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Fintech Friday Transcript of Episode 56:

Zach Smith, CEO and Co-Founder of Funded Today

Intro: Welcome to fintech Friday's a weekly podcast brought to you by the National Crowdfunding and Fintech Association of Canada and partners. Covering all things fintech, blockchain, AI and alternative finance.

Craig Asano: [00:00:02]  Hello, everyone. My name is Craig Asano, the founder and CEO of NCFA Canada, welcoming you to season four, Episode 56 of Fintech Fridays, a weekly podcast brought to you by NCFA partners where we sit down with incredible people in the fintech and funding community around the globe to talk about trends, product innovations, developments and challenges. Today, we have an absolute legend joining us from the rewards-based crowdfunding space. I'd like to introduce Zach Smith. He's the CEO and co-founder Funded Today. Some of you may have remember him from keynoting at the 2017 Canadian CrowdFinance Summit in Toronto. That was an illuminating talk. We also have that hosted somewhere on NCFAs YouTube channel. I think Funded Today may have also that hosted but Funded Today is the world's most successful crowdfunding agency. In the past seven years, Funded Today has cumulatively raised a whopping $426 million dollars. Yes, I said that they're approaching and counting and growing towards half a billion dollars. That will be a day. They've worked with 4000 plus crowdfunding campaigns around the globe, and they were ranked in 2018 one of the fastest, I think, the twenty seventh fastest privately held company in the U.S. on the prestigious five hundred list number two in Utah, where they hail. Chances are, if you have seen a monstrous, successful rewards based crowdfunding campaign, whether it's on Kick or Indiegogo. Zach Smith and the team and his partner have Funded Today have probably been the driving factor behind its success. So with that introduction, Zach, I'd like to get into the podcast. Welcome to the show!

Zach Smith: [00:01:56] Hey, thanks for having me, Craig. Appreciate it. Glad to be here. It's nice to kind of be back and talking to some Canadians. I spent a couple of years of my life in Toronto, so it's always good to give back to that community.

Craig Asano: [00:02:07] Two years? Did I missed it? What were you doing in Toronto for two years?

Zach Smith: [00:02:11] I was just doing a service mission for my church, so. You are back when I was a kid.

Craig Asano: [00:02:18] You're a man of many talents, I can tell you, because I've got a long bio and I only read a fraction of it. You even speak Mandarin Chinese says, Here you do. You're fluent. How did that come about?

Zach Smith: [00:02:30] That was also in Canada. So another wonderful thing the country of Canada is given back to me.

Craig Asano: [00:02:36] Well, you know, for the listeners here at Fintech Friday, Zach is also a lifelong learner. He's involved with angel investing, lending. He's an avid athlete. He's involved with just a like a ton of different sports, and he's a sought after speaker. So we're thrilled to have you here today, Zach, and want to kick things off by just, you know, tell us a little bit more about yourself what it's like to be a serial entrepreneur. How did you first become an entrepreneur?

Zach Smith: [00:03:05] Yeah. So it's kind of how I introduced myself. Anytime somebody says, Hey, Zach, what do you do? I say, I'm a serial entrepreneur. Now, not a serial killer. None of that Netflix how to make a murder stuff or anything. But for me, a serial entrepreneur is really simply, you know, it's an individual who's always working, but what looks like work to others feels like play for him. And rather than renting out time as an employee, they run small businesses and then they assume all the risks and rewards of those ventures. And so for me, being a serial entrepreneur is kind of intrinsically what it means to be me. I mean, I believe in I believe everything about entrepreneurship is kind of like, if you had to say who Zach Smith, serial entrepreneur, is kind of what I want to be associated with my name.

Craig Asano: [00:03:54] So that's your legacy. Well, what kind of businesses as a serial entrepreneur are you naturally gravitate towards?

Zach Smith: [00:04:02] Oh, I mean, sorry, I've got a little bit of a cough going on here, but basically I own 17 different businesses at this point in time, so things have transpired quite a bit even in just the last little while. So it ranges for me from a diesel mechanic repair shop out of my hometown of Ogden, Utah, to a gold and silver mint, a privately held mint that makes gold and silver coins and bars and sells them all around the world. And then, of course, Funded Today, which is, you know, in some ways, probably still my favorite most exciting company. I own a construction company. We're building a lot of single family homes, so it varies quite a bit. What am I attracted to? I think it would be 'pivoting' and making the right move at the right time to whatever business, I think makes the most sense when we talk about heavy inflation. Historically, gold and silver have been pretty good for that. When we talk about real estate, America is seen 20-29% increase in prices over the last couple of years in terms of appreciation of home value. So I'm always kind of keeping attention to trends, and I'm trying to attach myself to those trends to capitalize. And I did that with crowdfunding, too. Nearly a decade ago with Funded Today, I was the very first I was early on with email marketing before that was even a thing. I was very early on with Facebook advertising. I was early with Instagram advertising. I've always kind of been an early adopter, not the earliest adopter, but early before in terms of applicability, being able to apply these things to whatever needs to be applied to take advantage of that trend while it's hot. And when you do that because of scalability and because of like the connectedness of the world you can achieve, like exponential astronomical results in a very short period of time across all those industries that I mentioned.

Craig Asano: [00:05:43] That's incredible, is there a social bent to I mean, I get the economic pursuits and being surfing the edge of the curve, taking the risks, building and scaling. I mean, pivoting to actually how Funded Today, the story of how it was formed and how it evolved to the world's most successful or the world's largest, however you want to describe it. Four hundred and twenty six million is a big deal. What was the journey like? How did it go?

Zach Smith: [00:06:12] Yeah, it's a great story. And as I and you'll have to reference back to that presentation that I gave at the Canadian CrowdFinance Summit as well. But but very briefly, the story of funded today started actually with a pivot, believe it or not. So that's a that's a good Segway. Essentially, I was I was operating like an attorney or an accountant. I was billing on retainer and I had a client from my hometown, reach out to me and say, Hey, Zach, I can't pay you five hundred bucks an hour or whatever it was. I was charging at the time. But have you heard of this thing called Kickstarter? Have you heard of this thing called Indiegogo? I'd like you to take my invention, and she was a seamstress. She had just made this little running pouch called the Ru Sport and had put it all together and had created a prototype or two just by sewing it up. And it's essentially a wallet that attaches to your waistband with magnets and hold your car, your keys, credit card glue energies. If you're like a marathon runner, things like that and it doesn't bounce, doesn't chafe. So it was a cool little product and she's like, I wear it and I run 20 marathons a year or something. I'm like, Oh, wow, crazy. She's like, I can't pay you your fee, but I could pay you a percentage of all the money you raise. And I actually hadn't heard of crowdfunding because I was doing email, marketing, e-commerce, set up, early stage stuff like that, one that was still just kind of catching on before before.

