How One Author Raised $41m on Kickstarter

Jesse Pujji: By the way, I have one quick aside to a totally funny random story. Or thing I want you to help me with, actually. So in 15 months, 14 months, I'm going to be 40, turning 40, and I want to have a massive extravaganza party in St. Louis. Maybe even a conference-style party, like invite everyone—everyone listening, everyone on Twitter. And I'm trying to get Nelly to perform at my birthday.

Alex Lieberman: Why Nelly? Was Nelly your favorite growing up?

Jesse Pujji: Yeah, in St. Louis. Yeah, absolutely. And so during Covid, I'm part of YPO here, they got him, and I don't want to say how much, but it was pretty cheap. Cheap to the point where I was like, "Oh, I could probably do that as a part of the birthday expenses." Now apparently that's all over, and now it's like six figures to book. It's really...

Alex Lieberman: Oh, really?

Jesse Pujji: Yeah. So I don't know, this whole conversation around crowdfunding got me thinking. I need to put a budget together and I'm going to go on Twitter and here and be like, "Come to my party, donate money towards the Nelly fund to Jesse to have Nelly perform at Jesse's 40th birthday party."

Alex Lieberman: What's up, everyone? I'm Alex Lieberman.

Jesse Pujji: Yo, this is Jesse Pujji.

Alex Lieberman: And this is The Crazy Ones. Dude, what an awesome week. We recorded the episode about you selling your company, and then just the outpouring of congrats and hello emails came in. Pretty wild, right?

Jesse Pujji: It's crazy. I don't get overwhelmed often. That's not a feeling I'm used to feeling. And I think it's just this whole month has been, or January has been just overwhelming. Because first, we told all the former employees who were all getting checks for the sale. Then two weeks later there was the PR announcement, then that thing that...

Alex Lieberman: Which you didn't know about originally.

Jesse Pujji: I didn't know exactly when it was coming out; you told me, of course. But then, you know this, starting a company. So many people, your first vendor who sold you IT computers to your first client. This is everyone's...it's all the human experience. And then your trick of, "Say hi," and that we've gotten hundreds of emails that are just so touching, I just...

Alex Lieberman: No joke, because again, we typically do these episodes as like, I don't know, 40 minutes. We try to keep it to that, and now I'm rethinking everything. Given the last episode, I don't know, it was an hour and 20 minutes, and about an hour and five minutes in, I was like, if anyone's out there, if anyone's still listening, just write "Hi" to thecrazyones@morningbrew.com. And by the way, if you're listening, everyone's going to hate me for this. Write "Hi" at thecrazyones@morningbrew.com and we'll get back to you. I'm sorry, Micaela, Dan, and everyone else who's on the listserv.

But I literally thought we were going to get 10 emails, and we've gotten hundreds. And some of them were people just saying hi, but some of them were the most thoughtful emails. So I'm actually looking at the inbox right now and I'm just going to call out a few people like Dave F, Max M, Colin M, Justin W, Amanda J, Carolyn M, Abby J. The list goes on. The most ridiculous email that I think we got, touching, absurd, slightly strange, was the email of the person who's currently buying an Ampush T-shirt off of Craigslist or Etsy. Did you see that one?

Jesse Pujji: Yeah. You sent it to me, and I couldn't believe it.

Alex Lieberman: Yeah, but I didn't know if you looked at it.

Jesse Pujji: Yeah, it was apparel from a couple of our offsites in the middle of the decade, and the OG Ampush shirt. It blew my mind.

Alex Lieberman: It was insane. Well, what the last week told me is that we're doing something really cool, this show, that we have amazing listeners, and that we just continue to be on this journey kind of climbing up the mountain of building the best startup show on Planet Earth that helps people build their businesses. And so we're really humbled by all of the support.

Jesse Pujji: Two things that came up for me in just a very real way. I think one, I always call it the gravitational force of company-building, and it's not something I realized, and I think a lot of people who think about starting a company don't get this until you do it. It starts as a speckle of dust, and then five speckles of dust. And the next thing you know, it's a few rocks. And I remember the first time I saw someone out in public where I had an Ampush T-shirt on and they were like, "Oh yeah, Ampush." It was a thing that wasn't me and it was separate. And I'd see those T-shirts on Etsy, but I think it's a reminder of one of the coolest parts of the entrepreneurial journey is building something that is beyond you and outlasts you. And I just encourage people to think about it that way, because it's so powerful.

I think the other thing about all those emails for me, you and I obviously don't do this for money. Spiritually, I want to help other people learn and grow. And I think entrepreneurship is a great canvas to do that. And so to see and feel that we're actually doing that with all this stuff with you and I talking, it really filled my cup quite a bit. So it was cool.

Alex Lieberman: Yeah, it was amazing. So thank you all, and write us in if you haven't yet; we want to say hi. We want to learn about you. And without further ado, let's continue to give you all value and hop into this episode of The Crazy Ones.

Okay, we are recording. What episode is this? This is episode 21 of The Crazy Ones. As per usual, my co-host Jesse is late, and the worst part about it is there was expectation-setting that set him up for failure. He was like, guys, I'm doing a cycle reboot on my computer, because that's been the excuse for the last month and a half, is it's a computer issue that requires a cycle. He did the cycle, and he was five minutes late. So what's the excuse this time?

Jesse Pujji: No excuse, man. I got some development areas. We all have things we gotta get better at, but I went deep on this with my coach yesterday, and it was, as per the usual, it was very...I learned a lot about myself, and because it's not, obviously this being late is a symptom of a whole variety of other issues. My time is super tight in my calendar, you know that. I overschedule myself and I'm not good at saying no to things. Like I took two calls today that probably weren't the best, weren't ideal and aligned.

Alex Lieberman: No offense to those people that he spoke to.

Jesse Pujji: No, no, no. It has nothing to do with them. It has everything to do with me getting it all right, prioritizing. And it was funny because oftentimes when you do coaching, there's two sides of the coin. This is just a little tidbit and we can get into the episode. One side of the coin is just highly tactical, and if you make a small habit adjustment, it can sort of solve the problem you're having. And then the other one is literally the polar opposite, which is, there's some deeply rooted issues, and confronting them and absolving yourself like a kind of...and so I'll tell you, I'll share both of them, how it went. On the deep side, I'm a type seven on the Enneagram, and we need to do an episode about Enneagram and conscious leadership. But...

Alex Lieberman: By the way, I did the Enneagram after Jesse sent it to me, and I'm a seven also.

