 Hi everyone, thanks so much for coming. Can you all hear me? Can you hear me in the back? If you can't hear me just raise your hand and I will use the microphone. Thanks for coming and spending your Wednesday evening with us. I'm Claire, I started as the Singapore Malaysia Country Manager and now I'm the general manager which is really just a fancy way of saying I do everything that everybody else in the office does not want to do including changing the toilet paper in the toilet. And I've been working for POSSIBLE for about two years now and I'm going to go over what crowdfunding is, what we see a successful project usually does, so basically how to be successful, and then I'll open up for Q&A. And just to let you know, usually after the workshops that we run, people want to stop and talk to me and that's completely fine. Like if you have a project you want to come ask me about, please do. But if there's like a ton of people and you don't really want to wait around, then you can just email me. Okay, and I will get back to you really quick. So, can I get, I know Alia Seth asked how many of you know what POSSIBLE is, how many of you have actually pledged to a crowdfunding campaign? There's enough to be impossible just anywhere. Okay, a couple of you. How many of you have a project that you're hoping to start? Okay, interesting. Alright, so a bit about us. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm blocking your thing. We started in 2010 in Sydney. So POSSIBLE is an Australian platform. And when we started, there really wasn't, like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, those kind of platforms were around, but there really wasn't anything in Singapore, sorry, in Australia. And as anybody here who's tried to run a Kickstarter campaign knows, you need to have like a US company, back then you need to have a US company in order to start a platform. So Rick and Alan, those guys, they started POSSIBLE in order to be able to offer the same kind of funding to Australians. And when we started, a lot of people asked me what's the difference between us and say Kickstarter. When we started, we always had a very strong creative community. So Kickstarter is known for like games and tech. We've always been kind of like political causes, musicians, film, designers. So we have a little bit of a difference in the communities that we run. Our community is now about half a million. Most of those in Australia, but we do have quite a big Singaporean community as well. And most interestingly, it's really this number, which is our success rate. So two out of three projects that start on POSSIBLE hit their targets and are successful. That may still sound a bit scary because that means a third of them fail, but if you think that Kickstarter's success rate is about 25%, Indiegogo's is about 9%, 60% is really good. And I'll tell you a bit more later about why I think our success rate is so high. We've had this is now more than 11,000 projects and about $45 million raised. So we are kind of on a smaller scale. And our projects come from all around the world. So anybody with a PayPal account can start a project on POSSIBLE and anybody around the world can support it. There are chairs here, guys, if you want to take a seat. No? Up to you. I'll leave it to you. Does anybody here not know what crowdfunding is? No? Go through it really quickly just in case someone's afraid to raise their hand. So three main things that set crowdfunding apart from other kinds of funding. First of all, you have to have a target, which is basically an amount that you want to raise for your project. It sounds simple, but often a lot of people get stuck on the target because maybe I need to raise $10,000 for my film, but if I can raise $100,000, why not, right? So how do I set a target amount? We usually say it's clever to set a target. If you're running a four-week campaign, your target should be something that you could raise 30% of that target in the first week because that's the point at which we say this project is going to be successful. So if you set a target of $10,000, can you raise $3,000 in the first week from your network or from the work that you're going to be doing to promote the campaign? If you think, yeah, that's going to be easy, then you can moderate the target up and you think it's a bit challenging to moderate it down. But make sure that your target is always the minimum amount that you need to make your project happen because when you hit your target, you've got to give people the things that you promised them, right? Second, there's a time frame. The maximum time frame you can run on possible is 60 days and a lot of people are like, yeah, I'm just going to go for 60 days because the more time, the better, right? The thing to note is that there's no correlation between how long your campaign runs and how much you raise. Case in point, this project, it's a hairdressing magazine. It's pretty big in Australia. They were, as so many print magazines are, going out of business because printing a magazine is really expensive. So they came to us and said, look, we need to raise $200,000 or we can't print our next issue. And we said, great, let's do it. And then they said, we actually need the money in two weeks. They ran this campaign in four days. So, you know, you don't have to run a 60-day campaign to raise lots of money. We also have 60-day campaigns that the whole campaign don't even raise a cent. So the time frame is really thinking about how long do I want to be working on this thing? Because crowdfunding is a lot of work. It's basically like a job that you have while the campaign's running. And we've actually found that creators that have run campaigns with us before, each time they run another campaign, it gets shorter. Because they're like, I just want to get this out of the way. Another thing to note, if you're in the startup business, you're probably familiar with the term the trough of sorrow. And that is down here in a campaign. So when you first launch a campaign, you're pushing it out. You're getting a lot of kind of press, a lot of attention, all your friends are taking a look. You're getting a lot of pledges and a lot of visits to your page. And then time will go on. And that's always, after a couple of days, a drop-off. We see this in almost every single campaign that runs on possible, successful or not. The drop-off is the trough of sorrow. And this is when you feel like everything that you're doing, nothing is happening, nothing's converting. And you also start to think, why did I think this is a good idea? This is a terrible idea. This is really embarrassing. Where are all the people that said they love my music and would buy my CD? Where are they? It gets really quiet. And then at the end, because you've got that target, that's when you start to see people coming back to the project. And vast majority of our projects hit their target the last couple of days. And I like to show people this because a lot of the projects on possible that aren't successful, there's kind of two categories that they fall into. One is they thought that they could just put it up, do nothing, and money would fall from the sky. Two is they worked really hard, and then when they got here, they just gave up. So you really have to keep pushing it until the end. I've had projects that I've advised on that have raised 100,000 a day in their last three days. And again, that's because there was a target. So just push through. The other thing to note is, because I was talking about timeframe, if you run a longer campaign, all you're really doing is stretching the trough of sorrow. Because people like to be last minute, right? So they will just all come in pleasure again, no matter how long your campaign is. The only reason to really run a longer campaign is if you've got stuff planned in this time. Like maybe there's an event, if you're doing a comic book, for instance, maybe there's a convention that you need your project to be over this time. Or maybe you've already lined up some kind of book tour or something that's going to promote the project. Or you have a magazine that said, okay, I'll write about you, but I can only put you in our August issue. So that's the reason to have a longer campaign stretch over that period. But if you don't have a plan, then you usually find four weeks is more than enough for most campaigns. It's important to note that possible, we're all or nothing. So there's a couple of different card funding models up there. They basically fall into all or nothing or flexible funding, which means if you need to raise $20,000 and you only raise $50, you will still get the $50. A lot of people have asked us to be more flexible on this because people kind of get some of the money. But to us, we're like, you know your project better than anybody. You say you need $10,000, then you need $10,000. If you only raise $50, maybe from your mom, then chances are you're not going to be able to do whatever you said you would do, and your mom will be $50 poor because she's never going to get that money back. Also because crowdfunding is very new, people are kind of hesitant about, you know, am I going to get cheated? Especially like, if you've ever run a campaign and you try to get your grandmother to pledge the campaign, which I have done, I've got a lot of anxious phone calls to make sure that this was really like, that her money was not going to get cheated. So it's kind of an ethical thing to make sure that people trust us. What happens when you pledge to a campaign, if the campaign's not reached its target, we don't take any money. All we get is permission from the credit card company that when your project reaches its target, then we will take the money. So if you run a campaign, at the end of it you still haven't reached your target, no money changes hands at all. So you really have to hit your target in order to get that money. Right. I was hoping to have Rick from Paper Landing who's actually... Ah, there you are, great. Do you want to come to the front? I will put you here. I'll stick you here in front of the screen. Yeah, there are some seats here. People at the back, if you want to come sit down, there's like five seats. Let's come for served. So Rick is running a campaign right now? Yes, it's ongoing. Do you want to tell them a little bit about