Kickstarting the Butcher Shop at Sugar Mountain Farm

Kickstarting the Butcher Shop at Sugar Mountain Farm

The crowd source funding web site Kickstarter.com accepted our project proposal for raising money for finishing construction of our on-farm butcher shop and this morning our project launched at:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sugarmtnfarm/building-a-butcher-shop-on-sugarmountainfarm

If you're not familiar with Kickstarter, check out the bottom of the page above for an explanation of how it works. Basically, in exchange for backers pledging $1 or more they get rewards from the project which can vary from the simple swag to project products. For example in our case there are T-shirts, pig ivory tusks and most of all, meat - our pastured pork, sausage and hot dogs.

Cheers

-Walter
Sugar Mountain Farm
Pastured Pigs, Sheep & Kids
in the mountains of Vermont
Read about our on-farm butcher shop project:
http://SugarMtnFarm.com/butchershop

How long did the process take on kickstarter to get approved?

Amed Mesa wrote:How long did the process take on kickstarter to get approved?

Well, about two years. But that's not quite accurate as it wasn't linear. I applied back in July of 2010 but they rejected us saying they didn't do our sort of project. Then they did do some projects just like ours, in fact one inspired by our own project. Then I got invited to resubmit in mid-January of this year. I spent about a month and a half studying other projects, successes and failures, reading all their help pages, FAQs, blog posts, etc. Then it took about another three weeks to design and setup our project, reward tiers, text description, photographs. I then submitted for approval and got back an answer, a Yes, the next day. They were pretty quick. I then spent more time polishing the project with the help of friends reading it (hopefully we found and corrected all my tpyos - let me know if you find any!). Next I spent six days doing the video. I finished that last night about 10:40 PM. This morning I looked it over one last time and my daughter pressed the green Launch button.

So, if you ignore the initial rejection, figure a month to three weeks to design a project and then they do approval in a few days.

I would suggest having several weeks after they accept to do polishing. That really helped us. Nobody's going to mistake my video for one of James Cameron's but it's okay, it's us, it shows who we are, what we do, our farm and our Big Project.

Thanks a lot for the very helpful information. I was looking into making an economical juicer equivalent to the Norwalk but with 4 tons compression and a manual hydraulic lift for less than 250 dollars. Something similar to this (Welles or Peoples Juice Press) but with more capacity and of course cheaper.



I will produce CAD Drawings in the future.

Getting tooled up and doing the initial sales run of that would be a great Kickstarter project in the Design category. Check out:

http://www.kickstarter.com/discover/categories/product%20design

Read some of projects there to see how they function. Also check out Kickstarter's excellent Help and FAQ session. They have a tutorial.

We're at 33% at five days! Thank you everyone who has been spreading the word, Liking and especially backing our Kickstarter project. Here is an easy and short URL to pass out to friends: http://SMF.ME/K or just SMF.ME/K and capitalization doesn't matter.

We broke the $10,000 mark yesterday and I made up a special T-shirt iKickstarting the Butcher Shop for the lucky person who pushed us over the mark. If you would like one they're available at our cost - you'll help spread the word - for a limited time. See:

http://sugarmtnfarm.com/10000-t-shirt/

The shirts are full color on both front and back with my Archimedies Pork Cut Chart which hangs in many restaurants and stores and has appeared as far away as BBC TV.

If you haven't seen it, check out our farm video at the Kickstarting the Butcher Shop project:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sugarmtnfarm/building-a-butcher-shop-on-sugarmountainfarm

Short link: http://smf.me/k

Cheers

-Walter
Sugar Mountain Farm
Pastured Pigs, Sheep & Kids
in the mountains of Vermont
Read about our on-farm butcher shop project:
http://SugarMtnFarm.com/butchershop

Wow, congratulations!

We were in the news! Cool!

http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/news/958195-196/pig-farm-turns-to-web-for-financing.html

Today’s GraniteGeek will examine the cool process of crowd-funding via the website Kickstarter, and whether it can literally bring home the bacon via an attempt to build a slaughterhouse on a Connecticut River Valley farm.
Before we celebrate the wow factor of crowd-sourced money-raising, however, let’s acknowledge a bit of reality: Novel ways of doing things can be a pain in the neck....

Cheers,

-Walter
Sugar Mountain Farm
Pastured Pigs, Sheep & Kids
in the mountains of Vermont
Read about our on-farm butcher shop project:
http://SugarMtnFarm.com/butchershop

Check out our Kickstarting the Butcher Shop project at:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sugarmtnfarm/building-a-butcher-shop-on-sugarmountainfarm

Short link: http://smf.me/k

We're at 93% funded! I just put up a new cartoon info-graphic drawn by our son Ben and daughter Hope:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sugarmtnfarm/building-a-butcher-shop-on-sugarmountainfarm/posts/215971

We made it! There is dancing in the cottage on Sugar Mountain!

But we're not done yet! We have two more weeks. Additional funds we raise we'll put towards the next phase of construction, the on-farm slaughter and then after that comes the smokehouse. See:

http://SugarMtnFarm.com/whats-next-phasing-the-butcher-shop/

Walter Jeffries wrote:We made it! There is dancing in the cottage on Sugar Mountain!

But we're not done yet! We have two more weeks. Additional funds we raise we'll put towards the next phase of construction, the on-farm slaughter and then after that comes the smokehouse. See:

http://SugarMtnFarm.com/whats-next-phasing-the-butcher-shop/

Congratulations! That is easily 43 kinds of awesome right there