How did you get started in crowdfunding? Around 2012, when I was working at a documentary film company, producer and editor Tim K. Smith approached me and asked if I wanted to help raise money for a film that he was making about the world’s oldest freeform radio station, WFMU. At the time, I was fundraising the way most people have to do it for documentaries, which is through grant writing.

I had been pushing out grant after grant, so I asked Tim whether he wanted my help writing a grant. He said no, that he actually wanted to try the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. I had heard of this thing on the Internet, but I didn’t know fully what it was, so I went back to my computer to research it. I ended up launching that project from scratch. We learned the ropes that way, just by writing the project with him. And that project was successful.

That’s really how it started happening. At one point, I ended up leaving documentary film and freelancing as a campaign manager, working from home to run people’s campaigns. Then it really grew from there. People outside of the film world reached out to me about other projects, like theater production. Then last year, I was contacted by musician Neil Young’s team to help run his Kickstarter campaign to fund the high-quality music player system PonoMusic. That was a massive campaign, which we raised six million dollars for.

That’s when I realized this was a real business which needed to be bigger than what it was. So I moved from my apartment into a coworking space, and I got a freelancer on board, and then another one. Now, we have offices in TriBeCa, and I have a team—it’s four of us, plus a freelancer, some interns and me. We specialize in reward-based crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo to run three campaigns a month for everyone from designers to filmmakers to tech people. We now have done close to 40 campaigns with a 100 precent success rate—knock on wood!

What is the most difficult thing about crowdfunding? The hardest thing is getting out there. It’s scary for people to publicly ask for money. They know there’s a risk of failing.

But crowdfunding has really evolved. It’s not just about fundraising anymore; it’s about building a community, getting buzz around your project and sharing it with the world. It’s a place to launch your project.

So I say to people who are scared about it, “Go for it. It’s scary, but this might also be a great way to get your project out there.” Crowdfunding is taking that risk and going for it.

For example, Pentagram designer Hamish Smyth and I did a crazy project this year. The New York State Department of Transportation wayfinding signs are these really tall maps that are all around New York City. Hamish designed those with Michael Bierut at Pentagram. He redrew all the subway stations for that project, and one day, he designed a poster out of it—with all the subway stations in alphabetical order—and hung it up. People started telling us how much they liked it, so we decided to do a Kickstarter campaign.

We really tapped into the transit enthusiast, subway nerd, designer and artist communities as our audience. We ended up hitting our goal on the day we launched. Our original goal was something like $30,000, but we went on to raise more than $170,000 for this poster. I was even surprised at how well that campaign did.

What skills did Smyth and his fellow Pentagram designer Jesse Reed bring to the campaign you all worked on for the New York City Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual? Of course their work on the campaign page was gorgeous, with well-communicated content, beautifully laid out images and a compelling video. But what was especially well done was the very professional execution of delivering these beautiful books. They had both worked with printing before, on books. Hamish and Jesse even went to a printer out in Italy to print the books last year. Their high standards of production went a long way.

The delivery and execution can sometimes be the more important part of a crowdfunding campaign. If you don’t execute once you’ve gotten the trust of everyone who has donated money, that’s really bad for your company, your brand and your reputation.

What makes a crowdfunding campaign well-designed? Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms have their own internal designs. For Kickstarter, for example, you can’t pick the font. Its standard font is Helvetica. The formats are even similar—videos are always here, rewards are always there.

It starts with the video, which is such a prominent part of the campaign page. The video needs to communicate your message clearly, get people involved and excited about your project—and it just needs to look good. All in two to three minutes. You definitely need to hire a professional to produce a good video because if you have a bad-looking video, people could think you’ll have a bad-looking product.

With images, you want them to be really well shot and beautiful, not just shot on your iPhone. There’s no right amount of images. It just needs to look like a balanced page. Also, the text itself. You don’t want so much text that it’s overwhelming to the viewers, and they can’t decipher the content.

What is important to know about the timeline for a crowdfunding campaign? Try to get the word out on day one of the campaign as much as possible. If your campaign doesn’t blow up on day one, it’s very hard to keep pushing your campaign as it progresses.

There are many ways to do it. One way is to get press around a project by publicizing it on blogs and online media. Generate a lot of social media support around your project’s campaign. If friends and family are going to donate, have them do it on day one, so you can get traction on the campaign page. Donations made on day one help your campaign pick up its own momentum.

When would crowdfunding not necessarily be a good idea? It’s really hard if you don’t already have any social media support or any sort of network. That first day or first week of the campaign, you really need an audience that already exists in order to push your project forward—rather than starting from scratch. Build up an audience of people before going to a crowdfunding platform.

Also, while people are donating money because they believe in a project, people also really like the rewards. For instance, with the NASA Graphics Standards Manual, people were donating money, but they were actually just buying the books. When people give money, they want to get something in return for doing that. And lacking a good set of rewards is not a good place to be.

For example, we did a campaign last year to raise money for an important documentary about the writer Joan Didion. That raised about a quarter of a million dollars. It was a really intimate and compelling campaign that a lot of people in the literary world knew about.

We also offered exclusive, limited-edition rewards that you could only get on Kickstarter, such as illustrated T-shirts, a cookbook compiled with all the dishes that Joan Didion would have at dinner parties, or books signed by her. When you have rewards that won’t be available after the campaign, it creates a sense of urgency for people to get them now.

What’s special about crowdfunding? Crowdfunding is such a democratic platform. What’s so amazing about crowdfunding is that it really opens up the possibility for people to finance their own creative projects by themselves. They don’t need traditional investors. They don’t need to go get a bank loan. They can reach out to the public and ask for help in that way.

There are not many restrictions around it other than the typical restrictions on Kickstarter and Indiegogo of things you can’t crowdfund, like weapons or liquor. But other than rules for the platform, the possibilities that you have for what you can do are pretty limitless.