I want to tell you about the thing that changed how I see this whole industry, and it happened because of a book.

I read Crowdsourcing for Filmmakers because RB wrote it, and over the years I've worked here, I've grown to not just respect him as a wonderful boss, but as a passionate and informed creative professional whose insights I value. What I did not expect was that I would finish it and start noticing the pattern everywhere. In films. In games. In novels. In a card game about exploding kittens. Once RB names the thing for you, you cannot stop seeing it, and more importantly, you start seeing where it fits into your own work.

That is what I want to give you today. Not a theory. A way of looking at what you are building that I think will change what you do next week.

And I want to say this up front rather than saving it for the end: the audiobook is free for you right now. Click here to grab it on Audible for FREE, or click here for the paperback or Kindle copy. Everything I am about to share with you comes from it, and the book goes far deeper than I can.

The Thing RB Names That Nobody Else Does

Here is what took me a while to understand, and what the book made click.

Crowdsourcing is not fundraising with a nicer name. It is what happens when the people who care about your work stop being an audience and start being participants. They build on it. They add to it. They argue about it, make things because of it, and carry it to people you were never going to reach on your own.

Sometimes that includes money. Far more often it is everything else: the lore that makes a world feel enormous, the note that fixes the thing you could not see, the friend of a friend who has the location, the word of mouth that turns forty people into forty thousand. By the time a buyer shows up, the work has already been shaped and proven by the people who love it.

RB has a line about this that I think about constantly. "The word of another person in support of you is worth more than your own word to someone who does not know you." Sit with that one. It reframes your entire approach, because it means the goal was never to talk louder about yourself. It was to build something people want to talk about for you.

Where You Start Seeing It

Once you have that lens, the examples pile up fast. Here are the ones I keep coming back to, and I want you to notice how little they have in common on the surface.

Backrooms began as a single unsettling image and a short block of text posted on 4chan.

That was it. An empty yellow room and a few lines about falling out of reality. Strangers took it from there, and they did not just share it, they built it. They wrote the lore. They invented the entities that live in it. They developed the found-footage grammar that became the visual language of the whole thing, level by level, entry by entry, across years and thousands of contributors who never met each other. Kane Parsons was one of those contributors, a teenager making short films inside a mythos the internet had already constructed. By the time A24 came calling, the world was built, the rules were established, and an enormous audience already knew exactly what Backrooms meant. The studio was not betting on an untested concept. It was buying into something the crowd had already proven.

Obsession came the other direction, and it is the version most of you can act on tomorrow.

Curry Barker made short psychological horror on YouTube for years, working with friends on budgets that sometimes ran a few hundred dollars. He put the work out, listened to what landed, made more, and stayed in conversation with the people watching. That loop is the whole story. Each short was better than the last because his audience was effectively giving him notes in public, and each one brought more people in. By the time he had a feature, he had an audience that had watched him get good. A former Starbucks barista premiered at Toronto and walked out with a deal reported at $14 million, and the thing that made that possible was years of iteration in front of people who cared.

RWBY was an animated web series from Monty Oum at Rooster Teeth, released free online to a community that was already gathered for the company's other work.

Fans did not just watch it. They theorized about the world, argued about the characters, made art, wrote fiction, and cosplayed it at every convention in the country, and that response shaped what the series became as it was still being made. It grew into a franchise with video games, manga published in Japan, comics through DC, and an English-language series popular enough to be dubbed into Japanese, which almost never happens in that direction. The community that built it has outlasted the studio that made it.

Minecraft might be the most extreme case on this list.

Markus Persson released a rough, unfinished alpha in 2009 and let players in while he was still building it. They found the bugs. They built the mods. They made the tutorials, the servers, the entire culture around it. And they told him what the game needed, constantly, while he shipped updates in response. Players effectively co-designed the best-selling video game in history, in public, before it was finished, and Microsoft later bought it for $2.5 billion. Nobody market-tested that. An audience built it in the open.

The Martian was started by Andy Weir posting chapters free on his own website, one at a time, for readers who found him.

