Launching A Business Using Crowdsource Funding with Will Ford

00:00 Andy Splichal Welcome to the Make Each Click Count Podcast. This is your host, Andy Splichal. We are happy to welcome this week's guest to discuss today's topic, which is launching a business using crowd source funding. Today's guest is a president and co-founder of LaunchBoom, where they turn product ideas into successful businesses. A big welcome to Will Ford. Hi, Will.

00:21 *Will Ford * Andy, thanks so much for having me on today. I really appreciate it. I'm excited to be here, and I can't wait to dive in.

00:25 Andy Splichal Cool, well, let's get started. Let's talk about some of the options for someone starting a business. What are the typical ways that you can finance your company, and what are some of the major reasons for even needing the financing?

00:44 *Will Ford * Yeah, so I mean, Andy, honestly, man, I'm a serial entrepreneur. I've built many companies from the ground up prior to starting Launch Boom. I've had some epic wins. I've had some epic failures. And so I've learned, honestly, through my own personal experience, what the best ways are to raise funds, when to raise funds, and how to do it, especially as an early stage startup. I'd say probably my biggest mistakes early on was that I didn't really know how to value my company or business opportunity, because I'd raise the money too early. So I'd go out to family, friends, or angels, and I'd convince them that my idea was going to work. And I was really good at raising capital from angels for my early business ventures. And the biggest problem I had with my first two companies was I raised way too much capital. I gave up way too much equity at too low a valuation. And then next thing I know, I'm in the trenches doing all the work, all the heavy lifting. I made the companies super successful. And when I had my exits on those first two deals, I had the smallest reward. And all my investors made a ton of money. And I was kicking myself. I'm never going to do that again. So honestly, that's kind of part of my journey to getting to where I am today at LaunchBoom and loving crowdfunding as a whole. I've never had more fun in my career than I had in this crowdfunding industry. It really has so many opportunities. It's such a huge advantage for so many startups and entrepreneurs out there that are looking to raise funding. But to do it without diluting themselves or giving up equity too early. So I think that's kind of a good segue into kind of like how I started LaunchBoom and why we started with Kickstarter Indiegogo. So when it comes to crowdfunding, it's kind of a loaded word because there's so many different types of crowdfunding. So for example, there's reward-based crowdfunding. So that's what we focus on here at LaunchBoom. Reward-based crowdfunding. Yeah, so reward-based crowdfunding, the way that works is we're actually not giving up any equity at all. All we're doing is we're taking new product ideas, new consumer products, and we're literally pre-selling them on Kickstarter. We're pre-selling them on Indiegogo. Then when the campaign's over, as long as the campaign successfully funded or hits its funding goal, my client will get all that money from the platform and now they have the capital they need to place the manufacturing order and deliver a good experience to those backers. Now they're literally, they validated demand, they validated that their product has demand and they're able to do that in a much shorter amount of time with much less financial risk. So before crowdfunding, I was the guy who would launch a new product. I'd have to figure out manufacturing. I'd have to come up with at least half that money upfront in order to get the manufacturer started on producing my product. And then I better hope my marketing strategy works because if it doesn't and I can't find demand, now I'm stuck with a bunch of inventory I can't move and I'm upside down before I even get started. 03:53 Andy Splichal Interesting. So let's talk, you're not giving up equity as a company. You're pre-selling products. Why, I mean, what's the incentive for the people who are crowdfunding? Is it just that they can purchase it? I mean, where's the motivation?

04:10 *Will Ford * Yeah, Andy, that's a great question. So the only reason I believe crowdfunding works, and I started Launch Room back in 2015, and it still works even better today than it did back then, is for three reasons. People go to Kickstarter and Indiegogo because they want access to the coolest, newest products. The second reason they go there is they want not only that access to the coolest, newest products, but they wanna get the best deal on those products. They wanna discount off retail. And the third reason is they wanna get their hands on those products as soon as it's made before anyone else, before it even gets to retail, right? So that's the only reason people continue to go to Kickstarter and Indiegogo, and they continue to back these projects because they know that they're gonna get the coolest product, they're gonna get the best deal possible, and they're gonna get the first product line in their hands.

05:00 Andy Splichal So when I think this, the coolest, newest, hottest products, my mind just goes to tech. Is, I mean, what are the types of products that do well? Is it tech or is it other things as well?