Zach Smith: [00:07:27] Even like Clickfunnels and and Shopify and things like that became huge. And so I said, OK, let's give it a try. And so thirty five days later, for this particular product, we launched it on Kickstarter. We made a video, we designed a page and we raised them one hundred and fifteen thousand one hundred eleven dollars or something like that. And that was crazy. Six figures in 30 days, kind of thing. And suddenly everybody was knocking down our doors and say, Hey, how did you raise money for this crazy little wallet invention? We want you to raise money for our little widget. We want you to raise money for our new thing. And one thing led to another. Because of the scalability, because of the little formulas and secrets that we have kind of figured out before everybody else, we were raising money like nobody else could, and no one really knew how we were doing it. Essentially, it was through lookalike audiences and Facebook advertising and email marketing and some of those other things I was doing in my other company. But I had applied it across a very hot and growing industry at the time, crowdfunding rewards based crowdfunding specifically. And then it just went crazy from there, to put it mildly, and it still has. I mean, four hundred twenty six million now and counting as of just a couple of days ago.

Zach Smith: [00:08:31] You can follow the timer on our website. We keep it updated. It funded it today. If you ever want to refresh the page, it's kind of fun. Anyway, that's kind of how it went. We had a lot of stories and things along the way that that led to that, but it was one story like that thousands of people knocking down our doors and suddenly maybe being like, Oh, I guess there's something here. Truth be told, I didn't even immediately start the business Funded Today. I was working on some things and still going back to my business after I had raised the money for the Ru Sport product. And because of so many people reaching out to me, it was kind of like, Oh yeah, I better do something with this. So it wasn't as intuitive as you'd think that I was. Raise a bunch of money. Oh, let's go do this a bunch more times. It was more everybody reaching out to me and me, trying and trying and trying and seeing success after success, after success and then starting a business which worked out kind of cool. And that's how you should find your market. By the way, it was an easy lesson to learn because the customers were coming to me. I didn't have to do any outreach for our first thousand clients. They all hired us, essentially.

Craig Asano: [00:09:33] That's the beauty of crowdfunding. There's just that social networking element, and you know, how so how big? Obviously, I know that the funding meter and since the Canadian CrowdFinance Summit in 2017, I believe it was, I think you were at one hundred twenty six million around there, maybe $150 million. So you've tripled it since then. We'll talk to like this channel talks about startups, talks about scale ups. What was the trajectory? I mean, obviously it was explosive, but how did you operationalize it? Did you? Are you managing a large team now? And I know you've got a partner, Thomas, right? Could you talk a little bit about that?

Zach Smith: [00:10:13] Yeah, it's actually very insightful that you have those numbers. So 2018 turned out to be Funded Today's best year ever, and that year we were the second fastest growing, privately held company in America, and we made the prestigious Inc 5000 list. And so it's cool to hear you kind of say those numbers and I'm like, OK, where did we go? How do we get there? It makes sense because 2018 ended up being our our our biggest year at that period of time. So anyway, the scalability just kept going and going and going. And then I think we had a little bit of a plateau. And I think we've kind of reached a point where everybody knows about us. And so unless we're tied to a platform, we're tied to Kickstarter, we're tied to Indiegogo, we're tied to rewards based crowdfunding. So whatever platforms work on there, we're tied to that. And we can only grow as big as new inventors and inventions grow, essentially, which is one of the limiting factors of our market. Like, Hey Zach, why? Why isn't this a billion dollar company? Well, because there's not one hundred thousand new inventions. There's two to five thousand a month kind of thing, you know, and there used to be eight to nine thousand a month.

Zach Smith: [00:11:16] So it's kind of tapered off over the last couple of years as far as new people average inventions on the platform. So we grew, we grew pretty quickly. I think at our high we had 70 plus employees. Now we've made it a little bit more of a smaller team. We've become more efficient. We systematize lots of different things. And so by by being systemize, it's actually. Good or bad, it's made us be able to be more efficient with less employees, but still deliver good results, so I've kind of like that. Thomas is actually I would call him a serial entrepreneur as well, and he has taken on a couple of different businesses. He's essentially going after spammers with his with his law degree, and he's got a pretty interesting enterprise. And I don't know how much I can share about everything that he's doing because he's he's got some pretty big cases, but he's working against against litigating, against some pretty big clients around the world to try to make it so you don't get so many spam phone calls and fixing that industry.

Craig Asano [00:12:12] This is a huge problem.

Zach Smith: [00:12:14] Yeah, he's doing some pretty cool stuff there.

Craig Asano: [00:12:16] I, you know, my my dad got a call and they prey on seniors. He's 80 this year and basically they they want to get access to your computer, drop a widget, a code and then keyloggers and then drain your bank. It is. Yeah. So somebody's got to tackle it. I'm glad Thomas is doing it.

Zach Smith: [00:12:36] If you want information on that, if anybody listening or if you reach out to Craig, let me know and I'll connect you to directly to Thomas. He's got a he's got an app, he's got a pretty efficient team and. A full transparency, he has won some lawsuits for me when I was a beta tester where I would just turn people in who were spamming and he took care of it. So it's very effective and I made money on it too, so it's surprising how good it worked.

Craig Asano: [00:12:57] Wow, I'll have to look into that. But well, one thing you were just talking about when we're talking about scaling and the journey, and it's intricately linked to these platforms. So Kickstarter, we all remember when they passed your first billion and it exploded. And and I'm thinking back to the day 2017, you guys had a blow off top twenty eighteen. Yep, we're now 2022. What is happening on Kickstarter and Indiegogo? And are there competitors, real competitors and what is that impact to Funded Today's future? What do you think? What's the strategy?

