[00:00:00] Welcome to the Professor’s Podcast, where we discuss the best strategies to massively improve the reach and bottom line of your business in the current virtual and economic landscape.  Your host, Howard Thai generates over $5 billion for his clients annually using innovative tactics, both on and off Amazon.

[00:00:21] Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of The Professor’s Podcast. I'm as usual, the host, Hurricane Liz, and I'm here with two gentlemen. Obviously, you know, the first one, that is Howie, the man, the myth, the legend, the professor of Amazon and a special guest, which we're going to introduce shortly. But Howie, I know this guest, you met him in the trenches in China.

[00:00:42] So what a find, I've got to say. I heard the story. I know I've heard it all that, that happened, but how did you happen to find this guy deep in the trenches of China? Tell us a little bit more about him and why he stood out to you in terms of being able to deliver to your audience. A pretty Epic speech I'm imagining.

[00:01:01] So it's like, I think it was like three years ago or more, but let's say 2017 where I was interested in what he had to say, because he was talking about Kickstarter, a crowdfunding. So it was kind of really interested in it because I kind of wanted, always wanted to see how, how we could bring from a, from crowd, like a crowdfunding platform to onto Amazon and to grow it further on.

[00:01:30] So that was one, something that I really wanted to accomplish, which I think I will be able to talk about it with Don here. So that we can actually make sure that people that are actually don't have any money, won't have any money to be from a crowdfund, or crowd funding platform, like Kickstarter and will transfer themselves to Amazon and be able to from Amazon, roll their company or their brand to another level.

[00:01:57] So that is something that is very interesting. If we can get that started. Absolutely. And I'm going to introduce him in just a minute here, but let me say this much, Don will be one of 12 underground speakers that usually don't speak. They usually don't say too much, but they are experts in the field that we brought them in to speak about.

[00:02:19] And this guy has been underground for a very long time, and he's going to be speaking at the second ever annual Professor's Pandemic event, which will be held on November 9th and 10th. And if you want to learn more about that, stick around until the end of this actual podcast to hear where you can find out more.

[00:02:35] But without further ado, let me go in and introduce this gentleman. His name is Don Wilder and this at least is a name, I don't know, I haven't told Don this but I became known as the butcher of Amazon, because I butchered everybody's name who comes on this actual podcast. But I think yours is pretty straightforward.

[00:02:51] I don't think I butchered it. I almost did there because I overthought, but I finally got one right. But Don, I would tell people let's go to and just jump into straight into the actual interview. I want you to pretend that you are on an elevator with Howie, the man, the myth, the legend is I call him. And you want to give him a two minute elevator pitch on who you are and why you're qualified to speak at his pandemic event.

[00:03:15] Sure thing. Thanks for the introduction. Yeah. So I'm, I'm a Idaho boy based originally in the US and then 2010, I made tracks to go to China and I started working in the product development field and then focused in on crowd funding because it's, it's a great way to launch physical products into the market.

[00:03:36] And I did a few campaigns with some really good early on, in about 2013. About the time the platform was really growing. And then from there, I kind of leveraged success and there were some other Chinese hardware companies that wanted the same service then. So I transitioned and did quite a bit of consulting working primarily with Chinese hardware startups, helping them see success  on Kickstarter and launching, you know, hardware, physical products in space and accessing the Western market.

[00:04:06] So yes, to date, I mean, I've done over $2 million of fundraising on Kickstarter. You know, a few dozen campaigns and some of the campaigns that are far into the six figures and, you know, a few of them have been my own personal projects too. So, you know, going from ideation all the way through product development, all the way to launching that product, and then I'm getting out the market.

[00:04:33] That's amazing there. Howie, I know that you said that Don, you met him in a restaurant, is that correct? Could you tell us a little bit more about that?

[00:04:43] Yeah.  We met up in a restaurant.

[00:04:49] Is it an Italian restaurant in Mansun I brought my wife, he brought his, his girl, I believe at the time. I'm not sure whether she’s a wife yet, but, and then another guy I forgot there was another guy there too, and we kind of talked and there was a first, I was like, wow, guy's really interesting. He has tatted about full body, Pat.

