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Guest: Brandon Adams, inventor of the Arctic Stick and founder of Keys to the Crowd.
Host: Kevin Mako, founder of Product Startup and the leading expert in hardware startup consulting. A hardware entrepreneur since 1999, Kevin has advised more than 1,500 founders and built and scaled MAKO Invent through its acquisition by TriMech in 2024.
What an Inventor Learned From Crowdfunding
Brandon Adams shares the invention story behind the Arctic Stick and the lessons that led him to focus on crowdfunding. He identifies common campaign mistakes, the value of keeping the product simple, the role of market demand, and what makes campaign video creative more persuasive.
Episode transcript
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Filip Valica: The Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Product Startup Podcast, a podcast that helps bring your product idea to life by chatting with successful inventors, product designers, and other industry professionals. This podcast is run by Mako Design + Invent and hosted by Filip Valica.
Filip Valica: Our goal here is to get to the bottom of what makes a product successful, from initial idea to putting your product on the shelf. We're taking you step by step to build a functional product and scale your product business. Now onto the show.
Filip Valica: The main reason why I went through with my idea is because I wanted to prove so many people wrong. because they said I could never do it and it just it was like I have to do this because you get to that certain point like I just had to do it but for anybody
Filip Valica: get into this for one do not do it for the money because it's very rare that you just invent idea you make millions and it just happens just like that so don't do it for the money and be very simple with your idea stay simple a product that solves a problem
Filip Valica: and people actually want see if people want and that's why I love crowdfunding because it's a way to see if the mark even demands it of you and if it does it you can't And Phil is maybe you need to go to your next idea. The Product Startup, episode 27.
Filip Valica: Welcome to the Product Startup Podcast, helping you turn ideas into successful products step by step. With your host,
Filip Valica: Filip Valica. In the last episode, we talked with Tanya Heath, who created a multi-height shoe with removable heels. The interesting part of the interview for me was that she was able to do all of this in Paris, where the idea of a convertible shoe was pretty much sacrilege.
Filip Valica: So make sure to check out episode 26 if you want to hear how she spent the last two and a half years on R&D and how she sources manufacturing and production locally. So a boss I used to work with once told me, if you're not growing, you're just dying a slow death.
Filip Valica: And I thought it was a bit extreme at the time, but I came to realize how important it is to continue innovating. I worked for an industry leading company that lost its edge by resting on the success generated a decade before.
Filip Valica: One of our competitors in our niche outspent us in R&D for a few years, and they made a product that was much easier to use in service.
Filip Valica: Eventually, third-party technicians and operators that service our equipment started singing praises of the competitor's equipment to our mutual customers, and our brand started to lose market share at a rate that we couldn't recover from.
Filip Valica: Obviously, there's a lot going on in publicly traded companies, so it's not as easy as putting more money into this particular part of R&D. There's a lot of decisions that need to be made.
Filip Valica: But I think there's definitely a lesson learned there to continue pushing ahead. And all of us, I think, need to continue to get to that next level. Otherwise, our competitors that are nipping at our heels right now will take the lead.
Filip Valica: So in that spirit, I'm going to run an experiment for the next week. This podcast has made some decent gains, but it recently hit a new plateau. And it's critical for me to build something that you, dear listener, find useful.
Filip Valica: something worthy of subscribing to and sharing with friends and coworkers.
Filip Valica: So here's the experiment.
Filip Valica: For everyone that writes an iTunes review and sends me a screenshot at Philip at the product startup.com
Filip Valica: and tells me how to make this podcast more useful, I will trade 30 minutes of my time to help you get unstuck wherever you are in the product development process.
Filip Valica: So some things that we could talk about are maybe establishing the feature and specification set for your new product and creating a concept to solicit. feedback from users. We could talk about narrowing down design elements in mechanical products
Filip Valica: and identify some of the manufacturing methods that you could use to prototype and make them efficiently. I can also suggest some design changes or maybe even create a test plan to improve
Filip Valica: the quality and reduce your manufacturing costs, specifically for mechanical products, available to brainstorm other things as well. And we can also talk about using subcontractors
Filip Valica: and vendors to turn your product idea from a concept to delivery if you want to use outside contractors for that. So there's no bull, no upsell. I'm putting my time where my mouth is.
Filip Valica: It's that important to me. I really want to fix this growth issue now to make this the best podcast for founders of physical products. It's more important for me to do that than to make a sale.
Filip Valica: I recently switched to working on my side hustle full time and I really want to do everything I can to grow this site and podcast. So shoot me your iTunes review and your thoughts on how to make
Filip Valica: this show more useful for you to F-I-L-I-P at the Product Startup.com and we'll set up a 30-minute slot to cover anything that you want to talk about.
Filip Valica: And now on to today's episode, Brandon Adams invented the Arctic Stick during his college years. He pushed that product through concept, design,
Filip Valica: manufacturing, and funding. We'll definitely get into more of the funding side as Brandon will share some of his crowdfunding tips and his experiences helping his clients launch products and services on crowdfunding platforms. So let's get started. Hi, Brandon.
Filip Valica: Thanks for coming on the show. Hey, thanks for having me on, bud. So you have a really cool story. Not only did you bring your own product to market, but you also run a company that helps people with their Kickstarter campaigns.
Filip Valica: And I wanted to talk about both a little bit today just because we've had a lot of guests on the show that had some success with crowdfunding.