Zach Smith: [00:13:36] Yeah, great question. So essentially, yes, because of our success, just like you see across every industry, whether you look at e-commerce, social media, marketing, all those types of things, there's thousands of different people in there, and it's probably hard to distinguish who is actually the best. When you say, who's the best that email marketing, who's the best at social media marketing? Who's the best agency? Who's the best coach for speakers or clients? If you want to do something there, who's the best person that can help you in your personal weight loss or fitness journey? A lot of those things have become so saturated it's very hard to stand out. We still stand out at Funded Today as far as crowd funding goes, but we do have lots of competitors. But over the last three years, I would say there's only maybe two or three that have been able to maybe make it through COVID or whatever other changes there were in the market as far as as far as that goes. But for a time, especially in 17, 18, 19, 20, those four years, I swear there was like 50 new companies that popped up and they were kind of doing like the Walmart model where they would come in and charge very little and, you know, maybe not deliver that good of results, but they would do something. And it did hurt us in the sense that we couldn't be like the apple of the market and charge high prices for great results. We had to actually meet some of those demands and things. And then the industry has changed a bunch as well. In terms of Facebook marketing, it's not nearly what it used to be as far as knowing what to do and how to do it, and it requires way more effort and way more, which is good. And that's why we've been able to stand the test of time to all of these things have been good for us because now all of those competitors. I don't know if they died or they just moved on to something else or what. And then we've gotten really good in email marketing. Believe it or not, email marketing is still incredibly efficient. And I remember just last year, probably two or three months ago, we raised one hundred and sixty seven thousand dollars for just one product. And, you know, in their 30 day period just on email marketing and so very, very, very effective. Imagine if you could send out emails and essentially make that much money from two or three emails. So we've built up massive lists of audiences that way, and we nurture them and take care of them and just follow all the principles of a good, good email hygiene and good email marketing. And that is done well, too. So in the past five years, as far as Kickstarter goes, the biggest change I've seen is less products because it's the same thing for Kickstarter. So inventors saw the same thing. They would see us raise a million dollars for a wallet, $2 million for smart luggage and then 50 other wallets and smart luggage would pop up. And so Kickstarter backers, I think, got savvy and said, Wait a sec, there can't be this many wallets. There can't be this much smart luggage because everybody was trying to do the same thing. Oh, this agency is doing really, really well. Let's start an agency. Oh, this product's doing really well. Let's launch a product. And so I think they got saturated with products, and I think some of those products didn't do so well. And then I think a lot of products had issues with fulfillment and delivering and then compound that with all the worldwide supply chain issues and COVID and everything else. And I think that hurt a lot of things, people. I mean, Amazon is such a behemoth and they can do the one or two day shipping. And so some people will just wait. But the problem with waiting is then new ideas and products can't be brought to life because these people are going to crowdfunding because they don't have money and they need to make money to bring these products to life. And so when you add all those things together, it makes it interesting.

Zach Smith: [00:16:38] And then probably the biggest change for crowdfunding has been board games, board games and those types of things. Dungeons and Dragons type stuff, characters, figurines. I talked to a guy who's raised millions of dollars. I actually went to a little board game conference at his house. It was kind of fun. They put together this little thing and we played a bunch of board games. These guys are like professional board gamers. I mean, it was an incredible experience. I'm more on the, you know, I play chess a lot, but then mainly I'm other sports like basketball, soccer, tennis, pickleball, spike ball, things like that. And so going to play board games was actually exhilarating. It was a lot of fun to play with these guys for five or six hours because they they knew everything about board gaming. And I mean, they were talking like strategy and monopoly kind of thing. Anyway, long story short, I was talking to this guy and he said, Yeah, you can't be a board game company if you're not on Kickstarter anymore. And that was not even a thing five years ago. So now if you're a board game company and you're not on Kickstarter, you pretty much cannot make it. That's how much Kickstarter has influenced board gaming at large, and I think it's been relatively a good thing from what I understood from him.

Craig Asano: [00:17:34] And it's amazing. I mean, I think when it launched, as you said, any gadget, anything innovative but copycats, were there supply chain issues... It's interesting how something that stood the test of time, or maybe it's the novelty of a board games, but it does make sense. There's a community. There's almost an equivalent number of backer Kickstarter communities as there are Reddit communities, it would seem.

Zach Smith: [00:17:56] Oh yeah, for sure. Absolutely. It's crazy.

Craig Asano: [00:17:59] Like, is there a geography that in some reasoning that like, let's talk about the backers in 2022 to make sure they like games? I always thought that people want to see companies. Their ideas come to fruition, so they back it. They get a deal, they get a discount, they test product. Sometimes maybe early. Maybe it's the first iteration. Is that still hold true? Or another way of saying this, like which kind of products are not working on Kickstarter that used to work on Kickstarter that our listeners need to know?

Zach Smith: [00:18:33] Yeah, that's a good question. The ones that work the best still are definitely board game means and techie I talk about ubiquity, plus something unique leads to huge chance for success. And so, you know, smart luggage is an easy one to talk. You know, a smartwatch is easy to talk about if you look at Pebble. That was the first smartwatch before Apple Watches and Samsung watches and all the smart watches were a thing, but it's a watch. Everybody likes to tell time, they need to know the time, and so a watch is ubiquitous. That's what that word means, essentially. But how did they make it smart? Well, they made it so it could do things that smart things could do. You could look at your text messages, you could check your heart rate, you can do all these other things right. And so those types of products are still the best. That's what you want to be able to do. You want to take something that's ubiquitous and then you want to make it unique. But the problem is a lot of people iterated too much on that. And you know, you get like these smart scales that can do five hundred metrics for your body. I have one and I'm like, How much did I weigh today? It gets a little overkill sometimes, too, you know, with all the different iterations and stuff, and you've got to focus on what's really going to matter. I like my smart. I like my smartwatch most for the pedometer feature. I like to be able to, you know, and to check my heart rate, and I liked it. It's monitoring my sleep. Those three things are awesome. And so when you're iterating on a ubiquitous item, don't iterate to create five hundred things that no one's ever going to check. It's got to be meaningful in their life now. I think that's the new word I would add in. How do you create meaning behind it? So it's not just a bunch of tech jumble mumbo jumbo that's being harvested for data and sold to big companies or something, right? It's got to mean something to me. I like to see if I can get 10000 steps a day and if my heart rate stays this after a soccer game and it's this resting and how did I sleep? What matters in that sense, is how you should go about it. And then in terms of what's not working, I'd say books aren't working nearly as well as they used to. Not that they weren't amazing, but it just seems harder and harder to raise money for books. Different indie type projects are a little bit harder to to raise money for.

Craig Asano: [00:20:30]  Why do you think category like that books? Is it that different than board games? And if they're using the messaging and making it meaningful and all of these insightful things, why books like I'm just trying to get my head around of the trends for the hot sectors or the not hot sectors?

Zach Smith: [00:20:54] It could it could be a chicken or the egg thing to a lot of people used to run books and they'd raise money on there. And then they raised whatever they did and then they never went back. And so if you never go back, you eventually lose the backers because they're not paying attention to it either. I think you could say something similar to leave for like Hollywood and movies. You actually had some pretty cool things on there trying to think Bridget Jones diary. That doesn't sound right. So right? It wasn't all right. I don't know which one it was, but there's a couple of projects like that that are actually big names, and they started out as Kickstarter projects. You don't see that anymore. You don't see, like Russell Crowe getting on there saying, Hey, help me fund this new movie, right? You saw that a little bit with Kickstarter, but you don't see that as much anymore. So again, the backers that got excited about that aren't there anymore.

