A Unique & Effective Crowdfunding Strategy To Launch An Ecommerce Business

How do you make business problems disappear? Wrap em in bacon for business owners, marketing execs and anyone trying to grow your business. Pump your profits and make more while doing less. Welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business with Brad Costanzo. Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Every week our chefs will serve you proven recipes for ramping up your revenue. Now here's your host, Brad Costanzo.

All right, welcome back to Bacon wrap Business. I'm Brad, your host and today I am talking about crowdfunding. I've got my friend Greg Jacobs on the line and I'll be introducing him here a little bit more officially in just one second. But we're going to cover a topic of crowdfunding. You probably know what that is hopefully by now. Kickstarter, Indiegogo, this kind of ways to raise funds to create a product, launch a business, etc. And Greg's going to share a very unique method that he's developed that I have not heard of people doing before. He got on the phone with me and started telling me a little bit about it and I invited him on the show to say, let's flesh this out a little bit more. I want to know more. So I'm going to tell you in just a moment. But first I want to encourage you that if you're listening to the show and you're not already a subscriber on itunes, go over to iTunes. Go to baconratbusiness.com iTunes. Hit the subscribe button. You won't miss a single show. And if you like what we're doing, leave a review. If it's a five star review. If you love it, we don't have too many, if any one star reviews. Everybody seems to enjoy the episodes and I love it when you share it. Tag me in it. Let me know if you have any questions at any time. You can always reach out to me@askbradaconrappedbusiness.com Tell me your business challenges, tell me the guests that you'd like to hear more about, the topics you'd like to hear more about and I will make sure to get to them. So speaking of getting to our guests, Greg Jacobs, I met, I want to say about three years ago and he's been online marketing Since I believe 2007, starting with AdSense sites, before moving to ebay, then to mobile apps to Amazon and now crowdfunding. One of the things I've always been really impressed by is Greg has just a remarkable way to spot opportunities and capitalize on them quickly. So he has a way of following the latest trends in the industry and finding the low hanging fruit to a T. Every one of these low hanging fruit, high profit businesses still make people a lot of money. But after a few years of being in the public realm, it became a lot harder to break into these, what we call Blue Ocean industries. And Blue Ocean is an amazing book if you haven't read it, by the way. It's talking about an industry that is not red with blood because there's so much competition in the market. Now this Blue Ocean is crowdfunding. And Greg is one of the world's most in demand crowdfunding consultants. And he's recently come off a campaign that raised $500,000. So what he's here today to teach you is that crowdfunding is not just for inventors, but for everybody. And this is what really got my attention because I typically thought of crowdfunding as people who are just developing products and inventors. But Greg said he's going to enlighten us on another way to use it. Greg, welcome to bacon wrap business, buddy.

Well, thank you very much, Brad, and it's great to talk to you. And congratulations on the recent news.

Thank you. Yes, for everybody who doesn't know, I just got married this past Saturday and next week heading to Greece.

That's totally fantastic news. But crowdfunding, I discovered crowdfunding just a couple years ago. I thought that crowdfunding was the same as everybody else. I was like, wow, you have to be some big inventor person or have some magnificent world changing idea. You're writing a book or making a video game in order to do that. So in my mind, I kind of segmented and eliminated myself as, okay, I'll go and support crowdfunding campaigns, but I wouldn't even know how to start to do them. Brad, I guess that's probably where you are and where most people listening to this call are as well. It's like crowdfunding is just like this thing that other people do, right?

Exactly where, okay, I've got an idea. I don't have the money to develop it. Maybe I've got a prototype or I'm coming up with something and it's my genius invention. I need to raise money, money to make it happen. The problem is if you don't have that, if you're not sitting on this genius idea or you don't have this big passion project or you don't have kind of an art or creative project. For me, crowdfunding has always been one of those things, like, oh, yeah, that'd be nice to do. It's nice to know I have that option if lightning strikes and I get a great idea.