it? I'm in the Trough of Sorrow. You're in the Trough of Sorrow, right? You want to tell us a bit about, I guess, why you wanted to proud fund and how you put it together? Sure, sure, absolutely. So, hello, I'm Rick from Paper Lantern Distilling. We are a distillery producing a gin. We are launching in Singapore. I've been here in Singapore for four years. Two of my three children have been born here at Thompson Medical, so I know I don't look Singaporean, but I feel Singaporean. We wanted to make a gin that was a little bit different, so it's based on rice instead of grain. All the botanicals, except for the juniper, but we're correcting that with the next batch, are all sourced from Asia. Szechuan is the hero flavor, because most people have heard of it. Everybody knows Szechuan pepper. We use a pepper called the makowen from Thailand that has a lemony kind of citrus thing. We use ginger and galangal and lemongrass. It's actually quite a different take on gin, but it worked out really nicely, and we're distilling that up in Chiang Mai, Thailand. So, a gin that is made from rice and Szechuan pepper is not something that a lot of people would just pick up off the shelf. So, one of the things that we wanted to do, well, actually, the reason why we crowdfunded was two-fold. Number one, it's a great awareness vehicle for people. When people see it, they send it around to their friends. It's got a limited timeline on it, so it inspires people to, as opposed to a new product in the stores, oh, okay, you can buy it anytime. It's always going to be there, but this is kind of a limited timeline thing, and that gets people excited. The second piece of it is when you're making a product as opposed to a service, every fee that you pay is upfront. So, when you get your bottles, you have to buy your bottles in advance. When you pay your designers for the label, you've got to pay them in advance. You have to pay your distiller. You have to pay for your ingredients. You have to pay for space on the still. You have to pay for your cork. You have to pay for the little plastic thing that goes over it. Everything is upfront, and everybody wants their money upfront. So, by pre-selling bottles here or by crowdfunding for the reward to be a bottle, because they're not purchasing the bottles through the site. They're donating money to the campaign, and then the reward is a bottle. We're effectively moving our cash flow further up than it would be if it hit the retail stores. So, for us, that was a very important vehicle as well. Granted, we're producing more than is available on here, but we're offering a special price on here as well for people. One of the things that I have found most cool about the crowdfunding experience is, sure, you get your friends and family, and they're the first people that are going to donate and give money, and I missed the first couple of minutes, so I don't know if you said it, but it's critical. It's really important to whatever your target is going to be to secure, I would say at least 10% of your target that you know you're going to hit within the first couple of days. So, you get your friends to promise that they're going to donate. You generate that support and that structure because, you know, alright, so this is a very Singapore thing. It doesn't happen anywhere else in the world that I know of, but I have seen people rushing to get into a line, a queue, and they didn't know what the queue was for, but other people were queuing, so they wanted to get in because they didn't want to miss it. It's very kiasu, you know? So, and then they'll ask other people what's the queue for, right? But they don't want to miss their spot. Crowdfunding is the same way. If you see a campaign and it's on its 15th day and it's raised $20, you think, oh, well, I'm not even going to click on it. It's clearly not quality for me. It's clearly not interesting. But if you look at a campaign and just a couple hours have gone by and it's already at 10%, you think, oh, I've got to get involved in this. What's going on? You'll at least click on it and then watch the video and read the story and learn a little bit more about it, which is critical and important as well because you should spend a lot of time on making this right. The crowdfunding experience also provides you with, after your friends and family, that group of early supporters. And these are people that you've now established a community with. In a lot of industries now, it's the big businesses that always win and crowdfunding is a way to kind of take us small guys who don't have a lot of money and push us forward and get us out there and get a group of people that not only care about what you're doing, but they care about who you are. They care about why you're doing it and they want to be part of the story as well. And with crowdfunding, it allows people to be part of the story. It allows them to be your early group of founders and supporters. That then you can continue to engage with and have conversations with going forward, which if anybody's in marketing, that's kind of the hallmark of what you're trying to do in marketing. You're trying to get that one-on-one relationship with your customers or with your supporters. Crowdfunding does that. It does that for you right from the start. And then you can take this group of people and move forward as you go along. All right, I'll talk a little bit about setting it up. Can I keep going? I'll keep going and then I can... Okay, bring me back in. Sure, go ahead. Yeah, absolutely. All right. So, yeah, that was really good. Okay. It's always good to hear straight from a creator. I've run a campaign before and honestly it was the most terrifying thing I've ever done. I made the mistake of doing it after I joined Possible, which means that if I'd failed, they'd also have to fire me, which made it even more scary. But, yeah, it's one of those things where you're always glad that you did it after you do it, but then when you're in it, you're like, why did I do this? When you're going to push that launch button, you go away from the page a couple of times before you actually do it. Should I really be doing this? So, yeah, I guess... And the last thing that makes crowdfunding different from just donating money to someone, because a lot of times some people write about crowdfunding, they talk about partying, they talk about donations, is that you're giving people something in return for their pledge, so it's not just like you begging people for money. Preferably, you should be giving them something that they actually want. You're bringing them in, like Rick said, bringing them in on something that's exciting and that they want to be part of with you. So, there's three main kinds of rewards. The first one is recognition, which is basically recognizing someone by saying thank you for something that they've done. The most common recognition is like, we'll give you a Facebook shout-out, right? Maybe $5 will say thank you on Facebook, or we'll follow you on Twitter, we'll send you a little postcard that says thank you. We've had venues that have crowdfunding with us, so like cafes. Our most successful project ever in Australia, and I love this, was a pub, because have you been to Australia? They really love beer. And they said that if you pledged $5,000, they'd put your name on one of the chairs in the pub, which would just be forever. So, that's a good example of recognition. My favorite recognition reward ever, and I say it at every workshop, was a video game. And if you pledged $1,000, they would build a statue of you in the game for people to, I shoot at, I guess, because that's what they do in games. But I just love that so much, because who wouldn't want to be in a game? I almost bought it, but no. Okay, so that's recognition. And just one last note on recognition, sometimes when I talk to people about crowdfunding, and I tell them about recognition rewards, like, really, someone's going to pay me to send them a thank you card, but you really shouldn't underestimate how much recognition matters to people. Because who doesn't like getting mail, or who doesn't like getting a phone call that says, look, I couldn't have done this without you. Thank you so much. People love to be thanked. So, whether or not you've given someone a recognition reward, when your campaign's over, make sure that you thank them, because these are your community, these are your early adopters. You want to treat them really, really well. Sorry, and people at the back. I'll move out of the way. The second one is tangible rewards, which means you're giving someone something that they can hold in their hand. So, if you have a product, like RIP, that's easy, because you just give them your product, right? And often, our product campaigns, whether it's a book, or a gym, or a movie, you're often pre-selling something. So, rather than, I'm just going to borrow some money from the bank or from my really wealthy relatives, if you're lucky, and then I now have to pay them back, even if my idea fails, you say, okay, let's try this. These people keep saying that they would love to buy my book, if I ever write it. So, I'm actually going to put it up there, and they can buy it. And now I'll see how many of those people were actually telling the truth. And if you raise the money, then great, you can make it work. If you don't raise the money, at least you don't own the bank a pile of money plus interest. So, it's a great way to test stuff out. So, tangible rewards, I think one of my favorite rewards that I didn't manage to get was from the substation. So, this is interesting, because they were actually raising funds to renovate the substation gallery, right? So, it's not really a product. They can't give people the gallery. They can give people space in the gallery, but that's a very specific reward. So, they had to kind of think up all these things that regular people would like to get. So, the standard is like t-shirts, tote bags. But then they also had this reward of which they only gave out five. And it was, you know, that big, beautiful tree that grows outside the substation, the Bunion Tree. They actually took cuttings from that tree. So, you could own, you could grow it in your house, depending on how good you are with plants. I'm very bad. You could have part of the substation growing in your house. And I thought that was so special, because that's a reward you can't get anywhere else. Companies, things like Gin, they will often say will give you the first batch. And it's a special numbered bottle. So, you may not even want to drink it, or you'll save it for a special occasion. But it's that reward that you can't get anywhere else. Those are really good rewards to have. Cynthia, she raised funds last year to do a film called Singapore Minstrel. It was shown at the Singapore International Film Festival this year, and I think it's just gotten into another festival. She made t-shirts. The t-shirts cost her like $2 to buy from our friend. And then she just tie-died them with her friend and then broke the thing on. So, again, the reward did not cost her a lot of money, but it was something special that people could get. You really don't want to be spending a lot of money on rewards because you've got to put all that into your target amount. And we have had projects that like, yeah, we raised $20,000, but we're going to spend $10,000 printing the t-shirts and $5,000 mailing them out to people. So make sure you factor all these costs in. The last kind is experience rewards. So you're still giving someone something, but it's an experience that they can't get anywhere else. So the online citizen ran a campaign with us. Was it last year, general election? 