05:09 *Will Ford * Yeah, Andy, it's another good question. So for us, since our inception, which is almost 10 years now, I've been building LaunchBoom since our inception, products that typically appeal to a male audience, 25 between 50 years of age, generally will do super well on Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Now, recently, over like the last couple of years, we've actually had a lot more success in other categories outside of that demographic. So we've had a lot of success with kids' products, female products, in addition to those products that generally appeal to that male audience of 25 to 50 years of age. We also have a ton of success in probably 100 plus different verticals when it comes to products. So I'd say to answer your question directly, I'd say some of the best categories on Kickstarter would be like tabletop games. Tabletop games do really well. We have more of our million dollar campaigns come from the gaming category than probably any other category every year on Kickstarter. Also products that are like more creative, that are more artistic generally will perform better on Kickstarter versus an Indiegogo. Indiegogo is really strong when it comes like tech hardware, IoT type products. But we've had a tremendous amount of success even like in the apparel vertical with different types of apparel for kids, males, females. But yeah, if you go to launchroom.com, you can see like right on our main page, our main homepage, you'll see just examples of like all those different categories that we've had tremendous amounts of success in over the years.

06:58 Andy Splichal Is there a certain price point where, one of the things you said is that people wanna get a discount. So I'm assuming does it have to be at least a $50 item where they're getting a big discount? I mean, they're not selling $4 items, right?

07:12 *Will Ford * Yeah, Andy, correct. Yeah, so there is a sweet spot that we've discovered over the years. So typically we really like to see an average order value of about $99 or higher. And there's a lot of different ways to get there. So if it is a lower priced item, we can usually create like a bundle pack where we can drive up that AOV. So we can get that $99 or hopefully a lot more than that, depending upon the product category. Another great category are e-bikes. E-bikes sell for thousands of dollars. And ever since the pandemic, that's just been a super hot barricade for us. So you can on Kickstarter and Indiegogo, you can pre-sell a product for as little as $10, $20 per backer. We recommend trying to get that AOV to $100, but you can't take more than 10,000. So 10,000 is the cap. And the reason I say that is years ago, I launched an e-car that was $8,900, and we were able to do that successfully on Indiegogo. So anyway, so that kind of gives you a general ballpark, but the average order value we like to see is gonna be that $99 price point or preferrability much higher than that.

08:21 Andy Splichal So this is a great way, it sounds like, for an idea to get funding to manufacture the products. Is there any time, I mean, to establish companies uses to launch new lines? I mean, who's your guys' clients?

08:39 *Will Ford * Yeah, so I'd say today, 50% of my clients are gonna be like that early stage, super green entrepreneur or product creator that is looking to launch their first or second product. And they're looking to go into Kickstarter or Indiegogo because they wanna pre-sell the product. They're self-funding it, right? They're trying to validate that demand on their own before they go raise investor dollars to accelerate that growth post-crowding. Now, the other half of my clients today are actually very successful e-commerce brands that leverage my system to maximize their next product idea or their next product skew that they're planning to add onto their e-commerce site. And what they're doing is they're taking those products through our pre-launch validation system before they even go to Kickstarter or Indiegogo so that they can control those launch outcomes. And that's the validation they need to not only generate new customers and clients, but then to then take those successful validated products into their e-commerce stores once they have manufacturing under control.

09:41 Andy Splichal So let's take a step back. What needs to be done before an idea is ready for crime? I mean, you need to figure out how much it's gonna cost. I mean, I guess what needs to be done? What's the legwork?

09:55 *Will Ford * Yeah, so I mean, just to be blunt, the ideal client that comes into Launch Boom, they have a prototype or they have a photorealistic render that we can then convert into advertisements and use for the marketing to support that pre-sale on Kickstarter or Indiegogo. So we have had a lot of success with people just using renders and doing very basic video production with their Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaigns to pre-sell those products before they go to manufacturing. But we always recommend and suggest to our clients that they figure out the manufacturing piece during that pre-launch period, specifically before we launch on Kickstarter or Indiegogo, because we wanna know that we can actually make the product for a certain cost to understand how to create that margin that our client's gonna need to be successful and to make a profit on these launches. So to answer your question, we also have another program here at LaunchBoom called Source Boom, where we have some of the leading manufacturing experts that help our clients figure out the manufacturing so that we understand what their cost per unit's gonna be on different volume orders. And then the idea is let's take that into Kickstarter once we validate that our pre-launch is gonna scale and we can build a community around it. And let's make sure that we can raise potentially more than what they want. Because with economies of scale, if we can place larger volume orders with the manufacturer, we can usually get lower cost per unit and increase their profit margins drastically if we do it right. So to answer your question, we do like to understand the manufacturing costs before we launch. It's just safer for the entrepreneur. It makes it less stressful, honestly, after the campaign's done, because now they know they have more than enough capital to produce and deliver a great experience to that backer.

