.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Alex Hillman: And if I can be one small piece of a positive feedback loop that you know somebody’s listening, maybe that translates into you waking up the next day and being willing to do it on a day where you’re like, why am I still doing this? Because I’m sure somewhere along the way there have been days like that.
David Dylan Thomas: Oh yeah. And there’s totally weeks I’ve missed too. No. So yeah. So what happened was I’ll tell you my side of that and a) thank you, but b) my side of that was, so we had an initial meeting, I would say March, 2024, where it was like, I want, these days I called the brain trust, but there were like 10 people maybe who were there before the Kickstarter who in different ways were contributing, either people who helped figure out the budget, who were helping to executive produce all these different pieces of the puzzle. Like really proto-companions, colleagues. And once that kind of cohered, I’m like, you know what? I’m gonna, I think part of it was accountability, ’cause I needed having to send out an email once a week. I did, I think I did it mostly on Mondays. Having emails saying this is what happened makes you want something to happen. And so it gives you a little bit of drive.
So there’s that. But for me it was just like in my head, ’cause I don’t think we ever really had all those people in one room at the same time. Like this.
Alex Hillman: No, I still haven’t met several of ‘ em.
David Dylan Thomas: Yes, that’s true. Like it was just feasibly, like some of them were in New York, blah, blah, blah. But in my head it was like I had my own little A-Team. And so part of that weekly email is keeping that fantasy alive ’cause there’s some people who literally haven’t responded in two years and I don’t care until they say stop sending emails, they’re getting the fucking email.
But and again, I don’t know, and one of the things I’ve learned actually is that, and I’ve learned this from other convening things that I’ve done, when you send out a mass email you’re not gonna get a lot of response, but you send out an individual email about the exact same thing with the exact same information, you’re much more likely to get a response. And that’s just like the obscurities of spam filters. That’s the obscurity of just like getting a mass email, whatever. But so I’ve found, I don’t take all of which, I don’t take it personally when I send out an email to 10 people and one or two people respond.
Alex Hillman: Those are good numbers, actually.
David Dylan Thomas: Exactly. I’m like, I get it. I get it. I’ve gotten those emails too so all of which to say, yeah, that was a critical thing too, and that. Feedback loops, regular communication. Anyone who’s done a Kickstarter will tell you that is necessary. What they don’t tell you is that it’s necessary months and months before.
So of the people who pledged, I created a special email group for them called Day One Funders and I would send them special emails with special perks, like they got to see the Kickstarter video early and all that stuff. By the way, you say you had a conversation with me like two years. You were there to advise on the Kickstarter video, on the card, on the rewards like he was giving me excellent advice all the way throughout folks. Don’t let him downplay his contribution.
Alex Hillman: Look man, I just wanna see you win.
David Dylan Thomas: Yes, exactly. Exactly. But no, all that. Again, thank you for that. All that was critical. And it’s not over yet. I have so many other things to ask you. But but so I had that, I had the newsletter, which I had created a year or two before.
That was just for anybody interested in White Meat. And then once the Kickstarter started, there were regular updates to them, which are continuing to this day. Like we’re almost at a year from when the Kickstart and they’re still getting updates. They’re gonna be some of the first people to learn that we got into that festival.
They’re getting a very special secret screening of the movie online before anyone else. So there’s a lot of little perks. I’m still finding ways to reward them and thank them and ask them, right, for stuff as we go forward. So keeping those, and for me, honestly, it’s not a chore. I really like it.
It’s like correspondence. It’s hey, here’s this little group, this little community that I get to that we shared this little thing, this little secret thing.
Alex Hillman: Like you said, I think it would feel different if you weren’t taking the work seriously. But I think you have taken the work seriously at every turn, and that’s the reason that you have updates. And even when sometimes the update is a non update.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Alex Hillman: It’s still like there’s always a reason and it’s not because I wasn’t feeling it this week guys. It’s because something’s going on in the world or your life or a project or travel like the, again I, I. I think I get to watch a lot of creative people pursue stuff and the amount of money, notwithstanding the not the rate at which I see people just bring professionalism to the table is strikingly low. And I think that, people only think that professionalism applies when somebody, when some employer or boss or somebody with a purse is watching, and I feel like you operate with professionalism regardless of who’s watching in all of your work. And I think you brought it to this work as well, and I think that is why I think it’s at least part of why that update doesn’t feel like a chore is because you’ve been doing the work and you’re excited to share whatever you’ve been doing. If you had been slacking, it probably would’ve felt like a chore ’cause it’s another week of updates being like, sorry gang, another delay like that just doesn’t feel good. So like you created a virtuous cycle for yourself. And then you got to ride the virtue cycle.