2015? They ran two sets of campaigns, raised $60,000 in total to try to fund their coverage of the general election. And they gave out workshops. One of their rewards is a workshop. So they'll actually teach you how to report on the election for all the people that want to go to the rallies and contribute to the online citizen and get their name and print kind of thing. And that was really clever because not only is it like an experience reward that people want, but they are basically getting free labor and they're being paid for it. So it's like, I will pay them to write for their website. So it was really, really clever. So they had all these kind of citizen journalists that they trained to the coverage of the election. We've had wildlife sanctuaries in Australia that funded with us and their rewards were like a candlelit dinner for two in the wildlife sanctuary. So it's really special, something you don't get access to every day. Again, when you think about your rewards, think about all the different people who are the target audience you're trying to reach and what they want. Not everybody is going to want a tie-dye t-shirt. Not everybody is going to want a thank you on Facebook. So make sure that you've got something that those different people that are going to pledge into your campaign. We generally find that five to eight rewards is a good number. The most popular reward tier is $50, followed by $25, followed by $100. So make sure you've got those three numbers. And then you can kind of mediate up or down depending on what you want to do. Is that the same in Singaporean? Yes. What did you find like, was there anything special that you learned about the whole reward No, I mean, we, so when you set up your campaign and possible they're actually really great about giving you feedback and you can ask them questions. You can set up calls with them and they're extremely helpful because they want to see you succeed as well. And so they suggested for us that we had some lower tier rewards because our lowest tier is $100, which is a bottle. And then we have two bottles and it costs slightly less, I mean very slightly less, but slightly less if you go up in numbers. We have one, two, six and 12. 12 is just the big one that you put up there. Nobody's going to buy 12 bottles at the same time. But we found that most of the stuff was the one and two bottles. We did sell a couple of six bottles. Like my dad bought six bottles. Which is nice. Thanks dad. I can't deliver them to you because we live in Boston No, I found that most people who are familiar with what you're doing in spirits and things like that will go with the two bottles. But people who just like what you're doing and want to support you go with the one bottle. So, I don't know if that is helpful. Well no, it's exactly that. It's knowing your target audience and what they're willing to spend. So we've had campaigns, for instance, we had this campaign in Australia which was so weird that some people in it in a place called Collinsville in Victoria, I think it's about three hours out of Victoria and they're a mining town. If you know anything about Australia, you know that the mining industry has slowed down. A lot of mines are closing down and this town kind of lost its mind and then they were like well what are we going to do? And of course they were like well we'll become a tourist capital. And we're going to do this by building a giant statue of pony in the middle of the town because that's what tourists want to see. And they came to us and we were like okay, we'll never tell someone it's not going to work because people always prove us wrong and they proved us wrong. They wanted to raise $150,000. They raised $200,000 to build the statue of pony in their city. And they did that by having small rewards that were like $25 to $100 and a lot of people pledged for those rewards. So when they'd gotten to about $50,000 from those $25 to $100 rewards they started to go to businesses in the town saying look, the town really cares about this. People really want to see this happen. Will you come in as a sponsor? And they have rewards that were like $10,000, $20,000, $50,000 that were obviously meant for businesses. But they didn't just sit there and wait for the businesses to come to them. They actually did the legwork to talk to these businesses and said when we've got 200 supporters will you step in and pledge $50,000. So they had kind of a whole plan for it. So it was knowing the different groups that would be interested in a project like this. All right, so I'm now kind of going to go through the different qualities of this good campaign. The first one is to have a personal story behind it. This is usually very easy if you're a musician or if you're doing a project that is a cause. But sometimes the people that struggle with this are maybe like tech companies or big businesses that want to use crowdfunding but they don't know how to get away from their brand. And what we've found is that the more you push a logo at people or hide behind your brand it doesn't work in crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is about being vulnerable, being honest with people and connecting with them in a really personal way. And I think you guys did a really good job of that in your video. Thank you. Can you tell me a bit about that? Sure. I wrote like five or six different scripts for the video. Each script getting shorter and shorter and shorter because when you you sit there and then you time yourself reading it aloud and you know when it's past like six minutes and so you don't have to say a lot but I don't know it's for me it gets down to why are you doing it and you're typically doing it because it's something that you're passionate about it's something that you love and the best way is if it's a couple of different things that you love coming together so I like alcohol I like the production of alcohol but I really like ingredients a lot and we hadn't even really thought of doing anything like this until we got here to Southeast Asia and just saw all of the fruits and all of the spices and all of the different cuisines and you know America likes to talk about itself as a great melting pot of cultures but it's really just cultures spread out all over the place here we don't have room to spread out all over the place so we've got all of these cultures kind of mixed together right here in this tiny little island and you know it's just a lot of great opportunity for flavor expressions that came out and so you know for us it was kind of talking about that talking a little bit about who you are but more I think for me the personal story element is expressing your love you know why are you doing what you're doing what makes you excited about it if you've ever watched motivational speakers you know if you've ever been up in the middle of the night and you're watching those weird infomercials on TV selling you know like a mop you know the ones that you go maybe I should buy that mop the people are passionate about it like this guy loves this mop he loves it and that kind of you can feel that that passion coming out all the campaign videos we watched the ones that we really love where the people they weren't trying to sell you anything they were just trying to tell you about what they were doing and why they loved what they were doing yeah definitely cool so this is a project I don't know if you can read it it's really small and it was called rude packets I'm not sure if anybody heard of it they only wanted to raise $2,000 or something like that so a really really small project but what they are is they're they're red packets that have like funny messages printed on them and they're to give to people at weddings so like this one says advanced baby bonus and I think there was another one that said like this is 0.01% of your car's COE or something like that so they were very very Singaporean and the reason that they did it was she actually wrote this whole thing going to a wedding and freaking out because you don't have an ang pao and you need to give money and you go and dig and you find one and it's like super Chinese New Year kind of ang pao and then you have no way to write on it to say like this is my ang pao you know you put your name and usually there's some weird material that you can't write and the pen keeps coming off and then finally when you do it your friend doesn't even remember anyway or doesn't read the note because there's a place for you to write and that was funny enough that it would catch people's attention and it would be more the personal message so those of you who are used to going to Western weddings and then Singapore Asian weddings the Westerners always feel a bit weird about giving money because it feels so impersonal so this was kind of like a nice mix of the two things but you have this whole fake story about it like how she went to a friend's wedding and this huge disaster happened and they almost stopped being friends