Greg Voisen
Welcome back to Inside Personal Growth. This is Greg Voisen and the host of Inside Personal Growth. And Mark, all my listeners know who I am not maybe very many of them know who you are. Mark Pecota is on the other end of the line in Medellin, Colombia, used to live here in San Diego. And we became good friends, which goes way back. We donated a website to a charity that I was working with called Terry. And I'm so appreciative of the work that he did, Mark. Good day, thanks for being on Inside Personal Growth.

Mark Pecota
I'm pumped to be back. Excited!

Greg Voisen
I'm excited to have you talk about the second edition, the updated new edition of crowdfunded. And I'm gonna tell everybody right off the bat. This is not a hard book to read. It's well laid out well designed. And I think this second edition is the one that you want to get if you're thinking about doing any kind of crowdfunding. So it's called the proven path to bring your product idea to life. And I'm going to let the listeners know a little about us. Mark is the CEO and co founder of launch launch boom, a global team of experts who help creators turn their products ideas into real businesses. His deep knowledge of crowdfunding, digital marketing, and scaling companies, has been critical to the success of not only his clients, but his company launch boom. He is author of crowd funded the number one best selling book on crowdfunding in crowd funded Mark breaks down the step by step system. He and his teams have used to launch 1000s of products in dozens of categories. And he leads a pretty remote life. As I said, he's in Columbia, and he's got 20 Plus experts around the country that are helping drive this company. And what it is they do? Well, Mark, again, it's always a pleasure having you on you're always super knowledgeable. You know, you and I have known each other for a long time. And I just want to give the listeners a background, bit about your background and how you came to start launch boom, all the way back to San Diego State. And you walk across the campus and go from there.

Mark Pecota
Going back to the beginning. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So it's, you have to go back to San Diego State. I was, well read the beginning. So everyone knows, I was I was definitely a little Well, I wouldn't say aimless, you know, I, my, my, my path was different, a lot different than what I thought it would be doing now. So I was actually doing electronic music, I was producing music DJing promoting parties. And I did that for about three years. And this is a funny story I was actually talking to right before this a student at San Diego State that was interviewing me for a class I was telling this exact story about like 30 minutes ago. And I was I was at an event. And I was looking up at the DJ. And this is my junior year, about to go into my senior year. And I could not actually envision myself leave, like leading that lifestyle. I'm like, Alright, I've been doing this now for three years. But in that moment, it was like very sobering of looking up at this guy and being like, that is not actually the path that I want to go down. And right after that event, I started to get way more involved in school, actually. And they have this great program is Indigo state or a great club actually called entrepreneur society, which sounds kind of intense. Sounds like a secret success society.

Greg Voisen
I actually, I actually consulted there a year before last I was at that. Yeah, yeah. Very cool. It's

Mark Pecota
a great, it's a great, it's really good. It's great. So I met a lot of great great people that are teachers, a lot of students that were just, you know, trying to do the same thing. I was like looking for a path of looking into the path of entrepreneurship and and what was actually possible there. And so, there was someone that introduced me to a company called E booze consulting, and he was consulting was a digital marketing agency. They had an amazing internship program. Again, I was a senior associate, I did that interview, I had no experience in digital marketing, except basically trying to learn as much as I could leading up to this interview, and I was also learning how to do like, web web design development. I suck, by the way, but I was doing that. And I got this internship. And besides like learning really all about digital marketing from like affiliate marketing conversion design to paid media on both like Google and Facebook, it was like very wide in terms of the knowledge but actually went fairly deep as well. And we got the opportunity to work on actual nonprofit clients like pro bono. This is how they made the internship program work so they would do pro bono to work, have the interns actually lead the accounts? And so that gave me a lot of not only like knowledge, but confidence, and in like digital marketing, account management, etc. And then I would say, so not only getting the knowledge was really good, but number two is I met two of my business partners in this internship. So

Greg Voisen
they were also interns. That's when you met Well,

Mark Pecota
no, not well, so we'll came on later. So I can I can talk about that in the story as well. So I met Tom and Mike. And we started along with we had a whole relationship partners, the beginning 22, were young, we, we started this company called label creative out of college. So that was what you were referencing in terms of being all bright eyed, leading, leaving San Diego State we started this agency. Out of this internship, I was still at State. And I mean, even they call it like a business at the beginning is maybe giving it too much credence because, you know, we're just young young guys that got our first client at state was this law firm called delt law. And we sold them a $5,000 package, you know, I went into Kinkos. And got this, you know, it's like frosted cover and everything and sold them some website design and video production package. And then we're in business. So that was the that was the beginning of

