Unsurprisingly I was so hoping that I wouldn’t ever be writing this post, but here I am four days after the end of my Kickstarter campaign and no funds are coming my way.

While I’ve been pretty sure of this outcome for the past three weeks, I avoided a lot of the recommendations I read online about pulling my project early. Favouring instead to let it run to the end to see what would happen, I’ve endured the full 35 days of my campaign with the small but real hope every morning as I checked the page that somehow overnight a thousand people had suddenly decided to pledge out of nowhere and I’d already reached my goal. It never happened, of course it didn’t. It didn’t stop me hoping though.

Pretty much everyone close to me knew already that should this not work then it wouldn’t be the end of the journey, although I have had to face that question a few times. The bigger question for me is: What next?

The first thing I’m focusing on right now is a full retrospective of the campaign, which I’m planning to do as a series of blog posts here. Not only will publishing these keep you guys informed about what happened and what I’ve learned, but formatting this way is also going to be really helpful for me to process the huge amount of information and data I have and sort this into an actionable set of items that I will be able to work on between now and the next planned Kickstarter campaign (in around 4-6 months).

In the meantime, I’m also pursuing alternative financing options and opening up a whole series of conversations that were put on hold whilst the campaign was live – including a really interesting collaboration with some good friends of mine.

There’s so much still to do and I’m surprising myself each day that I feel even more energised to get this done and don’t feel the pangs of defeat at all. I just hope this keeps up and I see all the good things to have come from putting the Kickstarter live and running through these 5 weeks. After all, there’s nothing like throwing yourself in the deep end if you want to learn how to swim. I’m not quite swimming yet, but I do feel like I can tread water right here as I get my bearing before making the next big strokes.

Stay tuned as my journey continues!