Brandon Adams: But we haven't been able to get into the level of detail to kind of talk about what makes those campaign successful. But I also definitely wanted to talk about your product. So tell everyone a little bit about how you got started with Arctic Stick. Yeah, I'll get into it.
Brandon Adams: It's funny to say a cool product I have. It's actually used to cool drinks. So a little bit about my background. I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. I grew up in an ice business. My dad sold frozen water for a living. Yes, you can make money doing that. People laugh sometimes.
Brandon Adams: It's an ice shibbership that sells packaged ice. It was one hot day I was delivering, and I wanted to keep one bottle of beverage colder for a longer period of time. And instead of putting ice cubes in, which is time consuming, I want something different. Bad day with that idea.
Brandon Adams: Everybody has that light bulb moment. I decided to act on it. I invented the idea Arctic Stick, a product of the cool and flavor your bottle beverage. Took it to Iowa State University back in 2012 and won a class competition.
Brandon Adams: and won 500 bucks at the time. Graduated from college. I'm like, okay, I got an idea now what? Like, what do I do to move forward? And I end up raised in, and it was six weeks, I raised 10 grand from family friends and, I guess,
Brandon Adams: full strangers to get that product just started, jump started. I found a successful inventor entrepreneur called, his name was Jack Berenger. He had been on Shark Tank, and he had taken many products to market and had over a dozen
Brandon Adams: patents found somebody that could do it and uh he kind of mentored me along the way so fast forward uh three about three years i went through the product development doing cad drawing i parted with a
Brandon Adams: company called product quick start or slingshot product development group at the time in lana georgia they helped me with developing doing manufacturing been through a lot of different juggs in the
Brandon Adams: process and then i got to my final leg of funding i need to pay for the tooling the the machinery to mass produce this product, which anybody in the inventing field knows how expensive it can be.
Brandon Adams: And so I saw that I needed to raise $25,000. I turned to crowdfunding. I did a Kickstarter campaign.
Brandon Adams: This is July 2014. Actually, during when the coolest cooler was on their second round when they raised $13.2 million. So I did a campaign. In 33 days, I raised, it was $26,421.
Brandon Adams: I had a successful campaign, got the money I needed. for the tooling, but I found out how many things I did wrong. And I saw that 60 to 70% of the campaigns are failing out there. So I was on a mission to be the top and crowdfunding. I want
Brandon Adams: to be really good at it. I want to teach others how to do it. And you fast forward a year, I end up creating a whole company around it called Keys to the Crowd. It's at Keys
Brandon Adams: to Crowd.com. But what I did to stand out and learn, I ended up interviewing people. I started my own podcast show. One thing that I did different that I don't think anybody else in the world does. I went on TV across the country,
Brandon Adams: talked about crowdfunding, and that I actually promoted local campaigns in that city on Kickstarter and Indiegogo, on live TV that even know about it. I just promoted it. And then, well, I know, pretty random. So I got my publicity
Brandon Adams: from that, but where I really stood out from the crowd is I ended up doing John Lee Dumas's campaign for the Freedom Journal. We raised $453,000 on Kickstarter. starter with over 7,000 backers in 33 days. Jeez.
Brandon Adams: Yeah, it was like that overnight success, you know, which took so long to get to that point. And I've worked with other people such as Joel Com, Kevin Harrington, Ridgel Sharker Shark Shark Tank,
Brandon Adams: done some very unique campaigns. I even got a couple right now that are potential to do seven figures. But that's, so kind of recap my story,
Filip Valica: it all started with an idea I had on a hot day to take a product called Arctic Sick to Market, guide to market. after spending $100,000 of my harder money and three and a half years of education in it,
Filip Valica: I got that to market sells on Amazon, but where it really led me to is crowdfunding.
Brandon Adams: I like to help people take their ideas to market through crowdfunding, and it's a great way to raise money, but also raise awareness and find strategic partners in the industry. Great. I want to talk about Arctic Thick just for a little bit, because it's really cool to have
Brandon Adams: somebody on that can understand both sides of the coin of crowdfunding, of creating the product and also funding it. You mentioned that you spent $100,000 of your money to create this and bring it to market. Can you maybe break down just in rough terms where that money went?
Brandon Adams: A lot of it went to things that I shouldn't have went to.
Brandon Adams: I made a lot of mistakes.
Brandon Adams: Actually, one thing that happened with my tooling, the tooling, it didn't quite turn out exactly how it was supposed to.
Brandon Adams: So it's very unique for my product, the Arctic Sick. There's two components. You have an inner cavity and outer cavity. It's basically two pieces of polypropylene that go together.
Brandon Adams: And when you put two plaqueses together and you expect to fill it full of liquid and freeze it and it expands and basically use it over and over again, it's hard to get something to seal, especially the atmospheric pressure.
Brandon Adams: So that mistake cost me thousands of dollars, but actually that mistake got me on the cover in Venter's Digest. It was Arctic Meltdown, talked about how all this money I had put.
Brandon Adams: into and this product delayed going to market for a year because of this problem. So that spent some money. The tooling end up costs and probably maybe after all the mistakes, maybe 35,000 or more.