Jesse Pujji: Yeah, so you'll learn about yourself in this. One of our biggest fears deep down is emptiness. It's actually the one thing we're trying to not deal with and feel. So we have a tendency to...every minute has to have some stimulation in it, and it has to have something that...so literally when I did this just now, I said that to you guys, I changed. I wasn't wearing my turban, so I tied my turban. In the middle of it, my marketing manager for GrowthAssistant came up with a great idea for how we can engage agencies, because a big priority this year is to...and he started, and I just started Slacking with them. And so I was like, it's this constant need for stimulation, and the fear that it's trying to solve is that I'm afraid, and it's so true, of emptiness. I'm not okay just sitting there being still; that's scary for me.

And there was just kind of like, can you let that go and can you embrace emptiness? It's okay to have an hour in your calendar that's not scheduled, Jesse. And in theory my head says yes, but then my actions don't do that. So that's the deep side of it, is getting comfortable with emptiness. Emptiness in my calendar. There's another cool thing he said, which is, it seems like you're more committed to doing than being. So if you were more committed to being, you would care more about how you showed up, and showed up energized and not late or whatever. Instead, you were more committed to doing. You wanted to talk to your marketing manager, then jump on the podcast. 

So anyway, that's the...then the wholly tactical thing. One of the things we came at the end of the conversation was, and I told my EA to do it this morning, starting officially February 21st. He asked me, he was like, will you block off two hours to start your day every day? No meetings, partly to get your stuff done, but partly to calm. You know, like warm up the engine before you rev it up, versus jumping into things and then being frantic all day, which has been a lot of my experience so far this year. And I was like, "I can't do it this week. I'm traveling." And I was like, "I'll do it in March." And he's like, "Ehh...that doesn't work for me, Jesse." We eventually negotiated to February 21st. So as of February 21st, I'm going to block off 9:00 to 11:00 every morning. I'm going to start that way and it's going to hopefully create a little bit more breathing room to not overfill my calendars. And that's the tactical side. So anyway, it's just interesting, that's how coaching works.

Alex Lieberman: It means a lot to me that my time and this show are maybe a little part of the motivation that are leading to conversations with your coach about something that you want to grow with or to work on. And I mean, it sounds like you have a little bit of a plan to get there. I'm just also curious, one last question is, do you bake buffers into your calendar? Do you leave any extra time in between meetings, like a five-minute buffer in case something runs over, or no?

Jesse Pujji: My EA does, and I don't respect them.

Alex Lieberman: You just treat it as, that is the...

Jesse Pujji: I'm like, "I got free time! Hey, you want to talk really quick?" I called Vinny, my brother, for 15 minutes to catch up on three things him and I have been wanting to talk...we were joking about it yesterday, or not joking. It was like, well, the joke, it's not a joke. It was like, it feels...I've never drank alcohol a day in my life. I've never taken drugs, I've never done...I gamble, and I tend to have....but I was like, well, from what I've heard about what an addiction feels like, this feels like an addiction. I am addicted to filling my calendar, because even though I know, I knew I shouldn't have been talking to my marketing manager in between the time I messaged you guys and I was tying my turban and I got back on the show, but I was addicted. I had to fill that five minutes in between the folds of my turban with messaging him back and forth.

And so it feels like something that's almost hard to control. And the other analogy we gave, which was kind of fun, interesting and scary, it was a fun...is like I felt like I was rolling down a hill. I feel like I'm rolling down a hill around this category and I just can't stop myself. I know I'm rolling. I know I'm a little out of control. It was a really interesting coaching session, but...

Alex Lieberman: Well, this is why you pay Dave the big bucks, and I'm excited for February 21st. We'll keep chatting about it as you make progress.

Jesse Pujji: Let's do it.

Alex Lieberman: Cool. Okay, episode time. On this episode of The Crazy Ones, I am going to give Jesse a little bit of an update on my ridiculous plunger backyard game, The Plunge. Some tweaks to the strategy, one of those being going into crowdfunding and launching this on Kickstarter. We'll talk a little bit about the crowdfunding model and some of the biggest crowdfunding blowups and success stories, and maybe a few ideas we have around crowdfunding in general. So let's do this thing.

Jesse Pujji: You're gonna start, why don't you...you're gonna share some of the cool crowdfunding stories you learned about, right?

Alex Lieberman: You want me to start with that?

Jesse Pujji: I think it's a cool way to start, and then I have questions for you.

Alex Lieberman: Okay. So I've gone down this crowdfunding rabbit hole, because The Plunge, originally I was going to launch it on its own site. I was going to market it myself. We can talk about it in a little while, why I didn't think that was actually going to be the right strategy. And so now I'm going to be doing crowdfunding on Kickstarter for The Plunge, I think in May or June. But in doing research on Kickstarter, there's a few interesting things I learned. First of all, I've always found it interesting that a lot of businesses in a given space all launch around the same time. So it's Uber and Lyft, or Airbnb. A lot of these businesses either will launch around the same time, as a function of where we are in the economy or as a function of technology. 

I don't know what that is for crowdfunding, but like Indiegogo, Kickstarter, which are a specific type of crowdfunding, they're crowdfunding based on rewards, not based on equity in a company. They all launched around 2007, 2008, but the quick and dirty around Kickstarter is, this company is the largest crowdfunding platform for rewards-based crowdfunding. So not crowdfunding where you earn a piece of the company. Kickstarters raised $7 billion; 22 million people have backed a project. And the reason the founder of the company started Kickstarter is because he was living in New Orleans in late 2001. He wanted to bring a pair of DJs down to play a show during 2002 Jazz Fest. He had this great venue, the guy was all amped to have this show in Jazz Fest, and the show never happened, and it never happened because it was too much money, because he couldn't justify putting the money down. And so his idea was, the fact that there was a potential audience for this and that audience didn't get to see them because there was no way for the audience to actually be able to buy tickets for the show and make it happen. That was the idea for Kickstarter. And now you talk about 14 years later and Kickstarter is massive; it gets 30 million hits to the site a month.

Jesse Pujji: Wow.

Alex Lieberman: I went down the rabbit hole...

Jesse Pujji: You said it's raised $7 billion, you mean it's raised on behalf of companies, I assume. It hasn't...

Alex Lieberman: On behalf of companies, and then their take is 5%.

Jesse Pujji: Got it.