all because of an ang pao whether or not it's true or I don't know and by the end of it you're like yeah I like this person I like this story I'm gonna give them $15 or whatever it is to get the ang pao so really think about your story and what's special about your story and don't be afraid to be really personal with it okay next one graphics and visuals I think Rick's project if you take a look he does a really great job of this and if you're doing a project that has a product you have to make sure that your product looks beautiful and good photography or just find a friend who can take photos or for God's sake just learn how to take photos don't backlight it and all that kind of stuff like this is really important because this image the hero image the main image this is what will make someone click on your project and this main image is also what we use across possible so every time we do social media we use this image newsletter we use this image and often if there's a project even if it's a really great project but the image is terrible we won't use it because we know that so you lose that kind of chance this applies also when you're trying to get the press to write about you you have to have nice high resolution images that they can immediately print a newspaper on a magazine so think carefully about the images that you use on your project these are some images that creators used to promote the project so they would share these or they would put these on their page whenever they hit a certain goal so there was a whole branding that went into their project and every time they showed up on a Facebook wall their supporters could recognize this is an update about this project but that's kind of the extra mile most of our projects don't do this alright Rick talked a bit about his video you don't have to have a video but we find that projects with a video raise about 5 to 6 times more than those without now that could just be because people that have already spent time with the video would also then spend a lot more time on their project than people that don't but I think it's also alright so if you've got like a super long project text and there's no images it's not going to do as well as one that has a video and really nice images in it don't make your video longer than 2 minutes how long was your video it's like 220 or something 220 yeah yeah so we found that the average time a person spends on a crowdfunding page is about about 2 and a half minutes so that includes the time it takes to look at all the rewards choose one put in that credit card information all of that so if you've made like a 10 minute long diatribe about how much you hate the PAP they're only watching the first 30 seconds and then they decide based on that am I going to pledge to you or not so you can have a longer video but put the most important information in the beginning another thing that you can do is if you want to have a longer video you can have several versions of your video so you can have one to two minutes that goes on the top and then you can have longer versions in the body of the project you should also do a social media campaign so like if you notice on Facebook there are videos the videos auto play and a lot of videos usually have text now because the sound doesn't auto play so something like that that's really quick almost like 5 to 10 to 15 seconds long and it has text on it that can be quite effective I'm going to try to play some videos but the first thing I'll say I guess is that there's actually no correct way to make a crowdfunding video a lot of people freak out about the crowdfunding video because they think oh no I'm going to spend all this money on it or I don't know how to take a video I don't know how to edit it but there really is not one way to make it again you go back to having a personal story and making sure that comes through in your video and thinking about your target audience because crowdfunding is basically like running a marketing campaign so who's your target audience what is going to make them put their money down so these are kind of a couple what's kind of and I think Rick's is probably similar is like the typical crowdfunding video there's you can see the creative space it's like an appeal to cameras beautifully shot this one was specifically about saving the National Forest of Victoria so they're trying to make the National Forest bigger so that it can be preserved for future generations it's like a really huge amazing project I think David Adamberg on board like really kind of inspiring stuff and their video was all like beautiful footage and then this project which I'd love to compare it to was literally about maggots and flesh eating bacteria so you compare these two these people could have easily said there's no way to sell maggots to people nobody's going to want this but they didn't they totally went with it so the first video they made was very similar to this one it was it's a research project and it's about them studying how maggots can be used to treat flesh eating bacteria so the video was the two scientists in short explaining why maggots and flesh eating bacteria are important to everybody they found after running the campaign for about two weeks nobody was watching this video it could have been because the science talk was too sciencey it could have been because it was maggots it could have been on any number of reasons but people weren't watching it right so they decided rather than just give up and say like oh nobody likes that project they changed the video the new video was they took maggots they dipped them in paint they put them on a canvas and then they sped the video up so the maggots were painting and then of course they gave that canvas a way as a reward and one of our co-founders has one hanging in his bathroom he calls it his maggot painting he loves it and a lot of people watch this a lot of people shared it on Facebook because it was so weird the first time it plays you're like what is that and then you keep watching and then you're like wow this is so weird and clever or freaky whatever you either show it to someone or at the very least you'll pledge some money I guess two lessons there one again there's no correct way to make a video and two track try to really track every aspect to your campaign see whether people are watching a video I think YouTube and Vimeo both have statistics around this that are free you can also I think see how far in people are watching your videos you can get a sense of that's disappointing yeah did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you did you Make sure that when you have a link that your link is either all the way through the video Yeah, actually that's the best thing just make sure it's all the way not just at the end because if your video gets shared Other places people don't the link doesn't often come with it So you want to make sure there's always a very clear call to action for people to find your name I'm gonna see if I can play some videos. I'm gonna play yours and then I'm gonna play. Oh dear lord. Yes one other thing with the video is Believe it or not Not just a video, but So do you guys notice a button on the page right here? We get messages unposable from a lot of people saying so how do we how do we order a bottle? And you have to you know very patiently explain well, there's a pledge now button, you know It's like the when you're at the Store and you say well, where do I pay and they're like you see that giant sign that says check out right under there Yeah, I think it's also probably the language that you use someone that's not accustomed to a crowdfunding site May not know what pledging is They may think pledging is like I swear to tell the truth and love you forever or something So don't like don't use the word donate use the word pledge and use it in the video as well Okay, let's see how far this place because we had some issues earlier We've been making alcohol and home forever So we decided On a beautiful cover First customers Everything We've spent two years on building the idea, getting the right team in place, and figuring out the recipe, which is taking almost 100 different assemblages to perfect. Right now, we have 1,000 meters of gym waiting to be brought and shipped to Singapore. We'll begin early support of this new venture and help us craft a new chapter in Asian Gym. It's going to be a lot of fun. Help celebrate with us. Thank you very much. Cheers. Okay, I'm not going to say anything. I'm just going to go straight to the next one, and then we're going to talk about them. I've been trying to make a puzzle. Besides, I'm raising half more to count. How much? I love it. Crazy amazing. But the whole thing, that's a $30,000 budget. If you're a people, I'm going to buy the other. Many ways, some people will. It might be cool if you can pre-order it. So, it was from you guys for the manufacturing costs on the album. That's what made it different. I raised money. The last one was a kind of little puzzle. It's going to come in a little different city size. And it will come out of the page. It tells you all the things you get to share. Share time. Never. I'm going to try and continue into Breela and the album. And a lot of the dancing and dancing and everything. It's an encouragement. It's probably the end of the year. It's my Breela and the album. We'll be getting bones and bones. And if none of this can be true, I want my girl to sit still. And I don't think she's going to die. But I don't think she's going to die. I want my girl to sit still. A lot of the photos you've taken of Breela and the album. I love that one. She's not really a sister. She's not really a sister. She obviously doesn't use any of her sister's fame to get ahead. of you are on thing and she did like two of the biggest no-nos. One is using a web cam to shoot a video and two is using jump cuts which is just like you just cut from thing to thing and it's really disorienting but because her personality is so great and she obviously thought about this video really carefully it just works and you can tell immediately whether you like this person and you're almost pledging just because you like the person as opposed to even hearing her music she didn't play any of her music in that video and it's crowdfunding project so really interesting so two very different