In this episode, I take questions from Teas.com.au, Brannd Hub and PowerWells.org

We discuss:

Thanks to Teas.com.au , Brand Hub , and PowerWells for being on episode one.

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Here is a transcription of this episode: (there will be mistakes in this transcript so please just use this as a guide)

 

Hello and welcome to the Fractal Marketing Broadcast. I’m Gerard Doyle. Each week, I explore online marketing objectives and strategies from you, the listener. Sharing the advice on this broadcast for everyone to learn from. The goal of this broadcast is to keep startup founders and entrepreneurs, teach them marketing tips, tricks and best practices that they can apply to their business. Welcome to episode one. On today’s episode, we look at the niche marketing selection for teas.com.au. Help brand hub with their web presence, and I will share how I promoted the ground founding campaign for power wells. So let’s jump straight into the episode. So the first question we have is from Celina who runs teas.com.au, and that’s T-E-A-S.com.au, who asked the question with a rather low population density, yet first world GDP in Australia, how does someone choose a niche? Her niche is too niche. Is there a golden figure or a clever way to say, “Yup, this is a mature market for X or no, its way to small, thanks a lot.” Thanks for the question. First things first, just as I stumble over the word niche right at the beginning of my podcast. Franny Wayne is listening in the US, there would be a niche. It’s probably a little bug there for most Australians and Brits. That there’s a different way to pronounce that word, but in Australia we say niche. Look, great question. I think the first thing I want to say is just a lot of good domain name. Not directly related to your question, but teas.com.au, as somebody who’s worked in the domain industry for a while, one of the things I love is a domain that’s just easier to say, easier to spell and the kind of to quote the wrong sort of brand campaign, it does what it says on the tin. So good work on that one. To get more into your question, is there an easier way? Look, I guess I can give you a roundabout answer and that’s to say for me, the trick with niches is actually to go as niche as you can at the start. I think one of the traps we get into with business is we try to go too broad. And I guess that goes to the second part of the question which is have you gone too niche. I guess it depends on the way you’re looking at it. If one part of your question is the market big enough to justify, that’s a bit different to are we going to a niche. In my mind, one of the key things to do when you’re starting a business or running a business is to go as niche as you can at the start. So what that means is, you’re better off winning over a really small audience and turning them into an absolute evangelist for your brand. So what I mean by that is, it’s really hard to be everything to everyone. So, obviously, [inaudible] with so many tea drinkers, but even tea drinkers are a really broad set. So I think the trick is to get that niche as tight as you can and to play around with that. So, obviously, an easy market to define is people who drink tea. But that again is quite a broad market. I drink tea, not a huge amount. The tea I drink I describe as Bookies Tea. So, how do you appeal to me, or is there a niche market in that? Well, just– I mean, its always easy to use yourself as an example. So the way I’m thinking about it is, I’m a dual citizen living in Australia. Born in Australia, but lived for ten years in the UK. And there’s one thing I picked up in Britain is that Brits tea more than they drink coffee. So already I’m thinking of a niche market, which is British experts living in Australia. And even that in itself is quite a big market to go after. But its interesting because by niching that one level further, you’ve already started to create an idea in your mind’s eye about the persona of who we might actually be going after. So I’m thinking about it now, I’m starting to imagine the British person who is in Australia who don’t have a great tea selection or doesn’t quite understand why Australians are so obsessed with coffee and not drinking tea. And to that end, I think about tea and I think this is a good, long game