Yeah. And I'm an entrepreneur and I come up with lots and lots of ideas. But the first idea that I have is how I'm going to go make money. And sometimes I don't get that big splash of creative genius. But I've been looking, I've studied deeply the crowdfunding market. I've studied deeply, literally thousands of campaigns, successful and unsuccessful, mainly on Kickstarter and Indiegogo. And what I've discovered is a very interesting trend. Some people, when they hear about this trend, they could have one of two reactions, which we're going to go over in a minute. The trend is that people are taking products that are already out there. You can maybe source them on Alibaba or something, and they're basically modifying them up, doing some slight modifications, and they're putting it on sites like Indiegogo, and they're literally raising millions of dollars. Which means that with innovation, Brad, to make money, you need to do two things. Number one, you either need to innovate something new, or number two, you have to take something that already exists and you have to put it on a new and innovative platform. This is what a lot of people are doing to the tune of millions and millions of dollars is they're taking things that already exist. They're spicing it up a bit, and they're putting on crowdfunding. And instead of just being a commodity, it's a bright new, amazing thing.

Okay, so because you and I have discussed this, I know a little bit I'm not coming at this as blind as the audience probably is, but. But let's flesh this out. So you're saying that Alibaba. Most of my listeners probably know what Alibaba is, where you can go source all different types of products, like everything under the sun. It's the biggest e commerce platform in the world, and they're sourcing products that already exist. And you said that, but correct me if I'm wrong. So are some of them people just taking that and posting it directly like on Indiegogo, and just say, here, fund my inventory, or are they. Because you mentioned modifying it as.

Yeah, that happens. And under the terms of service of Kickstarter, that's generally not okay. Under the terms of service of Indiegogo, that actually is okay as long as you don't lie. If you're not saying, I invented this new electric bicycle, then this new E bike, and you're just saying, here's this E bike I found. I need to go and pre fund. I need to pre fund this. Go ahead and click here to do it. There's actually nothing that violates the terms of service and people do that. And there's been some controversy about it. If you look up like the Sounders E bike, that was an E bike, as far as I can see, that was pulled directly off of Alibaba and they raised $6 million at Indiegogo. $6 million is a lot of money. And if you look at every E scooter or electronic skateboard, most little Bluetooth headset devices that you'll find on Indiegogo or Kickstarter, you'll realize that they're actually sourced directly off of Alibaba or global sources. In some cases, people don't even change the pictures. There was one case of a campaign, and yes, it was controversial again, that they pulled directly the pictures off of Alibaba and photoshopped their logo on and put it on there. And they've raised over $230,000 so far.

Wow.

So, I mean, Brad, when you hear this, there's two reactions a person can have. One reaction is like, oh my God, that's horrible. Why could somebody do something like this? And the other reaction is, what?

Well, the other reaction is, that's incredible. And there's a lot of money to be made especially. I mean. So, yeah, my reaction was, wow, that's incredible. There's a ton of opportunity there. But my other reaction was that too good to be true. Okay, what's the downside? Is it against terms like you said, Kickstarter doesn't like that. But other platforms like Indiegogo and those are not the only two crowdfunding platforms I know that's not against that. Plus I also realize what you just said, that whether you're innovating or improving upon another innovation, there's not that many brand new ideas out there. Most things are borrowing the brilliance of other objects and you're improving, proving something. So I totally saw the opportunity there where I could imagine myself, if I'm looking on Alibaba, if I'm looking at products that exist and think, well, how could I improve on this? What could I add to this to make this be considered innovative? And in order to do that, obviously that does cost money. So now I am creating something that doesn't exist exactly like it is and using crowdfunding to not only fund the development, but the inventory.