[00:05:11] You know, it's hard to read. It's not very, usually we don't see that in some gen that, but he's one of the special ones. So, uh, yeah, that's all I met him or his expertise. I think it was, it was doing a belt back then or something that wouldn't be, what is the first campaign that I launched was a slider belts.

[00:05:35] Right. A little backstory was a friend of mine was the first of us like American ex-pats in Guangzhou that went to Kickstarter with the product that he, he, you know, pretty much was able to find in the markets, did a little bit of development around it, but not much launched it on Kickstarter and raised close to $400,000.

[00:05:57] For brand watches. Right? So when the few of us saw that we were like, wow, this is an interesting thing, you know, tell us more how this works. So from there, yeah, I jumped in, I kind of modeled what Ryan did was his project's original grain. And I decided to launch my own brand of men's fashion slider belts that didn't have any belt, belt holes in them.

[00:06:21] And the 30 day campaign that raised over 120,000 USD and was, was a big success. And that point I put, you know, no marketing dollars into the project, either just all organic traffic that, that drove those, those backing presales. So the platform has definitely changed a lot since then. And I've gone from doing some fashion products into like design and tech and some other categories on Kickstarter.

[00:06:46] So it's kind of a different space now. And I had a call podcast with Michael Michelini a few weeks ago, just discussing the differences between the platforms from early on in 2010, all the way up to 2020 over this past decade. But, but yeah, I mean, really there's a lot of synergy and I'm looking forward to being able to speak at your event just because.

[00:07:08] What I see in the space of physical product, you know, developing products for Amazon or eCommerce store. There really isn't, isn't a better way out there that I know of to get a product into the market, mitigating as much risk as possible as there is in crowd funding. Right? Some people listen to this podcast and they're not too familiar with what crowd funding is all about and to kind of break it down in a nutshell.

[00:07:38] There's a few different types of crowd funding platforms out there, but the three main types you've got Charity Crowd funding. So sites like GoFundMe, is a big one and it's just a charitable donation. Maybe someone in the community, a family member gets cancer and they want to try to raise money. So they'll post a campaign online to try to pull in charitable donations.

[00:08:00] Right. And then there's another kind, which is Equity Crowd funding. And that's for companies that have a business or a product that they want to get out in the market. But in order to raise funds, they're giving up a chunk of equity in their, in their company. Right. But the cool thing about Kickstarter Indigogo, these are the third.

[00:08:20] Kind is called Reward-based crowdfunding and yes. So for the past decade, this is reward based. Crowd funding has taken off because you're no longer giving up equity in a company like a traditional form of fundraising from the bank or from investors. You're actually putting it in a form of offering a reward to your supporters.

[00:08:43] So like I did the belt campaign, one was slider belt was $65, right? So someone gave $65. During that campaign, we hit our funding goal of 15,000. The campaign’s a success, we collect all of the, the funds. Then we take the funds. So we go out and manufacturer and we send it to the backers. So it's a huge win.

[00:09:05] Um, as not, we're not having to give up equity, we're able to successfully raise funds and then use that the funds to manufacture the goods. So, you know, compared to the traditional route of launching a product, there's, there's huge ways to mitigate that risk and have to give up equity in your company.

[00:09:25] Yeah. Um, like you said, helps mitigate the risk when, or from a person who doesn't have any cash too much. Like let's say you were going to raise a hundred thousand dollars for your next product launch product on Kickstarter, then you'll be able to like, make sure that the product is actually proven by the people who actually back you up and then you'll know that, Hey, that's a good product and you can then launch it further.

[00:09:53] to like, Amazon, where you have this. Now you have this profit and profit margin from the. For their first launch, then you can actually now use that profit to go on to the next level where Amazon's platform and maybe Shopify after that. So I think it's a good way for a lot of the people who are interested in launching and broader space.

[00:10:20] Without spending it. Can you explain us how much you think people would need in order for to start something like this? Like a crowd funding kind of campaign? Yeah, I think it really there's a wide spectrum and it comes down to the goals that the company or the creators have in mind, like what are they trying to accomplish?

[00:10:43] Do they just want to get an opening order with their factory in order to cover production costs and, you know, tooling without having to pocket all that upfront. Because, you know, maybe if you're developing a electronic product, there's a lot of steel injection molds that can get really expensive. Right.