Brandon Adams: And then for marketing, here's one thing. It's funny. I spent a lot of money promoting my idea. I think this is something inventors can relate to. So you get an idea and you're so excited and it's your baby. You want to tell the world about it. But I told the world about it a lot
Brandon Adams: before it was even available to buy and I got on TV and all this stuff publicity before even was time to even get the publicity but spent money doing that I actually spent money with
Brandon Adams: a mentor who I paid on a monthly basis I paid him actually $500 a month for two years and that got me I learned a lot from him more than for the inventing world but that's where some money was
Brandon Adams: spent and then you figure prototyping and cad drawings engineers aren't cheap you know exactly with this like yep no we're not but i did learn in college um so i had a buddy in college
Brandon Adams: actually did a lot of cadd drawings for me before i i went to a professional and i just paid them in beer and like a little bit of cash in there um but that was one thing uh they did help me out
Brandon Adams: but i guess for anybody out there listening here's my advice for me spending the hundred grand that i didn't need be spent uh find somebody's already done it before like me or or anybody
Brandon Adams: it's done it, learn from their mistakes, because mistakes are the most costly thing you can have. Bootstrap it. There's always ways, as an entrepreneur, think creatively, there's always ways
Filip Valica: around actually paying people, because if you want to just pay people outright for every service it is to get your product to market and your bootstrap, like, you're going to go broke real quick.
Filip Valica: And just think simple. Try not to complicate things. And I guess if you really want to just invent ideas and get them to market quicker, do the license.
Filip Valica: route. It'd be a lot easier than trying to turn your product into a company, which you can do
Brandon Adams: is what I actually intended to do.
Brandon Adams: But just from my insight, if you just want to invent ideas, have somebody else to deal with the marketing, everything else,
Brandon Adams: it's a lot cheaper route, especially if you find the right partners to do it for you. Yeah, absolutely agree with a lot of the points that you made, especially bribing friends and family to help you with things or, you know,
Brandon Adams: people in college to help you out with stuff. That's definitely the shoestring way to go. So, you know, that you found your passion in crowdfunding, talk a little bit about what led to that
Brandon Adams: and the realization that you had that there's other people that have this need and I'm just going to become the best at doing this. Yeah, so I saw opportunity. I saw a need in the market for my own experience and it was so unique now that I think about it too. Like not many people
Brandon Adams: that could say they like took a product to market from beginning to end and then did it through crowdfunding, but then now I started a company in crowdfunding to specifically do that. So
Brandon Adams: I guess when I did that campaign for Arcstick, I thought I knew everything going into it, but I didn't, I really didn't know a squat. I didn't know much about crowdfunding, but I
Brandon Adams: learned fast. And I really had to work for every dollar that I raised in that campaign. But I saw other people failing, which I hate to see entrepreneurs fail. I mean, a crowdfunding campaign can make your dreams come true or it could really make your dreams crash and burn.
Brandon Adams: And I don't like seeing that. And after so many people come into me and asked me for advice, on how to take product to market or anything else. I'm like, well, I need to help people on a bigger scale. I knew that podcasting could help me do that.
Brandon Adams: But also, I saw this opportunity to become the crowdfunding expert in the industry. Like, there was crowdfunding experts out there, but nobody, like, for say, the celebrity. I wanted to become that celebrity in the industry that people saw like, oh, when they think
Brandon Adams: of crowdfunding, they think of Branty Adams, the king of crowdfunding.
Brandon Adams: So I just saw that opportunity and I went with it. And that's where I did the random thing of going on TV across the country. I, like for a while, I think 10 weeks straight, every week I was on TV in different state promoting crowdfunding campaigns.
Brandon Adams: And that just kind of made me stand out from the crowd. And then from there,
Brandon Adams: it attracted certain people. And then obviously when I got some big names on board to work with me, that got my track record up. And then after doing campaigns, I've done seven or is eight campaigns in the last 10 months.
Filip Valica: and we've raised about three quarters of million so far. And now I'm getting to some bigger campaigns that could raise seven figures easily. It doesn't happen overnight.
Filip Valica: But I wanted to help other people. That was the biggest thing. And I saw that everybody is failing. And I found out from across the board what made a campaign successful and what made it fail
Filip Valica: and what the successful campaigns like the Pebble Watch, the coolest cooler and all these big known campaigns are doing in order to succeed.
Brandon Adams: And I just turned it into this, this accurate. and for called my fund formula,
Brandon Adams: it's F for 4.0.U for to utilize marketing plan and for narrative and D for deliver value. And that fund formula is what basically I teach all my clients. We work with when we do a campaign with them and what anybody should know if they're going to do a campaign.
Brandon Adams: That's really great that you got into that level of detail because we're definitely going to drill down to a little bit. A lot of the people that we've had on the podcast have done their own indigogo campaign or their own Kickstarter campaign. And they've never done anything like that before.
Brandon Adams: And like you said, sometimes they've stumbled through it and they were successful and other times, maybe less so. Can you talk about maybe some of the typical issues that you've seen with campaigns and why they might not fund or why they might not even get as much money as they could?
Brandon Adams: It's funny because this is like the whole thing I talked about in my TV segments. I had my pitch down good because you usually get about four minutes to be on TV and you got to go fast. So there's three main mistakes that most people make.
Brandon Adams: One is lack of preparation. A lot of people, they think that they're going to put the campaign up and it's going to be overnight success and everybody's going to succeed and you're going to get so much money. It doesn't work that way.
Brandon Adams: You've got to spend hours and hours building your campaign out, building up your audience, getting people on board to spread the word, try and find influencers to tweet out or do a Facebook share, send out their email list at a time.