Greg Voisen
the launch. That's kind of Yeah, we met right around in there. Because, yeah, you were doing this work at the nonprofit that I was involved with, called Terry. And you guys were nice enough and kind enough to make a donation to do the website redesign. So you know, you wrote your first book crowdfunded in April of 2000. Since then, you've developed a 500 launch boom clients and raised 10s of millions of dollars. What is the difference between this new edition, okay, and what the readers would have gotten out of a book in 2000, because I noticed a lot of differences in the book. I think the simplicity of the Read is a big one. The graphs and charts you use the pictures, you use the kinds of things you did to explain it. But give us a little bit of a background of what the reader can expect. Yeah,

Mark Pecota
yeah, you're right on top of just like, like being a better writer. There are definitely it's laid out better, I think it's easier to understand. But we've learned a lot, you know, as you were talking about, we've we've worked with over 500 launches since since we, since I wrote the book, originally three years ago, which is kind of crazy to say, Time goes by so fast. And I mean, there's a lot of on top of having new information, there definitely is a lot of refinement in terms of like the core system, because I kind of want to take a step back here for a moment because you know, launch boom, what we do is that we we essentially have created a system like a marketing system for how you actually launch your product, your like consumer product, using crowdfunding websites, like Kickstarter or Indiegogo, we essentially use these websites, like a pre order product launch, because all you need to have is a prototype. If you're watching this on camera, I'm holding a water bottle right now, let's say like this was your prototype. And then we can actually do all the marketing around that. And then you can pre sell your product and get revenue to then ultimately go make it. The reason why I'm explaining this is, you know, the core system of how we approach the product launches, has really remained intact, you know, since going back to 2020. But we still have learned a lot in terms of how to make refinements to the system, like how we do and also how it how it applies to, I'd say different product categories. That's been a really interesting one, as well is that originally, we were really focused, I would say more on almost like tech hardware products. But over the past three years, we've actually gone into other categories, such as tabletop games is like a huge category on it's actually the biggest category on Kickstarter. So we've we started develop systems specifically for that. We also have done this is like a kind of a random category, but glamping and boutique hotels, for example. And so we these are just a few examples. But getting these different, like different experiences with different product categories has allowed us also to like expand our thinking of how this not only applies to different product, kradic categories, but how maybe some strategies that we applied to these product categories can apply to different ones as well.

Greg Voisen
Your team's a master of your craft. I mean, there isn't anybody and this is just from somebody who's seen a lot of this kind of transpire. Number one, you have longevity in this business, a lot of people don't make it as long as you have to you have an amazing team that works very well together. Three, thanks, you are a master of your craft. In other words, you study really what goes on. And now all these categories you're talking about. And I think anybody out there listening today, who wants to do a crowdfunding campaign, they, they really need to get your book. But they also need to understand and study the content of the book. And then if they wish to go hire you, but if they don't, hey, try and do this on your own and tell you it's not that easy. That's why you would hire somebody by launch boom. And I think that goes along with this. You have a lot of success stories. I mean, everything from the loamy which I only want to have, because of you nice to this guy. A few success stories that I thought was good was Baba that giver. These these are great stories, and they kind of set the stage to inform our listeners about what it is you do. So can you talk about this guy with the gloves by by the giver? And yeah, and why why you profiled him. I mean, you profiled a lot of them in here. It's not like he's the only one. But he was one of them that you definitely put right up front.

