How Can Crowdfunding Help You Build a Brand?

Date: September 6, 2023
Name of podcast: The Amazon Strategist Show
Episode title and number: How Can Crowdfunding Help You Build a Brand?

Brief summary of the episode:

Welcome aboard for another exciting episode as we journey with Vance Lee, a seasoned e-commerce entrepreneur, who has a remarkable story of traveling the globe while managing his thriving ventures. Armed with 13 years of experience, Vance has remarkably launched 12 products in a single year and raised over $7 million! He offers invaluable insights into Amazon FBA, the significance of authentic reviews, and the art of building successful brands. 

Ever wondered how platforms like Kickstarter and Nogogo have revolutionized product launches and shaped the e-commerce landscape? We dive into the intriguing world of crowdfunding and pre-order launches, discussing the high stakes and customer expectations. Vance shares strategies on how to leverage Kickstarter to fund product launches, build a loyal customer base, and promote products on Amazon. Is crowdfunding a gamble or is it the best strategy for you? Listen in and find out!

08:33 - Crowdfunding and Pre-Order Launch Concept
18:44 - Kickstarter Launch Strategies and Success Factors
39:08 - You can’t build a real brand on Amazon Alone

List of resources, suggested materials, and social media handles:
Live My Playground - livemyplayground.com/sellercandy
Free eBook - From Operator to Business Owner - https://sellercandy.com/7steps

Ben Smith's Social Media
Instagram: https://instagram.com/skipwithben 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/skipwithben

Business Social Media Links
Website: https://www.sellercandy.com 
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/SellerCandyPro 
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sellercandyamz 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sellercandy/ 

Guest Website & Socials
Website -  https://www.livemyplayground.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/advancetagram/
Facebook - https://www.linkedin.com/in/vancelee/

Call to action, episode link & contact info
Shareable episode link  - https://bit.ly/3PnEo0y
For content collaborations, please email us at: grei@sellercandy.com 

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#amazonseller #amazonbusiness #ecommerce #amazonpodcast

Never Talk to Seller Support Again.

Seller Candy is the expert operations arm of your Amazon business. We provide outcome-driven support for time-consuming and challenging Seller Central issues so you Never Have to Talk to Seller Support Again! With Agency-Level security practices and an experienced team who’s been through the thick of it, we give sellers bandwidth on demand without the hassle of hiring, training, or managing.

#amazonsellercentral #amazonsupport #ecommerce #amazonbusiness

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

It's impossible to build a real brand on Amazon alone.

Speaker 2: 0:08

Hey there, I'm your host, ben, and welcome back to an exciting new season of the Amazon Stragia Show. This is the podcast that's all about strategy no hacks, no silver bullets and definitely no magic pills. We're all about delivering real, practical strategies for dedicated Amazon sellers out there who mean business. So today we've got a phenomenal guest joining us, someone who's truly mastered the art of strategic e-commerce success. So, without further ado, let's go ahead and dive right into today's episode and learn from the best.

Speaker 2: 0:35

Ladies and gentlemen, vance Lee Low background. Vance, so you are an e-com entrepreneur with 13 years of background as both a brand growth and marketing strategist, and since starting out in 2015, you've mastered crowdfunding, the pre-order launch strategy to launch products and grow brands, and you've raised over $7 million in successful launches, which is amazing in broken records, with two of those launches both reaching the number one most funded in their niches and ranking in the top 1% of crowdfunding projects of all time. Wow, that is pretty wild. So I'm excited to dig into this. You're originally from Canada and now I know you're kind of doing the digital nomad thing and traveling full time and living in different countries around the world. So I think the next kind of question I want to ask is where in the world are you and how long have you been there and kind of where, what's been your favorite place you've traveled to so far?

Speaker 1: 1:24

Thanks for the intro, by the way, and, yeah, thanks for having me here. This is awesome. Right now I'm in Thailand, so I'm in north of Thailand, in a city called Chiang Mai. So I've been here for about eight months, nine months. So this is a little bit of a longer stint for me, which I'm starting to enjoy. Now, after a lot of traveling, I'm starting to slow down the traveling a little bit and spend a little bit longer in some of the places that I'm in, but Thailand definitely one of the top places I love Bali, portugal so I've been to a lot of awesome places where there's a lot of expats and nomads and it's been really, really awesome to be able to have this kind of lifestyle and this experience.

Speaker 2: 1:59

So is this the longest you've stayed put in one place since starting kind of the nomad lifestyle?

Speaker 1: 2:04

No, I stayed in Bali for about two years during. I got there right before COVID and ended up staying there because, well, I mean, I chose to stay. It could have gone either way at the time, but I just stayed and it turned out to be the best decision ever. It was Bali was super empty and it was just this crazy kind of quiet island where usually Bali is very, very busy and lots of people there.

Speaker 2: 2:25

That sounds ideal because I've just been talking to a lot of my friends. I still have yet to go there, but just seeing that now it's so crowded.

Speaker 1: 2:31

If you go to certain.

Speaker 2: 2:32

You know the kind of touristy popular places. I'm sure that was amazing.

Speaker 1: 2:35

Yeah, it was really awesome. I loved it.

Speaker 2: 2:38

Cool. Well, so, vance, I'd love to kind of dig in here and learn a little bit more about how you initially got into the Amazon world or this e-commerce world, and how you found yourself doing the crowdfunding kind of model. You know, I know a little bit about it, but I'm excited to learn selfishly, you know, because I want to learn about this, but also I have friends that have tried this model out. I've heard, you know, kind of mixed things from them, so I've kind of loved to hear just the backstory, how you kind of wound up where you are today.