A lot of those readers were engineers, chemists, and physicists, and they corrected his orbital mechanics and his chemistry as he went. That is crowdsourcing in its purest form: an audience making the work more accurate than the author could have alone. He eventually put it on Kindle for the minimum price Amazon allowed, it climbed the charts, and the audience-corrected novel became a bestseller and then a Ridley Scott film starring Matt Damon.

Insecure started as Awkward Black Girl, a web series Issa Rae made and released online herself, building the audience that made her case before HBO ever did.

She was not waiting for permission, and she was not pitching into a void. She had proof, in the form of people who showed up for every episode. Now she is one of the most successful and well-known creators in the industry, with a production company, a film slate, and the kind of career leverage that starts with an audience nobody handed you.

Critical Role began as a private home game in 2012, a group of voice actors playing Dungeons & Dragons together.

They started streaming it, and the community around it grew into something none of them planned. When they launched a Kickstarter for what was meant to be a short animated special, the response shattered records and turned it into a full series, which they took to Amazon Prime Video as The Legend of Vox Machina. That success let them build Critical Role Productions and keep control of their own intellectual property, which is the part I want you to notice. They launched a publishing label, Darrington Press, which released its own tabletop system in Daggerheart. They built a dedicated subscriber platform in Beacon. A home game became a multimedia company, and it happened because a community decided to carry it.

Exploding Kittens is the one I would point to if somebody told me crowdsourcing only works for film.

Matthew Inman and Elan Lee launched a Kickstarter for a card game about cats and destruction, and that initial campaign remains the most-backed project in Kickstarter history. But funding the game was only the beginning. Netflix later made a first-of-its-kind deal for both a mobile game and an adult animated series based on the franchise, with Inman himself serving as co-creator and showrunner alongside Shane Kosakowski, and executive producers including Mike Judge and Greg Daniels. The series premiered in 2024 with Tom Ellis and Sasheer Zamata voicing God and the Devil sent to Earth as house cats. A card game funded by strangers on the internet became a Netflix original, and the guy who designed it ran the writers' room. Unheard of!

And then the ones where the crowd showed up with their wallets.

Veronica Mars came back as a feature because fans funded it, and that film eventually brought the show back to television too. Kung Fury turned a proof of concept into a viral short and a Cannes premiere. Anomalisa went from a Kickstarter to a critically acclaimed stop-motion feature. And Hair Love, which started as a bestselling children's book that raised close to $284,000 and went on to win the Oscar for Best Animated Short.

Those last few are crowdfunding, and we drew that line carefully a few weeks back (if you missed that blog, click here). But look underneath any of them and crowdsourcing is what made them possible. None of those campaigns worked because somebody asked for money. They worked because somebody had spent years building a crowd of people who wanted in.

Different mediums, different budgets, different audiences. Same engine every time.

RB Crowdsourced the Book About Crowdsourcing

RB did not write the book and then go looking for readers. He did it backwards, and he has been doing it backwards his whole career.

Long before Stage 32, he ran a men's lifestyle magazine called Razor, competing with GQ and Esquire on a fraction of their advertising and marketing budget. He could not outspend them, so he leaned on readers to carry the brand instead. One of their slogans was for men who had outgrown their Maxim years but were not ready for their Esquire years. The men who read it loved that line, and they told their friends. That was crowdsourcing before anybody was using the word.

Stage 32 came from the same instinct. One hundred industry friends, each asked directly to bring five more. He could have gone to those five himself. They would have wondered who he was, but he could have approached them. Instead, he knew that when a friend told them it was worth their time, they would come.

So when he signed the contracts for the book, about two years before it published, the first thing he did was tell everyone he was writing it. Then he asked for help.

Not for money. For stories. He went to Stage 32 members, to his Twitter and Instagram followings, to anyone who would answer, and asked them to write to him privately about what they had actually been through.

And here is the part I love most: he was not after the success stories. He wanted the failures. The crowdfunding campaigns that collapsed. The accounts that never gained traction. The people who got so worn down they quit social media altogether. Those were the people he most wanted to hear from, because those were the people the book needed to reach.

