Hi,

I'm Tomás Ford. I'm the CEO/Founder/(Non-Rapping) Elon Musk of the hottest new unbearable startup of the second DotCom bubble. 

We're called Normal Place. It's "Netflix For Weirdos". We're about curating the best short content from fringe comedians, underground performers and cult musical heroes into a subscription video streaming platform.

I've assembled a team of entrepreneurial spirit warriors who live and breathe unusual and exciting content. We've curated, produced, filmed, toured and made it. We've lost horrifying amounts of money supporting it and we're (obviously) not afraid to do it again.

If you're a fan of the kind of acts we are, you've probably seen them try to build audiences on platforms like YouTube with wildly varying degrees of success. These variations are almost all in the negative. Those sites aren't built to connect people with unconventional tastes to the kind of... frankly... f**ked up stuff that they like. 

But Normal Place is.

IS PETER DUTTON INVOLVED?

I love your question, but I am going to deflect. 

Our subscribers will enjoy a tightly curated selection of perfectly normal things, with new short content rolling out weekly. We're working with artists to present their work in the cost effective and bus ride-viewable shape of a web series of ten minute episodes. 

Unlike Netflix, the algorithm computing your next favourite thing is a human. The platform will be led with magazine-style editorial on new artists, tours through our catalogue and guides to help you get your head around the really weird stuff.  Or you can always beat your own track through the wild and rough tundra of our extensive digital jungle hellscape of the elusive and the bizarre.

We'll be collaborating with artists to help them produce new content, along with giving a new home (and path to montization) for their best existing content. While many of our competitors seem engaged in a competition as to who can out-slave each other, one of our core principles is to maximise streaming royalties for the artist. We want our platform to be a place where the people making amazing content can get their due.

HOW  WOULD I DESCRIBE YOU TO POLICE?

Please describe somebody else. 

Tomás Ford - CEO/Founder/Dear Leader

I've built a touring business as a late night fringe festival cabaret idiot, playing bars and clubs around Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and the UK. My best known are Crap Music Rave Party, Electric Cabaret and Chase!  Over the years, I've managed a healthy second career as a venue producer and creative director. I've been behind festival projects including the first three years of then-Fringe World institution Noodle Palace, outer-suburban performance festivals Midlandia (Midland) & Hubbub (Mandurah), spent two years co-ordinating the arts tent at Southbound and have produced tours for a bunch of comedians and musicians. 

Clearly, I am overqualified for this role. Thankyou for your time in reading my application.

Levon J Pollinelli - Director Of Content

In addition to being the person I have the most kompromat material on, Levon comes from an extensive background in film direction and production. His independent feature film Everybody Gets Stabbed is out this year. He has produced, directed and/or performed in too many fringe shows to name,, racking up enough award nominations that you could be forgiven for thinking he might eventually win one. In 2018 he produced The Lucky Cat independent fringe hub at Perth Town Hall, for which he continues to recieve ongoing trauma counselling, which he funds by selling off valium.

He has also worked as a driver for strippers, almost (of course) won Mr. Boylesque and once shadow-boxed with Muhammad Ali. He even almost won.

Jamie Mykaela - Social Media Intern

Jamie is a millenial. Yeet. Her background is in social media marketing and call out culture. Jamie has taken her man-hating feminazi ukulele cabaret act to festivals around Australia and Edinburgh Fringe. Being nice to her won't help.

YOUR DONATION IS MATCHED DOLLAR FOR DOLLAR.

Our crowdfunding is being MATCHED by the studmuffins at Creative Partnerships Australia, who are going to match anything you donate, all the way up to $10,000 Australian dollaroos. 

So for every dollar of your money, we get a dollar of their money. It's like how The Nationals think Centrelink works. 

If we raise at least $10,000 bucks on here, we get another $10,000 from them, which is $20,000 in the old money. Or the new money. They're the same money, except it's plastic now and worth less. 

OK, WHY NOT?

Lots of reasons. 

But: we want to do this. You want us to do this. Help us give you what you want. 

Give us your money.

DO YOU NEED THE THREE NUMBERS ON THE BACK OF MY MUM'S CREDIT CARD?

Yes. Also, let's talk about how we plan to make this money work for us.

This campaign is to build seed funding to launch Normal Place and secure its' first two years of content. We will be able to build and embiggen our initial audience and prove our futuristic internet business concept isn't the next MySpace, GeoCities, Pets.Com or MyHealthRecord. From there, we'll look to scale the business internationally, pitching for the kind of Silicon Valley startup-incubator equity-investment late-capitalist nightmare-money that your favourite barista is always talking about. 

Since cats drive internet traffic and we desperately need that to make this crowdfunding campaign work, here’s a pie chart made out of them, showing where this money will go: 

The graph is pretty self-explanatory, but the biggest cost is in supporting content production. Marketing that content is our next biggest chunk, focusing around social and online marketing. Pozible take a 3% processing fee, and a few of our rewards (eg the t-shirts and orgy robes) have manufacturing costs attatched (though these will give us extra stock to sell!). We also have sizable fixed costs in our online video platform, licensing and the cost of registering the business itself.

With these costs met, so long as subscription rates track on our (pretty conservative) estimates, we'll have a sustainable platform, and a perfect starting point to further grow the business.

Normal Place is supported by Creative Partnerships Australia through MATCH Lab. 

STRETCH GOAL: $13,333

We made our $10,000 target! Wahooo! Thanks so mauch, we can't wait to build a Normal Place for you.

So, we're "stretch goal"-ing to an extra $3,333, because maths should be fun. If we can achieve this, it will allow us some budget to rrrreally push the launch of the platform to the niche of folks who will freak out about it.

As you can see from our updated cat pie chart (above), many of our costs are pretty fixed, so this will go to our marketing and content creation budgets, where it'll make a huge difference. We're used to doing both of those things on insanely low budgets, so, really, we could probably make a James Cameron movie or something with that kinda cash.