AFTERWORD
Reengage and stay relevant. That is what William Shatner’s new book, Catch Me Up, is all about—a collection of stories and memoirs that will inspire the folks over 50 that their best days are NOT behind them…That the future is bright!
The more we shared this message, the more we realized that this idea—the overall notion of reengagement, fostering inspiration, and how to make it a reality—was so necessary and lacking in today’s day and age. How is it that something like this doesn’t already exist? That’s when we decided to take this idea and dive into the scary and uncertain world of crowd funding.
Prior to writing Catch Me Up, Shatner’s assessment of Kickstarter was that it was essentially just a fancy way of holding out a hand to ask for money. After going through this experience, it’s safe to say that Kickstarter is much more than that.
To him, it was market valuation: Does the world want this? It was social proof: Does the world need this?
It was demographic research: Who is our target and secondary audience?
After exceeding our funding goal by 120%, we can safely say that people do want this. After receiving the outpouring of support from both young and…not-so-young…it was clear that people need this. But that last question perhaps yielded the most interesting finding.
We were initially under the impression that our core demographic would be the children of the baby boomers; those who are growing ever more impatient with their parents’ “older ways.”
We were wrong. We found that our core constituency was the well over 50 set. There was an intense desire among the over 50’s to improve and enrich their lives by being their own bosses. There was a dormant spirit of entrepreneurship that only started to emerge with the bad experiences in their professional lives. They wanted to take their fates into their own hands…they wanted to be their own boss.
That’s when Kickstarter grew into more than a book. We want the CMU website to serve as the means to teach at a slower pace and with easy-to-follow terminology. We will build a community of like-minded entrepreneurs in their older years and support one another. We will help each other continue to stay relevant.