Mark Pecota
I love Bubba who doesn't like saying Bubba's name, by the way. I mean, it's the best. Yeah. Baba, baba Albrecht from Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Yeah, his company is called giver. He, he was one of our first clients. So I feel like we have like a special connection as well. Because, you know, he put trust in us when we were really early. This is back in 2016, I believe was when we first talked to him. Yeah. And, and yeah, we just, we had a great experience on the very first product launch with him, which were these gloves. So like leather gloves. But we call them the best damn gloves ever. They are really good. And but yeah, I

Greg Voisen
say I'm sure you shop there. Yeah,

Mark Pecota
well, I actually wear the mittens, which are like a later campaign that we did, which was even more successful, because I have terrible circulation my hands. So I need like really warm gloves. But you're back to like, why Baba. Besides that, he he also just has like a really amazing story. I mean, he, when we were working with him, he was starting this, this, this business on the side, you know, and he was a baggage handler at the Jackson Hole airport. So and this is very common, you know, we work with a lot of people that have full time jobs. And this is something that's like a, you know, a dream for them to go in and create this brand. You know, this business that is passion. Passion, yeah, passion, passion project to like, real business, you know, like something that like actually supports them. And that's not everyone's story. Like sometimes, of course, people are totally fine with just launching something as a passion project. But I'd say the vast majority of clients that we work with are looking to do this like as full time. And so I like talking about the story of Baba, because it's to show that it's possible to like take this passion project, and to work really hard. I mean, it was not easy for sure why he did. And we're not 100% responsible for his success, like he is like most of it, right? We just like gave him a system and support to allow him to have a more likelihood of actually achieving this, you know, this, this dream of his. So that's why I really like talking about Bubba's story is not only

Greg Voisen
Yeah, you know, I think what your crowdfunding does, number one, we could kind of combine two questions that I have for you. One is the crowdfunding framework, which is there's seven steps in it. And I think, you know, this is the part of the book that people have to get, and also speak to you if you would about those seven concepts, but also the whole concept of proof of concept. Right? In other words, why is it so much more efficient and less expensive to go crowdfunding to prove your concept because like, I come from the days, I'm old enough to say this, and I've launched products, I launch toy products, I lesson up, I launch software products, but, you know, you go through the prototyping phase and you try to get some feedback. Then you go to China, you get it manufactured or wherever you're gonna go, and you're literally and then you think, Okay, well, I haven't really proven it yet. But I'm gonna go see if Toys R Us wants to buy my dolls at the time I had a toy company we made dolls. And you realize that the internet is so powerful to allow you to do that with waste without wasting a lot of money and time Energy. And I think there's any one thing that you could say to somebody out there today would really be about how quickly you can create a proof of concept on the internet to see if people really like what you have, and whether it's worth pursuing. Can you speak to both of those?

Mark Pecota
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I mean, I'll start with a ladder. And then we'll work up from there, you know, to my earlier point of like, how crowdfunding works is that you, you only need to have a prototype. I mean, that's, that, right? There is like, the magic of this whole system is that, let's say like the traditional product launch, you know, before this type of, like, before crowdfunding really existed, you would have to go through all these steps of you know, building your product, building up inventory for your product, to ultimately go launch, and then hope that people actually, you know, purchase your product, but really, you've now invested a lot of time and money, which ultimately leads to more risk before you then you know, let's say like, turn it on, and then start to market and hope that you get sales. Now, with with crowdfunding, you again, you only need a prototype. And now you can start to actually invest, I would say, more into the marketing side before you actually build your product. And what that's going to do is actually give you a whole bunch of information, very valuable information of, do people actually want my product, do they want my product before I go invest a ton more time and money into actually making it? You know, so crowdfunding is not necessarily cheap, I want to make that clear to everyone, you know, it's not it, we're gone from the days, there was definitely a time in like when Kickstarter first started, where you could put up a product on there. And maybe without like, a lot of marketing spend, get it, get people to buy it, just because there was all this excitement around it. You still you need to, like invest money into marketing and adspend. And like, you know, if you're gonna work with experts, like there are definitely costs associated with it. So I don't want to mislead people there. But it is dramatically less, I think, than the alternative, which was what I was talking about. At first.

Greg Voisen
Yeah, radically less. Yeah, I mean, if you're launching a product and you go, crowdfunding route versus you do what I just talked about, which was prototype, and then think, Oh, well, I have a market because I've, I have a belief that everybody is going to be the pathway to my door, right? To buy this product or this thing, or whatever it might be that you're living on a on a prayer there. Whereas you guys give people factual data analytics, that says, hey, this thing has a probability of success. Here's the probability of success, correct? Like predictive analytics, is really what you guys are doing your predictive analytics. Yeah,