11:36 Andy Splichal Yeah, I know that makes a lot of sense. Now you had mentioned marketing it, trying to get the orders. I guess what's involved in that? What are some of your strategies for getting a Kickstarter campaign funded?

11:50 *Will Ford * Yeah, so Andy, honestly, that's why I started Launch Boom. When I first started launching products on Kickstarter and Indiegogo, I was looking for an agency that could help me really specifically with my pre-launch efforts, my preparation. My idea from the get-go, and it remains true today, was how do I build my own community before I go to Kickstarter so I can control the outcome? I don't have to just rely on their community. And so over the years, we've pioneered something called the reservation funnel. So to keep it simple, the way it works is we do a lot of our pre-launch advertising through Facebook and Instagram. So if anyone sees an ad and they click on it because they wanna learn more about it, we redirect them to a reservation funnel. The reservation funnel will show you some more images, some more information about the product, and then it will say something like, hey, we're launching soon on Kickstarter. The first thousand orders are gonna get a lower price and early delivery before everybody else. So if you're interested in getting the best deal before we go live, all you have to do is place a $1 money-back guarantee reservation with us, and we're gonna guarantee you the best deal today before we go live on Kickstarter. So that reservation funnel, honestly, is the most qualified audience who can build to support any launch. So on average, we have about a 30 to 40% conversion off that audience. So if I only have $1,000 reservations before your product launch on Kickstarter, I know I'm gonna get 300 or more backers in the first 15 minutes after we go live. So that's also how I set the funding goal on Kickstarter and Indiogo. Based on my pre-launch efforts, once I maximize that reservation funnel, then I can recommend to my client how to set their campaign funding goal. Because on Kickstarter and Indiogo, you have to hit that funding goal in order for the campaign to be successful and to get the dollars out of the platform. So I manipulate that goal. Most of my goals are usually 10 to 50,000 predicated on that pre-launch reservation funnel bill. So when I launched the Kickstarter campaign, for example, if I have $1,000 reservations, I might set your campaign goal to $20,000. Because now I know within the first 15 minutes, we're gonna get 30,000 or more funded. Now, when that happens, we outperform everyone else on Kickstarter. So when Kickstarter sees this audience coming into their platform and converting really well, they start to promote the product to their audience. Now, their community of backers today, Andy, has grown hugely. It's tens of millions of organic traffic that's there every day, looking for cool products to back. So if I can get the campaign funded in the first hour, which we do every time, then what will happen is they'll start to push it and promote it to their audience. So it'll give us better placement, they'll push us in their newsletters. When that happens, we get this organic lift that we don't have to pay for from their platform, from their community. So that 20, 30,000 very quickly becomes hundreds of thousands and sometimes a million or more by the end of the campaign. Does that make sense?

14:58 Andy Splichal No, it makes a whole lot of sense. I guess I'm curious on the pre-launch funnel, why a dollar? Why not $10, why not, I mean, why $1?

15:04 *Will Ford * Yeah, so we started it at a dollar just to kind of test it and we got very, very consistent metrics from all the campaigns that use that dollar system. But to answer your question, if the AOV is a higher price point, so if the AOV is a hundred dollars or more, we might bump that reservation to $5 or $10. If it's an e-bike, if it's gonna be selling for a couple thousand dollars or more, we're gonna set that reservation price to $100. So we can decide, we can select custom reservation amounts depending upon what the campaign average order value looks like going through our pre-launch system. So to answer your question, it's not always a dollar anymore. Sometimes it's $10, sometimes it's a hundred. We set it at a price that we think is gonna be kind of, it's gonna convert well, but it's also gonna be realistic based upon what the average order value will eventually be on Kickstarter.

16:06 Andy Splichal So you had mentioned you're gonna run Facebook ads. What kind of budget does somebody need when they come to you for, I guess, your services, your services of promoting?