Alex Lieberman: But it's interesting; I haven't fully figured it out. They switched to being a public benefit corporation in 2015, so I don't know how it actually works in terms of, can they be profitable? Is a public benefit corporation a nonprofit? I'm not sure. I have to look more into it. I know there are a few other companies that do this. I think Allbirds is actually a public benefit corporation, but I was going down the list of interesting companies that have launched on Kickstarter. It's actually pretty crazy when you look at it. Peloton launched on Kickstarter. Allbirds launched on Kickstarter.

Jesse Pujji: Wow.

Alex Lieberman: Oculus launched on Kickstarter, but there are two beyond those companies that stand out to me. The craziest one is in March of last year. March of 2022 was the biggest, most successful Kickstarter campaign of all time. And if you had to guess what this campaign was, I'd give you a hundred guesses and you'd probably be wrong. It wasn't technology, it wasn't a game—it was an author. So there's this guy, Brandon Sanderson. I've never heard of this guy, but he is an author who writes fantasy work and science fiction, and I guess he's like prolific. He's written dozens of books, and his audience of fantasy readers frickin' loves this guy. And in March of last year, he launched his Kickstarter campaign. I will say it was his second campaign. He had done one in the past, and he raised $41 million.

Jesse Pujji: Oh my god.

Alex Lieberman: He raised $41 million.

Jesse Pujji: What?

Alex Lieberman: $20 million of it came in the first 72 hours. And just for context, the most-backed campaign before that was Pebble, the watch company, which we'll talk about in a minute. He doubled that number, and the way that he did this whole thing was genius. First of all, he came out with a YouTube video on the day that the campaign went live, and he basically...I watched the video. He steps up to his audience and he is like, "I've been lying to you." That's how he starts. He goes, "I've been lying to you."

Jesse Pujji: Great hook, great hook.

Alex Lieberman: Yep. "For the last year, I was bored. I didn't know what to do." And he goes into this whole thing about, he wrote four books in a year, so he wrote four books in the previous year and the manuscripts are done. And he was launching a Kickstarter where anyone who backed the project would get a book a quarter from him for the next year. And so you could either get it in e-book, audiobook, hard cover, or all of them bundled together. And I just started running the numbers, because...

Jesse Pujji: They must have been self-published, right? He didn't...

Alex Lieberman: Yeah, self-published, he has his own publishing company called [Dragonsteel], 30 people. And after I heard it was self-published, I was like, this guy must have made so much frickin' money on this thing, because I always hear about how publishing is very broken, and I always wonder, why don't more people self-publish, especially if they have audiences. So I'm gonna do a quick breakdown. So my thought...I'll tell you the punchline first. I believe that this guy made at least nine and a half million dollars from this campaign, and typically a Kickstarter campaign is 60 days max. So I think he made nine and a half million dollars in his pocket from this, after all costs. So I ran the numbers, and basically on Kickstarter you have different tiers, and so I'm going to take you through the tiers quickly. His lowest tier was $40, so $40 for a quarterly e-book. So I have to assume the cost of the e-book like this has to be 98% margin. There were 44,000 people that backed the e-book, so that's $1.7 million right there.

Jesse Pujji: Oh my god.

Alex Lieberman: Then the next tier was audiobooks. So $60 to get a quarterly audiobook, 40,000 backers, that's $2.4 million right there. Premium hardcover is where you actually have some cost that goes into it. And I looked up some numbers. It looks like the average cost of a hardcover was, shipping and the book is $8 and he charged $160 for premium hardcover, and that includes four books. So $8 a book, $32 is his cost for it. And so $160 on the books minus the $32, times 49,000 people bought his hardcovers. That's $6.2 million in profit. And then there was a group of people that bought all formats, on e-book, audiobook and hardcover. All this to say, I believe he did...

Jesse Pujji: Why only nine and a half? He must have made $25m with...

Alex Lieberman: No. Okay, so first of all, he had $12.4...let me, so e-books, $1.7 million, audiobooks $2.4 million, and I'm just calling that pure profit, I'm assuming no cost. The premium hardcover, I'm just taking out the cost right now of the books, and that's $6.2 million. And then for all formats, which is hardcover, e-book, audiobook, that's another $2 million. So that's $12.4 million.

Jesse Pujji: Where's the $40 million? I thought you said he raised $40m when he did it.

Alex Lieberman: He did raise $40m, and I didn't go through all of the tiers. I just went through the first four tiers. There were like eight tiers, so he could have had more. I also took out the salaries. This is unfair, but I took out the salaries of everyone at his publishing house. So there's 30 people. I assumed hundred thousand dollar salaries, $3 million in salaries a year. Of course, these people are working on more than just those four books, so that's $9.5 million right there. But I only got to...to your point, I only got to $15 million in revenue. I don't know where the other $40m came from or the other $25m came from. So this guy, I think in all fairness, it's probably more like $15m to $20m in profit. And this is just a single author. Again, who has been writing fantasy books for the last 25 years.

Jesse Pujji: What'd you find in terms of the average success of something running on...what's the average amount raised? And...

Alex Lieberman: Yeah, so the average...I don't know the average amount raised, but there have been 581,000 projects that have been launched on Kickstarter, and 230k of them 230,000, have been successfully funded. So it's a 40% hit rate. So I didn't have a reference point, but it's pretty good. And so I started basically thinking about...and we can come back to one of the other crowdfunding stories like Pebble. But just to contextualize this for a second, and for people who have done crowdfunding or are thinking about it. Why did I even approach this topic?

The long story short of it is, with my backyard game, I was originally going to...my whole plan was I was going to leverage my distribution, so I was going to leverage my Twitter following, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, et cetera, and just promote the hell out of this game to those people. And then I was also going to create social videos and drive people to a website where people could pre-order. And the reason I decided that Kickstarter or crowdfunding would be the way to go is, one, I think I have a really quality audience, but it's a quality audience of entrepreneurial minds and founders. I don't know that it's a quality audience of people who throw plungers at boards. I think there's some Venn diagram there, but I think it's maybe 10% of the Venn diagram is my audience, so I think that's part of it.

Jesse Pujji: You're so surprisingly conservative about this. It sort of blows my mind how trigger-shy I find you about this business. Like, dude. We just talked last time that you don't have...I'm a dad, I have kids, I'd throw plungers with them in my backyard. You don't need that big of a Venn diagram to start making money from it.

Alex Lieberman: Okay, well, so I agree that I am risk-averse, but think about it from this perspective. What's the downside of doing Kickstarter? So on Kickstarter, first of all, Kickstarter's three biggest categories are games, design, and technology. So gaming is its biggest category. My view is, why wouldn't I have a Kickstarter campaign where I get organic traffic from their audience that's already built into Kickstarter? I can drive my...

