The One About CrowdFunding With Mike Cline - I Love Marketing With Joe Polish And Dean Jackson - Episode #119

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

Hey, everybody, it's Dean Jackson and Joe.

Polish and a very special guest by the name of Mike Klein. C L I N E. What's up, Mike? How are you doing, man?

I'm doing well.

Awesome. Okay, well, here's the deal. For people that don't know who Mike is, he's a good friend of ours. We've known him for quite a few years. Well, enough years to say we're friends, but basically Mike actually spoke at the very first I Love Marketing conference, gave a short talk. And Mike never has put himself out there as a speaker, quote unquote, teacher, guru. Although behind the scenes, his company, Tech Guys who Get Marketing, which is what it's called, Tech Guys who Get Marketing, is literally behind many very successful companies, organizations, authors, things like that. He's currently doing work for Tony Robbins database and all that sort of stuff, and Planetary Resources, the asteroid mining company, Peter Diamandis, and a whole slew of rigid famous entrepreneurs. Dean, before I start asking Mike about what his definition of marketing is, why he named his company Tech Guys who Get Marketing, stuff like that, is there anything you want to say or mention about him or ask him?

Before I started, I've always, always loved the name of his company because it's crystal clear, isn't it? Tech Guys who Get Marketing. How could you not love that? Exactly.

How could you not love that?

So what's that all about?

I mean, how did, how did you come up with the name Tech Guys who Get Marketing?

The actual brand name, Tech Guys who Get Marketing? It actually came out of a conversation with Dan Sullivan, of all people, and I was trying to explain to him specifically what we focused on, which was kind of the way I say it is that we help people build and optimize online sales and online marketing processes generate more revenue. It's funny, just trying to bring the two worlds together of the technical side of it, but we understand the marketing processes, so we're kind of like tech guys that really understand marketing. And I remember David literally said, well, why don't you think about calling yourself that? And it was kind of an aha. Like, that's a good idea. Well, you know, I love that Dan.

Had something to do with that. That makes it even better.

Dan is a genius. We all know that. Plus, I should mention that Mike is in the Genius Network mastermind, our 25k group, which is where he gets all his friends. Also, he's been on a couple of the necker island trips that we've done. And there was one that I really need to point out before we kind of get into the topics of this episode, which is he actually gave a presentation with Richard Branson there in the room watching this about how to basically make, I guess, Star Trek a reality. I mean, you are totally into space. You are a big thinker. You understand all kinds of stuff about platforms and crowdsourcing and crowdfunding and marketing campaigns and follow up and databases and all this crazy technical stuff. But you also have a deep understanding of psychology and persuasion. In I love marketing, we have the before, during and after units, which you are very familiar with, and the eight profit activators area of focus. Select one target market at a time, using direct response offers to compel people. Educating and motivating prospects to meet you. Presenting your unique service offers in a way that makes it easy to get started. Delivering a dream come true experience. Providing after sales service, nurturing lifetime relationships and focusing on lifetime value and then orchestrating referrals by giving your clients the opportunity to feel great, which is me just rattling through the eight profit activators. So you have all kinds of understanding of not only those concepts, but also building that into technology and databases and follow up, which is what your company tech guys who get marketing has done a lot for people is taking these methods, these processes, these strategies, these concepts and incorporating it into a business that actually works. So why do you love marketing? Why is there this focus on marketing with. You have an engineering background but you've been a student of marketing. So I wanted to find out why.

I would say I sort of was forced to learn it in order to continue to eat would be the one way to say it after I stumbled into the.

I should say, other than money, what is the reason you're in the market?

I became really fond of like JR.

Talked about Great episode.

I'm fond of eating.

But once I started to learn it, it's another world. I think once you really understand marketing, which is really just human psychology, as you mentioned there, you understand that it's a tool. And I love the pitch you did, Joe, the video you have, it's called Selling Evil because I think it really narrows down a couple key things about marketing that I resonate with. And that is marketing is a tool that can be used for good or for nil, right? Or for nil or for bad. And it is a very, very powerful tool. And you say sales is the oxygen to a company. Marketing is kind of the precursor to those sales. It's Setting everybody up beforehand. It's a way to get the messages out there. Without marketing, there really isn't anything else. And you can have the best mousetrap there is, but nobody's going to know about it. So that process of being able to educate and inform individuals, I feel like I've been studying it really as kind of like a foundation to my own knowledge. We work on a lot of different client projects. Some are very, very interesting and some are kind of that you call it the bread and butter work. That's not that exciting. It's just sort of rudimentary. But I think with this focus that I've had on marketing, as time progresses and I keep dabbling in other businesses and companies and everything, that skill is going to be absolutely invaluable to put forth something that will really help change the world. That's kind of how I see it.

