Bold (30 page)

Upselling.
One of the best ways to gain momentum during the campaign is to rally supporters to increase their contributions. Using this
foot-in-the-door technique during periods of high traffic can increase sales significantly. But don't beg your backers to buy more; instead, add engagement value at each reward level so backers become a substantially larger part of your movement when they level up.

Global focus.
With the Internet, crowdfunding campaigns are no longer local affairs. For ARKYD, we had to translate our campaign page into multiple languages to cater to our international audience. Over 20 percent of our sales came from European countries. Three percent of our sales came from China. Pebble's 68,000 backers came from all over the Internet and all over the world. “Our news spread from North America to Canada to Europe to Belgium to Holland to the Middle East to Singapore to Indonesia to China to Japan,” says Migicovsky. “Overall, the stats showed that roughly 50 percent of our backers came from North America and 50 percent came from elsewhere in the world. [And] it wasn't just the English-speaking world.”
²⁹
In other words, do your research and understand the global market. Prepare your campaign accordingly.

Ask questions and listen to your community:
Campaigns are not static. This isn't launch and forget; it's launch and get busy. And get busy with your data. Gauge the opinions of your customers constantly. Make iterative improvements based on the information collected. Making data-driven decisions throughout the campaign can dramatically improve your chances of success. Here are a few pointers:

Listening to your community will not only help fund your campaign but will also provide important feedback about the product/service you're offering and the right incentive structure to use. As you collect data, try to understand two things: What do people want? How much are they willing to pay for it? As expected, surveys work well in this context. Sometimes simply asking your customers and community exactly what you want to know is often the best approach.
So remember to:

1. 
Segment the audience.
By reaching out to specific groups of people within the community, you can draw better conclusions.

2. 
Ask only one question.
People are busy. Answering one question is easy and doesn't take too long. Ask the right question.

3. 
Expect exaggeration.
Be aware that people tend to choose the extremes in surveys. When it comes time for them to actually contribute, only a small percentage will actually put up the amount they selected in a survey.

So that sums it up. There's a lot more information online at the
www.AbundanceHub.com
site. My final piece of advice comes from our friends at Nike: Just do it. A major crowdfunding wave is just now hitting, and it will be growing tenfold over the next seven years. Don't miss it. Pick a project, a product, or a service and get busy building your campaign.

Shortly after submitting this manuscript to my publisher, a Portland-based product development whiz named Ryan Grepper crushed all previous crowdfunding records—including both Pebble Watch and Ubuntu—getting 62,642 people to pledge $13,285,226 to support his Coolest Cooler campaign. What were they supporting? The creation of a beach cooler for the twenty-first century—a cooler that comes with a built-in blender, phone charger, Bluetooth speakers, and, of course, a waterproof lighting system so you can find your beverage of choice after dark. Since my close friend, the marketing genius Brendon Burchard, had helped with this campaign, I reached out to him to see how they pulled it off. Turns out, during their campaign, Brendon and Ryan had uncovered four ideas not discussed in any of our previous examples, but with enough importance that a last-minute insertion was justified. So here's a quick look at what they
learned along the way.

1. 
Fail Forward.
Despite their enormous success, the Coolest Cooler wasn't an overnight sensation. In fact, this $13 million dollar success was Ryan's second effort at crowdfunding the cooler; his first failed to raise $125,000, and the story almost ended there.

And it's a long story. “Over a decade ago,” explains Ryan, “I made a beach blender out of an old Weedwacker. It made for fantastic family outings. The next year, I took my old car stereo and added it to a cooler so we could also have music on those trips. For years, these gadgets worked great, but then we moved and I put them in storage and didn't think much about them. But, last year, I pulled both the cooler and the blender out of mothballs and realized that technology had come a long way since I'd built them. Today, I could combine much more technology into a smaller, more portable cooler. And that's when it hit me—this could make for a great crowdfunding project.”

But not so fast. Ryan's first attempt at crowdfunding the Coolest Cooler actually failed. In a late 2013 effort, he only raised $100,000 of the $125,000 needed to reach his funding goal. Disappointed, but not deterred, and urged on by supporters from his first effort, Ryan took the cooler back to the drawing board—adapting, iterating, and ultimately succeeding. And this brings us to our first lesson: Fail forward. “The fact that your first crowdfunding effort failed doesn't mean you can't relaunch,” says Ryan. “In general, crowdfunding is a great way for any creative to put an idea in front of potential customers and get the most real and honest feedback you can imagine—feedback from their wallets. If you fund, fantastic. If you fail, you say, You know what, this wasn't as good as I thought it was. So what can I change, improve, and iterate? Or, ‘fail early, fail often, fail forward.' ”

2. 
Start with a Crowd.
The second lesson Ryan learned was the importance of having a community of people who care about
your product. Earlier in this chapter, I showed you how to create a group of Vanguards to play this role. In the case of the Coolest Cooler, Ryan's supporters from his first campaign filled that bill. “During that campaign,” he explains, “we did a lot of outreach—going to tailgating parties, networking, connecting. It was these same people who encouraged me to try again. And when I did, during our second campaign, these preexisting fans were with us from the start. They were a big boulder we threw into the pond. It made a very big ripple and had a very big effect.”

