Crowdfunding Hacks with Clay Hebert - Genius Network Episode #108

And when he launched, he was 100% funded in 36 minutes, 200% funded on the first day and raised $270,000.

Great crowdfunding is nothing more than great marketing. Yet 64% of crowdfunding projects fail. In this episode, Clay Hebert shows popular crowdfunding myths and misconceptions and how to know if your idea is right for this exciting space. Remember to subscribe to the Genius Network so that you don't miss a Future episode. Visit geniusnetwork.com subscribe for more clay Hebert.

Is a storyteller, a marketing strategist, and a highly sought after keynote speaker. After decades solving complex problems for global clients at Accenture, the world's largest consulting firm, Clay left corporate America and attended the most selective and unique MBA program in the country. A six month journey working with Seth Godin and eight other amazing people. Today, Clay helps leaders, executives, entrepreneurs, nonprofits tell better stories, grow their companies, fund their dreams, and do work that matters. He advises corporations, executives and startups on marketing strategy, innovation and growth independently and through Clarity, FM Exobase and the First Growth Venture Network. Clay is the founder of Crowdfunding Hacks, where he helps entrepreneurs and creatives fund their dreams. As one of the world's leading crowdfunding experts, Clay has helped over 150 entrepreneurs raise over 50 million on popular crowdfunding platforms Kickstarter and Indiegogo. He's frequently asked to speak at conferences and client events on marketing, growth, storytelling, innovation, and creativity. Clay has written for the Washington Post, Forbes, and the Next Web, and his work has been featured in the New York Times, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Life, Hacker, and the Financial Post. He's a regular guest on Fox Business. He teaches crowdfunding@fundinghacks.com and writes about marketing, innovation and the future of work on his blog@k clayabear.com, which is H E B E R-T.com I am really looking forward to this presentation. This guy is smart as hell and if you pay close attention what he's about to share it could perhaps change the whole projectory of your business and your life. Give it up for my friend Clay. Thank you dude.

Appreciate it.

Thank you.

$100,000 to finish the final piece of a critical project that you've just been put so Joe did what a lot of us would do. He went to millionaire entrepreneurs and asked them to help him fund the project, but they didn't agree with the project itself. Then he went to city, state and federal governments to ask them for funding for the project, and they didn't agree with the project's partners. So Joe went to every gatekeeper around asking for this money, and nobody would help him fund this critical project. So Joe turned to crowdfunding. And it worked. After six months, Joe raised $100,000 from over 120,000 people. And finally, after years of politics, delays, and gatekeepers, the Statue of Liberty had a base to stand on. The year was 1885, and France had given us the Statue of Liberty as a gift. All we were responsible for as a country was the base. The cost of the base was $100,000 in 1885. Nobody wanted to pay for it. The Statue of Liberty was in crates in New York harbor, disassembled, sitting there gathering dust, and nobody cared. So Joe, not Joe Polish, Joe Pulitzer, who created the Columbia School of Journalism in his will and the Pulitzer Prize, had a newspaper called the World. And the World was not a newspaper for rich people and gatekeepers. It was a newspaper for the people. Joe saw the benefit of having the Statue of Liberty in New York. New York wouldn't pay for it. The New York Times was against the project. Millionaires of New York were against the project. But Boston, Philly people were all shaking their hundred thousand dollars and saying, I'll pay for it, but you're putting the Statue of Liberty in Boston or in Philadelphia. So Joe used his newspaper, and he went to the crowd with a simple, clear, compelling offer. Donate any amount of money, and I'll put your name in my newspaper. Now, it's a little easier nowadays to get our name in the newspaper, hopefully for good reason. But in 1885, that was a pretty rare, scarce, unique thing. And he said, he'll do it for any amount of money. So the millionaires in the New York Times wouldn't fund it. But you had little kids sending in a penny and a nickel from Nebraska to see their name in Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper, the World. And it took six months, and from over 120,000 people, Joe Pulitzer raised $100,000 to fund the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty and keep it in New York harbor. He said, let us not wait for the millionaires of New York to give us this money, because this is not a gift from the millionaires of France to the millionaires of America, but a gift from the whole people of France to the whole people of America. He said, let us not wait. And he did it, and he raised the money, and now the Statue of Liberty sits in New York Harbor. Joe Pulitzer crowdfunded the base of The Statue of Liberty. So that's what I want to talk with you about today. Sort of five pieces. First, I want to talk about five myths of crowdfunding. People come to me, and they have some huge misconceptions about crowdfunding. So I want to crush the five myths. I want to spin through Crowdfunding 101 really quick. I want to talk about platform strategies and tactics, probably not what you might be expecting. And then I want to walk through a framework I call the 10 Magic Marketing Questions. And then we can do Q and A or we can do Q and A after lunch. And where's Joel? My goal is to aim for relevancy, clarity, and doability. And I'd be really surprised if you told me that I have not enough slides. I have lots of slides. All right, so we're going to start with five myths about crowdfunding. Myth number one, that crowdfunding is new. In 1713, Alexander Pope crowdfunded his translation of Homer's Iliad. In 1783, Mozart wanted to perform some piano concertos in a Viennese concert hall, but he didn't have the money to rent out the hall like Louis CK Rented out the Beacon Theater. So he did a crowdfunding campaign. And guess what? Crowdfunding doesn't always work. Mozart failed at his first crowdfunding campaign, but next year it worked, and he got the donors to fund it, and he did the concerts in the Viennese concert hall. And like we just Talked about, in 1885, Joseph Pulitzer crowdfunded the Statue of Liberty. So crowdfunding is not new. What's new is the Internet and the connection that brings us all together. They did it the hard way. Myth number two. Crowdfunding is still this small niche industry for hipsters making wallets in Brooklyn. Right? The rise of crowdfunding. If you see in 2014, crowdfunding hit $16 billion. And no, crowdfunding isn't new. But look at the power of the connection. And look at that graph. A hockey stick graph. And the growth of crowdfunding. Now, let's look at 2015. Doubled again. More than doubled again. $34 billion overall growth of crowdfunding. And what's even more surprising than that is that trends show that this year, It's December of 2016. This year, trends show that crowdfunding is supposed to surpass venture capital as a source of funding. This is not a cute little niche industry. The top. Brian talked about Mad Men. The top is some of the original Mad men. And the VCs who funded Fairchild Semiconductor, one of the first big, well known VC deals. And most people in the country's first exposure to sort of venture capital was Peter Thiel and the character he played in the social network when they funded Facebook. So the beginning and the end, the timeline of that is a really long time. And you saw the timeline of crowdfunding is much shorter and it's about to be bigger. So crowdfunding is growing and it's a big deal. Kickstarter alone, the most popular rewards based crowdfunding platform, has raised over $2.77 billion, over 12 million backers, and over 116,000 successfully funded projects. Lots more total projects. But there's a number that makes me frustrated every day. This is just Kickstarter. Globally, the numbers are different across all platforms, but 35.81% of projects are funded successfully on Kickstarter, meaning over 64% of projects fail. And they fail not because