AIPIS 59 - Crowdfunding with Kendall Almerico of ClickStartMe

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It's my pleasure to welcome Kendall Almarico to the show. He's the CEO of clickstart Me. He's a lawyer, sports agent, published author and serial entrepreneur coming to us today from Tampa, Florida. Kendall, how are you?

I'm doing great, Jason. Thank you for having me on.

Good. Well, crowdfunding is one of the hottest topics going and I'm glad to have you here to tell us more about it today. As I mentioned before we started, we did one other show on crowdfunding as it applies to crowdfunding real estate deals, which I know we're not quite there on that yet, but maybe you can address that a little bit. We have some shows where we have quite a big following of real estate investors, but people are interested in this for all sorts of reasons. I recently started funding some deals myself on Kickstarter. I just more than anything else wanted to see how it worked and see what the craze was about. I'm gonna get some free goodies in the mail. Well, not paid for them I guess, but some, some goodies in the mail here pretty soon and some credits for movies, I've, you know, documentaries I've helped fund and so forth. And you know, you're going to be world famous. I will be world famous, you know, absolutely. But, but you know, first of all, maybe just give us. Let's talk about the basics for those who may have heard of this in passing. What is crowdfunding? You know, we'll drill down on this. But, but let's just start with the basics really simply.

Pretty much everyone is familiar with the concept of walking into a church and someone passing around the collection plate or the hat and everyone in church puts a dollar in or five dollars in and by the end of the time the hat is passed around or the plate is passed around, there's a couple thousand dollars in it. That is crowdfunding. That's been around for as long as there's been any charities that's been around as long as there's been any churches. People understand that crowdfunding today is doing that same thing, but doing it on the Internet, basically having the opportunity for a large Number of people to give a small amount of money to raise a large amount of money to do something, whether it's to fund a movie, to create a product, to open a business, it can be done for anything. People crowdfund, they need an operation. It can literally be done for anything. But it's all the same. It's a large number of people giving a small amount of money to help something out.

Yeah. Fantastic. Well, the analogy of the church is. Is a good one. And that makes a lot of sense. Now, isn't it sort of odd that. Well, I guess it's not. But with crowdfunding, people can crowdfund things. You know, I guess we'd call them donations, right?

Yeah, I refer to them as donations.

Yeah. But.

The project or the people that created the project being funded can't give away a piece of the action yet. Right. They can't have crowdfunders share in the profits. But that's getting closer, isn't it? Yeah. Tell us about that part, Jason.

That's correct. Right now, if you go on any of the popular crowdfunding sites, whether it's our site, Clickstart Me, or Kickstarter, as you mentioned, and all of the other sites that are out there, the people that are out there selling a product or creating a movie or whatever they're doing are not allowed to give away part of the profits or to sell equity to sell stock in their business. That's illegal right now. What they can do is they can give away rewards. Like you said. You can get some goodies in the mail, you can get credits in a movie, you can get a thank you posted on Facebook, but you can't actually donate money and buy a piece of the action. Starting at some point in the next few months, you're going to be able to actually do that other thing, which is go online and buy stock in a company through a crowdfunding website. You are going to be able to buy a piece of the action online through a crowdfunding portal in what we call equity based crowdfunding. Right now, what is out there is what we call rewards based crowdfunding. You give away a reward today in exchange for a donation, but in the next few months, we are going to have it be legal. As soon as the securities and Exchange Commission promulgates the rules that we are all waiting for, it will be legal probably January or February of next year to go online and buy a piece of the next hot tech company or the next hot product that's coming out by making a donation Through a crowdfunding portal.

Yeah. Okay. So I mean, what kind of rules do you think the SEC will come out with regarding this? Or is it just a big secret right now? We're kind of waiting for that. What, what's the big deal? What are they going to do?