Jesse Pujji: And how does that work, by the way? How do you actually get organic traffic from their audience?

Alex Lieberman: Yeah, so this is the whole game. I would say it's very similar to the Product Hunt game, or there's probably other analogies for Hacker News, et cetera. So the whole idea is, and I'm actually...I decided to work with an agency that is a Kickstarter agency.

Jesse Pujji: Lovely.

Alex Lieberman: It's $8,800 bucks that I'm paying them for the next four months. And basically, the whole trick is building up an email list. So you want to build up a really qualified email list before you launch your campaign. And what they actually have you do, this agency, is they have you build a landing page where you send people to the landing page with your product. They first put their email address in and after putting their email address in, it prompts them to ask if they want to reserve a spot to get their Kickstarter product. Like the Kickstarter product at the biggest discount possible.

Jesse Pujji: Oh, I love that.

Alex Lieberman: Because typically on Kickstarter you just...and to reserve your spot, it's $1. And they have found that people who do the $1 reservation are 30 times more likely than just an email address you put in.

Jesse Pujji: That makes sense.

Alex Lieberman: And so...

Jesse Pujji: Which by the way, hold on, is before we move on from that, for anyone listening who has never started a business or who is in the early stages, $1 makes a person 30 times more likely to actually buy something. So when you're launching something with just an email address versus a dollar, it's so different what the demand or the intent level is of a person who's given you any amount of money. That's basically what it proves, versus just an email, and...people giving you an email address aren't saying, they're not really demonstrating that much interest. Just keep in mind the difference between email versus $1. 30 times. That's crazy.

Alex Lieberman: And that's why at the end of the day, it's so important to think about, what's the ultimate outcome you want? Because even in the early days of Morning Brew, we were not very calculated about emails. We would just look at, what is the lowest cost of acquiring emails to our list? And then at some point we're like, actually, if advertisers are paying us and they're paying us based on the opens we get of our newsletter, we need people who actually open the newsletter. So then it became, let's spend our marketing on channels that get us the lowest acquisition cost of the highest quality subscribers, which is people who open at least five of their first 10 newsletters. So yeah, a hundred percent. So all this to say, we build up this email list and the goal is, the kind of unspoken rule is, if you can hit your campaign goal in the first 24 hours...

Jesse Pujji: You get a bunch of...

Alex Lieberman: You will get onto the homepage on Kickstarter.

Jesse Pujji: Yeah, that makes sense.

Alex Lieberman: And so you get onto the homepage of Kickstarter and then they drive you a ton of traffic. The average Kickstarter campaign gets 30% of their traffic from Kickstarter. And so then the whole calculation there is, you don't want a campaign goal that's too high, because you want to blow through it. So I think I'm probably going to just make my goal $25,000 to $35,000. So all this to say that I think I'm gonna be doing it on Kickstarter. And the reason...I know you say I'm gun-shy, but my view is, like what is the downside of doing this?

Jesse Pujji: No, there's no downside. I think, but dude, I think it's a "yes, and." It's like, yeah, yeah, do it, and do your TikTok videos, and do some paid media. My point...by the way, I've seen people go in both directions. I've seen people who launch a Kickstarter, they blow up, and then they're not ready to launch an ongoing strategy and it's kind of a disaster. Or the opposite, which is someone's running a capable, good sort of paid media program and ongoing marketing and then they launch a Kickstarter and it actually augments everything they're doing.

So yeah, you're treating it a little bit like a holy grail, or I'm picking up a like, "Yeah, dude, I'm going to do the Kickstarter and that's gonna..." You remind me of the 22-year-old version of the entrepreneur who's like, "Then, once my Kickstarter works, then I'll be in business, Jesse," and I'm like, dude, this is in business. Just commit to it and say, I can't tell you whether it's gonna be a $5 million business or a $50 million business, but you don't care. So my point to you is the same I keep saying is, cool, just go run this business, man. Build it. It's gonna be successful.

Alex Lieberman: Also, my newest idea around this business is that it's gonna be media company and backyard sports company, where I'm literally gonna create ESPN8: The Ocho, like from Dodgeball, out of the games that I create, and it will be like leagues around the most absurd backyard games. And so you can monetize it via advertising and sponsorships on top of the games.

Jesse Pujji: This is very Type seven of you, all these random ideas. Go do some work, Alex. Go land some Facebook campaigns and get a landing page and...

Alex Lieberman: Classic Enneagram jokes. Wait, you mentioned something about people who launch on Kickstarter. Sometimes they haven't figured out their supply chain or they're not ready to do it. And I just wanted to mention Pebble. Have you heard of Pebble?

Jesse Pujji: Vaguely.

Alex Lieberman: Okay, so Pebble was, before this guy Brandon Sanderson, Pebble was the most-backed Kickstarter campaign of all time. I think in total they did three campaigns and it raised like $30 million, but one campaign I think did $20 million. And so the whole idea of Pebble, Pebble was the original smartwatch. It was a group of friends that went to the University of Waterloo together in 2008. And they literally, these guys built the original digital watch face that showed your exercise, your sleep, your music. And in 2012 they launched Pebble on Kickstarter for the first time. They raised $10 million from 68,000 people around the world, and they went on over the next few years to sell 2 million watches and did over $230 million in sales.

Jesse Pujji: Wow.

Alex Lieberman: And it's out of business now. I believe they sold to...I think they sold to Fitbit. Yeah, they sold to Fitbit at the end of 2016. And I will say, my assumption when I heard that this business failed was the Apple Watch. Like the Apple Watch was the killer of this once it came out. And at least the way that this guy Eric, who is the CEO of the business, phrases it is, it seems like it had nothing to do with the Apple Watch. And I think there was some really good lessons in what he learned from this experience that are worth it for any entrepreneur, but especially entrepreneurs with physical products.

So the first thing that he explained of why they failed was they had their first product, the normal Pebble, then they had their version two that in 2015, it didn't hit forecast. So they had forecasted $100 million in sales in 2015 after doing their 2012, and I think they did a 2014 Kickstarter. They projected a hundred million in sales, and they only sold $82 million worth of product. So they had $18 million of just this smartwatch inventory sitting around. And so they had to spend many months trying to get themselves out of this dead inventory. The other thing that he talks a lot about is, the initial market for Pebble was what they describe as like the geeky hacker user base. I feel like it is the person who's always the first person in the adoption curve...

Jesse Pujji: Biohacking and tech geeks combo.

