Interview

156: Listen, Focus, Balance, Pivot: Get It All Done and Pursue Your Entrepreneurial Dreams with Audrey Bell-Kearney

Focus now and expand your brain later. Audrey Bell-Kearney from HerTube.tv shares her unique story with us and tells us how she created a marketed a line of plus sized dolls and created her own content distribution network.

• HerTube.tv
• Dasia Doll
• "What's Your Big Idea?" Book
• Talk Business With Audrey

[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: Audrey Bell-Kearney is the founder and CEO of HerTube Media Network, which is a media marketing production distribution and consulting firm that curates and produces digital content for clients and helps them get exposure for their business. Now, Audrey sounds like a pretty amazing woman. She created a plus-sized fashion doll. She has a weekly radio show. She has a documentary. She has all kind of cool stuff. How are things today Audrey?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: Hey, everything is wonderful today. It's a beautiful day down here in Georgia. How about with yourself?

Robert Plank: Super beautiful in California. About to take a walk a little bit later, but in the meantime, just enjoying the entrepreneurial journey and all that good stuff.

As we get rocking and rolling here, what would you say makes you stand out from the crowd? What makes Audrey Bell-Kearney special?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: I think, for me, it's my ability to be a good listener to people and help them clarify what they're doing, help them clarify the journey that they're on because I find that- and I didn't know I was a good listener until I actually went to a job interview one time, at Comcast as a matter of fact, and the interview person asked me, "What do you think your greatest skill is?" And I said, "Listening," and she said "You are the only person that answered that question correctly." She said, "It's rare that I find somebody who say, 'listening.'" I would say that listening and helping people pretty much clarify what they want to do with themselves, with their business, with their lives, and things like that.

Robert Plank: Would you say that this whole thing about being a good listener, is this just something that comes naturally to you or do you see other people kind of messing up? Is it just a matter of just slowing down, being 100% present? What's the trick to being a good listener?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: I think being 100% present and really being concerned about what someone is saying to you, because a lot of times people are talking and you're not listening. For me, if someone comes to me with a problem, I'm present. I'm there. When I'm there, I get to be able to find out exactly what it is they're going through.

My mind is so weird because it starts planning out, while they're talking to me, it starts planning out the solution right away. I didn't really recognize this until people started saying to me, "Oh my God! You're so good at this. You're so good at this." It was just something that came natural for me. It's kind of like I'm a listener, and then I play it out. I can figure it out in a picture in my head, like this is what you should be doing.

I remember there was a gentleman who told me I was a clairaudient and I never knew what that meant. He said, "Clairaudients are people that listen. They learn by listening. They learn by hearing what people are saying." He said to me, "They're really to the point. They really don't like to beat around the bush. Get right to the point."

It was so funny because I said, "Oh my God. That must be what the problem is with my daughter and my husband because they like to tell a story, and they want to tell you a long story. For me, I'm like, "Okay, what's the point? Let's get to the point."

I think it's something that I was pretty much born with, didn't recognize it for a long time, but people kept telling me, "You're so good at that."

Robert Plank: I mean, if you're good at it, just go ahead and play to your strength. I appreciate that and I think that the average person probably doesn't pay that much attention. I think about in a lot of the conversations that I have, a lot of people either tell me just what they think I want to hear, or it turns out they only listened to the very last sentence I said, or they kind of tuned in the first few seconds and then they kind of tuned out. I like how you explained that, that kind of like, as they're talking, you're just kind of taking it in and you're already formulating a solution for them, as opposed to just kind of going through the motions there.

It's cool that- I see this all the time. Let me know if you experience this or not, but whenever I have someone who's outside of my business looking in, or I look at someone else's business as an outsider, they're are all kinds of things that are right in front of their face that they're completely missing. Do you see these kinds of things happening?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: All the time. All the time. I talk to women all the time. We do mastermind groups, and a lot of times you can't see what's right in front of you. Even myself, even me, I have to go to my coach, and walk through things, and talk with people, and I do my mastermind. A lot of times it's right in front of your face and they can't see it. Then, once they talk it out to somebody, then they can see it. It's declared for them. With me, I find that when they start talking, it's automatic with me. I have to turn it off sometime because I get so excited about what I hear and what I'm seeing, I just want to jump in and start blurting it out. Yeah, that's pretty common with a lot of people, even with myself.

Robert Plank: Okay, so you're a good listener. What has that listening got you? What have you done recently that kind of has you excited?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: What has me really excited these days, and it's pretty easy to get me excited because I get a lot of ideas. I'm working on a new series called Campus Crimes. It's so funny because we did our casting last week for the show. We cast about, I want to say, 22 people for the series. It's an Internet TV web series. I think just meeting new talent and young people who want to get their names out there. They want to be actors and actresses.

My daughter is a actor as well. My daughter had said to me that Friday morning, she said, "You want to know what really pissed me off?" I said, "What?" She says, "When I go on a audition, and I come home, and you guys say, "How did it go?" She said, "I don't know how it went. Every time you say that it just drives me crazy." So I said, "Okay."

The next day, I was casting. There was a gentleman who came. He said, "You know, I really want to do this. This is all I want to do." He said, "My wife has really been supportive. She's holding everything down for me." He said, "I'm out of work right now, but I really want to focus on my career." He said, "When I go home, she always say to me, 'Hey babe, how did it go?'"

It was so funny because my daughter conversation the day before gave me the opportunity to say to him, "You know what? When you go home and you see your wife, you tell her it went well and you got a part in it," because he say, "I get parts but I'm a extra. I never get a speaking part." I said, "You tell her you got a speaking part."

That makes me excited. It makes me excited that I could help people bring their dreams to life and be in this creative space right now, in this whole video space right now. That's got me excited. It keeps me up at night.

Robert Plank: Nice. It sounds like you're helping other people out or giving them a better experience when they go home with the little things, right? You picked up that, when other people go in for auditions and they don't know how it went, at least now you're saying, "Okay, right off the bat, I'm telling you if you're getting it."

Audrey Bell-Kearney: I only said it to him, because he said what my daughter had said to me, "I go home and she says to me, 'How did it go?'" Nobody else said that. I told no one else that day that they got the part except for him, because I just felt like, "Okay, here's a guy who really wants to do what he loves." You know when you want to do something that you love, you pretty much make huge sacrifices. I could tell he was making sacrifices. I could tell he was passionate about having this whole actor career. I wanted to make his day, so I said to him, "When you go home, you tell your wife not only did you get the part, but you got a speaking part," and he was like, "Oh my God! Thank you so much!"

By the time he got outside, I got a message on my phone. He had found me on Facebook and he put up a video thanking God. Just be patient. Just believe in yourself. I was like, "Wow! That's pretty cool."

Robert Plank: That's awesome. This Campus Crimes Internet TV web series, what is that? Why did you make it?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: I've been a business owner now for 20 years, 18 years full-time working from home. When I invented the dolls, I call that my real business. I invented the dolls in 1999, so the dolls are turning 18 years old next year. I was sitting here and I said, "Man, I really need to create something for HerTube," which is my TV network, HerTube TV, "I really need to create something that's going to stand out."

I'm sitting in my office and I'm looking at my doll. I haven't gotten her manufactured, probably in about 7 or 8 years, but I said, "You know what? I'm going to get a limited edition manufactured. She's got on the outfit that my daughter wore to the prom. My daughter wore the exact same kind of dress to the prom. I loved the dress so much I had it made for the doll. I sent the samples to Hong Kong and I said, "You know what? We might be able to do a story around her." Her name is Dasia. "Maybe I need to do a story around Dasia," and the more I thought about it, the more it kept coming to me.