16:21 *Will Ford * Yeah, so Andy, I think the best way to answer that question is to kind of take a step back and give you a high level look at kind of what's happened to LaunchBoom over the last 10 years. So when I first started LaunchBoom, I started off as solving the first problem. Let's build an agency that can give the product creator all the support they need to maximize the Kickstarter or Indiegogo opportunity. That was my first focus. And that business model, honestly, wasn't cheap. You actually had to have some kind of funding in order to work with us. So in the early years, you had to have $50,000 or more in order for me to do everything for you and to generate hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in presales, right? Now, a lot of my clients would be like, well, what's the 50 grand for? And I'd say, well, 25 will go into marketing, all the assets, the video production that has to happen in order to be able to even advertise and promote and have a beautiful campaign page on Kickstarter or Indiegogo. Now, the other half of the budget would go into just ad spend. And half of that would be used for pre-launch to maximize that reservation funnel. And then we'd reserve half of that for live campaign ads, once we'd go live to keep the traffic going and converting well. And we could control that because of all the learning from the pre-launch ad spend. And then at the end of the campaign, we'd take 10% of the raise, right? Or the presale. That was my original model. Now, over the years, I've moved away. I've gone in the polar opposite direction. Today, all of my services are under $10,000. And it gives my clients the same type of support that we used to provide as a white love agency, but now we've got much better technology built. So now our clients that come in, we can help them with the messaging, the positioning. We have more of a coaching consulting platform now versus agency, where we have daily coaching calls with various experts on my team, covering specific topics based on what type of process the clients in as they move through that crowdfunding process. So as they use our technology and they leverage our backer audiences, another thing we have, Andy, is we have over 7 million backers in our database from the thousand plus campaigns we managed over the years. So our clients can now access those audiences through our platform, and they can actually do a lot of like the beta testing during that pre-launch phase. So what's really cool about LaunchBoom is today, we're more of a coaching consulting platform and community. Today, I have over 1200 active community members that are crowdfunding. Now that's everyone, Andy. That's some people in pre-launch. Some of those are live, and some of them are wrapping up and delivering to backers. But what's really cool about the system is that not only do we have this community where they have access to everyone on my team, but they also have these daily coaching calls that they can jump on to get their questions answered as they're moving through the process. And then the technology we've built has significantly lowered the cost and risk and honestly made it more fun and easy to use. So now our clients come in, we help them with the messaging, the positioning, then they can just drag and drop the messaging imagery of their products into building their own reservation funnels. And then a lot of our clients say, hey, well, how much can I sell my product for? So we actually help do that market research. We help them understand what we think they can sell their product for, but now we go test it. So what we'll do is we'll develop like A-B testing, where we'll test one lead offer at $100 and maybe another second lead offer at 199. And then we look at the metrics, what's converting the best. Once we get through that micro testing period of the pre-launch process, then we know, okay, this is the average order value. This is how we maximize the AOV. This is gonna be the lead offer that we're gonna use to maximize that reservation bill for the rest of the pre-launch process. And then that's gonna allow us to help our clients resell more product and make way more margin on those sales.

20:02 Andy Splichal So after somebody has finished getting funded and it's a successful campaign, I mean, they've joined your community, they're part of, they've used your platform to sell it. What's next for them? I mean, do you keep helping them with their advertising or do they go off and hire an agency or they bring it in-house? I mean, what's the next step look like?

20:30 *Will Ford * Yeah, so to answer you, let me answer your last question because I didn't complete it. So what does it cost to take your product through LaunchBoom and have a successful Kickstarter Indiegogo raise? On average, I usually recommend a $20,000 budget. And the way it works today is 10,000 will cover the LaunchBoom costs. And then I always recommend having about a $10,000 advertising budget. And we'll leverage most of that for pre-launch now because that reservation funnel is gonna convert much better. It's gonna give us more of that organic lift from those backer audiences on Kickstarter Indiegogo. And it's gonna allow them to raise way more pre-launch, sorry, much more pre-sales on those platforms.

21:11 Andy Splichal And are you guys running the ads for them for the pre-launch funnel or are you giving them tools that they do it themselves?

21:15 *Will Ford * So we actually, so when I was an agency, before I pivoted over to this coaching consulting model, I had almost a hundred full-time employees on my team. Most of those employees were advertisers, digital marketers. So my best ones have actually converted into independent contractors. So if our clients do need an advertiser because they don't have one in-house, we introduce them to a LaunchBoom trained, certified advertiser who can manage those ads directly for the client. So that's how the model works. We actually don't manage ads in-house anymore. We just refer them to, honestly, someone who used to be on my team a year ago.

