More than one month ago I started an indiegogo campaign for Photographers Rights.
Just 5 days left and the results are really bad. This is a niche app, it’s useful and I think it’s important for a photographer to have it and it’s free! I’m making almost no money with this app, I just want to have a useful tool for those situations when a photographer needs instantaneous legal advice. Today photography is a target of many stupid regulations made by myope politicians that don’t understand the difference from a camera and a bomb. Many see street photographers as potential terrorists or criminals, which I have no need to even explain how absurd this could go. Photography, in all its variants, is extremely important as a way to keep our memories for the future. Photography is history in real time.
I wonder what went wrong with this campaign. I first created a video talking about the app. It was quite long, almost 3 minutes where I explained every detail of the app. The video had very few views, people didn’t even bother to watch it. So, I decided to change it. I made it shorter and faster, with some self-made animations but it didn’t change the statistics.
I posted about the app everywhere, in Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Linkedin. Many friends and followers shared this campaign in their own social networks as well. I wrote to many photography blogs, with no response. At some point it seems like nobody really cares about this app and yet, more than 20,000 people downloaded the app and the reviews are good! I got, and I’m still getting, emails from people asking me for an Android version and suggestions for improvements. That’s why I started the campaign, I thought that there were people interested and, in fact, I think there is a lot of people interested in this app. So what happened??
This is what I thought that would happen. People would share it. Photographers would share it too. Some of those people’s friends would share it as well and some of them would contribute with the project.
What really happened is that I reached the limits of my influence. No matter how many times I posted and reposted the same content, it would not reach anybody beyond that limit. Those photographers, potentially interested to participate in the campaign, were never reached by this information at all. They just don’t know that this campaign even exists.
This is just what I think that happened. But, I really have no idea what really happened. The only thing I know is that with no marketing, no advertisement, not having thousands of followers, a pretty interesting number of people downloaded the app in the last 2 years. But for some reason, I wasn’t able to reach a similar amount of people using social networks, blogs, direct emails, retweets, re-shares and so forth…
For now, Photographers Rights remains as it is, with no English proof reading and no Android version. Thank you for the few people that contributed. You will get your perks soon.