for you this is– in Australia is obsessed with coffee at moment, and I say at the moment since that coffee’s got a few hundred years of history whereas tea is based on thousands of years of history. So if I was going to take a bet for the long-term play, tea seems like a better one. It also seems like the slightly more mature option which I think you can play into with your marketing as well. So what I mean by that is– I guess I’ll try explaining through an analogy. Thinking back a long time ago so whatever it is, 20-plus years ago when I sort of I guess first became legal to start drinking or there [or?] thereabouts, [inaudible] drinking spirits or beer. Beer was the easy drink if you like and then over the next few years, people started to introduce wine. Nobody really loved wine the first time but it was that sophisticated answer and wine was more multidimensional. I mean obviously, you start looking at red wine and white wine, and then there’s types of grapes for the red wine, and then there’s regions and price points and styles, and I think tea’s in the same position. I think tea’s something where you can win over an audience and then when you win them over you create that level sophistication. Anyway, I’ll get to that in a second. I think it’s actually key to break down niches even further. So yeah, thinking about myself, the second job I had coming back to Australia five years ago was working at an ad agency at iProspect, and one of the things that amazed me about iProspect was the fact that half of the staff were British. They were either born in Britain or had dual citizenship or a lot of them had permanent residency but half of the few hundred people working for iProspect were British. Across the advertising industry, I’d suggest it could be as high as 30, 35% of the people working in the [al land?] industry in Australia are British which then creates a really interesting niche because all over a sudden now we’ve got probably higher educated, they’re going to be typically 20 to 40 years old. A lot of Brits sort of at around 40 years old start to think about moving back to Britain or back to Europe in some way. But if we’re starting to narrow that niche down, why does that matter? I mean, we’re not restricting our potential market. What we’re doing is creating a more narrow persona, the kind of customer that we want to win and turn into an evangelist. So in my mind zone now I’m thinking about advertising professionals working long hours, trying to be creative, keep clear of mind, try to be a bit healthy whilst probably still working in a desk job, British so a natural-born bias towards tea or coffee, and probably a higher than average disposable income. One of the other issues he thinks about the expert community [yes?], the advertising industry is that the time demands on you means that you’re probably less likely to have a family. So maybe I am higher income but more disposable without the kids, without the burden, maybe don’t [inaudible] have the mortgage as well. So what we have done here is we’ve really tried to come up with an idea of who we’re targetting and by niching down to that level what we’re going to do is attempt to create a marketing campaign that entirely focuses on that one persona, that quite micro niche. That’s not to say we only want to sell to the British expert community in the advertising space between 20 and 40 years old who higher income, higher education, no kids, no mortgage, but what it is is to say we can create a positioning for the tea around that. Now, when it comes to positioning with the tea and the niche market, what we want to do is step the tea up beyond the kind of what the tea does, the actual ingredients, and really move into why you would drink certain kinds. Now, having looked at the website I can see actually you guys definitely moving in this place and I can see that the copy that you’ve got on your website but I wonder whether there’s a way we can lift that to a higher level. So what I mean by that is– here’s another example [of?] a different industry if you look at some of the juices that are out there at the moment, so the premium cold-pressed juices. I go along to Woolworths. I have a look at the cold-pressed juice section, and what’s really interesting about it is often on the labels amongst all the ingredients, and the benefits, and the vitamins, and minerals, that are listed there. What really gets my attention is the fact that they often get labelled to do something, so what I mean is. I can pick up a juice that has lemon juice, orange, ginger, and that will be an immune juice – boost your immunity, or get over a head cold. And all over sudden we’re taking something that we can’t even transitively know or maybe it’s inferred, and you up to that level. So I noticed on your website there’s some great features that we talk about cleansing teas. Well, I think that’s the kind of benefit we really need to hone down on and so rather thinking kind of making a selection about what’s the type of tea that I’m getting. What I want the tea to do for me? What am I looking to achieve? And so all the website, all the copy they’re really targetting the articles, the blogs. I can really see that you’ve got that messaging and I think if we can tie that really nicely around a really tight niche. We’re going to be in a great position to market the products, so getting back to– yes, we started with a question. The way I think about it is what we want to do is take that niche, tailor our copy, tailor our ads the way we describe the product, what it does for me. Am I buying teas that give me energy in the morning? Cleansing teas in the afternoon, teas that help me go to sleep at night, clarity of mind, teas that sort of lead to