Hey

Back with another weekly edition of the marketing tactics and strategies that will have you feeling like you just discovered a forgotten $100 in an old jacket… but in your inbox…

... which is on your phone? In your pocket?

So I guess it’s exactly like finding money in your pocket!
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Last week, I shared my own amazing hacks for consuming content faster…

Ways in which I built up the skills to learn, read, listen to podcasts (and audiobooks), and watch educational videos at 2x speed.

This week, I want you to forget all that.

Because there’s a way to learn that is so much easier, and so much more effective, that it leaves everything else in the dust!

Not books. Not articles. Not videos.

People.

Around 8 years ago, when I first became interested in crowdfunding, I had NO clue about anything.

I wanted to raise a million dollars, but I barely understood how Kickstarter worked. I didn’t know where backers came from (do they grow on trees?). And I didn’t realize the role that advertising played.

I started reading the (very few) articles I could find…

But it was sooooo boring!

And I later discovered that most of the information in them was wrong!

All of a sudden, I had a genius idea…

“I’m going to get million-dollar campaigners to just tell me what they did!”

So I filtered through Kickstarter’s biggest recent successes. And sent them all emails, asking them how they ran such massive campaigns.

You know how many people answered? 0.

That was my first lesson — people need to have an incentive to teach you.

So I tried again.

But this time, I created a website and blog first.

I called myself the top crowdfunding journalist. And I offered everyone a chance to get featured on my site as a successful founder, in an exclusive interview — which is what I wanted to begin with!

Now, guess how many people answered this time?

50!

Of course I built the website, and featured them. This wasn’t a trick or anything. And everyone was happy with the exchange.

Each of them taught me something new, and helped me get started on my crowdfunding journey.

In fact, I ended up writing an entire book with all of their crowdfunding advice — 57 Secrets of Crowdfunding.

Stay tuned, I’m relaunching the book, after revising it from beginning to end, updating every single tip to a post-iOS, post-Corona, post-crypto, post-reality world, and adding in a ton of new strategies and tactics that our team uses to manage million-dollar campaigns…

All this, thanks to people sharing their wisdom.

This was a breakthrough for me… and I couldn’t believe the value I was able to get, just from asking others for advice.

As my company grew, I thought back on this lesson.

And I realized I had a golden opportunity to make this a weekly event.

What if, instead of having a 1-man learning capacity, I could scale and have the learning capacity of 100+ people!?

So for the past 5 years, very week, I've gathered all 127 of our teammates in our auditorium and ran a live Know How session, where everyone gathers to share what they learned that week.

There is so much excellent advice every week that I would never have discovered if it wasn’t for people sharing their knowledge.

The best ones become a part of this newsletter, and so many more get recorded in our database of strategies, to be used by the entire team whenever they need them.

These are 2 ways I discovered to incentivize people to share their knowledge with me.

But there are lots lots more.

This newsletter is another… even though I do most of the sharing, every now and again, someone in my community shares something back and it makes it all worth it!

So, what strategies do you have?

Think you can surprise me with something I don’t know?

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