This is Day 4 of my 30 Day Challenge to start a new company, start a Kickstarter, start a Shopify store. It is a whole new business that I am starting and I am really excited about it. If you have not already viewed the videos on the first three days, I highly recommend doing that. I am a little behind in filming the videos. I have been very busy. Let me give you some updates on what I have been doing. I have got some good news. A lot of really exciting things are going on.

So, the first thing I want to talk about is the marketing strategy I have. Now, a lot of people, I think, when launching a Kickstarter they reach out to Influencers and they say, “Hey, will you support my product? Will you send a Tweet out about it? Will you do this and do that and this other thing for me?” Now, I am flipping this around. Instead, I am asking people if I can help promote then. And the way I am doing this is kind of interesting. I have a personal podcast on How to do Your 20’s. It is a purely fun thing that I currently do on the side. I do not really make any money from it. I just enjoy good conversations. So, what I have been doing is reaching out to Influencers specifically in the health, fitness, nutrition space and asking them, “Hey, do you want to come on my Podcast.” Now, what this does is we end up having an hour long conversation and hopefully if everything goes well, I will develop a decent relationship with this person. Then, at the end of the episode I just mention to them this idea I have. Then, I judge from there, “Is this something they are interested in?” I want to get their feedback. If they say that is really stupid, instead of putting mixed cashews in it, you should put whatever in it. I am going to take a note of that. If enough people say that, I am going to change the recipe for what I am doing. So, that being said, it has gone great so far. Since this is day four – I just had the idea – I already know what happened and so far it has been doing really well. So, we will stick with that.
The next step – let me tell you about the packaging. I have this idea, maybe you will want to do the same thing I am doing, reaching out to Influencers. The lowest hanging fruit for me was getting my VA to go on ITunes. I gave him a bunch of keywords and then any podcast that is about MMA, I had him put it in this spreadsheet. I told him to include their name, the URL to the podcast, the URL to the website, their twitter handle, their email, and one or two other things. But, that was the main stuff. When I go through that and say, “Anyone who has more than 35 reviews, or 50 reviews or some other arbitrary line in the sand, I will contact these people. I recommend at least checking at their website and making sure it is a good fit before you waste your time having an hour long conversation with someone that is allergic to nuts, or whatever your product is, obviously. I did not actually scrape all the data. I let my VA do that. Then I go through and make sure everything is accurate. So, if the first name of the first person in the podcast is Tim, I am going to double check to make sure it is actually Tim. I will go to the website and check it. I also have been reaching out to these people with a semi-custom message. One message is more generic. I recommend checking out canned responses from Gmail.
So, I will put the canned responses – populate the email template and I will change some things. I try to make it seem like custom email even if 90% of it is canned. I highly recommend doing that. I just spent a lot of time ¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬sending at least 100 emails, something ridiculous, and a very high percentage of them responded to me. So, this is going great. This is my number one marketing strategy.
As of right now, I have some other things that I am thinking about as far as building an email list for and when I do launch the Kickstarter. But, once again, the goal is to interview them and afterwards have some conversation with them, tell them about it. Get them excited and get them interested in the project. Then, once it is live – or actually, even before it is live, I want to send them a free jar and say, “Hey, what do you think?” And, really listen to their opinion. This is not just a marketing event. It is also a little bit of research. So, that is the next step.
I am going to fast forward a little bit here. The other thing I did is I hired my co-packer, the person that is eventually going to be doing the co-packing. I said to them, “You know what, you are the expert. Let’s make a high quality, good tasting nut butter.” So, I sent them $350 worth of nuts and he is going to be testing out some different formulas and sending me some different samples. I am going to get the samples. I will taste it obviously. I will take them to the jujitsu gym that I go to currently and have them taste the samples. I will have friends that are potential customers taste the samples and keep track of what flavor does the best. Now, I think a trap that I have already caught myself getting into and I am trying to avoid is the flavor is never going to be super – never going to be perfect. But, I can tell you already from early testing, it is really, really good. “Perfect” is the enemy of done and I want to get this out. I can always reiterate later. If I realize down the road that I should have added a little bit more Macadamia nuts or a little bit more of whatever, I can always enhance it later on. But right now I want to get out a good quality product as soon as possible. So that is the other thing I have been doing. Just reaching out to people, having the podcast idea and the R&D so far.
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Thanks for watching this video and I will see you next time.