When Things Don’t Go According To Plan: You Have Two Choices

Unknown Speaker 0:03
This is the crush crowdfunding podcast, the number one place for people who want to launch on Kickstarter and Indiegogo. My name is Nalin. And I invite you to join me for tips, hacks and insights to get you launched and fully funded.

Unknown Speaker 0:20
What's up, everybody? Welcome to another session of the crush crowdfunding podcast. I'm really psyched to have you here and to talk to you about how to crush your crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter and Indiegogo. I want to start off by saying, thanks for being here with me today. You're honestly the reason that I keep doing this. You're the reason I keep recording podcasts and helping people launch products on crowdfunding. So again, thank you. The topic that I'll be talking about today is what do you do when things don't go according to plan? This is kind of a reprise of something I wrote about late last year, but I think that it's a really important topic today to talk about so let's kind of get right into it. So late last year, it was actually I think, early December of 2019. Yes, yes, it was early December of last year. It was a week before the holiday season officially started, you know, and I had a plan to get as much as I could done in that week. You know, I had all this course content that I really really was gunning to create. I had all these connections that I planned to make in that last week so that we could get going bright and early. In the new year, I had all these email responses that I had planned to, to write to people who've been writing to me, I had all these blogs and I had planned to write so that 2020 would just be filled with new just actionable blog posts for people I had, you know, all these updates that I plan to do for my website to make it easier for you, you know, to navigate and to use. For the websites making more mobile friendly things like that, you know, basically there's all these things that I plan to do to kind of set myself up for success come the new year and you might kind of understand where I'm going with this. So as you can imagine, I had a ton of things to get done and I hadn't even like an hour by hour plan of how to get it all completed. So you know that I'll be able to disconnect during the holidays and just be with family and just be present and be there to hang out with family and be present with my nieces and nephews. You know, but as life goes, as life always goes right, things don't always go according to plan. In this instance, my in-laws decided to come visit and do some you know, last minute grocery shopping and some last minute Christmas shopping before you know just the week before the holiday season kicks off. They literally told us as they were landing at the airport, that they would actually be staying with my partner and I the entire week. Lol am I right? So, you know, instead of work instead of all the things I had planned, you know, the email responses, the website updates, all these things that I had planned, you know, instead of all of that, you know, I was planning lunches and dinners, I was out shopping for extra groceries for the four of us, you know, I was running around deep cleaning the place I was checking online for fun things to take them to during the week, you know, I was planning pickups and drop offs, and I was basically just out, you know, helping entertain my in laws. Right? So, you know, things didn't go according to plan. And another instance actually earlier this year, in 2020, after a busy January traveling to different corners of the world from you know, Las Vegas to Main, basically to help entrepreneurs launch their campaigns, I was finally back at home in Seattle, and actually arranged to run my first local crowdfunding meetup in Seattle in February. It was such a blast and I had so much fun learning about the different people who are interested in crowdfunding, what exactly about crowdfunding they're interested in, and you know, the projects that they have in the pipeline and the ideas that they have and the things that they want to launch. And, you know, after that, I decided, wow, I really want to start running monthly meetups. I really want to do this every single month because all the people that I meet are so incredibly, just fascinating. All the projects are so really cool. And everyone just wants to know more about how crowdfunding can help bring their ideas to life. And so I, you know, was really looking forward to running these monthly meetups, But lo and behold, you know, Coronavirus hit and kind of stopped the entire world from moving right? It stopped people going outdoors. It's not people meeting face to face in coffee shops and bookstores, you know, it just stopped meetups, pretty much all meetups became like online, right? Through zoom or something, right? And in another instance, this is actually more crowdfunding related with a campaign that I was working on. I think it was like 2017 that I was working on this 2017 and 2018. So basically, in a campaign that I was working on, it was actually a smart cooler, right as cooler that has like a blender and has all these electronic ports for you to charge your, your electronics while you're out camping or out at the beach or something and it has all these cool different features for putting in Bluetooth speakers and things like that. So basically, you know, I was working on a smart cooler a few years ago, but anyway, we were getting a ton, a ton of great emails. leads add like $1 27 cents, just lots of great email leads. People are super excited about the product people

Unknown Speaker 6:07
were

Unknown Speaker 6:08
hyped up about the product. We were going into the summer season and you know, everything was getting ready to ramp up. The production was getting ready to ramp up and get the coolers actually delivered to people during the summer season. so that they could actually take it out to the beach, take it out camping, take it out to the backyard, take it out to do all these things. And people were just getting super hyped. You know, it was a great lead generation campaign. And the advertising was going well, and people were just really, really excited about the product. And they were really excited about the prospect of actually backing the product when the product actually went online. On crowdfunding, however, on the day before launch, the day before launch as we sent out the email to say hey, we are launching tomorrow at 6:30am pacific time, right on that day, the day before lunch. Email Marketing System completely crashed, the email stopped sending and the 10s of thousands of people that we had on the list just, you know, either didn't get the emails at all because the email marketing platform just stopped working. Or it just went directly to spam for some people. And this was again 10s of thousands of emails the day before launch, talk about a big