Mark Pecota
I mean, I've kept it like, pretty high level at this point. Because yeah, you know, in the in that I can go into it right now. And I will, but yeah, definitely in a, you know, on a book and or, and I have articles about this, like, there is like, a certain level of complexity to like what we're talking about, or you know, what you're talking about right now, in terms of predicting success. But that's a preamble. I'll go into how it works, is, yeah, so yeah, what what Greg's talking about is that you can actually validate demand for your product before you actually launch your crowdfunding campaign. And this is what we highly recommend you do. And this is what we show clients how to do, which essentially how it works is that, again, you have your prototype, you can create some marketing assets around this. So get some renderings, get some photos of it, right. This will allow you to then to create a few different very important assets that you're going to need to test and validate your product. One is what we call a reservation funnel. So think of it as a website with a few steps. Very important steps. So your your reservation funnel will look like this, you have a landing page, people the main call to action will be trying to get people's email address for them to show that they're interested in your launch. Okay, then we take into the next step, which is where the whole reservation part of the reservation funnel comes in. We say Alright, you're in, if you put down a $1 deposit, then you will reserve some type of special deal when we launch. Usually, it's a guaranteed discount, it can be like an exclusive add on as well, that you can throw in there. And and that's essentially it, then you have a checkout. And I think thank you page, right. But the whole point of the reservation funnel is really getting that $1 reservation, we found that people that do that are on average, 30 times more likely to buy than someone that just gives their email address. Why this is important is because having that data allows us to then create this predictive model like what you were mentioning before, because now we have, I would say enough like enough of a valuable data point that we have enough data to say that, you know, this percentage of people that put down $1 actually end up buying your product. And we have a high degree of confidence in that, that allows us to create a, an accurate enough predictive model for you to basically spend money on advertising. And we usually spend about one to $2,000. To then learn, am I actually able to find an audience where I can advertise to them at a low enough cost? That makes sense, where, again, you can predict out your sales and say, Alright, I spent this much on advertising, what is my expected revenue, and what's the expected profit right there. If you're expecting $0, in profit, based off of your initial tests, you know, you, you either want to change up your positioning of your product, which could be like, who you're targeting, and how you're actually like messaging the value of your product, or you may want to like, tweak some part of your product, you know, you might have to iterate on the product itself. So we recommend actually doing a lot of testing and the pre launch before you get to the crowdfund, because that's actually just going to further mitigate risk.

Greg Voisen
Right? Now, it's, it's a important point, because you call it test, launch and scale. That is what you define as the three phases of a system. And you were just really talking about the test part of it. Right, right. And I think now, it's really the kind of launch and scale. One of the other things you've talked about in this book, and you talked about in your last book, that I distinctly remember is the four horsemen. You definitely have to speak to with our listeners about this. Because it's really like, who's going to come and buy your product, right? So if you find these, the the horsemen and talk about it as it relates to your, what you call your three phases of the system, which is test, launch and scale. Yeah,

Mark Pecota
yeah. So we call it the Four Horsemen of traffic, which is like extremely apocalyptic name, which is kind of a funny one, but it's like stuck. I wrote this article, like, a long time ago called it because I thought it sounded cool. And I'm like, Alright, we're just gonna, we're gonna keep going with that. Yeah. We're stuck with that theme. Yeah, but essentially, the idea behind it is that we're trying to, like, simplify as much as possible, what are the four top sources of traffic to your crowdfunding campaign? And the reason why was because I remember when we were starting out, it's like, you look at these big campaigns, and like, how are they raising this much money? Like, where are all these sources of traffic coming from? You know, it's probably like hundreds of different sources. And really, it boils down to like four main ones. Okay, so the the four main ones is that one, you have your pre launch email lists. So what I was mentioning before with this reservation funnel, the whole idea behind that is that you are driving traffic from Facebook, or meta is the main one that we're using to then build up this email list of people that are highly qualified, meaning that you know, they're going they want to buy your products. Okay, so that's going to be a main source of traffic or pre launch email list. The next one is going to be paid media. So I just kind of mentioned this as well. It's like, you need to spend money on on meta advertising to one drive traffic to your funnel in the pre launch to build a pre launch email list. But also, when you launch you want to continue traffic, sending traffic from from meta to your actual crowdfunding campaign. So paid media in general will be the second horseman. The third one will be Pete, PR and influencers. So like to kind of like group them together. This typically comes into play during the crowdfunding campaign itself. And actually after is like where most that's really where you're gonna see the traffic from PR, so like news sites, tech publications, whatever is applicable to your product, or influencers as well. So yeah, these will be I think people understand what influencer so people on these, you know, Instagram on on YouTube, etc, people that can actually talk about your product, and then promote that to their audience. The Kardashians? The Kardashians? Yeah.