Speaker 1: 3:01

Yeah, let's do it. So I started Amazon FBA in 2015 and the reason why I started this business I originally was in the nine to five world, and then I kind of broke out of that and started running a video production agency in Toronto, where I'm from, in Canada, and I took a trip the year before I started this business to Thailand actually, so kind of comes full circle. But I just had an amazing time on this trip and I thought to myself, like what can I do to allow myself to travel and do this all the time? And so at the time my business was like a localized business in Toronto. We had clients, but they were all kind of like in-person clients and we had to do gigs that were in Toronto. So I've heard about Amazon FBA from a friend and just kind of dove in. So within two months I launched my first product and it kind of hit right in the beginning of December. So it kind of did pretty well for a first product launch. So that led me to being super ambitious and kind of overly confident. I'm so wanting to set this goal of launching 12 products in the next year and for anybody listening and thinks, okay, well, that's pretty ridiculous, definitely, it was very ridiculous. I didn't really understand much about cash flow. I had a little bit of money saved up, so it was this me and my business partner at the time we went all in. So it's like, hey, let's get a lot of samples, let's start launching products.

Speaker 1: 4:18

And, long story short, in 2016,. If you remember, there was this period where, before 2016, you could do honest and biased reviews. So, as long as you just said, hey, I got this product as a sample, honest and biased review, amazon would accept it. So somewhere in the middle of I think it was around Q3, q4, 2016, they announced that they were no longer able to accept honest and biased reviews. Well, that was a pretty bad situation because I had a massive order that was coming in for a product that we heavily invested in, so it was pretty much like in the process of being manufactured, kind of the early stages. We already put the money down, and so I didn't know about any other way of launching.

Speaker 1: 5:01

So I started thinking well, this is a panic situation right now. This is a massive, almost $50,000 order that went in, and what are we going to do? So I started looking at Shopify and I came across Kickstarter, which is a crowdfunding platform. We can kind of go into that a little bit later, I'm sure. But Kickstarter I was a customer before because I was supporting some different interesting products that I saw there, and so I knew about it, but I didn't know much about it.

Speaker 1: 5:25

So I kind of at that point said, okay, well, let's see if this is possible. We did have a pretty cool product that was a little bit unique at the time, and so we looked at Kickstarter and Long Story Short launched the Kickstarter campaign and I was blown away by kind of what was possible in launching in that type of method. So with Kickstarter, that first product it was a cold brew coffee maker, we called it the Arctic, and this did about $650,000 on the launch alone. And then we moved it over to Indiegogo, which is another crowdfunding platform, and that did another 200 over almost 300K on that platform. So the launch itself, including upsells, was about $950,000.

Speaker 2: 6:06

Yeah, $950,000 after, before you actually had the products or anything like that.

Speaker 1: 6:11

Before the product yeah, so this was all pre-orders, yeah, so it did really crazy well, and I thought, oh, there's something here, there's something about this that I had a lot of challenges with Amazon and I'm still an Amazon seller, to be fair but there was a lot of challenges with the Amazon model that this kind of addressed, and so I got really excited about this, since then launched more products on Kickstarter and had a whole bunch of people along the way start asking like, hey, how did you do this? Like you know, can you share with me what you did and where your process was? And that's kind of how it led to kind of exploring that. And, of course, I still run. I have my Amazon store Now. I sell on Shopify. But crowdfunding is something that I became really passionate about, because it was a really cool way to build not only a successful launch in terms of financial performance, but be able to build the community and build some element of a brand that's going to support the future of that product and the brand going forward.

Speaker 2: 7:05

Yeah, that's awesome. So my background in terms of use of Kickstarter, I think I've ordered like one or two items off of there that I ended up getting months later and, honestly, they were both amazing products and so that's that's about all I know about it. But that's like just a very cool story, because I don't know many people who have gone that route and I think the idea of being able to know and validate that there's demand for your products before you even actually go get the product is kind of this mythical world. Right, that not, you know, all of us Amazon sellers wish we knew that out of the gate. I, my first products were well, they had validated demand, but then there was way too much competition, so it was, you know, didn't work in the same way. So, no, it's an awesome background. So today, do you still do all of your launches using kind of the crowdfunding method before you actually launch them on Amazon or Shopify or whatever channel you're on?

Speaker 1: 7:54

Most of them if they make sense. We aim to launch most of our products on Kickstarter because we built a community as well, so we have customers that support us, and so Kickstarter launch becomes kind of this like occasion for people to come together and launch a product. So it's kind of unique and I'm sure we'll have questions. We can dive into those two.

Speaker 2: 8:11

Yeah, so let's do it. I mean, let's dive into our Q&A session here, because I think there's a bunch of stuff we should go into. So folks watching this is now our Q&A time, so we're going to dive into some questions that are awesome, clients and listeners have submitted and also just some of the things that have been sitting in the back of my mind in preparation for this episode. So, vince, I think the first kind of question here is kind of the basics, right, what exactly are pre-orders or this whole crowdfunding idea? Like what is that actually?

Speaker 1: 8:39

Yeah, so crowdfunding is this concept that wasn't necessarily initially for e-commerce alone. It was just a bunch of people came together to fund a project or fund like a business or something. So a lot of people maybe like a hundred investors will come and fund something that they want to bring to life, and so this became a concept for crowdfunding in terms of e-commerce when this website called Kickstarter launched way back in the early 2000s. So they launched this website and the idea was people put up project ideas on there so product ideas that they wanted to launch, and people could come and just pitch in and essentially just buy the product and then use that funding to support the product. And that's the first to get the product when that product gets manufactured. So at the initial phases is actually a lot of really unique products that are things that didn't exist or technology based products or things like that, and that's kind of how Kickstarter started. So people would essentially say, hey, I like this idea, I want to put some money down to support you and as an incentive, I get the product later when you guys launch. And that's kind of how this concept started.

Speaker 1: 9:40

Over time it's evolved a lot, so now it's not just for unique and inventions or anything like that. It's for all categories of products. You know, we've seen things from like food products, like a chili hot sauce, and we can talk about that. One is really cool project. But all the way from apparel to kitchen products, to pets, like anything you can imagine, products are kind of going live there and people are supporting them and it's an interesting way to start your business through offering, like you said, pre-orders. Essentially, people would purchase this product in advance by giving you the money before it exists. So it's not the same as Amazon or Shopify where you have the inventory available immediately because people expect to get it right away. This is kind of a little bit different than that in terms of how the customer expectations, but also how the platform works and the customers that are on that platform.

