Beto's Burrito, a Kickstarter Story

Editor's Notes

1. In 1997 I stopped talking to my dad for about ten years. Which was not all that unusual – we never talked much anyway. I grew up with my mother in Florida. Dad was in Texas, so although I saw him once a year every summer, I never really knew him growing up.\n
2. In 2007 Dad emailed to see if I was interested in collaborating on a children's story he wrote called Beto's Burrito. It was a wholesome story about a boy waking up to his mother and father cooking breakfast burritos. I wasn't sure about committing to a whole book, but I did one illustration – this is it. And it began a relationship with my dad that I didn't think was possible. \n
3. Later on I spent a month living with Dad and did a few more illustrations, then when I moved to Canada. Dad and I started talking on the phone every Sunday (still do). But last May, my dad's drinking put him in the hospital. And I thought, this is it. He's going to die and he's not going to see our finished book.\n
4. So I went to Kickstarter. For those who don’t know, it’s a website where people pledge to fund individual, usually creative, projects. My husband and I made this video in 48 hours while Dad was actually in the hospital, and within a week we had raised $5500 for the printing of the book.\n
5. This is our page on Kickstarter. The way Kickstarter works is you set a fundraising goal – anywhere from 100s to tens of thousands of dollars – and you have a deadline to raise that amount of money, usually 30 days. If you don't meet your goal within the deadline, then you don't get any of the money.\n
6. The thick black line was the minimum I thought we'd need to show my dad that we were published. Which we exceeded by more than 250%. This first big spike was me sending emails to everyone I knew and the second spike was when Kickstarter featured Beto's Burrito in their newsletter.\n
7. You also set rewards, which are usually experiential and related to the final product. Depending on how much people give, they get a different reward. Our most popular reward was the $25 book. The actual book retails at $15, so people were willing to give a little more to help make this thing happen.\n
8. Of 164 pledgers, 63% were people I didn't know at all. It's extraordinary how generous people are when they are moved by a personal story they can relate to. So many people sent me messages that they too had estranged relationships with their parents.\n
9. When I broke down how people gave, I discovered that the people I knew personally accounted for 46% of the total money raised and gave the average donation of $50. Strangers accounted for more than 50% of the project total and gave an average of $25 per person.\n\n
10. I think this happened for a variety of reasons. I was very lucky and was featured in Kickstarter’s newsletter and homepage, but I was also pretty resourceful. I used a lot of different channels to get my story out. I asked for help from a lot of different people and I put in a lot of hours myself promoting the project.\n
11. These are all the tools I used throughout the project, from analog methods in the upper left quadrant used to create the actual book, to the software some friends and I used to made a book trailer with all these crazy special effects. I was also all about social media and connecting with other people, so that we could all be a part of this bigger thing.\n
12. It may also be worth noting that women and men gave in equal measure, both in numbers and amounts. Some people gave as couples. Through surveys I found the ipad was more popular than the kindle as an e-reader, that there are eight times as many meat eaters as vegetarians, and gmail was unsurprisingly the most common email domain. \n
13. Most pledgers were from the states, then Canada, UK and France. But really people from all over the world were giving. One thing that I never would have predicted was that it is more expensive to mail something from within Ontario than from Toronto to Luxembourg.\n
14. Predicting the budget was really hard. We did end up in the plus with $800, but Dad and I decided early on to give back by donating 50% of our profits to CAMH Foundation’s Strengthening Families program, which is so far $400. You see Dad and I have each made about $200. So what is the profit, what did we get out of this?\n
15. With $200 in my pocket, if I estimate my hours at 10 weeks, full-time (which is conservative), that's 400 hours, so my hourly rate works out to about $.50/hr. We got 600 books, 340 of which are still in my guest room. But it wasn’t ever about pushing product or making money.\n\n
16. We had a book launch, which was one of the intangible rewards of the project. This is the actual book with a little plush doll I hand-sewed to give away at the launch with a print. Chipotle donated 100 free burritos, Cobbs bread send three huge trays of amazing scones, and so many friends gave their time.\n\n
17. My mom flew up from Florida and sat the money table (bottom left). We had a listening station of my dad reading the story so that he could be there even though he couldn't be there in person. We had a coloring station with one of the illustrations in black and white.\n
18. We had this giant wall and asked people to write their dreams on a post-it and stick it in there, and this is the kind of profit that isn't quantitative. You can't measure the feeling someone gives you when they write they want to cure their mother's illnesses. Or that feeling of, "I know what that's like."\n\n
19. This was probably the best and worst part of the project for me, actually holding the book in my hands. The realization that something that's been in the works for years is over. But also, the fact that so many people have helped you take it more places than you thought were possible. That I got to take it to my dad last September and show it to him in person.\n
20. Which was when this photo was taken, when he was practicing his autograph for the books. Now, his health is a yo-yo now and he is often in and out of the hospital. But now that I feel like I actually know my dad, I know this look on his face – and it’s one of utter contentment.\n