20: Life After Crowdfunding: Indiegogo InDemand

Zach Smith: (00:00) Funded Today nation, welcome back to get Funded Today, the Funded Today Podcast. Last week we got very analytical, if you ever want to know how you can best take advantage of SEO and ranking factors on Kickstarter, so that your campaign reaches as many people as possible that episode is going to do the trick for you. Now for those of you who caught “Episode 18” you might find today’s topic a bit interesting “Life After Crowdfunding, Indiegogo InDemand, “What do I do after I’ve had a Successful Campaign on Kickstarter?” It’s an interesting question, you’re journey has just began don’t worry though, we’ll get it all covered in today’s episode.

Announcer: (00:39) The Funded Today Podcast is hosted by World Renowned Entrepreneurs and Business Experts Thomas Alvord and Zach Smith. To get a help with your next big business idea or to take your business to the next level go to fundedtoday.com.

Zach Smith: (00:53) Welcome back to the show, I am your host Zach Smith.

Thomas Alvord: (00:55) And I’m Thomas Alvord.

Zach Smith: (00:57) And in today’s master class “Life After Crowdfunding Indiegogo InDemand, “What do I do after I have had a successful campaign on Kickstarter”? After Episode 17, you might think “Hey this guy has got a beef against Indiegogo, or maybe they don’t even like him at all” – we love Indiegogo and their Indiegogo InDemand platform and today we’re going to teach you how to best utilize this wonderful platform after you’ve raised a bunch of money on Kickstarter.

Thomas Alvord: (01:26) Indiegogo InDemand allows you to continue to raise funds for your campaign after your campaign is over. So even though you have a deadline say “30 days or 45 days for how you want to raise”, after that time if you’re on Kickstarter it’s done, it’s over you can’t keep raising money on that platform. With Indiegogo InDemand you can have a campaign that basically runs in perpetuity, it runs InDemand, while it’s InDemand you can continue to go make a pledge, and so it allows you to continue to raise funds. Now why doesn’t Kickstarter do this? Because Kickstarter has made a very conscious, purposeful decision to only be a platform that is for raising money to hitting your goal or passing your goal and then after that timeframe it’s done, they don’t want to be an e-commerce store. However, Indiegogo InDemand has actually taken the opposite approach, so that’s the beauty and power of InDemand, you can keep raising funds, you can keep generating sales after your campaign is over.

Zach Smith: (02:27) And if you listen to our podcast ever you’ve probably heard me talk about UNOBRUSH the toothbrush where you can brush your teeth in six seconds. Well we raised them just over $1million, $1.1million on Kickstarter that ended about November 22nd we transitioned them over to Indiegogo InDemand, and we’ve raised them an additional $270,000ish since November 22nd on Indiegogo InDemand. This is money that they are using to be able to get the product to life and to first ship to their Kickstarter backers and then ultimately ship to their Indiegogo backers. And the strategy behind Indiegogo InDemand is, you keep raising more money and instead of saying “That you’re going to deliver in July on your Kickstarter” you say “Hey, because you’re a little late you’re going to have to pay a little bit more and we’re going to ship your product in August, say a couple of months down the road”. So it's a great way to have sustained cash flow, to continue to raise money and to take advantage of platforms that are much bigger than your website while you get ready and get your business in order.

Thomas Alvord: (03:23) If you try to transition directly to your website to take sales you get in this really weird and difficult position because very often you’re not ready to ship the product, but you still want to raise the capital and Indiegogo InDemand lets you do that, you wouldn’t be able to go on Amazon, you wouldn’t be able to really do it on your own website, it's very difficult.

Zach Smith: (03:46) Now that’s a good point.

Thomas Alvord: (03:49) Again, you can but most people if they’re going to a website or expecting to be able to a make a purchase of a product, so if you’re telling them “Hey I’m and still creating this, it’s six months down the road and they’re not necessarily in that ecosystem of Crowdfunding or Kickstarter and Indiegogo it can be confusing.”

