Today’s post is going to be something a bit more on the inspirational side rather than being purely technical (and secretly I’m also testing something on the backend…shhh…don’t tell anyone). Nearly any venture, any idea, any product…or anything…works at least some of the time. Specifically, what am I getting at? Fund raising…
I’m sure most of you are trying to raise funds for an independent film, and it seems impossible. It’s just too hard…everyone says no. But indie films get financed every year. What are you doing wrong?
Probably nothing. The secret lies in knowing that everything works…some of the time. So, if you are asking for money to make a film, someone will say yes. It’s about percentages and ratios of success. Lets throw out an arbitrary number, such as 0.5%. Lets say if you ask people who can afford to finance a film to give you money, 0.5% of the time you will succeed. Seems pretty dismal doesn’t it? It’s not.
Robert Kiyosaki, author of the famous Rich Dad Series (a set of books I highly recommend) was once asked, “How can you recommend people start their own business when 9 out of 10 businesses fail”. His response, “If that is true, then I will start 10 businesses.”
So by the same token, if only one out of every 200 people you ask will finance your film …then ask 200 people.
This is much the same logic we use in the world of web promotion. For example, my other website Killer Film has some pretty high server costs, which we pay for through advertising. We get paid when someone clicks on one of our ads. Generally, only about 2% of people actually click on an ad. Do we waste our time trying to make more people click on our ads? No, we can’t control if people want what our advertisers are selling. So instead, we focus on growing our traffic. More people means more clicks.
Those of you who have a film already produced should also take note of this principle. Finding distribution is hard, and its easy to get disheartened if you get turned down the first time you visit a market like AFM. However, I’ve had friends take the same film back to AFM for two years with no luck. Then finally, they take it the third year and sell multiple territories, and completely pay back their investors.
You can’t predict everything that can happen. Maybe your potential investor just lost a ton in the market. Maybe the distributor just filled up their roster for this year five minutes before you walked in. Or maybe you’ll show up at just the perfect time and find an investor who just sold off a huge property and needs to move some money before he’s hit with a huge tax bill. You can’t predict what happens with a single person you speak with…but it averages out such that perseverance eventually breeds success.
On a crazy side note: Bizarre as it might sound, things that seem completely impossible are often possible…just very unlikely. It is entirely possible that you could drop a pencil onto a desk, and have it fall completely through the desk, passing completely through solid matter. In quantum mechanics a phenomena called, “tunneling” has been show to occur where a solid object passes through another solid object. You’d probably have to drop the pencil a few quadrillion times before it happened…but eventually it would happen, probably right after you win the lottery.