[00:11:02] So, you know, the offset that we're, the crowd funds can really help support the launch, but, you know, It's a hard answer to say exactly. But if you're looking to raise less than six figures and a crowd funding campaign, then you might come to the campaign with surrounds, you know, five to $10,000 of budget prep preparing to create your marketing assets, your video, doing all the graphics on the page, having a little bit of a budget for

[00:11:30] Driving traffic. The big thing right now with crowds, can you have campaigns is just like maybe Amazon or some other sites it's become more saturated, right? There's more people that know about it and more people doing it. So in order to have success, you actually need to drive traffic from outside of the campaign because limited amount of organic traffic, like when I launched my Belt campaign in 2013, seven years ago, I didn't have to drive traffic.

[00:12:01] There was tons of organic traffic going to the page, but now most successful campaigns will drive over half of the traffic. Right? So that, that means for creators coming to the campaign with a mindset that you're going to need to drive traffic through some sort of a strategy. And most of the time is through Facebook ads.

[00:12:21] So having a little bit of a budget to drive paid advertising to your Kickstarter campaign, right? Is, is something that's important. So if you're, if you're looking to try to raise maybe a hundred thousand USD, then having, you know, anticipating a budget of about 10,000, just for driving traffic is important.

[00:12:39] You're going to have a positive ROI, right? So depending on, on what your price point is, but that's, that's a misconception that people have to be honest is that they think that it doesn't cost anything, uh, to be able to raise tons of money on crowdfunding. And that's not the case, it still takes some money, but it's still a better option than the traditional route of just, you know, pushing in tons of capital.

[00:13:03] To produce the product and get it over to the market and then just see how it does to see if it can actually get traction or proof of concept crowdfunding. You can get all of that really valuable data upfront. You can get those presales that come in. You can even get feedback from, from these early adopters.

[00:13:20] And then after the crowdfunding is over, as you mentioned, you can leverage that, that momentum from backers on Amazon. And with that, that exposure, and with that support, you know, your, your Kickstarter backers could be the early review on your Amazon listing. Right. It was a good combination. And Amazon has so far as to support Kickstarter and some other crowdfunding and accelerators of programs like Y Combinator and they've opened up Amazon launchpad.

[00:13:53] So as a successful Kickstarter creator, You could take your product and also get it into the Amazon launchpad program where they do additional support on your campaign list and give you more, more, um, I think they have a few additional tools that they'll give to Amazon sellers that go through that program.

[00:14:13] So there's some cool stuff. As far as the combination between e-commerce Amazon and then crowd funding. Right. And, you know, Don, you've already covered a lot of, a lot of ground. I mean, you really kind of informed us a ton of information, but I'd like to know what three to five topics have you thought about actually presenting at the actual professor's pandemic event, other than what you talked about, have you actually thought about what you would share or what kind of exciting topics that you think people would actually feel that really relevant to Amazon?

[00:14:47] Yeah, you bet. You bet. Well, I think one in particular that I would love to dive into deep, I think it would be something people would want to learn about is really the connection between launching physical products, using Kickstarter and pushing them over to Amazon. There's been, you know, a lot of campaigns that have gone through Kickstarter and, and then done extremely well on Amazon.

[00:15:11] And, you know, like one, one in particular is a game that you guys may have played or known about called cards against humanity. Right now, what people don't know is that was actually a Kickstarter product that then went to Kickstarter. And about 2014 or 15, a group of high school friends, they put together a model of apples to apples, but with an adult spin on it and they called it cards against humanity.

[00:15:37] They raised about $15,000 on Kickstarter. Not really that much. Right. But they've lost the product on Amazon and it's a fun game, a lot of word of mouth. And if you look now on Amazon, they've got almost 50,005 star reviews right there. They are a powerhouse and they're there in the seven figures every month.

[00:15:58] You know, usually around Christmas, they'll jump up to four or 5 million in gross sales on Amazon. And it all started from a simple little crowdfund, right. But, but there's, there's tons of them. Nobody's like that. So that's one of the things I'd like to talk about. The thing is data-driven design because of Amazon and some other tools that you can kind of get into the backend through jungle scout and through helium 10.