Zach Smith: (04:05) And think of all the trouble you’re going to face, if you do what Thomas said and you put it on your website the reason it’s so difficult, one reason is because let’s say you tell people “They’ll get their product in three months”, but it ends up taking four because of shipping delays. Now you got a bunch of people who are mad, who are going to call their credit card company up and dispute a charge that’s a problem. Indiegogo InDemand solves that for you as well because they’ve done this with hundreds or thousands of campaigns and it gives them a huge advantage to be able to leverage those relationships with credit card providers so that you are protected and so that you can have the cash flow you need to eventually have some product that you can then sell on Amazon and on your website.

Thomas Alvord: (04:48) Technically speaking Zach with InDemand a pledger or contributor can actually go and get a refund through Indiegogo. So in that sense yes it might be bad because you lose the funds but it actually makes it a little better because Indiegogo has set that up, so you’re actually aren’t having to deal with those credit card disputes, and what also is nice about InDemand but also just Indiegogo generally is unlike Kickstarter, Indiegogo as well as an Indiegogo InDemand campaign is the person making a contribution their credit card will be charged right when they make a pledge. Whereas with Kickstarter they don’t charge people’s credit cards until the campaign is over, and sometimes you can have some pledges or charges that don’t go through. So that is one of the nice things about Indiegogo InDemand.

Zach Smith: (05:43) Yes I love that, from Indiegogo’s own website the biggest reason is that they highlight Indiegogo InDemand we touched on the first one, “Keep Raising Funds Post Campaign”, the second one we didn’t touch on as much “Continue telling your story and build on your campaign page”, I think that’s a great thing to do we’ll probably have an episode about “How to Engage With Backers”, “Life After Crowdfunding” if you remember that series. But you’re going to be able to tell your story, create more update, show the progression, it's kind of funny it just ends on Kickstarter and then now what I guess you could still do updates on Kickstarter, but why not engage with new people on the way, and get new people as part of your tribe and as part of your crowd and Indiegogo InDemand takes advantage of that. And then the last thing is reach “New audiences and receive ongoing exposure on Indiegogo” and Indiegogo hits the nail right on the head with that one. Indiegogo has an audience the Kickstarter doesn’t have, it’s much different, they have a very good selection of people and they have a newsletter, and they have connections and if you meet certain metrics Indiegogo is amazing at customer support and they’re very kind, and they’re very helpful and by meeting these certain metrics they will help you out to reach these new audiences and that can lead to quite a bit of money and pledges like I shared with the UNOBRUSH example and the $270,000 or so that we’ve raised after their Kickstarter campaign is over. So those again are the biggest merits and the biggest benefits behind Indiegogo InDemand.

Thomas Alvord: (07:01) Well and there is one more Zach that I think is perhaps the most maybe one of the most important that we actually haven’t touched on yet, it’s the “Social proof”, because you can show here is how many backers I have, here is how much I’ve raised that does have an impact on what’s happening.

Zach Smith: (07:18) So powerful.

Thomas Alvord: (07:19) How people perceive it, whether it’s a VC or an Angel or getting Shark Tank to approach you or again just getting a consumer to support your campaign.

Zach Smith: (07:31) Oh yes a lot of people are like “I need to raise $1 million on Kickstarter” and let’s say they’re at $700,000 here is what I tell them, “Hey. we’ll get you do $1 million it might not be on Kickstarter but guess what, we’ll get you to $1 million on Indiegogo InDemand” and UNOBRUSH again is another good example for that, if you go to their Indiegogo InDemand page it says “As of this recording 1,370,354 US Dollars raised”, and it seems like they’ve raised all that money on InDemand right, it’s not until hover over the question mark it says “1,106,959 US Dollars raised on another platform”, that other platform being Kickstarter and so the social proof is absolutely huge there and they can take that to Shark Tank, they can take that to investors and say “Look we’ve raised $1.4 million have a look” and it combines all of your funding together and one which I think is a nice little touch and of course it leverages that social proof very, very powerfully. Now the other Thomas I want you to talk a little bit briefly about the idea behind no deadline. The reason Indiegogo InDemand is pretty powerful is also because you can do it for as long or short as you want right, there is pretty much no commitment.

Thomas Alvord: (08:37) You turn it off whenever you want otherwise it just keeps going, and if I’m not mistaken you could even turn it off and then turn it back on later, now that’s necessarily a strategy to do a good thing.