Brandon Adams: Most people just show up on day one and they expect it's going to succeed. so that's one of the biggest mistakes and then the next one is lack of promotion they do a Facebook share
Brandon Adams: tweet out and they think that is going to make it go viral it's beyond that I mean it's it's putting money in ads it's uh it's also um getting a bunch of people with big email lists it's setting out to the
Brandon Adams: the editors the journalist ahead of time to get stories try to get on the end gadget or anything like that it's getting on a podcast shows it's doing Facebook live and it's also, by the way, I found a lot of success in my last campaign, Snapchat.
Brandon Adams: There's a great way to mark up a Snapchat for a crowdfunding campaign.
Brandon Adams: So that, the next mistake and another thing, you know, for inventors, we have this feeling like our ideas are our babies and we value it so much.
Brandon Adams: So what we think the value of it is is different than what somebody else sees it at. So you need an insight from other people. So they don't create enough value in their reward levels. So they might, and this is a big mistake I made with Arctic Stick.
Filip Valica: So for Arctic Stick, we were doing a three-pack for $15 on our campaign.
Brandon Adams: I should have did a six-pack for $15, which is what it sells for on Amazon. I wasn't thinking. I thought people were just going to give me money because my product was cool. Well, no, you have to give value. And when you have your reward levels for a product, you got to look at it as this way.
Brandon Adams: You need to give the Kickstarter backers or Indigo go-go backers. you need to give them a discounted value of your product. So let's say it's going to retail in the market for 20 bucks.
Brandon Adams: On your crowdfunding campaign, have it listed for like $12 or $15.
Brandon Adams: So give a lot of value and reward levels, and then people are more likely to give you money. So those are the three mistakes that I've seen across the board that people make all the time. And it sucks because a lot of times the people contact me the day after the campaign launches,
Brandon Adams: and they'll be like, hey, anything can do for me? Well, it's too late. You need to raise 30 to 40% of your total funding goal in the first 48 hours. And if you don't do that, your chance of success are very slim. That's a very good metric to have. So what happens if you don't raise the 30% in your first 48 hours? What do you do?
Brandon Adams: Most people I say is cancel the campaign and hire me and start over. But no, it's so the biggest thing, the reason for that, and so people know why. So with Indie Go-GoGo, Indigo calls a go-go factor, Kickstarter, you look at our algorithm.
Brandon Adams: them. So in the first 38 or 24 to 48 hours, you get a lot of traction on the page. And the traction that allows you to get featured or a better placement on the page or more eyeballs, they use
Brandon Adams: the combination of attraction to the page, the amount of people that view the page actually go to it, the amount of backers and the amount of money raised in X amount of hours.
Brandon Adams: So by that little math algorithm they do, basically the more money and more backers
Filip Valica: and more attention you get to that page in the first 48 hours, the more they'll put you higher up in their search engine. So you're getting organic traffic. And it's like momentum. So once you get that momentum, you're a lot more likely to reach your funding goal early
Filip Valica: on, which helps you get a higher percentage. And people look at it this way. So like, let's say you're 24 hours in and you have like 40% of your funding goal already
Brandon Adams: raised mentally people look at it they're like well it's already it looks like it's going to become settle more likely to back it but if they see like 10 or 15 percent raise of your funding goal they're going to look at it and be like some people look at it this way like i don't think it's
Brandon Adams: going to succeed so i'm not even going to pledge it anyways um and then then first 40 hours is just vital to get that and if it doesn't and i see this for my first campaign you got to constantly
Brandon Adams: work harder and harder and harder to try to get people to back your campaign because if it flattens out right away because your most money comes in in your first, your week, your first week or first four to five days and your last four to five days. The middle, it kind of
Brandon Adams: flattens out. So you need to go out of the gates with a big boom, which helps you get a lot more people. I guess one way of doing that is making sure that everybody knows about the campaign
Brandon Adams: up front. I know people that have done campaigns that have basically emailed everyone that I've ever interacted with in life to say, here's the my crowdfunding campaign. What is your thought on that?
Brandon Adams: And what do you do if you don't want to spam your friends and family? Don't do a crowdfunding campaign.
Brandon Adams: Yeah, there's only one way to succeed pretty much. You got to leverage your audience and other people's audience. I mean, it is calling in all favors for friends and family. But also, you've got to be willing to reach out to a lot of people and call in favors. A big thing I say.
Brandon Adams: And this is what you can do with a book launch, too. and Gary V is big on saying this,
Brandon Adams: spend a whole day in a hotel room and reach out to every friend you have, send them a personal email and say, hey, I'm doing this campaign, this project means a lot to me. Would you be willing to help me out in this day and back the campaign? And if you have something in return, like for me,
Brandon Adams: what I do is I offer access to one of my courses for free or something, offer them something,
Filip Valica: but get them to commit to pledging on day one. And then maybe you offer different incentives
Brandon Adams: for people that are going to support you on day one,
Filip Valica: So we've done anybody that backs on day one of the campaign will match one of my partners, Greg Rolette with ambitious adventures. We said, hey,
Filip Valica: whatever dollar amount you match on day one, we'll match dollar for dollar in ambitious bucks towards all the online courses we have.
