#37 – Update – Million dollar campaign

Summary

This is an inspiring update episode where we will talk about our million dollar campaign, how the progress with the business side is developing and how the podcast is growing.

Transcript

[00:00:02] This month we have received love and we have received hate. This is a story about how to navigate in a startup journey in both ups and downs, and the purpose of this episode is to give an inspiring insight into what is it like to run a startup in real life [00:00:30] and to let you have a look into what is going on. Kind of like a reality show of a startup. And I’m here, of course, as always, with the founder of Great my good friend, Eric Bergman.

[00:00:51] Yaukey to me, known for many things and out of question for you.

[00:00:56] You have three things that you love. You have [00:01:00] many things of value. But three of them is.

[00:01:02] One is being an entrepreneur and a very active doer, someone who implements things right away. You also identify yourself with being someone that is very honest. And you identify yourself with someone who wants to become a great father. Which one is the most important for you? If you had the shoes, I was like, where is he going with it?

[00:01:27] Yes. If I have to choose. [00:01:30]

[00:01:34] I think actually to be a good father at some point in my life and. Not sure if that’s just because I have curiosity for how that would be, since I don’t have children for now and kind of know the experience of the other things in a sense. So we’ll see. I’ll give that one. I think I’ll keep it behind my ear here breathing and save it for later. I think the beauty of life is that you [00:02:00] don’t have to choose. That’s true. I’ll just choose everything. Yes. I’m in a candy store and I’m just gonna take it all.

[00:02:09] And I’m here with with you with Emil, the proud podcast host of Becoming Great.

[00:02:15] Who was the first employee into Great as a company is my friend since ten years. And he’s the smartest and most passionate learner I know. And just like me, wants to find playful ways of [00:02:30] learning, which I think is rare and I greatly appreciate. So thanks for being here with me today.

[00:02:35] Mm hmm. Playful ways of learning. I haven’t heard that before, but I love it. I have a friend, ALEXANDRA. One of her things is playful productivity. I like that one, too.

[00:02:45] It’s a similar thing. Thanks, Ed.. Waiting in the way to stay productive is to enjoy the process. The things you can ask yourself. Yeah. If you can ask, how can this task be fun? And even then, if it’s not optimal way [00:03:00] of doing it, if it’s fun, you’re gonna keep doing until you’re done. If it’s boring, you’re likely to give up.

[00:03:06] And if you don’t think a task is fun, you will learn so quick. Just absorb it like a kid. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Right. And together. Me and Erick, we are doing this podcast becoming great, and the purpose of this podcast is to inspire entrepreneurs who wants to make this world a better place. And today, this is gonna be an update episode about [00:03:30] our company. Great outcome that will give away 100 percent of its profits to help the environment. Now, a lot of things have happened this month. We actually had a difficult time to boil down what we want to speak about. But one thing that’s been very enjoyable has been your Instagram campaign, which you pledged to donate a million dollars to the rainforest, and that is $1 for every person that was tagged on a picture [00:04:00] on your Instagram account. So. Do you have something to share about that campaign?

[00:04:06] It means we can start with a little background info. I was just having a really shitty day. I was really distracted with a lot of things going on in my life and I just felt like, OK, I need something more fun to focus my energy on right now. And I saw this speech from the UN with great with how dare you. And it’s like if she’s 16 [00:04:30] years old and she can do this, I can better get it. Get the fuck off my ass and do something productive for the environment and distract myself. So I said, how can I do that? Okay, let’s donate money. How can I donate money in a way that it makes it fun? Let’s put it super publicly on Instagram and say that for every person who donate her comments and tags people in this picture, I’ll donate $1 and we’ll see how viral it can’t be. So the idea was [00:05:00] super spontaneous, not thought through at all. Actually, more to distract myself from a shitty day than to save the environment. To be perfectly honest, but it worked out pretty well.

[00:05:14] It’s interesting because I heard yesterday some some haters saying that I’ll get that, too. But she’s not doing anything. She’s just she’s not doing something. And I know she actually made someone go from distraction to action. And that is that’s leadership. Moving [00:05:30] someone. Yeah.

