How You Can Use Crowdfunding To Grow Your Business With Chance Barnett and Rafe Furst - I Love Marketing Episode #206

I'm dean jackson, he's joe polish, and this is the I love marketing podcast.

Everybody.

It's D. Dean Jackson and Joe Polish.

And welcome to a special episode of I Love Marketing. But they're all special episodes, aren't they, Dean? They really are.

They're all special to me. Like. That's right. Yeah, yeah.

Some people we have are smarter than others, though. So we'll see. We got two special guests here, one by the name of Chance Barnett, he and Rafirst R a F E and they are basically the Co founders of Crowdfunder.com Crowdfunder.com so let me real quickly explain who these two are and then we will ask them some questions. So Chance Barnett, he's currently the co founder and CEO of Crowdfunder.com, the leading equity crowdfunding platform that works with influencers and celebrities and transforms their social influence into financial capital. And so while Kickstarter allows people to pre purchase and donate to projects, Crowdfunder allows people to become actual shareholders and owners in great startups and businesses. And Rafe first, which is R a F e last name, First, F u r S T is an entrepreneur, impact investor, writer, producer and poker player. He's co founder of Crowdfunder and advises many projects that involve technology and social entrepreneurship. First has spoken about transformation of early stage finance at TED, and in 2006, he won a World Series of Poker championship bracelet, something that you, Dean Jackson, have never done. Okay. In 2011 there's a book titled Shake the World featuring first, along with other business and nonprofit leaders, described him as the 21st century polymath, which I had to actually go and look the term polymath up online and try to figure out what the hell that meant. But suffice it to say, he's considered like a really smart dude. So Chance and Rafe, first off, welcome to I love marketing. I know you guys are on a very limited time frame, so we're just going to. This is kind of going to be an introduction to what Crowdfunder is and who you guys are. And we may do a longer episode with you guys in the future. But I mean, whoever wants to start first, tell us a little bit about Crowdfunder and how did you guys start this and how do you explain it to people so they get it?

Ray Falhauff and First, how we ended up starting it. Crowdfunder actually came out of a legislative and policy initiative that gained momentum in Washington, D.C. around 2011. And to make a long story short, there, there was really the idea at the time that entrepreneurs and small business owners around the US should have an easier time finding support and finance from investors and should be allowed to use the Internet, as crazy as that sounds. And as a little known fact in 1934, something called the securities Exchange act, you were actually prevented from advertising and mentioning the fact that you're raising money for a private company. Fast forward to today and the world has changed a lot. We have access to information, fairly transparent way of accessing information and sharing information over the web. But finance had not caught up to what the world was doing. So long story short, a small group of people got together in Washington D.C. and decided it was time to help change the laws. I and a few other people, including Rafe, were supporters of this and had been involved in startups and angel investing and venture finance a bit previously and had our host of successes and failures as entrepreneurs. So we took our voices to the hill alongside some other people and in a perfect storm of collaboration between two parties, some amazing laws were passed, a portion of which was called the JOBS Act. Rafe and I actually connected, reconnected during that process while we were supporting the legislation. And I literally bumped into him, having known him from several years prior at a a rally around the laws that would become the crowdfunding laws. And I said, hey man, what are you doing? Good to see you. And he said, well, I was working on this thing. I invested in this great company that was going to do equity crowdfunding that's had some twists and turns. I'm thinking about starting my own thing. What are you doing? And I said, well, I just bought this domain called crowdfunder.com. and he said, well, let's talk. And the rest was history. Fast forward to today, four years later. We have a great business. As you know, it's really incredible and amazing and important to have a great co founder and Rafe's leading our investments at Crowdfunder. Rafe, anything to add there?

No, you did a fantastic job. You saved me from it.

Good.

Well, which one of you guys is actually the really the smartest one out of the two of you?

We'll have to do one of those tests like in Princess Bride to figure it out.

Okay, so how many people actually have been on the platform and have successfully funded their companies and businesses and ideas as a result of Crowdfunder so far?