Brandon Adams: So that's an incentive, offering them something else of value, making exclusive perks on day one. But you have to leverage audiences. And then you have to be willing to go outside of your comfort zone and reach out to people
Brandon Adams: in that field. So let's say you're crowdfunding for a fitness product. Try to find all the fitness gurus and influencers in the industry and send them an email and say, hey, I'm doing this project. I'd be willing to maybe potentially give you free product or whatever it is. Would you
Brandon Adams: be willing to help me and support this to get the word out there? I think it's a great product the industry needs. Could you send this out to your email list and do a tweet out and a Facebook share when the campaign goes live? And if you get people like that on board, a bunch of people, you're
Brandon Adams: more likely to have success. It's a numbers game. The more numbers you can reach right away, the more success you'll have. Definitely. I could see some of the campaigns that didn't fund it was just because they just never got that traction from the beginning and they didn't have a,
Brandon Adams: you know, wide enough net. Yeah, it's exactly right. If you're a product designer, an inventor, you've come up with something. Is there a unique method to marketing for each type of product?
Brandon Adams: For example, let's say you've got a food product that you're coming out with versus something that's for home and kitchen, or do you find that the methodology is more or less the same? It makes me think of the potato salad campaign.
Brandon Adams: That happened during mine, too. It's funny how he made that go viral, but no, it depends. So, like, if you're doing a product, you're obviously, you're going to be, your main perk level is going to be that product and offering that value.
Brandon Adams: But if you're going to do, so, for example, I've done one for one of the events, I've actually launched two companies through crowdfunding of my own, which. I thought, I just thought of that the other day.
Filip Valica: I didn't realize until I actually was doing research on something. But one of them was a event, young entrepreneur convention. And what we were giving them was tickets to event. We were selling them an experience.
Brandon Adams: So you have the different, the reward levels for a campaign. You have your product itself. You have the experience, maybe something unique, once a lifetime opportunity. They're all different things.
Brandon Adams: So depending on what you're trying to raise money for, will decide what you're going to offer the crowd, which will change how you're going to approach your campaign.
Brandon Adams: So the biggest thing is knowing first what you're actually raising the money for, and then people want to see, where's their money directly going? So if it was an invention or a product, they know that when they back your campaign, that's
Brandon Adams: what the money is going to to actually create that product, and that's what they get in return. Now, for recently last July, this past month, we did a campaign for a TV show. we weren't giving them we're giving them DVDs but the experience we gave them was unique opportunity
Brandon Adams: to be a part of the film to to get inside secrets like behind the scenes just unique experiences
Filip Valica: that not many people get so that that will decide how you launch your campaign and how you really build out your perk levels your reward levels in the page and also the video itself in essence basically this is just like a miniature market strategy session where you're having
Filip Valica: to speak with people before you even launched the campaign to see what they would buy or what they would sponsor your campaign for because they might not respond to some of the things that you're putting up on your campaign. That's exactly right.
Brandon Adams: So that's actually, so crowdfunding is a way to get market feedback, but also I suggest to get market feedback before even launched a campaign because you want to ask people beyond just your friends and family like other people that don't know you or care what, I mean, give
Brandon Adams: real feedback, what they would be willing to pay for a pledge level. like what will they give you what what would they want i mean then you customize your your perk levels based off of what they want and what i say for our clients we want them to have 30 to 40% of their
Brandon Adams: total funding goal committed to on day one by reaching out and getting people that are committed to a two five 10 000 campaign level or perk level or getting let's say 100 people at 50
Brandon Adams: uh committed to a certain backer level so when you do launch you already have for sure amount of people that are going to pledge your campaign, because that is what really decides getting all that other traffic that aren't your friends and family where people you've reached out to.
Brandon Adams: It's people that don't even know you.
Filip Valica: And that's when it's beautiful because it's organic traffic and it's real proof of concept. Well, I think people underestimate the amount of work that goes into just even planning a campaign, much less even running it. One of the people that I spoke with on the show here said that she basically spent every day
Brandon Adams: of the 30 days that the campaign was live on Kickstarter, just managing the campaign and making sure that she was interacting properly on social media to hit her funding goal. And she was raising $100,000 and she was successful, but it basically sounded like a third job. Oh, it's a full-time job.
Brandon Adams: I mean, just to give you insight for how much work it is, I mean, for our team, when somebody hires us, there's six of us on it that work with them for professional social media guy, doing copy, publicity, all that.
Brandon Adams: I mean, I would suggest when you do a campaign, have a team and get them. And even if you want to incentivize them, let's say you don't have much money. to pay a company to help you do the advisory for it. Get some people that maybe they're really good at social media.
Brandon Adams: They're really good at writing copy or vigils or whatever else. And offer them a percentage of the race. So they're incentivized to reach out to their audience and to make it a huge success. So it takes a team. It takes a lot of work to do a real crowdfunding campaign.
Brandon Adams: You've got to put a lot of work into it. But it's well worth it because the value of it is beyond the money you raise. you can see the potential or the what it does for you in years to come, getting publicity,
Brandon Adams: reaching out to strategic partners, just having all these kind of opportunities come to you because of this campaign that you create. In terms of how much effort it takes, what do you think someone should budget the cost for something like this? Because like you said, you need to take out Facebook ads and invest some money in getting
Brandon Adams: your brand out there. If you wanted to raise $40,000 or $50,000, how much of that money is going to go right back into marketing. Yeah, so I'd like to say 5% of 10% of your total total raise that you plan on doing goes to
Brandon Adams: ads, to actual like marketing. And I would say the best ROI if you're doing what I found out is from just Facebook ads alone, retargeting. So spending money on ads itself just depends on your situation.
Filip Valica: That's what we've done. And a lot of that actually
Brandon Adams: is going into ads to build up our list before it even launches. So once we launch, we have this pool of emails that are people that signed up that are interested in the campaign already.