I have a lot of insight into this because as a crowdfunding expert and obviously the owner of a site that creates crowdfunding projects and one of the very few out there that's going to do both the rewards based crowdfunding and also do the equity crowdfunding once it becomes legal. I'm very integrally involved with the process, so I have a pretty good idea to simply educate everyone. And In April of 2012, there was a law passed called the Jobs Act. And the Jobs act was passed at bipartisan Congress. Everyone loves it. And they basically said, you're going to be allowed legally as of April of 2012 to go to a crowdfunding portal online, like what we have at Clickstart Me, and sell stock up to $1 million in a brand new business venture. Now everyone went, yahoo, this is going to revolutionize the way start businesses. I mean, Jason, you and I both since 2008, you could have the greatest idea in the world. You go over to bank of America and you say, I need to borrow $100,000. They're going to throw you out the door and probably charge you fees just for walking in the door to talk to them. Now you can't borrow money to start a business. So everyone is very excited about this concept of equity based crowdfunding being online. But the law said even though it's legal right now, it is absolutely legal. As of April of 2012, the law said that the who governs the sale of stock has to put out rules to tell people how they're going to be allowed to do this. And the law actually said they had to do that by January 1st of 2013. Well, I think today is, we're in June of 2013 and those rules haven't been put out yet by the sec. So everyone's waiting for these people go into Washington every day. They're complaining about how long it's taking. No one is moving at the SEC to get them done. And the reason is, I think the people at the SEC are afraid of what's going to happen to the general community of fundraising for businesses when this becomes legal. All of a sudden you're taking a lot of people out of the picture that have made a lot of money selling stock and selling equities and doing things to raise money for businesses starting. And you're saying, you know what, those people don't really have a whole lot of relevance anymore. Now that same stuff is going to be done on clickstart me or on a website.

Well, when you say that you're talking Wall street in general or are you talking about some other component you're talking about?

And again, this is, we're talking about only up to a million dollars. So the people that are starting the hundred million dollar businesses, this doesn't apply to them? No, not at all. But this is the small businessman in America. This is what America is made out of. This is the guy who wants to start a restaurant and needs $300,000. This is the guy who has the next great iPhone app and needs $200,000. He can't raise that money otherwise now he's going to be able to go on there. So who's getting hurt by that? Well, the venture capital world that normally would be the ones who would come in and take a huge chunk. Well, they're going to get hurt by this. The big brokerage houses, there's some effects there. And I think that that's one of the things that's held it up.

This is in a way that these people can deploy a lot of money. I mean, venture capitalists, their average deal size is probably three to seven million dollars for a vc and an angel group might be a half million dollars, give or take. So the angel groups, yes, it competes with angel groups, by the way. Angels are people who invest in very early stage startup businesses, if listeners aren't familiar with that term. And then they have some of them, like certain segments or industry types. And then there's what they call pure angels who do anything. They just, you know, they don't care what industry it's in, they just want to invest. So.

Yeah, but Jason, let me, let me take it a step further. So because you hit the nail on the head, it doesn't seem like this jobs act, this crowdfunding online through equity crowdfunding would affect your typical venture capital group because your venture capital group isn't doing $1 million deals. But here's how it affects them. When this one million dollar deal is done, you now have maybe 500, 1000 people that have crowdfunded this new business. You now have 1,000 investors in a business. You have a thousand.

And they are not just investors. Wait, they are supporters.

They are owners of. Now you get to the next stage of that business where you need to raise $20 million to grow and you go to the venture capital group. And now the venture capital group is going. You already have 1,000 investors in this business. We can't dilute their ownership in this business. It's going to be very difficult for venture capital groups to get that next step done because there are so many initial shareholders in the business. That's been the biggest complaint of the brokerage houses and the venture capital people is no rules in place as to what's going to happen once you get past this initial stage and it gets into the VC world or the public offering world or all the other worlds where this regulation doesn't really matter, which really essentially screwed those people up a little bit.