Yeah, yeah. And people that we know a lot of People, because it's been really trendy the last couple years, who do Amazon private Label selling. So they're pulling something on Alibaba and they're basically arbitraging it onto Amazon and doing the marketing. The skill set that it takes to do Amazon Private label, which is not that big of a skill set. You just have to be able to follow directions. And crowdfunding is basically the same. It's just moving. Is moving the party to a new platform. I can give you a good parallel example that a lot of people can relate to is Back in about 2011, mobile apps were becoming the new hot thing. And I was heavily involved in the mobile app industry. And what was happening there is you could take almost any website or any niche and quite simply create a mobile app based around that niche, and it would go and get hundreds of thousands and millions of downloads and hence give you a lot of profit, just because it was the first one there. That was how the industry worked for a couple years. Is there an app for that? It was like, oh, underwater photography. There's no app for that. So I'd make an app on underwater photography and Suddenly I'd get 10, 20, 30,000 downloads. It's not a lot, but you monetize that and you do it. You just keep repeating the system. People made a lot of money doing that. It's kind of the same thing with crowdfunding. Right now, crowdfunding is just the sparkling darling. You get something and you have to adjust the marketing. There's a few ways that we adjust it to make it crowdfunding friendly, which we could go over if you want. But you adjust the marketing, you put it on there and it just sells just because it's on those websites. People just like to buy things on crowdfunding that aren't ready to ship yet. I don't know why, but as a capitalist, is it okay to say I'm a capitalist or is it bad to be a capitalist?

It's quite all right.

Okay. Because I don't know these days with political correctness whether it's cool to be a capitalist or I'm bad for being a capitalist. But as a capitalist, that's just an opportunity to me.

Yeah. So I totally agree. One of the things I want to talk about, because this is my personal curiosity, so I've purchased several things off of crowdfunding Kickstarter, Indiegogo campaigns. And the things that usually that I'm familiar with is they're usually telling the origin story of, hey, this is my great idea. And this is how I want to sell it. And it's kind of new and unique, and this is the way to position it. And as you mentioned, and it is wise not to come out, find something on Alibaba and say that you're inventing this thing from scratch. But you probably also don't need to come out and say, hey, I just found this thing on Alibaba and I'm trying to find my inventory. So it seems like there's a middle ground in there to where you're not, you're not lying, you're not misrepresenting, but you're also portraying it in a way that makes people want to invest. And usually what I've seen is it's story driven, and there's something that really makes people want to buy that. How do you balance those two out?

Well, we need to. And everything you said there is absolutely correct. You don't want to lie, but you don't want to go and say like, hey, I just pulled this off of Alibaba. And, and the way that you do that is when I consult people, I have a list of modifiers that I give them. So the world's smallest. The world's biggest. The world's first. The first one made out of titanium, or if you're going to actually add something to it, is the world's first spatula with a laser pointer on it. The Bluetooth headset one I was talking about before, they say it's the world's smallest Bluetooth headset. I actually just kind of pulled up the campaign and I'm looking here on the page right now, and you don't have to say this or that. You just find something. People on crowdfunding want to hear that it's the world's first something. So if it's the world's first shirt made out of this material, it's the world's smallest this or that. So you take your product and you find out the one thing that makes it unique from everything else in the world, and then you say it's the world's best blank blank. If that makes sense, right?

No, it totally does.

So when you, you know, the world's. The world's. You know, the world's smallest iPhone charger with the longest battery life combined.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, there's a. It's kind of funny. This just makes me think of one of the things, you know, the guy, one of the guys who's in the news more than anybody right now is Donald Trump running for president. And One of the things, you know, I followed his trajectory over the years, and one of the things he's known for very much is using those qualifiers as well, such as, you know, this is the world's number one hotel, the finest thing. It's one of those things that you're always looking for. Enough of the hype. And hype is not always a bad thing, but enough of the things that create that brand, that mystique, that's something that people want to buy into. It's not necessarily. It's not a lie, but it is. It is marketing.

It's marketing. Marketing is everything. I mean, it's kind of hard sometimes, Brad, because there's people out there who are like, they witch hunt marketers. And the reality is everything's marketing. That iPhone in your pocket that's been marketed to everybody up the wazoo, that watch on there. Marketing is everywhere. And just because we're sharing what we do doesn't make us any different than anybody else out there in the world.

I agree completely. So when you are finding something that's available, let's just say elsewhere it's already been produced. And I understand some people may or may not the concept of private labeling. So you are typically doing a very small modification to it. You know, slapping your own label on something that already exists is a little bit different than taking something, something that exists and modifying it materially enough to where, you know, I'm going to put the laser beam on the spatula.

