It's not hard at all, that's what crowdfunding is for. It's been quite successful at rewarding free and open content, especially for lower-cost media like books (compared to live action movies or AAA games).
Crowdfunding is, among other things, a marketing effort. The campaigns which succeed are, in some way or another, adept at marketing themselves. If they’re starting with minimal budget, that means someone with marketing acumen is either personally invested or confident in a return. If they’re not budget constrained… they’re just choosing their investors by buying access to them in a way that’s not traditional but incredibly common now.
In either case, framing the endeavor as “not hard at all” strikes me as neglecting either the kind of specialized talent that goes into marketing, or the kinds of marketing strategies that can manipulate the former neglect.
To be clear I’m coming at this from a perspective where I realized I lack the charisma and social confidence to crowdfund a project I was wildly passionate about. I find marketing mostly distasteful, but I respect it as a particular set of instincts and talents. The notion that it’s “not hard at all” is as outlandish to me as it would be if I told anyone else that uncommon talents which come to me instinctively should be as trivial to them.
Also, it's much harder to build a platform organically than it used to be. I was semifamous in the 2010s and was literally almost killed for it. (Some people who were high in Y Combinator were on the wrong side of history there, but I digress.) So, I know how these systems actually work and how to exploit them (if one wants to go black hat). The game of getting attention is more competitive these days because there are so many more spammers, bad actors, and general-issue crapflooders. You can buy 10,000 fake Twitter followers for less than a hundred bucks and you probably won't get caught or face any negative consequences; on the other hand, getting from zero to 1000 legitimate followers is really difficult (much harder than it was in 2010).