Speaker 2: 10:27

Sure, and I think the other thing that I've noticed corrects me if I'm wrong, but I feel like, you know, amazon is very trims, actually right, as a shopper. You go in there, you buy something, you get it a day or two later and if it doesn't show up in that promise time window, you're upset. You know, and that's pretty much it right. You might leave a review if it's an amazing product or an experience. I feel like with Kickstarter and Nogogo, is that the other one? I think I pronounced it right.

Speaker 1: 10:48

Nogogo, yes, and crowdfunding is a category, and then Kickstarter and Nogogo are both platforms that are exactly there.

Speaker 2: 10:55

Okay, I feel like they also kind of have this very strong like community element to them, right when there's people that are constantly on there and want to shop through those, because they really want to support people that are trying to get off the ground, which I think is a really cool component of it as well. Is that accurate, like, is that actually how it is?

Speaker 1: 11:10

Yeah, you're absolutely right, and there's a lot of people that are what we call super backers and essentially there are people on the platform that just actively look for people to support, like projects to support, because they want to be the first to get something, they want to be involved in something cool. So, like you said, they're interested in kind of the story and the brand and the founders and if there's something that kind of fits what they're looking for, then they they're happy to support it because in a way, they like that. But then they also kind of get to show off like hey, I was a part of this project first and I was the first to get this and it's kind of like a cool thing if you're into things that you want to get for your home or gadgets or things that you like, whatever they might be. So, yeah, definitely like a huge community element and people are there to release. It's interesting because they're there to support people.

Speaker 1: 11:51

But they understand that often, like these projects, actually, you know, sometimes they don't get delivered because the campaign they launched and, like you know, we're not going to be in this category, of course, if we want your products, but there's, there's campaigns in the past that got a lot of funding, but because of logistical issues or, like you know, they had this idea but they didn't go through manufacturing, they couldn't actually deliver. So these are actually some of the most wealthy crowdfunding shoppers online because, when we think about it, these people are willing to put in $50, $100, maybe even in certain situations like over $1,000, for product that they are not going to get. So this is definitely you're right Like it's on, like Amazon, where people are paying for their, expecting to get it in two days later. This is a very specific situation where they they have money, they have this disposable income and they're ready to spend on something that they believe in. So that's. That's kind of like a very different context when it comes to crowdfunding.

Speaker 2: 12:41

It's like a kind form of gambling, I feel like, in a way, you're kind of cool I might get this product, yeah, yeah, anyway.

Speaker 2: 12:49

No, that's awesome. So I guess, kind of, why would someone want to use this strategy as opposed to just to at least you know, I'm coming from the Amazon world, right, so, like a lot of the people I'm talking to are just trying to get products launched on Amazon specifically but I know we can expand this discussion point beyond Amazon but why would someone want to kind of use this preorder launch method, you know, by Kickstarter or what have you compared to, kind of? The traditional launch on an Amazon platform or wherever else are selling.

Speaker 1: 13:16

Great question and I think to emphasize a point Kickstarter does not replace Amazon. Kickstarter is just a launch platform. It's specifically there for you to launch, so for people watching or listening right now. The way that Kickstarter works is that you you set up a limited time campaign of up to 60 days, so your campaign only runs for that time of the maximum 60 days, so when it's over, it's, it's done. So the way that it works is that once, if you set your goal let's say you want to raise $50,000 for your launch At the end of the campaign. If you hit your goal 15 days after that, you get paid from the platform Kickstarter, so you get your money.

Speaker 1: 13:50

So this kind of changes the way that we think about e-commerce, because we've always been told at least in the Amazon world or, you know, ordering inventory for Shopify that you have to order money from your manufacturer. You have to order the inventory from your manufacturer first, have it available in stock and to sell. So when this happens, when we do it this way, this allows us to also later on launch on Amazon after it. So this doesn't replace Amazon or Shopify. So why is that an advantage? Well, if we understand that we don't have to pay first for inventory. This completely changes the way that we think about the model, Because, instead of money for inventory up front, we can actually get the money in advance and confirm that people want this before we put the money in the cash out for inventory. So this completely flips the e-commerce model upside down in terms of the way that you spend money, and this has lots of advantages, not only for mitigating risk, which is a massive advantage, but at the same time, you really get to get ahead in your cash flow.

Speaker 1: 14:49

So any successful seller, or even a new seller, knows that cash flow is one of the biggest issues, and a lot of the new sellers will think well, once we get our sales up to a certain point, the cash flow doesn't become an issue. Well, it's actually the opposite. When you start selling more and more, you need more and more inventory, you need to place bigger and bigger orders, and cash flow actually becomes a way bigger issue as you continue to grow, unless you have a lot of cash available. So Kickstarter allows you to get that money up front. So in our situation, in that first product launch, we got that $650,000 right away into our bank account within 15 days. So that allows us to place our first inventory order. We get to do stuff like, hey well, do we want to invest, Do we want to do some different marketing tactics and how we want to launch on Amazon with influencers or whatever we want to do, we can actually take that money and decide what to do with it. So we're kind of getting ahead of the cash flow, the rat race of the cash flow grind that we're always trying to get ahead of.

Speaker 1: 15:43

But the other benefit that I think we can tap into and we can dig into this if you're interested is we actually get to build a community or an audience of people that care.