Alex Lieberman: Exactly. And what basically happened was, they thought to themselves after this first Kickstarter raise, how are they going to grow to a bigger audience? How are they going to continue to scale sales when not everyone's a geek or a hacker? And so the first way they positioned it was as a productivity device. Then they ended up positioning it as a fitness watch. And basically, his big learning was they never actually, in a weird way, they never actually found product market fit. They didn't actually talk to their customers to understand why they're using Pebble. They had no idea how to evolve the product.

And the funny thing that he referenced is, he said in the early days of the Apple Watch...I don't even remember this. He said the Apple Watch was positioned as this super-premium product. He said when it first came out, there was a gold version that Apple talked about that was a $10,000 version. I don't remember any of this, but the smartest decision that Apple made is they repositioned this thing for a fitness and wellness-centric community. And he was like, we just never learned who our customer was. And I thought it was such a great example of...I made the assumption that Apple killed this company. Like I assumed a lot of big companies killed earlier versions of it, and it wasn't the case.

Jesse Pujji: Yeah, I think that's right. Well, I think the other thing, just to pick on you more, you're talking about who your customer is, and dude, you're just not gonna...you don't know who your customer is. When we launched Unbloat a year ago, we thought, we'd heard lots of versions of it. We started selling it, and by the way, we interviewed 50 different women, all these things, like it wasn't...and then we launched it. We thought it was right, didn't really work. Then we tried really hokey ads and clickbait and whatever. And ultimately, we started seeing who was sticking around and who was leaving and who was leaving us really good reviews. And we've sort of built...we've peeled the onion or whatever analogy you want to use. We've dialed in the target; it's taken us a year, and now it's premenopausal women, right? I didn't know anything about premenopausal women a year ago, but we've been able to see through iteration that is clearly who buys the product, who sticks with it, who writes good reviews.

And there's this whole bloating thing with 25-year-olds on TikTok. They're not the target, like they don't, it's expensive, they don't...and so I would just encourage you...it's funny to see you do it, because that's the other thing I was going to say to you, by the way, is you are not starting the Kickstarter because you need money, correct?

Alex Lieberman: Correct.

Jesse Pujji: You're just doing it for distribution. It's just marketing.

Alex Lieberman: I'm just doing it for distribution and to justify a relatively high-dollar production order. I'm not willing to spend a hundred thousand dollars just running a production run of these right now, given, to your point, I don't know who the audience is. And I don't know if there's going to be enough of an audience. Would you...maybe you did...you can actually see my risk tolerance, but when you launched Unbloat, I don't know what you spent to start the business, but it sounds like it took a while to figure out who the exact audience was. Do you feel comfortable dropping six figures without knowing?

Jesse Pujji: I mean, we did, right? That was part of...I mean it was probably, we realistically committed about a quarter million dollars, all in...

Alex Lieberman: Why did you feel the confidence to do that?

Jesse Pujji: We're blessed to live in the most amazing country on the world at the most amazing time in the world at 330 million people. And it's like, dude, there's so many human beings. That was the point I was making that other episode, which to you, which is, to get back your money, your payback on a hundred thousand dollar order, if you're making $70 in gross profit, is what, 1,200 of these things? If you can't sell 1,200 of these things, you got much bigger problems, my friend. It has nothing to do with the product. Sell them to gyms, donate them to schools for a tax write-off. You can...I don't know. To me...I think you lose more. Let me put it this way, instead of just picking on you. You lose more by being conservative and doubting yourself than you do by going, at least for a period of time and a dollar amount of money, I am all in. I'm gonna do everything I can to make this thing work. I'm gonna stop asking whether or not it's gonna work. I'm gonna stop doubting whether or not it's gonna work, and I'm gonna pull every lever at my disposal. Sure, do your Kickstarter, do your TikTok idea, and then you're gonna learn, you're gonna iterate, you're gonna figure stuff out, and you're gonna do it again. And then you're gonna go, "Oh, you know what? This is interesting. This is what I realized." But it's funny how much entrepreneurial doubt you have around the idea.

Alex Lieberman: Totally.

Jesse Pujji: When I think...

Alex Lieberman: And by the way, I think...

Jesse Pujji: Which is normal, by the way. It's totally normal for anyone who...especially first-time entrepreneurs. When I was in college, we'd start these businesses, we started a high school version of Facebook, and we were like, we have to get to this number of users, or we're done with the business. We're not gonna keep spending our time on it. And it's just funny to see you in that sort of...

Alex Lieberman: Totally. And by the way, just to get a little, I would say introspective for a second, I think there's a reason for all of this, right? I think if I was to pull back the layers and be like, why am I behaving in this way right now? I think part of it is because, to your point, because money matters less to me today, it's like the incremental loss of money matters a lot more than the incremental gain of money. And so I'm trying to behave in accordance with that belief. I think the other one is there's still a part of my brain, no matter how much confidence people in the world has in me, that I was a one-trick pony and that what I've accumulated thus far is all I will accumulate. And so I very much have a...

Jesse Pujji: Scarcity mindset.

Alex Lieberman: ...cash-hoarding mindset.

Jesse Pujji: I feel scarcity. I feel you...

Alex Lieberman: Exactly.

Jesse Pujji: ...recoiling. "I can't let this go, even this..." Here's a reframe for you. If my coach was on the call, he'd say, Alex, are you willing to, if I told you, for the low price of $150,000, you could learn incredible entrepreneurial lessons, stretch yourself in ways you didn't think were possible. Are you willing to spend that much to learn and to develop yourself as a professional?

Alex Lieberman: Yeah. And I think the answer would be yes, but I would only feel comfortable with so many at-bats of that learning happening without making money.

Jesse Pujji: Yeah, sure.

Alex Lieberman: Yeah.

Jesse Pujji: But there's no way, dude, there's zero chance that you spend $150k and nobody buys a single set of this thing, right?

Alex Lieberman: Yeah, I agree with that.

Jesse Pujji: And so it's, even that number is way too high, which by the way, is true for Unbloat also. The first company we started, Poophoria. True story. We still sell a hundred SKUs every month. The thing is just making $10,000, $15,000 a month. I don't know how, I don't know how people are getting to it.

Alex Lieberman: Does someone run that business?

Jesse Pujji: No, it's just subscribers, they...so we've actually made back, I think all in all, that business maybe lost a hundred grand, not even. Like $80 grand. That doesn't include anything that's happened with Unbloat. So you'll figure it out, is kind of my point, I think. I believe you'll figure it out one way or the other and it'll be a valuable experience for you. And so I want you to go all-in and I want you to...