Yeah, so I'll take that one. As of Today we have 51 tombstones that's fully successfully funded deals, but we also have hundreds of more companies that have raised some amount of money by Being on Crowdfunder. So all told, over $93 million in 18 months has been garnered in terms of reservations for investment through the Crowdfunder platform, both online and offline.

That's pretty awesome. That's pretty. Now I see this as, it kind of reminds me like when I interviewed my buddy Matt Mullenwig, who's the founder of WordPress several years ago when he had 13 million websites using WordPress and someone had offered him a quarter billion dollars for his company. And now of course, it's worth much, much more than that. But I see this as like going, huh, It'd be interesting 10 years out. Where do you see this 10 years out? Like not only your company, but crowdfunding as a means of building, growing a company and this whole new method of starting. And even, you know, it's not even just about startups. It could be about any existing business that's wanting to. I mean, there's so many applications of this. But what do you think is going to happen over the next decade?

So this is the thing, I think, and Rafe can speak to it maybe from the investors perspective, which what he really focuses on in Crowdfunder. And I'll focus on it for a minute. From the entrepreneur's perspective, I see that the world has changed and continues to change for entrepreneurs. It was 15, 20 years ago that the notion that anyone who didn't have an MBA and hadn't already been a CEO of a big company, that person really didn't have the right, the credibility or the stature to go and start their own company and get outside investment to start it and run it. And not only that, but it might have cost several million dollars just to have a website. You had to host it on a giant server. Fast forward to today and you have this amazing economy that's been built around helping people start businesses for very low cost, no cost, and capital has become almost superfluous to, to anything relative to what it used to be. It used to be very difficult to raise even a million dollars. Now we're seeing rounds that are at the same stage, what used to be a million dollars that are 10 or 20 million dollars. So in some ways capital is becoming a commodity, especially as it's moving on the platform. And you combine that with changes in legislation, this culture of startups and entrepreneurship that is pretty global. It's not even just in the US right now. And then you also look at how many small businesses there's roughly estimated In, I think 2013, according to the Census Bureau, 28 million entrepreneurs in the U.S. alone and about a little over half a million that are minted each month. So you have this enormous tidal wave of change in the makeup of our economy and how people are going about earning a living, how they think about their lives and their jobs, and then how they add value to the economy and other people. And so where we sit, where we see the future, is that people have more control and a destiny over where they go as individuals and as professionals. And entrepreneurship is at the heart of that. And to help these entrepreneurs, finance is one of the essential keys. And our mission is really about democratizing the ability to go out and get support from great people and to get enough capital to get off the ground. Whether you're a first time entrepreneur or you someone who's done it before, now you have a great way to communicate that and a centralized platform to stake your claim, to tell your story, and to invite other investors to join you to participate in the upside.

Yeah, that's awesome.

Does this change the way things work? Guys with accredited investors or all the people who want to invest in companies still have to have the same qualifications of being an accredited investor, or is that more relaxed with this kind of a situation?

Want me to answer that? One chance.

Go for it. Yeah.

So as of today, you have to be what's known as an accredited investor to be able to invest in these early stage companies. But come June 19th of this year, non accrediteds will be able to participate for the first time in the 80 some odd years since the SEC was created and the securities Act 1933. So it's a really exciting time where access to incredible opportunities, investment opportunities, and potentially high returns are being democratized.

Really.

So it's exciting. I'm just giving you a look at what the potential is for everyday investors. Joe, you actually frame this perfectly with a hypothetical. At the top of the call, you said, if he had $25,000 to invest each year for the next 10 years, what would you do with that in order to produce a great return? And I know exactly what I would do with it because I know the numbers from angel investing over the last 35 years. If you had invested in every deal that got funded that was investable, your annualized return on investment would have been 28%. Now, you put that in perspective in the stock market, you're looking at about 9, 10%. And you know, money markets are close to 0%. So it's a pretty incredible asset class that's just now coming online, literally and also figuratively for everyday investors to participate, not Just the wealthy with incredible access.

And don't forget the unicorns.

Well, everybody wants a unicorn.

The unicorns.

How could we forget the unicorns?