Craig Asano: [00:21:35] The influencers.

Zach Smith: [00:21:36] Yeah, yeah, you don't see as much influencer marketing, I would say maybe that's different to an influencer marketing people have kind of caught on to that. Oh, you've got a million Instagram followers. Are they real? Are they fake? Are they? If I pay you fifty thousand bucks, did I actually get fifty thousand in return? I think metrics, just like I actually I kind of I kind of said this was going to happen and and it has to some extent, just because you have a million followers on Instagram doesn't mean someone's going to give you fifty thousand. Now people are more savvy and they understand that they'll they'll look at your last 10 posts and they'll be like, Wait, why does he only have one hundred likes on his last 10 posts if he's got a million followers or an Instagram, change their algorithm, too? So some of these people that do have a million plus followers on Instagram, just like Facebook did, they've pretty much restricted the organic reach. And by restricting the organic reach, influencers don't have nearly as much power and they have to be like everybody else, and they have to rely on ads and ad costs have gone up and that makes it more expensive. And so those things have impacted as well.

Craig Asano: [00:22:32] So if influencer marketing and the shifts in and sort of Facebook marketing and awareness and everybody knows what rewards based crowdfunding is about, I mean, how should entrepreneurs looking to raise some capital for x y z business approach and use crowdfunding to best to take the best from it? What are their strategies because it's obviously a stepping stone to early capital that can be built upon, and I think it's still true that you can connect with a wide variety of stakeholders that can bring more than just capital. They're not just backers, they're still ambassadors and all those good things like maybe we'll ask a question in this way. What are some of the things that entrepreneurs looking to use rewards based crowdfunding need to know or underestimate, or they haven't thought about that they should know the context of is it right for me and how can I do this and maybe also touch upon and this is like a multipronged question for sure, the DIY approach versus working with a company like Funded Today.

Zach Smith: [00:23:41] Great question. And let me couch my last thought on influencers as well with with one point. I think about this because I was reading something just a little bit before our podcast interview, Craig. Elon Musk Elon Musk tweeted about allowing merchandise to be bought by Dogecoin, which is for Dogecoin, Dogecoin, whatever you want to call it, it's basically a cryptocurrency meme coin or something that's taken off over the last couple of years. It went up 18 percent with one tweet from him. And so if you are the right influencer like Elon Musk, you can influence billion dollar markets incredibly well, and so influencer marketing works, you just have to be way more selective in terms of who you're reaching out to like if you can get Elon Musk to say something positive about your company. Yeah, you're going to make tens of millions of dollars, probably with one tweet. It's that crazy. So anyway, now as far as as far as your question in terms of how can we make crowdfunding successful today, number one, crowdfunding still is really good for validation. We call it the due diligence and product validation period. You can come you can come to us with an idea and we can tell you in 30 to 60 days or less after, you know, you spend a couple of thousand dollars kind of thing. Where else can you spend three thousand dollars and in 30 to 60 days know whether you've got a million dollar business or whether you need to fix some things. That's the most powerful thing for crowdfunding, in my opinion. It's not, and it never really has been, even though it's exciting to talk about how much money we've raised. It's not really about how much money you raise on the platform, it's about what you learn from the money that you've raised. Even these multimillion dollar projects we worked with pivoted, changed and adapt and adapted at least the ones that are still around and are very successful and created new products and iterated and talk to their customers. And that's the powerful part about crowdfunding. You reach out to your customers. Let's say you raise $100000 like the Ru Sport did. One hundred fifteen thousand Hey, what did you like about this? What did you not like and what and what did they do? And they've changed and the Ru Sport is still around. I just got an email from them yesterday that they read the Disney World Marathon and they were wishing everybody Happy New Year. So it's still a very successful company that's running today. And why? Because they talk to their customers, they iterated. I mean, they're at Disney and they've got the Minnie and Mickey Mouse version of their of their sport, right? That's a simple little pivot that they made that allowed them to get even bigger than they were when they first crowdfunded. And so iterating, talking to your customers, gathering that feedback now, let's say you fell. Let's say you're on a project and you needed to raise $100000 and you only raise $10000. Will you reach out to that group of ten thousand dollars and you say, Hey, why did you back my project? And then you figure out why they liked it, and then you look at your messaging and figure out how everybody else didn't realize that's what you were saying. And then you tweak it and then you launch again. Or if you raise no money. Then you figure out, well, that must not have been something anybody liked, and then you launch a new idea. And that's the power of crowdfunding for a couple of thousand bucks. Ten times over, you're twenty thousand dollars out and you finally have a winner. I think that's what's exciting about crowdfunding. Where else can you iterate and pivot and change and get that immediate customer feedback before you really spend any money? And then if you do raise tons of money now you have all this money that you can use to bring your product to life because you didn't have to buy any product before you begin, which is also exciting. And that, to me, is still why crowdfunding has a huge place in the entrepreneurial journey.

Craig Asano: [00:26:52]  You know Gofundme. Yeah, for sure. You never talk about them. I know you're working sort of exclusively with Kickstarter and Indiegogo, but I understood that GoFundMe grew very rapidly. I guess it's out of California. They've got an army of marketers. Yep. What? Compare and contrast that with like a Kickstarter communities?

Zach Smith: [00:27:17] Great. Great question. Gofundme. And last I checked, and it's probably still the case. They're the behemoth in the in the world. And it's not rewards based crowdfunding, though. As far as I know with GoFundMe, you give money to somebody who's asking for it just because you want to. Hey, I've got cancer, please or help. What I normally find is, in fact, I can give you a good example. I had a friend of mine. He fell off a roof and he died. And this was over the last couple of days, and he donated all of his organs and everything to charity. And he, when he died, when they when they took him off life support, he only had like 20 minutes or 13 minutes, some crazy amount of time to make it happen or whatever anyway. Some of his friends and family put together different GoFundMe links for him, and last I checked, I think they'd raised like fifty seven thousand dollars to cover his funeral costs. All these other things because they kind of told the hero story of this guy who was a really good dude who gave all of his organs away. And let's let's help him out so that he doesn't have any so that his family and his friends don't have any any trouble with that. That's how I see the appeal of a Gofundme. It's the emotional appeal, and you can get that in crowdfunding as well. But when you're like, Hey, help me bring this amazing wallet to life that I thought of doesn't have the same sense of this guy donated his organs to charity because he died, falling off a roof while he was working. Did you know what I mean?