Not only does it change your business, change your income, actually give you the ability to survive without marketing. No one is changing the world. It just ain't happening. There's got to be the message spreaders. I mean, we're all in the same boat. And I think everyone that listens to I love marketing or has been in it for a while kind of gets that intuitively. Although a large portion of the world has a negative perspective or thinks that marketing isn't important when without it, nothing is going to happen. So you have been doing something crazy for the last year at least you have been going around and meeting with some, some of the top minds on the planet in a specific topic area that you know a hell of a lot about. And, you know, we've had many conversations. I mean, you know, even in the last month, you know, me and you have been in meetings where there's billionaires and some of the biggest influential people. And you're, you know, you're meeting with a lot of smart people related to gamification, crowd sourcing, crowdfunding. And I want to give you an opportunity to talk about that, set the stage and make that one of the main topics that we're going to talk about on today's episode so that our listeners can kind of get some insights and some know, how about this, you know, say, the area of crowdfunding that you've been spending the last year meeting with, you know, top people on. So let's talk about that.

What is it?

What have you been doing for the last year?

What have I been doing? Well, as you said, I've actually been working on a project with Peter Diamandis. And it's kind of an extension of something that I had started back about four years ago and you mentioned it earlier. I want to see Star Trek become a reality. I want to see us be able to explore the stars. I'd love to see that in my lifetime. And I listen to Ray Kurzweil quite a bit. So ideally I'm going to have to make the decision if I do want to live forever in my life and then I'll get to see some of this stuff. Very inspiring to listen to Kurzweil talk on some of that because the scale of what I'm talking about here and trying to say I want to see real is insane. You talk about Star Trek becoming a reality. The technological requirements are just off the charts. And I really started, in fact, Joe, you and I had a conversation about four years on this and I started noodling on what does it really take to solve these audacious problems? These problems that are so grandiose that they're incomprehensible, scale wise to most people. I'll back up for one second. I have a degree in engineering physics that I got from Embry Riddle Aeronautical University. And one of the most impactful things from that degree sort of that I took away from that degree was the understanding or the glimpse at an understanding of how big the universe really is. It's massive, right? Me talking about it here doesn't do justice to the scale. But there's a big disconnect with sort of the human perspective when scale comes into play. There's a lot of different industries that that's present in, et cetera. But I guess the core thing that I'm getting at here is that when you have a big audacious problem, you got to look at what are the models to solve it. What are the economic engines or tools we have to solve those. When I first started going back from this whole conversation, I was saying, okay, well could the government actually solve this problem? Well, how does the government work from a work production standpoint, in an efficiency standpoint? And where does that break down at scale? Scale is one of the funky things in all of physics that gives us trouble. Really, really small scale, really, really big scale, things change, things get weird. And we see that in companies and businesses too. There's kind of the steps, I think within different scales of businesses. A one million dollar company to a 10 to 100 to a billion, there's these little plateaus and the system infrastructure is what sort of has that happen? Has those plateaus emerge so I started evaluating what is the right economic model to actually accomplish, trying to make Star Trek a reality, sort of a good mental exercise. And I sort of came up with there wasn't one, that there needed to be a new model. And I didn't know exactly what that looked like. I started sort of pulling out different ideas. And mind you, this was about four years ago when I first sort of started this mental pursuit. And just in the past few years, we've actually seen the rise of the crowd in some pretty unique ways. You've seen it for the past decade, sort of silently working in some ways with Wikipedia. It's a crowd sourced encyclopedia for the world. It's one of the top websites on the planet in terms of getting the most traffic. The people made it. It wasn't a government or an institution. It was a decentralized group of people actually moving forward to achieve that goal. So fast forward, I guess a bit here. I apologize if I'm a little all over the place with some of the background. Kickstarter is a company. It's one of a few companies that have come up focused on crowdfunding. So crowd sourcing is really where we're utilizing the expertise of the individuals in the crowd to do work. Crowdfunding is where we're utilizing the crowd to actually throw dollars down to move a project or idea forward. And that's kind of the real topic, I guess, that I'll dive into here. Crowdfunding is an interesting, interesting, interesting thing. Excuse me one second.

He gets so excited about this subject that he starts coughing and choking, which is totally fine.

I mean.

I tend to like that. That means this is really important, Mike. So now that you've braced yourself, your lungs are ready.

My lungs are ready.

Speak powerfully.

Speak powerfully.

Live with passion. Live with passion. You ever gone up to Tony Robbins and said, live with passion? I mean, just to mess with him?

I have not gone up to Tony and said that that would be. I think he would laugh though, actually.

Yeah, he would.

He would get a kick out of that. So for the past year, I've been focused on really diving into crowdfunding and understanding it. So Kickstarter, Indiegogo, you know, hang on one second. I'm sorry, guys.

See, I can tell what's going on right now. Dean, he's pulling things up to talk about on his computer.

Well, I had all my notes up, except I might have had a little bit inappropriate setup. Anyways, okay, so some of the companies that are out there, Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Rocket Hub, I've had the opportunity to sit down and actually talk with some of the founders of those organizations. And this has been in conjunction with the project I've been working on with pet. We really started digging into how have people been leveraging the crowd. Who can do that? What can you use it for? If you look at Kickstarter, if you studied Kickstarter at all, you'll see that people have used the crowd to fund just about everything from a Glow in the Dark plant, a genetics company looking to gather funding for a Glow in the Dark plant that they were experimentally trying to build. That just came out, actually, I think maybe a week or two ago. I actually supported that one to all sorts of art and theater productions. So it's really about being able to market to the crowd and sell something to the crowd of your own passion, kind of your passion project before the thing is done. Joe, you might know the exact term for this, but I know in the past, if you were to try to sell a product that did not actually exist, it was illegal, even if you were planning on making it, etc. Do you remember what that fell under? What the actual classification was?