Yeah, well, let me make sure we understand that. So what you're saying, if I understand correctly, is that You've got these 1,000 investors in your example, that invested in a business and the business opened the doors, it was successful, it got to the next step to where. Where the thought is, hey, we should expand further, we should open more locations or franchise it or whatever. And so then they go to the next stage of funding, which might be a venture capitalist, and they say, hey, we want to raise more money. You funded a lot of different businesses in our industry or whatever. Are you interested? So then the VCs now face a problem. How do we deal with the first stage investors that crowdfunded the project and do we buy them out? Do they stay in the deal? Is that the issue?

That's the concern that I've heard over and over from the venture capital world is that they don't know how they're going to deal with that because they don't know what rules are going to be promulgated by the sec.

Think about a typical venture capital firm. They're not dealing with the company that already has 500 investors. They're typically dealing with a company that might have a handful of friends and family, an angel, or what have you, but they're not usually dealing with that functioning ongoing business with a bunch of people that invested 100 bucks. You understand what I'm getting at? So now they are faced with how do we meld that into the next step of this? And there's ways to do it. I'm not suggesting there's a problem. All I'm saying is that's where some of the resistance has come from. The SEC putting rules out because they're trying to make sure all these little steps in the way that have been around for 100 years get thrown out with the baby in the bathwater. When the new rules come in and say, hey, you can get this first million dollars by crowdfunding. That's been the concern, is addressing that kind of super technical stuff that you and I or the guy on the street who wants to raise the money couldn't care less about right now. They just want to get their business started right.

So let's just compare this. And we've got a lot of other things I want to move on to here and some really sort of interesting and entertaining funny stories. But when you look at the issue of the sec, one just has to think that this whole area of crowdfunding will be just fraught with fraud and scams. I'm saying that. And let me just lay out my thinking a little bit more on that before you answer. And I think Wall street, that is highly regulated in theory.

You know, and it's very expensive and very difficult to be a public company. I think Wal is the modern version of organized crime. Okay? So I don't have much faith in Wall street at all. And these big companies, I think they defraud people on a regular basis. They do it many times illegally, the way Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing, Bernie Madoff, et cetera, but they also do it legally. I mean, I think it's legalized fraud. When Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, between 2000 and 2002, take almost $1 billion out of the company, his personal take out of Oracle, and at the same time his shareholders lost 61%. I mean, it's crazy that these execs get huge bonuses and the shareholders get, you know, either meager or negative returns during the same exact period when they're paying themselves these ridiculous fees. I mean, it's obnoxious. And, you know, that's legal. Yeah, that's not illegal.

No, that goes on every day. And don't get me started talking about what the banks do to.

I mean, you're absolutely right. And to answer the concern, absolutely, there is a concern about fraud being incorporated into the situation. I will say this. It's kind of interesting. Just historically, in other communities it's legal to sell equity through crowdfunding in several other countries already, and it's being done in Australia and in England and there has not been a single reported instance of fraud yet. Now, that doesn't mean it's not going to happen. I both know this is the kind of thing that somebody comes into and says, oh, wait, I can just put this up online and make money and they're going to send me the money. And then I just give them the stock and I'll just run off with it. Well, it's not going to be quite that simple. In order to have a crowdfunding portal on the, you know, on Click Start me or any of the other websites that is going to raise money for equity, there is going to be still registration requirements and things that have to be done with the sec. There's still going to be financial records that have to be produced in order to do this. It's an abbreviated version of what you would have to do if you went to a broker dealer and said, I want to do a public, not a public offering, but a private placement offering to raise money. It's a very abbreviated version of it. But there are still a number of safeguards that are actually written into the JOBS Act. They're already there. They say you're going to have to do these things in order to raise a million dollars. Jason, the homeless guy on the street isn't going to be able to just log into clickstart me, put up a video and go, I'm raising money. And then people start sending them a million dollars. It won't happen that way. There's going to be a number of steps to go.

I mean, can you give an example of some of those safeguards? I'm curious as to what requirements will they have to meet.