they don't have a good idea. They fail because they don't understand how to market their campaign. They think that if they just show up and put up a crowdfunding campaign that the platform is going to bring them the traffic and backers. And by the end of the day, you'll understand why that's not the case. Myth number three is that crowdfunding is only for creatives. It's not just for artists and filmmakers and painters. This is Mizzen in Maine, a very cool company that's redefining men's sportswear. They just launched their chino. They make the coolest dress shirts around. They're like stretchy, like Under Armour. Don't have to iron them. So they're a real legit e commerce company that launched on crowdfunding. This is GoldieBlox, a really cool product that teaches young girls engineering skills. Who else is doing that? This was a campaign I was able to help myself called jewel Bots, teaching young girls, middle school aged girls how to code using Arduinos and friendship bracelets. They can code it so they can make their friendship bracelet buzz when they get an Instagram alike or when their dad picks them up from school and awards. Blue Ruin won an award at Cannes. Innocente won an Oscar. Fubar was a New York Times best seller that started on crowdfunding. So this is not little niche industries. These are big, legit, award winning projects. Oculus Rift was acquired by Facebook for $2 billion and they launched on Kickstarter. Myth number four, crowdfunding is free money. This is what I deal with all the Time with people who come to me, they want to launch on crowdfunding because they just see the success of all these other campaigns and think that if they just get their project live that it'll get funded. It's not free money. You have to build the tribe, build the audience. We'll talk about that and bring it and launch to them. You want to launch to your tribe. But I will say this. Crowdfunding is free. And what I mean by that is a lot of things, we do a lot of marketing things, Facebook ads, et cetera, they cost money. Now, crowdfunding isn't free, as in it doesn't cost anything. But what I have seen, Kickstarter takes 5% as a fee to put it on the platform. So it's not free in the sense of it doesn't cost anything. But every campaign I've ever seen, the platform does bring more than 5%. The problem is people think it's going to bring 95%, but it almost always brings more than 5%, which means it pays for itself. Myth number five, that none of you have ever crowdfunded. Every single person in this room has run a successful crowdfunding campaign. This meeting itself was crowdfunded. Joe crowdfunded it. Every single one of you. If you've ever been in college and had friends chip in to buy pizza or beer, you crowdfunded that pizza or beer. So this is not complex. It's not this crazy new world. It's getting people to chip in a certain amount of money to create or buy or make a thing. All right, Crowdfunding 101 really fast. Crowdfunding versus crowdsourcing. I've been doing this a long time, and I'm shocked at how many people transpose and conflate those two terms when they talk about this stuff. And I'm going to give you a super simple way to remember two definitions. Crowdsourcing is the sourcing of anything from a crowd, often information or ideas. Crowdsourcing. Wikipedia is a crowdsourced encyclopedia. Crowdfunding is the sourcing of funding from a crowd of people. So crowdfunding is technically a subset of crowdsourcing, but people misuse those all the time. And one I hear a lot is, oh, yeah, I'm going to crowdsource my book. A book is actually the simplest way to remember the difference between crowdfunding and crowdsourcing, because you can very easily do either one. The book on the left. 20 innovators, 300 pages, one awesome book. David Paciak just rounded up people to Write chapters for that book. It's called book packaging. But he crowdsourced the book. He had everyone submit their chapter. He packaged it up and printed the book. The book on the right is my friend AJ Leon. He raised $37,000, $38,000 from his tribe publishing his book on Kickstarter. Now, AJ wrote every word. So the book on the left is crowd sourced. The book on the right is crowdfunded. So those two terms do not mean the same thing. People interchange them and conflate them all the time. And now you won't. The five types of crowdfunding rewards based pretty well named. When you donate, you get a reward. Could be an app, could be a hoodie, could be something else, but you get a reward for it. Donation based. So rewards based is platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Donation based is like it says, a donation, not so much a reward. One of the more popular donation based platforms is GoFundMe. When someone has cancer or somebody's kid is sick, or somebody gets hit by a car and doesn't have medical, you'll see a campaign for GoFundMe. That's donation based. They're not giving you a hoodie in return. They're just saying, can you please help us out? Equity, totally different. Equity is funding in exchange for a piece of your company. Just like what it sounds like. Equity platforms like Angellist allow startups to raise money from angel investors that they've never been in the same room with. Debt crowdfunding, much less sexy, but a big part of the overall global crowdfunding pie. Platforms like Prosper and Lending Club. Simple way to think about debt. Crowdfunding is think about it like a bank, but instead of getting a loan from, let's say Wells Fargo and you're owing Wells Fargo $30,000, you might get $3,000 from different people on the debt crowdfunding platform or people in this room. And you could even negotiate a separate interest rate for that. And people in this room could play on the other side of that and you could be the lenders. If you want to diversify your portfolio, you can go on Prosper and Lending Club. Look at people who need money and lend it to them at a specific interest rate. And then recurring crowdfunding, this is platforms like Patreon. Recurring crowdfunding is for creators who make something on a recurring basis. So podcasters who release a new episode every month, or YouTube creators who want to up their YouTube game. Maybe they're not making enough from YouTube ads, but they have a Ton of raving fans. But the raving fans aren't the ones who they make the money from the ad from YouTube. But another way, and you can do both, is using a platform like Patreon to go to your fans. Let's say you have 50,000 people on YouTube that like your content. If only 1,000 of them gave you $1 every time you published a new episode, so not even a huge conversion rate, then you're making $1,000 every time you publish a new YouTube thing might allow you to. If I was a YouTuber, I would reinvest that in camera and lighting and up the show. Right? So recurring is one where it's not the creation of something new and big. One time, it's someone who creates recurring content. We're going to focus the rest of this presentation on rewards based crowdfunding, Kickstarter and Indiegogo. But I'm more than happy to talk about any of the other ones to you guys afterwards. Just come grab me so I'll talk about your idea if you have one or if this has sparked one. People always ask, is my project right? For Kickstarter or Indiegogo, A good rewards based crowdfunding project on Kickstarter or Indiegogo is a creative project with a beginning and an end, in which something new gets made and shared with a tribe of people that you can both identify and build trust and permission with before you launch. I know that's a mouthful, so we'll go through it one more time. It's a creative project that means if you have accounting services that you sell and you just want to sell more of your accounting services, that's not really a creative project with a beginning and an end. It's time bound. It's a thing, it's 30 days. There's urgency built in in which something new gets made and shared. Now it can be doesn't have to be brand new idea never heard of before, but something new to you, something new to them with a tribe of people that you can both identify and build trust and permission with. Before you launch, we're going to look at an example of someone who did just that. So there are lots of reasons to crowdfund beyond the funds, beyond the money itself. And this is where smart marketers like this room can use crowdfunding in interesting