Maybe she's in college now. Let's make her want to be a FBI. I came up with this whole story of mine about these 3 friends who meet in college. Dasia's from the inner city. I grew up in Newark. I was born in Georgia, but I grew up in Newark, New Jersey, which is pretty tough. You've got to be pretty tough to live in Newark, New Jersey.

I kind of thought about my life: pretty smart girl, book smart, street smart, can hold her own. I said, "You know what? I'm going to make Dasia like that," but because there's so much crime in inner cities, I wanted her to be studying to be a FBI. I created the story around her and she wants to be an FBI. She meet up with 2 friends. I'm here in Georgia now. One of her friends is Macie and she is a beautiful white girl who lives in Savannah. She was raised on a farm. All she cares about is keeping the Earth and the planet safe and clean. Then there's Terri who is raised in Los Angeles. Her family is rich. She's a black girl. She wants to find money. She loves fashion and she wants to be a fashion model.

They meet up on campus and because Dasia is training to be a FBI, the police and the campus police are always coming to her when something's missing, for her to help crack it. She may be hacking a computer. She may be tracking somebody down, you know, just solving cases. That's pretty much the gist of how I came about with the story line.

Robert Plank: Cool, so am I understanding you right in that, so you have an Internet TV station, and you have this show called Campus Crimes. Is it live action? Is it that these plots, and these stories are being acted out, but then there's also the doll version of Dasia. Is that right?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: Dasia is actually a doll. The show is actually a real version of Dasia. Dasia is a limited edition that I'm putting out because she's turning 18. In the doll world, there are a lot of people who knew Dasia when we had her out there actively selling her and promoting her. She hasn't been out now for some years. Because she's turning 18, we're doing a limited edition line. I decided to spin it and turning her into a real person, so we cast real people to play the role of Dasia and her friends.

Robert Plank: That's pretty cool. What's the deal with these dolls anyway? I know that we mentioned it a little bit as we were ramping up. I didn't realize that some of these different things connected.

Eighteen years ago, the thing that started all of this off, what was the idea here? I guess these are plus-sized dolls and you have the African American one and the white one. I mean, how did all this doll stuff start?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: I was working at Verizon in 1999 and hated every second of it. Verizon had- I didn't like it. It was a customer service position, but I was also trying to figure out my next move. I said, "You know, I want to do a business. I want to do something." I had just retained a representative for Primerica Financial Services. I was in the back of the room recruiting my friend to Primerica. I said to her, "You know, I was at work and I had this idea for this doll," and she said, "Yeah? What kind of doll?" I said, "Like a fat fashion doll. You ever seen one?" And she said, "No, I never saw a fat fashion doll," she said, "but I collect dolls." She said, "You've got to stop by my house and look at my collection." I said, "Okay."

The weekend, I went to her house and when I got to her house, she had just got this really beautiful doll by Mattel. She paid $250 for the doll. I'm looking at the doll. I said, "People pay this kind of money for a doll?" She's like, "Yeah, it's a collectible doll," so we took that and we started running. She said, "Listen, I want to know, can I be the vice president?" I was like, "Sure," so we founded a company called Big Beautiful Dolls and we just hit the ground running.

For 6 months, we looked in every corner of the world trying to find a doll manufacturer, and we came across the one guy down in Maryland who had his own doll company. I reached out to him. We drove to Maryland because at that time, I was still living in New Jersey. We drove to Maryland and we spent 8 hours in his warehouse. He told us everything we needed to do to launch this company, including giving us the name of a sculptor. He said he could manufacture the doll. He said, "I can manufacture it for you," he said, "but it's going to be really expensive to get the molds." He said, "You've got to think about that," He said, "but the first thing you've got to do, you have to actually get your doll sculpted."

I came home and I looked online. I pulled up some plus-sized women. I sent a picture of myself because I'm a plus-sized woman as well. I sent that to the doll sculptor. You know, what was kind of funny about that whole situation, she lived in Kincheloe, Michigan and she said to me, she says, "Well, I thanked Percy for sending you to me," she say, "and it's a good time for you, but it's a bad time for me." I sat there like, "Okay." I didn't understand what she meant and I said, "Why do you say that?" She said, "Well, I can't charge you what I'd normally charge you because I'm going through an estate settlement right now."

She said, "My son just learned how to fly a plane and he was graduating. His father came to visit us, and he took his father up in the plane to show him that he could fly, and the wind blew the plane into a tree and they both passed away." I was like, "Oh my God!" That was such a sad story. I was like, "Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that." She said, "Me too," she said, "so right now, this is going to give me some kind of break from thinking about that whole thing and I just can't charge you what I would normally charge," which was great for us, but it was sad for her.

That's pretty much how the dolls got started, so for 5 years, I ran that company, running up and down the east coast doing doll shows, talking to people, getting written up in magazines, doing press and all that kind of stuff.

Robert Plank: Awesome, and there's a lot of interesting things in there. I mean, one thing that I liked about that whole story there is that, first of all, you had your friend, the one that jumped on being the vice president, who is just as excited about it as you are. I think that what was also cool was that instead of just looking at this as some kind of dream, you broke it down, or you at least did the research and figured out what were the smaller steps that you had to do. Right? You had to figure out what the doll would look like, have it go to the designer, have it go to the manufacturer.

What I also like is that that manufacturer was very helpful, right? A lot of people just want to say, "Just give me money," or, "give me this lump sum and I'll figure it out," but he was very helpful, it sounds like, in educating you and getting you kind of brought up to speed to the point where when it came time to buy from him, then you were a more educated buyer, right? That way, you could come- like, he told you all the stuff you had to figure out and then what you would have to come back to him with. That way, it just seems like an easier transaction, and more of a long-term thing, where it seems like everyone involved, number 1, was super excited to get it done, and then number 2, was very clear about what the prerequisites were in order to move to that next step in the process.

Audrey Bell-Kearney: That is absolutely the truth. His name is Percy Sutton. His company is called Integrity Toys. He was so instrumental in helping us get this off the ground, and not a lot of people are like that. There's so many coaches out there. There's so many mentors and all these different people. It's very rare to find somebody who will take the time to sit with you for 8 hours. We sat for 8 hours, all we had was water, because we were like the student in the classroom and we wanted to get it done.

He sat there with us and he told us. We met his team. He walked us through the process, so for him to sit there and do that, I will forever be grateful because of him I would not have gotten the doll done as quick as I got it done because it took us 6 months to go from an idea out of my head to actual physical product in December. The doll was actually sent to us, the prototypes were sent to us in December. Him being that person to help us get to that level, that was something. That was priceless for me.

Robert Plank: Awesome! When you look back and you look at the creation of the dolls, your Internet TV station, and your web series, and things like that, and you look at what you've done right, what do you think it is that you've done right that a lot of people aren't doing out there?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: Being focused. I've got to tell you, Robert. That is the one thing that I will tell anybody. I had a coach, probably back in 2006, and he said to me, he said, "Audrey, you need to just pick one focus," and I was like, "I'm a wonder woman. I can do it all. I can do all the things. I can do 10 things." He kept telling me, "You need to pick one thing because that's why you're not hitting the level of success that you want to hit, because you're all over the place." He said, "Your site is beautiful." I had just paid $1,500 for a new site. He said, "The site is beautiful," he said, "but nobody knows what you do." I kept saying to myself, "but it's right there!" It was clear to me, so I didn't listen.

What I would say is, listen to the people that know more than you. Be focused. Pick something and be focused. Now, I'm not saying that you can't expand your brand later, but right now, pick one thing. That's the one thing that was pretty tough for me about being an entrepreneur because I have so many great ideas most of the time. Sometimes, somebody have to smack me side my head and say, "Hey, listen, focus."