That's our joke. Laser beam on the spatula.

I love that. So how. How challenging is it to get really material or a, how challenging is it and B, how necessary is it to get really material modifications done on some of this stuff? Like, to what degree do you have to modify something to really make it work? And how challenging is it that? Or is it really kind of just like private labeling?

No, it's private labeling. Plus, you need to. Sometimes you can get lucky and you can find something that like, for example, earlier this year and they actually did it on Kickstarter and Kickstarter let it go. So Kickstarter is inconsistent. They went and sold as an iPhone charging cable that was made out of like some sort of material that wouldn't tangle. So it's like a tangle free iPhone charging cable. And they raised, you know, $122 on it on Kickstarter, which is really, really cool. And then you look and there's like, there's 20 suppliers selling the exact same thing on Alibaba. So in that case, they went for it. They had the balls and they did it and it worked. And they did it on Kickstarter. Good on them. And you'll find things work over and over again. That E bike that I told you about, they raised 6 million. A couple months later, somebody was like, oh, wow, they sold 6 million on e bike. Let me get another ebike and put it on there. And somebody else sold $800,000 on an E bike that was just pulled off of the web. It was a wave E bike. In this case, people aren't doing anything. They're putting it up there. But I don't recommend that. If you're going to do that, that's going to be something where if you have to ask, the answer is no.

No, that makes sense. That makes sense. And what I do like about this a lot, a lot is that you can't. If you are the least bit creative, you can source products that really aren't available elsewhere. You can brainstorm on what could, you know, what could make this even a better seller. And even if it does require additional modification that would cost money or whatever. The nice part about this is that crowdfunding makes possible something that absolutely would not be possible any other way.

Yeah, get a prototype, figure out what you want, get a prototype made. They usually don't cost that much relatively. And then crowdfund the manufacturing. If you want to put a laser pointer in your spatula, they can make you up one prototype. You can get you a general production cost and they'll say, okay, well it's going to cost $40,000 to get started. Great, go crowdfund it. That's what crowdfunding is there for. That's the point of it. It's like, I can't afford to do this on my own, right?

How, how important? I mean, this may be dependent upon the actual product, but how important is having a physical prototype ready of yours with your modification, etc. Versus whether it's a computer generated mock up or just, you know, the, you know.

Well, I could tell you the best practice and I can tell you what people do.

Please.

Okay. Best practice is with. And if anybody asks me this is what I'm going to tell them is for numerous reasons is get a freaking prototype. If you can't have a prototype in your hand, then you don't even know if it's possible to make. So you need to know before you do your campaign, you need to know that it works and you have to know how much it's going to cost without a prototype. You don't know that it's actually going to work, how much it costs and you're going to be in a major shot show. Do we swear on this podcast, Brad? I don't know.

Go for it.

You're going to be in a major shit show. Okay. That's what I'll tell people. And sometimes prototypes aren't that pretty. So they'll get a prototype that works and then they'll go computer generate up actually what it's going to be. But unfortunately that's not what a lot of people do. A lot of people will literally raise millions of dollars off of computer generated models with no prototypes. And right, Wrong. Who knows? I'm not there to judge. I just would not recommend doing that because that for obvious reasons can get you into sticky situations. But it is done time and time again. Look at any of these pages with a critical eye, you'll find that a good percentage of them aren't actually. They don't actually show what the product is. It's just a good designer on the computer who just raised a million dollars based off of Photoshop design. Good on them, I guess. I don't know.

So what are the ramifications of raising money? I come up with an idea. Here's my laser pointer spatula, which I love that example.

Yeah, yeah, let's do it, dude. You and me, partners.

Let's do that.

1.

Biggest Indiegogo success ever. So what are the ramifications? Because I know that you typically offer the various rewards like you can, you know, if somebody pledges X, they can get the, you know, they can actually get the product, but they can also get other kind of swag and different things. And I don't really want to go into the reward strategy because I know you have an entire strategy around that. But what are the. I want to talk about downside. What are the ramifications if a. I guess if you don't raise the funding that's required, you don't have to do anything. It just what, refunds the people back their money?