[00:05:31] I think that no one has been better face for the environmental cause. And sure, she is not doing. She’s not giving solutions. She is not actually researching this. But she gets it at the top of my head. So I acted on something which I might not have done. Well, I wouldn’t have done it at this very time if it wasn’t for her. Mm hmm. So she’s definitely making a positive impact, even though that’s hard to see in many ways. [00:06:00]

[00:06:01] So how did the campaign turn out in that? Sayd went super viral to start with.

[00:06:08] I went to bed in the evening, and when I woke up there were six thousand comments of people tagging each other. It was like, Hmm. It’s a good thing I put a cap on this too. One million dollars. We can see how this turns out. And then some newspapers wrote about it. Some people picked it up. Some people called me to do an interview. A local newspaper [00:06:30] from my hometown in Sweden called them. Want to talk about it? So it was fun. It slowed down quite a bit, though. It reached 12000 comments. All in all, so I don’t know. Twelve thousand dollars. And I’m very happy with how it turned out. I like the idea of doing this publicly.

[00:06:51] Yeah, that’s a great idea. Now we’re gonna get. Back to that a little bit sooner.

[00:06:58] And if you are curious about [00:07:00] where we donated the money, I recommend that you check out episode number thirty five that is titled with a little bit of a clickbait title called We Will Give All capslock Love capslock All Our Money, Too. And that one is all about the environment. So if you want to hear how we think about the environment course, check out that episode. And regarding this update, episode 1, I want to put in there is that the most exciting news this month we’re [00:07:30] going to save for last year?

[00:07:34] Is your first telling about a clickbait title in another way? And then you putting in this little super exciting hook about some things. Fun is gonna be in the end. You better not stop listening.

[00:07:47] This is actually exciting for me. So it’s not actually. Or is it? It’s a listening bait.

[00:07:54] So let’s start somewhere else first before we get there. We launched the Instagram, [00:08:00] the great dot com official Instagram account. So what are your thoughts on that so far?

[00:08:07] It was certain this angle. So you are the one who’d been been running that account. Why are we doing this?

[00:08:15] To your understanding. To.

[00:08:21] To my understanding, it has different purposes. One purpose to me is similar to the purpose of the podcast, which [00:08:30] is to inspire entrepreneurs who wants to make the world a better place. Another purpose of that count is a similar similar benefits for the company that you get out of your private Instagram account, which is create a platform for networking, for community, for potential recruitments to reach out with our message to update. People are interested about great dot com about what [00:09:00] is happening.

[00:09:01] In the company.

[00:09:03] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So what what have you learned so far doing this?

[00:09:11] So me and Spirit, our colleague, have been doing this and we are both both raging noobs when it comes to social media.

[00:09:21] Spirit new sites in Super Beginners. Yes, I like that word, but Spirit is a raging noob. He learned what a hashtag [00:09:30] was three weeks ago, so now he’s been handling the account and.

[00:09:40] In the beginning, we wanted to get many posts out to three per day, and we ended up having a quality that was too low. So. Yeah, we felt it didn’t it didn’t bring in a value to the listeners. So we had it felt like we’d been playing Super Mario. And [00:10:00] we have been dying 10 times. Just trying new things and redoing. So we have changed approach a lot. And right now we are we have changed approach to having a message that is valuable for entrepreneurs who want to make the world a better place with some kind of rainforest background. And I like that. I kind of wanted to take it in that direction from the beginning because I want great to get branded as an organization that is helping nature. [00:10:30]

[00:10:31] So I feel good about that direction. Do you think it’s realistic that.

[00:10:38] That this will actually generate attention over the next six months? Or how would you see that we need to invest a lot of time together? Does it feel like a realistic strategy?

[00:10:53] I think where I think we need to invest more time than me in spirit can do at this point, especially [00:11:00] since both him and me are currently working halftime. Halftime on this project and I think to run an Instagram account. Good. You need to be active every day.

[00:11:09] Yeah.

[00:11:11] So let’s say you were giving advice to another. Well, beginning entrepreneur if we put you in that pocket. Yes. Would you give them the advice to actually use Instagram or do you think it’s a lot more work than than you first anticipated?