Alex Lieberman: I agree with you. And I think, again, my goal for myself is to get to a place where obviously, I'm still smart with my money, but I'm not conflating being smart with my money as actually operating out of a scarcity mindset because I doubt my abilities. And so yeah, that's my goal for myself as I grow. There's a few ways we can take this.

Jesse Pujji: By the way, I have one quick aside to a totally funny random story. Or thing I want you to help me with, actually. So in 15 months, 14 months, I'm going to be 40, turning 40, and I want to have a massive extravaganza party in St. Louis. Maybe even a conference-style party, like invite everyone—everyone listening, everyone on Twitter. And I'm trying to get Nelly to perform at my birthday.

Alex Lieberman: Why Nelly? Was Nelly your favorite growing up?

Jesse Pujji: Yeah, in St. Louis. Yeah, absolutely. And so during Covid, I'm part of YPO here, they got him, and I don't want to say how much, but it was pretty cheap. Cheap to the point where I was like, "Oh, I could probably do that as a part of the birthday expense." Now apparently that's all over, and now it's like six figures to book. It's really...

Alex Lieberman: Oh, really?

Jesse Pujji: Yeah. So I don't know, this whole conversation around crowdfunding got me thinking. I need to put a budget together and I'm going to go on Twitter and here and be like, "Come to my party, donate money towards the Nelly fund to Jesse to have Nelly perform at Jesse's 40th birthday party."

Alex Lieberman: I think that is a great idea. By the way, I had a few ideas as I was going through Kickstarter of just businesses that I think could be built in and around Kickstarter, or separate from Kickstarter, I want to get your thought on. The first is, I've been wondering why there isn't a software version of Kickstarter. And so what I mean by that is, okay, you have Product Hunt, but when you have Product Hunt, a business has already launched. It already exists. There's already somewhat of a team. Why isn't there a crowdfunding platform, a reward-based crowdfunding platform, where you have a prototype of a product of software, and you go live on this platform. I was going to say Kickstarter with a D, but it doesn't come out the right way. And so it gives entrepreneurs validation about if they should push forward with this software so they can go out and hire a technical person to actually build the thing. And...

Jesse Pujji: And the best costs a dollar. You have to make people pay money because we know that paying a dollar is a much bigger signal...

Alex Lieberman: Exactly.

Jesse Pujji: ...than just giving your email or vote.

Alex Lieberman: Exactly. But I don't understand...I'm just going to use a random example of you. An idea of a business that I tweeted about a while ago that I was thinking about just having someone build on the side was an add-in to Google Meet or Chrome, sorry, Google Meet or Zoom or WebEx, where you put in the salary of everyone in a meeting and as the meeting's ticking, it tells you the cost of that meeting, right? I ultimately don't think it's a good idea, and I could explain why, but why is there not a place where I put that on the site and people can, to your point, put a dollar to reserve their spot and they get some...why does this not exist for software?

Jesse Pujji: I love it. It's kind of like a media company too, because then like, there's almost like a Shark Tank or your 60-Second Startup vibe.

Alex Lieberman: Exactly.

Jesse Pujji: A buddy of mine here in St. Louis started a business called Thumbraise, and it actually was one of the inspirations for Kahani. You could see a vertical video of the entrepreneur pitching, and I think he ended up pivoting to more of a hiring platform just away from fundraising altogether, because it's just like there was some network effects issue. But yeah, I think it's a good idea. I think you gotta have to figure out how to get people, like on Hacker News or like on Product Hunt. You have to have the people who engage with something like that.

Alex Lieberman: Totally.

Jesse Pujji: It's really an idea that Product Hunt should do.

Alex Lieberman: Oh yeah, I think Product Hunt, they literally just go one step earlier.

Jesse Pujji: Pre-launch, yeah. Exactly, or idea stage Product Hunt. Idea Hunt.

Alex Lieberman: Yeah. So that's one. The other one is, so as I was going through this whole Kickstarter thing and I told you that I'm working with this agency and their process is helping me build out what is the brand for my product, then the landing page to get people to put in emails, then getting people who put in emails to reserve their spot for a dollar, all building up the list for launch. And one of the ways they build up those reservations is they run a fair bit of Facebook ads pre-campaign. And so I was reading a book by the founder of this agency and he was basically talking...and this is child's play for you, but he was talking about lookalike audiences, and he did this exercise that was called the Dream 20. If there were 20 brands in the world that you would die to have your product be put in front of their customers, what are those 20 brands? And I wrote down the 20 brands for The Plunge that I actually thought it made sense. Here, I'll just read a few of them to you. The brands I wrote down for my backyard game, let's see, we had...okay, Happy Dad, which is Nelk Boys' seltzer brand. Nelk Boys is this big YouTube group. Chubby's Cornhole, KanJam, Yeti, Dude Perfect, Barstool Sports, Coleman or Weber, some hunting company, Bud Light. This church group that the founder of Spikeball told me was one of his really early passionate communities, DraftKings, Axe Throwing, Manscaped, and there were a few others. So anyway, that was my Dream 20.

But as I was going through it, a thought I had is like, I want to target a certain type of demographic. So one demographic I thought would be interested in the plunger game is the college student who's into college sports and is into drinking at a Big 10 school. And then I was trying to figure out, what brands does that 19-year-old interact with a lot? And I couldn't find an answer to that. And so one idea, is there a service where you can put in a type of person, like 18 to 22, gender, et cetera, interest, and it spits out the brands they're most likely to search for? What are your thoughts on that?

Jesse Pujji: There is a...the founder of SEO Moz started a company that does a version of that. Hold on, I'm looking it up now while we're talking. New company, SparkToro. Check out SparkToro. And I actually think they may do what you're saying, which is they even potentially plug into Facebook or...

Alex Lieberman: Audience research at your fingertips.

Jesse Pujji: Boom. There's also a business called Clearbit.

Alex Lieberman: Oh yeah, this is a hundred percent it.

Jesse Pujji: There's a business called Clearbit, which does this for B2B, which is really powerful.

Alex Lieberman: Clearbit was literally our saving grace in the early days of the Brew. I don't know if we used it for all of its functionality, but in the early days of the Brew, when I needed to find the email address for a marketer at a company to go email to pitch advertising in Morning Brew, the Clearbit plugin to Gmail was the thing that I used to find someone's email address.