First of all, in order to create the. You have to be incorporated. You have to have a company in order to sell stock. So the first step is someone has to incorporate or create an LLC or something where they can sell. Well, again, you and I both know that doesn't mean there's not going to be fraud. But that's a step someone has to take that requires some legal registration, requires the assignment of a federal employee number through the irs. This is some work someone has to do just to get the company started. The second step is in order to raise up to a half million dollars under this law, under the JOBS act, you're going to have to have a review done by an accountant, a public accountant, of your financial records. So you have to have not, which is very, very expensive, but just a review done and a letter from an ir, you know, from a CTA that says that this is the legitimate review. And these are the records, the publicly available now records of this business. So that's all out there as part of the crowdfunding project. So, Jason, you go on to the crowd, you go on to click start me. And there's a guy on there who says, I've Got the. I just invented the greatest new automobile in the world and I want to raise $250,000 to build the prototype. And I'm taking donations at $100 apiece to sell shares of stock. You are going to be able to see the letter from that CPA firm. You're going to be able to look at the financials of that business before you invest. It's not just going to be. Let me click on a button and give you money. Those are a couple of the examples that are built into the Jobs act that basically make it the same as what someone would do through a broker dealer today to money, but in a very, very abbreviated version where it can be done for less money, it can be done cheaper, it can be done by pretty much anyone as long as they have a corporation.

Okay, so corporation or an llc. I suppose an LLC is probably okay, right?

Yeah, I think any type of corporation or an LLC or even, you know, any of the other business entities that are exist in any state. I mean, every state has different ones, but whatever entity exists that you're allowed to sell ownership interest in within that state that you're funding it and that's the way that it would be done.

Let's shift gears for just a moment and then we'll come back to a few more of these things. But, but you're, you're a sports agent and an author. Tell me about that.

Okay, well, first of all, I'm probably one of the oldest tech startup people in the world. People. I'm the grandfather of tech startups with Clickstar, maybe because I just turned 50. So I've been doing a lot of things for a lot of years by training. I was an attorney, practiced law for a number of years, helped people start businesses for so long and helped them market their businesses for so long that this was a natural fit for me. But as part of my law practice, I was a sports agent. Still am. Represent some different people in different sports. Right now I'm representing a driver who's going to be the first Hispanic, not Hispanic, the first Caribbean driver in the NASCAR Sprints Cup Series coming up in about three weeks. I've represented baseball players and football players and I also wrote a little potty humor book called Hoogles that sold very well for a couple of years and was in Barnes and Noble and actually there's been a couple of calendars that have been out. So I've always been involved in a lot of different things and helping start things. And that's why starting clickstart Me and running it is so much fun because I get to dabble in a lot of different things that are fun and creative.

Sure.

Yeah.

You see a lot of different opportunities with all the projects coming your way. How old is clickstart me?

We actually launch in January of this year so we are pushing up on our six month birthday.

Happy half year birthday.

How many projects do you have on the website or have you had since the beginning? I guess I should say yes.

We've probably averaged at any given time between 20 and 30 projects that are on the site. And ultimately it's a growing number. In fact, today we launched a fun project that went up on the site where a gentleman is doing crowdfunding. This is kind of a crazy thing and we are going to get a little off topic here. But you will like this because this just shows how crowdfunding can be done for pretty much anything. This guy is on the site. He just put up a project where he is actually crowdfunding to buy a diamond and thrust baby high chair for Kim Kardashian and Kanye West's baby that's going to be born now.

I think you probably heard about that $12,000 or something. Yeah.

And it's actually getting a lot of publicity and it's kind of a fun, crazy thing. Now in reality, you know, I think it's just a, for the most part kind of a publicity stunt. But it's also an interesting thing because he's taking the money if he doesn't raise the full amount.

That's Trent Silver, right? Yeah. It's funny, I had him on my show just two days ago, so. What a small world.