[00:11:27] Let’s call this shitty advice because I don’t have any real experience. [00:11:30] I’m happy to give shit advice. And my shit advice is if you need more time than you think and you need to actually enjoy interacting with a lot of people. A lot of often. And you need to enjoy being in online conversations with people and create the community where you are active.

[00:11:51] Ok, so we’ll turn it into advice then if you are a person who really enjoys interacting online and really enjoy [00:12:00] the idea of creating content, then this could be a thing.

[00:12:04] But it’s likely that you’ll end up not producing enough, not enjoying it enough, and not realizing how much time it takes. So it might be a dead end kind of situation. It’s not like starting a business start an Instagram account. It might be a good idea to hold back on that.

[00:12:20] I agree it’s a lot harder than than you might think. Yes. Yeah, I can see that. Yeah. But either way. Great dot com dot official is [00:12:30] the Instagram account for anyone want to check it out. And we’re gonna keep publishing there, but not at the pace we started out and with a different kind of quality level.

[00:12:39] Yeah. So less post, better quality, which I think is good for anyone following. And also updates about what we do know. Podcast guest. We might have on the podcast we are doing updates about the company. Things like that. Yeah. Yeah. It makes. SWEEP. So what [00:13:00] is going on on the product side. Cause Great is gonna be a casino affiliate that is gonna make money through the casino affiliation space and then give all of it away to charity. So what’s the progress been with the product? The last month.

[00:13:16] So it actually felt quite a lot of frustration with that. This is not moving as fast as I wanted to. And I’m a guy who wants things to move fast. And I’ve realized that I’m the bottleneck pretty [00:13:30] much everywhere because I’m. I’m the one kind of setting the structure of the product and how everything would look like. And I haven’t done that detailed enough for anyone else to pick it up. So I’ve given tasks to people thinking that they’re easy to solve. Haven’t really done the research myself. And then they’re actually really, really hard to solve. And we’re not moving forward. And we’ve gotten a lot slower pace than I’d hoped. So now in the last. For [00:14:00] weeks or so, I’ve started to invest a lot of time in this from myself and we start to have a lot more calls and meetings and now the pace is coming. So we got a new design that’s done. It’s not live yet, but it’s much more structured and the casino product takes less like shit. But now getting somewhere where I’m actually really excited about where we have married the design of Amazon dot com with TripAdvisor dot com and kind of turn that into something. And the reason why we picked those two sites [00:14:30] is that to me, I believe that those are the most trusted sources of user reviews online that people trust the reviews on Amazon, people trust reviews on TripAdvisor. So if we can create something that somewhat looks similar, I think that gives us a certain amount of trust already to begin with.

[00:14:51] Would you say this is a this could be a good strategy for anyone starting a company to look at who’s doing this [00:15:00] the best in your field and kinda use their design to gain trust for your brand?

[00:15:07] Yeah, I think that’s the best way of doing it, because if you don’t have any data, you don’t do anything about anything. You could either guess and your guess is probably gonna suck. You might think this looks good because you think it looks good. Doesn’t mean anyone else thinks it looks good. And you’re just gonna guess. But if you’re taking Amazon, that probably no company in the world has done more tests than Amazon [00:15:30] is very likely that you will that they have made a better guess than you have. So if you can do something that’s somewhat similar, for example, they have yellow buttons. So when you buy now things on Amazon, they’re yellow. I can assure you that they have tested every single gradient of every single color out there. And still a lot of people might go with green or red or anything else. And it’s green or red might be better, but it’s likely that Amazon has more data than [00:16:00] your best guess.

[00:16:01] And at least you’re not going to make a horrible choice. They’re not going to make the worse choice. It’s kind of it’s not gonna be far from optimal. That is actually a very interesting way to look at it with the yellow button. I remember because I used to play poker professionally for many years. And one thing that I often did was I looked at the very, very best players.

[00:16:23] And then I looked at their statistics and I just played the same statistics. I used the same frequencies. And I knew that, well, [00:16:30] they might not be perfect, but they can’t be that far off because those guys are the biggest winners. They have and they have done the research. Yeah, it is very similar.