Zach Smith: (08:49) Yes, Hiral Sanghavi with the BauBax travel jacket did that same exact thing, ran it for several months turned it off, and then turned it back on for a bit and had another run. So that’s an interesting strategy not a lot of people take advantage of it, but it can have a lot of power to do as well. Topic two Thomas, and this one I think it gets back to Analytics and Data, and that’s why I want to ask you it, “Why choose Indiegogo InDemand as supposed to just transitioning to your own website and taking pre-orders maybe setting things up with salary or something”. Again I don’t want to get too technical but and we hinted on this a little bit but what are some other reasons for why this might be a good strategy aside from what we’ve discussed?

Thomas Alvord: (09:28) If you’re coming off of a big campaign you want to keep that momentum, you want to have a community if you will, it’s really hard to do that on your own website, if you are a new startup. If you’re a big brand or something and you’re launching a new product, then yes you definitely could just take people over to your social channels where you have community, where you have engagement but you most likely don’t have that, so really the momentum is a huge factor that you want to ride that as much and as long.

Zach Smith: (09:59) And you know what Thomas that’s a huge point. A lot of people don’t understand and I’ll use UNOBRUSH again, I’ve been using them this whole episode. You want to transition your Kickstarter campaign over immediately, you can take advantage of all of the Ad traffic, all of the press everything else that was sending traffic your Kickstarter page. If you use redirect links and if you set everything up properly all of that traffic that was going to your Kickstarter it is essentially dead traffic once your campaign is over because you can’t raise money on Kickstarter after that 30 days or after that 60 days well guess what you redirect all that traffic, you capitalize on that momentum and boom it all comes over Indiegogo InDemand and now that traffic is actually not just valuable, it’s valuable monetarily because now people are seeing your product and actually being able to back your product on another platform and it’s not just wasted. You might land press the last day of your campaign and it might raise 10 grand on Kickstarter but what are you going to do when that press was only live for a couple of hours and now your campaign is over, Indiegogo InDemand capitalize on all the remaining people that haven’t read the press yet, haven’t gone the article, haven’t received the email, haven’t read the Facebook post whatever it may be the momentum is huge and it just makes perfect sense to make the transition.

Thomas Alvord: (11:06) Absolutely and I would even say “It’s one of the cardinal sins”, if you have a big campaign and you don’t have Indiegogo InDemand ready to transition to you’ve just literally throwing thousands of dollars out the window.

Zach Smith: (11:22) It drives me insane Thomas when that happens, it really does. We’ve had clients who are like “Wait five hours” and it’s like “Oh! My gosh why did you wait hours, you should have had all these setup in the moment your Kickstarter ends, everything should have been simultaneously switched over to Indiegogo InDemand.”

Thomas Alvord: (11:34) And that’s why we talk with our clients and say “Hey, we need to start getting this setup usually week or two weeks beforehand to make sure everything is in place because you shouldn’t be placing the finishing touches on your Indiegogo InDemand campaign when there’s 30 minutes left on your Kickstarter campaign, that’s just not the way to do it”, and that momentum on a big campaign you should be scaling your traffic, your Paid Media that last day, that last week and you might have a 100, 200, 1,000 unique visitors on your website or I should say on the Kickstarter website on your campaign page when your campaign ends. If you have a 1,000 people who are sitting there and then all of a sudden can’t make a pledge that is so much money you just lost.