videos the thing that I will note is that you can probably tell at some point in the video when your attention is starting to kind of go away to somewhere else right so think about what it was that made you switch off is it like she was talking about something you didn't really understand was it the sound was bad a lot of people forget about how important sound is in videos so your picture could be great but if people can't hear what you're saying then there's no point right or it could you just spin that it was too long it's always worth showing your video to people to getting to get that feedback did you do that yeah we showed the video to a bunch of different people and we watched it ourselves a painfully large number of times yeah and you need to be showing it to your friends who are honest you know like not the ones that you always hear about an American idol they're like oh my friends say I think so well and you need to find the people that would just tell you the truth because you want to make sure that your video will appeal to people that don't know you right okay so that's video right so the next thing I'm going to talk about which Rick touched on a little bit was promotional strategy so I think a lot of times people spend so much time on the photographs the video the description the rewards and then they launch it and they're like yay and then they're like oh shit not actually got to promote this thing right you want to make sure that your promotional strategy is in place way before you even launch that you know what you're going to be doing day by day and the reason to that is because once you launch it's really it goes very fast and you don't want to be playing catch up to it like Rick said you want to be doing really well in those first couple of days because that will determine how well you continue to do through the project and it doesn't have to be something really complicated you don't have to be a marketing guru or anything one thing that I tell people is just draw up a list of everybody who would be interested in pledging to your to your project and this is whether they know you or not it could be general like soccer moms or aunties in the hopper center whatever just have a list of all the people that you're going to try to reach out to and then order that list according to the people who are most likely to give to your campaign and those people should be the ones that you contact first so they'll often be your friends and family or people that have kind of if you're like a musician or filmmaker those people that have kind of gone to every single gig or screening that you've ever had so you know that these people really really love your work treat these people really well you can contact them even before the campaign launches and let them know it's coming you can write them a personal email which is what I did for my campaign on the day that launches and say look it's really important that I raise this money as quickly as possible so that other people will pledge to my project it would mean a lot to me if you think you're gonna pledge pledge today like on this day and those people will go into your campaign and they will pledge money you'll get a couple hundred couple thousand dollars then you go to the next group of people the next group of people are people that are in your networks they know you but you're not completely sure that they will pledge then you reach out to them they'll go into your campaign and say oh look all these other people have already pledged something good must be happening and then they're more likely to pledge and then you go to the next group and the next group and so you're trying to create the snowball effect often we've had campaigns that kind of go by the traditional PR marketing strategy which is everything goes out on launch day so like press releases social media everything goes out and what happens is you've got lots of traffic but everybody's going there and seeing that nobody's pledged yet so the people that don't know you are like this is a crappy project I'm just not going to waste my time putting my credit card because then I'm just gonna go and this is what happened to the pub project that I mentioned earlier they actually got on the front page of one of our biggest newspapers on day one and there was tons of traffic no pledges because they went zero right so you have to kind of stagger it in that way I wanted to ask you you've got a lot of press attention how did that happen you actively pushing it out yes okay so what did you do so we we anticipated that effect and we were concerned about it one of the things we didn't do but only because we thought about it too late we we actually read a lot about crowdfunding and looked at a bunch of other successful campaigns if you know you've got friends and family that will be your first like 50 supporters or something you can have limited rewards so you have a reward that there are only 50 of them available so you know if those people pledge first they get a greater reward than the next tier would be so then people oh I missed that one but oh let me let me get the next reward so that's one thing but so we did just a little press at the beginning just to get a little attention and then we did Facebook and we sponsored a Facebook post and that went around a lot that actually that was pretty good for us in terms of people sharing it and sending it around and then since then a lot of the press has actually been contacting us and asking us about things just because it's um it's alcohol and I don't think there's a ton of especially Southeast Asian most people picture the bottle with the dead scorpion in it you know we've all seen that right so I think there's there's a hook angle for her stories with that but especially if you guys are doing something that's kind of fun and interesting and something new remember the guys who are writing the articles and having the websites like it worked to find the content to fill that stuff so a lot of people are really open to hearing about your story one thing that is key and critical for any sort of press is write it up beforehand yourself because you'll get contacted and they'll say so we need you to answer these 10 questions by tomorrow because we got to go to press right away it's all a deadline business everybody's running up against deadlines and then if you look at the questions and you've honestly never thought you know why you know why did you choose rice as your base botanical like what does that do that's different in the gym so we spent a lot of time with we just came up with as many ridiculous questions as we could think of and you know I spent an entire weekend just with my laptop typing up answers to all of the questions you know what's what's your message what's your why why are you doing this why do you love this why Singapore why Szechuan why gin are you worried the market is saturated why Asia why are you here who are you what are you doing why are you making me drink this like you know all any ridiculous question you can think of and then answer it and then when you finish when you get those questions even if they're different you're like I got this boom you can just roll your answers right out because you know your message you know what you're trying to do and then in terms of you know if you want to write a business plan if you want to do all those other things and and expand beyond it or if you want to write little sales copy or advertising copy it's just it's easy it just happens because now you understand your own message so that that was that was deep for us yeah I think an important thing that I picked up from that as well is think of all the different angles that your story has so for instance I worked because I I handle PR possible and I'll just go through the site and choose interesting projects that aren't doing really well and I'll try to get them some press attention and one of them was a sushi vegetarian sushi cafe setting up in Sydney so obviously I usually think who covers vegetarian stuff so I look for any vegetarian food magazines food magazines in general kind of like healthy website all those kind of like new age mama all that kind of stuff those are people out of contact I didn't even think to contact the big papers because I think of those people first those are like the easy ones that are going to write about this and then I found out a bit more about the project oh it's a mother and son okay mother's day is coming so obviously this is very good story like a mother and son starting a business together so that was a different angle and I sent it out to different people I think there was like the kind of rise that they were using is grown in a certain part of Australia so it's like okay I'll contact all the rural magazines the ones that's right about farming and all that kind of stuff so think of the different angles don't just go with one thing that you send out to everybody because journalists want to feel special like you know them you know who they are there are a lot of good options for that here in Singapore too you know so I actually have a full-time job and so I'm doing this kind of at night but my wife quit her full-time job to focus exclusively on this so there are a lot of great women entrepreneurs networks here like Crypt Society Athena some other ones but there are also bloggers of every every single niche interest you could possibly have there's probably left-handed chess players like clubs here in Singapore and there are bloggers that write about all the left-handed chess players in Singapore it's just that probably doesn't exist but it may now but so you know also explore those niches like people people are interested people want to talk about stuff and people are also interested in other people talking about stuff there's so many opportunities for that here almost more than anywhere else yeah cool so I just like to show this little graphic because it just talks about the most efficient ways that you can use social media so you don't have to use social media a lot of our campaigns don't use social media at all that's completely fine but if you're going to this tells you what people share most often on social media and the number one thing is pictures so not even videos so this is not just what people are liking liked make you feel great but they don't