[00:16:21] And you can really see what products are doing well on Amazon, right? And I'm learning how to take that data and go to Kickstarter and kind of improve designs that can work well with Kickstarter. So data driven design, just being able to go through deep research, use crowd funding, to launch and get over to an Amazon or an eCommerce store is something I think that sellers could really utilize.

[00:16:46] Yeah. Okay. So I just want to also ask you, what do you see? People who are having problems now for crowd funding in 2020? Yeah. Well, I think there's, there's a few areas. One in particular is with crowdfunding. A lot of people don't know where we're the right place to put mine. Like if you're going to spend money to set up a crowdfunding campaign, it's me like be similar to Amazon where there's a lot of black cats.

[00:17:17] Right. So a lot of companies that will front saying, Oh, we can help you with your crowdfunding campaign. We can, we can do all these different services. We can drive traffic and, and it's, it's really a lot of scams. So it's hard to know really the best way to utilize your budget to get the maximum effects.

[00:17:36] Right? So that's one of the areas that's a challenge of 2020 again, cause it's so saturated. But another thing is really just learning how to connect with the, you could say more of like the organic audience on Kickstarter. So Kickstarter has brought in. You know, every month they have around 26 million visits to their site.

[00:17:57] So they have heavy traffic that goes there and they've got a lot of supporting backers, but you know, it's a community just like any community. There's going to be certain things expectations within the community that if you're coming from the outside and you don't understand this, and you may not have as successful of a race as what you would like.

[00:18:15] So, you know, last year I launched my first game on Kickstarter. And I had seen a lot of successful games go through Kickstarter. I'm like, all right, I did it. And it was one of the toughest categories that I've ever funded. Right? Like most category categories at one time, we're going to have around 200 live funding projects, but the games category, tabletop games, especially Pat over 500.

[00:18:40] Right. So you're competing if you're on stage moving from 200 to contestants, two to four or 500. So it's hard to stay at the top, but within that, That community. There's a lot of, like, you can say gatekeepers. So my game was around improv. So I went out and I they're looking for a celebrity improv comedians and actors and coaches.

[00:19:01] And that really wasn't the ideal spokesperson for the campaign. Right. So the backers would see that, but they weren't really moved by it as much as a few gatekeepers that are, are commonly reviewing Kickstarter games. So if you guys that have small blogs where they post, you know, upcoming Kickstarter or reviewing via Kickstarter campaigns, et cetera.

[00:19:20] So, um, that's one of the things that I would, I would say it's a challenge. Guys, come into crowd funding. They don't really realize what the communities are about and what moves it. So they don't, they don't see the maximum amount of success there. How about another words? What about the opportunities in 2024 deep crowdfunding?

[00:19:39] What do you see for the people who are interested in getting into, into it? Well, again, I mean, what I'm really interested in is. Seeing now, because of all the data that people can access online and utilizing that to build, I have a, a better, better product. That's right. So you can, you can see what types of products are doing well on crowdfunding, and you can also see the type of products that are doing well on Amazon, on Shopify.

[00:20:12] And I'm just connecting the dots. Right. So I think there's tons of opportunity. Another thing too, is a lot of this tech, traditional tech is slowly moving into an IOT format, right? So I've seen. I've seen kind of shifts in basic that, or whether it's analog turn into digital, right. Or there's a combination of something that uses an app.

[00:20:36] So like a water bottle that somehow can track your water intake using an app. Now there's, uh, a lot of that stuff in the market that I feel like that is creators. If you look closely, you can see it like a lot of it's coming out of Shenzhen too. Right? So there's, there's definitely opportunities there. I wanted to ask one question before you, you notice, like, I'm not sure about right now, but before we noticed like a lot of people who had like a lot of Kickstarter campaigns and stuff they put on there and a lot of Chinese manufacturer or whatnot would copy it and try to start selling.

[00:21:16] What do you see? What's the trend that you can tell us about what happened before and now these Chinese factories that are trying to copy. Yeah, well, you know, I've seen it go both ways. To be honest, I've seen a heavy amount of creators that are outing, so to speak when they go to conventions like the cancer fair or whatever, and they'll lift products and they will, they will say it's there.