21:53 Andy Splichal Got it. Yeah, I know that sounds like a great system. So let's talk about e-commerce. I mean, you're seeing a lot of new ideas coming in. Where do you see e-commerce going over the next 12 to 18 months?

22:07 *Will Ford * Yeah, so that's a great question. So what we do at LaunchBoom is once we get our clients through the crowdfunding process, now what I'm talking to you now, Andy, are the green entrepreneurs, that person launching their first or second product that don't already have e-commerce in place, right? What we'll do is once we take them through our crowdfunding process and now they've had a successful Kickstarter Indiegogo raise, they've got the money out of the platform, they've got their manufacturing going. We also have a program called SourceBoom, like I mentioned earlier, where we actually help them figure out the manufacturing piece as well, which is a huge pain point and problem for most of our clients. Once they have product landed, that's usually when we recommend that they turn on e-commerce. We love Shopify. We have another division here at LaunchBoom called ScaleBoom. So once we complete that crowdfunding process, now they have manufacturing complete, they've got product landed. That's when we turn on the e-commerce piece. And it's very similar to our coaching consulting for crowdfunding, except now we graduate them into ScaleBoom. It's a similar low cost solution where they don't need an agency to do it all for them anymore. They come in there, we've got technology dashboards built. We have a whole entire Shopify expert team there that help them grow and scale their business through Shopify post-crowdfunding. So when it comes to that question, I think e-commerce is such an important part of the scale and growth opportunity for any one of my clients that are crowdfunding. Now, I have a lot of clients that already have e-commerce businesses in place, right? And what they're doing is they're using my system to validate that next idea for their next product SKUs. And in those cases, a lot of those bigger e-commerce clients, they already have internal teams that manage that for them, or they work with other agencies that are managing million dollar plus budgets a year so that they can generate tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue.

24:08 Andy Splichal Now you had mentioned Shopify for selling their products on their own website. What about Amazon? Do you guys support them going on to Amazon? Do you recommend it? Where do you stand with that?

24:21 *Will Ford * Yeah, so to be again, just brutally honest, we are the experts when it comes to crowdfunding. When it comes to Shopify, we can help kind of get our clients set up and going, but there does come a point once they get to like that million to 10 million range where we'll introduce them to an agency partner that can manage the bigger budget, do a lot more creative than what we're able to do in-house. Now the same is true for Amazon. So when it comes to Amazon, we have a handful of Amazon experts that we'll connect our clients to if they're interested in turning on Amazon and going that route as well. But again, a very important part of consumer product growth in addition to Shopify, definitely we always recommend Amazon, but we don't provide any expertise or support there. We usually just introduce our client to that Amazon expert that we trust.

25:11 Andy Splichal Got it. Now, what are some of the challenges that you guys might have encountered with somebody that comes to you and maybe you can't help them or you're gonna have to do a lot of work to make it successful?

25:29 *Will Ford * Yeah, so I mean, I'd say, I get asked that question a lot, Andy. And to be honest, it's so much easier for us to reduce the headache, reduce the amount of time and capital involved with any new product idea if we can talk to that person before they talk to an expensive agency in the crowdfunding space. And the reason I say that is because it's true. Having run the biggest agency in the space for years before I pivoted to this coaching consulting model, the whole idea with the pivot was how can we create a more fun, a less risky way for entrepreneurs everywhere to validate demand through crowdfunding and to do it faster with much less financial headache and hardship versus working with an expensive agency or doing it the traditional way, doing it themselves. And so that's kind of what we've been focused on the last 10 years is creating that solution to this market that we're currently leading. I tell you right now that, and again, I'm gonna be brutally blunt, Andy, I always tell anyone new to crowdfunding or even launching their first or second product, I always tell them that it's always the smartest to fail fast and fail cheap. And that's what we do here at Launchbone. We literally have put most of our focus into this preparation pre-launch process to allow entrepreneurs to understand whether or not there's demand for that product before they even go to Kickstarter. Because sometimes we'll get through that pre-launch process and the data won't be strong. People won't convert through the files. And that's usually when we have that honest conversation, it's not an easy conversation, but we tell them, hey, listen, maybe we should iterate this product and improve it. Let's do some surveys to the people that were interested. Let's figure out what they like about it. Let's figure out what they don't like about it. Or maybe it's best just to put that idea on the back burner and put your time and resources into a different project. So my number one advice to any entrepreneur out there launching any type of product is fail fast, fail cheap. I've done it the other way before. I failed hard and it's been super expensive before I was crowdfunding. And I never wanted to be in that position again, which is why I created LaunchBoom. And yeah, that's the best way I can answer your question.