David Dylan Thomas: It’s funny you call it professionalism and I call it just being a good friend. You know what I mean? ‘Cause to me. So one of the things I should point out, and some of the longtime listeners may know this, one of the core values, we wrote down this thing called the White Meat Manifesto.
One of the core values, I’d say the highest value actually is relationship. Like at the end of the day, the highest success we can have as we walk away from this, not with an Oscar, not with a big box office, with great relationships, more relationships than we had when we started, and better relationships of the one we already had.
That is the most important thing. And then after that, financial, artistic, blah, blah, blah, blah. So to me, when I think about those virtuous circles, what I’m thinking about, I’m. I’m glad it comes off as professional and I think that is what professionalism should be. It’s interesting, in my mind though, to start to connect those two and saying what is professionalism actually mean? I think good relationship etiquette and good professionalism are actually very close together
Alex Hillman: And integrity and I think a lot of it is, it’s simple but not easy, but say what you mean and do what you say.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah. I still remember one of the, I’ve gotten so many sage things from this guy, people. One of the things you said once was if you want people to trust you say you’re gonna do a thing and do it. And I’m like, damn, that’s, yeah. Fuck, that’s,
Alex Hillman: It’s the whole game.
David Dylan Thomas: And I’ve seen that in my life over and over again. So that’s one of those. The other one I’m just gonna tell you now is, and I think I’ve told you this, like when people ask me what’s the best advice I ever got, I say you cannot, it is impossible to listen and react at the same time. That’s something you said in one of your classes once, and it’s to this day, I’m like, fuck, that’s how I need to operate.
Oh my God. So anyway, before we run outta time, I want to get to the meat of it, as it were. So we’re doing all this, world building, creating this community, and then we decide initially, I dunno if you remember this. Initially, I wanted to do the Kickstarter in September and start shooting in October or something, which was insane in retrospect.
But you and the rest of the braintrust talked me down and again, we decided to actually make the Kickstarter video as good as we could be, like, treat it as its own artistic project. But it gave us time to breathe and again, really prepare. So we decided February of 2025.
There are also tax reasons involved and again, real talk. If you are doing a Kickstarter campaign, the money you get from that campaign is taxable. Work that into your thing. So we decided if we shoot, if we spend the money we raise in the same year we raise it, there’s nothing to tax, right? It’s basically an expense. You get to put it down as an expense and not income.
So again, if you are in a position to decide, hey, I can either raise the money in year one and spend it in year two, you are going to get less money. Just know that if you, instead you say, hey, I’m gonna raise it in 2025 and spend it in 2025. Okay? That’s less money to be taxed. Just a real thing that has a very real impact ’cause that’s like 20% maybe of what you’re getting, maybe even 25. So just again, practical advice around that.
So anyway, we decide we’re gonna do the the campaign over Black History Month, right? This is a movie about Black zombies eating white people so sure.
And that U-shaped curve. So lemme tell you emotionally what it’s like to do this. So everything that happened in this campaign is what is supposed to happen. It’s what typically happens in a successful campaign. So we started up at, like I said, day one, $21,000, right out the gate. Bam. Holy crap. Great day. I had everyone over for a party and we were just like, yay.
Then so the first 20,000, the first 21,000 happens in a week, the next 20,000 three weeks, three, or sorry, a day we get the first 20,000 in a day, the next 20,000 in three, it takes three weeks, and those are the longest fucking three weeks. You are watching the amount that comes in every day go down and down. The whole time byy the way, you are sending out emails, you’re still sending out emails, you’re still sending out all the communications to your backers, to people who haven’t contributed yet. Anyone and everyone you can think of, you’re still doing that nonstop, but it’s just, it goes from a flood to a trickle, and then it slowly starts to go back up.
So first 20 grand one day, next 20 grand three days, three weeks. Final 20 grand, three days. So that final little push, and this is like right before the Oscars and I’m throwing an Oscar party, I’m like, I’m gonna be shitty company ’cause I’m not gonna know. But fortunately, we got our final, we hit 60 about a day or two before the Oscars, about day or two before the final day. And I was able to be chill, but, and we ended up at the end making maybe 62,000. And again, something you should know, you have the option of leaving your Kickstarter open after the final deadline, and we, so that, and that way, maybe another 1500 by leaving it open after that.