Unknown Speaker 7:29
and you know, the way I see it with all these examples, with all these things that happen in daily life with all the things that happen every single day, you know, with all the unknowns that pop up in life with all the unknowns that kind of throw you a curveball with all the unknowns that just kind of pop up in the middle of nowhere and just kind of stop us dead in our tracks and make us super surprised and shocked and kind of freeze right? The way I really see it. You know, whenever something like this happens, we always have two choices. two choices, there's two choices. The first choice is, you know, we can grumble, when things don't go according to plan, you know, we can grumble, and we can drag her feet or, or we can take with life, you know, has to give with a big smile on our face, and move forward. When you're thinking about your crowdfunding campaign. This is actually going to be a huge springboard for you into your life as an entrepreneur, right? Because crowdfunding is again a platform to launch products to the market. And then after you launch a product, you're going to be, you know, building your company, building your business, growing your business, scaling your business, and there's going to be so much more complexity within your crowd within your business. There is going to be so much more complexity within your business, the more you grow. So with crowdfunding, when you're really thinking about crowdfunding, it's kind of the world's problems and all the obstacles I can get into your way on training wheels, right? With crowdfunding, I can assure you that not everything will go according to plan. I can assure you that, you know, your fourth prototype might not work like you imagined it would, you know, the landing page that you built might all of a sudden be erased for some reason, who knows, you know, it might start pouring rain on the day you're scheduled for a video shoot and your product is supposed to have a really sunny day for the shoot. You know, a photographer might promise you images one day only to send it you know, a week or two weeks later, you know, the review that you've locked down with a journalist with an influencer with someone really key in your industry and in your niche. You know, it might not be able to roll out when you need it to or it might not even be done at all right your parts supplier your you know that the supplier To all the raw materials for your product, you know, might have to greatly increase their prices, you know, that might refuse to work, right? When you've started shipping out to beta testers, this definitely has happened to me before. You know, a lot of this has actually happened to me, to me before. And you know, a global pandemic might stop all manufacturing for months on end. You know, things don't go according to plan. things really don't. And crowdfunding is really just how you deal with all life problems pretty much on training wheels, because right now, you're at a point where you're getting people to pre order your product, you're not even creating the product just yet. Everything is done before you're actually manufacturing so everything is done in a more safer atmosphere for you, right. So remember, if things aren't working the way you envisioned, or if you know things are going far south from what you've always hoped for, or just nothing is going according to plan. You always have two choices. The first choice that the majority of people in the world choose to do is to sit around and just whine about it. If things don't go according to plan, they, you know, freeze, pretty much they freeze and they, they cry, they cry, that things aren't going according to plan. They complain that the world is against them, and that there's nothing that they can do to make it work. Or they complain that they just can't figure it out, right. That's the first choice. That's the first choice that a lot of people do. But there's also a second choice, right? A second choice that entrepreneurs make every single day, and every single time that things don't go according to plan. And that second choice is to really truly figure it out. Right? You always have two choices. Actually, let me tell you a quick story before I move forward here, you know, a few years back when I was doing my undergraduate studies, actually my sister and I went backpacking. Looking through a few countries in Europe, in the summertime, you know, what we had was a set plan. Just a very, very precise plan, what countries will go to how many days we'd stay there, where we'd stay and what we'd eat and how we budget, basically, you know, we had everything planned down to a tee. But Surprise, surprise, things didn't go quite as planned, right? trains were delayed, causing us to just miss different connections. You know, some of our gear was accidentally destroyed as we were doing some sightseeing, you know, weather didn't cooperate as we'd hoped that it would and we were either underdressed or overdressed for the weather. You know, like I didn't have warm clothes when we were in Ireland, and it was freezing cold, right? So basically, no matter how much We planned things still didn't go according to plan. And as a reminder of that trip, and as a reminder for pretty much everything else in my life moving forward from that point on, my sister and I actually got matching tattoos that says, we'll figure it out. Because at the end of the day, that's what we did. No matter what life hit us with, we ended up figuring it out. So back to you, like you are really just starting on your entrepreneur journey. You're starting off with a crowdfunding campaign and from this crowdfunding campaign, you're probably going to be starting a company, starting a business, starting a company and scaling it so that you're able to, you know, live the life you want and make the income you want and basically be the person who controls your fate and be the person who controls your destiny. if things aren't working the way that you envisioned and nothing goes according to plan. Just remember that you always have, have two choices. And it is truly my hope that you know, no matter now during crowdfunding, no matter any other time in your business and when you're scaling up that you do end up choosing door number two. So guys, there you have it. I hope that you enjoyed this session because I know I really enjoyed recording it. Thank you for being with me here today. And if you haven't yet, I'd love it if you would subscribe to the podcast. Doing so will notify you the second that a new episode is released to the world. And lastly, if you enjoyed this episode, I would really appreciate it if you would leave a review for the podcast because it will just really help others find out about it. Thank you again for being with me and I will see you in the next session.

Unknown Speaker 14:50
Thanks for listening to the crush crowdfunding podcast at crushcrowdfunding.com.

Unknown Speaker 14:55
Tune in the same time next week for more ways to crush your launch.