Brandon Adams: So once you notify them on day one, they're most likely to back it. So you already have an audience built up. And then once your campaign launches, you can just do retargeting ads towards that existing audience that you've built up. So spending money in that,
Brandon Adams: again, every campaign's different. I mean, some of the campaigns for our clients, and they're spending like 20 grand to put a campaign together. I mean, there's big companies that get into this that do crowdfunding campaigns. It's the cheapest, easiest way to take a product to market.
Filip Valica: So that every situation is different. If you have experts on board that can do certain areas like social media ads or writing the copy or creating the video, the video is a very important aspect. Then leverage them to help you out so you don't have to pay out.
Filip Valica: I do say like the video is one of the most important things of the campaign.
Brandon Adams: This is the first thing that people see.
Brandon Adams: And people in today's day and age, I mean,
Filip Valica: even me, like I have ADD a little bit. like it's hard to keep somebody's focus for a longer period of time.
Brandon Adams: And I'm talking like three, four minutes. So if you can create a really good crowdfunding video that gets their attention, captivates them and educates them about what your product is and you can get them
Brandon Adams: involved in that way, that will allow them to understand what is you're asking of them and they'll give you money. So, hey, get this professional videographer on board. The video is important. Don't create some video that's from your iPhone with bad audio and
Brandon Adams: just bad visual like uh it has to be a really good video yeah has to have a ukulele in the background yeah yeah it has to be it has to be good like i've seen where people have created
Brandon Adams: videos one time a guy i've seen the video he created nine minute video where he was sitting on his couch asking for money and i'm pretty sure there's a beer can in front of the computer and i'm thinking like you're asking for money and what like because a video if you see a really good
Brandon Adams: video then if people see that they're like wow if they put this much work in the video they're going to put this much work into investing money wisely into creating the thing that they say they're going to create. Right. Or if you create a really bad video, like, that
Filip Valica: kind of tells the perception or the value of your work. Like, if you're doing, if you don't put much work into this, what makes us think you're going to put much work into your idea? Totally get what you're saying about the video. And I think, you know, people invest in the team or in the individual before they invest
Filip Valica: in the product because they don't know if the product is going to be successful. So they're, they're banking on you to deliver. So what would you advise? an introvert to do that's not comfortable with getting on a video and hawking their product?
Brandon Adams: Learn to become an extrovert for that period of time. Yeah.
Brandon Adams: I mean,
Brandon Adams: I mean, you don't necessarily have to you, but… Does it have to be you? Can it be somebody else? Can it be an actor?
Filip Valica: It can be somebody else, but it's not going to be the same effect. Like, it depends on the approach you take. But the big thing in crowdfunding is, like,
Filip Valica: depending on the campaign you're doing.
Brandon Adams: I mean, it's different for a huge company that isn't doing it for the money. They're doing it for other reasons.
Brandon Adams: then it would be a different video. But let's say you're an inventor and you have an idea. I'll just put my example for Arctic 6th. A lot of people invested in me because they believed in me. And I showed them how much I believed in this idea and how I needed help from people
Brandon Adams: to help me create this and create a movement.
Brandon Adams: So that was important for me being on camera. And I think for the creators,
Brandon Adams: there's the people that, like, there's backers, like back thousands of projects. They're addicted to this. Like, people will back it because of you and you only. And for me, personally,
Brandon Adams: I backed a lot of my campaigns because I believed in the person on the camera that their idea and I believed and I wanted to help them. And I think you get a lot of backers from that. And I really think that it should be important that you should be in the video in some way
Brandon Adams: showing who you are as a person and then through the campaign page itself, kind of telling your story and why it means so much to you and why it should matter to the people that are watching. So that's an interesting point. you feel like the people in the video need to connect somehow with the audience. And what I mean by
Brandon Adams: that is you might see a gap in the market for something, whatever that is. But you're not your target audience. You just saw the gap and you're looking to fill that with your own product. And so now you're looking to connect with a certain demographic or certain segment of the market.
Brandon Adams: Let's say it's people who bake cupcakes. And you're not a cupcake baker. How do you put together a video that doesn't seem fake? Yeah, that's a good way to put it. So let me get the example.
Brandon Adams: right so you're saying if if somebody was creating cupcakes but they're not a cupcake fanatic how do you get to go yeah or you're not the the picture of a cupcake fanatic or you not might not be the ace of cakes
Brandon Adams: typical person you're just an entrepreneur and you found a product niche what i would show is show
Filip Valica: the pain show the problem um and that's the biggest thing people see and they can relate to that just because you're not the expert in that area but maybe you saw the problem and for me and i don't
Brandon Adams: I don't know. This is just kind of throwing something out there, but like, let's say I, let's say I go and eat cupcakes and I go to this cupcake store that created the
Filip Valica: cupcakes, but they didn't create the specific cupcake that I wanted. And I was frustrated with this. So what I did is I created a campaign video showing people like me eating a cupcake
Filip Valica: and be like showing a face like it's not that good and showing how I wanted this specific cupcake, but nobody made it. Have you ever felt that problem?
