You've helped make the first week of my Kickstarter campaign a success—we've blown through our funding goal and are scrambling to add new backer rewards to replace the ones you've all sold out. (Read the detailed update here).
I wanted to share some news and updates about stretch goals, bonus rewards, and you can Ask Me Anything at 5:30 EST today (Wednesday, March 25th) on Reddit.
New rewards
Our rewards are running out! Since many have already sold out, we’ve added a few new ones: a special reward for Kickstarter creators including a mini digital book and a call with our campaign team, as well as a package called “I want everything” which includes many of the most highly-requested rewards in one package.Stretch goals
We hit our first stretch goal of 3000 backers last Friday! Thanks to our corporate sponsor, Pivotal Software, everyone who backed the campaign is eligible to attend one of 11 LG workshops in cities around the world. Workshop content will be developed by Pivotal’s Janice and Jason Fraser, based on the The Leaders’ Guide, with input from me.And we added a new stretch goal today. When we hit 4000 backers, every backer of the campaign will receive access to the Lean Content course, created by award-winning filmmaker Ondi Timoner and me.
The Leader’s Guide in the News
We’ve received some excellent press, including pieces on Vox, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Inc. Our vanity metrics are strong. I especially liked Vox's "Lean Startup explained" approach:It's become a cliché for an executive at a large company to promise to run it like a startup. Yet in his influential 2011 book The Lean Startup, startup founder and business guru Eric Ries argued that businesses of any size and age — and perhaps even nonprofit organizations and governments — can still learn a lot from management methods pioneered in Silicon Valley.
On Monday, Ries began work on his next book project. Fittingly, he started it off with a Kickstarter campaign. The campaign achieved its $135,000 fundraising goal on Tuesday, and by Thursday morning Ries had more than $170,000 in pledges.
"I'm a believer that this is the future of publishing," Ries told me on Monday shortly after the campaign began. For Ries, the Kickstarter campaign isn't just about raising money; it's also a way to solicit feedback from his future readers. Pledgers will be able to participate in a closed online community for aspiring entrepreneurs. Ries wants to learn what they want from the book and — more important — gather examples of real-world business successes and failures that he can incorporate into the book.
Ries' big idea is that the key to success for a startup — or any organization trying to innovate — is to learn quickly and act on the knowledge gained. While that might sound obvious, doing it often requires people to do many things that are counterintuitive.
Reddit AMA
Ask me anything! Check out my Reddit AMA tomorrow at 5:30 EST tomorrow (Wednesday, March 25th) here.I’m updating the campaign page several times a week with news and rewards as well as behind-the-scenes looks into the campaign itself. You can check it out here.