Speaker 1: 15:50

So in the Amazon world, a lot of people call this a list, but really we look at it as you suggested earlier, like we look at this more of an audience that really cares about what the brand is doing. So we call this a community because at the end of the day, these are people that know your story but at the end of supporting your campaign, they know who you are, they know what you're about, they know what the brand is about. There's some type of real connection to your brand in a way. So that is really invaluable because with Amazon, of course, we don't have access to our customers. We're not really building a real connection with the customer other than this transactional nature of like you're buying the product, maybe you slip an insert card in there, maybe they leave a review if they're feeling generous, but that's the expense of it. We don't really build a real connection with an audience that's needed to be able to scale a real e-commerce business in a way that's diversified across multiple platforms.

Speaker 2: 16:38

That makes sense. I mean, as someone who loves mitigating risk, the entire way of doing this model really makes sense to me, and I guess to me the kind of question that's bouncing back and forth my head is with these orders. Let's say I get 100, 200, 300 pre-orders or whatever, and I go and fulfill those through Kickstarter, my campaign there. How does that actually translate to benefiting me on Amazon, aside from the cash flow? Are those customers now going to be able to follow me, or am I getting their emails to kind of bring them over and continue selling to them through my Amazon or my Shopify store or whatever else?

Speaker 1: 17:11

Yeah, great question. So this is really key because as soon as somebody backs your project or Kickstarter, you can communicate with them and you can already immediately actually even ask for their help to promote the campaign or share with their friends that's interested in a copy or pets or whatever, and so you can actually engage with them immediately. And after the campaign is over as soon as the campaign closes, you get their emails so you're immediately able to kind of communicate with them directly one to one by email. So what that means is, if you just said, hey, I'm going to launch on Amazon, why don't we do a campaign to this audience saying, hey, do you know anybody else that needs this copy cup? And if so, here's a 50% off promo code, or like a 50% promo code. You don't even have to give it to them for free. They already like what you're doing. So if they want to buy it from you, this is their opportunity to kind of like funnel your customers to Amazon to help you with that Amazon launch.

Speaker 2: 18:00

Gotcha and I guess another question, because I've seen you know I was looking through Kickstarter before this but what happens? Like obviously there are a ton of people that are doing Kickstarter campaigns, but what are like the high level strategies in terms of just like, how do you actually get your campaign in front of people as a like successful campaign? So I know there's ones that are, you know we'll show up kind of similar how to Amazon. You know we'll have different badges that they give to products right that help you obviously get some trust and convert better. On Kickstarter you kind of have the same thing right With like there's the staff or editor picks. I think that I've seen in the past there's things where they'll do like, hey, this one's nearly funded or a brand new launch. So how do you actually kind of get the attention on your products or campaign on there?

Speaker 1: 18:43

Sure, great question. So Kickstarter has an algorithm, much like Amazon's algorithm. So the algorithm is based on how well you do in terms of things like driving traffic. You know, people converting all sorts of kind of like video watches, like how long they're finishing and watching your video, things like that.

Speaker 1: 19:01

But the most important metric is usually how quickly you hit your funding goal within the first 24 to 48 hours. So if you're setting your funding goal to be, let's say, $10,000, how quickly you hit that funding goal is an indicator to Kickstarter that you've actually invested time and effort into building an audience or a community in events. So the key to this is really I mean, the way to summarize is that we want you to hit your funding goal within the first 24 to 48 hours, because that's going to allow you to kind of tell Kickstarter well, tell their algorithm really that like start paying attention to us, this is a cool campaign, people care about it. And then you start getting some organic ranking within the Kickstarter platform and if they like the project sometimes that they this is how the editors will pick out like hey, we like this product, they feature their emails or social media and that type of thing, and that's when you get a lot of organic lift from the actual platform itself. So that's kind of like the short answer.

Speaker 2: 19:49

No, that's perfect. That makes sense, cause I was really curious, like if you know I'm going on there, of course I'm going to. You know I want an aggressive goal except, but there's an argument really that you shouldn't go and just say like I want a million dollar funding goal, but you want to have that funding goal fulfilled because that's going to help you then have a successful kind of start to your campaign as well. I'm sure there's tons of little tricks and tactics like that. Who is this exactly for? I guess is kind of like the next question here, Like who who should look at doing kind of this is a launch method and who shouldn't do it. And can you do this if you already have a existing product? I would assume this is just for brand new products.

Speaker 1: 20:23

Yeah, so great question. So I think let's start with who it's for in terms of the like, the stage of your business. So the the misconception for Kickstarter before was that this was I mean, that's kind of how we used initially but the misconception is that it's meant for new businesses or people that haven't launched yet. And it definitely works for those people because, of course, if you want to mitigate risk, you want to get cashflow, all those benefits of launching if you're a new business that works for you. But even we're finding so many big brands are now launching our Kickstarter for new product launches, because it's such a great way to build your audience, build your community and also get ahead on that cashflow and get the cash.

Speaker 1: 20:59

So not only do you kind of get the financial benefits that you would get, you know, if you're a new business, but all the other benefits of actually building an audience, building a social media following, building people that are willing to share stuff on social media in terms of user generated content and reviews all those types of things.

Speaker 1: 21:14

Those benefits small brands and big brands. So whether you're just starting out or if you have an existing business, it works well for those types of cases. So in that situation it works well for all businesses. But when it comes to specific product categories I mean we've seen this successful in many different product categories but the thing that we really look for when it comes to a successful campaign is an interesting way to position your product. So it doesn't need to be a completely brand new product, it doesn't need to be something that's like never been seen before, but it should have some type of unique angle to present the product in a way, or to position the product in a way that makes it interesting or exciting or unique to that particular audience that you're presenting it to.

Speaker 2: 21:56

Right, because you do still have to. I mean, there's a landing page for your products and your campaign. You really do still have to tell the story well and sell the product. And that is another kind of question that I have is you don't have this product made yet. So are you getting mockups, normally, of the product and then creating kind of video as the founder talking about like the story behind it, but like what goes into that actual listing itself, if you don't have the physical product yet?

Speaker 1: 22:21

Yeah, great question.

Speaker 2: 22:22

Maybe is that kind of how it goes.