Brandon Adams: now if you can help me we're going to create a formula to create this cupcake that I love and maybe you like too and then we can create other cupcakes that are similar to what you want but they don't create on the market so showing that pain and people that can relate to that same
Brandon Adams: pain they can relate to that person i mean it's like an idea and invention like when you see it and you look at the coolest cooler is a great example it's like the best copy wrote for a video ever uh ryan grepher did awesome that campaign the first time around they failed the second time they
Brandon Adams: it was the most successful campaign at that time they showed how a regular cooler didn't fulfill every need it was just an old junk cooler that he couldn't have a flashlight on it couldn't have
Brandon Adams: a radio player didn't have all the things that needed so because of that problem that he had he he came up with a product that would solve them needs to fill that that pain that he had
Brandon Adams: and because of that people related they bought that product they bought a lot of it for 60,000 backers. So that's what I would say. Show the pain that people can relate to. And the solution
Brandon Adams: of the pain is you and the money that you're going to give to that person to help solve that problem. And together, you can solve the problem and create something that solves that pain.
Brandon Adams: But that makes sense. Yeah, that's amazing advice, Brandon. You should be the next Billy Mays, the next pitchman.
Brandon Adams: That flowed really well. I could see it on TV already unfolding with, you know, that's funny you know my one of my good friends kevin harrington invented the infomercial so like i'll often tell
Brandon Adams: him that you know while we're talking about this you know you mentioned that you need to reach out to as many people as you can and including people with some influence bloggers YouTubers that type
Brandon Adams: of thing a lot of time they're just getting pinched left and right for stuff and so either they're going to be again they're charging you now for just for looking at your product or maybe for supporting it or they just don't even have the time to reply back to you how do you make that
Brandon Adams: an enticing offer for them without really spending as much as you're going to earn yeah so there's multiple ways uh the first way i would take and this we call this our ambassador program um to get
Brandon Adams: influences on board to help support your campaign offer them something that doesn't cost you money offer them to be an elite ambassador that gets listed on your website with a link to their site or they listen to the campaign they get free publicity
Brandon Adams: or if that doesn't or offer them a reward level or free or if it goes the next step make them affiliate so indigo it makes it really easy you can actually have a it's a referral
Brandon Adams: program so you can get give them a specific link if you have indigogo account you can have a link when you go to that campaign page you click it and there's a link unique to you and it'll
Brandon Adams: track how much you send to the page on the back end so like i can know of joe from wherever sent $10,000 worth of pledges. Make a deal where you give them X amount of percent of the pledges they direct. Make them an affiliate.
Brandon Adams: That's one way.
Brandon Adams: Be creative. I always say to entrepreneurs, be creative
Filip Valica: and offer something to value that person that makes it worth their time. But some of them, they might just, honestly, they might love your product so much and want it for themselves that they're willing to support it because they have that same problem. It just depends on the situation
Filip Valica: of the person, but for a campaign,
Brandon Adams: if you're launched a certain niche product or industry, reach out to the people that are influencers in that industry. If they're in the industry, they're going to be a lot more likely to support you. So that's one thing I would say.
Brandon Adams: So again, I go back to the fitness product. If I'm going to launch a fitness product and I want to get a big audience on board, go to the celebrities in the fitness industry. Don't go to the celebrity in the food industry. Sure, sure. Yeah, so that would be my advice, the best approach.
Brandon Adams: and hey you throw enough darts you're going to eventually get a bullseye so reach out to a lot of people they're not all going to commit don't feel bad if they don't um there's going to be a lot of people say no but they are going to people to say yes and if you ask enough people you're going to get enough people on board to
Brandon Adams: help support your campaign and just to relate to relate to relate to support the campaign and send out their campaign and at that time he had over a thousand guests on a show
Brandon Adams: and we relay reach out to every single one of his past guests on a show and ask that they would support the campaign and send out their email. list. I think we had maybe, maybe it is 20% or so that actually committed to it. So that's a big
Brandon Adams: number. And they sit out of their list. And I mean, he leveraged his ambassador program that
Filip Valica: we could, like that was one of the most vital things to his success. So not only in day one, did he have 18 or 20 podcast shows going out live from other shows he went on, but he had,
Filip Valica: I mean, probably the millions of emails that were sent out at once for day one of launch,
Brandon Adams: which allowed us to raise 100 grand in 33 hours. I mean, 100 grand in 33 hours. But that was all that work we put in prior. So on day one, that was all their success. It just didn't happen. I just want people to realize that.
Brandon Adams: Like, that campaign took so much work ahead of time. For any campaign we do, there's so much work you have to put in prior to that pushing the launch button. Because once you push the launch button, you better have a lot of work done already. So people are going to come to it.
Filip Valica: And you mentioned Indigo go a little bit. So I think part of the prep work, is deciding what platform you're even going to be on. Can you just give us a quick rundown of the demographics or maybe the audiences that flock to Indigo versus Kickstarter and why you choose one versus the other?
Filip Valica: Yeah, so Kickstarter, it depends. I mean, I've been denied by Kickstarter before and I had to go on Indigo go. It's very unique.
Brandon Adams: Kickstarter's really, they're very picky on who they have. You've got to fit into their category.