Craig Asano: [00:28:32] Yeah. Well, one is donation, right? Yeah, that's a true cause-based crowdfunding and rewards is the more the entrepreneurial they're trying to build a business

Zach Smith: [00:28:41] That cause has that virality factor. Look, I'm telling you about this on the podcast. I saw it before you from 50 other people that had shared it. You're not going to get that with a wallet like unless you tell a really good story, unless you really make that emotional appeal. Incredible what you should do. You absolutely should try to integrate those cause based notions into your own Kickstarter or Indiegogo project, but it's very hard to do. And I think that's why I Gofundme is the behemoth as far as crowdfunding goes.

Craig Asano: [00:29:10] What is corporate crowdfunding still happening? Let's take a Canadian brand like a Canadian tire. They want to see. They need products for their shells, and they want to know if a product, whether it's sourced from Amazon or crowdfunding market, is going to be successful or not. So they do crowdfund. They validate. They test. It's a great use case for crowdfunding and then they have an agreement and they say, Listen, we'll buy a whole container stock shelves and you get your money and we did it through corporate crowdfunding. Ok? Do you see much of any of that going on?

Zach Smith: [00:29:45] You know, I see I see people who reach out to us who have products that would go into like a Canadian tire type place who raise money on crowdfunding. And then they're like, Look, we raise two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in the last 30 days on crowdfunding and then they get on Shark Tank or what's the Canadian one called Dragon Dragon? Then, yeah, Dragons Den. Yeah, they get on shows like that. And then that leads to opportunities across there. I haven't. I actually, I've seen Samsung. Samsung has actually run projects themselves on crowdfunding platform, specifically Indiegogo generally, and then they determine how those perform, and then they use those metrics to determine whether or not, how they if they want to scale it or build out on that. But most of the time, it's people like you and I who come up with a good idea. We run it on a rewards based crowdfunding platform, and then we take that success story with us and create press pitches for all the places that we want to get it as far as retail goes.

Craig Asano: [00:30:36] Yeah, yeah, that's that's true to the cause, the origin, the genesis of crowdfunding, rewards based crowdfunding, I think, is a way to get. What are some of the most memorable or strange campaigns you've worked on in the last couple of years or not worked on? You've seen them and you're like, OK? And how much of the reason like I want to, you know, cover some different ground here on this podcast?

Zach Smith: [00:30:59] Ok One one.  It's a good question, and I am trying to think right now to see. I remember I remember somebody who ran a project for a pickle. Let me let me see what it was about pickle. Kickstarter.

Craig Asano: [00:31:11] Wasn't it the potato salad?

Zach Smith: [00:31:14] Potato salad was memorable, for sure. Yeah. Oh, what was the pickle one? I think it was something like the potato salad one is a great one to it. It was kind of that was early on in crowdfunding. That was why was that years ago? Yeah. He basically wanted to make the most amazing potato salad recipe, and I guess I could be getting this thing wrong. But and he said, Give me, give me money and I'll make you. I'll test them out. I'll taste them all. I'll make the best one ever and you'll have the best recipe in the world when I'm done or something like that. And everybody thought, That's cool. He's crowdsourcing the best possible potato salad recipe, which isn't a bad idea for a lot of things like How often have you been on Facebook and said, What's the best this? You know, that's kind of what he did. And he and he made money on it. Believe it or not, I'm trying to think of the pickle one. But you know, it comes to mind. For some reason, he was like selling different pickles or something. But what's it called them?  I don't know.

Craig Asano: [00:32:01] Well, look in the NFT space, they're selling JPEGs, and I know there's a lot more that's going to happen with with non-fungible tokens, these NFTs. But they're getting a lot of money raised for some weird things like, you know, the ape NFT and others. But sticking on the crowdfunding like the I have a good idea here. Let's try to have a fictitious company and walk us through your approach. Some of the things and advice that they might have to consider for crowdfunding. So I'm just going to come up with like a pet app, like a dog or cat app, call it a dog cat app. And that provides health advice and connects these pet owners to vets. And they need some capital. They want to raise money. Would you say crowdfunding is right for them? What would you say to them?

Zach Smith: [00:32:53] Yeah. So the first thing I would say and we talked about this earlier, what things are doing well, what things are not doing well. The first thing is apps generally do not do very well on Kickstarter, but they do really well if you pair them with hardware. So the first thing I'd say with this particular product is how can we create a hardware item? And I've got just the idea. It's something that they wear around their leash that does something as far as dog care goes. My brother actually has something for this with his golden doodle. It, like tracks all the steps the dog takes and the dog takes like fifty thousand steps a day. It's just crazy, like how much dogs are moving around, especially his dog. I guess it's got a good backyard to play in. But we do something to pair a hardware item for the pet with this particular app. That's the first thing that we do. Next thing we do is we design a video and a page. And again, when we talk about hardware and we talk about apps, what is going to make this hardware in this app really great. You know, if we connect, if it connects them to online vets, when they have problems, then let's hope it's measuring some sort of vitals. So what can we measure on dogs as far as vitals go? Maybe it, maybe it can do something with, I don't know, taking pictures. Maybe it's doing something like that. I don't know. You'd have to get creative here. Maybe it's doing heart rate. Maybe it's checking for certain signs of a healthy dog and what makes it good? Maybe it can somehow track the fur of a dog or something. Or maybe it notifies you, you know, when you need it, when you do something like that. I don't know all the different things, like the crazy stuff that's happening as far as the smartwatch that I wear is even it's like, how is it doing a lot of this stuff? And apparently it's pretty accurate. I take it to my doctor when I go in, and he said he doesn't even have to do anything because I just send him the data from my app and he's like, OK, let me just confirm. And he confirms everything is right. So I think doing that is kind of cool too. Maybe it, maybe it saves on medical bills. I just had to pay three hundred bucks for my dog because she had something wrong with her on something, and it would have been nice if somehow we caught that proactively and it sounded like we could have. So if an app can do something like that, combined with some hardware element that is communicating with the app, that's the best way to make it happen. And then all you do is you make amazing VIDEO You make an amazing page, meaning all the design and the ad copy and you appeal emotionally, which is easy to do with dogs. I love my dog, most dog owners do, and I was not a dog person at all before I. It's been two or three years now since I've had a dog in my whole life. I was like, I'm never going to dog. It's a pain in the butt. It's hard. It's still, yeah, it is. For the most part, I have a pretty good dog still, but you got to go on a walk every day. Well, it's good to go on a walk every day because now you can, you can walk your dog. Maybe that's what it does. Maybe the I mean, as I continue to talk through this, you can kind of see how my mind works. So it's a great question. I appreciate you asking this one. But OK, the app says, Hey, what are you doing, man? Your dog hasn't walked in two days. It's a really good app like your dog needs to get out and walk. And so do you, buddy. You're getting fat. That's a really good thing, right? That could be a very good app. This might be an idea here. So somebody, somebody steal it I'm not going to knock on a pet.