3. 
Mockup Matters.
The Internet is a visual medium. It's why people care so much about the size of their screens. It's also the reason that we talked about the importance of having a great video for your campaign. What Ryan learned is an extension of these facts—that having a great mockup of your product to display in that video is equally important. “The extra time between campaigns allowed us to build a great quality mockup,” he says. “It made a big difference. And it's not all about looks—it's actually about trust. With crowdfunding, you're asking strangers to care and to believe in both you and your concept. You're asking for a big leap of faith. Showing them how close you are to having an actual production model—something both finished and great looking—provides an incredible leg up.”

4. 
Targeted Advertising.
Market segmentation matters. “It's critical to craft your message for a specific audience,” explains Ryan. “From our first failure, we had some data about our backers—who they were and what kinds of things they were excited about. So we put together targeted Facebook ads and connected with people who already had passion for boating and tailgating and camping and picnics and Jimmy Buffet and such. When you understand your buyer, the targeting power for some of these advertising platforms is astounding.” So here, our fourth lesson
is the value of paid targeted advertising through platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Be a data-driven company. If the ads help your campaign raise more money than you're spending on advertising, then go for it.

Finally, I'll add one last point I found fascinating: The campaign's incredible level of success brought an entirely different type of benefit. Ryan recalls, “One guy reached out saying, ‘Do you need $20 million in financing? I've got a team, and we can make this the next $200 million company.' On top of that, we had countless partnership proposals for almost every major component maker—from batteries to blenders to speakers. Even potential distributors got in touch.”

“The trillions of hours of free time the population of the planet has to spend doing the things they care about” is how NYU professor Clay Shirky defines the term
cognitive surplus
.
¹
The entire third part of this book has been spent exploring strategies for tapping this surplus, but we've come to one of the most important lessons: how to build a community that you can tap into, work with, and use to accomplish the big and bold.

Let's begin with what we mean by
community
. For starters, it's different than the crowd. The crowd is everyone online. A community is pulled from the crowd. It's everyone with whom you have a working relationship. There are different types of communities, but in this chapter we're going to focus on two: DIY communities and exponential communities. A DIY community is a group of people united around a massively transformative purpose (MTP),
²
a collection of the passionate willing to donate their time and their minds to projects they truly believe in. These folks work for free. They work long hours. They remain committed. And they do so because they feel the work is meaningful and important. An exponential community, meanwhile,
is a group of people who are immensely passionate about a particular exponential technology (machine learning, 3-D printing, synthetic biology), and who unite to share techniques and experiences.

On a certain level, there's nothing new going on here. As long as humans have lived communally, they've been banding together to share passions and tackle problems. But today's DIY and exponential communities (which I will refer jointly to as communities for the remainder of the chapter) are distinguished by differences of geography, scale, and structure. Let's take a closer look.

Geography is the most obvious change. Historically, if you were building a boat and the best maker of masts was located on the other side of a mountain range—well, you were out of luck. But the Internet removes these barriers, and does so in important ways. As Bill Joy famously pointed out, the smartest people on the planet usually work for someone else.
³
Technology now gives you access to these big brains no matter where they live and without a host of traditional biases. Online, no one can see what color you are, which gods you worship, how you dress, what your hair looks like, if you smoke or smell or smile too much. This anonymity allows people who wouldn't normally sit on a park bench together to share deeply meaningful and potentially profitable experiences.

Moreover, liberation from proximity and prejudice increases access to new ideas. Since creativity is recombinatory—i.e., breakthroughs result from new ideas bumping into old thoughts to produce novel insights—this increased access to ideas amplifies the rate of innovation in communities. In fact, if you combine this amplified rate of innovation with our newfound ability to tap any expert anywhere in the world, the potency of technologies like 3-D printing and cloud computing, and the power of crowdfunding to capitalize such ventures, you find the second key difference in today's communities: the scale of projects they can now undertake has grown exponentially.

Communities are now empowered to tackle jobs far larger in scope and size than anything previously possible. For one example, the online hobbyist community DIY Drones has been able to build
military-grade autonomous aircraft; for another, Local Motors is constructing fully customizable automobiles.
⁴
Ten years ago, challenges of this size were the sole province of large corporations and governments. Today they're open to anyone with access to the Internet.

Structurally, the change has been equally significant. Consider that the major structures that handled the dissemination of information of the last century—radio, television, print—went in only one direction. Communication flowed from the top down, and even then just barely, by contemporary standards. But today the Internet permits top-down and bottom-up and side-to-side communication. In communities, these new possibilities for communication don't just allow a leader to lead, they allow other leaders to emerge. They permit collaborative structures that would have been unthinkable just a decade back.

Even better, in many cases, these structures are self-organizing. If the community has been set up in the right way, then growth happens organically, without need for too much direct intervention or intensive capital spends. For example, after Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg wrote
Lean In
, her bestselling book on empowering women to pursue their ambitions, she decided to capture the energy it was generating by building an online women's community. As part of their growth strategy, one of their ideas was to create Lean In circles—local groups of eight to ten women coming together to share experiences and offer support. “These circles are almost entirely self-organizing,” says Gina Bianchini, CEO of Mightybell, the online community building tool that serves as the backbone for the Lean In community (more on such platforms in the how-to section). “All they did was suggest the idea to the community and issue a set of loose guidelines for how these circles should form and function. There is no one in the Lean In organization whose job it is to create new circles or manage existing ones. But in a little over a year, some 13,000 circles have been formed, with more starting up every week.”
⁵