ways. Some of you may not need the $50,000, but running a Kickstarter campaign might be worth more than the cash to you. Or you could run it and break even and learn something. So there's lots of Reasons to do crowdfunding. Validating your idea. Right. There's no focus group like the market itself. Building your tribe. Some people don't know this, but when you have a successfully funded Kickstarter project or Indiegogo, you get the emails of the people that backed. And so there are companies who see this and they've built their tribe. We're going to look at Manal a little bit later as a luggage company. Two friends have completely built their tribe. Launching with crowdfunding, gaining exposure. Media. If it's that kind of project that the media talks about, the media needs a reason to talk about you. And sometimes if it's packaged well and has another hook, a crowdfunding campaign can be that reason. Testing your pricing and marketing. Let's say you have a great thing, but you don't know the pricing or the marketing. You could build multiple packages on crowdfunding and see what works. Or securing investment. I do a lot of startup advising and one thing I always tell them is the most effective slide in any investor pitch deck is a successful overfunded crowdfunding campaign. Because all investors, angel investors and VCs are looking for. They're looking for big ideas, looking for overall growth and everything else. But the most important thing they're looking for that most startups don't have when they walk in is what VCs and angel investors call traction. Proof that people care. Proof that people want your project. And there's no better proof of that than both the comments and the cash and the backers. You print out your successful crowdfunding campaign. That's the most powerful slide in your pitch deck. So what's your why? I'm not going to belabor this, but Simon Sinek wrote a great book, amazing TED Talk called what's yous why? I always implore people start with why are they doing this? Because you should not crowdfund for something you don't care about just to hopefully flip $50,000. It doesn't work that way. It's way too much work to do that. Being the crowdfunding guy, I spend a lot of my time talking people out of crowdfunding because they're in it for the wrong reasons. So define your why. This was the very first crowdfunding campaign I ever helped. Midi Mirror is the woman on the left. She was making a film called Gold Star children. She needed $20,000 to finish post production of the documentary. The film connects two generations, her generation and the kids who were losing parents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mitty lost her dad in Vietnam four hours after she was born. So she never knew her dad. And now one of her big project life's work was making this film. She needed $20,000. So her why wasn't the $30,000? It wasn't even finishing the film. Her why was connecting two generations. And this picture shows that Manal these guys, this bag, I'll show you, These guys have now made over a million dollars across two campaigns because they built the bag that they wanted to exist in the world. They're digital nomads. They travel around. And there's kind of two types of bags. Before Manal, there's the roller bag that a lot of the road warriors use with the handle and the wheels. And if you want a backpack, if you want a big backpack to carry all your stuff, it was stuff everything through the top. So like the North Face bags, like you just came off a mountain and you have to load it through the hole in the bottle at the top. And they said, we travel, we want something soft and backpack style, but we want it to lay flat like a suitcase. So they combined a roller suitcase and a North Face backpack. They built their why was literally scratching their own itch and building the bag that they wish existed. Now they've raised a million across two campaigns and they've started a company. This was their first campaign, $341,000. And like I said, their second one was over $600,000. They launched their second SKU, essentially, was the smaller bag, which is more the laptop size. Soma is a beautiful glass carafe water pitcher. Soma was Mike Del Ponte's answer to the big ugly Brita water pitcher filters, the plastic ones that most of us have in our refrigerator. He was having a nice dinner party with a nice table runner and candles and everything else. And he was pouring the Brita, and the top of the Brita fell out and the water went all over the thing, Ruined the table, ruined his party. And. And someone said, because the wine carafe was right there, someone said, why doesn't someone make a water pitcher filter that's more like a wine carafe, like a decanter. And so they built Soma. David Elner wanted to change the way people learned how to cook. We're going to learn more about David in just a minute. I see crowdfunding like a kid in a candy store, because all the elements that all great marketers like you all know how to use, storytelling, pricing, scarcity, urgency, copywriting, headline writing, like Brian was talking about, they're all wrapped up In a page that consumers know how to use. A crowdfunding campaign page gives you. Just like being in a mixing board with the Beatles on the other side of the glass, it gives you all the tools. Now, the bad marketers just like bad Internet marketers that we all know, they just crank everything up to 12. But crowdfunding gives you guys the ability to turn the knobs and play a symphony. Great crowdfunding is nothing more than great marketing. So platforms, strategies and tactics section may not be exactly what you think. So here's some examples. Some platform questions. Should I focus on Facebook or Instagram? You guys have probably either said or heard these questions in the last two months. Do I really have to use Snapchat? Gary tells me it's the next big thing, but it's kind of annoying. Do I really have to use Snapchat or. Or like, what's the next big platform? Don't rely on platforms. Platforms die. MySpace died. Other platforms come and go. Understand them, learn them, but don't rely on them. And certainly don't think that Gary or anyone else telling you that the next platform is going to save your marketing. Listen to Gary. Learn how to use the platforms, but don't. If you're saying, is this platform going to fix and save my marketing? It's not. The questions we're going to walk through today will. And then if the platform helps layer into that strategy, that's perfect. All right. Platforms change their rules. This is one of my favorite hip hop albums from Macklemore called the heist. But the real heist was when Facebook changed their rules. Facebook in 2009, 2010, went to the biggest, not even people in this room. I'm sure some people in this room bought some likes and things like that, but they went to the cpgs like craft and P and G and these huge companies, and they said, spend for likes. Build your audience, build your tribe, build your community. We've got all the demographics to show you where the people are. Facebook was literally like, the door is closed. We know all the people behind the door. If you just pay us, you'll build your tribe and your community. And people paid for likes, millions and millions of dollars for these big companies. And then Facebook took the knob on the mixing board and they turned down organic reach almost to zero. There was an attention heist from Facebook to these massive companies. They said, no, we're not going to show your stuff unless you pay us again. Right? Okay, Coca Cola, you have a million likes, but we're not going to just show your Million fans, your advertising. You have to pay us again if you want to boost that post. Strategy questions like, do we need a referral program like Sean Ellis growth hacked at Dropbox? Do we need a blog? More like Buffer. Buffer's killing it with their blog, right? They write really great stuff. Or should we be focusing more on SEO or tactic? Questions like should we try more Facebook ads? Or how effective is retargeting? Or will our genius network mannequin video go viral and make us all billionaires? Don't rely on platforms, don't copy strategies, and don't plagiarize other people's tactics. Think of it like a custom made suit. If someone looks really good and they have a custom made suit and it fits them perfectly, you wouldn't say, wow, what size is your suit? I'm