Craig Asano: [00:35:41] Well, if you know someone with that hardware, I know someone with that pet app, we could connect the two.

Zach Smith: [00:35:47] It could honestly be really good. My wife's always like crap. Ari hasn't had a walk in three or four days because it's cold here in Utah now, too, so you don't want to go outside that much, but you should walk your dog. So maybe that's what it does. Maybe it's a really simple thing, just like you're like my watch, actually right now. Just a second ago, it said, Hey, get up and moving. You've sat around for whatever right? The app could shoot you a push notification and say, Look, your dog hasn't walked. Go take her on a walk. What we might be that might be enough. That literally would be enough to probably sell millions of copies of this thing if the price was right. The emotional pill was good, and all those things are like good nowadays, everybody wants to get healthier. You've got COVID and so everybody's thinking about what they can do to protect themselves. Well, getting outside and walking is a damn good way to take care of yourself, right? They even say if you get coronavirus, you shouldn't be laying down as much because that's how the pneumonia can happen. So look, now I'm making the emotional appeal. I mean, we've almost got this thing done, Craig. You start, let's start a project.

Craig Asano: [00:36:39] Let's do it. And how much are we raising if we do this and how?

Zach Smith: [00:36:42] And here's another I always like to try to raise millions.

Craig Asano: [00:36:46] Is this stuff? Yeah. If you only raise one hundred thousand, it's not moving the needle when you've raised four hundred twenty six million and you're almost half a billion. How much of this stuff has to be real, like, I've built the app, those versus I don't want to say vaporware, but you know, the intentions are good. I'm getting into the back of a napkin versus, it's here. Yep.

Zach Smith: [00:37:06] Great question, because then you're talking about costs, too. It's like, Well, this would be awesome, but I don't have two hundred fifty thousand bucks to make whatever it is, right? It's probably not that expensive because there's so much. The good part is there's a great book called 'Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal' Everybody should read it. Listen to it. Essentially, you could probably take a lot of this technology is probably available on Android or something, and that's allowed to use and maybe get this thing most of the way there without really having to spend too much money. But Kickstarter is pretty strict with prototypes. You've got to kind of show them that it does something. Specifically, Indiegogo has a cool little button on theirs that says, Hey, this is an idea on the back of a napkin, and I like that. I wish Kickstarter would do that, too. And you can choose different options within Indiegogo, depending on what your product is, and so you're not misleading your customers. If we came out and said, Hey, this thing already works, it's ready to go and then we take two years to send it to them, we told them we were going to take three months. That's one of the reasons why Kickstarter has not Kickstarter specifically, but why Kickstarter brand has been tarnished a little bit in some sense and Indiegogo as well. That's why Indiegogo made this pivot is because people were told they're going to get a product in three months and two years later, they still haven't got anything or it's not what they said. It was so great question, and it's absolutely something you need to do, but I wish they just had a button, and I wish backers could look at that button and say, Oh, OK, do I want to support this thing? It sounds really awesome. It looks like the likelihood of it happening is 50 percent sure. Let me throw a hundred bucks at it, right?

Craig Asano: [00:38:27] The probability of yeah, exactly operationalizing to a real, you know, brick and mortar, not a brick and mortar business could fully be a digital business, but it's not vaporware. Well, exactly. It's amazing with this. I've got another one for I had a call. Ok, it's a U.S. company. They are doing retrofitting of commercial buildings. This is all in the cleantech space. An example of a retrofitting is as simple as they're using incandescent light bulbs. We can just switch over to LEDs and it's 8x saved and there's lots of buildings and they also run programs. They get into surely the back systems of a commercial building. And apparently the U.S. is several years ahead. This is all in the carbon capture, carbon abatement area, but Canada just hasn't got their stuff together. So there's a group interested. They mentioned crowdfunding. They reached out to me. We had a good initial call. But what is your thought process to, you know, let's do a crowdfunding to raise awareness because ultimately consumers and others that are involved with this, not just building managers, I think if you're living in a condo, you can go to your building manager and say, we should be doing this because we're not doing our part. And it's it's this is the sustainability area as well.

Zach Smith: [00:39:45] So it's an awareness campaign. Are we hoping to raise money here or just spread the word and get a lot of people talking about this?

Craig Asano: [00:39:49] Well, we're we're there to raise money and then grow that need into a much bigger project. And maybe the government, maybe a larger private equity sort of institutional firm can get there and say, Listen, we've got like the numbers stack up the unit metrics, but there's 10000 buildings, OK, if we got half of them and we retrofitted them, here's the numbers.

Zach Smith: [00:40:13] And are we raising money for this particular company that does the retrofitting?

Craig Asano: [00:40:17] Well, that's a good question. Maybe some of the savings go to the consumers. Maybe some of the savings goes to reduce condo fees because the property manager realizes that we've got a, you know, a better long term sustainable plan for retrofitting their building.

Zach Smith: [00:40:32] And in this case, in this case, since the market has been defined as ten thousand. I did like how you said consumers and property owners could make money from it. That could be a crowdfunding element because we got to think of what reward we're giving because this isn't Gofundme, this is Kickstarter or Indiegogo. And so the reward could be if you join early, you're going to get this savings versus once we raise all this money, you're not going to get the savings. So act now and get the savings forever kind of thing. Be one of our early adopters. However, I would maybe hurt myself and I would say, why don't we just reach out to these ten thousand buildings and build this amazing PR campaign for them and get all their names, emails, phone numbers, addresses, whatever and build this whole targeted email personal campaign to all of them and just see how many we can get interested in this sort of thing and just reach out to them directly. Now we could do that through. Funny, too, because if we have data on them or if we can gather that data, then we can build targeted Facebook ads specifically to that particular subset of people. And if I can get all their names, emails, phone numbers, addresses, I could literally target just those ten thousand people and hit them up hundreds of times with all kinds of different messaging. And I may not even need crowdfunding to do something like that. I could arrange in person meetings where I have salesmen and people come in and close, but I would probably approach something like that and that in that regard, maybe.