When I realized that that was a big key for me. When I started HerTube, I said, "Okay, what's my focus going to be?" What I did was, even though I have several different subsidies to the company, I have people in place to handle those subsidies. I handle the basic overall operations of the company, the marketing, and the expansion of the company. I have a person that handles the production, and I have a person that handles the content curation and stuff. Even though I have all these ideas, and each one of those can be separate businesses by themselves. I would say focus is the main thing for anybody.

Robert Plank: I like that. I think that's a really powerful message for a lot of people listening, especially because I think about the times that I told myself that I could have the split focus, or that I could have the multi-tasking, and when I think back on it, I realize that, okay, let's say if I had to switch careers between three different businesses. In your head, you think, "Okay, I'll just put in 33%, 33%, and 33%," but as far as the having to switch gears and remember stuff and all that, at least for me, it was more like 10%, 10%, 10%, or maybe even 5% in each of those things.

I think that is so huge. Once people get past that initial crunch time, for example, you mentioned that there was that 6 month period when you were probably not sleeping a lot, or doing all the stuff to get that idea to the prototype phase, or to get it finished. There's, for sure, the crunch time period when you're figuring things out, but then after that time, when you're looking more long-term, then it becomes time to kind of take yourself out of the business. It sounds like you've kind of had that similar path, where you say, "All right, well, there was that period of time when I was super overworked, but then in the long-term, I need to have the focus to not be burned out, and then I'll go and look and see who can fill what gaps for me.

Audrey Bell-Kearney: You know, it took some learning because with the doll company, I didn't know that. That was my first real business. My partner and I, we were running. We were grinding it out. Then she moved to Texas because her husband works for Fox Television, so they moved to Texas. I was in New Jersey by myself and at the time, my boyfriend who is now my husband for the last 13 years, he became my partner sort of. We just did the highway thing, up and down the highway. I had to find some balance because I was really burning out.

I remember my daughter was about 9 or 10 years old at the time and her teacher sent me a notice home and said, "Hey listen, you need to come in so we can talk." I go into the school and I said, "Yes?" She said, "You know, your daughter grades are slipping." I'm like, "Why?" She said, "You work all the time," and I was like, "Oh my God!" Which I was. I was working and I was doing a business. I had to find some balance.

What I did was, when she was home I gave her all of my attention. She went to bed about 8:00 at night, so when she would go to bed, I would start all over again and I would work to probably like 2:00 in the morning. At 3:00 in the morning, because I quit my job at Verizon, my husband and I would go and sling papers. We had a paper route at 3:00 in the morning. We would sling papers until about 5:00 in the morning, come back home. I'll lay back down for about a hour and get my daughter up around 7:00 for school. She would go to school and I would start my day all over again.

You can get burned out but when you're focused and you're passionate about what you do, you don't feel like you're getting burned out until it hits you. Then all of a sudden, you're like, "Bam! I'm tired. I'm drained. There's nothing else I can do." I learned over the years that I have to take time for myself when I get like that because, I don't know if I'm a type A, but I know that when I'm into something, I'm into it. I've learned that when my mind says, "Okay, you're just looking at the screen. You're not really seeing anything," it's time to take a break.

Robert Plank: Yeah, and I think we've all been there. Does this same thing happen to you, where like, I'll be in that exact mindset you just described, where nothing's working. I'm super, just like, staring at the computer screen, can't really make any progress. I take a break. I do something unrelated, away from the computer. I come back and in 5 minutes, I've figured it out. Do you have the same kind of experience?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: I do, but mine is a little bit longer. It might take me a couple of hours and it only happens to me late in the evening. I'm a morning person so I'm at my best in the morning. If I'm working on something, I want to get it done, so I work all way through to the evening, and then I kind of lose it. I start to drain down, but if I step away for about 2 hours, normally that's like 10:00 at night, I want to go back and start working. It's like, "Oh man! Now, I've got it. Now I can go back," but I won't go back. I say, "You know what? I'm going to go to bed now and start again fresh in the morning."

Normally, it happens to me at night time, like around 7:00, when I guess most people should be shutting down, I'm tired. I'll take a break for a couple of hours and then I'm fresh again. I don't start again because I know if I start again, I'll be working until the morning, which is really going to mess up my day for the next day.

Robert Plank: Nice, but it sounds like that's a good problem to have, right? You think about the typical employee and they're dreading to go to work, and they take their time to get into the office. If you're holding yourself back from using the computer until 12 hours later, that sounds like a pretty good place to be. Right?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: Oh, absolutely. I could tell you, when I used to work at one company, I would go into work, Robert, and straight break out in hives. I remember, I went in one day and I broke out in hives. They thought I had eaten something and I was having an allergic reaction, but it was just I hated being there. I was out of work for 3 days, sitting home all day with Calamine lotion all over me because I just broke out in hives. I just hated to be there.

Robert Plank: Oh man, so now, you figured out a better path for yourself. I mean, I really like everything that you explained. Today, it's even easier for people to do that kind of thing with Alibaba Manufacturers and Amazon FBA, and with Youtube and Vimeo, and all this kind of stuff. Am I right about this? All the things that you've done as far as making the plus-sized dolls, making your TV show, and all that stuff, you had to go through it the hard way, right? It's a lot easier these days, isn't it?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: When I tell you it is so- and I'm so excited because I think it is so funny you say that part. When we started in 1999, I had to build my own website with FrontPage from Microsoft. That's just to give you a idea of where we were. FrontPage was a website building software from Microsoft. Because we didn't have any money, I had to learn how to build my site. I learned how to build a site using Microsoft.

I was just sitting here thinking there's probably a couple days where I was like, "Man, when we launched those dolls, there was no social media." I'm really excited. The doll is going to be a limited edition of 3,700. We're doing a pre-sell of the doll. There was no social media. It was me going to doll shows up and down the highway. Now, fast forward to today. I can't wait to see how this is going to play out on social media and all across the web, because there was no social media. I don't even think Youtube had came out yet. I know Youtube wasn't out in face, but none of those guys were out. By the time they came out, we had pretty much halted production. I think that was right around 2005. I think Youtube and all those guys were just coming out.

I was saying to my husband, I said, "Man, I want to see how this is going to work out with pre-selling the dolls using social media when there was no social media when I started." Now, with this whole Internet TV thing, man, I'm loving every second of it. I'm on Roku. I just got a partnership with Amazon for their video program. We're going to be on Apple, so it's a great place to be. Technology is really opening up doors for a lot of new entrepreneurs and making things a lot better. It's a lot easier. It's still a lot of work, but you just have a lot more resources at your fingertips these days.

Robert Plank: Nice. It sounds like no one's going to push the button for you. You still have to take those steps, but you can get a lot wider reach instantly from your house, as opposed to getting in the car and having to drive around.

Audrey Bell-Kearney: Absolutely. That's the thing. You still have to push the button, Robert. You still have to take yourself seriously. I still talk to a lot of women who want to start a business. Even my husband, my husband makes this really good chopped barbecue. He says to me he wants to do it as a business, and he knows that if he tells me that, he has to do the necessary steps. I say to him all the time, "I can't run the barbecue business so you're going to have to do the necessary steps." He doesn't want to do that part. You still have to push the button on your dream if you want it to be a business, if you want it to come true.

Robert Plank: Nice. If you think about it, if it was that easy, if all you had to do was just think it and it would happen, then it would be super crowded. It's almost like, the fact that you have to pursue that dream, take all those steps, and manage all that, it kind of weeds out a lot of the weak people who otherwise would have been your competitors.

Audrey Bell-Kearney: Absolutely, because it's a lot of work. Once you say, "Yeah, I'm going to do this," you have to keep going. I've been doing HerTube for 3 years now. October will be 3 years and people are still amazed. My first year, I had to figure out exactly what it was. The second year, I had to tell people what it was because they still didn't understand it. Now, the third year, I know what it is, a lot of people know what it is, but now it's just about making great content. With that type of focus and that type of clarity, you can move forward along with the work.