sophistication, things that I might be able to highlight around a working life of an advertising professional. And then package those teas up in that way and sell to that niche audience and win them over. The great thing is once you get yourself into the head-space that you were thinking about niche market it opens up niche marketing opportunities. So then finding brand evangelists, finding advertising professionals with high net promoters scores for you creates another opportunity. You’re able to gauge places like marketing week, Ad News, Mumbrella and pitch the idea. That the advertising industry is moving towards tea with a high demographics of British people coming across, turning us from the nine cups of coffee in feeling clogged and fuzzy headed. We’re moving into tea which is a more cleansing, sophisticated, power drink, and we start to create this idea amongst this niche that tea is the choice of the successful high-level advertising executives. And so you see where we would never be able to get maybe appear [inaudible] into Ad News all over sudden because we have niched down we’re able to do that. And that’s not the say you have to stop there but this great thing happens and I’ll kind of paraphrase it badly – reference Seth Gordon here – it talks about tribes in his book. I think it’s actually called tribes and one of the things that I really took away from that is that people aren’t a member of a single tribe, so what that means is. I might work in the advertising industry. I might be a dual citizen – British-Australian – I might be male. And these sort of different tribes, so one tribe can be around [Adland?], one tribe can just be around your gender, one tribe can be about being a dual-citizen. But I can also be a father. I can also be a Star-wars geek. I can also be a soccer fan. I can be lots of different things. Now, why is the important? Well, it’s important because if you win me over to tea in my dual citizen 25 to 40-year-old male, hard working advertising professional persona and that tribe, and that becomes stunted. Well, I can bring that tribe to the next level or to the next tribe that I’m part of, and it might be that I’m able to bring it to a world of school or me, as a dad, or other social circles that I’m able to get into. And that is the way you can take one niche or one tribe and move it into the next so I think it’s an interesting position. I think I guess what I’m getting at with this whole thing is I guess two things. One is I think you need to niche down. I think absolutely niche down to the tightest audience you can, which allows you then to create evangelists, get that high net promoter score. And once you’ve got that, you’ve got a fan base, a supporter base, that don’t just buy your product, they rave about it. I think it’s important that you absolutely then, once you got those niches, focus down onto the, “Why are people drinking tea?” not just, “I’d like a black tea or a green tea” or the ingredients or whether it’s got ginger or not. What we’re trying to do here is talk about the benefits of tea. We’re trying to sell the whole idea. And part of this education process is not just to sell to new customers. It’s absolutely crucial in the way that we do our marketing that we take these great I guess rationales as to, “Why I drink tea,” the irony here being often the logic – not the heart, the head logic here- is something we apply after a purchase, a post-purchase rationalisation of our decision. And this is the great thing you’ve got. You’ve got email addresses, you’ve got Facebook fans, you’ve got retargeting pixels. This is where you’re able to educate your existing customer base and give them a rational reason as to why they bought the tea in the first place. They might have bought the tea with the heart. You pitched in the idea they can work harder, longer, stronger, smarter. So they bought the tea to be better at their job. But actually, what you need to do after that is give them the rational arguments. So when they’ve got a high net promoter score, they’re inclined to promote to other people, to talk to other tribes. That’s when we take the rational things and we pitch those in to other people. So when niching down, we can create the 10 out of 10 net referral scores, give the people who are giving us these scores the argument, the rationale, the reasons as to why they want to promote your Teas.com that are you, and then I think you’re going to be in a great place to go from niche to niche to niche. Look, if you really wanted to– I mean, the other great thing about the web is it is completely possible to produce multiple brands without a huge amount of [inaudible]. So it is possible that you could have one I guess holding brand if you like, and then you could actually produce sub-brands under that. So it could be, for the advertising executive, you could have an entirely separate brand and domain although the whole backend and processing is all the same. But you could bring those people in. So there’s a lot of different options open to you.
