Scorched Earth Fundraising: Why Your Indie Pitch Fails Before You Even Open Your Mouth

Jun 9

This is an understatement, I realize that, but I’ll say it anyway: few tasks are more difficult than getting others to care about your project, business, or dreams. Why is it so goddamn hard to pitch an idea to someone who could make a difference? It doesn’t matter that you’re passionate, driven, or that your plan is rock solid. Doubt creeps in from somewhere deeper. It’s not always about your pitch falling flat. The doubt was there before you stood in front of anyone, before you booked the meeting, before you even put pen to paper. Honestly, it probably showed up before your parents even hooked up to conceive you. Because the people who came before you poisoned the well.

That’s the truth of it. That’s why sometimes no one listens. Why you can’t seem to catch a break. It’s not you. It was them.

We all have fundraising stories. “It was a fantastic idea, but no one would bite.” Mine started in 2017 and landed like a gut punch. I had just been appointed to a committee by the mayor of the city I lived in—an honor I was proud of, maybe even more than being chosen as one of ten artists out of nearly a thousand to compete on Jim Henson’s Creature Shop Challenge. That committee seat meant something to me. I believed in the work. I took it seriously.

It was tradition for every member to talk about our individual projects. When my turn came around, someone cut me off with a joke about how my next project was like the last few. I’d probably just be doing another celebrity appearance at a comic con somewhere in the world. They weren’t wrong.

At that point, I’d been a guest at over 45 conventions. These appearances were a big part of my life. I had seen it all: the contracts, the logistics, the agents and handlers, the security, the volunteers. Sit at a celebrity row table long enough, and you’ll hear every horror story, every lesson. Nothing stays a secret at a convention.

By that point, I didn’t know everything, but I knew enough.

That offhand comment snowballed into a real conversation about how great it would be if our city had something like a pop culture convention. All they had was a megacon in the state’s capital that was full of itself. Someone asked if I could build a con here, and I said, “Yeah. I think I could.” The more I thought about it, the more excited I got.

So, I went to work constructing a business plan. I pulled from the knowledge I’d gathered over years of appearances and reached out to owners of cons I’d worked with. There were a rare few who actually shared information.

One key takeaway was that the city had to be involved. If your city didn’t have your back, there was no point. So I brought the city in. I structured the whole pitch around an event that would align with the city’s branding and community. To my surprise, getting the city on board was the easy part. We met with the mayor, the city planner, director of economic impact, and a dozen others. They all loved it. They just didn’t love it enough to give us the $70,000 grant we needed. After too many rounds of back-and-forth, that “support” morphed into an SBA loan that hung around my neck like a noose.

Still, we had them, though. The city was in. That should’ve meant something to people, but nope. Then the real cracks started to show.

The venue options were dismal. One was a rundown Union Pacific building with a low capacity—much lower than the number of attendees we needed to break even. The other venue was the city’s lone convention hall—which cost $30,000 and came with red tape, strings, and capacity issues.

This city simply wasn’t built to support a big event. There were only a few hundred hotel rooms available, and we needed a turnout of at least 3,000 attendees to cover expenses. But anything over 10,000 would break the city’s infrastructure, so we capped the number of possible tickets at 6,000. This made the event rather exclusive: “Get them while you can. We ain’t making any more.”

We leaned into it. Built the convention as an experience. The VIPs were truly VIP. Unlike most conventions that sell just as many VIP passes as they do general admission, we capped ours at 100. That was it.

A convention hall, tightly curated programming, and celebrity guests who had never before appeared at a convention in our state. And we wanted to offer access. No rush-job autographs. You could talk to the celebrity guests. The panels were wild, and there was real fan interaction. We wanted people to feel like their time and their money were well spent.

But again, it’s all for nothing without sponsorship. And there was literally none of that.

Early on, I reached out to a contact who ran a venue supply company. I’d made a deal with them a year prior to get tables and curtains in exchange for an in-kind sponsorship. Even that fell through. Turns out the owner’s son had taken over the company. A bitter prick. He didn’t care about the original agreement. Said they’d been burned before and weren’t willing to take another chance. What chance? We offered access and executive producer-level sponsorship. How would that fall through?

No deal. Only cash. This was an added expense we hadn’t budgeted for, to the tune of $10,000. So, we took our business to his competitor. No way was I doing business with a deal-breaker. Once bitten.

And that was the theme, over and over. Potential sponsor after sponsor, business after business—burned by some previous event, some long-gone organizer who vanished with their money, left them hanging, or outright screwed them on the deal.

Nobody wanted to meet. Nobody wanted to hear the pitch. Car dealerships had been scammed and were not interested. Media outlets had been exploited to the max. Even my own bank refused to sponsor the event. They had been done in by a larger convention, and once word got out about what had happened, the rest of the banks said hell no. Not even law offices, who could enforce the contracts, were spared from these crooked cons. No one wanted to risk their money.

I’d raised money for film projects before. I knew it wouldn’t be a cakewalk. But I honestly believed having the city’s support would have opened doors, or at least lent credibility. I truly thought we had something solid. In the end, it didn’t matter. The wreckage left by others kept hitting us like a curse.

Ticket sales lagged. Granted, we were strapped for cash to feed the marketing machine, but we had a hell of a grassroots, get-out-the-word thing going. Still, tickets weren’t selling like we hoped. Not because we hadn’t done the work, but because events like DashCon and Fyre Festival had obliterated public trust.

DashCon was infamous among comic con attendees. That convention left a permanent scar on the convention circuit as a whole. The phrase “extra hour in the ball pit” still burns in the minds and memes of cosplay America—a shorthand message for broken promises and disappointing fan experiences.

Then there was Netflix and that goddamn Fyre Festival documentary. Three years after DashCon, Fyre Festival hit the news. A luxurious, exclusive music festival set to take place in the Bahamas in April 2017, promoted by high-profile influencers and models as a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Tickets ranged from hundreds to thousands of dollars, promising gourmet food, beachfront villas, and performances by major music acts. However, upon arrival, attendees were met with disaster: incomplete infrastructure, emergency tents instead of luxury lodgings, canceled music performances, and basic meals consisting of bread and cheese.

So while I was working my ass off to build something my community could be proud of, it was being shit on by past bad actors with whom I had no association.

The names of those two events came up so many times that I thought I would literally scream. What’s worse, those names weren’t just being muttered by media interviewing us—which sucked—but by dozens upon dozens of potential attendees. People told us outright: “We’re waiting until year two to see if it’s legit.” They couldn’t shake the fear that they were going to be scammed.

For us, it was a clear response: “If you don’t support year one, how could there be a year two?”

In the end, we needed 3,000 attendees to break even. We got 1,200. We were seriously screwed, but still intent that a year two might be possible if we started getting sponsorships. But as we started to get people to finally listen, 2020 happened. The pandemic sealed it.

It wasn’t poor planning that did us in. It wasn’t a lack of drive or vision. It was the echo of broken promises made by people we had never even met. Their deeds had infected every phone call and poisoned every meeting.

The funny thing is, we delivered on our promise. The attendees that did show up reported having a fantastic time. The measure of success from the city was that the event happened. Unfortunately, it didn’t matter that it happened. The financial damage was done by those that came before us and who scorched the earth while they were there. We paid the price for mistakes we never made.

So when you’re out there trying like hell to land a sponsor or a donor, and you’re getting nowhere, it’s very likely not you they are saying no to. And that means it’s not your fault.