Greg Voisen
Those are big influencers. Yeah,

Mark Pecota
it might be that might be kind of expensive to get them. But yeah, so that will be the that would be the third one. And the thing with I haven't really been talking about some of the differences between these besides like, of course, I mean, they have pretty clear differences in terms of what the mediums are. But I guess I'll just start with this last one. PR is one of those things PR and influencers. It kind of like it comes in waves we like to say like you don't really know exactly when it's going to hit it, but if it does hit, it could be pretty big. Now going backwards, and then I'll finish with the fourth one paid media, you know mostly on meta is going to be the most consistent form of traffic because it's something that where you can usually get to the place where you can kind of just like crank it up and and until it might like start to lose some of the returns that you're seeing and it can kind of drag it down, but is it consistent form of traffic, and then on the pre launch email list, that's something that comes mainly just at the beginning of the campaign, you kind of have the all Russian at the beginning, that's going to be like the main source of traffic at the beginning. All right, now we're gonna go to the end. So the fourth horseman is the platform itself. So meaning Kickstarter, and Indiegogo, whichever crowdfunding platform you launch on, both of them have many people 10s of millions of unique visitors every single month. And these are people that are looking for, like cool, innovative new products to preorder. So in order to become more visible on the platforms, you essentially have to do all the other sources of traffic, well, you have to you have to bring traffic yourself in order to get funding on your campaign, which then will push you higher up in the rankings on Kickstarter or Indiegogo, which then gives you more visibility, and therefore you are more likely to get traffic and sales. Now typically, you see on the last one, it's like 20 to 30% of the total funding amount will come from the actual crowdfunding platform itself, if you know you do everything else, right. So that's like, one of the most powerful parts about crowdfunding is that it's, it is this platform that has unique visitors on it that you can tap into, like, you could tap into this crowdfunding audience.

Greg Voisen
Yeah. Well, everybody, you know, wants to go viral, you know, if you look at a video that gets placed on YouTube, and, and, and they say, overnight success, and some of them are, you know, 3 million hits. You know, our pandemic was definitely viral, but it wasn't a good thing. Right. So the question, I have kind of a crazy analogy, but it is an analogy. At some point, you're looking for the speed of this momentum, the quality of this momentum, and the ability of conversion rate of this momentum, who's going to actually convert because people are talking about it, they're saying something about the XYZ glove, or the product, or the lomi, or the this or that or whatever. Now, I want to have you speak about this because you say the biggest block to the success are internal limiting beliefs. This is a show on personal growth. It's a show on business, it's a show on really wellness and spirituality. There's four genres we cover. And these limit internal limiting beliefs are actually pretty big. Because you're the, you're saying these are the things that stop people before they start? Can you speak to the seven limiting beliefs that you talk about in the book, and how an entrepreneur really can overcome those? So I

Mark Pecota
got my got the book right here, we're gonna we're gonna read from it. This is the this is the this is the proof copy. We can we can switch off Greg, you can you can read one and I'll read. That's

Greg Voisen
actually that's actually more valuable mark. than then the copy I have because it says proof. The proof

Mark Pecota
one Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So this is actually this is actually something that wasn't in the first first book. Yeah.

Greg Voisen
That's why I wrote out.