So, that’s I guess my view on the niching side of things. The other posed question was around the size of the market. Look, I think the trick is, whilst your expanding those niche markets, is to recognise that– look, I don’t think Australia’s too small of a market to make this work, but it is a premium product. It is going to require you to win those niches over to expand out. So I just really focus on winning group to group to group as you expand your market. I’ve got a general feeling that you’re backing the right trend. I’d rather be selling top-end, quality teas much more than I would be coffee. I think coffee’s a much more competitive market. I think you’re on a better long-term game with tea. I think it’s more sophisticated. What you need to do, though, is you need to bring that purchase decision up into more around why I’m drinking tea. What’s in it? What’s the result going to be of drinking tea, as opposed to the actual tea itself? Again, it’s in the copy on the website. I can see the messagings there. I think maybe just commit wholeheartedly to the idea that, “I’m not selling tea, I’m selling clarity of mind,” or a positioning statement that you can go with. So I hope that’s been a help. I’m going to post, obviously, the podcast. Of course, I got your details, so more than happy to do follow-up questions afterwards. And then we’re going to move on to our second case study.
So the second case study we have today is from Brannd Hub. So that’s Brannd Hub, which is B-R-A-N-N-D-H-U-B.com, who come with a question, “How does an online, service-based business effectively market itself?” So Brannd Hub is targeting small businesses, medium businesses, startup firms, etc. And they professionally develop names and slogans for entrepreneurs, businesses, and brands. So this is a tough one for me because I think my first instinct is to test your name itself, which is Brannd Hub. And the test I was given by a good friend of mine from evergreen.com domains is what she calls the radio test for domain names, which is if you can’t say it on the radio without having to spell it out, it’s probably not a fantastic brand. The reason I bring this up is the difficulty I think you’ve got at the start is that Brannd Hub, in its own self, doesn’t necessarily pass the radio test because, for me to spell it out, I have to actually– or for me to explain exactly who you are, I have to mention the double N. So for me I think one of the core things is going to be not to fall into that trap of being the mechanic’s car. Sorry, this is the idea that you look after everyone else’s brand but not your own. So I think it’s going to be absolutely crucial that Brannd Hub doesn’t have two Ns. I think to have the two Ns is kind of self-defeating and it’s going to be really hard to sell the business and services you offer after that. So my natural position as an ex-domainer – so it’s obviously coming up a lot – is to go look at, well, who owns other domains similar to that. So I’m not 100% sure where you’re based but, for example, I looked at branndhub.com.au and noticed that that was a parked domain which was potentially for sale from Sedo. At the same time, I might get a look at brandhub, with just one n, .com, and you see other sites that are there, which is not a great place. Because if you think about it, there’s going to be two scenarios, and they’re going to play out here. Scenario one, you struggle to take off as a brand because people can’t really remember it, in which case you never really got to have a chance to demonstrate how good you are at the service. Scenario two, which in some ways is even worse, is you do become successful. Then you have massive leakage of your brand traffic off to the person who owns the premium domain, the actual, real domain. So I guess it’s a difficult one to give advice on on that side because, obviously, I’m looking at your brand first. Look, the other thing is really focusing and spending some time on your website and the way it looks and feels. I think it’s going to be absolutely crucial for you that your brand, your website and the way you portray it, needs to be super slick. At the moment there’s a lot going on with your website. I think the animated snowflakes is very sort of late nineties in terms of website design. I’d be really keen to see you guys [taking?] your domain, and then throw up a template from Wix or a Squarespace. On one side, you kind of look at these and you think, “It’s just Wix,” or “It’s just Squarespace,” but these sites look amazing now. And as a brand, I don’t think you have to communicate a huge amount through your website. I think you can actually keep it really slick. I think minimal is probably the way you need to go, so for your website in itself, I’d really be focused on minimal. And why do I say these two things? What am I thinking of when I look at this, and I say, “Look at your domain. Look at your brand.” Well, this is the thing about selling services online. There’s very little people can use to assess you, so your domain name, your website, I mean, that’s basically it. You know, in terms of the last check. So this website has to look great. This website has to be slick. This website has to look like you really care about brands, and if you care about brands, then you got to care about layout and design. So using a template that’s going to work on every