Robert Plank: There's the work, or the grinding stage, and then the period of looking back and reflecting and figuring out, "Well, how do I get this out here more?" Or "How do I explain this better?" All that kind of look back at all the random stuff you did and kind of connect the dots.

Audrey Bell-Kearney: Absolutely. I was in an investment meeting last year with some investors. I worked on an accelerated program called Launchpad 2X, and they put me in front of some investors and I thought, "They're going to get it because I'm going to tell them, 'Listen, just think about a hybrid. It's a hybrid between Netflix and Youtube,'" and they didn't get it. I'm like, "Really?"

It took me a year just to kind of crack down on, "What are you?" I just started to say, "I'm an Internet TV Network Woman, so think of me as an NBC on the Internet for women." Then people got it. "Oh, okay. Okay, good." It took a year for me, because I'm thinking in my head, "It sounds pretty simple. Don't you get it?" They didn't get it, so you have to really get your message down pat for people to understand it. People started to get it, like, "Oh, that's really cool." Then I started getting, "Man, that's really cool. Wow! How did you come up with that idea?" I tell the story about how I came up with that idea, but yeah that's really important for anybody who has a business. Your message has to be clear so people can understand you.

Robert Plank: It makes a lot of sense, and it might take a few years or a few iterations to get that down pat. Could you tell us about all these different things, about HerTube, Campus Crimes, Big Beautiful Dolls, and all this kind of stuff, especially HerTube TV in particular? This is a network for women on the Internet. What kind of things do you air on this?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: What we did was, when I first had the idea for the company, I was at a film festival. I had just moved to Georgia and I was at a film festival. I had written some books so I knew about self-publishing and how to distribute this stuff online. At that time, I had already produced a documentary that sells on Amazon right now along with one of my books.

I was at this film festival and I was sitting in the front. They were doing a workshop on distribution. The people that were presenting the workshop, they were telling the filmmakers, "Yeah, we can get you distribution, but you probably won't see any kind of royalties for 15 years." I'm thinking, "15 years?"

Robert Plank: Oh, no, no.

Audrey Bell-Kearney: That was crazy!

Robert Plank: I might be dead by then, right? In 15 years, you never know.

Audrey Bell-Kearney: Exactly! I was like, "Are they serious?" I thought they were joking at first, but they were serious. They were saying, "We've got to put a lot of money in packaging," and all this stuff. I'm thinking, "I know how to distribute stuff on Amazon, CreateSpace, FastPencil, Lulu, and all these different places. It can't be that much different for a film." I sat there and I thought about it.

On my way home, I said, "Okay, how can I help these filmmakers do this better? How can I show them that, man, you're really getting robbed?" HerTube was the idea that came to me. What was interesting about HerTube, because I am a woman in business, it started out as a way for me to help filmmakers get their stuff out there. Probably the next year, I became a panelist at a film festival here in Gwinett County. I became this panelist, then talking with people about distribution. They loved it, but what hit me was, "This could be a great platform for women who are in business also," I said, "because it's like a marketing tool."

I started to lean that way, you know, leaving the filmmakers and kind of going to the women in business because I was a woman in business and I was always looking for a way to market my business. Well, the women in business said to me, "Yeah, we don't want to be making that many videos. We don't want to be in front of the camera." I was like, "Huh? Really?" I kind of had to pivot. I said, "Okay, now, who am I talking to?"

I went back to talking to filmmakers. Filmmakers are a little funny too, Robert, because everybody wants a Oscar. Everybody wants to be in the movie theaters. Everybody wants to be all over the world instantly, but not this way because they didn't understand the platform. I started getting really stressed out, saying, "Okay, this is stressing me out."

On our Roku channel, we have 500 videos produced by 19 women, so we said, "Okay, now we have this working for us on Roku." There's not a lot of income coming in there because the ad-serving company that we have, they just don't pay a lot of money. I had to think, "Okay, how am I going to make this where it's going to make some money, you know, bring in revenue for the company?" That's when we launched our online platform called HerTube.TV.

We launched that and I said, "Okay, we need to have our own content as well as content produced by other people." That's how Campus Crimes came about. We had a whole list of shows. Campus Crimes was the one, after I thought about how to incorporate the doll, that's when I took it back to my team and said, "Listen, this is what I want to do."

What's funny is, when you make up your mind about doing stuff, everything and everybody kind of falls into place. When I made up my mind that I was going to do Campus Crimes, a friend moved from Jersey. He was a cinematographer. He was like, "Listen, I'm going to work for you to get it done." I said, "Wow! That's so cool." Everything has kind of fallen in place. I think I have a great cast of people. I sat there last Saturday and I talked to those people and I think this is a really, really great cast. That's pretty much how HerTube, Campus Crimes, and all the dolls tie together.

Robert Plank: I'm looking at HerTube.TV right now. There's a couple of videos of just homemade stuff, but as far as the actual shows, there's Yoga shows, learning, shopping, and stuff like that. Even just seeing the still thumbnail screenshot, this is some professionally lit and shot stuff. Isn't it?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: Oh yeah. A lot of the stuff is very professional because we have some of the real filmmakers. Some are filmmakers. I have some people who would want to do stuff at home. I have some people that started working with me and decided they wanted to be coaches. I had one young lady, she did a lot of cooking things on there. She was doing a lot of cooking videos at home, real nice stuff, and she realized, "I'm really good at being a coach," because people started calling her because she was talking about how to eat healthy.

Some stuff is homemade, some stuff is very professional, and some stuff is kind of like the lady I just talked about, that producer right there, the one you see now. She does a lot of training stuff. She's in a whole other country. What's cool about her is she said, "Hey, listen, can I partner with you? Can I distribute my content on your network?" I said, "Absolutely."

We come up with these great plans to partner with people and bring that content to life and help distribute. I'm almost like a marketer for other people at the same time. That's why the whole description was I'm a marketer, distributor, curator, producer, and all that kind of stuff, because that's what we do.

Robert Plank: Awesome! It's not just you. You're helping everyone else out. HerTube, is that at HerTube.TV? Is that the best place for people to go?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: Yes, if you want to check out HerTube, just go to www.HerTube.TV. If you want to check out Dasia, you can go to DasiaDoll.com. She's there for pre-order right now. I only have 3,700 of her coming in. I'm believing I'm going to sell-out those pretty quick because I haven't even mentioned it to the doll world yet. There are a lot of people out there who followed her when she first came out. This is the first time I'm making it public, Robert. I haven't made it really public to anybody, so the first time, on your show that's public.

What happens is, when you go to see Dasia, when she comes back. You can pre-order her now, when you come back, she's going to come to me and I'm going to sign her and I'm going to have the 3 main cast members sign her, and send it off to the people who order it. Check her out. She's going to be 18 and the dress that she wore, if you go to DasiaDoll.com, my daughter is standing right next to her in that same dress. My daughter's a lot smaller now. She grew up. She's a beautiful young woman. She lost a lot of weight. She's acting and all that stuff, but that's the dress she wore to the prom.

Robert Plank: Nice. This is amazing that this has been around for as long as it has been, and even some people who were little girls when the first one came out, are now full grown and might have, even, kids of their own to get it. That's pretty awesome.

Audrey Bell-Kearney: Yeah, my daughter was 9 when I started. She's 25 now.

Robert Plank: Oh man. Time flies.

Audrey Bell-Kearney: It does.

Robert Plank: Time flies so fast that you never know if your plane might get blown into a tree, or things might not work out in one way or another. Time is short and we have to kind of step it up and be entrepreneurs, do what needs to be done, do it quickly, and do it so that we can get that knocked out and move to the next thing.