Yeah. So unicorns, this is great vernacular. We used to call these black swans back in the day, but I guess I'm old school, I'm Gen X. And so the millennials, they call them unicorns. Basically these are the Ubers and the Facebooks of the world, where early investors, people who put the first money in, angel investors, they could put in $25,000 and they could get 1,000 times return on their investment if the company does really well and goes public or has a huge acquisition.

You know, I mean, do you believe that crowdfunder is going to prop up like just a couple of unicorns, or do you think as you build this thing out, it's going to be more attractive to those sort of companies and organizations than other means?

You know, you can't really pick the unicorns ahead of time. That's the other thing that all the data shows. Everybody tries to figure out which ones are going to be the winners, but there's just so much risk. I mean, that's the other thing is you really have to diversify. It's not just about picking these magical unicorns or the winners, but it's about creating a diversified portfolio and a rigorous investment strategy which now, for the first time, because of the law change and because investment is moving online to platforms like Crowdfunder, it actually enables you to do that as if you were a professional investor, even if you're not. But I think to answer your question, unicorns are about one in a thousand venture backed companies become unicorns.

Okay, gotcha. Well, so what are the. I'm looking at this not only for my own projects, for people that listen to our podcast, and different ways of how they can get their companies off the ground, get their ideas off the ground, you know, but also from an investment standpoint, just simply being an investor. So what are some of the risks with equity crowdfunding and what are some of the things, if there are any, that can be done to alleviate some of the risk as people, you know, utilize this?

Well, here's the biggest couple of these. Oh, go ahead, go ahead. Well, I was going to say the.

Biggest risk is that you lose all your money. Right? That's the. On any one investment, you will expect it not to survive. That's just the statistics. So the way around that is it's a diversification. Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

We actually help in A few ways. And this has been part of the legislative change and why we see ourselves and why we're different than asking, say you, Joe, hey, put money into a fund and we'll invest it for you and then you'll get returns. Trust us, what crowdfunder is is a new version of that where instead of going out and doing a couple of investments every year and saying we've got to make 100x return to return money to investors at this 25% yearly rate, what we've done and what our platform allows us to do and what the new laws allow for is we end up getting you the ability to invest, say $5,000 instead of $100,000 or $250,000 or a million dollars to get into a startup deal. Because the economics don't work and a fund wouldn't work if it was investing, say 5,000 do. But you as an individual, when you go and you have the economies of the scalable platform and these deals brought to you, you can get in for as little as 5,000 and spread that across, say 5 deals or 10 deals, however much money you want to invest that year, that increases the likelihood. If you're following, if you have your own thesis that you might have a couple of bigger winners, whether it's singles, doubles or home runs in there, and we give you access to those deals alongside all the information that the VCs are getting, and you get to know which VCs are also investing. And so this literally didn't exist two years ago. You couldn't have gone on the Internet and gotten access to investing alongside some of the most notable venture capitalists in the world. And if you did, you would have to work your way into the club and you'd have to invest a minimum of, say, 100,000 or half a million.

Right, Right. No, it's very fascinating. So what is the crowdfunder business model? How much does it cost to utilize? I mean, you've covered that a little bit, but talk about that. And how does crowdfunder make money? How do you guys actually make money doing what you're doing?

So we operate two parts of our business that are related. I'll say one thing first. What we aren't and what we're excited to not be is change how banking has been done in the world of early stage finance. In the past, if you went to someone to raise money, they would have taken 5 or 10% of the money that were raised. We don't think that really aligns us with investors and entrepreneurs terribly well. Which is why we've chosen a different model that we also think is much more scalable and a more interesting business long term. So what we do on one hand is we have an open platform that is truly democratic for any and all entrepreneurs to come on to pay us a small monthly recurring fee for access to the platform, our tools, and to our investor base where they can run their own campaign and take an investment and manage that process. Right now that's between 300 and $1,000 a month. And if you're successful running a great campaign, as some people are, and take in half a million dollars in a month and a half, that can cost you very little money if you do the math. That's our platform business. And we have about 12, about 25,000 companies that have signed up and created profiles looking to fundraise the other half of our business, which is, for us, long term, more strategic. And what I would say is the other reason why we think we have a tiger by the tail and a big unicorn potential of our own is we're building a long term portfolio for ourselves and our business brief. Do you want to mention how that works?