No, I don't. I mean, a lot of people would obviously do it anyway and call it dry testing, but no, I don't.

Okay.

Dean might be smarter than me, though. Dean, do you know. Dean is stumped. What are you doing back? You drinking and smoking back there? What are you doing, Dean? Come on, hop to it. He's completely stumped. It's all right.

Completely stumped. Carry on, Carry on.

We'll crowdsource this definition and have someone comment on the I Love marketing.

You know what?

I have. If I wouldn't, you'll hear what I said on the actual recording. I just realized I had my phone on mute is what it was. You'll hear it when you hear it on the episode. But I had some really insightful comments right there.

Okay, what did you say?

Good thing that these I Love Marketing episodes are so formal and structured, right, Mike?

It's good to know that they're fairly loose. It's all good. But just on that topic with the crowd, it's the first time we ever really had an environment where you could dry cast or sell something before it was ever made legally. One of the laws, actually, the JOBS act, which was passed, actually has allowed equity to be sold in a crowdfunding environment. So if I go to Kickstarter and I want to back a project, the project, like the glowing plants that I just recently backed I pledged $40 to get some seeds of this genetically modified glowing plant they're working on making. And the expectation is that I'll get these seeds next year sometime. They could have also offered me a couple shares in the company, and that is huge. With the JOBS act opening the door, mind you, as of right now, the securities and Exchange Commission hasn't. I don't think they haven't finalized all the rules around this. So it's still kind of like what's really going on. But it's going to enable, or it does enable, small companies to act like a publicly funded company without all the shenanigans and the paperwork and all the overhead that's required for a company to go public and really gather investment dollars from a large pool of individuals. I'm not a corporate lawyer and whatnot, but I know the number of investors in different company types. S Corp, C Corp, et cetera. There's a limited number in certain situations. And the notion of being able to open the door up like this, it's just going to allow innovation so much faster, I think. Who can do this? Anybody can go to Kickstarter and actually post a project. So if you've got a great idea, you want to. Mind you, a lot of these projects in Kickstarter are actually from the theater and arts categories. I have a chart up here. You guys can't see this, but it goes through. It goes to the actual different areas that the categories that have been the most funded. And to date thus far with Kickstarter, they've had over half a billion dollars actually pledged by the general public to support projects that other members of the general public have posted onto the site. That's absolutely awesome. Over the top and the categories here. I was just going to bring it up. Film and video is kind of the number one with about 100 million technologies down into the 50 million range. So crowdfunding is a very, very powerful thing. And it's getting more and more intense in terms of the dollars that are being pledged to projects like this. So it's a very different way of doing business. It's a very different way of investing as the equity doors kind of open. And it's really going to shake up the world for. It's going to shake up the world for a lot of venture capital firms, how they operate. And the laws are obviously going to have to protect the individuals. It'll be interesting to see what happens. So that's kind of the background.

What do you think is going to happen? I mean, what do you think is going to be? What are the positives of this in terms of innovation and people with ideas that now have a vehicle to get things funded and get things done and get capital. And what's the negatives? I mean, where's the disruption going to put certain? I mean, have you thought about it that much yet, or you just really. No one really knows yet.

There's a lot of unknowns. But who's going to benefit from it is, I would say, the positives. And who's going to benefit? Is anybody innovating? You can take a good idea and get funding for it in a way that you couldn't before. There's a pretty famous Kickstarter that happened last year, a guy by the name of Eric, I'm going to say his last name wrong, Pichofsky, I think I may have butchered that, but the Pebble Digital Watch was the actual project. And we had him on the phone and chatted with him to some degree here last year about that project and how it went and that kind of thing. And what was quite interesting is that he was actually down, kind of like down to his last dollar from the investment rounds that he had had beforehand. And this was the last ditch. Let's keep the doors open with the hope of actually raising a couple hundred thousand dollars. And they raised $10 million. I mean, just blew the doors off what they thought was possible. And it's really because of the marketing that was behind it. They did their prep work, they reached out to a lot of the different tech outlets, your Mashables, Your Engadgets, your TechCrunch. They had a lot of those guys lined up to release an article on day one when the project went live. They had a lot of their big supporters that sent out emails to their own lists and would Tweet about it, etc. And they were able to just get momentum right out of the gate with this thing. And it was an amazing, absolutely amazing. I'll get into here in a little bit, I guess, and we can have a dialogue about this, because I know I could get totally off topic or tangents here, but there's a lot of unique nuggets that have fallen out of these different conversations that I've had as I've studied, really studied, and we've been putting this, our particular Kickstarter project together. And one of the interesting things is that momentum is the most important thing. The projects that are actually shorter in time, like you can have a project run, I think it's up to 90 days still that was the last I checked. I think that's the max length. They actually succeeded less, fewer times than the projects of shorter length. Very peculiar about that. And it has to do with the social component of getting individuals motivated and engaged with what you are offering here. Because it's kind of a pie in the sky kind of epic thing. It's a project. It's not a let's buy a product. It's this bigger vision that you're sharing and you're asking the crowd to help you to come along with this journey or come along this journey with you. Yeah, the negative.