going to go buy the same size because it's not for you. It's perfect for them. What you want to do is learn how to see why it looks good, why they did what they did. What you want to do is test platforms. Learn them. If your customers are on Snapchat, bite the bullet and try it and use it and see what you think. The people who got really good at Twitter were the people who were doing Twitter poorly in 2008 and 2009 when everyone else thought it was stupid. So try it, but don't think it's going to save you. Decode the strategies. Learn from the strategies. This is something I do all the time, probably too much, spend too much of my time looking at other things. Not to copy the strategy or the tactic, but to figure out why it worked and to look at work like Cialdini and all the people that Brian just mentioned and based on the fundamental principles and seeing what they're doing and decoding and understanding why it works and studying those tactics. You want to learn how to see. This is marketing. Marketing is not the latest tactic, platform, tool, trick or whatever. If you learn how to see, then it doesn't matter. Those things will come and go and you'll use them when they come along. I was at a conference with Gary recently and he said, you think you guys are frustrated about the decreasing reach of Twitter. He goes, I won Twitter and it doesn't work for him anymore. It doesn't have the reach that it used to anymore and it's good for other things. Another thing, there's no slide for this. Learn how else to use these platforms for other benefits. You know what Twitter is terrible for right now? Reach clicks on your link, tweeting your thing. I don't care how many followers it has. I helped a crowdfunding campaign that said one of the only ones I've ever talked to worked with whatever. They weren't a paying client or just a friend. And they said, don't worry, Clay. We're not going to use a landing page. We're not going to build an email list. We have two killer marketing strategies. I was like, oh, this should be interesting. They said, one, they're musicians. They're going to walk up and down the Santa Monica pier handing out glossy cards about their upcoming crowdfunding campaign. Their product was actually pretty cool. I said, okay, that's not going to do anything. What else? They said, brody Jenner is going to tweet about our campaign, and he's got 7 million Twitter followers. And I said, looked who Brody Jenner was. I said, that's not going to do anything either, because people don't go to him for that kind of information. This is about understanding influencer marketing. People go to Kanye west for Kanye west content and albums and maybe recommendations about other stuff, maybe fashion, right? It kind of goes down. But if Kanye west tweets about bulletproof coffee, it's not going to make a difference. The press will write about it. It'll spin off some other stupid little articles, but it's not going to move units of bulletproof coffee because people don't look to Kanye west for that kind of information. So you got to learn how to see and unpack it. They launched their campaign the day that Brody Jenner tweeted to his 7 million Twitter followers was the lowest day of the first week of the campaign. And they didn't get funded because they wouldn't do the basics. So great marketing is really just about 10 questions. This is Lee Miller. Lee is the one on the left. Lee was cat sitting his friend's cat, Pasha. That's Pasha's the one on the right. And it was a new kitten. The friend had just got up, but then she had to go away on business. So she was texting Lee saying, you know, hey, how's Pasha? Is Pasha okay? Da, da, da. Everything, actually, I'm gonna pass this around. So Lee was being a good cat sitter and replying to her. And then eventually they started shooting videos, playing with a laser. And the owner of the kitten really, really loved it. And so Lee had an industrial design firm mock this up. This is called Kidio. Passing a unit around so you can see it. Kidio is a device that allows you to play with your cat, even when you're not home via an app and a laser, a camera and a treat dispenser. So Lee found me and he said, I want to launch this on Kickstarter. And we both happened to be in New York. I said, if you meet me on Saturday, I'll be at this coffee shop, come chat. So he came to me and he said, this is the idea, this is the situation, this is the story. I said, yeah, this is the kind of thing that if you do it right, could do really well on Kickstarter. I said, how many emails do you have? And he looked at me really funny and I didn't understand it. He's like, what? I said, how many emails do you have? He said, two. I was like, two? Did you just start marketing this morning? He said, no, I use one for work and one for personal. And then I realized that, like Joe and Michael were talking about yesterday, we have to make sure that we're using the right language when we're talking to people. He was in marketing, but he was in the branding side of marketing. He was great with logos design. Kdeo's beautiful. But he did not understand direct marketing at all. He didn't understand permission or emails or landing page or anything. I was speaking Greek to him when I asked that. Then I said, well, to do this, you have to launch a campaign to people. You have to build permission with cat lovers who want this thing. He said, okay. And then he was one of the best students I ever had. He ran away and he built a terrible landing page, but he built it in 48 hours and sent it back and said, how about this? And the opt in was way at the bottom and there were 87 cat puns and everything else. And I said, okay, you're a guy who's going to take action. We can fix this. So now KDEO is sold in Best Buy pet value. You can order it online. What happened was we built this landing page and I used the headline play with your cat even when you're not home. His original headline was instant catification. I said, in the whole landing page, you can have one cat pun. Choose where you spend it. So he said, when can you get your paws on one? We promoted it in the right places and it converted at 40%. So Lee went from having two emails, one for work, one for personal, to having a landing page that was converting well at 40%. In six months, he gathered 13,000 prelaunch opt in emails. Not like stealth, not sure what you're launching emails. People who had seen the product raised their hand and said, yes, I want it. And when he launched, he was 100% funded in 36 minutes, 200% funded on the first day and raised $270,000. Now you all are starting way further along than Lee Miller was when he started. But he took action and he did the right thing. And he did the fundamentals that we're going to walk through. So these are the 10 magic marketing questions. Number one, who, very specifically are you trying to reach? If the answer is, everyone, start over. Your product is not for everyone. Get really specific. I would say that you can absolutely be too general on this. You probably cannot be too specific on this. It should be an actual person. You should know what they look like. You should know what they smell like. Peter Drucker said, the aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him or her and sells itself. That is the aim of good targeting and good marketing. The right customer avatar attracts the right customers and repels the wrong customers. You want to repel the wrong customers. They will chew up marketing spend. They will chew up support costs. And it informs your marketing. It informs every aspect of your marketing. The words you use in your video, in your campaign, everything else. The right customer avatar becomes your Magic 8 ball. Those questions earlier, those platform tactics, strategy questions, should we do this? Should I do what? About Snapchat stories? Do I need Instagram sponsored posts? For most of us, the marketing looks like this. Reply hazy. Try again, because we don't know. But if you have a perfect customer avatar, whenever you have one of those should we questions, you just say, I don't know. Is that how Jessica would find out about it? Is that what Jessica does? If Jessica is your avatar? So there's four components. The way I like to build customer avatars, demographics, which are facts, basic age, what city they live in, sex, married, single, that kind of stuff. Psychographics are feelings. Most