Alex Hillman: It’s basically no downside.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah, exactly. And the thing is you only get your money if you’ve hit the initial goal by the last day. But if you hit that initial goal, you can leave the thing open forever if you want. So yeah, so that was really gratifying, but really stressful. And, but what’s funny about it is I’m panicking not because things are going wrong, but because things are following the exact pattern that they always do. And that was my one comfort is it’s supposed to, like, things suck right now!
Alex Hillman: They’re doing exactly what they’re supposed to.
David Dylan Thomas: Open up the manual. Things will suck right now. It’s like, damnit!
Alex Hillman: That’s right. Again, it is where like the Hollywood expectations of number keeps going up doesn’t exist in reality, but that’s what we hold. But then we like are hard on ourselves and that’s not happening. I’m like, that’s literally never happened to anybody.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Alex Hillman: So why would it happen to you? So I think it’s like having calibrated expectations and knowing what are these patterns. And I’d be willing to bet, like I have not sat down and talked to people who have run a lot of Kickstarters, or there are people who you can hire to run your Kickstarter for you.
But I’d be willing to place a wager today that anybody who is good at what they do is gonna tell you the exact same thing in terms of expectations of what the funding pattern looks like. Because again, I learned that pattern outside of crowdfunding. Just good old fashioned, straight up sales. When I run a product launch and there is a sale running for a week, if I’ve done my job correctly, the only number that I don’t know for sure is what day one’s gonna look like. And once I know what the day one number is, I can basically plug that into a spreadsheet and have a pretty solid estimate of not what we hit at the end of how much is gonna come in each day.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Alex Hillman: It’s that predictable. It’s kind of wild. It’s really like human psychology is so freaking pre. We are wild beasts in the, but we are some of the most predictable, behaviorally, things on planet Earth.
David Dylan Thomas: Someone ought to write a book.
Alex Hillman: Someone ought to write a book.
David Dylan Thomas: No, that’s, it is fascinating to watch, but it’s fascinating to watch. It’s even more fascinating to be in
Alex Hillman: Yes.
David Dylan Thomas: And be at the whims of.
Alex Hillman: Yes.
David Dylan Thomas: You know what I mean?
Alex Hillman: Because this is literally gonna influence what you work on for the next however long.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah. And so a few things I want to as we start to to wind down here. So one is, I knew before I started that doing a campaign like this is a full-time job. It is a lot of work. I did not wanna do it. My, this was not my plan A. My plan A was to find someone who’s an experienced Kickstarter person oh, and hire them.
Alex Hillman: Yes.
David Dylan Thomas: To do this. I could not do that, so I did it myself.
That by the way, is the refrain of all indie filmmakers. I wish I could have hired someone to do that. I couldn’t. So I did it myself. I’m sure that’s in business. Business people too.
Alex Hillman: A hundred percent. Yeah. People wait to do things until they can hire. I’m like, or I just do the version I can do and hope that it sets me up for the next round where I’ve got whatever advantages I didn’t have in round one.
I think that’s gonna be true the second time around, too, is now that you have all these expectations, you, like you, you could do the exact same thing a second time, and know more precisely where to put your effort.
David Dylan Thomas: Yes.
Alex Hillman: And where to either bury or deflect your stress.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Alex Hillman: And probably, I don’t wanna say half the effort, but I’d be willing to bet you could do it for 20% less effort and 50% less stress.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah. And I think I would stress out less when the predictable, annoying things happen, like that U-shaped curve. I would be less stressed about oh, it’s week two and we didn’t make nearly as much money, I’d have more of a feeling like, yep, this is how it happened last time, versus, oh my God, what if I’m the one time it doesn’t work.
Alex Hillman: Correct. Correct. Correct.
David Dylan Thomas: I’m I’m curious, do you have any questions about, so that that’s the story of getting to that 60,000, like I said, there was other things that happened.
Oh, the other thing I should say about Kickstarer’s reward fulfillment. So my executive producer Mo, was very, took charge of most of that. And again, one of the ma some of the math you have to do is if I’m creating something physical like a T-shirt, how much is that gonna cost? Okay how much do I need to raise to compensate that?
And shipping. What’s, an interesting thing I learned about Kickstarter is they will have an option when you’re doing the thing to throw in the shipping. And I think when they’re either, when they’re pricing it on their end,
Alex Hillman: As in you can either roll it in or charge it as an extra.
David Dylan Thomas: Exactly. And the way they did it, shipping got taken care of by the donation.
