At two o’clock, Junie texted: Just shared your campaign on all my Crown Island Princess channels. Go get ‘em, girl!
Jo watched the numbers. A small bump. Eighteen backers. Three hundred and ten dollars.
Later that afternoon, Maileah shared it. She had ten times Junie’s social media reach, and she’d written a post that positioned Jo as a fellow woman entrepreneur building something meaningful. The next time Jo looked, supporters had nearly doubled.
Hank and Sherri came in for their afternoon dark roast and told Jo they’d backed the campaign for the Jam Session gift box.
“Sherri’s sending one to her sister in Denver,” Hank said, eyeing the white chocolate macadamia nut cookies under glass.
“She’s such a coffee connoisseur,” Sherri added. “She’ll love it and tell her friends.”
“I sure appreciate that.” Jo lifted the glass cover over the cookies and took out two. She put them on napkins for the couple and smiled. “A little something extra for you.”
A little while later, Rocky walked into the diner and sat down at the counter. “Have you been watching the campaign?”
Jo poured coffee for him. “I’ve been trying not to refresh every five minutes, but I’ve been keeping an eye on it.”
“You broke a thousand dollars,” Rocky said. “That’s a good start.”
“I don’t want to jinx it,” Jo said, smiling. “It seems like a long way to reach the goal.”
“You have thirty days,” Rocky said. “A lot can happen in that time.”
“It sure can,” Jo said, thinking about the last month.
This month would be better. She had learned so much that, even if she didn’t make her goal, she would figure out another way.
13
As the days passed, the campaign numbers continued to climb, a little each day, but not as much as her first day. Still, Jo was hopeful. She’d heard about deep-pocketed backers sometimes swooping in to help a campaign make its goal so that it could fund the entrepreneur.
If the campaign didn’t meet its goal, then it was over. People’s credit cards weren’t charged, and products weren’t sent. After all the work that her friends had put in, Jo hoped that wouldn’t happen.
This is why they’d set the campaign funding level at ten thousand. Rocky had explained the strategy and shown them the spreadsheet. That was half of what she needed to work at scale, but she could manage. On lower quantities of coffee and merchandise, prices were higher, so her profit margins would be slimmer.
That wouldn’t be enough money to expand right away, but she could chip away at her goal. He pointed out that studies showed that when a project looked popular, more people would be interested and fear missing out. FOMO, he called it.
She decided to trust that strategy and went ahead with it. Half would be better than nothing.
Candy came in late that afternoon. “How’s the campaign going? I’ve been passing out the cards you gave me that have the campaign link.”
“It’s all helping,” Jo said. “We’ve almost doubled the first day now. If this keeps up, I think we’ll make it.”
Barely, but she would do everything in her power to make sure it did.
“I’ll change,” Candy said. “Be right back.”
She wondered if Blue had seen the campaign. She hadn’t seen his name on the list of campaign backers. Not that she was watching for it, but how could he miss it? Word of what she was doing was all over Crown Island and featured in the local paper.
She was confident that her customers would carry the campaign to the finish line, and she was figuring out how to ensure that.
Earlier this morning, the campaign had crossed two thousand dollars and sixty-seven backers, or about thirty dollars per person, spread mainly among the lower tiers except for a couple of them.
Jo was breathing easily again, and she'd stopped checking the dashboard every half hour.
“Have you seen this, Jo?” Candy returned, wearing her red-and-white striped blouse. She looked at her phone in confusion. “A customer sent me this. From her social media, I guess.”
Jo was refilling the sugar shakers from a larger bag. “What is it?”