people don't go to that level. What are they feeling? Their habits and consumption. What podcasts do they listen to, what magazines do they read, what books do they consume? We all have varied, even in this room, wildly different consumption habits. Therefore, there's a marketer out there trying to reach us. And unless they go through Joe, they're not going to get to us. They need to understand, where do we go? Online. And then the last part, and this is the hardest part, but also the most important and most effective part, understanding their problems, fears, hopes and dreams. And if you don't know this, you have to Go out and talk to them. You have to ask. They will tell you, but you have to unpack it. One good way to do this is the single customer exercise or single unit exercise. Pretend that that Kiddio unit is the only one in the entire world. Pretend you only had one unit, one item of your product or service. Think if that was it, who's the right person in the world to get it? Who's the one person that wants it and deserves it more than anyone? And that person may be your avatar. Some people are your avatar. There's a lot of fitness and personal trainer people who are their own avatar. They have six packs and they're trying to teach people how to get six packs. Super overweight personal trainers don't do so well. Sometimes you are your avatar, but if you're not, that's totally fine. You have to talk to them and use their words. Really quick story. Friend of myself and Michael and Joe and a few others, Ramit Sethi was going to launch a program for women's fitness. And Ramit is smart enough. He's one of the smartest marketers I know and he has a huge list and a huge database of customers who know, like and trust him. But he was smart enough to do this step, talk to them and use their words. It would have been super easy for Ramit to say, I'm so smart, I know what I'm doing. I'm the best copywriter. I'm going to write the headline myself. He didn't. He asked them. And one of the questions he asked these women were, what are your workout goals? What does success look like for you? And a lot of them wrote back and said, you know, I just want to fit into my skinny jeans. And then 12 more percent said, you know, I just want to fit into my high school jeans. Now Ramit's a 33, 34 year old Indian guy who's trying to make his biceps bigger. He's not trying to fit into skinny jeans. So he never would have come up with that phrase. But if he would have launched the project, he would have, he would have used that line on the sales page. So you have to talk to your customers, whether it's your list or Starbucks or segment, you have to use their words. There's other tricks we can talk about Amazon books that are related and seeing what people say in the reviews and things like that. The best copy will come from your customer's mouth. So I won't read this whole thing. This is an example level of detail that when I build a Customer avatar. This is what it looks like. You have an actual picture of the person, some logos that are consumption habits, you know what their apartment's decorated like. And then you also know that she's worried about maybe her boyfriend committing and getting married and moving up in her job and things like that. Because that informs the rest of your marketing. And I'm happy to, I'll send this avatar template to all you guys. So Kittio's results, because they focused very specifically on Jessica, the 29 year old in the upper west side, they were able to raise over $270,000 from 2,400 people, a lot of whom looked nothing like Jessica. But if you try to talk to everybody, your marketing will fail. If you talk to Jessica, you're going to get ripples in the pond. Tim Ferriss, who a lot of us know in this room, he used to write for one guy, 32 year old Joe, he put on 15 extra pounds, wants to have more sex, used to be a college athlete, he could very specifically define who he wrote his articles to. But then it rippled out and he had a lot of other people, even though he was writing for that avatar, he had women follow him and he had older guys follow him, things like that. So the takeaway is I never received the orange slide specific takeaway. So define your detailed customer avatar. Define your version of Jessica for your company. And if you have totally different industries and products and verticals, then define multiple. Next, define your sub tribes. This is David Elnor, who I said built panna. David was a music industry executive, very successful, but always very busy. Never learned how to cook. His first time he learned how to cook was Thomas Keller's famous roasted chicken. And he was blown away that he was able to create something so delicious and that it was so simple. So his frustration was he had his iPad with YouTube propped up, he had the cookbook up, he had his iPhone, he had all these things. He's trying to make chicken and there's just too many pieces. He said, why isn't there one iPad app that just does everything? And actually, you know what? I want Thomas to show me how he makes it. I don't want to have to find the right late night TV show, chef show. I want Thomas to show it. So he built the iPad app to do it. Now, sub tribes are the sub circles of people. It's basically your customer avatar would belong to multiple sub tribes for your company. So David's sub tribes for panna, obviously foodies, that's kind of a simple one, right Food bloggers. But all food bloggers are foodies. But not all foodies are food bloggers. Cooking show fans. There are people who just go home and this might be their first attempt at actually making food, just like David. Or it could be iPad app early adopters. There are thousands of people out there who buy the cool new iPad apps regardless of the content. So how does he reach them? And then fans of specific chefs. If you're a fan of Thomas Keller or Mario Batali or. Or these things, there's a million ways online to find and market to the fans of those specific chefs. So let's just take one of these subtribes. Food bloggers. The good old Google type in top 500 food blogs. Google just tells you who they are. Now don't reach out to the top 500 food blogs and spam them. The pioneer woman gets spammed all the time with please write about my spatula. Please write about my iPad app. So you have to figure out what's the win win combination with these, in this case, these food bloggers. So what I told David to do was the Panna app is a subscription app where you pay per month, just like Gourmet magazine. But now it's on the iPad. And so I said, why don't you go to these food bloggers? Because bloggers wake up with two problems. They need content for their blog and they need to add value to their tribe. And I said, you can knock out both of those with one swing. Offer them a lifetime subscription to Panna for themselves and then offer them one to give away on their blog. So they get to kick the tires for free and they get to do a blog post about it and they get one to give away to their tribe and they can run the contest however they want. And if even only 100 of the 500 blogs would have hit, it would have contuppled. David ended up not having enough time to do that strategy. But that's a simple example of Avatar sub tribe. Then you got to find the win win. And that would have been perfect. So the takeaway is define your sub tribes. Just draw those simple little Venn diagrams and say, who are my sub tribes like Panna? Then figure out what story are you telling or living or spreading. We've been talking about this a little bit over the last day and a half. Story is super important. This is my friend Satya Tweena. She ran a Kickstarter campaign to save New York City's last millinery. She saved the last hat factory in Manhattan. With a kickstarter campaign. And the video is killer. I don't want to waste your time now, but the headline we came up with was very simple. Again, hers was, I think, manhattan with hat in the middle of Manhattan. Again, everything poorly named is too clever, right? This was, again, not clever, very straightforward. Get a custom hat. Save a New York City hat factory that appeals perfectly to people who want a custom hat. And then the cherry on the sundae that they get is saving the New York City hat factory. It does not appeal to people who don't wear hats and certainly don't wear custom hats. So that's fine. This simple headline repels