Speaker 1: 22:24

Yeah, exactly. So great question. So there's two things that you mainly need to launch a campaign. So you need to, number one, have a prototype of the actual product, because to get approved by Kickstarter, they need to see that your product exists. So if it's a cup, it's a cup. If it's a towel, whatever it is, you need the prototype of the product that works. And the second thing is you need to actually prepare your campaign page. So, within the campaign page, that's equivalent to your Amazon product listing page, where you have to essentially, like you said, tell the story of why people should support your product and to purchase it.

Speaker 1: 22:57

But the good news is, when it comes to preparing your product listing page, I mean, you're going to need a few key assets, right, you need your photo, you need your copy, and this is kind of debatable down days.

Speaker 1: 23:08

I think that every product listing page and every campaign, you need a video to launch, because it's going to really help you with your conversion rates. But so the idea is you need all the assets you need if you launch on Amazon, if you're going to launch a Shopify store, you're going to need those assets. So you're not really creating anything that you wouldn't have created otherwise for launch. But the caveat is, I would say, that you generally want to invest in higher quality, so you don't want to get your husband's sister's cousin to take photos for you, but you want to get something professionally done because you're investing in your brand right. So you want to invest in high quality assets and those assets, once you're successful and your launch is good, then you can actually supply those to you know, your Amazon page or your Shopify store, whatever it is that's going to be useful for you to sell this product. So you're not really doing much different in terms of the actual preparation, that campaign page, than you would if you were just launching on Amazon or Shopify.

Speaker 2: 24:02

Yeah, no, that's great because you can also, like you said, repurpose that, so it's not like you have to go and double down and now spend more money on more of that. Maybe you have to get a couple more things, but that makes sense. Who's this not for? Are there any categories that are specifically really bad or do not do well in this type of campaign? Are there any types of sellers this should not be used for? Just tell me about that. I want to hear a little bit more.

Speaker 1: 24:25

Yeah, there's a few categories that just don't get approved on Kickstarter and they just don't end up doing well. So things like supplements, things with health claims, that doesn't really do well and that's generally not like. As long as it's something that you have to consume, they don't really allow that. Anything that's associated with like drugs or like weapons or that type of thing.

Speaker 1: 24:47

That stuff doesn't really work. So there's like a category of a bunch of different categories of things that are not approved. In terms of things that get approved, I've seen things do well in so many different categories. The one that blew my mind was we had this client come to us. She is a chef, so she wasn't really at e-commerce at all and she wanted to launch her hot sauce. She developed this like Chinese chili hot sauce and if you know anything, if you've heard about hot sauce, this is a like $2 item at the bottom shelf of the grocery store type of thing. But we said, okay, well, why don't you consider? You know you have a cool story. Why don't you consider launching this on Kickstarter? And she was very open minded. She's never done e-commerce before, but she was like, yeah, let's give this a shot. So she ended up launching her product on Kickstarter and she raised $120,000 on Kickstarter and this got a lot of really interesting press people talking about you know this new chili sauce and you know this cool founder story and that type of thing. And she took this and she ended up doing a lot of really cool things with this campaign.

Speaker 1: 25:45

So she ended up deciding to launch e-commerce. So she built a Shopify store she launched on Amazon and her Amazon listing. I mean she had a, I think, three listings because they had different SKUs but the product was doing about 200K a month combined on these three listings. So crazy, crazy performance on Amazon for a hot sauce. This isn't like a revolutionary product I mean, there's a special recipe to it and it was cool but this is like it's not something commonly perceived as like hey, you can sell this for $15 to $17 on Amazon. But she did that and she built a massive community of people that really supported her and so, above and beyond, like the e-commerce performance she would, she had like over a hundred thousand real followers on Instagram that came from her developing or ran in this way, and her Shopify store was. It had almost about a hundred thousand regular visitors every month. So that was her traffic organic traffic from a tour Shopify store.

Speaker 2: 26:42

Yeah, that's not bad for a right out of the gate.

Speaker 1: 26:45

Exactly yeah, and the coolest thing was she actually took the results for a successful campaign and she brought this to kind of like private investors and essentially the pitch was hey, we raised this much money before this product even launched, and so she got a lot of strategic investors that were interested in getting involved in the business and she ended up launching this on a few different retail channels.

Speaker 1: 27:06

So she sold this in, I believe, whole I'll talk about that one last but Target, costco, and she got into the most one of the most difficult stores to get into, which was Whole Foods. And all of this came from this launch that had really cool results and had a lot of, essentially a lot of ability to have a conversation around why people liked your product and why she was able to build an audience around it, and so that allowed her to be successful not only on Amazon, but on a bunch of other channels that she didn't really imagine before. This was somebody who did not have the commerce experience at all, so it's gone like people are listening to this podcast who have already done something or maybe in their process of researching.

Speaker 2: 27:41

This was literally somebody who was passionate about a product that wanted to launch it, so yeah, that's really cool Because, I mean, I didn't even think about that, but there's that whole element of, yeah, the press that you can kind of get from it. And in a way, I'm thinking too a little bit about some of the people I've worked with in the past who have been Shark Tank products launches and how they've been able to leverage that story into so many other different things. And it's kind of the same thing as if you do it right, you can use that, as this person did, and really leverage that and tell that story to other people, to really grow your brand right out of the gate.

Speaker 2: 28:11

So that's amazing.

Speaker 1: 28:12

Exactly. It's funny you mentioned Shark Tank also because some people take their successful kickstart launches and then go to Shark Tank and that's where they get their valuation, because they say, hey, we raised $100,000 pre-launch and then they go to these people and say, hey, we haven't gone to market yet, but sharks like we, we have 100k, so our valuation is this. So it actually. This is a really interesting way to start moving into different areas, so it kind of allows you to have opportunities that you don't think that are really kind of possible when you start going into e-commerce alone.

