How To Use Crowdfunding To Increase Your Reach And Define Your Customers With Slava Rubin - I Love Marketing Episode #211

I'm dean jackson, he's joe polish.

And this is the I love marketing podcast. Co founder of indiegogo, which is currently the largest crowdfund platform in the world. And he played a crucial role in establishing the SEC for crowdfunding rules. And he founded Musicians Against Myeloma. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. And it's an annual charity event that raises money for cancer research. He's going to talk about why entrepreneurs should care about crowdfunding. And today is especially a very special day, which Slava is going to tell you all about. So give it up for Slava Rubin. Thank you, sir.

All right, thank you for having me, Joe and Peter. There we go. Thank you. This is very exciting. So we'll start off by letting you know that my dad died of cancer when I was a kid. So what does that have to do with anything? Let's just press forward and we can see where that goes. So the title of this presentation is why Entrepreneurs Should Care about Indiegogo. I think some of you were actually just nice because it was who enjoyed Peter's comments. I think some of you actually weren't going to raise your hands. I think some of you just raised your hand because Peter was in the question. I bet you some of you were saying, I already make a million dollars of revenue. I make $5 million. I make $100 million. Whatever it is, crowdfunding is for those young guns, those brand new things, those things that aren't so certain. So what's that have to do with me? I'm just betting you don't have to tell me if it's true or not. I've heard it already many times. So by the end of my remaining nine minutes, I'll explain to you the reasons why every single person in this room should care about Indiegogo and crowdfunding. There are certain topics that we're not going to cover. We're not going to cover how you can have a great campaign. We're not going to cover how this all launched. We're not going to talk about equity crowdfunding. I can give you lots of different talks. None of those things are going to happen. So we're just going to talk about why you should care about this, and we're going to use examples. So what is crowdfunding? It's pretty simple, right? It's just the pooling of funds. Lots of little nuggets of money, little nuggets of money to come together to make a big nugget of money to make some idea happen. And often you use rewards or perks in return for those different levels of funding. Okay, there's crowdsourcing. You can crowdsource anything. You can crowdsource videos, ideas, movies, words. This is crowdsourcing of funding, which is crowdfunding. Two images, pretty simple here. The one on the left, Statue of Liberty. The one on the right. Anybody? All right, this is good. The one on the left is the Statue of Liberty. The Statue of Liberty is one of the early examples of really great crowdfunding through technology. The base was not free. The statue was free. The base cost 300,000 US and private investors were able to pay for the first half, but the second half, they weren't available. So the technology at the time was the newspaper. And Joseph Pulitzer, who worked at the New World, which is the precedent to the New York Times, reached out through the technology and asked people to give money if they cared about this symbol of liberty. The amazing thing is not that it got funded, because it did, but the technology was used for just its local radius, obviously, and the average contribution was $0.83 to raise $150,000. It just shows you that the crowd was already ready to do this, and they reached out to the newspaper a few times over a few weeks. Now, if you can use a newspaper which just has its limited technology reach, imagine what you can do 140 years later with the Internet. And the reason today is a special day, and I'm especially smiley today, is because the product on the right is the Ubuntu Edge, which is made by Canonical, which is a huge company already. The founder is like a 500 millionaire. And I think you said, Peter, the second client ever going to space. So this isn't some joke of a company. They're serious and they're on Indiegogo. And today, unless it falls off the wagon, will become the largest funding project in the history of the world. On Indiegogo, $10.3 million will be hit today, and it'll just keep going because they're looking to raise $32 million to create the ultimate phone. See, their theory is that in the car industry, you have vanilla cars, Hondas and BMWs and whatever, and everybody drives vanilla cars. But if you're super cool, you work on the most innovative edge, and you drive a Formula one race car, right? And that trickles down to vanilla world. But in the phone world, we think we have cool phones, but obviously. But actually, we're all driving around in vanilla phones. So this company is like, I'm going to create the sickest, coolest phone ever. Do a one time run. You can only get it through Indiegogo. And they're actually up to $10.3 million just to give you one spec on it. The glass doesn't scratch unless you scratch it with a diamond or markup just to give you one spec. Right. So you go from Statue of Liberty to the Ubuntu edge. And now how is this relevant to you? So we'll give you a really quick history of funding because the other things are much more important. This can really go for half an hour or an hour. You go from the Statue of Liberty to. Then you have 1933, the securities act law is signed where you have to have accredited investors. The