Let me ask you something about the marketing of it. Because if you were to take crowdfunding, which is now in its infancy stage, to people that have never heard about it, but really just where the applications of it are ginormous, but you just simply look at it through the lens of before, during and after in order to have a successful crowdfunding campaign. Because I've talked to you about what makes one work, what makes one not work. Certainly you have to have something that connects with the public, with the audience. It's almost like that Walt Disney saying, which along the lines of somewhere around, if you want to have word of mouth marketing, you've got to have something worth talking about. You got to present it in a. Hopefully something remarkable, presented in a remarkable way. Or something that just is presented in a remarkable way is indeed remarkable to whoever has seen it and buys into it. So a lot of people want to go out and just get other people to fund stuff. But if they don't have a way to engage the crowd through effective marketing and positioning and packaging and setup. Because a lot of people that have had great successes with crowdfunding, there's a ton that never get their projects funded. It flops just in the same way that someone tries to run an ad saying buy my stuff and it flops. So I think in a lot of ways you're still selling. You're out there positioning yourself for people to fund your idea, your concept, your belief, your bigger future. And how you go about doing that from a marketing standpoint has everything to do with the success of it. I would say offer and list. List is when does someone go to Kickstarter, when does someone go to Indiegogo, that sort of thing. So I'd love to have you speak to that.

Got it. I resonate with exactly what you're saying there, Joe. I mean, it's. You have to think about kind of the epic nature of what you're doing here. And it's in a lot of ways, it is really bringing these individuals from the crowd into the project itself, into the process of it. Because the big expectation with crowd crowdfunding projects is that the individuals who backed you continue to get updates. They want to know how it's going. In fact, some of these very successful campaigns, we're sending out updates to their backers, people who have already pledged every single day during the campaign. And part of that marketing is doing that and then asking them to share it. The Facebook integration and some of the other social media integration that Kickstarter has is huge for the success of this. I think of social media as the digital form of word of mouth. A lot of people talked about social media and how do you make it effective and this and that. I really think it's just as simple as the digital form of word of mouth. And the things that apply to word of mouth apply to social. And if you build a campaign around that, you can be successful. Interestingly enough, the current stats on Kickstarter that I have, with success rates, it has 43% success rate on projects. So that's almost every other project being successful, which is pretty impressive. 64% of the projects in the theater or the arts are successful, and then only 31% in the publishing categories are successful. So it's interesting to see those stats are actually up from the last time. I remember pulling some of these up, actually, and I'm kind of pulling some of these as we're having this conversation, because this world is changing extremely fast. But to speak to the other crowdfunding platforms, Indiegogo and RocketHub are just two of the other ones. They all kind of have a different focus or a different angle that they're coming at. Engaging the crowd. In speaking with Yancey, the CEO of Kickstarter late last year, they had expressed, as I mentioned earlier, about equity being an option, at least on the table legally, from the government. Kickstarter expressed that they were not going to go down that path. They didn't want to play in that realm. Now, some of the other companies, India, Go Go and Rocket Hub, I'd had similar discussions on this, and they hadn't really come to a final thought on it. But the founder of RocketHub was continuing to stay very close with the government in how they craft laws around crowdfunding, because his belief was, this is the way of the future, this is how we are going to be innovating as the world progresses. It's just a lot more efficient for one, and things can Happen a whole lot faster. You can go from idea to funding in a very, very short period of time.

Yeah, no, I like it.

You said the maximum. You said the maximum was 90 days, but there. What is the shortest, like what's the most successful thing? You said the shorter ones seem to work.

Yeah, the, the overall, let's see, the 90 day project itself, the stat on that is they have a 24% success rate and the sweet spot for succeeding, just from a time length perspective is between 28 and 34 days. So there's not enough data to kind of have the significance, at least from what I've digested, that says it's exactly 31 days into this particular category. Raising this amount. Mind you, the bell curve for pledging, it's an inverted bell curve, kind of as you'd expect. Right. Big marketing push in the beginning and you got your push at the end. Kind of almost exactly what we see with product launches. Only we don't have the opportunity here to sort of close down an offer and reopen it. It's a one shot deal with how you construct a Kickstarter campaign.

So, Mike, so people listening, don't just think of this as, oh, something you do on a website like Rocket Hub or Kickstarter, Indiegogo or whatever. Just the whole concept of crowdfunding. Let's take Peter Diamandis, let's take projects you're working on. I mean there are different ways to get. Crowdfunding can exist even without an online platform, although obviously the online platforms facilitate it tremendously. How does someone determine when and how and where to apply the concept?

I would say you would really say analyze what is it you're wanting to do and is the project or business you're trying to create something that other individuals would be excited to support and be involved in. You said a quote earlier. I think it was a Walt Disney quote about exciting. I can't remember what it was.

Yeah, if you want. And by the way, I'm butchering it and there's a thing. So I sort of in spirit said what. I don't have the exact quote.

