Would you like to be part of a World Record?

I’ve just launched my ninth Kickstarter campaign.

This post is partly shameless self promotion, but also hopefully an interesting insight into a slightly unusual project.

The Largest Playing Card in the World

The project is all about attempting to break the world record for the largest playing card.

Apart from being big, the card will also have a unique design because the King of Hearts at the centre of it will be made up by 4,000 photos submitted by backers.

Normally when I run a Kickstarter campaign, it’s to raise money to make the first batch of a physical product which I’ll then ship to backers.

This one is a bit different because I’m only going to make one of these giant cards, so that’s what the money will be used for.

So why would people back the campaign?

Being a backer in this project means you’ll get the chance to submit a photo that will become part of a Guinness World Record.

Backers will also get a digital image of the finished piece to print at home for themselves, and there is an additional option to get a professionally printed scaled-down image that I’ll ship to backers.

A bit like my Make 100 campaigns that I’ve written about recently, the nature of this project means that there is necessarily a limited number of possible rewards available. That means that this is a relatively low-budget project where I haven’t spent any money on marketing and have kept costs low by doing all the design/photography/videography work myself.

Quid pro quo

This project shows that Kickstarter isn’t always about designing a physical product and then raising money to get a batch made.

Plenty of people run similar creative projects without physical rewards - for example digital comics, music/film downloads, or even 3D print files.

What is always required for a Kickstarter project though, is a quid pro quo: a backer backs a project and in return they expect something - be it a physical product, a digital product, an experience, or simply the satisfaction of having helped something great happen.

As a creator, your job is to pitch the something, whatever is may be.

With a less tangible project like my giant playing card experience, the challenge is to try and get people excited about being part of the ride.

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A little side note about this project is that it sort of came to me in a dream. Earlier in the year I had broken the world record for the smallest deck of playing cards, so the idea was perhaps in the back of my mind, but then one night when I was struggling to sleep I imagined a Million Dollar Playing Card.

The inspiration for that was the early internet phenomenon, The Million Dollar Home Page. If you’re old enough to remember that from nearly 20 years ago it was a teenager in the UK who auctioned off literal pixels on a web page. People could then buy multiple pixels and determine their colours to make up pixelated graphics.

There were a million pixels available and he sold them all for a dollar. Genius.

The page is still available to see online here: www.milliondollarhomepage.com

In my case, the maths didn’t allow me to have a million ‘pixels’ in my giant playing card, and I doubt I’d have got that many backers anyway, so I scaled it down a little.

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My giant playing card project will be live on Kickstarter for the next couple of weeks. So far, just under half of backers have gone for the physical print option so it'll be interesting to see how it all plays out.

If you have your own plans for a Kickstarter project, big or small, check out my previous blog posts and make sure you sign up below to my newsletter.

And if you’d like some help from me, feel free to get in touch.