27:46 Andy Splichal Yeah, I mean, I think that you have a great advantage, somebody working with you, just because you would know it's an issue with the product and you don't have to worry about, is it an issue with the landing pages or is it an issue with the strategy of the pre-launch funnel because you guys have done it before? So you kind of take that out of the equation and yeah, no, I think that's a great way to really test products. Now, who is the perfect person to work with you guys? Like if they're listening, should absolutely jump on a call with you guys.

28:20 *Will Ford * Yeah, I'd say anyone out there that has a product idea or anyone out there who has a successful e-commerce business and they're thinking about launching a new product or a new brand. Like how far along does that product idea have to be? So I'd say ideally that product idea has been turned into a photo realistic render. Literally, if it's a photo realistic render Andy, we can generally take that through our system and figure out the validation. We can actually start building that reservation funnel and get our clients set up for a successful Kickstarter IndieGoGo campaign. Even if they have no idea how to build it. Well, so that's the one exception. So as long as they have that photo realistic render, we can get them started with the pre-launch and the validation, but at the same time, we usually plug them into our SourceBoom team. So we have a team here at LaunchBoom called SourceBoom and over the years, we've found the industry's top manufacturing experts and sourcing experts that can actually help them understand how to manufacture the product, what it costs to manufacture that product, because that's an important part of how do we start looking at the price testing? Because we don't know how to price an item if we don't know what it costs, right? Because what we don't wanna do is we don't wanna take that photo realistic render through our system, launch a campaign and not know what it's gonna cost to manufacture, because now we're setting our client up for disaster potentially. So instead of that, while we're taking that photo realistic render through our system, building that stacking that reservation funnel, we can also figure out the manufacturing and sourcing at the same time. So now they understand, okay, this is what my cost per unit is gonna be if I work with LaunchBoom's recommended manufacturer, based on that data, now I know that if I sell for $99 or $500, I'm gonna make the margin I need. And then my job at LaunchBoom is to then hopefully exceed their expectation with the raise. So now they can place a larger volume order with their manufacturer. And as we both know with economies of scale, if they have more capital, they can place a larger volume order, especially if they've already pre-sold it. And now with economies of scale, that price per unit drops drastically.

30:29 Andy Splichal And now that we can actually improve their margin. What percentage of people that come to you with an idea, do you are typically successful?

30:38 *Will Ford * That's a really, that's a great question. I would say to answer your question directly, I would say that 100% of our clients that go through the LaunchBoom system, where we have the metrics we need to see to set an expectation that we can raise the amount they need to manufacture and deliver, 100% of those clients are successful. Now, to answer your question a different way, 100% of the clients that come through LaunchBoom, I'd say we do a really good job on the sales side, making sure that they're a good fit for crowdfunding and our system before we take them in. And how do we do that? Anyone that matches a vertical where we've had prior success usually is going to be a good match for crowdfunding. Why? Because we also have those back audiences that they can leverage for targeting, right? And we've already had success there. So there's a good chance we can actually, it's easier for us to do that again. Now, if a product comes in to my sales team and it doesn't match a vertical where we've had prior success, we're usually gonna redirect them a different route. And we're gonna tell them why crowdfunding doesn't make sense because A, we failed there, B, we've never seen a product do well there, or C, it's just not a good match for crowdfunding. Now, do you have a list of verticals on your website or? Yes, yes. So if you go to launchboom.com, on the homepage, you'll see a variety of successful verticals where we continue to have success with multiple products in that same category. So anyone listening, if you have a product idea, if you've always been interested in launching on Kickstarter or Indiegogo, if you just go to launchroom.com, you can see examples of campaigns that have done extremely well through our system. And if you're in that category or vertical, definitely schedule a call with one of my team members because we can educate you more, we can help explain more of the details involved and potentially help you have a successful Kickstarter Indiegogo campaign outcome.

32:39 Andy Splichal Well, this has been great. Is that the best way for an interested listener to learn more is just to go to the website?