browser and every style. I mean, I’m looking at this on a Windows 10 Surface Pro looking through Chrome. But I could just as easily be using an iPhone 8, X, using a Safari browser, an Android phone. These are all very valid options, and at the moment, your design just doesn’t really work across those. So I’d really recommend looking, yourselves, at the brand, and something simple. Probably stay away from even using the brand in the actual domain. Let’s look for a domain or a brand for yourselves that’s super slick and maybe doesn’t actually say a huge amount. Borrow a leaf off the way I approached it, naming my company Fractal. It’s not the perfect brand by any stretch, but it’s one word. It means something. It can be spelt, but I get to make and use a brand that I want to make it into. Anyway, getting more specifically to your question and some ideas that I think everyone else can sort of take away and use, I think the trick for service providers is not to try to do everything on their website. It’s really around content and content distribution. So what we’re doing is we’re trying to present you guys as thought leaders, and the best way to be a thought leader is to share those thoughts. Look, there’s a general rule which is you should be able to talk about all the different strategies and still retain a whole lot of value in what you do. So what I mean by that is you should be able to sort of create bespoke documents, detailed documents, talking about specific areas of brand marketing, and come up with brands, and add a lot of value, and position yourselves as thought leaders. Though over the years it’s actually a lot harder to execute. So you can give someone all the answers, all the ingredients, but it’s kind of like a recipe when you’re making a cake. It’s one thing to say to somebody, “This is what the cake is going to look like. These are all the ingredients. This is in the method. You can hand all that to me, and I’m still going to make a horrendous cake. And that’s the way I want you to think about your business, as a service business online. Give away the ingredients. Give away the method. Give away the final product. Give it everything you possibly can to help people. Don’t hold anything back. The reality is for services that provide real value and require real talent to deliver, the people aren’t going to have to do it, but what they are going to do is see you as an authority. They’re going to see you as the person with the answers, with the method, with the process, and they’re going to trust you to deliver all of that knowledge into what you do. It’s actually really hard to validate everything you’re going to do for a brand in one of these services. You can spend a long time justifying your decisions to get the person’s radio content all ready, and they’ve considered what you would– potentially considering you’ve done a lot of the pre-sell for you. The thing about content is it’s absolutely fantastic for distributing online. Use LinkedIn, use Twitter, the more professional channels, and put your content out there. Partner with people. Approach other websites, web hosts, small business start-ups, accounting firms, whatever it might be, and offer to write articles for them. There’s enough accounting firms out there with small business coming to them in local areas. They don’t really have anything to say. They’ve got emails like– my accountants send me a newsletter every month, and it’s so dry and dull. There’s never a huge amount in there. But if you were to write something that was for them, for their clients, that used your brand, I think you’d find a really high take-up. So I’d really focus around create a nice brand for yourself, a brand that is nice and clean. Carry that through to a super slick website. You don’t have to spend a lot of money. Like I said, Wix or Squarespace are just really valid options now with so many fantastic templates. Keep it minimal. Don’t put too much onto your website. Don’t try to say too much on your website. Keep that looking premium, slick. Make sure it’s compatible with every kind of browser. And then focus all your efforts on writing down your thoughts and distributing that content to as many different providers as you can. Post it on LinkedIn. Share it. Grow your audience. Post it on Twitter. Follow people. Engage. Look, one of the best things you can do on both Twitter and LinkedIn is actually be the listener and offer value. So what I mean by that is social media channels, these days, are full of people shouting and not many people listening. It would be absolutely amazing if you became one of the people that listened to what people were shouting about, and responded, and added value. It would be an amazing way for you to build up traction online. So instead of being just one more person shouting out on Twitter and making a post, why don’t you put all the effort into replies because that what people can respond to. It’s amazing. You look at the number of businesses that are tweeting frantically trying to get some kind of traction to an audience that really doesn’t care what they say on Twitter. If you’re the one person who’s on there who makes a valid comment, you’re probably going to pick up a follow. You’re probably going to win a little bit of love back from that particular brand, and that can be a fantastic guerrilla way to kind of get your brand