Mark Pecota
I realized in Yeah, how can I make this book better? That, yeah, well, you said it already. Like one of the biggest things that that gets in the way of people actually launching is just their own limiting beliefs. And I was very, very aware. I mean, your audience, I don't think is like this, you know, if they're listening, they they want to grow. But there's definitely a group of people, they're like, Man limiting beliefs. It's kind of like woowoo BS stuff. You know, that's, that's not me. But I feel like if people read this chapter, you know, they'll realize that they may have one of these. So the seminar The first one is, I don't have time to launch my product. We get this all the time. You know, I talked about Bubba, where he had a full time job, again, a lot of people do. And they're like, how am I going to make this work? I just don't have time. And the thing is, I, you know, you can make time, right? It's a choice. At the end of the day, not saying it's not that easy, but it definitely is a limiting belief that needs to be addressed. If that is one that you have the next one, the timing isn't right yet. So it's like, well, I don't have time now. You know, but later I'm going to But oftentimes, what I see with that is that they end up pushing it off, you know, more and more and more and that just never happens. The third one is I'm not a marketer, I'm bad at it or I hate it. We get this a lot as well. Man, I don't even have social media, you know, I don't want it to marketing so scammy and all this stuff. But really, it's like changing your idea behind marketing that. I mean, they probably just had, they've experienced bad marketing, at the end of the day marketing is just connecting, you know, a product with with the person with the person that like needs that product. And it is, it is a force for good, you know, and especially if you want to bring your product or idea or whatever it is in the world, you should be able to communicate the value in to the right audience. It's a really powerful thing.

Greg Voisen
Well, like I said before, to Sell Is Human. I think a lot of people, they don't want to use the word sell. So they'll say marketing or something else. But the reality is convincing something, convincing someone that something they don't have, may benefit them in some way, whatever that might be, or they have a need for it. It's just kind of natural. It's been going on since the dawn of time. And all you do is you make that a lot easier by putting it out on the internet. So instead of asking, you're doing it with pretty pictures, and words, and audio and video, right? Versus you actually saying, Hey, do you want to buy this refrigerator? I know you need it.

Mark Pecota
Rare?

Greg Voisen
So what are some of the other limiting internal limiting beliefs? So

Mark Pecota
we just have, we have three more. So the the next one is I don't I don't have a team. We have four more than we gather. But I don't have a team is the next one. I mean, this is a big one. Like there's so many, like solo creators. And so they just they feel like, because they don't have a team that they're not going to be able to bring this to life. But we found that is very much not the case. I mean, no bias, right? Like we're, we're the ones that are helping supplements that that thing that's missing for them. But I would say even if you're not working with launch, boom, there are just like so many other people, other creators out there that you can that you can talk with. I was interviewing, we have a podcast as well. And I was interviewing a creator. And he was saying that his advice to creators was, you should just go ask other creators for help. And you probably be surprised at how many of them will help you. So that's my answer to that. Yeah, then I don't have enough money to launch on my own. You know, I was talking about this before that. It is not cheap. Right. I again, I don't want to mislead people say like, I hate when people are like, oh, yeah, you can just go do this. Like just, it doesn't take that much, or whatever it might be. It's like, Yeah, there's definitely investment that needs to be made into this. But I would say a lot of people find it to be more affordable than they think. And I would say the other thing is, what's the word I'm looking for here? It's like, it's man of this words escaping me, I basically, it's less risky than you think. Because there is a system behind it, where you can do things like what we're talking about earlier with the with the testing and validation, where it's like, if you have these very specific milestones, where you can get a better understanding of how much is actually going to cost you before you decide to move on.

Greg Voisen
In that test phase, you know, so, hey, if you put, I don't know, 10 to $15,000, that test phase? That's right, not saying that's the number. But the reality is, that's a lot cheaper than you would if you went out maybe build a prototype and brought it in and did whatever you needed to do. hired the people all the rest of stuff. It's it's a great investment. You guys have a great program going. Thanks. So appreciate the next one. Yeah,

Mark Pecota
we we have two more. All right, we're almost everyone to next one is the launch might fail. It's true. I mean, it might it might, it might fail. The in there are a lot that fail. You know, just in general when it comes to to product launches. But the thing is, you know, I put in here like what would you rather like, launch and fail or B never launch in regret? Because regret is a deeper pain than failure, because at least with failure you tried. Like that's so true. You know, it's like, obviously I do I wrote it, but it's it's Yeah. So that's, I think that's that's all it needs to be said on that one. And the very last one is, who am I to launch a product. And this is where like the impostor syndrome is starting to show itself and this is very real, right for a lot of people.

Greg Voisen
very real, very real. Yeah. And, you know, there are some of them. I think there's a fear of failure. And I think, you know, they say fear of public speaking is probably the biggest thing for people. But I think it's the fact that you fail, but I'll tell you one thing if you don't fail, you're not learning and you're not gonna know what will work unless maybe you tried something that didn't work? Right. So I highly recommend it. Now that that kind of leads me to this question. You've obviously had crowdfunding campaigns that have been stellar, and you've had some that haven't been most effective. Can you make a comparison between one that was super stellar, and one that maybe you didn't see happening, but kind of fell through the cracks? Yeah, a good one. Yes.