Jesse Pujji: Yeah. Well, and anyway, the other thing I was going to say to you is, we were talking about this offline a little bit, but the new Facebook paradigm is targeting...creative is the new targeting. So for anyone listening running Facebook campaigns, you don't need to target anymore. It's broad. You let Facebook's algorithm figure it out. But what you could do is you could write the brand name in the ad copy and say, like, cornhole lovers, and then have a picture of cornhole and maybe break it or something, like a funny ad that engages those people. And then Facebook's algo will naturally start to find those people. And so that's just a thought for you, is you can...

Alex Lieberman: Well, just explain. Like you're glossing over it because I feel like this is just so in your DNA, but explain how there's been that shift, like what used to be important with Facebook advertising. And why now actually me targeting a cornhole audience actually isn't in my best interest.

Jesse Pujji: Yeah. Yeah. That's a great question. So the nuance here is there's a difference between what's targeting and ad serving. So targeting is, if I say, target a hundred thousand people in St. Louis who like the St. Louis Cardinals or whatever, and they're between the ages of 40 and 45, that's who I tell Facebook to target. Who they choose to serve the ad to is based on their decisioning. They don't automatically show it to every single one of those people. And one of the ways you can know this is if you actually try...we've done this as a test. You could do an ad like that. If you target clicks and you ask Facebook, I want clicks, that's my objective, versus I want leads versus I want purchases, the funnel will look completely different. Even though your targeting is all the same, which means they're making...serving to, they know who tends to click and just click. They know who tends to click and buy. So they know, based on people's behavior, they see all this data they don't share with advertisers that make their systems more effective.

So 10 years ago, you did all the targeting because you had to tell them. Their systems were dumb; they didn't know what to do. Now their systems have gotten so smart that they'll put an ad out and they'll quickly see who stops scrolling, who just likes it, who clicks on it and engages with it. And when you target, because you're limiting their freedom, they actually charge you more because they have less auctions you can be in at one time. Whereas when you say "Go after anybody, I don't care," it lets them explore freely, which ultimately means you can be in more auctions, which is a higher chance of finding a good price point and actually finding a better audience. So that's why...their algorithm is AI, whatever, super smart, learns very quickly, and it's able to kind of put the ad in front of the right person at the right place, right person, right time.

Alex Lieberman: So all this to say, if you're doing Facebook marketing, I'd assume it's the same for Instagram because it's the same engine. It actually isn't your prerogative today to pick brands or lookalike audiences of brands to run your ads to, because Facebook is just smarter than you.

Jesse Pujji: There's certain advanced strategies you can still hack, but I wouldn't worry about them if you're listening and you're spending less than $500,000 a month on Facebook. I think the one thing I would tell you, though, just as an example also of why I want to get you out of this audience thinking too, is one of the things that Facebook's really good at that they don't surface for anybody is buying intent. As an example, go to three meal kit websites after you listen to this, and then go to your Facebook feed and you're gonna see a bunch of meal kit ads. It doesn't matter...your demo, who you are, doesn't matter. What matters is, oh, this person seems like they're in the market for healthy food solutions and I'm going to deliver them.

So your gaming thing, it may or may not matter who the person is. It may or may...what matters is in that moment, someone's looking at Spikeball and a few other related things, and then they're gonna go, "Oh, you're looking for fun games? Here you go. Here's an ad for The Plunge." And anyway, that's also part of how the algorithm does its magic.

Alex Lieberman: Well, and I think it's, again, I think what's amazing is, it's very nuanced, the stuff you're talking about, but it's widely applicable for anyone who spends on Facebook marketing, which is a lot of people. And so you mentioned this at the beginning, but it's now, so much of the game of driving just like quality leads or sales from marketing is on the creative. So it's on the images and the copy. It sounds like that's 90% of it now, which led to the other idea that I brought up with you that I know you have thoughts on, which is, as Jesse was telling me, he's like, all that matters now is what your creative is for your ads.

And so I was thinking to myself, and I'm always thinking from the perspective of like, what is a group of skill workers or knowledge workers that aren't necessarily paid highly in their current career, but if you use them differently, they can make more money, and also you can build a business around them? So the current idea is an ad creative specific agency, so be super focused, because ad creative's most important now, where you hire standup comedians, copywriters from ad agencies, where ad agencies are notorious for not paying well, and they provide a constant flow of creative for the paid marketing teams of companies. What's your thought on the idea?

Jesse Pujji: Yeah. Well, there's two things I think to hit on that are important. One is, the old school of writing a really good ad, Ogilvy or whatever, the famous people of advertising and marketing, they were all about writing good messages and copy. Television's the same way. We can still remember TV ads, the Santa packs with the polar bears. And what's interesting is the internet started to complicate it with all this stuff, but it's so funny because now it's basically gone back to the origin of marketing. Which is, it's not some hacky thing. Ampush spent a lot of time hacking. We would figure out all these bidding changes and algos and all this stuff, and then it's now back to, can you speak to your audience? Can you deliver them a message that explains the value? Can you hook them and get their attention? So it's funny in some ways, just to think about it for anyone doing it is, stop worrying about tricks and just start focusing on delivering a message, a compelling message to that audience of why your product is the right thing for them. That's just one aside.

And then, yeah, I think the idea is great. I think yours is kind of a vertical play with the comedian idea, but there's these businesses: TubeScience, Narrative Ads, Ready Set. There's a whole cottage industry, Rickshaw, that all they do is make creative using kind of out-of-work or in-between-work actors in Hollywood and maybe offshore, GrowthAssistant-style editors for their video. And they'll produce a ton of them. They won't even charge the brands for them, but the genius in their model is they'll say, whatever you choose to use of the media, you're going to have to pay me a percentage of that media spend.

And so if I'm a media buyer and their stuff is working 30% better, I'm gonna allocate as many dollars as I can to it, even though I have to pay a rake on it. And they've crushed it. I mean, they've been very success stories...by the way, they all started in 2016, '17. They're old, relative, or they're new relative to the Ampushes of the world because they really saw that trend and capitalized on it. And I think your version's a verticalized version. You could do that for men's products or comedic approach or other genres, essentially, that I think could be as successful as any of them.

Alex Lieberman: Oh, totally. Yeah. I've been also thinking about, how do you use voiceover actors who are in between gigs of getting commercials, or how do you use models who are trying to make it in the modeling industry, or really good-looking people for ad creative. How do you leverage them as well?

Jesse Pujji: And this is a crazy category. One thing just most people don't appreciate this, I think, is have you heard of Semrush?

Alex Lieberman: I have but I don't use it.

Jesse Pujji: It's a search analytics SaaS tool that gives you all the data on what your other advertisers...do you know how big it is, what its valuation market cap is?