actually do anything because it's just one person seeing it sharing is what you want so you want to create content that you know your mom's gonna like it great but she gonna share it other people gonna understand what it is if they don't know who you are so think about that why people share content also very interesting the number reason number one reason why they share is because it's a way to support causes or issues that they care about to think about what your project is tapping into you may think like I'm making gin there's no cause like alcoholics anonymous is not gonna love me but you know it's about someone quitting their job to start something that they love or it's about appreciating kind of the qualities of Asian ingredients so think about a bigger kind of theme that you're tying into and try to kind of run with that most shed emotions so then the number the two biggest things that is shed are things that make you feel inspired something that creates all and things that make you laugh right though the one that's not shared at all is sadness this is really important to remember when you're in the trough of sorrow and things seem like really bad you don't want to share a picture of yourself crying or something even though you feel really bad so try to put a spin on it try to make it funny and relatable always try to kind of go back to those two emotions right you want people to be inspired by what you're doing so that they want to be part of it or you want to make them lost so they like you so they won't be part of it this is the great farce national pop campaign the whole campaign was pretty much just instagram sized images that they shared on facebook really quick you didn't even have to read the text to really understand what was going on they had like a little thermometer graphic that counted down how many days they had left you can note that they had two days left and they don't erase two thirds of the money so they raised like 20,000 they should raise $40,000 in their last two days which is pretty huge cute animals yes and I think at one point when the campaign was running somebody interviewed about something completely different but he was in Australia and then somebody else asked him do you think it's important to preserve our national forest who's gonna say no it's not important so he said yes they put his face on the campaign and they tweeted at him and then he retweeted it so some of these things this one got shared over 600 times and when we looked at the reach of this campaign it was in the millions and you know this is all kind of free just from people sharing it right so pretty effective okay get that early momentum when you're planning your promotional strategy make sure that you're always aiming to get to that 30% in the first week or really kind of getting a lot of momentum in the first couple of days because then that gives you lots of time to work around you know other other possibilities another thing is we find that people that don't know you will not pledge to your campaign before you're at least 30% right so we always get people that campaigns not doing well they email us and say please can you share it on social media and we say we can share it but nothing's gonna happen because you're only at 2% of the topic right so you want to get to that 30% so that you can instantly stop converting new groups of people and keep everyone updated this means during the campaign celebrating with the people that have already pledged people kind of wrongly think that what I want is someone to pledge to my campaign and then I've been successful no what you want is them to pledge and then share it with other people tell other people about it get excited about it and you do that by updating everybody as you go like yay 10% is a picture of me doing something weird my favorite update ever because you can post updates through the website right we have a feature that you can send updates everybody has pledged to your project was from a project called the chaser they're kind of a comedy magazine your fundraising to get a print version out and I think a week before Father's Day again very clever because using a holiday period as a reason to share something they sent everybody who pledged to the campaign a certificate and they said here is your free gift as a reward for you being an early property support you can give this to your father printed out and put his name in so the certificate was like this is to certify that blank to put a dad's name has had sex at least once it was funny as soon as I received it I told my colleague about it so instantly people are going to share it you will then I also send it to my dad of course and then he pledged to the campaign so it was like a really great way to not just you know make some make someone who's supported you laugh but also to get them to share with other people so that's kind of the best kind of update you can have and this applies even when things are going wrong right after the project maybe your printer didn't come through maybe they said it's going to cost another $20,000 that you don't have all of these things don't go quiet on people we never get people emailing us and saying like oh they just told me it's going to be delayed by a week I'm so angry I want my money back that never happens what we get is people saying I've been trying to contact this person for six months I haven't heard anything I want my money back people get pissed off if you just try to cut them out right often will even have projects that completely fail like for whatever reason something went really wrong and they told us that they were surprised by how understanding their backers were so even though they told people like I'm really sorry this didn't happen we're going to try to get you your money back most people said look it's okay we understand because they were kept updated all the way they felt like they were this person's friend even though some of them didn't know them so they understood what had happened but if you like treat them like a jerk and you never speak to them and then tell me you're like oh well you're not going to get your thing anyway too bad then obviously they're going to be angry so keep people updated all the way through to the end so don't be a jerk don't be a jerk get rule of thumb okay so why crowdfund I love to show this particular project when I come to this side because this product was literally a drawer that's tied by a piece of leather that you carry around with you just thinking about how comfortable that would be to carry a drawer around and I like to imagine the creator going to a big department store like Metro or something and saying I have a great product that you should put in your store what is it it's a drawer that you carry around in a piece of leather not gonna happen right the reason this project did well was because of the story so the creator she had memories of being a little girl and going to visit her auntie and a grandmother and every time they went to visit they would bring a basket of stuff like homemade muffins all beautifully packaged or flowers from the garden or hops or whatever there was this like spirit of exchanging things in hospitality in the culture that she came from and she felt like people didn't do that anymore and she wanted to create a product that would inspire people to do that right so she created a drawer and it's kind of proof that crowdfunding is a great way to pre-sell something and to test something that you're not sure is gonna work and often the traditional needs of funding is you have to go to an investor and see whether they will give you the money for something you have to go to a bank see whether they will lend you the money and both of these things are gonna require that you meet their criteria even a government grant like okay is it like talking about the aging population check okay yes you get $10,000 they're talking about AIDS no too difficult I don't want to do this so often crowdfunding is about going around these traditional ways and finding the people that want to support this by telling them a really good story even if it's not marketable or trendy right and testing it that way all right so it's a great way to pre-sell a product that you're trying to make and as Rick said often when you're if you're in publishing or anything like that the costs are all up front when I ran my campaign I wasn't trying to raise a lot of money and I was doing it because my husband and I have a small band please do not Google us it's very embarrassing and every time we performed they said people would come up to us and say like you guys sound great where's your CD and say well we don't have one because it's expensive to record they said well tell me when you have one and I will buy it so after like a couple of years of this we thought fine we're gonna put this project up and then we emailed all of those people and said now you can buy it bitches only about 30% of them did but that 30% was enough to fund a whole recording so from day one we didn't spend anything we were in the black we actually money in the bank to spend on this and then we had extra money so we could pay you know a photographer and all these people that we kind of that we're gonna do it for free anyway so it's kind of really nice and that's much nicer than kind of having to owe somebody money from the start and stressed out about paying it back you also get full control and ownership over your work right so if it's a book and you're trying to go through a publisher the publisher will want to make changes you may not agree with those changes there's this great podcast that I listened to that talked about this writer who was writing about the revolution in Cuba and like it was really political really intense book amazing and then Hollywood bought it wanted to turn it to move in he was so excited and then after years and years and years of the script being written finally it came out and it was dirty dancing to Havana nights so obviously really different from the political intense book that he wrote now it was like a love story dancing so that's kind of a good example of something that he made being completely changed to somebody else because they thought that would be more marketable so you have a lot of control over your work this is also good to note for government we've