Congrats to Team Notorious VFA on winning the Profit Challenge! 2014 Fellows Ranjani Sridhara, Avery Hairston, Brian Schwartz, Katherine Robinson, and Spencer Wolfe created “The Great World Novel”, a crowdsourced and crowdfunded narrative. They raised over $800 in profit and $1200 in revenue from crowdfunding platform Indiegogo.
Team member Ranjani Sridhara recounts the challenges faced and lessons learned by her team during the Profit Challenge, and how they ultimately succeeded.
Be comfortable being uncomfortable. This quickly emerged as one of the biggest lessons we were going to learn at Training Camp. On Day 4 of our challenge, with our campaign already in full swing, Team Notorious VFA went into crisis mode. It was in the heart of the profit challenge – a project in which we were tasked with making as much profit as possible in 10 days using crowdfunding.
Since my background is in biomedical engineering, it’s safe to say this was the first time I’ve really had to sell something concrete to my friends and family. With no idea how to crowdfund anything and with the strange recent success of the Potato Salad guy, I had absolutely no idea what I was getting myself in to. I was completely out of my comfort zone, to say the least.
Our group quickly decided that we wanted to keep as much profit as possible while creating something of our own. After an incredibly productive ideation process, The Great World Novel was born. Our goal was to transform the concept of the telephone game into narrative form and play it across the entire internet. Anyone could be a part of the novel, by contributing a sentence, paragraph, page, or illustration. In addition, enthusiasts could pay more to name the book, design the cover art, or write the first or last page. We would then compile the content by facilitating the “telephone” process through all of our authors and turn it into an e-book that would be sent to those who contributed more than $15.
We got off to a slow but steady start, making a few hundred dollars from close friends and family in the first few days. By day four, however, we were at an impasse. After running our idea by a member of the VFA team and posting the idea on Reddit hoping for traction, we began to see an unfortunate pattern.
“It’s a cool idea…but it sounds a little scammy. What’s the incentive for me?”
“Scammy” was definitely not the reaction our team had been looking for. We reconvened later that evening into a heated debate over
whether or not our idea was even viable. Some group members thought the curation process was our value-add, while others wanted to scrap the project altogether and start over. Finally, we settled on a happy medium. In order to move forward with our campaign, we needed to give more in exchange for the content our writers were providing. We decided to print a physical copy of the book and send it to anyone who contributed more than $15 as well as donate a portion of our proceeds to Reading is Fundamental (RIF), a charity that provides literacy resources for children.
Feeling much better about ourselves and the legitimacy of our campaign, things finally started looking up for The Notorious VFA. We hired a PR firm that had reached out to us, got contributions from a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, learned a prominent New York artist had donated to design the cover, and ended up with a website after a freelance designer took an interest in our project. By the end of the first week, we were more than halfway to our goal and getting much more positive feedback.
By getting comfortable with the uncomfortable situation we encountered, we were able to tip our campaign. The Notorious VFA has raised over $1200 in revenue, $800 in profit, and has more than 50 authors contributing to our novel. After receiving more positive feedback, we even decided to extend our campaign by another month to try and reach 100 authors. Our goal is to publish the book by January 1st, 2015 and start distributing The Great World Novel to those who were involved.
I learned more in these ten days than I ever could have expected. It is clear that one of the main goals of Training Camp is to explore life outside your comfort zone. Learning skills in the classroom was valuable in its own way, but being put right into an uncomfortable situation opened my eyes to skills I never thought I had. I am constantly impressed by the things my fellow Fellows accomplish from week to week and I can’t wait to continue learning with them.