Craig Asano: [00:41:41] Yeah. Well, like one of the ideas was we have Home Depot. It's like a hardware type store. But you know, you get some volunteers, you have them spread the word, the awareness cause, and they do this with refrigerators that are old cars or, you know, take them off the road, join this program, get a replacement for free. And there's a savings. There's a benefit. It's good for everybody, sort of like a win win if if it's if it's done properly. But you know, I'm just picking your brain, you know, this is this is the time to do it. But it's very interesting. You know, at the end of the day in 2022, what do you think is the main difference between a successful campaign and an unsuccessful one? And I want you to address the question of a DIY approach versus working with a company like Funded Today because obviously you guys know your stuff, it must come with a cost. But you're raising more money than they can ever do themselves, no doubt. So what do you think?

Zach Smith: [00:42:41] I'll hurt myself again, and I'll say as much as possible, if you're looking to save money, raise as much money as you possibly can on your own, find someone at your local school. If you're in high school, your high school or college who can make a video for you, find someone who's going into design that can design a page for you. You can look at every single case study Funded Today's done there on our website. If you want to see all the four hundred twenty six million dollars we've raised, just go to our website Fundacao today and then click on the tell you exactly what button is. Let me just look it up right now. Click on the Get More pledges. Learn more. It's a blue button and then scroll down midway on that page and you can start seeing every project we've worked with and you can click on those projects, look at the video, look at the page and then tell your people exactly what they need to do by analyzing all those and then launch your project. The other thing you can do is read my book. It's only like ten bucks or something, and you can listen to my podcast. I've got 40 free episodes. If you did all of that and then launch your project, you're well on your way. And now here's the best part, and this is where I come back in higher Funded Today after you've raised all the money that you can now. Conversely, you can hire us for all of these things up front. You know, call us three to six months before you plan on launching. We'll make you a video, we'll design you a page. We'll do everything that I teach in my podcast. We'll do everything that I teach in my book, and we'll make you. We'll give you the very best chance to succeed without you having to do all of that legwork yourself. So it's just an opportunity cost tradeoff.

Craig Asano: [00:44:03] I love it. Well, I think our listeners have have learned a ton here, we're going to move to perhaps one of my favorite parts of the show. It's these rapid fire questions where we're going to fire a quick question expecting, you know, a quick off the top of your head response. You're ready for something like that.

Zach Smith: [00:44:22] Yeah. Let's see what we can do.

Craig Asano: [00:44:25] So what's the one thing that you would chalk up funded today's success to?

Zach Smith: [00:44:30] Hmm. Good question. I read something recently from essayist Nassim Taleb, and he says there are two great addictions heroin and a monthly salary. So how does that answer that question, in my opinion? It answers the question because we were one hundred percent operating on performance. When the Ru Sport reached out to me, I made no money if I didn't raise them any money. And so because we were entirely motivated by performance, we were able to get very creative to try to raise as much money for our clients because the more money we raised for them, the more money we raise for ourselves. And I had a joke that I said years ago, and I guess it's still appropriate today. I make more money from broke, poor, starving student entrepreneurs than anybody else in the world. How? Because I only get paid when they get paid, and once they get their check from Kickstarter, they write me a check. And so I'd say maybe it's that. And then the other thing is, if I had to say one more thing, it's pivoting every single time throughout my life that I've had successful businesses, even with what I believe are going to be some successful businesses with those 17 companies that I own now, in addition to Funded Today.

Zach Smith: [00:45:33] It's been pivoting with funded today. What did I do? I was doing e-commerce and email marketing, and I pivoted into crowdfunding and it took those same things into this new industry. Where can you take those same things that are working in whatever business you have now and be thinking two to three years ahead? So that when whatever you're doing now stops working or doesn't work as well? You can go on to the next thing. And I've done this with Funded Today multiple times, even during the coronavirus, when everything else was really, really struggling and things were shut down and things were bad. We integrated email marketing in a way that hadn't ever been done before, and we have the biggest, most successful newsletter and email list in all of crowdfunding. And we raise hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes five six hundred thousand dollars a month from that newsletter alone, which is huge.

Craig Asano: [00:46:16] That was in a rapid response.

Zach Smith: [00:46:17] No, sorry about that.  I just thought if I talk really fast, it still counts as rapid.

Craig Asano: [00:46:25] I've come up with a follow up I actually like. All right. The million dollar question is like, Well, if it's such an interesting thing and everybody's got to be in the edge of the seat for this one. What do you and you've been in crowdfunding space for a long time and you went from email, marketing, crowdfunding and the industry is maturing, if not matured. And so what might the next pivot be? Hmm. Because people want to join you.

Zach Smith: [00:46:47] Crowdfunding or just like, OK, good pivot. Well, I've given I've given a few away and I hate to act like a prophet or something because I'm never. Then I look really stupid. But again, if you don't like, if you don't own up to what you say, then you're not really committal anyway, you know. So let me let me make some predictions. I guess I'll do a Gary Vaynerchuk thing, huh? I love my predictions are a self... What is that? What does that word? Selfish, selfish in a way? Yeah, self-fulfilling, sure. I'd like some of them to come through. I'd love to see real estate continue to do well because I'm heavily invested in real estate, especially single family homes, particularly in areas that are a little bit lower priced. So I'm early there. I'm hoping that I'm hoping that trends continue where people moved west from New York and California because they make so much money there and they they can get a three thousand square foot house in America where I live for five six hundred thousand dollars and it would be like $4 million in California for that same type of thing. And so they'll pay my prices, which are amazing for me, and they'll think they're getting a steal of a deal, which maybe they are not necessarily now, but maybe 10 years from now when Utah continues to grow and expand the way it has. Utah was number 10 in the top 10, I think, like three or four in the nation last year as far as job growth goes. If those things continue, I feel like real estate has huge potential in Utah. The other reason I love Utah is because of our mountainous landscape. It's hard to build. You can't go build ten thousand homes in Utah in a year, no matter who you are, because it takes excavation, it takes rock work, it takes rock crushing. It takes all these other things that make it a little harder to jump into and it's kind of capital intensive. And so somebody like me who has millions of dollars of play and leverage to credit different lenders and different things, I can take advantage of that where maybe a someone who's a little bit more younger can't just jump into the way that I did. And so I like real estate a lot. The other thing I like is I like gold and silver. I feel like gold and silver has potential. I feel like with the. What was it? Was it JPMorgan or no, it was Goldman Sachs or like, I can remember who it was. But there was this big lawsuit a year ago, year ago, year and a half ago, where they were basically artificially holding down the price of silver. And that's been revealed and things like that. Well, that should allow the price to actually reflect what it needs to be. And if that's the case, not only do I sell gold and silver, but I'm also buying up my inventory supplies. It should, it should increase in value. And then everybody wants to know my opinion on bitcoin, and I don't want to piss off. So many people says it's such a hot topic. I don't see the use cases yet as much like bitcoin, specifically Dogecoin. And again, that's not to say I'm not investing in I am. I'm investing in bitcoin. I've got I've got different holdings and a lot of those different types of things. I do think blockchain. Blockchain technology is here to stay. I just don't know if what everybody's doing right now, what are we doing right now? It seems like get rich quick schemes. And believe me, I even have like fear of missing out. I will tell you one thing I've never had fear of missing out. I've never felt like I didn't execute strong off any of my business because I've never been like, Man, I wish I would have done more to Funded Today in 2017 and 2018. I haven't felt that way because I felt like I did as much as I could have done. I made as much money as I possibly could have. I helped as many clients as I could with bitcoin and some of those others I'm like, Oh, I knew about that 17 years ago or something. I did whatever it was like. I remember I remember a guy who worked for one of my earlier companies, and he was telling me about bitcoin. His name was Ramin and Gilbert, and he's like, Hey, you should get into some bitcoin or something, you know? And it was back when it was a couple of pennies. And now what is it, forty fifty thousand dollars? So do I have regrets on that? In a way, but I also am still thinking it's so speculative that why is it actually worth money until someone can? And believe me, I'm not just saying this like, I'm naive. I probably know more about bitcoin and blockchain and all that than most of you listening to this. So I don't think I'm just some idiot who's like hiding behind my screen here and hasn't studied at all. I have. I've read thousands of things on. I've read the white papers I've looked at and I and I have money in it, but I have money that I can afford to lose. And that's the difference. I believe on things like this that are speculative, that are changing 15 to 20 percent every day, you probably should only put in money that you can afford to lose. And that's what I've done, and it's significant for me, but I don't necessarily believe in it.