Right.

But it's basically if you want word of mouth marketing, if you want word of mouth, you need to have something worth talking about. I mean, you need to. He wanted Disneyland to be so remarkable that when people went there they could not help but tell other people about it.

Yeah. And that right there is the way to be looking at crowdfunding. From the grandiose sense, from the big dollar sense. It's appealing to different Niches, dreams and aspirations. So one of the projects that we've been working on and the reason for a lot of my research in this is I've been working with Peter Diamandis and Planetary Resources, which is the asteroid mining company some of you may have heard about kind of on the news. It released that it existed last year. They've been working on it for quite a while, but it kind of came out into the public light last year. And the idea with that company is focused on putting small satellites into orbit for asteroid detection for mining purposes. And then ultimately there's actually a whole, a big defense reason to do it as well. Considering that life on this planet has been almost destroyed by asteroids in the past, knowing what's going on up there is pretty important. But we got to talking about how could we engage the crowd in space more, right? So kind of in the beginning of this, I talked about my dream is really to make Star Trek a reality. And I've been looking at what is the right kind of infrastructures to pull it off. Well, crowdfunding, crowd sourcing, an amalgamation that I've kind of started talking about as a crowd hub is really what's been sort of falling out of that. And one of the projects to kind of test this is one I've been working on with Planetary. And that is they're building all these satellites for their own use. They got billions of billionaires funding this company. I mean, it's a natural resource. Mining is a huge, huge undertaking. But we started looking at it and saying, well, what if we built an extra satellite and we let the public use it by a public use space telescope? There's a huge niche of amateur astronomers out there and there is a lot of kids sitting in science classrooms learning out of a book versus engaging with a real piece of science hardware. So we've been crafting this Kickstarter campaign around actually doing that building. It will be a crowdfunded, publicly owned, publicly controlled space telescope. And I'll tell you, thinking through pledge levels and how to position that and how to market this thing is definitely, definitely a challenge.

I'm trying to look up Eric Anderson's Twitter account. I think he's the CEO of Planetary C anderson.com I think people should. I think that's the right one.

I hope so. Yeah. And if you go to planetaryresources.com and you can see some of the blog posts from last fall, we actually started by asking the list, the Planetary Resources supporter list and saying if we did this, would you guys be interested Right. Pull your own list first before we put any more time into it. And they came back pretty excited. So we set up a page where people could actually click and like different pledge levels. If we were to create this thing, what would they want? So we were able to use our own list as the foundation to build a crowdfunding campaign that we would then roll out via Kickstarter to the rest of the world. So I think to riff, Dan Sullivan here, you know, it's always listen to your check writers. The only people you listen to.

Say that again, sort of is the ultimate really way of, you know, starting with check writers is putting up your idea and seeing if people are willing to fund it before you even do anything. Talk about the ultimate market research.

You know what I really want to, I want to emphasize what you're both saying right now so much because you know how many thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people have collectively listened, millions have listened to the three of us talk about marketing concepts and talk about ideas and stuff that never present theirs. Their headline, their sales letter, their offer, their product, their service, their concept, their model to check writers. And how many ideas never see the light of day? How many dreams never get realized because they're shared with family members or well intentioned friends that talk them out of it or don't give them, they suck all of the energy away from the idea before it ever sees the light of day. And if people could just put blinders on to everybody except those whose opinions matter, it's kind of like the only votes that count are the ones that are bought and paid for. I mean, I'm still daily amazed by how many people on any social media platform, be it Twitter, Facebook, whatever, the big ones that just pursue likes and pursue shares and pursue more friends, but they're not testing. And people that actually have things that they could sell, want to sell, want to start and they don't. Because the whole concept of testing ideas on check writers is just such important wisdom. And if I could do anything to just make the people that don't realize it and see that and understand that and taking them to the point of action to where their behavior is determined and dictated by it, great. I mean, there are people that are listening to this right now that have things that would add immense value to the world, that if we could just encourage them to take even what you're talking about here and just putting it out there, it will happen, it will make it a reality. And that's the whole point of this discussion, is to encourage those people and to give them some knowledge and wisdom on how they can make their dreams come true. And there you go. Mike, in your own life, how do you use this in other ways other than what you've already shared? What are some other ways that you are using crowdfunding or intend on doing it?

Yeah, the big vision has been around, like I said, making Star Trek a reality. And what I continue to do is to vet out the different elements required. Crowdfunding plays somewhat of a role in this bigger vision that I have. And if anybody out there has not, I would say read the book Starfish and the Spider, the Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. Joe, you recommended that book to me a number of years ago and it really helped set my course in how I've been thinking about these things and how to be leveraging them and how to be using them. We're in the infancy stages with all of this. But from one crowd sourcing, one crowdsourcing example, once again, this is all about the power of the crowd and how do we channel it, how do we use it? Topcoder is another one of the companies that I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with the founders last fall when we were doing a lot of really diving into a lot of this. And it was really interesting because one of the things that they had said, what topcoder does, by the way, is they actually provide crowdsourced technical services, basically like algorithm optimization and other types of high end technical services using the crowd. The crowd does it. They throw a problem out there and they have like 400,000 programmers and it's a competition of who can get the think solved first within the time frame, maybe subgroups are selected. They have this whole arena software platform that the crowd built that allows those.