Alex Hillman: Especially when you’re. You’ve got donors from all over the world. This is not just ship a t-shirt across Philadelphia. This is potentially ship something to New Zealand where the cost is-
David Dylan Thomas: This was like 90%, I would say, local stuff or local-ish and yeah, there was stuff going to Australia.
Alex Hillman: But even local. It still costs money. It’s still gotta be part of your math.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Alex Hillman: I would say so often people look at it’s the same equivalent to people when they buy a car or a house and they’re just looking at the monthly payment instead of total cost of ownership.
This is the business version of that where it’s I, if you’re not someone, look, I’m gonna be clear. Spreadsheets don’t make me happy. I know people who spreadsheets make them very happy.
David Dylan Thomas: Oh, yes, they are. God bless ’em.
Alex Hillman: I am not that person, but I am the person who knows how to use a spreadsheet to create, not certainty, but confidence.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah.
Alex Hillman: And so I can I’m gonna sit down and do the math. So often people go in, especially when you’re excited, especially when there’s, creativity on the line here and you, I think sometimes it’s people forget to do it. Sometimes people don’t want to face the reality, but I think this comes back to the professionalism thing is like show the way you show up for anything is the way you show up for everything and you ran the numbers because to run a movie, you need to run the numbers. And the fact that you did it in the Kickstarter, I think is part of the proof that you’re the right person to run a movie too.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah. So as we get to our final 10 minutes or so, I wanna ask you, now that it’s all said and done, do you have any questions?
Are you curious about anything about the process that you theorized two years ago and now has actually happened?
Alex Hillman: That’s such a generous opportunity. I’ll start by saying the, and this is even before you started working on White Meat, and I might have even said it on the last episode, is the more I’ve learned about movie making, just as a, an outside observer has made me appreciate how even bad movies are miracles.
David Dylan Thomas: Oh, it’s insane. Bad movies are so hard to make.
Alex Hillman: And I feel like. Since we’re here talking about money, I feel like I, I feel like I have a pretty good peek into the creative process. We haven’t really talked about the money side of things. I know that part of the path, as you said, was raising some additional money.
I’m curious about, the Kickstarter goes about as right as it could have
David Dylan Thomas: Pretty much
Alex Hillman: What money things didn’t go right, and how did you navigate them?
David Dylan Thomas: Sure. So anyone who’s ever worked in the movies business will tell you that like your initial budget is a kind joke. I’ve never worked on a movie that stayed on budget in terms of this is how much we think it’s gonna cost and yep, it was exact amount.
Alex Hillman: It’s like always estimate this much more and it’s always gonna be more than that.
David Dylan Thomas: Exactly. There was no I personally have never seen an accurate budget in my life. So there was, and part of that was our own sort of oh, we raised this much money let’s go ahead and hire that choreographer. Let’s go ahead and do this other thing that we thought we might not have money for. So that starts to balloon it. But then there’s just other unexpected things that kind of come in that you don’t see coming or you forget about this or that. So like I said, we estimated 60 ish.
We actually. And again, there’s Kickstarter fees. That’s another thing not to forget about to calculate in. But we, like I said, we ended up needing more closer to a hundred thousand.
Alex Hillman: And what was it that pushed that up out of curiosity? Like I imagine there’s a relatively, there’s there’s the unpredictable things, but there’s predictably unpredictable things.
Yeah. Like where do costs-
David Dylan Thomas: So, I’ll give you like a small example. So wardrobe. We, the person was coming in from New York and there were unexpected delays in getting stuff from New York. So there’s stuff like that you don’t necessarily, and maybe they brought more people than we expected them to.
And there’s all these kind of negotiations that happen with stuff like that. There’s to be honest, it’s really without the, this is, I think is actually a very real thing without the paper in front of you, ’cause it’s really oh, that thing. If I had the budget out in front of me, I could walk you through
Alex Hillman: Because I’m like, you don’t just accidentally spend an extra 40 grand.
David Dylan Thomas: Yeah. It’s no one thing. I’ll put it that way. It’s like these little things that take little bites that you’re not expecting. It’s oh, we forgot to calculate these lawyer fees here. We forgot to calculate or this-
Alex Hillman: Those are the things that add up. It’s not stuff on set, it’s the other stuff.
David Dylan Thomas: It’s not exactly. No. Like by the time you get to the set and you’re going through this, like the actual, because again, we only have a three day shoot.
Alex Hillman: I feel like the set is probably the most regimented plan that exists.
David Dylan Thomas: There’s absolutely there’s really not much that can happen. Yeah. Even with that, there’s some rental car shit that happens that we weren’t expecting.