Zach Smith: (12:25) Oh! Yes like you said “It just sickens us when we see this sort of thing”. Going off of why choose Indiegogo InDemand the second reason is a pretty exciting one a lot of people don’t know Crowdfunding, but most people have heard a “Shark Tank” the hit ABC, MSNBC TV show “Shark Tank right Mark Cuban, Mr. Wonderful, Lori Greiner”, you haven’t’ seen this show take a look it's a really good show if you’re an entrepreneur or if you’re a small business. Basically, people come on the show and they pitch their idea to these millionaires and billionaire Mark Cuban and they say “Look for 50% equity I’ll give you $500,000” and then Mark Cuban says “Great deal over” Mr. Wonderful says “No, not a deal”, anyway the show Shark Tank is a very, very, powerful way to leverage your success on Kickstarter and then couple that success with an Indiegogo InDemand. So UNOBRUSH right now can say “Look we’ve raised $1.4 million” and they can approach Shark Tank a lot of people don’t know this but in fact just a couple of weekends ago I was watching Shark Tank and every single person on the TV show that night was actually a former Funded Today client it was pretty cool. We have more clients on Shark Tank than anybody else in the world. Now what you might not know about Shark Tank and again I’m kind of going into the weeds here but they usually interview them for three, four or five hours, and so they cut the approach down to maybe 15 to 20 minutes on TV and say “You don’t hear it all” but they’re asking him all kinds of questions Mark Cuban in particular will say “Did you do a Crowdfunding campaign?”, if you watch the show religiously you’ll probably see him ask that quite a bit and the reason he asked that is because he wants to see validation. What better way to show validation than a transparent website like Indiegogo InDemand that literally shows exactly what you’ve raised, you can’t fudge the numbers they can Google it, they can look it up right there “Yep he’s raised 1,370,354 United States Dollars as of December whenever – as of February 7, 2019” and that is very, very powerful, and the other interesting thing is most of our clients get extremely good deals way better deals than the others who are on the show who don’t have sales, who don’t have numbers, who don’t have this third-party credibility, who don’t have the transparency than anybody else, and I think it’s a very, very, powerful approach. The other reason it matters is for investors, Angels and Venture Capitalists they see that this campaign is validated, they see that there’s thousands or hundreds or tens of thousands of people that back the campaign and they say “Well look this is good, why does that matter to you, you have to give a plus equity” that’s a wonderful thing, when you’ve raised a lot of money and you’ve proven that your product works now you can ask for more, your company is worth more and when your company is worth more you give a plus equity, and long-term that wins for everybody. If you go on the show Shark Tank or if you got to a VC or an Angel or any sort of private equity the first thing they’re going to ask is what are your numbers, and if your numbers are not good they’re going to ask for more money, and if your numbers are great now you’re in the driver seat now you can negotiate, now you have control and that is very, very powerful and it’s been amazing to see what our clients have been able to do, leveraging Shark Tank and then skipping to the investors, skipping to the venture capitalists and taking things to the level. The most famous example probably is “Oculus” where they did the Crowdfunding strategy and then literally within a few years they sell to Facebook for $4 Billion, so it’s no joke when we’re talking about this sort of approach and how you can leapfrog from one step to the next, starting with Kickstarter going to Indiegogo InDemand, then to Shark Tank, then to private equity, then to Venture Capital.

Thomas Alvord: (15:58) You know what’s so interesting Zach as you’ve been talking about the strategy is not what you’ve said, but also what you haven’t said because one of the benefits of Indiegogo InDemand is to have a strategy where you don’t take that investor money. I don’t know how many people I have spoken with meaning it’s been a lot where they say “Oh! Man I got this awesome idea, let’s go create it and go get on Shark Tank” like literally that’s how they think you launch a business because that’s what they see on TV, but that’s not how most people launch a business and it's just so interesting right that a lot of people think, Oh! You got to take the Shark Tank approach”, if anything it might not be the best approach because they might be taking way more than you should be giving up. So Indiegogo InDemand as well as Kickstarter allows you to have another strategy option which would be to take no capital and have all of the equity with either yourself or some business partners.

Zach Smith: (16:57) I love that let’s say “You do get on the Shark Tank show because you get approached by the way”, the reason you also want your campaign, your new invention, your business on all these other third-party sites is if you are successful, even relatively successful like I’m talking $40,000, $50,000 we’ve had clients who’ve raised that amount of money which might not be a lot, but it’s enough to get them on Shark Tank and to get a deal, but we’ve had other people go on Shark Tank and their strategy is to go on Shark Tank and turndown the deal, it’s an interesting approach and you get the camera and all the lights behind you and maybe sometimes you’re like “Maybe I should do the deal” but then their website sales spike, and they get exposure and then people listening and watching the show like me and Thomas see the product and then we say “Ah! Maybe we want to invest in it” and so they get people that aren’t just the four or five sharks they have on the show interested, so it's a great way to get exposure even if you don’t take the deal.