Yeah. So we have criteria that we look at that fits the profile of our investor base. And if we like a deal and they fit our criteria, we will make them an offer to put them in our, in our portfolio, as Chance said. And so instead of investing our own cash, we invest our expertise, the use of our platform, etc. All those things that Chance mentioned. And we get equity in those deals, just like cash investors. So we align ourselves, as Chance said, with investors and with the entrepreneurs themselves. We don't become successful in that portfolio. There's no upside for us unless the companies do well, which means the investors are going to do well.

Okay.

Hey, Dean, I can keep asking questions, but if you got one, I'll let you.

I know they've got some limited time, but do you have a couple or, you know, particular success story or of something that might give us an idea of how this is actually working for people right now?

Sure, I'll take that one. A pretty fun interesting story was a recent campaign that we closed some investment into a little less than a year ago. And it's a fantastic music product that I happen to love music. I play guitar. I've been a fan of a certain musician for a long time. And he was the creator of a new digital music player that plays much higher quality audio files than traditional MP3s. And that music player was called the Pono Player. And the Founder of that company was a musician named Neil Young, who's a classic rock kind of legend. And Neil's passion is he wants to restore music to the intent that the musician had it when they recorded it. And he feels like because of the digital age, that quality has been lost. So what he did, he went out and created a fantastic digital device and a music store where you can purchase these high quality audio files and play them back and have a much better audio experience and listen to the music the way the artist intended. Well, he knew about crowdfunding, and so he went to a rewards based crowdfunding platform first to validate his idea and to see if customers would really feel the same way that he did about this high quality audio. That platform is called Kickstarter. Kickstarter has been a huge phenomenon for the last four or five years. He was able to raise $6.2 million in pre sales of his Pono Music player on Kickstarter. Incredible response, A huge validation of the idea that there's a market there. And he had a bunch of pre orders and money to fulfill on those, started creating inventory, went into production. Well, then Neil actually saw something else happen in the crowdfunding market which he was interested in by and actually saw as a weird outcome from a prior Kickstarter campaign. And that was a campaign for a company called Oculus Rift. And if you're a gamer, you probably know all about it. It's a really amazing product. They did about $2 million in pre sales where people got to pre purchase the Oculus Rift device. But then a couple years later, they sold the Facebook for $2 billion. And while it's a great outcome for the company, all of the people who participated in the Kickstarter campaign didn't get a dime. And while that was the terms of the Kickstarter campaign was that they weren't investors and they wouldn't receive a return on their investment. Some people in the community felt a little bit shunned. And so Neil Young and his board at Pono saw this and they literally said to us, hey, Crowdfunder, we want to come and we want to offer our community the ability to also be shareholders because we don't want to risk them. We don't want them to be left out in the cold thinking that they were helpers with the product. But they never got the opportunity to buy their way in and truly be a part of this as owners. So that's what we do. Uniquely at Crowdfunder, we work with everyday entrepreneurs on our platform, but we Also take some of the best entrepreneurs in the world with some of the greatest products, and we get involved with their fundraising campaign and we help them through our big network of investors. And then we take all of those investors. And to oversimplify something that's a little bit complex, instead of making these hundreds of people that wanted to invest in Neil Young's Pono Music direct investors in his cap table, we create a vehicle that puts them all in this separate entity, and that's called a special purpose vehicle. And we manage that vehicle for Neil and for Pono. And so those are actually investors in our vehicle. And then we take their investment dollars into the vehicle and we invested in Pono as one investor. So all Neil has to worry about is he has Rafe and I managing the investment into his company as a single investor, and we manage the relationship with all the people who came through the platform who wanted to be shareholders.

That's very cool. That's very cool.

I was going to say some of the videos that Neil did for that, showing people experiencing it and coming out and they're real natural reactions to it, is quite a. Quite a story. But yeah, Joe, you were probably going to ask how people can get started.

What should we do?