Oh yeah, that's so. How funny. Well, he's actually. Yeah, it's a really interesting thing. And he's actually going to, you know, if he doesn't raise the amount of money, he will give all of it to this children's hospital that is the Kardashians choice of, you know, charities. And anyway, it just shows you there's. There's a lot of different things that's going on right now. But just as that's going on, I have a band that's, you know, funding their next CD that's on there. We have a film that's about gang warfare in South Carolina by an award winning young filmmaker that's being funded on the site. We have a couple of products that are being funded that are just about to go up on the site that are really interesting new cool inventions. So it just shows that the crowdfunding world is all over the place. There's so many different things that people can do with it. And that's what's so exciting about it, is there's really almost no limitation on what you can do at this point, because you're not selling equity. You're basically giving away something in exchange for a donation.

So did you want to give number of projects? I'm just kind of curious. Those are interesting as can be. You guys basically take a percentage, right? That's what Kickstarter does. That's what all the crowdfunding platforms do. Right.

Every one of the sites is pretty much the same. Everyone charges you one way or another for credit card processing. They might. Might eat it up as part of their fee, or they may cut it out separately, but all the donations that come through these sites come through credit cards. So everyone is going to charge you for that fee that they have to pay for credit card processing. And then everyone on top of that charges somewhere between 5 and 10% of whatever money is raised to run the site. So you'll typically see, whether you're on Kickstarter or on clickstart Me or anywhere else, that the fees that come out of every dollar that come in are somewhere between 8 cents and 10 or 11 cents. It's somewhere in that ballpark. So Basically, you're getting 90 cents on the dollar pretty much on every donation.

Okay. All right. And can you differentiate some of the different platforms at all? Like when, if someone's listening and they have a project they want to crowdfund, why should they use your company versus one of the other platforms out there? Or do certain platforms sort of specialize in, like, certain areas of the market or there must be differences, right?

Sure there are. Absolutely. To answer the question, Jason, everyone should use clickstart Me for everything. No, I'm just kidding.

I'm a realist. And there are projects that probably make more sense to be on somebody else's site. For example, when you have a site that has.

Kickstarter is famous for funding major Hollywood pictures movies, if a major Hollywood person wanted to come on clickstart Me and fund their movie, they would have probably the same level of success on clickstart Me as they would on Kickstarter. For one reason. That is, these projects promote themselves. Let's say, for example, that George Lucas said, I want to fund Star Wars 7 through crowdfunding. George Lucas could put that on any crowdfunding site and raise whatever the millions of dollars is that he wants to raise. Because it's George Lucas saying, I want to raise this money. Now, independent filmmaker who's never made a movie before, who doesn't have any social network, who doesn't have any contacts out in the film world, says, I need to raise a half million dollars for a movie. The odds are on a site like Quick Start Me that has just started, it's going to be a much harder sell than if they went on a site like Kickstarter where people have gone on there looking for films to fund. I'm a realist about that. The fact though is all crowdfunding is based on the project owner's own promotional activities. If you aren't out there promoting what you are trying to raise money for, if you are not out there pushing it, the chances that someone is just going to stumble upon this crowdfunding project, whether it's on Kickstarter or on clickstart, me or any of the other sites, is very small. 80 to 85% of the general public don't even know what crowdfunding is still. So if you think that you could just say, I'm going to create an independent film about how to make a couch and it's the most interesting film in the world and I'm going to go raise a half million dollars and I'm going to put it on Kickstarter and I'm going to raise a half million dollars just by creating the project. That will never happen. It won't happen. However, if you want to make the same film and you happen to have a thousand social media friends who are followers of yours that like what you write about that understand that the couch that you're going to do this thing about is very interesting. And this is going to be a. You can go on any site and if you're pushing it to those people and asking them to push it out to their friends and asking them to have their friends push it out, you can use that money on any site. And that's been proven over and over. So to answer your question, all sites have different things. There are sites that are out there that are very niche oriented. They only do raising money for medical expenses, they only do raising money for creating new music. But the fact is they are all based on the project owner being able to promote the project themselves. And if you don't have a project owner who is out there promoting the project themselves with very limited circumstances, like a George Lucas or some product that just captures the fancy of America, most of those projects are going to do the same on pretty much any site.