32:44 *Will Ford * Yeah, I would say go to launchboom.com. You're gonna, we provide more free education than anyone else in our industry, literally. So if you go to launchboom.com, we have a ton of free education there. You can also easily book a call with an actual person on my team who is a crowdfunding expert and you can ask them any questions you want. You can even learn more just about whether or not you wanna take this route. But I will tell you being an entrepreneur, having launched over a thousand successful products over the years, crowdfunding is the safest, easiest way for you to validate demand, do it much faster and generate thousands of new loyal customers.

33:25 Andy Splichal Well, this has been great. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we go ahead and wrap it up today?

33:30 *Will Ford * Yeah, I mean, the only other thing and what we didn't really cover today, Andy, is crowdfunding. We talked about reward-based, right? We talked about how to use Kickstarter Indiegogo to pre-sell your product, but there's a whole other opportunity called equity crowdfunding. And so what we have found a huge amount of success in over the years is any of our clients launching products through Kickstarter Indiegogo. Once we take them through that part of the process and then we get them over to e-commerce and they start to scale, you can now go to equity crowdfunding platforms. And because of the new SEC laws, you can literally convert your customers into investors. So like I was saying earlier, I've made the mistake of raising money at low valuations based on what my company was actually worth in the future. And to prevent that from happening, I always encourage everyone, leverage Kickstarter Indiegogo and Indiegogo to launch that new product idea, then continue to scale it through e-commerce if you're not already there or if you're already there. And then what you do is you take that business to equity crowdfunding platforms like Wefunder or Start Engine or Dalmore. And now what you can do is you can raise up to $5 million from credited and non-credited investors, meaning that you can convert your customer now into an investor on those platforms and you can do it at much higher valuations. You can give up much less equity and you can raise way more working capital to accelerate your growth and success

34:57 Andy Splichal. So I just wanna take that seat. Yeah, no, that's great. How do you determine that evaluation?

35:03 *Will Ford * Yeah, so again, that's a loaded question. And Andy, that might warrant itself for another podcast with you just to talk about that. But basically it comes down to like the P&L, it comes down to what are the financials over like the last year to three years? You wanna have financials in place, you wanna show growth before you go to the equity crowdfunding platforms. Why? Investors aren't dumb. If they see an idea that's pre-market that hasn't been validated yet, they're probably gonna be more hesitant to back it and put money in. But if you prove that people do like your product, that you do have sales and that you do go on to scale, you're gonna get a much more favorable valuation and you're gonna get a much better conversion of investors there. Cause they're gonna be like, wow, this company's off to an incredible start. It's had a strong launch. Its second year financials are growing very, very fast. And I wanna be a part of this deal. I wanna come along for the ride. So I think that's a high level way to kind of answer your question without diving into the weeds there. Because there is a lot more strategy that goes into the valuation piece, making sure that we do maximize the valuation for the clients on the equity side. But equity crowdfunding is entrepreneurs best friend. Again, guys, I've raised money from venture capitalists, angel investors, and I continuously see the entrepreneur win on these equity crowdfunding platforms because they get more money, they get it faster, and they get much better valuations and they keep control of their company. So I think that's a great way to give up board seats.

36:33 Andy Splichal Well, this has been a great conversation. You're right. I think we might have to expand it for the evaluation cause that's another piece that people struggle with, but it sounds like you've really created a great solution for people just starting out to test it relatively low risk.

36:53 *Will Ford * Yeah, exactly. I'd say anyone out there who has a cool new product idea, if you've been interested or wanting to learn more about Kickstarter Indiegogo and how to validate demand for a fraction of the risk, reach out to us, please. I'd be happy to talk to you. I've got a whole team of experts that will talk with you and help further educate you, but I would strongly encourage you to consider launching your next product on Kickstarter Indiegogo, especially if you're in that consumer hardware space.

37:18 Andy Splichal Well, this has been great. Thanks again, Will, for joining us today.

37:22 *Will Ford * All right, Andy. Hey, thanks so much for having me on the show. I really appreciate your time. And yeah, happy to come back if you need me.

37:28 Andy Splichal All right, well, for listeners, remember if you liked this episode, please go to Apple Podcasts and leave us an honest review. And if you're looking for more information regarding LaunchBoom or connecting with Will, you will find links in the show notes below. In addition, if you're looking for more information on growing your business, check out our podcast resource center available at podcast.makeeachclickcount.com. We have compiled all of our different past guests by show topic and included each of their contact information in case you would like more information any of the services I've discussed during previous episodes. Well, that's it for today. Remember to stay safe. Keep healthy and happy marketing. And I'll talk to you in the next episode.