What you do?

Here's what I was going to say because both of you guys need to jump because we squeezed this in. And so we're going to continue to talk about you after you hop off the line here. But what action should people take now to familiarize themselves with crowdfunding and to get started with Crowdfunder if they actually want to use your platform and fund their projects or look at it from an investment standpoint so twofold for people that crowdfunding, they've never done it before, they don't know much about it, but they hear about all this buzz. And then secondly, utilizing your platform, do you lay out step by step, everything that people need to know in order to do this? I know there's a lot more that we can talk about and we'll do a future episode and go in more depth when we hear back from our listeners about what their interest is in this particular subject. But if you could. Yeah, just give us some direction on learning about crowdfunding and utilizing Crowdfunder. Sure.

So we built a platform that creates a process and helps everyone learn everything they need to know and all the requirements and all of the success tips about how to successfully crowdfund your company. We have a free learning and education center at Crowdfunder, which is@crowdfunder.com learn and we provide best practices, example campaigns, and even some free templates and from previous investment raises where you can see what other people offer to investors. Anyone can join Crowdfunder for free. You can start building your company profile if you're looking to fundraise and go through the process free. It's not until you're ready to fundraise and want to activate your campaign that you have to start paying. So it's a great way to just get set up, get familiar, learn what you need to know, and get ready for investors. Crowdfunder is entirely free. And so today you have to be an accredited investor to participate and actually invest. But very soon, next month, new regulations. Yeah, just a few more days. Really exciting. Yeah. So I'd also say go check out Rafe's TEDx talk, which I think just personifies the ethos of why we're doing what we're doing and how we love helping entrepreneurs. If you just search for Rafe first and TedX, I think on YouTube, you'd find it more on. Yeah, on YouTube.

We'll link it up too.

Yeah, we'll put the links and everything@ilove marketing.com and for all of our listeners, please check out Crowdfunder. These guys do have to run, so I want to be respectful of their time. But me and Dean will continue to talk about our thoughts on this subject and we will invite both Rafe and Chance, you guys back on a future episode and really appreciate it. And I love the innovation. I love what you're doing and I'm interested in. Maybe we'll come up with some. I love marketing something or other. And we'll go out to all of our listeners and have them give us all a bunch of money so we can do it all together and we can all be one big happy family that's building and growing the most important subject matter on the planet when it comes to growing a business, which is marketing. The other thing too, which you'll learn if you check out Crowdfunder, is that you don't just slap something up on a site. You literally got to do your homework. You got to present it, you got to package it. There's things that you need to do, but you guys actually show people how to lay that out.

It's.

It's pretty awesome. So thank you, guys.

Thank you. Our pleasure. Thank you. I love marketing.

Yes. Awesome.

Yeah.

We'll talk soon, and then me and Dean will continue to share about our insights now that we've had this short conversation. So have a great day and we will Talk again soon, guys. Thank you.

Have a great one.

Okay, Dean, so here we are. What are your thoughts on that? I mean that was sort of like bit a little, little taste of what.

They'Re doing, but it's just a couple of things. So I think that we're really at the epicenter of what's really happening here right now. When we were in LA with Peter Diamandis in January at Abundance360, one of the things that is really shaping the future is this is crowdfunding. I mean it's certainly an incredible vehicle to give people access to capital. And when you look at these companies that they've been talking about like the unicorns and we met Saleem Israel Mail at Abundance, who's the head of Singularity University. And you know, he talks about these things as exponential organizations. And that's really just become a very recent development because I think it was Raif was saying how years ago, even 10 years ago, it cost millions of dollars to build a launch ready website because you had to have banks of servers and you had to have everything all optimized to accommodate all the high level traffic and stuff. And now the technology of starting a company like that is really so inexpensive now and instantly scalable with everything on the cloud, you can start somewhere and expand as quickly and as much as you need. And only, you know, the cost is just incremental to scale exponentially. And having now this piece of the puzzle where all of the capital that is available to be invested is available to you as a resource now. Because the reason I was asking about that accredited investor situation is because, you know, just like they were saying up until next month, only people who had a $250,000 income and net worth qualifications were able to invest in companies. And now you've got people who can invest $5,000 or $10,000 that maybe are not accredited investors but want to take advantage of all these entrepreneurial opportunities and they've got access to it now. So just the pool of capital and the availability of it is really, I think it's going to make it so much faster for companies to grow.