Two websites there: DasiaDoll.com and HerTube.TV. Thanks for being on the show, Audrey, and telling us not only about your cool story, but giving us lots of little nuggets and all kinds of business advice. I really appreciated having you on today.

Audrey Bell-Kearney: Thank you so much for having me. It was really a pleasure. It's always nice to be on the other side of the microphone and the TV camera.

Robert Plank: Yeah. It kind of makes the scenery different, right? Breaks up the day, makes it so you're not just doing the same old thing every day, right?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: Yes it does. Yes it does.[/showhide]

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155: Crowdfunding: Get Funded Today on Kickstarter and Indiegogo with Zach Smith

Could you use some extra money to scale your online business? Do you want to test the marketplace demand for your physical product? If so, Kickstarter and Indiegogo are your tools and Zach Smith from Funded Today is your guide to raising capital for your business using crowdfunding.

• Funded Today
• Crowdfunding Success Matrix
• Funded Today Blog
• Crowdfunding Cashback Network

[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: Zach Smith is going to talk to us today about crowdsourcing. Now Zach is a serial entrepreneur, never having had a real job his entire life. He is always starting, selling, running, and managing businesses. Zach loves helping others turn their dreams, ideas, and inspirations into successful companies, and this passion lead to his creation of Funded Today LLC, which is America's most successful crowdfunding firm, and the largest provider of crowdfunding marketing services worldwide. I'm excited. Can we talk about it? So you guys strap yourselves in. Zach, how are things today?

Zach Smith: Doing real well. Thanks for having me on your show today, Robert.

Robert Plank: Cool, I'm glad you're here, because this is a new topic that I don't know much about, but I've seen it kind of take off. I've seen it get popularity. So crowdfunding, what the heck is it?

Zach Smith: So crowdfunding is basically a way to raise money, that over the last few years has become extremely popular. There's a lot of different types of crowdfunding, but we'll just cut out all of that. The part of crowdfunding that we focusing on is called rewards-based crowdfunding, and that means that people essential preorder new ideas on sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. So let's say I've invented a cool new watch, and this watch does all kinds of fancy features. I might have a prototype of just one such watch. Well I film a video, I talk about this watch, I talk about how I want to bring it into mass production, and I tell people for $250 you can preorder this watch that I have on my wrist, and I'll make one for you just like the one I have here, and then people pay $250 to get this watch. There's no catches, there's no strings attached. You don't have to give up any equity in your business, and people do this to the tune of millions and millions of dollars. Funded Today, like you mentioned in your intro, has done that more so than anybody else in the world for thousands of different inventors now.

Robert Plank: Awesome. So you're the guy to talk to. I've seen every now and then... Before the show started recording we were talking a little like, Indiegogo and Kickstarter, people have used that to bankroll movies and TV shows and stuff like that. Plus on the practical side, every now and then I'll see something. I'll see someone will invent a camera that allows them to talk to their pets and dispense pet food remotely.

Zach Smith: I saw that one, yeah.

Robert Plank: Yeah, that's the most... That's the one that comes to mind the most when I think of crowdfunding and Kickstarter type of stuff, but it's also practical enough, something like a multimillion dollar movie and stuff like that. Using the watch example, someone says "I'm going to design the watch." So what are the steps then? I guess they sign up for a site like Kickstarter, they make a webpage. I guess maybe they can make a prototype or a graphic, and then people can preorder the watch. So the thing that I was curious about as you were explaining it, let's say that you, Zach Smith, say you can preorder this watch for $200. I preorder the watch and then what happens, because I've seen some of these say we need a hundred backers or something like that. What happens if they don't get adequate funding for that project?

Zach Smith: Yeah, great question. As an entrepreneur, you want to know how much it's going to cost you to build this watch, so let's say that your MOQ, your minimum order quantity, is 1000 watches. You've talked to manufacturers, you've talked to suppliers, and we can help with all this stuff as well. We can help with almost anything, and because we've done this so many times, anybody who needs help with, oh I don't know how to prototype, okay great. Oh I don't know how to make a view. I don't know how to do a design. We can help with all those different things, but let's assume you've got all that covered, and now you've talked to all those people. You've done all that stuff. Getting the extra prototypes made is going to cost $10,000. Ordering 1000 of these watches, let's say it's $20 for each watch. That's $20,000. You add up all your total costs, and that's what you want to set for your goal.

Kickstarter has what's called all-or-nothing funding, so on Kickstarter, that means if you set a goal for let's say $100,000, that means that's what it's going to cost you to bring this watch into existence. That's factoring in all the product you have to buy, all your costs of goods sold, whatever overhead you have, all your prototypes, and whatever it's going to cost to deliver and ship the finished product off to all your preorder backers. That's what you set your goal for. On Kickstarter if you do not hit that $100,000 goal, let's say you're $99,999, that means you don't get any of your money, and so it's very important that you set a goal as low as you possibly can so so that you can get funded, but then as high as necessary so that when you do get funded, if you don't get whatever you need, you can still deliver it to your backers.

Kickstarter, I say particularly, that particular website, is a paradoxical vehicle in the sense that you might set a goal for $100,000, and until you get to $100,000 you might not get a lot of excitement and a lot of traction. Once you hit $100,000 the crowd engages and says "Oh wow, this is great. This is funded. This is going to happen" and then they get behind it and the momentum rolls, and it's like a snowball going down a hill. That's why I recommend setting a low enough goal that you can get funded really quickly so you can show that you're successful to get that paradox of success to happen, and then you will really become successful. But again, you want to be careful, because if you set your goal too low and you only end up raising $50,000 when you actually needed $100,000, that's a bit of a problem. So I always recommend setting your minimum viable goal so that you can create your product, but not setting a goal so high that it's impossible to real, or it looks just so daunting to people and it takes many weeks or a month or so before it gets funded, and then you don't ever get the momentum that's so exciting about crowdfunding.

Robert Plank: Right.

Zach Smith: Does that make sense?

Robert Plank: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. If I were to go to your Kickstarter page, and you have this watch, and it says we need $1,000,000 raised and we've raised $100, I could look at that and say there's 0% chance this is going to go through, but if you said we need $50,000 and the thermometer was at 60 or 70, I'm like, well great, they passed their goal. I can buy this and I'll be guaranteed to get it.

Zach Smith: Exactly, yep. That's exactly right.

Robert Plank: Let's say someone set up a Kickstarter, they calculate their MOQ and stuff like that. As far as setting the goal and all that, do you recommend that your clients have any wiggle room, or is it just set the goal based on the costs, and then hopefully the Kickstarter will overfill, or whatever the term is?

Zach Smith: I think that's a great question you asked. I think it's very` important to add some wiggle room. Good examples of not having enough wiggle room are the Coolest Cooler, one of the most funded projects of all time. They didn't factor in that it was going to cost a lot more when they went through all kinds of different change orders, and because of that they still have 50, 60% of their coolers that 3 or 4 or 5 years later, they still haven't been able to ship out, however long it's been. That's just because they didn't... Even though they raised $12 or $13 million, I forget the total number. That still wasn't enough to deliver to their thousands of backers because of fancy and how amazing they ended up making the cooler. If you have a little bit of wiggle room, you avoid those issues.

Robert Plank: I looked up the Coolest Cooler while you were talking, and I've seen this recently, but I didn't know that was the name. It looks like they had 62,000 backers pledge $13.2 million dollars.

Zach Smith: Yeah.

Robert Plank: Crazy, the amount of money some of these types of sites raise.