Mark Pecota
didn't perform very well. Right. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, tip typically, like the I mean, the most simple answer to why there is a big difference outside of like, are we perfect? Have we ever made mistakes and product launch? Like, absolutely not? Right, like there are there have been in the basically decade of doing this, you know, we have made mistakes that probably lead not probably did lead to like worse results. In a campaign, I will own that. But I would say most most of the time, what you're seeing if there is like a big difference between a big launch, and let's say like not as successful have a launch, it typically is something around the actual like product itself does not like really having as much demand. I mean, just to put it quite simply, it's like there's there's only so much that marketing can do to push a product. And this is why the whole testing and validation part is so important. Because, you know, when we, when we first launched a company, we didn't talk about testing and validation at all. And then we had, you know, a string of launches that we knew going into launch that it wasn't going to be that pretty, because everything we were doing the pre launch was basically like us like slamming your head against the wall trying to make it work, right. And once you know, the metrics just weren't that great. And we are trying all different types of things. But at a certain point, there is really no other option or like reasoning, for not working Besides, the product may just not have that big of a market that's interested in. And that's that's just the truth. Right? I will say though, in general, if, let's say like outside of like launch boom clients, there's also a whole other subset of people that either don't like actually position the product correctly. So meaning that they are not communicating the value of their product to the right audience. That's like one whole group where it's like, they actually have a pretty good product, they just don't know how to talk about it, right. So they don't actually end up making a lot of sales. That would be one other like big mistake. And so the other big mistake is that they don't actually focus on the pre launch enough. So we we work with, I'd say a decent amount. I mean, it probably made it makes up like, definitely less than 10% of our clients probably like 5%, or people that have failed, you know, not working with us and then come to work with us. And most of the time, it's like they don't focus on the pre launch is specifically building up a pre launch email list of people that want to buy the product, as simple as that sounds, but that like separates these these like failed versus successful campaigns. That's like the biggest separator. And I have like a few examples of that in the book even. And so yeah, those are, those are all the differences. pre

Greg Voisen
launch is so important, because you know, it's like seeding. A farmer has to seed his field before he's gonna yield the crop. You know, I mean, some of the basic principles here. Look, the book has a lot of resources in it, you took the time to put all these QR codes sprinkled throughout the book. What's the goal of providing the listening audience with all these templates and tools and, and so on? Is that assisting them and leading them up to maybe doing something on their own? Or them contacting you? And saying, Yeah, we really need your help and assistance. Yeah, I

Mark Pecota
mean, I'll be 100% Transparent like this, this book, the way I view it is like, it's a great marketing tool for launch boom. At the same time, it is a tool that a creator could use and launch on their own. And people do that, you know, I get that I get those emails all the time. There is one that just posted on LinkedIn. Like a few weeks ago, Nicholas, he launched his product on Indiegogo over 100k Shout us out, use the book that you know, so that even the way it's priced is like for the print version is $8.71, which is like quite literally the lowest I can possibly make it and it's 00 $0 and royalty. So it's it's the way I view it is that if someone reads it, they get value from it. They have two options. Essentially they can use it to launch by themselves which great, right it's awesome. or they can come and work with us as well, which is awesome. And no one, no one loses in this exchange, whether like, either option they go, or their path they go down. So that's, that's my super secret

Greg Voisen
astir with a great marketing tool for launch boom. But on the other hand, I want my listeners to know that Mark is really providing you with all the tools you need, if you were going to launch on your own, and then if you failed on your own, you would think that $8.61, you spent, you would come back sorry, 71 says that you would come back to Mark and actually, and actually get the advice of Mark launch boom in his team. Now, Mark, everybody loves, you know, I take away from a book, you know, it's just, I always end my interviews this way. Because at the end, usually it's kind of like, okay, so what am I going to walk away with? So what are three points that you'd like to leave the listeners with? That they could remember from this interview that are probably, if I was going to prioritize them and say, these were a items, right? This was top priority. They're sitting out there right now they're listening to us. They have an idea. They've maybe done a sketch, they don't know where to go, they're not going to patent it yet. You know, they've gotten all this advice from friends and family and whatever going, Yeah, your widget is great. I think you ought to go make that thing that opens up cans easier, or whatever the hell it is. What, what three things would you tell him to take away from this?