Well, fortunately that's never happened to me because we know how to market.

Just what's the. I want to just downside protection.

So legally what happens is Indiegogo and Kickstarter, at least Indiegogo, they remove themselves from the process. So legally they're saying that, okay, great, we went and we're hosted. We were a platform for raising your funds. You got your funds and now it's your legal responsibility. There was one case of a crowdfunding campaign owner who I Don't know if he got fined or indicted because he literally took all the money raised, it was a few hundred thousand dollars and spent it on personal expenses that had nothing to do with the actual product. So that was something where he was being blatantly dishonest. There's been thousands and literally thousands of other cases over tens of millions of dollars where people have raised money. And like it says at the disclaimer at the bottom, this is a risky product. This is a risky venture. They put all that money into development and things didn't go well. And they sent emails to the people who contributed with some summary of their finances to show that they tried their best and they failed. And then everybody just kind of shakes their head and moves on.

Right. So that's like the, maybe the big risky downside, especially to consumers. What about. Then there's two other things for product developers is a, I guess if you need, let's say you put your goal is to raise, I don't know, $10,000. Let's do a small one, and you raise $3,000. So the downside there is just, okay, well, I didn't get funded. And it. You don't get the 3,000, you don't get money unless your goal. Is that correct? How does that work?

Well, Kickstarter, you don't get your money unless you hit your goal. With Indiegogo, they have flexible funding. So I mean, if I try to get $10,000 and I only get $500, I get that $500. Now that me taking that $500, that becomes my problem. So if I know I need $10,000 to make the mold for my product or something, I'm not even going to like, you know, take less than that because I'm screwed and the customer screwed if I go ahead and take that. So that's why we have goals, is because we need this much money to get out the door.

Okay. On the average product, that, if there is an average product, let's just say there is. What do you recommend people kind of setting as a goal? Because in this case it sounds as if the biggest expense is not necessarily, correct me if I'm wrong, going to be product development. Because your angle is to take products that already exist and either have the manufacturer modify a private label, et cetera, et cetera. So it sounds to me like the biggest expenses, funding your initial inventory purchases so that then you can get them, let's just say on Amazon or Shopify or however you intend to market it, once it's at market what do you recommend? Do you have a recommendation for what people said as their initial goal?

Yeah, you actually game the system, Brad. And I say that in the most gentle, loving way.

I love it.

Just like if anybody sold on Amazon or tried to do SEO is these crowdfunding websites has algorithms. And basically, if you can get on the front page of Indiegogo or Kickstarter, you're going to literally get sent hundreds of thousands of dollars in free traffic.

Right.

And so what you need to do is you need to completely gamify your approach to do that. And to do that is you need to hit your goal, preferably in the first day. So if you go and say set, let's say, like, your real goal is $100,000. If you set your goal for, say, $10,000 and you hit that $10,000 in the first day via your own internal marketing, you can't expect Indiegogo or Kickstarter to drive your initial sales. You actually need to go ahead and drive it yourself. You hit that initial goal with your own marketing, it's going to kick some algorithms over, and those algorithms are going to go ahead and get you on the front page.

Yeah. Let me guess. Indiegogo loves to show off the.

Yeah, they're like, look, they just hit their goal on the first day. Now go buy more of it. Yeah. So by doing this, you're going to. So what I recommend to people is depending on the scale of your project, is always set your stated goal on the page lower. Because let's say your goal is. Let's say you raise $90,000. Brad, if your goal is $100,000, somebody goes to your page and they're like, oh, Great, they're only 90% funded. I don't know if these jerks are going to make it, but if your goal is $10,000 and you've raised $90,000, they're like, holy shit, they just raised 900% of their goal. That's really awesome. Mary. Let's buy one.

Yeah, yeah, we know where it's going to go. Yeah, that's great. And that's an interesting insight. I actually had not thought about that before, and I've purchased many things on Indiegogo, Kickstarter.