the wrong people because she doesn't even need them on her page. And she raised thousands of dollars to save this factory. So that was the story that she was telling. Kitty O. Very simple story. Play with your cat even when you're not home. This was the top of the landing page that converted at 40%. It's impossible not to understand this. One of the biggest things in all of your marketing is instant clarity, right? We've been talking about clarity a lot the last couple days. This is instant clarity. I get a lot of entrepreneurs coming to me who are like, oh, my idea is so stealth. Will you sign an NDA before we even talk about it? And there's no way I'm doing a landing page. And they just want kickstarter to fund their thing. So stealth. This was up for six months, and he built the audience, he built the tribe, and he launched it to him, and he was instantly funded. People are way too worried about stealth and stealing their ideas. It's got to be super simple. And one little fun little litmus test I like is called the alarm clock test. So does someone, somewhere, your ideal customer, avatar, roll over in the morning? And when they open their eyes, before they reach for their phone or before they meditate, what are they thinking about? This goes a little bit to the avatar stuff of problems, fears, hopes, and dreams. That moment from when the alarm goes off or when they open their eyes to whenever they do the next thing, what are some of the things that they're thinking about? And for kiddio, that's how I came up with that simple, clear headline. Because you can imagine someone. I'm not a cat person, but you could imagine the cat cuddling up in the little space in your neck or whatever and thinking, maybe she kind of hates her job, and maybe she has to travel all the way down to Wall street from the upper west side for her job. And you know what? She just wants to stay home and play with her cat. So play with her cat, even when you're not home is perfect. So think of the alarm clock test. It's super simple. And the words that they use. Again, use their words. If they're not using those words, people don't roll over and say, I really wish I had a successful segmentation methodology. Nobody says that. Nobody talks like that. So the takeaway, Tell a super simple story that your customer already believes. Define your alarm clock test. So that leads into, does this story resonate with the worldview that people already have? This is simple. It's not rocket science. But we miss it every day. What's the thing they already believe? Some of us think we're in the convincing business in marketing. We're not in the convincing business. We're in the leading business business. Literally write down. Just get a piece of paper with your team and write down what do they already believe. Some of that will come from your avatar. This is one of my favorite marketing graphics of all time. I really wish I would have come up with this, but I didn't. It's from the folks over at User Onboard. We all know Little Mario. We all think we sell the product. The product is features and benefits and modules and horsepowers and horsepower and money back guarantees. So we spend all of our time talking about the product. And what we really should sell is the Super Mario that our product creates. And we know this. Yeah, transformation. Exactly. That's it. This is complete transformation. I mean, what Mario, the flower transforms Mario, he really doesn't care about the flower other than that it turns him into Super Mario. And billion dollar brands have been built on the top of this. Nike, Lululemon, Athletica, Gatorade. Lululemon sold thousands of pants when they launched to hardcore female yoga users. Lululemon sold millions of yoga pants to women who have no clue where the nearest yoga studio is. But that's the Super Mario. That is who they see themselves as. That is who they're convincing themselves that they're going to start on January 1st. Nike didn't make many guys dunk. This is a great lyric that explains this perfectly from, again, Macklemore, the lyrics from the song Wings. He's talking about Nike. And the whole song is actually a bit of a slam on Nike. But he's slamming them because their marketing and branding is so brilliant. How it changed his life. He said, I was seven years old when I got my first pair and I stepped outside and I was like, mama, this air bubble right here, it's gonna make me fly. I hit that court, and when I jumped, I jumped. I swear I got so high. I touched the net, Mom. I touched the net. This is the best day of my life. I remember feeling like that when I got Nike's. And the next line in the song is, and air Maxes were next, so moves them right down the funnel, right? But the best day of their life. How can you make your marketing and your product. How can you make someone feel like that? It didn't actually do that. It certainly didn't make me dunk, believe me. But that is the kind of feeling Gatorade didn't even play around. They literally just said, be like Mike. Gatorade understood this so well, and I credit their marketing team for not over committeeing this line and adding 17 words and making it wrong. I'm sure it was probably a throwaway line in one of these meetings that said, should we just tell them? Be like Mike? And that's what it was. And it sold millions of dollars of colored sugar water, colored salt water. They said, drink this red or yellow salt water and you'll be a little bit more like Michael Jordan. And all of us all over the country did it. That is the Super Mario. Now, if you want to take this one step further, there's a really amazing book that I'm guessing is. It's probably the best book that most people in this room don't know because I know you read a lot. We all read lot of the same books. It's called Making Users awesome by Kathy Sierra. What she talks about is now we have the ability to actually make our users awesome, to actually deliver on the promise. So you sell the Super Mario, but then you deliver the Super Mario. Think about a digital SLR camera. I kind of dabble with photography a little bit and I have a Canon 5D. And I was so excited because I consumed all the marketing and I looked and it was like these beautiful pictures of mountain ranges and high rise and everything else. Just gorgeous photos. And then I got the camera and what's in the box. After I give them my $1,300, what do I get? A manual in 13 languages showing me where the aperture button is. That does not make me awesome. There should be a little card in the Canon box that says, congratulations, you made a great purchase. Go to this secret URL and choose which level of photographer you are and we'll give you the best photography instruction videos there are. That's what it should be. Not the manual in black and white. Thirteen languages and this book talks a lot about that. That story is from Kathy's book. Highly recommend it. She talks about our opportunity is to actually deliver on these huge promises. So redefine what you really sell. Just say, what are the words? What does my customer see as Super Mario 4 is? What is the fear that prevents action? Why might they say no? What might prevent them from saying yes again? This is not rocket science. This is not stuff you guys haven't heard before. But sitting down and saying, how are they going to say no? What are they going to say no? You have to ask, you have to talk to them and listen and use your words. There's no better words than the words that come out of your customer's mouth. This is an email sent by a friend of mine and one of my favorite marketers. He's an Internet marketer. That is whatever the most sleazy Internet marketer is. Paul Jarvis is the least sleazy Internet marketer. He just makes awesome stuff with amazing design. This particular thing, he made a. He made a thing called Chimp Essentials. So he's probably the most power user of mailchimp in the world. And mailchimp doesn't do things like infusionsoft and all the segmentation and funnels and stuff out of the box. But Paul knows code and he figured out how to do it. So he was teaching people how to kind of hack mailchimp to do what it wants. Because a lot of his people are on mailchimp because he knows that data and he looks at that. So he launched his thing and this was the email he sent out afterwards. And again, I'll give this to Joe and send it out. He literally just said.

What do you.