Alex Lieberman: My guess is it's a billion-dollar business.

Jesse Pujji: It's like a $3 billion market cap, public.

Alex Lieberman: It's insane.

Jesse Pujji: And Facebook is $110 billion in revenue. Something crazy that. Just think that there's a 10% to 20% on top of that of software services, et cetera. Entire industry built around Facebook. And so that's what makes businesses like this incredibly viable. That's what Ampush's whole...and it's funny because when I first started Ampush, I thought, this seems like a good opportunity. Then I did all the nerdy MBA math, and it turns out that on average, for every ad dollar of any platform, there's about 20 to 30 cents in services, support, software tools to make use of that platform. So all these marketing services and software are such huge industries, so just people should realize how big the economies are around each of these spaces.

Alex Lieberman: It's wild. Okay, I want to finish up with, given all this weaved in and out of crowdfunding, Kickstarter, how my game is pivoting to this launch strategy. I just want to share a few final thoughts on when I think it makes sense to go the crowdfunding route. And feel free to share if you agree or disagree, and also anything else that comes to mind.

So my view is that first, like Jesse said, if you're a first-time entrepreneur and you want to test the waters and you don't want to, especially in the world of physical products, where it can cost a lot of money to do a production run of a product, it's a great way to just mitigate risk before taking on more exposure. So just to use the example, I've invested $12,000 in this game so far. That's how much money I've put into this. If I didn't have Kickstarter and I had to manufacture a thousand games tomorrow, my investment goes up to a hundred thousand dollars. What Kickstarter allows me to do, and especially like he said, is helpful of your first-time entrepreneur. Three months from now I know, do I have a hundred thousand dollars' worth of orders before I place the order with the factory? So that's...

Jesse Pujji: It may let you know that.

Alex Lieberman: It may.

Jesse Pujji: It could be a false negative, just to be clear, right? If you mis-execute it, if the timing isn't right...there's a lot of reasons it could work, that...it could potentially be a very positive signal.

Alex Lieberman: Yes, a hundred percent. To that point, what is for sure top of mind for me is, what do I do if this doesn't work out? If I don't hit my campaign goal, do I just end the game altogether? How do I know if there's demand or not? So...

Jesse Pujji: Exactly.

Alex Lieberman: ...it's for sure...

Jesse Pujji: Which, by the way, hold on. As a quick aside, we should tell people, you wouldn't. I don't think you would. I think you would try at least three things and you'd put another year of your time into this before you'd walk away, which I think, for people who are doing entrepreneurial things, obviously if something, if you try something and it works, hell yeah, go crazy. But also, every time I've tried something the first time, that shit never worked. And so I think one of the best kind of rules of thumb are, first of all, it has to have all your focus and energy. Second of all, you gotta try a handful of things in a serious way, not in an off-the-side-of-your-desk way. And then ultimately, time box things. And if after a year...Poophoria, we shut it down. It was, just after a certain amount of time, it wasn't where we wanted it to be. And that was it.

Alex Lieberman: Totally. And then just a few other thoughts. I think also at the end of the day, just understanding what is the cost of making this decision. The cost of doing Kickstarter is that you're paying basically 5% for access to distribution and maybe avoiding some of the headaches of creating your own site, because they have these pre-built-in tools. So if you're willing to pay 5% for access to the distribution of an audience, it could be worth it. And I would say, especially for Kickstarter, if you're in the gaming or design and tech category, it makes it even more interesting. So those are a few things that come to mind.

Jesse Pujji: And can I add one suggestion to that?

Alex Lieberman: Yeah.

Jesse Pujji: If you're gonna do a Kickstarter, I mean, this is true for anything. Obsess about it for a month or two before you launch it. If I were interviewing an entrepreneur and wanted to make sure they were ready, like "You did all this research, you know who the biggest is, the average? Oh, you're gonna do a Kickstarter. Tell me, what are the five most similar games? How much did they raise? When did they...?" If they couldn't answer that, then I'd be like, "Your Kickstarter's not gonna work." Like, it doesn't even matter. It's not even gonna be a signal because you haven't done the work to go deep enough to obsess over getting that. And that was the same thing for running Facebook ads. That's the same thing for being good at email marketing. It's like my rule of thumb is, 90 days of more than 50% of your time and energy to crack something, to truly walk away and say, this didn't work. And so, people don't realize that sometimes. They go, "I'm gonna throw up a Kickstarter and I'm gonna see if it works or not." And then it doesn't work, and they're like, "Oh, it didn't work."

Alex Lieberman: Yeah. I mean, just to be clear, I've made the shift to Kickstarter in the last week. But what came before that was three months of not planning on doing Kickstarter until I got new information, spending four hours writing an investor update to...we don't actually have investors for The Plunge. I just wrote one to force myself to think deeply about it. I've played the game for, I don't know, 500 hours already, and I've talked to the founder of Spikeball, the founder of Crossnet and the founder of KanJam. All those things happened before getting to this place.

Jesse Pujji: I love it.

Alex Lieberman: Anything else before we call it a day?

Jesse Pujji: No. Well, one last thing. There's this really cool place that just launched in St. Louis called The Armory. I'll send you videos of it, but it's like this...

Alex Lieberman: Is it a gun range?

Jesse Pujji: No, it's like it used to be an armory. They used to keep stuff there. It's been reinvented as an adult playground/bar thing. So they have like 10 cornholes.

Alex Lieberman: Oh, I love that.

Jesse Pujji: They have a bunch of those volley...or the four-way nets. They have jumbo ping pong. And I'm sure I can get you...

Alex Lieberman: Like the massive bucket.

Jesse Pujji: I'll send you pictures and videos of it, but I'm sure I could get you a meeting with them and you can sell 10 of these to them.

Alex Lieberman: Oh, totally. And that's like the ultimate strategy with this individual game, also, is that there's a B2B play where people who want axe throwing in their place, but don't want to actually set up axe throwing can do this. So...

Jesse Pujji: It's a great idea.

Alex Lieberman: Yeah, I totally agree. Cool, guys. Well, thank you so much for listening to this episode. Hope you enjoyed the deep dive into Kickstarter, some of the craziest stories around these platforms of Pebble, and then the author who raised $42 million on his campaign. As I mentioned earlier, I want to piss my team off. And so say what up. Shoot an email to thecrazyones@morningbrew.com. Say hi. Maybe say a little bit about yourself, and we will get back to you. We want to build relationships with you all. And until next episode, thank you all for listening.