Lessons

Lesson Info

How to Build & Manage a Team

There are a lot of roles that are going to need to be filled, and I'm just going to hit on these really briefly we're not going to elaborate on that, but this takes a team of people to d'oh the job right now, these roles are varied you don't have you know, these aren't necessarily it's an individual person, one person might be able to fill multiple of these roles, so here's little assignment for you on line is, you know, is to take the time figure out which of these roles can you fill? Which one of these are you able to do, and which ones they're going to have to find someone else to do the job? So just briefly, who are these people? The campaign creator and manager usually that's you the person with the idea that's the person who's going toe, set up the campaign and lead it, and man, is all the other people who are in it make sure they're getting what they need to get done on time, so that it's ready when the time comes the campaign strategist again, that might be this first person or...

a lot of times, this is a specialist who comes and people hire, tried, and sometimes to be a strategist, they'll hire us to come in and just give them input and feedback based on her experience about how you know, what's going to be our social media campaign what's going to be a paperclip campaign if we're going to do one of those? What? You know what the, what the marketing angle, but to someone who's got a vision for how to market the campaign, and sometimes the creator is an inventor or a musician, and they don't necessarily understand marketing, so at that point you're in, you need to bring someone in who's got a sense for how to market things and a vision for what the campaign is going, you know, uses its angle and story, a financial person, someone who can help you look at the finances and make sure that there's money to be made if you're successful and someone who can look at all the numbers involved in the campaign and analyze those. So if you're not a good numbers person, you're gonna want to find a good numbers person. It could be an accountant or could just be a friend who's good with spreadsheets, but like spreadsheets in particular super valuable skill. Next, a graphic designer. So of course you're going to have a campaign page where you're telling your story it's gotta look great. If it doesn't look great, then it's not likely gonna work and so you're going to need someone who can make logos who could make everything look sharp who can handle a professional look and generally speaking is one of the lower cost professions to take advantage of relative to like video you know in part because the amount of time that's involved but it could make a huge impact on the overall feel if you got real profession looking graphic design toppy writer someone who's good at telling this story how are they going to tell the story again? Lots of times these people could be, you know, the same person but who's going to write who's going to write the copy what's the story going to be and how is that gonna pull all the different pieces together in a way that's compelling that gets people to move takes him to action, not just telling the information so there's a difference between, like just communicating information and getting people to take action. You know that takes me back to like sixth grade when you're writing your either like informing, convincing or persuading, you know there's like different functions well, copywriters, air people, professional cooperators are very good at coming up with copy that causes people to take action videographer slash editor someone who's going to shoot and edit your film film is super important and spend a whole lesson on the video because it's, the most important piece of the campaign other than the product product itself, so you're in need someone to create that video, you're going to need the people who are in the video. Usually the creator wants to be in the video it's important piece, but they may not be the person for all of the video, depending on what's going on soon might need to find some people to be in the video other than yourself, a digital marketing specialist, especially if you're looking to have a campaign that goes big. You need someone who understands how to run facebook ads and make sure they make sense, and we find them overtime or email marketing all those pieces super important to bigger campaigns, social media experts some way within a manager or social again, a huge component, and then there's a lot of interaction on the the campaign itself. On the platform, they have common section who's going to interact with and handle that sort of customer support, answering questions and interacting with your backers, public relations, someone who's going to outreach to various publications and blog's to get coverage vory products so a lot of times that might be your social media expert might not be so someone who's got that role. Technical logistics at the end of the campaign someone's gotta help you sort through all the backers and make sure the right backers get the right things it's not necessarily easy and customer support as your start delivering your products people have questions they're going to address changes they're going to have a million different possibilities that have complaints whatever it is you have to have someone who's got assigned the role to manage the communications with your backers so it is you know there's a lot of roles to fill and it be extremely unlikely that one person could be good at all of them and certainly it's very hard to film yourself so like we're gonna end up building a team and there's a lot of ways you can build a team you can like gather together freelancers or you can potentially hire an agency one stop shop to do it all typically it'll be less expensive to work with freelancers though you've got a lot more coordination to do so depending on who you are if you're a big corporation just want to get the job done and obviously hire an agency if you're an individual trying toe shoes bring it together then you can find freelancers there's a lot of great web sites so I'm sure you guys have heard of the sites like up work or freelancer there's a lot of these sites out there we can find people and you might be sifting through people who aren't too skill to get find the right people, but at the end of the day, it's going to be less expensive than hiring an agency, and if you've got more time than money than that makes sense. So finding those people also people, you know, that you can enroll in helping you for free or for a piece of the act. So ultimately you've got the option of paying people convincing them to work for you for free, just as they love you, which is a great