People to work within.

But one of the things the founders said that really struck me was the company only exists to support the crowd. It's an inverted pyramid. The company is in the bottom and it expands out and above it, the real person in control in this decentralized top coder environment, it's the programmers. And it's very interesting because ebay actually has a decentralized infrastructure to a model to a degree as well. It's kind of a hybrid centralized core with a decentralized user experience. All the buyers and sellers are just a crowd en masse. I'm getting a little off, I think off in the weeds. But I want to just come back, Joe, to something you said about people getting their messages out there, looking for more likes or More shares. That happens in some purchases is a declaration of what something is worth. And I think a lot of people just have fear around that value being different than what they think, so they hold off on asking for the sale. But the worst thing that we come across, the worst thing that you can have is a really, really large list, be it an email list, a big Twitter follower, big Twitter list, et cetera, of non responsive people, particularly on the email side. It takes a lot of work to manage. It takes a lot of list hygiene practices, you're more susceptible to spam complaints. All these other factors come in. So I would just say the quality of the relationships that you make with your list, with your buyers, with your prospects, far exceeds the importance of the quantity of it. Quantity should always be second. Making sure that that quality is up there first.

Yeah, totally. No, that's great. Well, you know what I'd like to do, Dean, See if any questions you have. I think Dean wants to say is I'd like to have you share some of the training, some of the. I mean you already mentioned the book Spider and the Starfish, which is great. Mentioned some resources and things that you're studying, things people should be paying attention to other than the obvious, which is find an application yourself and just go out and do it. Look at it, look at Kickstarter, look at the different applications of this and learn about it. Read the book Abundance, that sort of stuff. Dean, anything you want to add or ask.

I think going down that path, I'd like to see what would be the action steps for somebody to take away from this, from having been inspired here. Everybody's kind of heard on the periphery about Kickstarter and seen the success stories like the pebble and all of those things. And I'd like to hear maybe like what's the. What would Mike recommend, you know, for somebody who's got their own idea that they want to get out there?

I would say the first thing. If you have an idea that you want to vet out, get it out there, go to Kickstarter, create a campaign and just try it. Definitely go out there and just learn how those systems work. Go and browse Kickstarter and find something to back so that you are a backer and you get to actually see what do those updates look like. What are my options? Like how do I feel when I am engaging with this kind of a project or this kind of a structure or I am buying something before it exists and they're updating me about the manufacturing process and oh wow, mine is on the assembly line. Just diving in is probably the best advice that I can give. Do not just gloss over crowdfunding and think, oh, it's a fad. I fully believe it's here to stay and it's going to really shake things up, as I said earlier, shake things up in the, in the investment world, when the SEC kind of gets some of these laws sort of finalized and we start seeing some people do some equity stuff and there'll be messes, we'll probably see some epic crash and burn situations where the neatest idea from a crowdfunded company hurts a bunch of people going to see that. But the thing is, the model itself, I believe is pretty solid. Other resources I don't know if you guys have interviewed or had Michael Drew on after he did his book. Okay, so if he spoke about Pendulum and understanding where we are in a social swing and how we are in this we society, I mean, the reason this stuff is birthing right now is because we want it. We want to be part of something bigger than us, part of a collective. It's on the crowdfunding side, it's on the crowd sourcing side. So particularly the parts of Pendulum that just talk about what kind of marketing elements work for a we environment. Authenticity. The raw authenticity. Most of the Kickstarter videos while saying this, actually this is sort of like a tip with Kickstarter, actually. I guess marketing in general, from my perspective, is that people want to do business with people. They want a face, they want engagement, they want real, they want raw. It's not about the over produced, super fancy video to wow everybody as much as it's to wow them with the authenticity and the reality of what you're doing. You're doing something lame, it's probably not going to get funded. But I doubt anybody listening to this podcast has lame ideas. You probably all have amazing ideas. I think everybody does. We just get stuck in how to get them out.

No, totally. The cool thing too is that a lot of the stuff that we try to bring to people at I Love Marketing is just a reinforcement of things that they're hearing about, hearing other people talk about, but they may not be pursuing it or seeing the relevance of it. So if nothing else, I can assure you that this is going to cause a lot of people to start doing crowdfunding campaigns that probably weren't thinking about it and at least doing it sooner. And if nothing else, if you don't even see an application for it, I think people would be well served to at least study it. So if someone doesn't have at least enough of a motivation, from what we've talked about so far to go, go look into it, where would you point them to to discover and learn more? Because like you mentioned earlier, this is going to change the future. Just like one of the main reasons I go to things like Singularity University and became a platinum partner is I'm watching, studying, learning about things like artificial intelligence and 3D printing, because that is where the world is going. Even though you can't go online right now and have a pair of tennis shoes that you custom designed with a picture of your face on them tomorrow, that's going to be happening relatively soon, along with all kinds of weird stuff that people have no earthly idea. So I think just even when you hear about stuff like this, if you want to be on the cutting edge, if you want to be positioned to where you're going to have a truly unfair advantage for people that do not stay in the know, it's stuff like this. So where would you point people to in order to get to save a year of traveling around and talking to the top people like you have done? How does someone take all of your hard work and effort and, you know, speed up the learning process?