Yeah, yeah, it's going to be an absolute and total game changer. I mean it already is. I mean there's so many companies that have launched and things as a result of this. Now as you know, Slava, one of the founders of Indiegogo, is a good friend of mine and there are all kinds of ways and different platforms that you can utilize and just even on your own to utilize crowdfunding to make something happen. I mean, hell, even with what I've done with contest models, 15 years ago, we crowdfunded or crowd sourced, I should say, different ways to actually make things happen. And I think with this, you're going to see a lot of people starting companies that have never been able to do it before. But you're also going to see, you know, what I don't want to do is paint this picture that, oh, my God, everyone, it's the gold rush now. Everyone's going to get rich. There's going to be a lot of people that are going to be. Hey, hey, hold on, let me finish, let me finish here. So. No, yeah, yeah, no, but I just want to make sure I'm really crystal clear as we put this out there. We want to introduce people to obviously innovations all the time with, I love marketing and there's also risk with all of this. So you have to really, you know, go into this being 100% responsible for the decisions that you are going to make. Just because you hear about something new does not necessarily mean you're going to profit from it. There's going to be a lot of people that are going to want to game the system. There's going to be a lot of people that are going to make great pitches but are not going to have companies that end up working or that are going to have management. That's going to make it a reality. But certainly to not look at this and to not look at different ways that it could be utilized for value creation is insane because there are people that are going to just kick ass and take names as a result of this, including. I think we will. You know, I mean, I'm thinking of this for all kinds of different applications. You know, I mean, I just over. I won't go into detail here on this episode, but, you know, I just spent five days filming, you know, an addiction documentary that I'm doing and creating a platform to help people with addictions. And you know, this just makes me think of, wow, you know, I mean, there's all kinds of ways that I can move that, that cause and that mission forward as a result of just the conversation we had with Chance and Rafe that I didn't really think about before.

And I think that the danger, one of the dangers that's going to come from this is people thinking that this is the magic bullet, that now if they just had more money, that that would solve the problem. But it's really going to be even more important to, if you're a business that is going to take advantage of this to raise money, that you understand that you've got to have the core, right, to have a scalable core before you add money to it, rather than looking at this as an opportunity to raise money to figure out what the core is. And I think that, that that's going to be something if you're going to look at this as an investor too, to be able to really discern the difference, to look for things that are fundamentally working and that adding capital to it is going to accelerate the growth of it. I think getting capital at the right time, time for the right business is, you know, can be a rocket ship, but also getting it too early when they, you know, when you don't have the core figured out, it can just be a death spiral, you know.

Yeah, totally, totally. And you know, I mean, one thing that they said which is really I think kind of important is that when they're talking about Neil Young, how he went to Kickstarter to first even see if the marketplace had interest in it. Now granted, when you're Neil Young, you already have a following.

You have a.

Built in advantage because you're famous and you have a lot of people that love you. So that always helps. Having a community that is behind you, no matter what you would launch, you would have possibility. But there's a lot of people that have used platforms like Indiegogo and Kickstarter to actually see if they've even got a viable idea. Will people back it?

Do they like it?