Speaker 2: 28:43

Right, yeah, no, that's cool. I'm curious what have you seen that's kind of changed over the years that you've been doing this Cause? Obviously, when was your first launch on Kickstarter or your first campaign? Was that in 2016?

Speaker 1: 28:54

2016,. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2: 28:56

Okay, so we're what, seven-ish years right now, from since that, roughly what's changed in that time? Has it become a lot harder to do these, these crowdfunding launches, or is it easier, like I'm assuming, it's a little bit harder?

Speaker 1: 29:08

to just change.

Speaker 2: 29:09

So what are kind of the key differences now versus when you first started?

Speaker 1: 29:12

Yeah, when I first started, it was still possible to.

Speaker 1: 29:16

So, look, I guess let's talk about like strategy.

Speaker 1: 29:19

When I first started, it was it was still possible to have some really cool products that launch and just do a little bit of marketing, have a really small audience and still kind of launch and potentially be successful because there weren't as many campaigns and so now there's more campaigns and so the strategy has shifted towards building an audience before launching and it's like this was important before but it's significantly more important now. So the idea is around building a community and building an audience and a list before you launch so that when you launch, you have that 24, 48 hour time window that we mentioned. You're emailing those people, you're telling them on social media hey, we're launching. This is what gets them excited to participate and purchase within that timeframe. So you really need to have that audience first, because that's what's going to really get you those initial sales to hit your goal, and then, once you're in that range, you're doing. Well, that's where you get the opportunity to get momentum from Kickstarter once you've already established kind of that foundation of purchasers from your own audience.

Speaker 2: 30:16

Yeah, that's awesome. So you do kind of and this is something I've been reading more and more about I know there's the whole Concept of a thousand true fans, and then I read a Ryan Daniel Moran's book I forget what the name of it is a while back, but both of them.

Speaker 2: 30:28

The concept is you really kind of want to find those, those initial people to build that list, to help kind of get your everything around, but you need surprisingly fewer than you would think. Like in my mind, I you know I would think I need a hundred thousand people to really have like a successful launch like this. The reality is, you can probably do it with just a thousand people, or even less in some cases, maybe, as long as they're really passionate about kind of what you're talking about. So how do you actually go about kind of building that list before you go and launch one of these campaigns? Or do you have Facebook groups who you're running ads to, like the landing page, what's that look like?

Speaker 1: 31:02

Yeah, there's lots of different ways to do it. There's free ways to do it, there's paid ways to do it. But I think, in general, the goal, the way that we look at this, is we're looking at a way to how do we engage people and get them involved in the process. So this is very unique to the way that I do launches. This isn't the most conventional way of doing. A lot of people just go with the basic, you know, add to landing page and you get the email, and then at some point use, email them and say, hey, we're launching. We do that too, but that's closer to the closer to the launch of the campaign.

Speaker 1: 31:29

Before that, what we really like to do in our process and and the way that we like to execute this, is we really focus on getting customers involved as early as possible. So, even if we have this product idea in mind already, or if we have like a, you know, like a few designs that we want, that the product is not ready, we want to start reaching out to people that we think are within our target audience To get them involved in giving us product feedback, because not only does one that help us actually Determine if our idea is good, but two, that also gives us an idea of how to sell this to them in a way that allows them to want to purchase in the most exciting way possible. So what is the product? So we're getting feedback on the product. So it's like hey, do you like this feature? Does it make sense to have it in these colors? You know all those types of things that you can ask them about the actual product before you invest in. You know Paying for mold or like anything like that.

Speaker 1: 32:19

But the other thing is like hey, well, let's say you have a product already. So a lot of people come to us and they already have a product almost close to ready or, like you know, like version one of the prototype ready. Well, in that situation you can get help with from your audience that you're building to give you feedback on what we call positioning. So it's like well, you have five, seven different features. Which one is the most relevant one? Which one is the most exciting to you? Which product photo do you like the most?

Speaker 1: 32:44

You know and this is way better than you know I know a lot of I'm not hating on pick food and this type of thing, but a lot of people like to use pick food. We don't know who's answering those surveys. We have no idea if these are people like the young people, old people and men, women Like that. That could be helpful to some extent, but it's not necessarily as helpful as being clear about this is the type of person that wants to buy your product and this is what they think is relevant to make this appealing to them as a target customer.

Speaker 1: 33:08

So we like to involve our customers in this process to be able to ask them for feedback, get them involved in surveys and and get them to to kind of help us build the product, launch product and, like I said, this doesn't mean that you have to listen to everything that they say. You know, if they give you feedback that you don't like, you don't have to incorporate that into your products. And again, some people actually come to this process with already a pretty close to complete product. But regardless of the stage you're at with a product, the best way to build a passionate community is to give them some type of way to be Involved in launching the product. And the more that you can do that, the more that people feel invested in what you're doing and they they feel much more inclined to support you when you finally launch.

Speaker 2: 33:48

Sure, yeah, that totally makes sense. That's really cool. I feel like that information is also so valuable, right, and then also for subsequent launches. You already have you know, assuming you're kind of launching a product in a similar category or Variation or something like that, you now already have this list built and you can use that for so many other things. So that's amazing too.

Speaker 1: 34:05

Yeah. So that's a really good point because With our first launch we acquired about 10,000 customers, so it was a really, really awesome launch. And so our next launch, we said, hey, what type of product should we launch in the coffee nation? And so we actually surveyed our audience about what they wanted to see and what they needed, and this idea of so our, my second product was this glass, this coffee glass, that double glass, and essentially it's just it was designed to make your coffee smell and taste better. Sounds kind of Woo-woo and maybe not like doesn't work, but actually it's based on the design principles of wine and whiskey glasses, where it's shaped a certain way and Anyways, it works. It's a cool product. But this idea came, it was birthed from our surveys with our, our audience, who wanted to see a cup with some unique properties, and we said, hey, let's explore this category further because people gave us that feedback.

Speaker 2: 34:55

So so they actually gave you the product idea pretty much for your second product.