Zach Smith: He's a good guy, too. People make him out to be like he screwed everybody out of things. I think he just kind of made some common mistakes of an entrepreneur. He didn't set his margins right, he quite know what he should have charged, and he was way more successful than he ever planned. A lot of people don't know, but he ran his first project and he raised $125,000. But guess what his goal was? $250,000. So guess what? He had to cancel it. He didn't get any of that money. He relaunches, and look what happens. $13 million later, he doesn't know what to do with himself, and he wasn't ready for it to become that successful. Interestingly enough, one of the most successful crowdfunding projects of all time on paper, it has been one of the most unsuccessful crowdfunding projects of all time in practice.

Robert Plank: Oh no! Have you seen this happen over and over again, or does it go right more than it goes wrong?

Zach Smith: I'd say it goes right more than it goes wrong. We've worked with lots of creators, and I've worked with a few creators. I love Jon Richards and Jacob Durham. They're a couple guys out of Utah, where I'm from. These guys have done four or five crowdfunding projects now, and they've all been successful. They usually fulfill on time, if not earlier, and because of that they just got done running a product called NOMATIC. It's a bag that has all kinds of different features. It's pretty amazing. Nomatic raised over a million dollars. This is from two guys that came to me two or three years ago wanting to raise $10 or $20 thousand for a wallet. We ended up raising $171,000 for the wallet, then we raised money for a notebook, then we raised money for a laptop stand, and then they did really well on their own with this NOMATIC and brought us on at the end, and we did pretty well raising the money for their bag as well. You can have stories like that where you keep coming back to crowdfunding because your backers love you, you build up that customer lifetime value, and everything new you invent, everybody wants to be a part of, because you've created that tribe, as Seth Godin likes to call it.

Robert Plank: Nice. So is that the secret to getting a campaign to... By the way, what's the term for if a campaign completes or whatever?

Zach Smith: Yeah, funded is what we like to call it. That's why our company name is Funded. Funded Today.

Robert Plank: Today, not tomorrow, because tomorrow is too long to wait, right?

Zach Smith: Well, we got Funded Tomorrow too, when you raise enough money with us, we take you over to Indiegogo inDemand, and we raise you more money tomorrow, too.

Robert Plank: Oh nice. So it's today and tomorrow.

Zach Smith: Yes sir.

Robert Plank: That means you cover all the bases. Is there a secret to getting a project funded? Is it a matter of building up these followers? Is there any amount of outside traffic involved? What's low hanging fruit there?

Zach Smith: Yeah, the secret is... And again, there's no secrets really. I mean, it's obviously a secret I guess, because not everyone can do it, but the secret is putting in the work. It's hard work. In order to get really successful on Kickstarter particularly, and I'm talking about Kickstarter generally, but I mean crowdfunding holistically, because Indiegogo is the same sort of thing, but everybody is a little more familiar with Kickstarter. Indiegogo has a couple different things than Kickstarter. For example, in Indiegogo you can choose flexible funding and you can keep all of the money that you raise. You can set a goal of 50 grand, but if you only raise 48 grand, you get to keep it all. Indiegogo likes that. I'm kind of torn on it, because if you don't get the money you need, how are going to go and get the extra money so you can make sure you fulfilled your backers.

Robert Plank: Right.

Zach Smith: But maybe if you get close enough, you can get a little bit of capital or self-fund a bit and deliver. It seems to work for Indiegogo, but I'm kind of 50/50. I like the idea of setting a fixed goal. The other reason I like that too, total divergent here, is because if you can't raise the money you need, it probably means you don't have that good of an idea, right? Or you haven't marketed it right.

Robert Plank: Right.

Zach Smith: So if you can't raise the amount of money, you probably shouldn't bring the product into existence, because that means the market doesn't want it. That's a whole other topic. In terms of what you do to raise money, You need to start out just like you would in any other business, just like they teach you if you're going to be an insurance agent or salesman or something. Start with your friends and family and tell your friends and family, "Hey Robert, I've got this amazing idea. It's this cool watch. Here's what it does, and I'm going to be launching it on September 22, 2016 at 11 o' clock AM Eastern Standard Time. Can I count on you to give me $200 at that time to back this?" "Oh yes, for sure I'll do it!" Right?

Everybody has friends on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. Contact every single one of those people privately. Build up the spreadsheet. Use a Google Spreadsheet. Use a Google sheet or a Google doc. Write them all down, commit them all, get their names, emails, phone numbers, and don't just let them tell you it's cool, it's a great idea, because everybody is going to tell you that. Really ask if they'd pay money for it. If they wouldn't pay money for it, say "Be honest with me. If you really can't buy this from me, why, why not?" You'll kind of get a good idea if you have a good idea or not. There's it all from your friends and family. Once you have them committed, try to get 200 or more. The reason why is because the day you launch, if you have 200 or more of your friends and family, there's a good chance that you'll pop to the top of Kickstarter, and when you pop to the top of Kickstarter's popular and magic rankings, you get millions of eyeballs on your page. When you get millions of eyeballs on your page, if your idea truly resonates, you could have what we like to call a supernova, which is a good product and good marketing. Factored into Kickstarter's algorithm, that results in millions of eyeballs and thousands of pledges on a product. All you had to do was sign up a few friends and family.

Robert Plank: Nice. That's cool, so you have your launch team or whatever you could call it, which is your close friends and family, and they all buy right when the thing opens, get it ranked, and then get noticed and going on from there. Is there a way, or do you know off-hand, is there a way to... I'm even kind of afraid to ask this, but is there a way to pay people to buy your Kickstarter, or is that too black hat for them?

Zach Smith: That's a good question. To gain the system, I see what you're saying. I don't recommend doing that. Kickstarter is really good too at... They have what they call an integrity team. They look at a lot of things like that. The other reason I don't recommend it, even though it is a good idea and we've thought about it, but we ultimately decided not to, because if you don't have a good product, paying people to buy it isn't a good idea because no one is going to buy it when it ranks in popular anyway. You want people that actually want your product, and you want legitimate people seeing it and ready to buy.

Let's say you don't have that many friends and family. Let's say you maybe don't want to do the work. That's why a lot of people come to Funded Today, because we have a network of thousands and thousands of people, and we can tell those thousands and thousands of people about your product, build you up an email list, get them ready to go, and tell them the day you launch, and then they will back your project. Or while doing that, we'll let you know if you have a good idea or a bad idea before you even launch. Hey, nobody wants this. We can't anybody to sign up or opt in. You probably shouldn't go any further, and you won't waste the rest of your life chasing an idea that people don't want. Does that make sense?

Robert Plank: Oh yeah. That way they can move on to something that does make money.

Zach Smith: Exactly. So many people chase their dreams without ever taking action. Crowdfunding has made it so that you can quickly chase your dreams, figure out if it's right or not. If it's wrong just a little bit, you can pivot, or if it's completely wrong, you can move onto something entirely different and make money, and create a good job or create a life you want to live. Sometimes it's not your first idea, it's your second. Not your second idea, might be your third or fourth idea. We have guys that come to us the fourth time, and finally we're raising them hundreds of thousands of dollars. Where their first, second, third ideas were complete failures, we didn't raise them any money, even knowing everything that we know and having access to everything that we have access to.

Robert Plank: Right, so it's like they had to go through those failures and get those ideas out of their system to get to the good stuff that people actually wanted.

Zach Smith: Exactly. We call it product validation, and Kickstarter provides the best possible way to validate an idea than I've ever seen. You have everything there.

Robert Plank: Right. It sounds like it puts the funding people need with their businesses within reach, whereas before they would have to... Like in the 90s they'd have to go to some venture capital meetings or -

Zach Smith: Oh, you're so right.

Robert Plank: They'd have to to go on Shark Tank, or there's always all the stories about people who spend 30 years just making $0 trying to get on the shelf at Walmart, and after 30 years they finally get it, and now they have to come up with 10 million units and they just totally go bankrupt. It's like your reward for 30 years of waiting was bankruptcy.