Thomas Alvord: (17:46) Now in full transparency Zach, we had a client who we were crushing it on InDemand and this person said “Oh! I’m going to be on Shark Tank it’s airing in two days, I want to cancel my contract with you” and we said “Well we can track, we’ll see if there’s a spike it's probably not going” and she is like “No, no I am just going to be done, I know there is a going be a ton of sales” and then there actually wasn’t like any spike at all. So sometimes you might have a spike I’ve heard of people where they were like websites go down and I’ve heard of other people where like in this case there wasn’t a spike, so I just want to put that out there so if you ever are on Shark Tank you don’t say “Oh! Zach and Thomas they lied to me I didn’t get this big spike”, but then again you might get a spike.

Zach Smith: (18:30) And you know what else Thomas, your product needs to kind of fit that formula that we talk about “Ubiquity plus techie innovative plus compelling story. Ubiquity being the largest element.” I had a friend get on Shark Tank who sold Lip Balm KISSTIXX, Dallas Robinson and his product did really, really, well on Shark Tank right after because it’s a $15, $20 purchase for some cool lip balm, and everybody makes that purchase and his website was rare and ready to go and he had a huge day. If your product is a home security, smart camera may be you’re not going to have as many people ordering your product. So I think it depends on the niche you’re in and how Ubiquitous you go in terms of what that spike is going to look like on Shark Tank, but I would always go into Shark Tank not necessarily hoping for that 24 to 48 hour spike and the rerun spike which are true they do happen because there’s millions of people that watch these shows I would think about it in terms of the long term. Who’s watching that show, who eventually want to invest with you or can connect you to the next supplier or the next person that get your business to the next level, not necessarily who is going to – is this rerun, is this TV show going to make $10,000, $20,000 or $100,000 overnight. And I think that leads perfectly into the last point of this topic Thomas and not that’s such as traffic and Alexa rank, we talked about this on the last episode “Is your website bigger than Indiegogo’s?” well I don’t think so. Right now I’m looking at Indiegogo’s Alexa rank and they’re 2,136. Their rank in the US is 1,252. “Are you one of the 2,000 biggest websites in the world?”, if you’re not it makes sense to leverage other people’s traffic, other people’s crowds, other people’s audiences and take advantage of that while you build up your business, and that’s a simple strategy behind why choosing Indiegogo InDemand as supposed to any other thing is 99% of the time a better idea.

Thomas Alvord: (20:20) Going along with that too Zach, there’s the quote by I think it was Emerson who said “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door” and lot of people think “Oh! my product is so great everyone’s going to love this or hey Indiegogo has a bigger website than mine, I’m going to get traffic”, it is a bigger website, they do have more traffic, but they don’t just give you free traffic right, you have to provide value, you have to be driving your own traffic and then that’s where Indiegogo will come in and actually help promote your campaign by featuring it on the homepage.

Zach Smith: (20:58)  So you’re telling me feeling the dreams was wrong Thomas? If you build it they will come?

Thomas Alvord: (21:02) That is absolutely correct. If you build it and market it they will come.

Zach Smith: (21:07) I love that. “If you build it and you market it properly they will come and if you keep building and if you keep branding then and only then you’re going to succeed”. I don’t know when that was ever true or if it ever there is a lot of stuff that kind of goes down through the ages and nobody really corrects it and so people just assume it’s true, but I can tell you definitively that “If you build it they will come, build a better mousetrap, people will beat a path to your door is not true”, not in 2019 and probably never again. You have to capture attention, you have to create curiosity we’ve got episodes on all these. Episode 16 where Thomas went over everything with Paid Media would probably be an amazing one for that to go back and listen to. But nobody is going to get excited about your idea anymore unless you are doing all kinds of things on your end, no matter how good your idea is call that crazy, prove me wrong, but we’ve just seen it time and time again. SpineGym is probably my most famous example of that pretty amazing product, pretty terrible marketing we flipped on the marketing switch $1 million later literally within just 30, 40 days it made all the difference right, he had an amazing product all he needed to do was get the word out. He built it, he put it on the platform not a soul came, so keep that in mind. Alright Thomas final topic of today’s episode, “How can you best leverage Indiegogo InDemand, what are some takeaways, some action items that people listen to this episode who just want to get right to the nitty-gritty, they got a product, it done a good Kickstarter campaign how can they capitalize to get the biggest return on investment for Indiegogo InDemand” and maybe this question too has a follow-up. “What is to be expected? if I raise $1 million on Kickstarter what is it 10% more 20% more over the next 90 days what would you like to kind of give people as a benchmark so they know if they’re on the right path or not or if they could be doing better?”