Speaker 1: 35:00

Kind of, yeah, they pointed us in the right direction and we kind of refined the idea and and found a way to to build it. But the the really cool thing is from that first audience. We, of course, when we're launching our second product, we have access to this audience. We have access to the emails, are following us, that we have a Facebook group there in, so they're they're engaged with our community. So when we decided to launch the second product, we said, hey, we have this coming. This is launching on this day. Make sure you're ready for it. And on launch day we set a goal of $20,000 and we hit that goal within the first hour. So people are ready to buy.

Speaker 1: 35:30

It was exciting and by the time the campaign finished, our second campaign did about $300,000 $310,000 between starter and you go. And what was really interesting was that five percent of our initial customers Support from our initial audience supported our second campaign. So I mean five percent. That doesn't sound like a massive number, but when we worked out the math, five percent of those customers Resulted in about thirty nine thousand dollars of sales for this second launch. So imagine being able to launch a new product and already have customers that are ready. You're not investing in like giveaways and like you know all these kind of like strategies to give away your product, so hopefully get ranking and dumping a lot into PPC. You already immediately have people that are that know what you're about, that like what you're doing. They were involved in the product development process and then now they're just ready to buy. So forty thousand almost forty thousand dollars of that campaign came from existing customers and it only took five percent of those customers of I wanted to return to be able to make that happen.

Speaker 2: 36:29

So exactly right now, so so they have super funders on your people that are super funders. They also have super launchers and on these platforms, people are just serially launching products over and over again.

Speaker 1: 36:41

Yeah for sure. So there's this brand called a peak design, kind of like the. They're kind of like the apple of, like the role model for the crowdfunding community. These guys launch one to two products every year on crowdfunding. They're at the point where they don't need to anymore, but they're doing it because that's their way of giving back to the community, getting them the best deal when they first launch. These guys have raised over 300 million, like some ridiculous number on Kickstarter, and it's just like a crazy, crazy amount that they've done.

Speaker 1: 37:10

Really sorry, I think 30 million, not 300 million, but they've essentially done such a great job with their launches that this it was originally this guy in his base, but that was just launching a camera accessory, but now this has grown to be a massive camera accessories bags like tripods, like all these types of products that are competing with some of the biggest camera companies in the world, and their real asset is their audience in this fan base.

Speaker 1: 37:36

So how can they compete against, like the Sony's and like the Nikon's, like when it comes to accessories? Well, they have an audience that's really passionate about what they do. So instead of buying, you know, this product from this expensive camera company, they'll buy it from this brand, that they have this connection with that. They feel really like they supported them from ground up. So this is a great example, because I buy their products and I have like three or four other products and I'm constantly, you know, they have new stuff and it's like, you know, it's something I actually want to buy. I'll usually support it because I feel somehow connected to this, connected to the brand.

Speaker 2: 38:07

Yeah, that's how it makes sense. What are the weirdest products you've ever seen launched? I'm curious, like, are there any weird really out there products or they all kind of? I feel like this is a place where you go to kind of also launch a weird product or something that's just not out there.

Speaker 1: 38:22

I've seen like an app enabled sex toy. I think it did pretty well and they couldn't really advertise on Facebook so they did some interesting campaigns to make it work. But like an interesting kind of like, I think they positioned it as like a sexual health product, but really it was like a sex toy for men.

Speaker 2: 38:41

All about the positioning, for sure.

Speaker 1: 38:43

Exactly so yeah, there's a lot of cool products, but, yeah, weird ones. I think that's one of the oddest ones I've seen people launch. You know, food products, yeah, I mean, I think the sex toy one is like the one that's been out to me. I think it's okay for sure, nice.

Speaker 2: 38:59

So, vance, I want to switch over to our controversial take section. I call this kind of the does pineapple belong on pizza section, which I am a firm believer it does. What is one of kind of the debatable or controversial, I guess, ideas that maybe you have that other people in the e-commerce industry might not share.

Speaker 1: 39:18

Sure, yeah, and this is okay. This is a great question because it's coming from me, as also an Amazon seller, also selling on Shopify. So I'm not. I'm not very specific in terms of like, oh, this has to be this platform and this other platform, but my, my take is that it's impossible to build a real brand on Amazon alone. So I know a lot of people on the Amazon world are talking about building brands on Amazon and I get where it's coming from. You know there's a brand aesthetic, there's logos, you build your, you know your brand page on Amazon.

Speaker 1: 39:44

But when it comes to building a real brand, I think the definition for real brand in my mind is having an audience that really cares about what your company and your products are about, and they have. You have a real connection with them. So if you have a real connection just like the you know the Apple fanboys and you know the, the Red Bull fanatics, and like all those people that love those brands those people care about the brand, they have a and they have a connection with them. They have this type of relationship with the brand. And just being on Amazon alone, I feel like it's very difficult to accomplish that type of that type of relationship, especially, like you mentioned, it's more of like transactional nature.

Speaker 1: 40:19

So if you want to build a brand that connects with a lot of people, that you kind of interactions with them, that you have communities where people want to participate and give you product ideas and that support you when you launch, you know, like all the crazy people that wait on launch day for the new iPhone and Apple, you're not going to get people doing this on an Amazon store if that's where you think your brand is going to rest.

Speaker 1: 40:37

So if you want to build something that's sustainable, that's diversified across multiple channels, that where you have real customers that really care, I don't think you can do that on Amazon alone. That doesn't mean you have to do crowdfunding to do this, but you might have to start considering. You know how am I going to build an audience and build a community off of that? So am I going to build a Shopify store? Am I going to build an interesting Facebook group that gets people involved and excited? There's lots of ways to do this, but to do this on Amazon alone and just to have a brand page on Amazon and, you know, to have a nice logo, that's really not enough to build a real brand, if that's what your goal is eventually in the future.