I totally agree. Anybody who wants to do anything. Obviously, having a network of followers, a tribe, as Seth Godin puts it, will certainly help you because you've got an instant audience there. That's very good. The thought came to mind when you mentioned George Lucas, like, if George Lucas did put a thing up there and he, you know, some of these people that have posted movie projects, like the Veronica Mars one was pretty interesting a while back, I'd kind of think, well, hey, George, why don't you fund your own movie? You know, what do you need me for? You know, I'll pay $10 to go and see it, but, you know, or probably 15, because you'll stick it in IMAX 3D.

Right.

But, you know, it's kind of ridiculous that he's asked, you know, is sort of my thought on one answer.

There's a big backlash. When Zach Brant came out with his Kickstarter project to fund his movie that most people thought was a sequel to Garden State, which was a very popular smaller movie that did very well, there was a big backlash, but he still raised a couple of million dollars. And I've actually heard him enterprise, he made some very good. He said, look, I could have. First of all, I am putting a million dollars of my own money into. But by having this additional funding for people, I'm a giving them the opportunity to have their names and the credits. And I'm making. In the case of his project, he was actually making a monthly video and online magazine that was just available to his donors where they could watch the movie being created behind the scenes. No one else would have access to this. He was giving them something in return for their donation. And yeah, there's a whole lot of people that criticize, you know, here's a rich guy who's trying to raise money. Why doesn't he do it himself? You know, first of all, I was a rich guy and I wanted to raise money for something and people wanted to give me money. That's America, you know, I mean, that's. Donald Trump's out raising money all the time for various different things. You know, that's what businesses do.

Yeah, but the idea, the idea of Trump raising money is that, you know, he's doing it through a private placement memory or something. And, you know, he's sharing the equity, which is coming to crowdfunding. But it's not here.

No, you're absolutely right. But again, it depends on what you're doing, I guess, is what it comes down to. Jason, I agree with the criticism. It sounds kind of crazy to see if George Lucas were to do this, I think there would be a huge backlash. I think when you have someone who has a huge fan base, like a Veronica Mars. And I can tell you there's been a couple of projects on Kickstarter that failed miserably. Recently, Melissa Joan Hart, who played Sabrina, the teenage witch on television, tried to fund a million dollars for a movie on Kickstarter. She raised less than $30,000 and had to shut it down. These things fail just as often as the ones that we see that are popular and they're in the news. Because again, if people aren't enamored with the concept, if they don't think it's something that's worth giving to, they don't give money. And sometimes the backlash works and sometimes it doesn't.

Yeah, very interesting. Well, tell us just quickly, recent story with Gawker that was in the news. That's, that's kind of interesting. Now here you have another example of you have a successful news media organization, gawker.com they crowdfunded. I guess there was no backlash against that. I mean, it seems like Gawker would have some money. They, they should pay for their own stuff. But, you know, what did they do?

Well, Gawker, basically what happened was the. One of the writers, one of the people that run Gawker, saw a video that was being basically trying to be sold by several unsavory characters, allegedly of the Toronto Mayor, Rob Carr, smoking crack. These unsavory characters wanted to sell this video to the Toronto Star, the legitimate newspaper in Toronto, and to anybody that would pay for it, but they wanted $200,000 for the video. You and I both know, Jason, there is a tabloid media industry out there that pays for photographs and stories every day. This isn't anything new that someone's out there trying to sell a story or sell photographs or sell a video. The National Enquirer, those types of places, they pay for that stuff every day. So they go to Gawker. Gawker says $200,000. Let's see if the public wants to see this. They put a crowdfunding project up online on a website, and they raised $200,000 to buy the video through crowdfunding. People giving $10 here or $25 there. They raised the money to buy the video. It's been an extremely interesting. It's all happened in the last couple of weeks. Extremely interesting use of crowdfunding because now you're talking about journalists going out. And if you want to call Gawker journalists, you're Talking about journalists going out and saying, okay, this is the way we're going to raise money to get a story. And that's something that's never been done before. But, Jason, if the National Enquirer paid $200,000 for this video because they thought it was worth that, they're making that money from people somehow. They're either raising advertising rates or subscription rates or whatever. The money's coming from the public to do that anyway. So there's been no real backlash against it. But I think it's fascinating that they were the first people to use crowdfunding to do something that was really unique. I think the biggest backlash has been people think that there's $200,000 that are going to go to some unsavory characters like a drug dealer.