Brandon Adams: So Kickstarter's known for doing film and tech projects is a big thing. so that indigogo allows you to raise money for about anything i mean you can do non-profits
Brandon Adams: fundraiser approach um it lets you raise money for about whatever they don't really make a judgment on what it is so again it just depends on what you're doing what you're raising your money for if you want to do anything with some kind of social approach with x amount of money goes towards
Brandon Adams: this nonprofit or hey i'm raising directly for a nonprofit um indigo goes the way to go
Brandon Adams: Kickstarter if you are doing specifically like a product or like some kind of tech product or maybe a film itself that's what you do so just to give you example for the campaigns
Brandon Adams: i've done kickstarter when we did the freedom journal that was a book that was on kickstarter um indigo go go i've done for non-profit i've done for an event an experience
Brandon Adams: another one a Kickstarter uh last month we did for a tv show um we've done for a physical product it just it depends on the situation that you're in for your ideas
Brandon Adams: idea. Well, and I'm sure that's one of the things that if you were to bring them on as a client that you guys would discuss about the pros and cons and choosing a
Filip Valica: specific platform. But pretty much other than Indigo GoGo and Kickstarter, are there any others that anyone needs to look at? So here's my advice. I like Kickstarter Indigo go-go because they're the
Brandon Adams: most known. People fear what they don't know and crowdfunding is still new. So Kickstarter and Nogogo are good. They have GoFundMe. They have like hundreds of crowdfunding platforms out there.
Brandon Adams: So it just depends. I mean, there's many forms. crowdfunding. A lot of people do crowdfunding campaigns, they don't even realize it just from raising money for events or stuff. You're raising money from the crowd. But I suggest if it was me
Brandon Adams: and anybody that works to me, we do Kickstarter or any go-go because of their most known platforms out there.
Brandon Adams: Yep, very good advice. So as we're wrapping up the end of the show here, I always ask everybody for that one tip to help somebody out. You know, they're creating a physical product and they might be stuck at a certain point and they feel like they've just hit a wall. What advice would
Filip Valica: you give somebody to keep going or what advice do you think is important to keep in mind while you're trying to launch your own product? Yeah, so me going through this, and I think the main reason why I went through with my idea is because I wanted to prove so many people
Filip Valica: wrong because they said I could never do it. And it just, it was like, I have to do this. Because you get to that certain point, like, I just had to do it. But for anybody to get into this, for one, do not do it for the money because it's very rare that you just invent an idea.
Filip Valica: You make millions and it just happens just like that. So don't do it. it for the money and be very simple with your idea. Stay simple, a product that solves a problem. People actually want. See if people want. And that's why I love crowdfunding because it's a way
Filip Valica: to see if the mark even demands it of you. And if it does, your campaign fails, maybe you need to go to your next idea. And another thing, ideas are nothing without you. You have to push forward.
Filip Valica: You're going to, nobody will believe in your idea like you do. And for what I've learned is find somebody who's already achieved what you want to achieve and follow them their footsteps. So find somebody that is a successful inventor or product, somebody like me who's taking a
Filip Valica: product to market, learn from them, learn from their mistakes because those are the most costly for me and anybody else and get advice from people who have done in the industry and they can help you get in front of the line, I guess, per se,
Brandon Adams: to have success a lot faster. So that's what I would say. I mean, it's persistence, perseverance, and never giving up. believe in your idea and finding people that have already done it. Don't go at it alone. Brandon, if people wanted to get in touch with you,
Brandon Adams: I know you offer some services on Keys to the Crowd, talk a little bit about that. Yeah, so if anybody, by the way, keys to the crowd.com, we have a full-out service company for crowdfunding, but if you go to that and subscribe,
Brandon Adams: I actually have a seven-day free course for people to teach them on crowdfunding. And then also we have, I created a course called Lightbulb to launch. It helps people that want to take their idea to market.
Brandon Adams: everything I learned, my $100,000 of training, learning mistakes, I put that into a course. So go to University of Young Entrepreneurs.com, and there's some courses there for under 100 bucks that can help you.
Brandon Adams: If anybody wants to personally reach out to me, I tell you this before, like, the best way to reach me is Snapchat.
Brandon Adams: BT Adams 18, I will snap you back. I love Snapchat. It's a great, unique way to market things. Just snap me, and I'll get back to you right away.
Brandon Adams: awesome Brandon hey thanks again for coming on the show you're super transparent we covered a lot of material love to have you on the show again at some point and maybe we can hit something in even more detail so thanks again for sharing your wisdom with us hey thank you so much man
Brandon Adams: and that's all i've got for today thanks for listening if you've got any questions or comments I've put all the links that we've covered under the show notes posted on the product startup
Filip Valica: dot com slash episode 27 join me next time as I speak with Lisa Ruiz she's the founder of credible products and has been featured on the home shopping network. She was a former police officer
Filip Valica: and decided to take over the family janitorial cleaning supply business. She saw an opportunity in the consumer marketplace creating cleaning products for home users that would give the same results
Filip Valica: that their professional customers enjoyed. So tune in next week to hear that episode. And again, just a gentle reminder. If you want to spend 30 minutes with me brainstorming ideas on how to get unstuck with your product-based business.
Filip Valica: Shoot me a screenshot of your iTunes review along with ways that you think I can help grow this podcast to make it better to Philip at theproduct startup.com. Thanks again for joining me and I'll see you next week.
Filip Valica: Thank you for listening to this episode of the product startup podcast with your host, Philip Veletsa. For more great content and to stay up today, visit theproduct startup.com.
Filip Valica: Your guide to getting there.
Filip Valica: Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Product Startup Podcast, the show that teaches you what it really takes to bring your product to market and turn it into a big success. This podcast series is brought to you by Mako Design + Invent, the first firm in North
Filip Valica: America to provide global caliber end-to-end physical consumer product development to startups, inventors, and small product businesses. If you're looking for product development help on your invention, head over to macawdesign.com.
Filip Valica: That's m-a-k-o-design.com for a free consultation. from one of Mauco Designed Four Design Studios from coast to coast. Thanks for listening and see you next time.
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