Zach Smith: Your pitch you just said there is exactly the pitch why I believe crowdfunding is the new economy. We are literally branding a new economy. You no longer have to have a rich dad, rich family, rich uncle, venture capitalists, angels. You can literally bring an idea for the crowd, get your friends and family involved, and let the crowd decide if you've got a winner or not.

Robert Plank: Nice.

Zach Smith: It's powerful.

Robert Plank: That's some internet democracy right there. We mentioned a couple of platforms like Kickstarter, and there's Indiegogo. Are those the top dogs, or are there any others?

Zach Smith: There's others, but I'm the biggest in the world, and I don't know who they are.

Robert Plank: So why bother, right?

Zach Smith: Exactly. 80/20 is what I preach quite a bit, and you want to be on Kickstarter if you're raising money, and after you want to go to Indiegogo inDemand. That's the process.

Robert Plank: So why is that? Why Kickstarter first, and then Indiegogo?

Zach Smith: I love Kickstarter. I love Indiegogo. I love Indiegogo a hundred times more than I love Kickstarter. They're just such a good company, so many nice people, but for some reason their platform just doesn't convert as good as Kickstarter. Kickstarter is a lot bigger, so Kickstarter has a lot more traffic, and so if you have a good idea, going on Kickstarter you're going to raise more money, but Indiegogo is going to treat you way nicer. So if you want to be treated nice, have amazing customer support, all kinds of help, all the bells and whistles, everything for you, and maybe you don't have the best product ever but it's good, Indiegogo is going to be your best bet.

Robert Plank: I'm trying to figure out if I'm understanding you right. When you say Kickstarter then Indiegogo, do you mean launch your product on Kickstarter and then once that's done, launch it on Indiegogo, or are you saying -

Zach Smith: Yes, that's correct.

Robert Plank: Okay. So you can take the same offer and do the Kickstarter launch first and then the Indiegogo launch.

Zach Smith: Yeah, so what you do is you launch a Kickstarter project, and then once your Kickstarter project is over, you go to what's called Indiegogo inDemand, and Indiegogo inDemand is simply a way for you to continue to take preorders while you are in that final protyping manufacturing fulfilling stage for your Kickstarter. You set your shipping date back a couple months, you charge a few bucks more for your price, because obviously people didn't take action on Kickstarter so they have to pay a little bit more, and then you continue to raise money for your product, and you get it closer and closer to what you're going to charge for retail pricing instead of the early bird pricing, so it gives you even more time to validate, more time to raise money, and more time to cover your overhead as you go about building your new business.

Robert Plank: Nice.

Zach Smith: It's pretty powerful, and Indiegogo is way better than Kickstarter at that.

Robert Plank: That all sounds like a kind of cool strategy.

Zach Smith: It's amazing.

Robert Plank: So if someone is either on Kickstarter or Indiegogo, and they calculate all their costs, and they list their product, and they have their initial sales, and they get a bunch of backers, and let's say that the project gets funded. Is there a way to back out? Like you said in that once situation where the cooler raised $13 million, he was totally overwhelmed. If Ryan had decided that he just didn't want to deal with it, is there a way to just hit a cancel button and refund everybody, or is that not a thing?

Zach Smith: Yeah, you absolutely can. Now Kickstarter is going to charge their fee, and Kickstarter and Indiegogo both charge 5%, and so you're not going to get that back. Kickstarter is not a store, so when you back a project on a crowdfunding site, even though I call it a preorder because that's an easy way to understand, you're not preordering, you're preordering the idea should it come into existence. Like I said, most of the time they come into existence, and they're usually pretty good. Sometimes they don't happen, or they don't materialize, or other unforeseen costs happen, just like when you invest in a normal product and it doesn't work out. Kickstarter is not a store. They are a place for people to try to bring new invention and new innovation to life. I've seen a lot of creators refund, but you usually won't get back all of your money because Kickstarter takes their fees. Obviously the creator probably spent a lot of money trying to build out the product or do whatever they could to try to make it happen, and so if they were to not ultimately fulfill, you'd be out whatever money that is.

Now that's one thing we created to mitigate that because sometimes the risks to back a project, especially if the project seems really crazy or really tacky or intense, it's like wow, how are they going to really pull this off? Like Oculus Rift, it just sold for several billion dollars to Facebook. It was one of the first crowdfunding projects ever. They took three or four years to deliver, and I think they're finally delivering. They ultimately delivered, but look how long you had to wait. What we've done to mitigate some of that risk, because we've created something that we call the Cashback Network. The Cashback Network is a place where you can go and back projects and get 10% cashback on everything that you back.

Robert Plank: Now how does that work? How are you able to pull that off?

Zach Smith: Because we work with tons of projects on Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Any project that's in our network, we simply give a kickback of what we're charging to all of our backers to mitigate their risk for backing.

Robert Plank: Nice.

Zach Smith: It's a win-win-win for everybody. The backers love it because their risk is mitigated, and they get a deal, and like I said, it's not too risky. Most people deliver. Literally every client Funded Today has ever worked with has delivered a product. We have a lot that haven't delivered yet, but all signs point that they're going to deliver. We have a pretty good track record, and since we work with lots of the big projects, I think it's safe to say probably 80, 90% of projects you back are going to deliver. They might be slower because obviously these are new businesses, and when they get injected with tons of capital, sometimes it's a bit confusing or crazy, but there's a lot of good stories too. Literally my entire wardrobe is from projects that we've raised money for. It's pretty cool.

Robert Plank: Awesome. With all that stuff, is there any kind of legal risk? If there is a Kickstarter or something, and someone buys it, and let's say that it's late or it's inferior or it catches on fire or something. Is there any kind of protection on Kickstarter's end for that?

Zach Smith: Yeah. There's a lot of legal risk. If a project doesn't deliver, I've seen quite a feel backers combine together and form class actions. I saw a case that I was reading yesterday about... I can't remember what project it was for, but a bunch of backers got together I believe in the state of Washington, and they ended up winning, and I believe they got trouble damages, so if you try to screw the backers and you don't even make any attempt at actually delivering, you're going to pay the price. There's some pretty good laws in place to help that out, and fortunately Kickstarter does a good job with their integrity team. We have our own internal integrity team to make sure the projects we're working with are going to legitimately deliver.

We like to require a prototype, so we'll look at and review a prototype of any product that comes our way to make sure it does what they say it's going to do so that we know they're going to be able to do it. Now will they be able to do it en masse? That's always the question, but generally if they get a prototype down, there's a good chance they know how to build it out massively as well. But there is a risk. If you don't deliver, if you're trying to screw people, people will take action, and fortunately the Kickstarter ecosystem is pretty good at finding those before, and Kickstarter does a great job at suspending them. We've worked with probably 5 to 10 projects that have been suspended because they were doing different things. They were either reselling products, not inventing something new, or probably blatantly trying to rip off money, but Kickstarter has pretty good ways of catching that, even after they start raising lots of money, so you definitely have to have a legitimate idea and have plans for how you're actually going to go about fulfilling or you could be in trouble, even if it's five years down the road.

Robert Plank: Fair enough. It is a little scary, but I guess it's no more risky than anything else on the internet as far as physical products and stuff, right?

Zach Smith: Yeah, I mean the risk is... And again, Kickstarter has something called the prototype category, so any product you back in the design category, you can look at all of the prototypes and see what you think can this really happen. You're kind of an investor in a way. I don't think Kickstarter calls their backers investors, but in a way you're kind of an investor, but your investment is being able to get the product before anybody else, and saying that you helped bring something into existence, and having the joy of helping an entrepreneur realize the American dream or something, right?