Thomas Alvord: (22:57) You raised say $20,000 on Kickstarter and then you go to Indiegogo you might raise $1,000 maybe, you’re probably not going to raise that much, it’s again it’s not as good of a platform as we’ve discussed in our previous episode, but it’s still is valuable and so yet typically you’d be looking at say 10% in the first 30 to 90 days, so if you had raised a million you’re looking at raising maybe $100,000 now that number could be higher, it could be lower, it depends on other factors and some of the things that people can do they should do. One thing they can do is “Utilize a feature that Indiegogo has called Secret Perks”. A Secret Perks is a pledge level that is only available to people who come from a certain link, so you could have a Secret Perk that maybe you had a prelaunch list from your Kickstarter campaign and you can email that list and say “Hey, if you didn’t have a chance to make a pledge we have the Secret Perk because you are with us before we originally launched”, and by utilizing these Secret Perks you can basically create some exclusivity, “Hey this is only going to be good until three more days” because in Indiegogo InDemand campaign you don’t have a time limit so there’s not really that pressure to go and make a pledge. So using the Secret Perks you can kind of still massage and get some of that value where you have parameters for when somebody needs to make a pledge. 

Zach Smith: (24:44) Second thing you can do “Get in newsletters”, I talked about this briefly. If you meet certain benchmarks and certain criteria so you can talk with Indiegogo or you can leverage our relationship that we have with Indiegogo and we can chat with them and line some things up for you, but you can talk to Indiegogo and you can say “Look, if I raise $10,000 in the next 30 days will you put me in your newsletter” and they have certain rules and certain metrics but that would be an example of something and then you do your “FFF”, you do your marketing you do everything else and we’ve talked about in all the other episodes and then Indiegogo perks you up with their traffic and they have the best email out of anybody on the planet. They have great subscribers, they have lots of volume and if you get featured in their newsletter and your product is a good product it will raise lots of money, sometimes even $100,000 or more and I think that’s a very powerful Perk take advantage of with Indiegogo InDemand because Indiegogo was so friendly and they’re so kind and they’re so generous and they want to help create or succeed. If you can do your part, they generally step in and do their part which I think is a very powerful thing. If Kickstarter is listening I think Kickstarter should absolutely find a way to leverage their newsletter the way that Indiegogo does because it’s a great I mean you have the people who want to back campaigns why not tell them about the amazing campaigns that are raising money and changing lives and inventing really cool things because there’s a lot of stuff on Crowdfunding and not everybody is searching on Crowdfunding every single day, but everybody is on this email list and when you email them it notifies them and then they come and check out your product and if they like they get back, I think that’s very powerful.

Thomas Alvord: (26:19) Email lists are always powerful. “The Funded Today Cashback Newsletter” it can raise tens of thousands of dollars for campaigns and the Indiegogo newsletter with the millions and billions of backers that Indiegogo has had its very, very valuable so I couldn’t agree more.