Yeah, yeah, we're the junkies. There's actually. We found our product was a very specific product in the health and fitness niche that only would really appeal to generally to us people already in that niche. And we found that after all was said and done that more than half of our buyers were not in that Niche at all. They were what we like to call crowdfunding junkies. These were people who just troll these sites and just look for neato stuff and buy it every day.

Shopaholics.

They're shopaholics. So what I found is that the products that do best are the products that anybody can see is like, wow, that's neato. I want one of those so that there are products that don't exclude people, if that makes sense.

That does make sense. Mass market.

Yeah. They're products that like almost anybody can see and just be stoked on and want to buy one.

Okay.

And if you can, you know, going further, if you could pick your niche that really, really goes ahead and fits that, you know, something that's just like a neato impulse purchase, Whether it's, you know, for a few dollars or hundreds of dollars, you're going to do a lot better than being highly backed into a corner.

Right. So here's another question that just popped into my mind. Most of the indiegogo and Kickstarter crowdfunding campaigns that I've seen have these really compelling videos that mark the heck out of them. And a with video technology these days, that's easier and easier to create. But the real question is how necessary is it to have just this jaw dropping video? Obviously, if you can afford to produce one of those, you're probably going to do a lot better. But how necessary is it?

It's necessary, but it's not as out of the ballpark as you think it is. I've seen a friend of mine went and did $350,000 campaign selling some basic sunglasses. He's 75 years old and he literally was just. He was standing in front of a camera. No professional cameras or anything. He like had a camera at home or maybe it was even his iPhone. He held up the sunglasses and he talked about them and he sold $350,000. Other people went and, you know, they'll go and hire agencies or there's agents and I've seen agencies that will do these videos for you for as little as 5, $600, up to tens of thousands of dollars. It's depending on if you find the right people and if you can manage them correctly, which is such. And you don't necessarily need a live action video. You could do screencasts or whiteboard videos. The point is it doesn't matter how you show it. What matters is that you get the message across for your product and your team and really the vision.

Okay, so that brings me to another Question is, in general, what could somebody expect to spend? What's the initial investment to get one of these really kind of off the ground? If I have an idea, my laser spatula and I found a source on Alibaba or some other source and I want to do this, what could I realistically look to invest out of my own money that for a, you know, to get the, you know, the campaign set up and a decent video. Nothing. And maybe it's a, it's a, you know, I'm not going to spend five and ten thousand dollars for the most unbelievable video, but I'm going to do one kind of either myself. Whoops. Got a Harley Davidson going by me here.

Cool.

But what could I expect to spend just to get that kind of off the ground, not including any other marketing tactics, Facebook ads or whatever? Is it relatively inexpensive or.

Well, I mean, it depends how skilled you are, Brad. I mean you can literally spend nothing to get it up there. I mean, you can get the photographs yourself, you can do the video yourself. You know how to go and put together the page. You don't have to hire anybody. If you don't and you know, you personally, I wouldn't expect you to hire anybody. Maybe just you and your page. It's all marketing. So if somebody has marketing experience, these are the same things we've been doing for years. It's just a new platform now. If somebody is, they have no idea. They're totally starting from scratch. They're going to need to get some help. And that's just a matter of how long is a piece of string.

Yeah, exactly.

It's hard to say. But I do know for a fact that you could get good turnkey videos for, you know, under $1,000.

Exactly. Okay.

And then you will need good product renders. And to do that you need to hire somebody on Elance. You know, we had some drawings done. It cost us just a hundred, a couple hundred dollars and it was fine. The problem with hiring people on the Internet is you could spend a lot of money for really bad to poor work. You could spend very little money for excellent work. I once hired, I once hired a guy and he charged me $110 an hour for some design services. And he was recommended. And I was like, wow, this guy must be great. And you know, he worked slow. He had a schedule and block off his time for me. He was very professional. He was used to working for corporations and all that. And I ended up throwing out his work and getting a guy from Eastern Europe to do better. Work for like $12 an hour. So it's just, you know, it's like, this is what happens once you go down the Internet wormhole.