way, especially if you're a small, you know, a single person operation. You can also give people a percent of the race so that's a very common practice anymore is people you know, you get one percent, five percent, ten percent of whatever we raise instead of getting anything now, so they're doing it on suspect because they want to support you or because they believe in the product or project, but at the end of the day, they're going to get something based on the campaign, though be careful as you're giving a percentages, because we'll see those percentages at a pretty quickly and pretty soon there's not much left, but maybe you're on the way to go is to give up some percentages. Again a numbers person will help you make sense of all that we have a little saying it tried and you can accomplish a lot if you're handy with money so like you got money you can throw money at the problem you can make it happen easily but the real trick is how do you do it efficiently with a minimal budget by gathering up people in a cost effective way and then lastly if you're not in the habit it's not your job to manage people you should get consideration how you're going to manage the team it's not just something that happens willy nilly you want to come up with a process weekly meetings daily meetings where people are connecting in the right people and like but then ultimately if you're the creator you've got to be the leader and leading is different than managing actually also run a leadership development school as another business and there's a huge difference between running things and leading things leadership is about creating the vision and rolling people in your vision and driving the vision not just about making sure everyone is doing the right thing that that's also piece of it that's project management so you get to be the leader meaning you get toe make the decisions the buck stops with you if it's your campaign and you're creating it so you've got to take responsibility for making the hard decisions when they need to be made and then project management is making sure everyone knows what they're supposed to be doing, you know, that they know, oh, and then you follow up with them to make sure that they did what they said they were going to do it if they didn't getting a commitment for when they're going to get it done. We call that closing the loop because a lot of times like, well, so and so said they were going to do it now we assume they're doing it, but then we never go back to find out that they did what they said they were going to do, and we're assuming that they did sometimes that's the case sometimes it's not, but you want to close the loop by finding out that what you thought was happening is actually happening and it's on target on time because you don't want to get to an important deadline and find out the day before your campaign's supposed to launch on the day of that, some important key element hasn't been handled, so that is just like real brief project management guidance for you, so that's it for getting ready. So now you've decided into a campaign, you've got your team together to the campaign, you know what it takes to succeed. In our next lesson after the break, we're going to talk about actually building your campaign page, which is really this, you know it's what it's all about if you're gonna run a campaign it's the campaign page question you mentioned about the email lists at some point does kick starter or indiegogo share the actual email lists with you and then you can kind of incorporate it with male chimp or yeah well with indiegogo you get the email list as it's developing with kickstarter you get the email list at the end if it funds ok and then yes, you could do that but you can always contact your backers two rue those platforms as well using the updates I see ok and my other question was you said about the b to b space is this is the set up? Is there like a particular platform that's better for b two b I haven't seen a platform that this focus done b two b meaning products for businesses sadly, yeah it's because of the nature of platform of crowd funding, which is like many people timing in on one thing there's just so fewer businesses than there are people that it hasn't shown up yet in that space I'm sure it will come, but it hasn't gone mainstream enough yet thank you great I had a couple of questions from our online audience before we wrap up this first one comes from frank and he says, will you be talking about using crowdfunding to make an existing product better? I know a lot of this is taking a new product and making it come to life, and he thoughts on taking a product that already exists and using crowdfunding to improve it well, you've got to think of it just like a fresh product and this comes back to kind of like the general rule of thumb of the perfect product pyramid and value density. So if you've got a product that is dramatically better it's not just a little bit better but it's a dramatic improvement, then yes, you can use crowd funding to do that and there's a lot of examples of, you know, every product is truly an improvement on an existing product on the quickie was an improvement on a key, you know, so it's or on this other little keys, the chain multi tools that just didn't have quite the key shape to it. So an improved product absolutely could be on a crowdfunding site as long as it's, exciting and innovative and you know, sexy is such that people are going to want it based on whatever the improvement is not just a little better, but a lot better and obviously so okay, great let's do one more this questions from signs in the uk who has a question about product exposure, and they want to know how much risk you see of other companies, perhaps with more capacity taking your idea that they see on a crowdfunding page, this is definitely a possibility. So, like quickie and for example, immediately, they're actually chinese knockoffs that need us to market. I know the nature of a knockoff company is they never, in my experience ever having been a student of this, make a product of better, they make it cheaper and less nice. So in addition, if people are paying attention, which is usually the case, a lot of people be like, hey, this is a knockoff of the quickie, this isn't through a quickie, so it is definitely a possibility because that's a reality of the world, is there people paying attention and looking at successes and trying to knock them off? But the marketplace is savvy enough that a lot of time it'll be identified is knock off and won't be successful anyway, because they do a crappy job, but it is a risk, and again, I recommend being patent pending before you launch a crowdfunding campaign. So then you can go after those people and shut him down.