now had people crowdfunding because they've already got a grant but the grant only allows them to use the money on certain things so like they can't use the money to pay themselves they can only use the money for the printer or something like that so they use crowdfunding to kind of chop up all the extra things that they need to pay for to make this happen great way to build audiences again you're testing something and if you're in the tech business or the startup business you want to know who are the people that are willing to pay for this it's really easy to say to someone that's a great idea when you're a Ted talk or a networking idea but if you have to put money down that's when you know that this person is really really seriously a fan of your work and that database of people is very very valuable we've had creators that come to us every year they run a campaign and every year they build that database that community and they're basically building and it has a lot of potential so we've had campaigns that raised $15,000 with us and then use that crowdfunding campaign to say to a government body or an investor look all these people wanted will you invest in me and it's a proof of concept like it's really hard to run a crowdfunding campaign you do it successfully that's something that's on your portfolio right wherever you go you've also had campaigns that failed miserably we had one that was trying to raise $2.1 million to build a school they raised $60,000 so really really really bad but because they got so much press attention media attention that there was actually invested the came in and gave them the money to build the school so you never really know what's going to happen what's going to come out of the crowdfunding campaign quickly runs for our guidelines it has to be a project meaning it has to have a clear beginning and end you can't just say I have a dog shelter please money it has to be I'm trying to meet an ex-friend check or there's this really cute dog that has no legs and I want to build him a prosthetic leg it has to be something that people know okay it's successful this is what you've done the end so there's no question that the money has gone to the right place don't use the word donations one because again you don't want to be begging for money and two because sometimes people will ask for a tax-deductible receipt if you use the word donation to just stay away from it unless you're a charity in which case you can offer those tax-deductible receipts you can't give raffles through the campaign you can't say pledge $5 for a chance to win a t-shirt you actually have to give them a t-shirt and that's just a legal thing we're not allowed to run raffles although we have had some creators that have done things like auctions as part of their campaign so they run a physical auction at a club or something while the campaign was running and then use that money to put it into the campaign that's completely fine as long as it happens outside of the campaign itself if your project is successful you have to take note of the fees so five percent goes to us so we can keep the company running 2.4 percent plus 30 cents is about the payment fees so just to be safe most of our creators will just put 8 percent on top of whatever the target is and factor that into fees and these are only charged if you're successful so you're not successful you don't have to do anything no money will change how do you end up on the front page you end up there naturally when the project first launches and when it ends because remember that you cut and our front page is calculated based on how many people are visiting your project and how many people are pledging to your project okay so it will happen normally as part of the campaign and the 30% line as I mentioned earlier that's when people that don't know you will start to pledge so that's really what you want to kind of work towards right I'm gonna talk really quickly about this is something that we just launched and this is because every time I run one of these workshops there's always a couple of people that come to me afterwards and say I want to create my own crowdfunding platform will you help me and I'm kind of like why would I help you yeah anyway so we always get these emails and eventually we realized that people want to create their own crowdfunding platforms because they want to do something very niche so for instance we have a partner that runs a platform that's just to help people fund solar panels so like for Kenny Pop for instance wants to put solar panels on their roof so they go to their community and say will you find me that's all they do so it's really specific and they want to keep that all in one place and we also have partners where it's a university and they're crowdfunding research for their for their students but they want to have like all the branding to be their university and for it to be on their university's website so we've launched something that allows you to create your own crowdfunding platform you can brand it however you want you can stick it on your website if you want to the only mention of us will be powered by possible at the bottom I think and all of the projects on your page show up on possible.com so you get access to our community because the hardest thing about building a platform is not the technology it's getting people to actually pledge to it the community that's behind it so if you come from an organization or you're thinking about starting something up it's really kind of built around a crowdfunding platform this is something to you and I'll send stuff to you guys in the workshop notes that you can take a look at the website. First of all, why possible? I talked earlier about our success rate and I really believe that we have this high success rate because every single project that comes through we see like a human looks at it and we send you an email and says hey do you want any help about anything we will help you they're awesome we really do this. Most people say no most people are fine to do it on their own sometimes we bug you a bit like if you see your projects not doing well we'll email you and say hey we really we're serious about helping real people the best one of the best parts about that is that we require you to upload a photo ID of yourself and the things that people upload in that photo ID are just the best we actually have a channel on Slack which is our chat app of all the things that people have uploaded on that so somebody this is a photo ID so it's meant to be your government like your driver's license or your IC yeah use my passport I didn't know we could be funny about it oh you're not supposed to be funny about it we will reject you so we had someone who literally had like selfie at the front and then you're supposed to put the back as well selfie at the back we were just laughing because they had to get someone else to take the photo of the back of their head like there's two people in the world that thought that meant the back of your head great we also had someone upload a picture of their cat we had someone upload a poem all of these got rejected that's pretty much the only reason we reject a project if the yeah this follows wrong but we will give you advice on pretty much any aspect of your project however you like we will call you on the phone we will just look at it by email if you're kind of shy I give a lot of advice to people in the press releases to try to get them kind of extra help even if I don't have time to send them out myself so really make use of it because we have worked with a lot of projects so we're kind of in the best position to make it successful thank you very much I'd like to thank from the OMG team for hosting this in this great space they run a lot of really cool courses so you should check them out if you'd like to build stuff with your hands yeah I think you'll probably send them more information in the email right yes the people that are recording thank you very much I'm now going to open to questions if you have questions for me or for Rick or for the lab yes yeah yeah that's fine reward based company we only do reward at the moment but we're looking at opening equity because my base in Australia you have to kind of look at what Australia is doing and Australia hasn't released equity they're doing it this year I do know that there are quite a few equity crowdfunding platforms in Singapore so you probably look at that if you were looking at that for those that don't know equity allows you to give a share in your business instead of a reward or in addition to a reward as well it's kind of appealing to bigger capital rounds yeah anybody else yeah yeah yeah that's a really good point um so when you pledge your project you have to have a credit card and you can't have a credit card unless you're okay you can use PayPal but PayPal is usually linked to a credit card or a bank account the vast majority of people use your credit card not a bank account so that's kind of the way that we verify but again because we have people looking at the site all the time and kind of approving the projects we're able to kind of monitor that and yeah I think that's a really good point yeah I'm well you know this is when it's your own business and your own licenses you have to take that pretty seriously so I'm actually hand delivering all of the the bottles from my campaign so you know if I show up and it's a six-year-old I'm gonna be like sorry buddy give them your money back but getting a six-year-old $100 with it weird too so I don't know I'll play it by ear yeah yeah good point anybody else yeah yeah we have a lot of short films in the site including yeah including one so Pam always banned which I think it's called ugly in the morning or ugly in the city of something ugly in the morning yes so they crowdfunded for a music video which was shown in a film we both have had 13 players 13 in this is a film by Jun Kai they did their short film with us Singapore Mestro actually started as a short film and then was expanded out to a full-length film it's important to know that we've also had short films that crowdfunded their short film and they came back in crowdfunded game to make it a full-length film so yeah film is one of our biggest categories yeah yeah um so you can always raise more than your target and something called