[00:21:43] Right? So it's an OEM brands that they're coming to a crowdfunding site, which is technically isn't allowed, but they get away with it. Right. Harder to do a little harder to do now than, than what it was before, but on the reverse side. Yeah. Like Chinese manufacturers and companies will, will look on Kickstarter for innovative products that they're going to copy manufacturer.

[00:22:03] And most of the time they don't have the reach to get into the markets that the creators do like the Western market. Okay. So they just sell domestically and there's a third, there's a third way that I've seen it happen. There's there's contracts that are set up with manufacturers. So. You know, one campaign that just finished on Kickstarter was called.

[00:22:24] It was a fitness product, almost like a Bowflex, like a reinvented Bowflex. It's a V shape. And it's got a hinge in any way. You can do home workouts with it. It raised, I think, 4 million USD on Kickstarter. And they sell it for on Amazon for around 150 USD. Right. Kickstarter was little, it was over a hundred.

[00:22:44] And that product with the branding audio branding, it sells on, on Taobao for $20. Right. And I don't know, no, if it's the manufacturer that's selling under the table, or if they made an agreement with the creators that they could, they could sell. At whatever, you know, they want to sell that to the domestic market.

[00:23:04] Since that's not the creator's focus, I don't know. But there is a lot of space between these two. These two countries are, are vast markets, whether it's the Chinese market and Western markets. I think learning as a creator to be a bit just aware of what's going on. If it isn't important products, it has some high IP, both patenting in China.

[00:23:28] And then in your, in your folks, markets is an important thing because Pat's in China. It's not that expensive, to be honest, right. Compared to other markets. So. So, yeah, I mean, one of my good friends I'll, I'll give you just a quick story. He crowdfunded a really innovative product. It was, it was a, a mat that you put next to your bed, like a rug and it had a built in alarm clock.

[00:23:52] So the only way you'd actually shut off the alarm clock was standing on the mat. Right? And, um, he raised over 400,000  USD on Kickstarter. And then I was surprised I was in China and I'm looking on Taobao, which they have a crowdfunding platform as well. And I'm seeing Winston's products on the Taobao site.

[00:24:11] So I messaged him. I'm like, Winston, why did you, why did you launch your product in China? Like, it was a bit surprised and he's like, I don't know what you're talking about. I didn't launch, I didn't launch anything in China. And immediately I realized it was either his manufacturer or some other manufacturer that size product, but his IP was so low.

[00:24:28] It's easy to copy. And they rolled it out at a faster production schedule than what Winston had. Right. So the thing was, you know, they couldn't access the Western market. Winston had that settled. So he did really well on Amazon. He did well on Shopify. You know, he was doing six figures a month and they just decided to not sweat.

[00:24:47] Like there's some things as. As a creator that you can control other things you can't. So I'm not trying to spend your energy where it's not necessarily needed is important, I think. Right. And we're about to wrap it up here, Don, but I wanted to ask you one last question. What do you see most people do wrong on these actual kick-starting platforms?

[00:25:11] Good question. Yeah. I mean, I can, I think I could unpack quite a bit there, but. You know, Kickstarter is again a community. They like to hear stories about the process of innovation and the process of development and the reasons why it's important. Right. It's different than like a sales page. And I see. I see creators that go to crowdfunding and they're just putting a very traditional, like sales pitch out there.

[00:25:40] And it doesn't gel that well. Right. So that's one of the things that I see as an issue. Another thing is that, you know, Kickstarter, it is very, it is a very design centric type of a site. So a lot of these early birds, you know, like early adopters, Are, you could say mid to high income, you know, white collar and into tech and fashion and design.

[00:26:02] So even on the sites products that are more designed like center, right? So they've got a lot of very strong visuals and good creative assets. It's good videos, uh, do much, much better than sites that are campaigns that kind of just go on the low ball on the budgeting for them. Video and such. So again, there's some things that creators, I see that they major in the minors on things that's not important.

[00:26:28] They push money where it's not really necessarily useful. And then they there's others that do the opposite. You know, they, they groom the creatives really well and they build out a community before they launched, since there's certain things like that, that can really give the campaigns a lot of extra support through the community when they do things right.