Need the most help with in regard to your mailing list, et cetera, et cetera. Curious. Why didn't you join Chip Essentials? Timing. Not what you're looking for. Using a different platform, something else. So he gave him some prompts and some nuggets, some open ended stuff to respond with. He said, there's no sales pitch here. In fact, the course is currently closed for months. But I just genuinely like to know so I can improve the product or change up the messaging. He's literally just saying, I want to make. Did I not explain something to you or are you just not in the market? Maybe there's lots of people on Puzzlist who use a totally different platform. And think about if he gets that information and the person says, no, I don't use Mailchimp, I use ConvertKit. Well, now he can put them in a bucket and segment them so that he doesn't bother them with out marketing next time. This doesn't have to be extremely difficult. So the next takeaway. Ask people nicely why maybe they didn't buy. This is the simplest thing that a lot of us don't do. When do you expect people to take action? If the answer is now, what keeps them from saying later? This is urgency, right? Or scarcity. It's always safer for them to act later. Everyone's favorite day to buy anything is the same day tomorrow. Crowdfunding is fortunate in that it has built in urgency. Crowdfunding campaigns expire typically after 30 days. And then you can do pushes with 24 hours to go and things like that. So it doesn't mean everything always has to be a traffic jam of ambulances and everything's on sale and fire sale and everything else. But you do have to figure out, is it okay if they don't buy today? And if you want them to buy, how can you create that? So take away. Understand your version. Understand what will make them move to purchase? Why will they choose you? This is one of my favorite pieces. So old classic marketing book. But again, like Brian Kurtz talked about some of the fundamentals that we don't often do. Positioning. Super simple. This takes an hour with your team. Draw a simple XY graph. One of the best marketing books of all time. But now you don't even have to read it. Choose opposite adjectives. Fast and slow. Cheap and expensive. Exclusive and open. Disposable, durable, elegant, functional. Opposite adjectives. There's no right or wrong answers here. They're just different, right? Walmart one cheap. Amazon one cheap. FedEx is happy to be expensive. Even more so. Tiffany or Louis Vuitton are happy to be expensive. That's part of the brand. And so choose because there's different people looking for different things. So write down your opposite adjectives. The campaign on the right, on the top right, Jake Bronstein ran a campaign, a crowdfunding campaign for the 10 year hoodie. So just in the name itself, 10 year hoodie. He's talking durable, right? Also happens to be made in America because he was positioning himself against Zara and H and M, which he calls fast fashion, disposable, made overseas. It's fine if you want that. If you want an $8 blouse that falls apart. His opening line of his Kickstarter video was brilliant. You hit play and immediately Jake's looking right into the camera and he said, can I tell you a secret? I Don't know if anyone's ever said no to that question. Right. Can I tell you a secret? No, I'm good. I heard a bunch of secrets this morning. Of course. So then you lean in. You don't even know if you watch people watch this video, they lean in. He said the clothes you're wearing were designed to fall apart. So in one line, he's instantly positioning against that. And then of course, he gets to the show of the factory in 10 years and it's just like your grandma. And if it tears or rips, send it to us and we'll sew it just like your grandma would. Brilliant positioning. Raised over a million dollars with one sweatshirt that nobody actually needed. Here's the Soma water pitcher filter. We talked about that. The positioning for Soma, Elegant, eco friendly. Right. We worry so much about the flowers and the functionality and what it's actually going to do. Oh, does it filter the water as good? Well, that's part of it. That's part of the story. And how you tell that story matters, but it's more about what it looks like on your table. Elegant and eco friendly. And when you tell that story, this product didn't even exist before most people saw it the first time. But then they said, I'm the kind of person who serves water out of a Soma. So elegant and eco friendly. And he went around and around on the positioning on this. It's really important to do this positioning, right? I know we think some of this stuff is like, yeah, yeah, I know. I'm going to skip it. Well, he was 100% funded in 10 days, 147% funded overall. The positioning words give you differentiation against your competitors. It informs your video and your copy and your marketing whether you're doing crowdfunding or not. Those words and it also. I'll show you this informs press and bloggers. The media needs words to write about you. One of the things any press wants to know, why are you different from the sea of sameness? So this was the headline in Fast Company when they wrote about Soma being one of the 25 most audacious companies. The headline is purer than pure, more elegant than Brita. You remember those words, Purer than pure, elegant, eco friendly. Actually, the sub headline says of the article, soma is taking on the big guys with an elegant eco friendly water filtration system by doing the positioning correctly. They wrote the headline and the sub headline for the press. Got it. Take away. Own a unique position like Soma. You don't have to create a product like kdeo, they made a glass carafe that filters water. But you have to nail the positioning. So fill out your XY positioning grid. Like I said. Get your team together and then again, talk to your customers. Listen to their words. What do they think of your product or service? What will they tell their friends? How will the story spread? Because the story has to spread. None of us in this room have marketing budgets to reach individual people. If it doesn't spread from person to person, you will lose. If you don't get referrals, you will lose. If you don't get word of mouth, you will lose. And then what's the trigger event? When will that happen? Think through that. Think through the trigger event. What are the words that they will use when you're not in the room, when you're thousands of miles away or you've never met them because they bought from your website, how will they feel? Will they feel smarter? Will they feel in the know? Will they feel like an early adopter? Because we're all different. We buy portable stories. So, Kiddio, very simple. Do you want to grab? Sure. How does the story spread for Kidio? What's the trigger event for Kidio? When Jessica, our avatar, is at work at our creative agency and she gets out her phone while she's eating lunch at her desk to play with her cat using Kiddio and a co worker walks by or she's at a party, she's like, check this out. And she pulls up her phone, she's going to show cat lovers and they're going to see it. So that's pretty easy to say. Check this out is the verb. That's the language. Soma. When you have a dinner party with 12 people and you get out your soma, that's not a Brita. What do you think? One out of 12 people asks, Whoa, that's cool. What is that? Or this is my favorite example. Obviously it's not crowdfunded, but we all know Dave and Bulletproof. Putting butter in your coffee may be the best trigger event of all time. Bulletproof coffee, because people, a lot of people consume, you know, a lot of us consume coffee individually and by ourselves when we're by ourselves. But it's also a very social thing, right? Starbucks created a third place and created a super valuable company having us congregate around coffee. What Dave did was he this. Putting butter in your coffee is such an amazing trigger event. Because if I know about bulletproof and I'm at Charles's house and he does that I go, whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you doing? What is that? What are you putting butter in the coffee? Think about that. And then what happens? That's the trigger event. Now what are the words? What are the conversation? Charles says, oh, let me tell you about good fats. Because you don't know because you haven't been told. You haven't been enlightened. And now Charles works for Dave. Even if they've never met. How do you design your marketing and your trigger events and your words so that you employ millions of marketers that you've never met? It's worth thinking through those conversations that are going to happen when you're not there, because you can't always be there. There's one other non crowdfunding story, but one of my favorite brands and companies in recent years. So this is a Coleman cooler that any of us can go buy at Walmart for $30. Even the five day coolers are like $30 now. So coolers are a commodity, right? Can't make money selling a cooler. Does anyone know this brand? Don't say it. You do. 2, 3, 4, 5. Okay, five of us know this brand. I did a white out over the name. The name is in like bold black Helvetic. It's called Yeti coolers. Yeti coolers cost 10 times as much as the five day Coleman cooler. They're not. At Walmart, they cost 250 to $300. They're not 10 times better. If the five day coolers, it doesn't keep your stuff cold for 50 days. So how can they charge 10 times as much? Yeti sells a lot of coolers in the