[00:16:40] Can you take it back? Yeah. So I dont need to understand the science between the yellow. Exactly. You dont need this. You understand the science of why is that poker hand played in that specific way. You can just copy it and it will be a lot better than your guess. Yes, exactly. Yeah, I think that’s a good advice for me. It is kind of you dont need to reinvent the wheel. It’s like I [00:17:00] dont need to understand why the wheel is a smart thing. I can use it anyway. You just need to drive the car. I need to drive the car. And yeah, I think that that makes a lot of sense. So that’s a really big thing going on. I’m really excited about getting that up there and we’re working a lot with these reviews and how to review the case, see, you know, what factors to look in. And I’m very excited about that process and it takes a lot of time. And I’m also super excited about this guy to be us who reached out to me a [00:17:30] couple of weeks ago. So he’s is from the casino space, is an old friend of mine. But I haven’t worked. Never worked with him before. And he has kind of been chasing me for a while, like, hey, Eric, I want to be part of great.

[00:17:42] I want to be a part of great. I want to. And I’m like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. And I haven’t really given them a shot. And then I sat down with him and had a lunch and he had listened to everything that we’d done. It done so much research. She’s had so many smart things and was like completely [00:18:00] shifted. My way of thinking on a lot of stuff that we were doing is like, yeah, let’s do it his way, let’s get him on board. And one of the things that he wanted to do was to launch the great casino section in Sweden, and he had tons of good arguments for it. And I’m just. Okay, I’m sold. Let’s do it your way. Let’s do it your idea. Let’s make this shit happen. And so now we’re preparing a lot for launching it in Sweden and really excited started in Sweden, actually, because it’s home turf. There [00:18:30] is a lot of things going on there that I I know the people and I’m really excited to having him on board running this because he’s so passionate about this talking.

[00:18:39] Just hearing him talking about this just fills me up with energy.

[00:18:43] It feels like just hearing his voice and excitement in his voice feels like someone is just pouring Red Bull all over me in a shower and I grow wings and want to do things.

[00:18:55] I was even rhyming.

[00:18:57] That was the plan all along. Those are really excited [00:19:00] about things happening with the product side. Right now, we’re also we had a seventy four percent increase in traffic from Casey in a month on month, which still on really low levels like 50, 60 visitors in August and then several hundred visitors something in in September. So it’s really small numbers, but it’s interesting to see the progress. And if we keep that progress month on month for the next 10 months, [00:19:30] then we’re actually starting to see really good results. So it’s a lot of things I’m excited about that have been moving to that I’ve felt frustrated about in the past. And now finally it starts to become a company.

[00:19:42] Mm hmm. Yeah, I think it did. It does. We had a weekly call two weeks ago where we talked about our values. And I think. How did you feel from that call? Because I felt like that call brought us together.

[00:20:01] I [00:20:00] loved that call, so background of that call is that we have been doing strategy work. Me, Joao Kim and we had a consultant on his big, big shot strategy consultants has been helping us called Mike and I. I’ve never really liked the idea of having a strategy. To me, it’s just, yeah, we’ll put some fancy words on a paper and we’re not really going to care about them. And in my previous businesses, we’ve done similar things and. [00:20:30] The core values we found then was passion, curiosity and professionalism. And that’s just three cool words that doesn’t really mean anything. And of course you want to be curious, passionate and professional. So when they wanted to do this kind of values workshop and see where we are, how we are doing, I was like, yeah. Bullshit. But OK, let’s let’s do it and then we had these values call to see, OK, what [00:21:00] are the values of the team? What do the team value? How do we want to live as a great organization? And the first question was what values do we have right now? And I just sat back and and listened because I didn’t want to influence people and say this is the right answer, quote, unquote. Yes, what what were people saying? I’d love to hear your memory and this.

[00:21:25] You know, I think.

[00:21:31] I [00:21:30] don’t want to misquote anyone, but. To me, great feels like. I’m not even sure I want to say this right now because I’m pretty sure we’re gonna do a whole episode on our values. And do you think we should say this now, should us?

[00:21:52] We can literally. Leslie, this for a full episode and I’ll e-mail and I’ll put some cliffhanger into this.

[00:21:57] Yeah.