[00:26:50] Yeah. Awesome. Don, will you cover a lot of, a lot of information there that was all hardly even aware that that existed. I've been selling on Amazon for a long time, but it kind of opened my eyes to a whole new realm of possibilities. I, for one am super excited to hear what your talk is going to be at the second ever professor's pandemic event, which I'm about to give you guys details on here in a second, but how he, what did you think?

[00:27:12] I mean, was Don also for what. If he's not awesome, I'm gonna be having him on. Right. I always have questions regarding the Kickstarter because it's something that I'm very interested in and wanted to more know more about how it all works out. What's the integrated part of getting a successful Kickstarter campaign as well before, before we.

[00:27:33] For my, one of my last questions I wanted to ask him. So for marketing wise, you said it's mainly now, since it's all on the, you need more than just the organic sales or organic traffic, one of the external traffic you were saying, which is the Facebook, is there any other external traffic that is getting selled besides Facebook that you see people are doing?

[00:27:57] Yeah, well, I mean, Facebook is kind of  the main channel for driving. Since you can get quite focused on your audience and, you know, with pixeling, but I see that YouTube and Google advertisements can be of use, but overall, the, you know, for the, the ROI, usually Facebook ads is the best. I want to say. How about like, do you ever see people do like PRS and does the PR help a lot?

[00:28:27] Have you seen like a lot of campaign where influencers there stepped back, get that particular Kickstarter campaign? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And it depends on the right. So influencer marketing can work with crowdfunding. It's usually not something that people creators will focus on a lot. There's, there's some companies it's like, if they're trying to have a really big race, they'll hire a traditional PR company that they're, you know, they're going to be writing to journalists and media and tech blogs to try to get featured that, that.

[00:29:00] Process. It takes a lot longer and it's a bit more manually tiresome, right? Cause when you drive Facebook ads, you can drive a huge audience fairly quickly within a week or two weeks. Right. But if you're doing traditional PR connecting with journalists and all these different gatekeepers, it can be, can be a tough one.

[00:29:17] So that's why traditional PR companies exist. So creators don't have to do all that manually, but yeah, that is, that is an approach for sure. Yeah. Awesome. Amazing. Thanks so much, Don, for joining us. We really appreciate it. I'm fired up to your, what you're going to say at the event and Howie as usual, well, thank you for hosting us again.

[00:29:39] If you guys want to find out more information the last time I butchered the link, again, going back to the butcher of Amazon, it is Howardthai.com/PPE2. So the number 2 at the end of that, not spelled out just the number to find out more information. On the second ever annual professor's pandemic event, which will be held November 9th and 10th from the luxury and comfort of your own home.

[00:30:01] So as I always tell people, you can show up bottomless, you can show up topless. We're not going to see you on screen. If you don't want to be seen show up, however, in the heck you want it's Howardthai.com/PPE2. And again, no worries. You can chill in the comfort of your own home and listen in as 12 to 13 experts from around the world are going to tell you about the latest strategies and tactics and what is working on Amazon.

[00:30:26] Right. And as Don just talked about off of Amazon too. So if you're ready to hear about all this new technology that's available for Amazon. Yeah. As Don spoke about things we've been around since 2012, I think, I think he said he started in 2013. But this is an area of expertise that he's known now for over seven years of learning and implementing and consulting with really big brands raised over $2 million.

[00:30:50] He will be one of the many. Howie, any last words before we sign off here? Um, I'm sorry, I don't have any other things to say. A man of a few words, as we usually say. A man of few words and few emotions, but when it comes down to it, he's fired up to also present his presentation. So I can't wait to hear what that's going to be about.

[00:31:10] We will reveal that in a future podcast, but again, Don, thank you so much. And thank you so much for everyone out there for tuning in. We'll see you on the next podcast. Alright, thanks for having me. Thank you Don. Welcome to the Professors Podcast, where we discuss the best strategies to massively improve the reach and bottom line of your business in the current virtual and economic landscape, your host Howard Thai generates over $5 billion for his clients annually using innovative tactics, both on and off Amazon.