Who.

Why should those people be getting that money to do, you know, to portray this mayor in such a bad light? That's what's so interesting about it to me is, you know, should you be paying these people at all for this? And, you know, is this.

Well, I mean, it's legal to pay someone for a news story?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Nothing illegal about that.

Yeah, yeah, no, it is. It's a very interesting story. So you think we'll be seeing a lot more crowdfunding in journalism, I assume, then?

Yeah.

Gawker broke the ice, right?

Oh, yeah. Not only that, but I think you're already seeing people that are starting to crowdfund journalism in general, because you have newspapers shutting down and television stations are having their staff disappear. You're actually seeing people that are putting up websites that are being crowdfunded, putting up newspapers or newsletters that are being crowdfunded, that are news sources and saying, look, we need the money to create this so we can give you this niche piece of news or this niche piece of newsletter. You're actually starting to see that also, which is with the way the journalism world is going, I think you're going to see more and more of that as time goes on.

If someone's listening to this or they've heard about crowdfunding and they're excited about it, they want to do it. They want to use this in their business or start a new business with it, or maybe they just want a nose job. I mean, there's all sorts of funny things that people can do, right? How do they learn how to do it? Right? Can they hire a crowdfunding coach if they do their first project and they just don't position it correctly, or they try to raise two little or too much money or don't get enough exposure. I mean, the project can just be a flop and it won't work out. What do they do to do it right?

The first time you hit the nail on the head, Jason, that is the single biggest criticism that Kickstarter has had from day one is that Kickstarter provides this wonderful forum and they've had some great success stories, but they don't really do anything to help you. They don't teach you how to create your project. They don't even tell you why they reject your project when it's rejected. For the most part, you are kind of on your own to copy what other people have done to try and figure it out. And so there was a whole lot of criticism online and then blogging about how they were kind of left. People were sort of left out in the cold trying to figure this out. One of the things we did when we created clickstart Me was we said, we will actually do hands on help for you. Not only do we have blogs and videos and tutorials and everything to walk you through every step of the way to show you how to do it the right way, but we will actually get on the phone with you. One of our trained staff members will get on the phone with you and tell you this is something that needs to be done. This needs to be fixed. We will rewrite your project for you. We will actually write your Facebook posts and tweets for you. Giving that kind of hands on help is something that no other site does. Now, there are businesses out there that are starting to crop up that will do this for you for a fee. Yeah. You pay them $1,500, they'll do the whole thing for you. One of the things we decided at the beginning was this is something people want and need. We are going to provide it to them if they ask for it and if they need it as a free service as part of what we do.

What else would you like people to know? In closing, we've gone a little longer than expected here and I don't want to keep you too long, but the website is obviously clickstartme.com just anything else you'd like people to know.

I think the one thing that I would tell people that are interested in any kind of crowdfunding, Whether it's through ClickstartMe, our site, or any other site, is to your homework and to figure out what you want to do the right way before you start. If you just go on and haphazardly do this, it may or may not work, but it's probably destined to fail. There are a lot of resources out there. I have a lot of videos on YouTube. If you Google crowdfunding expert, I'm all over the place on the Internet, all kinds of tutorials, all kinds of things. Learn about the process because the more you know about it, the more you prepare before you launch, the better chance you have of actually raising the the money. There's more work goes into getting it ready to go than actually happens once it's going. And if you do that part right, you've got a great chance to raise the money whether you're on clickstart, me or any other site.

Good stuff. Well, Kendyl, thank you so much for joining us today and shedding a little more light on this very hot new trend.

Thank you very much Jason for having me. I really appreciate it.

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