[00:21:58] So for you listening, we have done an episode [00:22:00] in the past Episode 32 where we describe our vision for Great. And then we made an episode number 36 about the strategy to reach that vision. And soon we’re going to release another episode that is all about the values that we have and we’re going to recap that whole conversation in that episode. But I think we got to some really beautiful insights there.

[00:22:23] Yeah, well, I can sum it up. I just get goose bumps just thinking about that conversation. So I’m just sitting back. I’m just listening [00:22:30] to how the team describes their experience, working ingrates and. I just cry. I don’t. I have no words. I sit there and I feel my my eyes is getting wet from how the conversation is and what people say about this. This baby of mine and I’m looking forward to do a full episode about it, it makes more sense. We’ll just leave this in for the curious minded [00:23:00] person to find in the future when we’re talking about it more in detail in the far, far future.

[00:23:06] No, no, not that far. So we’re coming towards the end of this. And of course, it’s time to reveal the most exciting news. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Do you want to do it? Of course I want to do it.

[00:23:21] And that’s my show, motherfucker. No. Well, yeah. It’s really exciting that people have start reaching out to [00:23:30] to our podcast, saying really nice things and want to help us grow. And what happened just recently was that Times of Malta, which is the biggest Web site in Malta, the biggest newspaper they’ve been around for 80 years, wanted to start publishing our podcast on their site and start writing an article about every and everything that we do. And this is not by any means done yet. We haven’t agreed to anything. But just the fact that someone reaches out and wants [00:24:00] to do this is such a proof of concept and what we’re doing here and that it actually adds value and people excited to hear it. And yeah, it’s it got meece even more showered in Red Bull and wanted to do even.

[00:24:14] And how do you think it will affect the podcast if something like that happens?

[00:24:20] So this site has about a million users a month. That’s a lot of people. And I’m just guessing that that could generate somewhere between [00:24:30] a thousand and tens of thousands of listeners more to each episode. And the podcast right now is very small and I think it will. It will grow our reach significantly and grow our excitement for doing this. So there is so many things coming from it. I just saw one of the feedback they gave us was to to deal with the audio quality. And yeah. So that’s what we’ve been doing now is if you don’t hear a difference in the audio quality of this podcast, then [00:25:00] we will be pissed and disappointed. We don’t want you to keep listening. It’s definitely not our fault anymore.

[00:25:06] We’ve tried now not. I think we hopefully step daughter call it up. And you said excited about what could happen with a podcast. I feel it more as something that I feel more as a deep sense of. I’d say some mixed between joy and gratitude. Is that many people have reached out and said that. [00:25:30] We love what you guys are doing, and I watched all the episode or most of the episodes. And to me that that feels surreal. That’s that’s such a huge compliment to me that someone would be giving their the gift of their time to us. It’s it feels surreal and it gives me a lot of. A lot of energy to keep doing this. And one thing to be my best and one thing to show up and one thing to raise the bar and one thing to give more [00:26:00] and one thing to be more excited. Yay! Yeah. So whoever did that. Thank you so much. It really, really gives us energy.

[00:26:11] Yeah, I completely agree.

[00:26:12] It’s it’s such a beautiful compliment hearing that. What we do matters and that people want to listen to it.

[00:26:21] And. Yeah. It’s just a wonderful feeling. It is.

[00:26:28] So I think we [00:26:30] are approaching a good time to round up, they left one little open loop somewhere. Do you know which where woods. Well, that suits my boy. I I see of making public donations. Yes. The idea of bragging with charity. Yes. Can you do it in a British accent? I’ll do it in a British accent. I’m not very good with this, but I’ll give it a try. No, I’m not going to do that.

[00:26:55] Well, one thing that happened with this Instragram campaign that I did was that people started [00:27:00] throwing hate on me from doing this publicly. It’s like all he wants to do is to stroke his ego, be narcissistic and show off.

[00:27:09] And to that, I replied, yes.