Do they got the marketing right and the video. This is very much almost like a lot of marketers sell knowledge products and information products and the way they do product launches. Brendan Burchard doing a video series and following up with emails or any of these sort of individuals. Well, Kickstarter in Indiegogo and all these different platforms are very much, it's a marketing game. The people that I've spoken with that have had very successful crowdfunding campaigns have always told me if you don't have the marketing right, it doesn't matter how great the product or service is or the idea. You got to have the marketing right. Now granted, you can use those other platforms to first off, see, well, for one, do people give a shit about it? Are they interested in will they do it? And then if you have a viable thing there, you can actually raise money to a certain stage just to maybe start production or to build it or to film the documentary or do whatever the thing is that you're wanting to fund. But then you can actually look at a platform like crowdfunder to say, okay, now let's get equity partners in this thing. So you're not limited. They will tell you you can also do a portion of your company. This way you can still use angel investors and VC people. I mean, there's, there's all that sort of different ways that you can actually fund, you know, a idea or a company. It's just, this is what is happening right now. And I think 10 years from now we're going to look back and be like, why? Remember when people actually, if they needed to start a company, they had to put up collateral from their, you know, or go to their uncle or whatever. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, you look at all of this, what's enabling all of this, of course, is all these exponential technologies that are becoming available now. One of the things that's fascinating about this particular time in history is that it's never been easier to go from hey, I got an idea to 18 months later with a billion dollar company. I mean, it's insane how this is all happening, I would say, because I've been thinking a lot about this lately. Like, I mean, for people who are going to sort of get into this world and you'd be crazy not to at least become aware of it because it's certainly going to shape the next, you know, the future here is, you know, starting with reading things about what's happening with all these exponential technologies that people are doing, like reading Peter Diamandis books, reading Abundance and reading Bold and reading Saleem Ismail's book on exponential organizations and getting familiar with the landscape of companies that are taking advantage of, of these technologies. They mentioned Airbnb and Uber and you look at those companies that are really, in a lot of ways, they're kind of pass throughs. You look at Airbnb, they don't own any real estate and yet they're if not the largest room night provider. And you look at Uber, which is certainly the largest transportation company and they don't own any cars yet they were able to scale using all these exponential technologies. Right. And crowdfunding is certainly one of those things that's going to make it so much easier to get access to capital now.

Exactly. So what do you think? Just if I had to ask you without any prep whatsoever, if we had to come up with a way to raise money for I love marketing to make everyone that listens to I love marketing a shareholder in something, what would that look like? Or I put that question out to all of the people that listen to it like if you guys had an opportunity, opportunity to have a piece of I love marketing, what would you want it to do? What would you want the company? I mean, I'm just more curious. I clearly have ideas of this as an entity, as an organization, as what it does and how it does it. But I'd be curious to hear any ideas you have, Dean, and more so the people that are actually our listeners.

Yeah, I mean, you know, I think about this a lot. I think the whole. I think the things that we have going for it are. It's a rallyable community. You know, I mean, when you look at the. Just the name. I love marketing. It's outwardly focused, you know, it's rallying and saying to people, you know, you're in the right, right place. And I think that that sort of thing, you know, has so much opportunity, you know, to. For everything under marketing. I look at it like the Martha Stewart Living sort of, you know, opportunity that if you were to look at I love marketing as this overriding thing, all the things that go in into marketing, we've got so much opportunity there.

Yeah, yeah. And plus, you know, I mean, if we could raise a bunch of money and stuff, we could hire more people to do the work for me since, you know, you don't do a lot of work. Come on. You know, I have to turn this into some way to, like, you know, bust on Dean. I mean, I've been too nice. I've been too nice to you this whole. I mean, like, look, I've been dissed on you in at least a couple weeks since.

That's true.

It is.

It must be the brain waves or something that fired. We lost that part of you. You've like all of a sudden come back from Mexico and you're super sweet to me. It makes me uncomfortable, honestly.

No, that's not going to be the case. So. Well, here's what I'd like to do. I would like to follow up with Rafe and Chance and actually do more follow up on Crowdfunder. And I'd like that are listening to this. What's that?

Yeah.

No, it's certainly a topic to have on our radar here.

Well, look, people ask all the time about this, and if someone wants to hear the episode we did with Mike Klein, if you just type in Mike Klein or crowdfunding into the search box@ilovemarketing.com you can hear an entire episode that we have with Mike Klein where he talked about the million and a half dollars that was raised for the, you know, The Arkard Telescope for, you know, planetary resources. And that's been really helpful episode for a lot of people that don't understand, you know, how do you use Kickstarter? How do you do. What is crowdfunding? What's that all about?

And that.

We did that one a year ago, but it's really, really good. And a lot of people have learned a lot about, you know, crowdfunding, like.