Zach Smith: (26:37) And you know what Thomas you make a good point go back and listen to the episode on “Email Lead Generation” where we featured Kevin if you hadn’t had a chance to listen to that one that would be really good. In all my years of business and I’m approaching more than a decade now and Tom is probably roughly the same. Everything we’ve talked about pales in comparison to a powerful email list. Yes, you have the sustained power of Paid Media that you learn about in Episode 16, you’ve got the one-offs of cross collaborations, but an email list is something that continues to give day in, day out and the customer lifetime value on an email list simply can’t be measured because every time you send out another email the CLV the Customer Lifetime Value increases, build an email list, nurture that email list, take care of that email list, funnels, campaigns, strategies whatever keep in contact with your people as much as possible Colton talks about that quite a bit in this Cross Collaboration Episode as well, it is so imperative to your long-term success as an entrepreneur, as somebody who’s creating a product to take care of your people, we talk about the serial Kickstarter backers like or those serial Kickstarter creators like “Peak Design or Nomadic” or to some extent the “BauBax Travel Jacket” when they launch new campaigns they can raise $200,000, $300,000, $400,000 just in the first 24 hours why? Because they’ve nurtured their email list, they’ve taken care of their backers, they’ve treated that email list properly and that’s the same case with Funded Today’s email list, our cash back email list and of course the one we’ve been talking about on this episode “The way that Indiegogo treats their email list”. Now finally the last point we want to talk about for this particular topic is and we hinted on this briefly about redirecting your Kickstarter traffic and I’ll just lead in to this UNOBRUSH is a good example and we’ve pretty much talked about them the whole episode so I’ll stay with them. On their Kickstarter campaign page, right now if you go to it you’re allowed to edit your Kickstarter page after it ends and what they’ve done is they have just changed their button to say “Get us on Indiegogo, back us on Indiegogo, www.indiegogo.com” and it’s a blue button right at the top of their page and if you click it there’s a little tracking on it and it redirects you right over to their Indiegogo InDemand page. So very powerful strategy, very simple and you can do this with everything, not just your button at the top, but as soon as your campaign is getting ready to end within the last hour, couple of housekeeping items update all your “Back now” buttons, if you have a bunch of back now buttons throughout make sure those are redirecting to your Indiegogo InDemand page, update any sort of press, any sort of call to action, just redirect people because they’re going to come on to this page because like Thomas said “The last week of your campaign is going to have the most momentum aside from maybe the first 48 hours” capitalize on that momentum by redirecting that traffic somewhere valuable and in this case the value being your Indiegogo InDemand campaign page.

Thomas Alvord: (29:25) A little bit of history back in the day Kickstarter did not allow you to create a customer for and what that is if you log into the Kickstarter dashboard, you can create within the dashboard and you can do the same thing on Indiegogo, you can create a link that is a unique URL that you can share with people and if anybody pledges through that link it will show up on the dashboard as however you specify. So you can have a link called “My School Friends” and just share it with all of your friends from school and any pledges that happen from that link would show up on the dashboard as “My School Friends”. Well that was an invention or something Kickstarter had added after the fact because back in the day you used to not be able to do that right and we had to create a unique subdomain that would, basically we have to create a whole bunch of our own links that would redirect to the Kickstarter campaign to get pledges to show up on the dashboard how we wanted them to, and how it works exactly isn’t too critical for this purpose. But what’s interesting is we still use that same system, we still use these link shorteners instead of using the Kickstarter dashboard, and we’ve had people ask us “Why do you use these custom links that you yourself are making why don’t you just use the referred links that you can create inside the Kickstarter dashboard” and the answer is simple “Both work, both are functional but the main reason we use our own links is once a campaign is over on Kickstarter in our own backend we can change where all of our links redirect to”. So imagine we spend $100,000, you spend $100,000 marketing your Kickstarter campaign your Ad has been shown to millions of people and tens of thousands of people have made comments, have tagged their friends in it, have shared it on their own wall. Now once the campaign is over people are still clicking on those links, the question is “Where are they going to?” If you do how most people do it, when people click on the link they’re going to go to the Kickstarter page and then once they’re on the Kickstarter page they’re going to have to click again to get to the Indiegogo page or to your own website, maybe it’s a year down the road. But if you set it up so the links can be redirected to whatever URL you wanted to go to right when the Kickstarter campaign is over we can send them to Indiegogo InDemand, and then after that’s over if you’re transitioning a client say Amazon and we’re running their Amazon marketing we can take all that traffic and then just switch it over to Amazon. So that’s one of the benefits of having a link shortener that allows you to change the destination URL at any time you might want, because it is powerful, you want to funnel all your traffic once your Kickstarter campaign is over.