the stretch goal if you're not familiar with it means once you hit for instance ten thousand dollars you say if we reach twenty thousand dollars this is what you're all gonna get and kind of expand it that way if you're hoping to raise a lot more than what your target is have a strategy for how you've been a kid stretch goals before you even launch because a lot of people are like yeah we have target now let's try to think of something and then it's not really done properly and you know it doesn't work usually stretch goals are you have to make it very clear to people what they're gonna get if you hit that stretch goal so for instance if it's a call-space project going back to like an animal shelter you can say great we've raised money to build this but if we raise this we'll also be able to build something extra so really kind of making it important all saying that like okay if we raise this everybody who's already pledged will get this extra thing that's also a really great way because you're trying to motivate the existing community go and continue to pledge to other people yeah anything else yes yeah so whenever you use your credit card on the internet in case you don't already know this all like if you use your credit card pretty much anywhere and you don't get the thing you can call your credit card company and say this is a scam I didn't get the thing and the credit card company will settle it for you we also settle disputes between creators and pledges so if a pleasure emails isn't that pay I never got this I got it and it was broken and the creators not responding because we have the creators ID we have their address we have their phone number we're able to kind of call them and we try to mediate between them we've never gotten to a point so far I mean touch would where we've had to like say okay now you need to see each other thankfully but I think it's happened in the states with bigger technology projects so as a creator please be aware that you need to deliver even if it's delayed you need to eventually be delivering it yeah you can set it yourself so every single reward you have to put at the bottom what your estimated delivery is and this can range from three weeks to a year so we recently had a film that crowdfunded with us in 2012 and their film was only shown last year that's three years but as long as you tell people what to predict and you keep them updated there isn't really like people are not going to not pledge because you know it's a long way away the only exception is if you're launching a campaign that's a product and it's coming out around Christmas make it really clear to people whether or not you're going to be able to deliver by Christmas because you get that a lot sometimes even though it says there you know June 2017 people will still be like hey why didn't I get it by Christmas so just make sure you make that clear to people. I can't think of ones that failed and then came to us I can think of ones that were successful other platforms and then came to us because they wanted to launch to a different market or they wanted to try again so it does happen but the tricky thing about that is usually that the first time you've run a campaign you've gotten all the press attention and all that kind of stuff the second time you launch it it's unless you have a different angle it's difficult to get people to cover you again. On possible we've had projects that failed the first time then came back and was successful the other time that's kind of more common. Yeah shipping is the the real nightmare and you guys on shipping outside of Singapore. Is that illegal stuff or? Well there's there's a bit illegal stuff so you know typically with alcohol everybody is scared of it so if you ship to another country you can't technically just send somebody alcohol because you're not licensed. We're licensed in Singapore to sell alcohol but I wouldn't want to ship to Australia because then there's a chance that if customs sees it and they take it and now the person doesn't get what they paid for so number one it's a customer obsession thing like you know if I promise I'm going to give you something I don't want to let you down but also in terms of the shipping and it's expensive shipping is very expensive I mean even here in Singapore they change their name but I love the name before Rocket Uncle that would deliver stuff for super cheap like using a service like that you can deliver all over the island but you know then you have to worry about breakage and you know all of that kind of stuff so there's there's a lot to consider when you're talking about shipping if it's if you're sending something by you know just in an envelope I don't know what product you're thinking of but depending on the size of it I would try and stay local and the other thing to think about too is the community angle you know your your reaches is more powerful if you can control it and you can access it and you can touch it if you think well there you know how many billion people in the world so if I get even like half a percent of that I'll be but that's a big market so knowing who your target customer is and the way you're going after them just like you said earlier is really critical too and I find you know if you're going to try and market somebody let's say from from Thailand or somebody from Australia it's going to be a totally different pitch the cultures different the people are different what they're interested in is different so I think right right there that limits some of your shipping options but I mean if you're trying to do a campaign from here and you're targeting you know middle-aged French people in in France then yeah you're gonna have to get involved with stuff so you can always set different shipping amounts that people can add into to make it easier some of our creators would just have two different rewards and I'd be like the Australia reward and the international reward and the cost of the different and shipping is already built in yeah you can choose you can either say ad postage because some projects there's a choice to pick it up so you don't have to add postage or if you want to make it easier everything's gonna be posted then you can just build it into the cost and just say no no added postage cost just as an extra point we've had projects that were like in Australia but manufactured in China and then they had backers in the States what they actually did was they asked the Chinese manufacturers to split up the orders and send some of them directly to the States and that was a lot cheaper than sending it to Australia and then sending it back to the States so that's something you can think about when you choose a manufacturer. Shipping is awful. Yeah it is. There's no fix for it. Like even Kickstarter and Inigo they don't have an answer to that and they're a lot bigger than us. It's really challenging. Yeah in Australia we're working with partners now who can automate the shipping for you and then we'll build it into the site so like as soon as it's gone it's like boom boom boom boom you get all the labels you send it but there's no option to do that internationally at the moment because it's so expensive. Yeah any other questions? Yeah. You can be an individual so you don't even have to do this. The only time you need to be registered is if you're trying to give tax stuff to overseas. Yeah. My name is Linda and I would like to ask if there are any questions that you would like to discuss about free-boarding like how does it work? How often do you get to do the point of free-boarding when you don't want to do it? Okay well people can always choose that they don't want a reward so sometimes someone just wants to pledge to a campaign they don't really care about the reward and then in terms of making sure that people have a reward they want just have a variety like have five to eight different amounts different kinds of things I don't have ten rewards that are all postcards and then if somebody doesn't want a postcard you've lost them. This is also quite important to theater companies who are funding productions and the production is like in Singapore but they have funders overseas and then those funders can't pledge because I can't come to Singapore so we will tell them can you release like a journal can you print a journal of the production can you give them a DVD of the production so that it applies to those people. The other thing that I would recommend doing and this applies to every aspect of your campaign is once you launch see what is popular what's working which reward is selling out or people are choosing a lot of then introduce variations to that reward and take out the ones that maybe aren't working. You can update you can edit any reward that nobody's pledged to so if you have like a $10,000 reward and nobody chooses it you can take it out put something else in you can't obviously kind of edit a reward that someone's chosen because then you could just take away a bottle of gin and put like a matchbox or something but yeah you can kind of add it as you go. Any other questions? Credit card fees and all that yeah so if you if you raised a thousand dollars our fee would be $50 and the credit card companies would take I don't know $30 $20 to $30 so it's just it's 8% just back to that. That's all. Yeah, yes. Well if it's a product like we've had some products that there's not even a prototype that's kind of difficult because then people are like it's gonna get built especially now that a lot of big tech projects have failed terribly people are more suspicious but it's also like you can't sell a product that's a film and not have any photos or any footage so it's kind of not so much which point you have to be at as what do you have that will convince people you can do this and that it's gonna be great yeah because we have people that find it all different they'll do it before they even started filming there are people that finish filming and then they find it's really up to you anything else okay I'm gonna stop it so that we can kind of disperse but remember if you're too shy or if you think of something later please just drop me an email or you can stay back to talk I don't mind thank you so much and thanks again to everybody who was part of it someone who does please bye it's really cool yeah right thanks guys have a nice evening