Alex Hillman: But not 40,000 for rental car shit.
David Dylan Thomas: No. And like I said, it’s not like this line item 40,000, it’s more like all these things add up and they add up over time too, ’cause certain things end up being more expensive than you thought.
There’s postproduction stuff that happens. But what’s interesting about your question is like I in my mind can’t point to it.
Alex Hillman: Sure.
David Dylan Thomas: Like it’s this vague 40,000, that sort of like creeps in over time. So yeah. If I were to sit down with me and Mo and Stephanie, we would wa walk you through and say we thought this ends up that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But experientially it’s just like you go to a budget meeting and you’re like, oh, we thought we had enough. Oh, but it’s actually this, the number keeps moving almost magically.
Alex Hillman: Yeah.
David Dylan Thomas: So I the real answer is I’m the wrong person to ask. ’cause Stephanie and Mo were much more on top of the budget than I was.
Alex Hillman: That’s part of building the team.
David Dylan Thomas: But, experientially as a director, what I can tell you is it does feel almost magical. It almost feels like this thing you know how in Minecraft skeletons spawn in the dark? Which is a weird analogy, but it’s what comes to mind, like the, you leave the room for a second and you close the door so it’s dark and you open the door again. Suddenly there’s skeletons. That’s just how it’s like you leave the room and suddenly it’s another 10 grand that you didn’t see coming. It’s just there.
Alex Hillman: I get it. I get it. Again, it’s again, it’s fascinating. It is as someone who I’ve spent my entire adult life, both like living and breathing, collaboration and also like studying to understand collaboration and teaching, I feel like making a movie is the ultimate, like it’s where collaboration becomes the art form.
David Dylan Thomas: Yes.
Alex Hillman: Like a movie, literally. I think we get closer to, you can make a thing as a person on an iPhone, but that’s not exactly the same. And also the difference between a solo endeavor and a true production like what you did, is remarkable. And it’s, this project is the closest I’ve ever gotten to see all the moving parts and I still didn’t get to see all the moving parts.
David Dylan Thomas: I didn’t get to see all the moving parts. Understand there were people on set. I didn’t know who they were. That’s how big our crew was for something like the world I was coming from.
Alex Hillman: That’s wild. No man, it’s so cool and I’m super proud to be a part of it. And I have yet to be in a room where I get to watch people react to it. I feel like that’s the thing I’m most excited for at some point is I know how the short goes.
Actually, that’s not true. You did a small screening for some Indy Hall members at one point and I did. That’s actually the only time I got to see other people react to it, and it was awesome. And I want, I can, and maybe the better answer is I want more of that. That was so fun. I’m sure it doesn’t get old for you.
David Dylan Thomas: Oh, not at all. And February 5th, keep that date open. We’re gonna do a screening at Strangelove’s if you’re free.
Alex Hillman: Oh, sweet.
David Dylan Thomas: But but yeah, no, it, that is my favorite part of post of post of taking it out now to festivals, to little private preview screenings, what have you, is that reaction and is the q and a here’s the thing but again, any of you who followed me for any period of time know I love to talk. So q and a is after and just telling all these stories and hearing all these reactions and hearing all these oh, hey, I was at a screening and someone was like, oh, that little throwaway line about Quakers owning slaves. I know someone who like literally studies that for a living. Lemme hook you up with them.
So it’s the best version of somebody heard you like strawberries, so now every birthday you get like strawberry shit. Except I know I’m really genuinely interested in history of Black Philadelphia and no, everybody’s given me the history of Black Philadelphia.
But no, that is so one of the things we talked about in that last podcast is it worth $60,000? For this, like what are you getting for your $60,000? And if I’m being honest, this, this is part like the, or a hundred, this is totally worth a hundred thousand dollars to go around the country, maybe even around the world actually, yes, around the world. ’cause we did a screening in India, to go around the world and just see people react to, and have conversations around and just react to this thing. It’s totally worth it. If we never make a dime off this movie which in all likelihood we won’t, it’s a short, but if we never make a dime off this movie, totally worth a hundred thousand dollars to just go all over the world and have this communal experience with people around this art.
Alex Hillman: Yeah. No, man, it’s amazing. Congratulations.
David Dylan Thomas: Thank you for the, well first off, Alex, thank you for all of your help. Couldn’t have done it without you, so thank you for that.
Alex Hillman: You’re very welcome.
David Dylan Thomas: And for the White Meat Podcast, I’m your host, David Dylan Thomas, and we’ll catch you next time.