Zach Smith: (32:38) Look at that gym Thomas I know you were saving the best for last. We talk about owning assets and you don’t own your Kickstarter campaign page, you don’t own your Indiegogo InDemand page, but if you own 90% of the traffic that’s coming to the page and you can change that traffic on a whim to wherever you wanted to go there is power in that. So definitely take that away if you take nothing else away from this episode, thanks for saving the best for last Thomas. Alright Funded Today nation it is now perhaps our favorite time of the show “The Funded Today products of the week”. And I’ve got a really special one, in fact, as I am speaking this campaign just got another pledge. This is “SNOW, the State-of-The-Art, Wireless Teeth Whitening System”. Imagine if you could whiten your teeth wirelessly in only 10 minutes that’s what SNOW teeth whitening promises to do it’s pretty amazing, it uses a blue LED light for the professional whitening you can get but it’s in home, just a simple little device pop it in your mouth 10 minutes later whiter teeth plus get this five year guarantee. So if you can’t get whiter teeth in five years I don’t know what is going to stop you, check it out it’s on Kickstarter Live right now, this is the “SNOW Wireless Teeth Whitening System” I think it’s going to be an amazing product and make for a lot more happy people because we have a beautiful bright white smile it leads to great confidence. Check it out.

Thomas Alvord: (33:59) My product of the week is “ARMED AUDIO”. It’s The World’s First Durable Speaker Headphone and basically what that means imagine a pair of headphones that you can put on but then when you take them off or set them to if you put it around your neck or if you set them down you can actually flip the headset so they face out and it turns into speakers, so it’s basically a two in one headset and speaker which if you like music you can listen to your music to your beats and then you could put that around and have a little dance party or if you like listening to audiobooks and there’s something interesting you could just listen to it and then you find something interesting with your colleague, your business partner, your spouse, your kid whoever you could say, “Hey check this out” just take it and flip it around and make it listen to. Pretty neat, pretty awesome it’s called “ARMED AUDIO” and this is very timely because “ARMED AUDIO” just finished today and I believe we’ll be transitioning to Indiegogo InDemand where you can go and make a pledge, so check it out “ARMED AUDIO”.

Zach Smith: (35:08) That wraps up today’s episode. As I hope you can see after you’ve had a successful Crowdfunding raise on Kickstarter your entrepreneurial journey has just begun, we got more about this. So if you like this episode we’re calling these part of our “Life After Crowdfunding Series” let us know comment on our website at funded.today/podcast Thomas and I read every comment you’ve probably seen us responding to some of your questions and concerns you have there. We love hearing from you Funded Today nation our loyal listeners and if you really like this episode please leave us a Five Star Review on iTunes or whatever you listen because your reviews really power us through. In fact we are changing some things up because of your reviews our Funded Today product of the week are now a little bit more timely so you’ll be able to actually take advantage of backing these campaigns while they are live, we used to record those episodes a little bit early and so a lot of the campaigns were over by the time the episode got live not anymore for the most part we’re going to be able to still check out these campaigns while they are live and in action and that was because of one of you. So we listen to you, we love hearing from you and we take your feedback into account every time you share. We’ve got some more amazing great episodes and if you have an idea for another one that you think we need to talk about let us know, here is the teaser now next time, if life ever get you down consider the stoic resolve of Thomas Edison. In the early 1900s Edison’s factory burn down, he sees his life’s work going up in flames without hesitation or any panic; he calmly turns to his son and says “Go get your mother and all of her friends they’re never going to see a fire like this again”. I love that, there’s a whole philosophy and way of living that encapsulates Edison’s story we want to tell you all about it this fire invigorated him, what fire trial in your life are you facing right now and most importantly, how can you allow your trials to invigorate you rather than set you back or discourage we’ve got some tips and tricks for you, we think we know it’s going to help you, we want to get a little bit more emotional and talk about the emotional side of Crowdfunding, emotional side of being an entrepreneur and hopefully you’ll be able to learn from our experiences so that you can have an even better experience and have that stoic resolve to hang in there because the best is yet to come. And as always remember don’t wait until tomorrow get Funded Today.

Announcer: (37:30) Funded Today is the worldwide leader in the Rewards Based Crowdfunding on Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Combined they have raised over $200 million and counting for thousands of new ideas and inventions worldwide. If you got an idea for a new product or invention visit www.fundedtoday.com to speak with one of their experts.