state of Texas. Guys in Texas have that conversation with other guys in Texas about how tough their cooler is. If they both have yetis, they just nod and say they recognize each other in the way that Harley riders nod and recognize each other. But if one guy has a yeti and the other guy doesn't, it's just like the bulletproof conversation they say. Exactly right. Chuck Norris proof. They say it's grizzly proof. That's one of the things people say about Yeti coolers. But there's an interesting thing. There's not a grizzly bear within a thousand miles of Texas, but yet that's what they say. And it's a $450 million brand of coolers. Because they nailed it. Because they nailed the story. The product, it's got black rubber hole. I mean, the product is cool, it's better, but it's not 10. I mean, the functionality isn't 10 times better. They're selling the story and the Super Mario. And so I read this article. I was fascinated by it because I always love brand stories and understanding marketing. I was talking to my dad. My dad went on a fishing and hunting trip in Arkansas. And I said, dad, have you ever heard of yeti coolers? Because we certainly didn't have them in our family. He said, I hadn't until I went on this trip to Arkansas. And he said, you're not a good old boy fishing and hunting guide in Arkansas if you don't have a yeti filled with Bud Light or Budweiser in the front of your Ford F150. So this is not a luxury item. It's 10 times as much as the competition, but it's not a luxury item. This is guys banging around in pickup trucks taking people hunting. They built a creative, a brand because they told the story and they understood their trigger event. Their trigger event is, what's that? What kind of cooler is that in the truck? So tell a story that lets you charge 10x more. Don't worry about trying to figure out if you're worrying about, are you as cheap as your competitor. It's much better to figure out how to tell a story that lets you increase the price. Define your portable story. Define your trigger event. Learn what they'll say and learn how that makes them feel. So then, number eight, you'll see how they become aware of what you have to offer. The biggest thing. How will they hear about you? Who do they already know like and trust? And how do they hear about other things that they buy? The biggest point of this whole thing is this is number eight. This is not number one. We always launch a new thing and then we say, how do we get the word out? I always hate that when people come to me over crowdfunding, I have a problem. I didn't get the word out. No, you didn't do one through seven. Because once you do one through seven, eight becomes obvious. So again, Lee Miller with kdeo. This was the landing page we built. This was one tactic. Now, if this works for you, steal it. What he did is he went to Facebook groups, Facebook pages where housewives had never monetized it at all. And he went to them and he said, this is kiddio. What do you think? Every cat lover loves kdio. So these women had just been posting funny pictures, cats, GIFs, GIFs for years. And they have, let's say, 50,000 likes. But it's not a business. It's Just a silly little cat page. So he said, would you post about this if I give you $50? And they said, absolutely. He said, can I give you another hundred dollars to boost that post? And it worked because we knew the landing page converted when it was relevant people. But his Facebook ad spend was much more efficient because it was the woman who owned the page posting it herself and then boosting that post. He didn't have to pay Facebook's tax to find those people. So that was one example. This is one of my favorite stories. House Panther, the tagline for House Panther. This website is the premier online magazine for design conscious cat people. This site is designed within reach for cat freaks. When he promoted it here, he got 2,000 emails in a weekend doing a simple giveaway. All the right people, highly targeted leads who'd seen it. Here's a little ninja trick. If you find a relevant website like House Panther, you can use a tool called Similar Web to punch that in and SimilarWeb will happily tell you what are other sites. So from HousePanther, he can find Modern Cat, he can find Shredmycouch.com that's where people go after their own House Panther real quick. Flash Press versus Cash Press. If I offered most of you, would you rather have your product on the View with Whoopi Goldberg or on a little niche blog called House Panther? Most of you would choose the View and most of you would be wrong because they were on the View. It was one of Whoopi's favorite things and you couldn't even notice the blip. You remember the Brody Jenner tweeting about it. Big Press. It doesn't mean that Big Press is worthless or it never works. But again, what do people go to Whoopi for? Not design conscious cat products. That's what they go to HousePanther for. So understand the difference between FlashPress and cache press. Find your customers, build permission, find your site that's HousePanther and then plop it into SimilarWeb and find 10 other sites and then keep going. And know what the different types of press are good for? How will you know what it's working? What defines success? What is your champagne moment? If a year from now, if you drink champagne, what would cause that to happen? Is everyone in agreement on what success means? The champagne celebrations in baseball. Baseball players are never confused whether their season was a success or not. At the end, they either pop champagne if they win the pennant or the World Series or they don't. I think the champagne celebrations is the Cubs. They get more and more. You know they're getting more champagne than Yogi Berra. But these are grown men wearing goggles spraying perfectly good and expensive champagne all over each other just to celebrate a very specific victory. What I want you guys to do is write your marketing goals down in such a way that a year from now, you're willing to celebrate with champagne. So define your champagne moment. Get everyone on board. I see this all the time in companies and brands and startups. They have different goals and different champagne moments and they don't even know each other's goal. So now take this crew team and flip two of them around. That boat's not going anywhere. Everybody's got to be rolling towards the same goal. And please, please, it's the end of 2016. Can we please stop caring about vanity metrics? Like, number of Twitter followers is one of the worst marketing metrics. Now in 2016, it used to mean a little bit more, but again, people come to me and they say, oh, I'll be fine, clay. I have 30,000 Twitter followers. I was like, cool, good luck with that. See how many actually even see your tweet. Click on the link, buy your product, doesn't matter. Ignore vanity metrics. Figure out what your real metrics are. Avinash Kaushik, one of the best marketers at Google, he says, how idiots track success. That's hits. So then he came up with this. And I'll include this in the deck I send out to Joe. This is my favorite framework. This, when I work with companies, this is what we build out because it's often more than one metric, the bigger the company is. You do have multiple metrics. But see, think do solves the brand marketing and direct marketing problem. Long story short, brand marketing is a Mercedes billboard. Doesn't mean that it doesn't work. It means that it's not trackable. Mercedes needs you to see the brand as luxurious for 30 years so that when you can afford a Mercedes or Tesla, then you buy that. So I'm not saying all brand and impression doesn't work. Gary Vaynerchuk doesn't get speaking gigs because he's got the best optimized funnel or even the best headline. He gets them because he's Gary Vaynerchuk. That's brand marketing. Direct marketing is what most of us in this room do a lot is funnels and emails and conversion and all that other stuff. They're both important. But this framework, see, Think, do and then care shows how to integrate those across a company. I love powerful one page frameworks. Just like the positioning grid and the lean canvas, this is a super powerful one page marketing framework. Understand your customer lifetime value. At one point in Amazon's growth, Jeff Bezos had all hands meeting and he said go get all the customers you can for $82. Because he knew that a customer at that time was worth $82 to Amazon. So he said, I don't care how you get them, here's $82. If it costs 83, we don't want them because he knew his customer lifetime value. So define specific goals, know your champagne moment, your customer lifetime value and measure your marketing fairly with the See Think do framework. If you type cthink do into Google and hit images, you'll see that image and then last. How will you iterate and learn? How can you build this into, you know, build these 10 questions into your company so that you can revisit them and test and learn the best marketers I know small how can you have these little micro failures? Right? So yes, Joe Pulitzer was a great marketer, but this is a room full of great marketers. And yes, Joel Pulitzer had a newspaper. But you guys have access to the tools and apps and connection machines that Joe Pulitzer could not even dream of. So Joe said when he was funding the base of the Statue of Liberty, let us not wait. And so that's what I'm imploring you guys to do today. Let us not wait. Thank you.

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