Then he kept going. He shared his planned subjects with the audience. He floated chapter titles and asked what people thought. He described what was going into each chapter and asked what he was missing. People got into it, because they had ownership in something before it existed.

And they changed it. RB had not planned much on crowdfunding, wanting to keep the focus on crowdsourcing. His audience pushed back. If you believe a crowdfunding campaign cannot succeed without crowdsourcing behind it, they said, then cover crowdfunding. So he wrote two chapters on it. Those chapters exist because the crowd asked.

There is a lot of "everybody" in that book, as he puts it. That is not a flaw in the process. That was the process.

I have looked at these photos a lot while writing this series. That is what the end of a crowdsourced project looks like. Not a launch. A reunion.

If you want to see the method laid out properly, the book is where it lives. The audiobook is free for you here.

Where RB Says to Start

When people ask him how to begin, his answer is consistent, and it is not what most of us want to hear.

Be honest about who your audience is.

This is the first question and the hardest one. Every one of us wants to believe our work is for everybody. Filmmakers, screenwriters, actors, all of us want to be universally loved. But think about your favorite film of all time. Your favorite book. Your favorite piece of art. Does everyone love it? No. There are detractors for all of it, and there are reasons. RB loves The Godfather because he loves mob movies. Plenty of people do not, and that is fine.

Answering "who is my audience" honestly is often harder than asking it. But you cannot build a crowd you have not identified.

Then engage without an agenda.

This is the step people skip, and it is the whole thing. Everything about building relationships and building an audience begins and ends with value, and not the value they can give you. That comes later. You already know what your ask will be at the end. But nobody is walking that road with you if you are not bringing something first.

Find your people, then show up for them with no agenda. You can start that today. You could start it in ten minutes right here on Stage 32.

And understand you are playing a long game.

This is why so many people give up. They do not want to do the work. They want to make something and have people find it, and that is not how any of this functions. But the relationships built this way last. Some turn into friendships. Some stay professional. Either way, that value carries for years, and it compounds in ways you will not see coming.

You Are Already Standing in the Room Where it Happens

Here is what I most want you to take from a month of these blogs.

You do not have to build a crowd from nothing. You are already inside one of the largest creative communities in the world, over 1.5 million members across 190 countries, and it exists because RB did the exact thing he later wrote a book about.

Stage 32 is where you build your audience. It is where you test your message, find the people who care about what you care about, and start the relationships that become collaborators, champions, and opportunities you cannot see yet. Every Lounge post, every note you give someone on their pages, every conversation you start is a brick in that foundation.

And the book is the instruction manual for doing it well.

Your Challenge

One ask to close this series, and I would love to see the Producing Lounge light up with your shares. Use "Crowdsourcing for Filmmakers Challenge" as the title of the post, so we can all see it!

Go post about crowdsourcing, and tell us one of two things.

If you have crowdsourced something, tell us what happened. The audience you built. The feedback that changed your project. The collaborator who found you. The campaign that worked, or the one that did not. Especially the one that did not. RB built a whole book around those stories because somebody reading yours is going to need it.

If you have not, tell us what you need. Eyes on a cut. A connection in a city you have never worked in. An honest read. Gear, a location, a person who understands the thing you are trying to make. Be specific. You are posting to over 1.5 million people, and somebody in that number may be able to give you guidance, advice, or resources you need. You're not promoting your project with this post; that's not its purpose. You're sharing where you're at and what you're trying to build.

Then go answer someone else's post. That part is not optional. It is the entire point.

Go Get the Book

Everything in this blog is a surface-level version of what is in it. The frameworks, the case studies, the chapters on crowdfunding that his own audience talked him into writing, all of it is there.

Get the audiobook free on Audible by clicking here.

It is also free in the UK, Germany, France, Canada, and Australia. Prefer to hold it in your hands? Grab the paperback or Kindle copy here.

Thank you for coming along with us this month. Now go build your crowd one post at a time.

Let's hear your thoughts in the comments below!

Got an idea for a post? Or have you collaborated with Stage 32 members to create a project? We'd love to hear about it. Email Ashley at blog@stage32.com and let's get your post published!

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