SEC is created. Before that, grandma was getting stolen money from her because people were going door to door in Maryland, everywhere, saying there was gas in Oklahoma, but really there was no gas and they just stole the money. Grandma was upset. She spoke to her local constituent, said, I'm getting yelled at, we gotta do something. Let's create the SEC so grandma can't get upset. So that's Roosevelt signing it. That's 1933. We now have the SEC. You move forward, you get big banks, you move forward, you get credit cards get created, you get moved forward, you have one of the first next crowdfunding technology. NPR uses the radio. You move forward, you get PayPal, you now have distribution of money. You move forward, you get FriendStar, first social network, unless you want to call the globe. But really, whatever you want to say, you move forward, you get the Obama campaign politics, raising over a million dollars a day and sub $1,000 contributions through people, which is the first time that ever happens. You move forward, you get Indiegogo, you then get square. Point is you get the Ubuntu campaign, we can move forward. Okay, so we have indiegogo. So my dad died of cancer when I was a kid. I met up 10 years later, I actually started my own charity called Music Against Myeloma because I was an Eastern European who suppresses his emotions. And 10 years later I said I had to do something about it. It was to. It was actually really challenging to use the Internet to raise money. And I'm a technologist, I think, and I was using, you know, MySpace and PayPal. It really sucked. So I met up with two other folks, one my best friend and another person. We shared our experiences. One was on the board of a theater company, the other one was working with different filmmakers and entrepreneurs. And they said, wow, you have a frustration trying to raise money too. Yeah, I'm trying to use the Internet. Oh, this sucks. EBay's cool. YouTube's cool. Why isn't there just an open platform? You can just raise money where no gatekeeper gets to decide anything. Oh, that's obvious. Why don't we start it? So we started. So we started in 2007. Now we're the world's largest we just fast forward. Boom. Okay, fine. So today's gonna be the largest campaign in the history of the world. So this is actually why we're here. I have three and a half minutes left. So you have market validation. Testing your market Extra promotion, capturing your day. And the money. You think it's the money, but the money's not the most important because actually you have opened a cat cafe in London. What are we talking about? Imagine the ridiculousness if somebody said, I'm gonna open up a cafe that has stray cats hanging out. We're gonna keep them there. And. And the reason you want to go there is because you can't keep a pet at home. So you want to hang out with a pet somewhere and I want to drink coffee or tea and hang out with a cat. Yeah, you're going to invest in that, right? So they put it on Indiegogo and actually got funded. Market validation was there. They wanted to raise £108,000. They raised it. They got 109. What about if you want to test your marketing? So the former CEO of Apple is actually part of this team. They created one of these activity trackers. It's beautiful. It's like a fashion statement. Also John Scully, former CEO of Apple. Also Sunny Vu, an incredible entrepreneur. He's done medical hardware multiple times. So go on to Indiegogo. They wanted to raise $100,000. They were able to raise 846. The point there is not the money. The point there is they were able to find out that black they could charge a premium for. They were able to find out that accessories are things that people want to pay more for and they can get higher margin. These are all things that you're testing your marketing as to how it works. They don't need money. They have $7 million of VC money. They have John Scully. They have CEO of Apple. They don't need Indiegogo. You follow the way some of you are thinking, but they need Indiegogo. Cause the only way you find this out without wasting money and time is Indiegogo. Extra promotion. This is Shemar Moore. Already got plenty of accolades in the media world on tv, some of you think he's really cute. You're like, oh yeah, I watch him on tv, he's great. So he doesn't need to use Indiegogo, but he does because he comes on because we help amplify his reach. He raised the money he needed after he went on to a competitor. He tried to raise the money on a competitor, he failed. He came out to Indiegogo, he raised four times more money. Capture the data. This band's been around for decades. They don't know their customers. They've been around for decades, toured the world three times. They don't know their customers because there's always mediators in between. So they went on to Indiegogo after they dropped their label because their labels were not being nice and they captured all the data and now they're going on tour. And you know what happened next? Actually, the labels all came crawling back and now they got better terms and they now have the data. And of course there's money. These guys want to raise 70 grand for this little quarter sized device, which is GPS tracking. So imagine you put this on your keys. So you never lose your keys. You put it on your cell phone, you put it on your remote. You lose your remote, you lose your socks, you lose your wife. You just use your phone to just track where it is. That's exactly what happens. It's cool. So they just wanted to raise 70 grand. They raised 930. First time entrepreneur. I'm actually done.