Exactly, yeah. So many resources. There's good, there's bad, there's everything in between. And any of us who've been doing it for a while know how to kind of flesh out the, you know, get the cream of the crop for a good price.

Cool.

So I'm trying to think if there's anything else that comes to my mind. Like, I find this extremely fascinating, you know, on many levels, because it just really provides another opportunity for an idea to come to life where you may have been sitting around going, I have no idea how to do that. You know, there's a lot of people speaking of the E commerce business, you know, Amazon, private labeling, etc. It seems really exciting to them until they realize that, oh, man, I've got to spend hundreds to thousands of dollars on my initial inventory potentially. And they have no idea how they're going to come up with that because maybe they're bootstrapping and maybe they just don't know. And.

Yeah, and if somebody already has an idea, they're already like three clicks ahead of the game.

Exactly, exactly. I love that.

Cool.

So now you have. You told me about, for instance, some training or a checklist, or you're teaching a class. Explain what you're doing here. You've created a resource for people if they're interested in learning a little bit more about this.

Right. Well, I wasn't planning on doing this, but I did my crowdfunding campaign and then people started asking me how, because I figured out a system. I basically figured out how to game the system. And so I started telling people how to do it. And then more people kept asking, asking, and I was like, oh, Crimeanine, let me go ahead and make a course. But before long, me teaching my friends how to do it and then taking on clients turned into me going and documenting all the training, putting together supplementary software, and even planning a live event from an innocent crowdfunding campaign. Somehow I've become an authority teacher on crowdfunding, but what I'm teaching people is working. So we have some called incredible dream machines. And we're going to be doing kind of a public launch window. And we're doing it kind of a limited time because we're associating with a live event in Las Vegas. If you're interested in learning more about that and also getting a checklist, I've made a checklist of, I think the 10 steps that you need to have done in order to do your crowdfunding campaign. We have a number that you can text. Do you have the number there, Brad?

I believe it is 33444. Is that right?

Yeah, 33444. And we made this special text to you. What do you text to 33444?

Text my bacon. I love that. No space, just M, Y, B a C o n to 33444. And I did that just before we got on the phone. And yeah, it's actually a five step crowdfunding checklist. It looks really cool. It's a couple pages, but it's really. It gives you kind of a breakdown of everything you kind of need to do. What I also like about this, by the way, so you're showing people how to do exactly what we've been talking about. But if people have another idea, like they've got just an invention, they are an inventor, they're real creative, they've got this idea they'd want to come out with and they've heard about crowdfunding and they probably don't know all the ins and outs. Is it safe to assume that your training will also help them immensely with all of the marketing? The way to launch it, the way to.

Oh yeah. Doing a crowdfunding campaign is moving a mountain. And we break it down into steps. There's literally hundreds of individual micro tasks that you need to go through in order to be able to do that. Coming at it cold, you're going to miss a lot of these. One of the main things for a successful crowdfunding campaign is you need to basically engineer your first round of backers. You can't just throw it up there on the side and hope for the best, but you actually have to do prelaunch practice, either free or paid, depending on how fast you want to move, to engineer that traffic. And by engineering that traffic, you're going to kick over the algorithms and then the rest is crowdfunding history.

That's great. I think this is really cool. And what you're doing is you took exactly what you're telling other people to do. Find a product that already exists and find an innovative and unique twist on it, and then launch it out there. Well, that's exactly what you doing with this incredible Dream machines is you're taking something that exists that people are aware of, which is crowdfunding, and you're adding something that people don't really know that you can do. And as long as you do it strategically, ethically creatively you can fund an entire launching of a business.

Yeah. This isn't just like arbitrage, like Amazon sellers, where you're just selling commodity. These products get into Brookstone, they get into Best Buy. We have Walmart contact us. We've had the people at the most famous fruit phone in the world contact us. It becomes a launching platform because you've already done all the test marketing. You already verified if you want to get into Best Buy or Target, you knock on their door, they're like, we don't know if that sells, but if you show them, look, we already sold $300,000, they're like, oh, this product's vouched for. Give me that. This can churn one product into an eight, nine figure business. Right.