That's a good question. I don't know of any concise resources that have compiled all of this information, but I would cite the book Abundance by Peter Diamandis. He speaks about a good amount of this stuff in the book and in fact a lot of what I've learned has been in conjunction with him going to a lot of these interviews and stuff. He also put together an audio product that a six disc audio series where he hits some of the crowd elements pretty good. But I know the next book he has coming out is going to have a lot of this stuff in it. The book is called Bold. I'm not sure when they're going to release it, but for right now just going to kickstarter.com reading, poking around, watching their videos, looking at their FAQs, checking out the Wikipedia page actually for Kickstarter has a lot of really interesting information. It lists some of the top projects and then some of the really interesting stuff that's happened kind of recently too with who is it? Amanda Palmer. This is last year, I guess she raised about $1.2 million. This is for an album or a tour, I can't remember which. And due to how she was talking about using the funds, she received a lot of criticism. So a big thing with the crowd is that you are accountable to all of these people that back you. And if you are going to raise a million dollars on Kickstarter, you're generally going to have 10, 20, 30, 80, 90,000 backers to get to that number. Although one of the projects from Formlabs that was a 3D printer, they actually did 2.9 million with about 2,000 people. That was a higher end product and it was just really, really niche for what was wanted, that kind of thing. So I guess I would also say other resources, as you see articles about crowdfunding, read them. I mean this stuff is changing very quickly every day. As far as putting together your own campaign on Kickstarter, a lot of, A lot of the other marketing knowledge, I would say a lot of, I would say all of the other marketing knowledge that Dean and Joe have been talking about here applies. There are a couple key numbers with Kickstarter. Like the most common pledge level is $25, but the average pledge amount is $72. So the way you set up your pledge levels and your different dollar amounts, keeping those things in mind and actually running estimates based upon other campaigns can really help you get it dialed in for what you're offering. It's probably a good idea.

I got a fantastic idea. I got a fantastic idea on how people could learn the most cutting edge stuff. They could actually come to the 25k annual event and lay down 10 grand because it's probably going to be 25 grand next year and come and meet you in person. And Peter Diamandis speaking. And some of the top smartest people on the planet, some talking about this stuff. And that's in August, which by the way, and this gives me an opportunity to plug my own stuff which Dean is going to fight tooth and nail about because I don't think he likes that. But at the time we're doing this episode, if people go out and pick up a copy of Fortune magazine, Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur Success.

There'S another one I'm missing.

Forbes. They can read about 25k New York. It's in all the magazines right now. And yeah, and the reason is because I'm kind of a big deal.

I'm kind of a big deal.

I say that for my lack of self esteem and my narcissistic tendencies, you know, thought we would put that out there just, just in case anyone, you know, wants to read one of my ads. And kind of, it's all very exciting.

How do I, how do I crowdsource.

The funding of my lifestyle, Mike? I mean, how do we do this.

If I Have nothing to sell other.

Than I just want more money to live a certain way.

How do I position?

Yeah, here's what we do. Would you be wearing.

Willing to wear a helmet, but if.

You were willing to wear a helmet and equip it with a camera, and then people could just live your life with you, along with you. They could spend a month with Joe. You just wear the helmet and live stream 24 7. I think people would be into that. You should try that on Kickstarter.

You know what, Mike? Maybe you know what I want to do, actually, and I'm dead serious. This is probably premature to say this, but part of crowdfunding, I think, is the whole launching of premature things. I mean, pretty much right when you don't have something completely figured out, you might as well put a pitch together and see who the hell is going to fund it. I think we should dream up something cool, something that truly does add tremendous value to people's lives, and we should put it together with. With Mike, and we should come back and do a future episode so we can actually talk about a case study. It could be something you're working on, Mike. It could be something Dean's working on. It could be something to, you know, I mean, like, I want to do a thing to help, you know, stop soldiers that are committing suicide. Because, you know, we were at Visionary, and Tony Robbins gave this great. Leading a group on behavior. And, you know, for every soldier that, you know is killed in combat, 25 commit suicide. I mean, it's insane. You know, I mean, the real death is taking place, you know, and not just in the United States. We're talking in probably all over the world. You know, there's similar things that are happening, and it's horrible. And, you know, I, you know, I was sitting there thinking, you know, how do we actually put together a documentary and maybe crowdsource and putting people into resources, like, you know, stuff Tony does. Transcendental meditation, things that are proven to help people that are in depression. There are so many applications for this. Not just selling widgets and making money and selling your book or whatever, but things that can cure diseases, things that can make people's lives better, things that can help people that are disabled. There are so many applications for crowdfunding and what it is you're talking about. So I would really like to dispute. Put that out there, because I don't want people just to think this is a way to make money. It is. It's a great way to make money. It's a great way to launch and start a business. It's also a great way to get people behind things that in the past this sort of vehicle was not available with what technology has allowed today.