Where are the right places to use the different things? Like, when is it, you know, when is it a good idea to use something like Indiegogo or to use something like Kickstarter? And when do you make that shift over to doing something like Crowdfunder? You know, just kind of this. I think this is a nice ongoing theme that we can continue to explore, you know.

Yeah, exactly.

I'd love to hear from our audience, too, of people who have successfully used crowdfunding. You know, how they're using it and where they see the opportunity. Yeah.

And also from people that have done it or have attempted to it and it just flat out failed. And if they could identify what went wrong, did they not have. I mean, what. What were the factors that they think caused it to fail? Because I've spoken with some people that have attempted to do a crowdfunding campaign, and it failed, but then they retooled it, and then it worked. I mean, even if you look at the coolest cooler, who, you know, Brendan is, Brendan Bouchard was very much behind the marketing of that. And it's one of his best friends who I've met. He actually came on a. You know, the creator of that actually came on an X Prize trip that I was on. And their first attempt at launching it, which they ended up bringing in $13 million, they ended up surpassing Pebble Watch. And for a short period of time, it was the top crowdfunded product.

We'll relaunch it again.

Yeah, but they actually. The first time they attempted to do it, it didn't work. So that's also evidence, too, that it's not about the product. I mean, it just isn't about that. Things do not sell themselves. I mean, there's so much truth. And build a better mousetrap. That's not true. You don't build a better mousetrap. I mean, you have to have good marketing. You have to tell the story. You have to communicate it in a way to where people get it, where it connects.

You have to have, I think, most importantly, a good use for the money. A lot of people think, if I could just get some capital. But most of them would use the capital just to give them some breathing room because they're not making their business work right now. And, you know, that's not really the best thing for raising capital. You have to start to think, what would you do if you had access to $100,000 or to $500,000 or a million dollars? Would you be able to deploy that for a multiple? You know.

The biggest and most exciting thing is this now gives you access to things both from an investor standpoint and also from a, you know, investor, an investee and idea launching and, you know, supplementing what I mean just. It just gives you access to things that simply did not exist before. And with the new law now, I mean, that just opens up a whole nother level of opportunities that you can either profit from or that you can not profit from if you're not smart about how you approach it.

I think part of it too, what I'm really excited about is that the opportunity to really, because of this crowd, you know, idea that we're so connected to the crowd now that you can really stay in your lane and you don't have to be all of these. You don't have to be all of the things, you know, you can really be the best thing that you are in your lane and have other people, you know, connecting with other people who are. Bring the other. Other pieces of it. You know, you look at another book that I would recommend for getting kind of this landscape together. I read Peter Thiel book 0 to 1.

0 to 1.

Yeah. Have you read that?

Yes.

Yeah. Which is really. It was an interesting thing, you know, of really. There's a difference between going from nothing to something. Being an idea generator. I mean, almost breaks down to ideas and execution in a way. Like, going from 0 to 1 is a different thing than going from 1 to n. Expanding all the way. Like, the example he uses is going from not having a typewriter to inventing and creating a typewriter, and then that's 0 to 1 and 1 to N is now taking the typewriter and turning that into an industry. You know, that. And it's. I think people have different skill sets, you know, and different affinities that they feel more comfortable with. One versus the other, you know.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Okay. So for timing purposes, this will be. This will be one of our episodes with it. We really want to crowdsource some comments and have people share with us what it is that they. What they think of this, what their. How they're going to utilize it any questions that they would want us to ask Chance and Rafe in the future. And we'll go ahead and schedule, get.

The questions in the comments, and we'll bring them back on and get their questions answered.

Okay, cool. Well, that was a very interesting episode, Dean. So any famous last words?

I'm excited. It's getting really cool.

Okay, awesome.

All right, everyone. Me and Dean will talk with you on the next episode of I love Marketing. Make sure that you subscribe to I love Marketing on itunes or anywhere. You can go to our website and you can subscribe if you'd like, or go to itunes and do it and share it with anyone that you think needs to hear this. And spread the love. Spread the love. We'll talk to you next time. Have a great day.

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