[00:27:13] I want to stroke my ego. I want the attention. I want to show off. It’s a big part of what I’m doing. And at the same time, I want to inspire others. And I want to create an environment where charity is cool, where people can be proud [00:27:30] of charity. And I got a lot of hate when I said that as well as like, that’s just bullshit. No one’s going to do what you do. No one’s gonna be inspired. And I still felt that it was the right thing to do. And then I got a message from someone who had seen the campaign sending a print screen of them, setting up a monthly donation of five hundred dollars per month to the same organization, thanking us for doing the podcast, explaining this. Thanking us [00:28:00] for showing this and said that he would have done this if wasn’t us. And that was such a compliment. It was such a relief to see that, wow, it’s actually working. I’m not just a dumb ass bragger in this. It’s true that if I can do something publicly, it can actually influence someone who then starts donating. Five hundred dollars a month. That’s six thousand dollars a year.

[00:28:24] That’s a 50 percent increase on your original donation. It’s not [00:28:30] even speculation at this point. That just proves just obedience. It’s actually very inefficient not to donate publicly. Yeah.

[00:28:41] And then this other female influencer, Fouquet from Sweden reached out and say, I will add 10 percent to every donation that you do in this campaign. So she added 10 percent. So 50 percent on him, 10 percent on her and then a few others. And. To me, that really made me feel that, okay. Every [00:29:00] donation that I’m doing from now on to anything should be attached to something of a public appearance with it.

[00:29:08] And imagine if these people maybe they did. But imagine if these people did that, too, in their network. Then maybe the woman that donated 10 percent, maybe three of her friends will donate 1 percent. Yeah, whatever. I wish we came to a place in history where it would be as obvious to brag about [00:29:30] your monthly donations on Instagram as it was to show your car or your vacation or whatever.

[00:29:38] Yeah, completely. I don’t think that we would have. I don’t think that we would have poverty and diseases in the world, at least not serious ones. If if we were as proud of charity work as we are over watches or handbags or vacations or expensive dinners. If people took as much pictures of [00:30:00] charity work as of expensive nights out, I think we would have solved climate crisis, poverty, polio, all kinds of things. So that’s one of my one of my life missions that I see after this campaign that really shifted with me is the importance of that question.

[00:30:20] Yeah. And if and I think one important thing, too, is a shift. It’s not only if people felt as good about it, but also if someone [00:30:30] who did that received praise and a feeling of significance from people in their network. Right. Because the reason you probably post an image of unliked out or whatever is because you want to feel some kind of significance or social status. So please, if someone is making a public donation, praise them, give them hell accounts. So we spread that idea.

[00:30:56] Yeah, he is poor love with him. Be the red a shower [00:31:00] on their donations, let them grow wings, inspire others and do the same thing. I think that’s that’s so key. It’s it’s not about starting to brag. It’s about praising the ones who is posting.

[00:31:15] Yeah, that’s a that’s an important shift. I haven’t really thought about it like that before, but that’s a great place to start.

[00:31:21] Yeah, I completely agree. All right.

[00:31:25] Now it’s time to round up. Now you can round up. I actually actually, of course, [00:31:30] knew that this loop was open. I just wanted to see if you were alert, as always.

[00:31:34] Well, yeah, I appreciate that, that you’re testing me to see that I’m on my toes.

[00:31:38] Yes, of course. Now, the recent we are doing this podcast is, of course, to inspire entrepreneurs. Like we said in the beginning. But we also want to build a community. Here we have we so much appreciate people reaching out and saying that they enjoy what we do and people reaching out to wants to help us on this project. That feels feels wonderful. [00:32:00] And it feels like what we’re doing, it is important now. What we’re practicing as well is to ask for help in this community. So if you do enjoy this podcast, if you think that this has helped you gain your value and somehow if you feel like the project is important, please think of one person. One person in your life that is into entrepreneurship, put environment or charity and.

[00:32:29] Send this podcast [00:32:30] IDEM.

[00:32:32] Send your favorite episode and that would really help us out to grow this and reach more to rissoles. Yeah.

[00:32:41] Please do please send them this episode and say this is an inspiring episode in a reality show of a startup that’s trying to change the world and hopefully will grow this community together.

[00:32:54] And you’ll be a part of what we’re doing here. Listen. All right. [00:33:00] See you next week. See you next week. Thank you for having me, buddy. Chau. Chau..