Yeah, I think that's well said, Joe. And some of the things that are on crowd, I can speak here on Kickstarter, are pretty groundbreaking. I mean, just some of the stuff with the 3D printer that I mentioned earlier, I mean these kinds of innovations supported by the CROWD are changing the world fast. And doing something in the space of an artistic film or a documentary focused around bringing light to a certain subgroup or directly helping them. I know the whole notion of Transcendental Meditation applied for soldiers returning from combat. I think the David lynch foundation has spent a lot of money in that. I think they did that and they did the schools, the kids in the schools, and seen amazing results in helping individuals overcome challenges.

So you know what, Mike, I have to interrupt because I did not even mention this. When I went through Transcendental meditation training. Mike was with me, with us. We were with a group of cool people. We went to Fairfield, Iowa in the middle of nowhere. We could do a whole episode just on the shenanigans there. When Mike went to the Golden Dome, I mean, he looked like he was stoned. It was.

Was very weird.

I was, I was. Joe.

Oh wait.

Before we move on to something more important, I need to interrupt this to make an important announcement. I have been sent a website link because while I was like plugging away my 25k group in New York, I sent my assistant Eunice, like what the heck is the link for the 25k New York event? Because I've got so many different ads running, I lose track of which one because we track all this stuff. So this is the link that everyone, if you forget everything useful that Mike talked about, but just remember one thing, it's this. 25kgroup.com VIPinfo 25kgroup.com VIPinfo and you may very indeed meet Dean Jackson there because.

He will be there.

Yeah, we don't want Evans.

I'll throw this out there too. The project that I was talking about, the Kickstarter that we had scheduled for last fall to launch got pushed back due to some investors and things like this. Very interesting obstacles with trying to launch a Kickstarter project on the back of a company like Planetary that is going to be launching here very shortly. And ideally you are going to hear about it in the news. And if we do all of our marketing right, we are going to end up with a space telescope for public use and ideally have a huge impact on science education, which is kind of my big thrust out of this thing is vet out some of the different tactics we are trying on the crowd side and support and let us know.

So we can let everybody know to go and check that out. But I was thinking as you were talking, it's probably a good idea for somebody who's even peripherally interested in crowdfunding to maybe put aside $500 and go. If you're saying even to fund things on a little level, it's 50 or 70 or $100 to go and participate in half a dozen projects and see what the actual process is like.

Absolutely, absolutely. That's kind of the old adage of joining somebody's list or buying their products just to analyze their marketing.

That's great advice. That's exactly what people should do. So look, there's so much more we could talk about, Mike. I mean, even in the future, we could do an entire episode with you just on gamification because you're also very, very knowledgeable in that particular area. But first off, I think this was great. I think this has planted a seed into the heads of a lot of I love marketing listeners. And so in as much way that I can, I would encourage people to. To share this episode with people that, you know, that have innovative ideas and have companies they need.

Come to ilovemarketing.com and leave a comment and let us know about any projects that you've been thinking about, maybe crowdfunding and any projects that you have crowdfunded or. I'm sure there's people listening who have actually successfully use Kickstarter for this.

Yeah. And kind of in the purest sense of this, if you guys wanted to do this, it would be to reach out to the I love marketing list and just do that ask what would that list want to see? So we could actually solicit from them what they would want from you guys. Maybe it's one on one time with Joe. Not that I think too many people are going to want that, but whatever that might be and package that up and actually do a form of a crowdfunded campaign. It's kind of like the ask campaigns. You can do to your list to vet out the direction and then create the product around it. But you can do it in a couple stages or one stage. But you guys could definitely come up with something from the ILM list.

No, I totally agree. Totally agree. Awesome. Mike, we are out of time. So before we depart, how do people find out about you and your company if they want to follow you and learn anything else from you. I've actually done past interviews with you on Genius Network and everything. But what's the best website for people to get a hold of you?

We would be techguys whogetmarketing.com and you can sign up to basically get our newsletter there or you can reach out to us. The numbers and emails we actually have on the website do work and they get to me pretty quick. We're kind of a small team and often stay behind the scenes if you're working on something interesting. Definitely, definitely love to hear about it. Awesome.

Awesome. Dean, any famous last words from you before we go?

This has been great. I'd like to hear, I think, you know, let's get everybody involved. I'd love to see if anybody has any Kickstarter projects that they're working on or have successfully funded to maybe hook us up with a link in the comments. And I'd love to hear, get some feedback and I think it would be a good idea, kind of. I've been thinking for a while about doing that myself is getting just observing the environment and going and put $500 into just participating in some of these projects to see how it works.

Yeah.

And by the way, if people listening have not heard some of the previous episodes we've recently done, go and do it, including a couple with the mystery man, J.R. who Mike of course knows. He's one of the few people that he. Because, you know, J.R. j.R. Doesn't talk to anyone, but we've had numerous phone conversations and I'm going to involve J.R. in the whole crowd funding sort of evil scheme hatchery thing that we're going to come up with here and we'll go from there. So Mike, thank you very much. Great wisdom, really appreciate it. And as Dean said to all our listeners, please go to ilovemarketing.com give us your comments, give us your ideas, give us your inspiration, and we will talk to you on the next episode of I Love Marketing. Thank you.