Speaker 2: 41:10

Yeah, no, 100%. Thanks for sharing that. I think it kind of a follow up question to that is do you think you know, being a seller, you've seen some of the changes. Do you think Amazon is going to ever get to that place where maybe it truly is a place where you can build a real brand because they have made changes right in terms of like investing more, in terms of what you can do with A plus content we're like now they have the premium A plus stuff in the brand story that you can add in there. You know now they're adding the Amazon post stuff. So the things like that were, and I know there's a lot in terms of kind of the engagement that they're giving sellers the ability to do with the shoppers right. So like reaching out to the people who had, you know, negative one, two, three star kind of ratings in certain cases. So they're kind of like doing it in a controlled way. But do you ever foresee that Amazon is going to get to a place where that is? You feel differently about it, I guess.

Speaker 1: 41:58

Yeah, great question. I think it'll be really hard to get to that point because, like, I think the way that I define brand is this connection to the customer and then they that they care. So it's not, you know, and if that's the case, then it would mean that we have to be able to start using Amazon to be able to connect to the customer directly, not to thin like the you know, the poor review situation, but it's just like somehow to connect with your audience. And that's kind of against, like the intentions of Amazon, for obvious reasons. Right, it's their customers and like they want to make sure that they're controlling, kind of the communication. So, who knows, like something could happen.

Speaker 1: 42:29

But I think, just based on the way that the platform is structured and what the platform is there for, we're interacting with Amazon's customers, like I mean, if we're going to be straight with it, I think that's really what's happening and I think it would be really difficult to convert people to kind of being really passionate about our brand. But I know, you know, over time we found different ways to do this. You know there's insert cards, you know there's interesting ways to try to get emails.

Speaker 2: 42:50

So I always try to gamify the way that it's done.

Speaker 1: 42:53

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2: 42:54

Right, it's like Amazon does own that customer and that customer's information and that's the relationships there, so that totally makes sense.

Speaker 1: 43:00

Yeah, I think it won't be a matter of Amazon kind of making a change that'll make this easier. I think it will continue to be us sellers to find different ways to innovate, to get into a position where we can build that audience relationship and relationship with the customer. I think it'll be less than the Amazon side, more from, like, our side, of deciding, hey, we want to do something interesting, to create this, you know, real connection with the audience, to who will support us and care about what we do and have a real relationship. I think it's yeah, that's the way that I see it.

Speaker 2: 43:28

Yeah, no, that makes sense. Well, thanks for sharing. Does pineapple blowing on pizza, by the way? I just have to ask you is that something you believe in or no?

Speaker 1: 43:35

I'm a huge pineapple pizza, so all right, that's.

Speaker 2: 43:39

I just I'm all for it. Okay, cool. So that's. I know we're kind of reaching our closing here, so I'm going to kind of transition out and just go into say, first of all, thank you so much for being here, really appreciate that. I can't believe how much we were able to kind of cover, and I know there's a lot more to this world in terms of strategy and tactics, in terms of crowdfunding and the whole thing. So we've definitely talked a lot about this stuff, your insights they've truly been amazing. Vance, I want to turn it around to you for a second and give you the chance to kind of talk about where people can come and find you and, yeah, anything else that maybe you're working on right now as well.

Speaker 1: 44:14

Sure, yeah, so I am. I run a program called the launch accelerator blueprint. So this is outside of my, my regular selling and my brands. But this is.

Speaker 1: 44:23

This program is designed to help people essentially just launch using pre orders, through crowdfunding or even, in some cases, people are using this to launch on their Shopify stores and that type of thing as a precursor to their their actual scaling into ecommerce. So this is kind of before the Amazon stage or before launching officially on Shopify. So I have some free resources that I'd love to offer, if you know if anybody's interested in exploring the crowdfunding model or the pre orders model and to see what that looks like. So essentially, you can just visit a our website, live my playground so I think we can include this in the show notes live my playgroundcom slash seller candy and you're going to get access to essentially this free training, that that that walks you through understanding what it takes to go through a pre order launch, and it's a little bit of a guide that I put together that you guys can get access to 100% for free. So check that out and see if that helps you in your journey.

Speaker 2: 45:15

Cool, yeah, no, that's awesome. Thanks so much fans. So everyone who's watching this, whenever it may be, if you're coming up or thinking about doing a product launch in the near future, definitely go check this out. It's something that I'm personally super interested in. I think this model is very unique, and who doesn't want to start, you know, hitting the ground running, knowing their product has true validation, getting that cash flow up front and really getting that feedback and building an audience I mean that's an amazing way to go and launch product. All great stuff. Everyone, make sure you check that out. But I think, without further ado, I just want to say thank you again so much for being here. We really appreciate it.

Speaker 1: 45:47

Awesome. Thank you for having me. We covered a lot today. So, yeah, your audience got value from this, and if you want to have round two, we can go in deeper into stuff. I'm happy to do it too.

Speaker 2: 45:57

Love it, absolutely Cool. Well, thanks again fans, thanks everyone who's watching.

Speaker 1: 46:00

And there you have it, the final curtain on this episode.

Speaker 2: 46:02

So big shout out to Vance for gracing us with his expertise and insights today. I'm sure everyone listening got a boatload of information. I know I certainly did so. If today's discussion did hit the mark for you, we'd be incredibly grateful if you could take a moment, share your thoughts by leaving a rating, a review, even a comment, on our YouTube channel. This is the fuel that really propels us forward so that we can reach more people with the Amazon Stragia show and reach more e-commerce enthusiasts like yourself.

Speaker 2: 46:26

And hey, let's not forget to stay connected. Make sure that you follow us on your favorite social media channel, your favorite podcast player, stay in touch with us so you can get the latest episodes, sneak peeks behind the scenes and a whole lot more. You can also catch the links that were mentioned in the episode in the description box. And with that we're going to be wrapping up today's episode. But don't worry, because we are just getting started. Mark your calendars next week. We've got another one We'll be diving right back in, so get ready to soak up more expert insights very soon.