That's one of the things I really like and I've noticed, just to kind of bring up this other topic, that there's companies who are launching their products on crowdfunding even when they don't have to. Oh yeah, it's always of the hype that you get. It's an event. Including one that I was just reading about the other day because pebble just came out with. You know, a lot of people are familiar with the Pebble Watch. They just came out, they launched their Pebble Time and Pebble Steel. I think they've so far raised $20 million. I think it's by now by far the most successful crowdfunding campaign. And Pebble's already a multimillion dollar company that didn't need to do this.

No, but it's an awesome platform. People just see it on these platforms and it just makes it fun to buy. It's like Amazon Prime. I mean, my girlfriend has an Amazon prime account and she just goes and like, just because she's on Amazon prime, she sees something, she just buys it because it's on that platform.

Yeah, I do the exact same thing. And reading about pebble, they're like.

We'Ve.

Got a community here of people. And especially if you've launched it once. And I would imagine if you, if you, you know, if strategically, if you kind of stick to one general vertical, let's just say like health products or whatever, that you, if you continue to come back, you give people, okay, we got cut off there, but picking up where we left off. One of the things that I was saying was that if I imagine if you stick to one particular vertical and you have a successful launch of a product and then you decide to come back out and launch your next product, you've already got a bunch of backers who you've given a great success to that this can compound and build on itself. So just like pebble, if you continue to launch on here, the more you do it, the more success you probably have. And it becomes a community of people who just want to patronize your business.

Yeah, yeah. And that's pretty much. And that's pretty much what it is. The platform just becomes a hub for the community and such things that are things that you can for people in private label on Amazon, things that you're struggling to get on page one and you're buried down in page two or three of the listings and you have no hope of ranking. People are taking that stuff and they're putting it on Indiegogo and they're raising half a million dollars and getting invited to be in Best Buy. I mean, it's just ridiculous. You could take almost commodity products and just by being the first on a platform like mobile apps back in 2011, you just become something special.

I love it. So once more to get the checklist Incredible dream machines five step crowdfunding checklist. And to learn more about this, text 33444. And the what you want to do in your message is my bacon. So what's really cool about this is you'll get a message back and then you can just reply back with your email and Greg will send it right to you. It worked for me. It worked really well. It was kind of cool. And Greg, this has been awesome. When we talked about this the other day, you kind of gave me an overview and this was a lot of fun to kind of get on here and flesh out some of the details and cross some of the T's and dot some of the I's of details that I didn't know. But I think you've tapped into something really cool and unique and it's going to help a lot of people, especially if they were sitting on a desire, an idea to get this going and didn't really know exactly the best way to do it, or they had something going and they want to use crowdfunding to put some extra octane in it.

Yeah, it's hot, man. You know, in a couple years it won't be hot, it'll be hard and we'll move on to something else. But right now it's hot. And when things are hot, you got to jump on them.

Absolutely. So I appreciate your time on here. I encourage anybody listening who is the least bit curious to text my bacon to 33444. And if you have any other questions if they want to get ahold of you, if they want to go to your website.

We have a page up there. Incredible dream machine. Or they could just add me on Facebook. It's igregjacobs is my Facebook thingy.

So you could just igreg iPhone. I Greg.

Yeah, it's like I Greg, like interactive Greg Jacobs. I like it. It's like facebook.com IGregJacobs and we can connect on there as well.

That's awesome. For anybody else who has any questions, please send those to me@askbradbacon wrappedbusiness.com you. You can send me your questions, you can send me your comments, you can send me guest requests. And if you want to be a guest on the show, you've got something really cool and innovative you would like to share with me. Heck, let me know and leave a review on itunes if you like this. If you're not a subscriber, subscribe to it. Leave a review. It doesn't take just a few seconds to let me know. And I read every single one of them. Greg, I really appreciate your time on the call today. I look forward to seeing you here. Hopefully sometime soon. I've got a honeymoon to get to, but this has been great, buddy.

Yeah, yeah. Thank you very much for the time. Brad and I think people are gonna love this.

I think so too. Alright, guys, see you next time.

Bye. Bye.