out there. So I guess, in a nutshell, content’s going to be your friend. Use your experience. Use your knowledge. Share as much as possibly can. Again, think of it a bit like a recipe. Share all the ingredients. Share the method. Share the final product, and you’re going to find that people will find a way back to you eventually. Some people will solve it. Some people will take your instructions and do a really good job. That’s actually not a bad thing. Two great things come from that. One, you’ve got someone who genuinely values what you’re doing and will be grateful. And, secondly, you can feel good about it. You’ve helped somebody. But what you’re going to find in most cases is that people look at it and say, “Do you know what? I’m just going to ask BrandHub to just go and do all the work for me because they seem to know what they’re talking about.” I hope that helps. I look forward to seeing some changes on the– maybe your brand and the way you can position your website. And, look, when you produce your first content, send it through to me on LinkedIn, and I will give you my friendly comment and help spread love from my end as well. Good luck. So, lastly on today’s podcast, I just want to cover off a company I have been doing some work with about 16 weeks now, and it’s called Power Wells. That’s powerwells.org. And what the Power Wells guys do is they come up with this really novel way to provide power to remote communities around the world that don’t have regular land supply power. So what they do is they find large containers where they drop recycled laptop batteries into them and then you use solar panels to charge up the batteries. And the idea behind this is they’re looking to provide means power supply to communities, what they discovered is that these are remote communities, their mobile phones is actually an absolute essential tool. Now, at first part, you think mobile phone, its a luxury. But in a lot of these remote communities, and they have done a lot of work in Indonesia, they discovered that their mobile phone is their only form of communication. And that’s not just to chat with people, this is about emergency communication, trade, any kind of information to the community. It’s also often their only source of light, which was another amazing fact. So, what the Power Wells are designed to do is during the hours where these remote communities who are typically farmers are out working the land, the solar panels charge up the recycled laptop batteries, so you’re reducing e-waste. And it allows the community to come plug their phones in at night, charge them up to remain connected to the rest of the world, to give them some light so they can do things like prepare dinner and extend the number of useful hours in the day. Anyway, I met these guys at the Logan startup weekend. And meeting Nick and Brad, well they didn’t actually have a great idea exactly how they were going to go about this. One thing was abundantly clear, and that was these are two guys with a heap of passion and a really sort of strong desire to do something. So I quickly went from mentor to permanent mentor, so I guess weekend mentor to permanent mentor and started donating a lot of my time to these guys. And what we did is we sort of set ourselves a really ambitious goal, which was to sit down and we said, “Can we go from zero, startup weekend to running a successful crowdfunding campaign that would finish in January,” which gave us a total of 12 weeks from the two founders meeting each other to actually launching a crowdfunding campaign and hitting the target within 12 weeks. So what I wanted to share with everybody was really I guess my approach in how we did that. The end of our story is good, we hit our target. We wanted to raise $12,000, which we did. But I think what really interesting is a couple of lessons we’d learned. One of the key things we did was that we built an audience first. So we went back and we started all– the people we had at the beginning with the Logan startup weekend people. So got them, added them to our Facebook page, and then decided, “Okay. Well, Facebook is going to be our primary method of communication. We need one channel, but we got to be really good at it.” Any other channels we got, we decided that was going to feed towards Facebook. Again, it’s from the same square, it’s easy to be successful on one medium rather than trying to spread too thin. And everywhere we went, everyone we spoke to, the guys just encouraged people to follow them, to like them on Facebook to see the post, and everyone was directing people here to Facebook. So what we were really doing was building an audience and the idea behind the audience was people that have met the guys, met somebody, heard something could engage in some different way. The bigger that audience was the day that we decided to launch– the day we launched, sorry, the crowdfunding campaign, we had somebody to talk to. And the key to these crowd funding campaigns, and I have only run one, so this an experience of one is that if you launch and have zero dollars in the bank, you’re going to struggle. So what we did is we– as soon as we launched, we had a few bankers, people who we knew were going to come in and make donations. So right from the very word go, we had