Mark Pecota
So I would say regardless of what stage you're at, like, the way I think about it is, I feel like so many people get stuck, trying, like just not taking the next step. Like they're getting, they're making it way too complicated and trying to figure out all the steps before they actually go and, like realize that all they need to do is take one more step. And so I would, I would recommend that, you know, whether you're at the sketch stage are working on a prototype or just idea, you know, figure out like, what is the next step that I need to take and just go take that step, don't get paralyzed by not understanding every single step that's in front of you. Because there are so many resources, not not even just my book, just online, you just Google things, and be able to, like learn. And I really do believe that, if you're willing to put yourself out there a little bit, and like, look for the information, the right resource will appear at the right time for you. So I would just say, take the next step, I would say that, let's say that you are now committed to doing your product launch, that the you do not want to like skip a step. Now Now we're talking a little bit bigger picture here. But I would say that the thing that people skip the most is the pre launch. I mentioned this already in the in the interview, but I'll like really stress this part, because it's probably the place that people make, the biggest mistake is that they rush, like getting to the launch. And, and they end up skipping like very critical steps. And if I want to make it very clear what I think are the most critical steps, it would be number one, spending some time actually thinking through how to position your product. And like that, again, that's who your audience is, and how you are communicating how your product solves the problem to the audience, it's simple to say it's a little bit harder to do. But just think about that part. The next thing would be actually building up a pre launch email list. So like building an audience of people that want to buy your product before you launch in wrapped up in there is all the testing and validation as well. Because in order to build an audience, you have to test and experiment and learn. So those would be like the two biggest things on the pre launch side of things. And then I guess the third thing, if I had to choose three, so he's nicer in threes, isn't that?

Greg Voisen
Never in three? We

Mark Pecota
do. Yeah, exactly. You know, I kind of gave like seven things right there, though. And now but the third now that I was getting the third thing, I would just say that I guess I'm rehashing something I said. But I really do believe it's very important is that don't be afraid to ask for help. And I'm not saying this to be like, hit up launch boom, we're going to help you. Not even us go to other creators go ask people for help. I also think a lot of people get stuck. When like the answer is just it's really just an email away. Almost like to Motrin oversimplify it but there are way more people that are willing to help and I think a lot of people realize, so I would say reach out for support. And it also might unblock you if you know if you don't know what the next step might be. Because that's probably where somebody was a reaction to my first point was like, just take the next step like, well, what is the next step? You know, go ask someone that might be like a few steps ahead of you. And they'll tell you? Well,

Greg Voisen
it is, you know, you provide great wisdom and knowledge you've done, you know, like you said, What 700 of these now, you're bound to learn something from all of these campaigns that you've done. Some of them have been tremendously successful. I know, the lomi was one of them. That was you also did a electric bike? If I remember correct, weren't you involved in that one with a

Mark Pecota
whole bunch

Greg Voisen
of electric bikes? Yeah, electric bikes. So you know, you, you, he's got the background, and I'm saying, Go get the book. In this, you've got QR codes to boot. If you want to do it on your own. There's one I just started the page. The other thing is reach out to mark himself. He's available, go to the web suit website, I should say, launchboom.com. Or it's crowdfunded.book.com. And you can also scan the QR code in the back. But that's one place where you can go to do it, Mark, it's been a pleasure having you on, you're always a wealth of knowledge and information for people. And I just hope people soak up what you said today about doing crowdfunding, because it is a way for them to not only save money in that pre launch phase, but to really study their product and understand better, is there a demand in the market for it? versus going out half cocked thinking, hey, great. The world is going to you the the world's going to beat a pathway to the door, not like the Field of Dreams, which he talked about in the movie, because that's not what it was. Build it and he will come build it and they will come. And I think that's a lot of people think is build it, they will come. But it's great having you back on the show again for your revised edition of crowds. Everybody go out and get a copy of the book. We'll put a link to Amazon. We'll put a link to his website. And there's a lot of resources there. But you also can talk to Mark direct. Thanks, Mark. Thanks,

Mark Pecota
Greg. Thanks so much. Thanks, everyone for listening.