Robert Plank: Yeah. Thanks for clearing that up too a few minutes ago, because I didn't even realize that Kickstarter and Indiegogo are investing site, that they're not stores. This whole time I was thinking that people go and they just click and buy their little doodads here and there, but it's making a lot more sense to me now. The find a project, they read all the stuff, and if they believe in not only getting the item, but also in the person who's making it, then they can provide that support in that way.

Zach Smith: Exactly, yeah. That's right.

Robert Plank: I've seen a lot of the... I don't know what you'd call... The prototypes, physical products, e-commerce kind of stuff where they're making an item, and I've also seen some of these weird Indiegogos where people say like, help me pay my hospital bills, or pay me $5000 for me to go to a cabin and write a book. Have you seen those? What's your thoughts on those?

Zach Smith: Those are more on a site called GoFundMe. Maybe there's some of those on Indiegogo, I'm not quite sure. We don't work with projects like that. I love charity, don't get me wrong, but I believe you got to have a product that stands strong, and then leverage those profits from the product to go ahead and do charitable good. So look at Facebook. Facebook makes most of their money from Facebook, but look at all the cool stuff they're doing. Same with Google. Google makes 80, 85% of all their revenue from Google search, but look at all the amazing stuff Google is trying to do on the charity end. Don't create a charity and ask people to throw money at it. Create an amazing product and then use the money from that amazing product to go ahead and do charitable good. People don't want to give money to those kind of things. And there's so many. Use a site like GoFundMe and get your friends and family involved in something like that. I don't think the crowd is going to go crazy. But then again there's always the one that raises a million bucks and every talks about. Look at this guy, he wanted to start a lawn mowing business, and everybody loved his story so much that he made a million bucks. There is those stories, but those are one in a million, and that's just the nature of virality.

Robert Plank: That makes sense. I'm sure that someone out there has made it work, but for the average person not very likely, not very practical as opposed to creating something that provides value. Even that you mentioned Facebook making the drones that provide internet to Africa and stuff like that. The amount of money that Facebook and Google pour into the charity stuff, they would never have raised that amount of money just asking. The only reason they can provide that amount of money is because they built their own company, and then they choose to allocate those funds. That's cool. As we're winding this town, let's talk about Funded Today, because that's come up a couple times, and it sounds like you guys provide an all-in-one solution, and all the stuff in there that makes Kickstarter campaigns a lot safer, more reliable, and likely to succeed. So can you tell us about Funded Today and what it is?

Zach Smith: Yeah, so Funded Today is an all-in-one crowdfunding marketing agency. We can do everything. If you have an idea in your head and that's all, come talk to us. If you've got everything ready and a video make and a page designed and you're ready to push go but you don't know how to make money or you don't know how to launch, contact us. We'll chat with you. If you're all the way into your project and you haven't raised any money yet and you think you maybe have a good product, we have something called the crowdfunding success matrix. You can link to this in your podcast if you want, but it's basically just a little matrix, just like you see in business school.

There's four quadrants. Outer darkness, black hole, shooting stars, and supernovas. You might be a shooting star, where you launch well, all your friends and family liked it, they backed it, other people backed it, but then your marketing died off, so it's just like a shooting star. It's fleeting, it goes away. We can turn a shooting star into a supernova, and a supernova is a good product with good marketing. A shooting star is a good product with bad marketing. A black hole is a bad product with good marketing. You're just throwing money in and it's getting sucked away. Outer darkness is where you definitely don't want to be. That's a bad product and bad marketing. If you have a shooting star, my most recent example that I love sharing is a guy named Timo Heino from Finland with a product called SpineGym. He came to us when he had 41 backers, probably his friends and family, and $8047 raised. If you look up his project on Indiegogo inDemand now, I believe we're at $1,300,000. We raised him $463,000 on his Kickstarter, so 463 minus 8,000 over $450,000 raised for this product that was pretty much dead in the water. It had a little bit of a shooting star and then it died.

At any stage of the crowdfunding process we can help you raise money, it just depends on where you're at. Worst case, we'll validate your product, and we'll tell you, look, we've raised millions and millions of dollars and we did the exact same thing we've done for all these products that we've raised millions of dollars for, but for your product it didn't work. So chances are you've got a bad product and you probably need to pivot or tweak or disband, and here's some things we recommend. Or you know what? You've got a terrible idea. Nobody wants it, and as hard as this is for you to accept, it's time for you to move onto something new or go get another job, because this one's not going to do it for you.

Or best case, we turn into a supernova and we do what we've done for the $80 million plus we've raised for hundred of good Kickstarter projects, and everybody's happy. Those are my favorite. We have a lot of them right now. We have the second most project on Kickstarter running live right now. It's called Flag, a really cool idea for photo sharing, and we have probably 5 to 10 more in the top 20 on Kickstarter, and tons on Indiegogo inDemand. We're Indiegogo's number one partner, we're Kickstarter's number one source of traffic aside from Youtube and Google. We even pass up Reddit most of the time. We're doing big things, and we're working with big companies. We've worked with lots of big names. We worked with the guy that invented Furbee. We've worked with Samsung. We've worked with the Coolest Cooler guy on quite a few things. Baubax Travel Jacket, the fifth most funded project of all time. That's Funded Today. Hiral Sanghavi is a good friend of mine. I could name drop all day with all the random stuff we've done, but we're doing big things and it's exciting, it's fun. It's great to see these new ideas get brought into existence when you get to be a part of it.

Robert Plank: Nice. Who knows, maybe someday you'll be bigger than Kickstarter and you can start your own, right?

Zach Smith: I don't know. We've thought about it, you know?

Robert Plank: I'm looking at the site, and you guys have like $80 million total in funds raised in all kinds of cool stuff. What's the website? What's the address to get to you and your company.

Zach Smith: It's funded.today. We also own fundedtoday.com, but I think that just redirects to funded.today and the reason we do that is because we get your project funded today. Pretty easy to remember, but it's not a dot com domain name. A lot of people mix that up. We went with something kind of weird with all those neat domain extensions.

Robert Plank: But weird stands out.

Zach Smith: Hey, exactly.

Robert Plank: Cool, so funded.today and before I let you go, do you have off the top of your head a super weird and crazy successful project that you've backed with Funded Today?

Zach Smith: That is a great question. Let me scan our site real quick. I'm going to do what you do.

Robert Plank: Cool.

Zach Smith: So we'll just go to Funded Today. If you go to the Get More Pledges page, you can scroll down and see a ton of the testimonials. We try to get a video testimonial from every client too, so we have lots and lots of video testimonials. People are slow to give them, but they all eventually come in. I think we've got 30 or so on the site. Let me find one that I really enjoyed. You know, I like the BetterBack. The BetterBack comes to mind. I use it almost every day. It's sitting on my desk right now. It's a product invented by Katherine Krug. It raised $1,193,776. It's an apparatus you wear for 15 to 20 minutes a day. It helps you maintain perfect posture. In fact, I'm not wearing it right now as I'm doing this interview, and I lean back, deep in my chair, horrible posture. Katherine would be ashamed of me. I should probably be wearing my BetterBack. It's a cool product that I don't think anybody has ever heard of or seen. I really love it, and it's very well made too. It was better than you even expected when you backed it.

Robert Plank: I'm scrolling through, and I'm seeing the BetterBack. People are selling wallets and clothing items and shoes and sunglasses, all kinds of stuff. It's crazy the amount of money that people are raising with some of these sites, especially when they use Kickstarter plus Indiegogo plus Funded Today and all these other tools that are out there. So look at all the great ideas that people have and all the money flying around. I think that anyone would be silly not to use crowdfunding to fund their physical projects and things like that. So once again, that webpage is funded.today, and thanks a bunch Zach for stopping by and telling us all about the exciting world of crowdfunding.

Zach Smith: Thanks Robert. I appreciate it. Glad to be on.[/showhide]

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