me coming in. I guess [inaudible] the theme of today’s podcast I’m talking about [inaudible] talking about Seth Gordon talking about tribes and another thing, in his book, he talks about the need for the first person to jump out there and do something and say, “I’m going to start a movement.” And the absolutely crucial thing to the tribe is the second thing. Once you have a second person who joins in, you’ve got a tribe. That makes it really easy for person three, four, five and six to come along. Sitting back with zero dollars on a crowdfunding campaign waiting for the first person to drop a dollar is absolutely gut wrenchingly, excruciatingly hard to do. You’re sitting there saying to yourself, “This is never going to happen.” No one wants to move first so having two bankers at the very start made a massive difference for us, it meant that the momentum was there and people thought, “Yes, I’m going to get behind this and I’m going to give them a few dollars as well.” And obviously, the first two people it helps if they’re making reasonable donations. Over the course of that campaign which we ran for four weeks, we really focused on the story, we focused on the why. The amazing thing with Nick and Brad, is that they were really clear on their why. And it was really clear to everybody else who read their story and watched their videos is to why they were doing it. The amazing thing was they didn’t really know how, they still don’t really know exactly how, we had [inaudible] so we knew what we were going to deliver which was these PowerWells, exactly how wasn’t known. So it gets to this really interesting Simon Sinek quote and thing around getting to why and answering your why. We were able to successfully raise $12,000 and we didn’t even really know how, and we still didn’t know how we were going to get the PowerWells exactly in. We knew what we were doing, we knew why we were doing it, and it was the why that made a difference for these guys. Couple of other things we do in the crowdfunding campaign, every single time somebody donated, sent them a thank you email and that’s the automated one but Nick was in there sending a personal email saying “Thank you.” Giving the person at the same time some collateral that sort of said, “Hey, can you post this and share it so.” And when they did and then we were sort of posting and thanking them on social media so it really shined the movement. We told the story to news spots. We got some great coverage on the Brisbane Times, 4ZZZ, ABC Radio, and the reason we did is you get one go, you get one go at telling these stories and so we knew it was our momentum play, we knew we could get some press, we could get some coverage but it something that was going to eventually die down. So there was no real reason reason for us to go run this campaign for 12 weeks, it was really, we had one shot, one go at the story, had to draw a line in the sand, and the exciting thing for us was it’s actually the last few thousand dollars goes quickly. So effectively, in the crowdfunding, we launched, we started quickly, the middle was a real low, took a lot of people, a lot of 10 and $20 dollar donations and then as you get to the end and people can see that you’re inside– once you [inaudible] got past $10,000 dollars, we kind of even doubt if we were going to get there because you get to a situation where the people that have already backed you and the people that are thinking about it don’t want you to fail. The thing about a crowd funding campaign is when you set that mark, and we set it at $12,000 dollars, if we had raised 11,900 it would have been a failure because we wouldn’t have got a single dollar, you’ve got to get to the 12, 000, you can’t go under. But the great thing is when you do get close, you do find you tip over the end. So really, the key of the campaign for us was that we launched with some backers, we had an audience, we kept building the audience. Two, we really focused on the why, why we were doing PowerWells and what we have to achieve from it. And thirdly, we just kept the communication going, we focused on the explosive start, did as PR as we drive towards the story and got it over the line. So I don’t think PowerWells is typical, it’s sort of a B Corp style setup but the one definite thing, I’d recommend it for anybody, is if you’re to do any kind of crowdfunding campaign, is make sure you’ve built up a real audience before you get started. So that’s the end of my first podcast. I hope you’ve really enjoyed it, I’ve had a good time recording it for you. If you’d like to be featured or you have any questions you’d like me to address in future podcasts, just head over to fractal.com.au, the follow links through to the LinkedIn page where you can drop some comments down under this episode’s links. In those comments, and I’ll put some notes in the description there but just try to describe what your company is, the name of it, the URL is absolutely important, explain to me who your customers are, the problem that you’re solving, and then finally, in a little bit of detail, one or two lines, what’s the question you’d like to ask me for me to address in the next podcast. Those questions on LinkedIn almost always form the basis for each of my podcasts each week. I hope you’ve enjoyed it, look forward to answering your questions in future podcasts and we’ll see you next week. Cheers. [music]

 

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