Craig Asano: [00:50:47] Well, there's no question it's a risky asset, but trying to stay that these rapid fire questions. This a whole other episode.

Zach Smith: [00:50:55] I'll be quick.

Craig Asano: [00:50:57] One piece of advice you'd give to a budding entrepreneur?

Zach Smith: [00:51:01] Fail fast. Really simple. Fell fast like it's OK to lose. You're you're young. If you're an entrepreneur and you're young, you're calling yourself. If you're young, fell fast. Like, you probably don't have that much money if you lose it all. Who cares? You're probably getting supported by your parents. Awesome. Take advantage of that time when you get older, like me or Craig, or we have family and kids to support. It's scarier to take big risks. Elon Musk told a story where he was bankrupt, where he was two weeks from bankrupt in both of his businesses in a Tesla and SpaceX. That's a crazy risk to take, and he had like he was going to lose all of his PayPal money. That's how much of a risk he took. I wouldn't dare to do what he did there. So do it while you're young. Take these big risks. And then once you've been successful, take some of that risk off the table and in and diversify and invest in other things.

Craig Asano: [00:51:44] I love it. What is the next question? If you had one wish, what would it be?

Zach Smith: [00:51:52] It's kind of trite, but I think it would be great to have joy like pure utter bliss and happiness and not just like momentary because I believe we all have momentary fleeting moments of that type of thing. But it would be great to just have peace of mind and confidence and no worries and no risk and just joy for a really long period of time. Like just to be very joyful, not not all the time, because I believe you need that holistically harmonized aspect to understand how good it is to feel joyful. But most of the time, ninety ninety five percent of the time be great to just be joyful.

Craig Asano: [00:52:22] Do you meditate?

Zach Smith: [00:52:23] Yeah, I do.  Not, as well as I should, though.

Craig Asano: [00:52:25] That's it just being in the zone, you know, letting some of it go existing for for just so in. What's your favorite movie your book?

Zach Smith: [00:52:47] Yeah. You know, I like stoicism quite a bit, and it kind of goes to that joy thing too, because it helps you get rid of a lot of the worrying. So I like meditations by Marcus Aurelius. I was a big I'm a big fan of autobiographies, too, though I like I like Steve Jobs. I like shoe dog. I liked Washington a life. If you go back to like some of the early founders of America, things like that are pretty cool. Favorite movie, huh? Geez, I saw Dear Evan Hansen recently, I really liked it. That's apparently polarizing, but it was. I cried. I watched it last year and I cried. I never do that in movies. It was a great movie. But you know, classics like Shawshank Redemption probably remember the Titans. If you're looking for just an ultimate feel good, we can do it. We're the underdogs and just kind of blending in a lot of the different things that are still really important to fix in our countries nowadays. To remember, the Titans tackles a lot of that. So probably stuff like that.

Craig Asano: [00:53:37] Well, there you have it. Stuff that you but if with Omicron here, if you do, you get away. Do you get any holidays? Like would you go somewhere? Where would you go?

Zach Smith: [00:53:45] Not as much, if not as much. I've kind of been keeping it pretty close to home the last couple of years just because, again, I kind of don't want to piss anybody off, too. So I'm trying to just stay within my own thing and do my own thing. But yeah, we get I get outside, I go walking a lot. I go into the mountains, Utah. It's nice for that kind of thing, so you can kind of get away and not be around a lot of people still. And that's been working pretty good.

Craig Asano: [00:54:07] Perfect. And last last question, when the hell are you going to be back up to Canada? So you Funded Today and NCFA can do a roadshow.

Zach Smith: [00:54:17] We didn't make that happen as soon as as soon as it's clear and people feel good about coronavirus and some of those different roadblocks. Let's get it on the calendar and make it happen. I love going up there and it's man how long and 2017. Probably last time I did go up there, so let's be awesome to get back

Craig Asano: [00:54:30] we could crowdfund some real estate. Yeah, let's do it. That's what we need to do.

Zach Smith: [00:54:35] Well, we need to talk about that. I heard Canada is hotter than America, even as far as real estate goes.

Craig Asano: [00:54:38] So it is bonkers. It is bonkers. But maybe, you know, there's a good story there. We can help first time homebuyers get access and figure out for them and others how it could work. So it's a win for everybody.

Zach Smith: [00:54:49] But that's the play, by the way. Craig, yes, but the play was I should have brought that up. If you can find a way to like, get first time homebuyers to qualify for homes because they're getting priced out. Even in Utah, probably only 20 to 30 percent of people can afford the median price of home right now. That's worrisome. That's scary. If the problem is, you can't really reduce your cost that much. So if anybody can innovate or figure that out, whether it's tiny houses or some townhome type of setup, you can make millions of dollars and actually help a lot of people.

Craig Asano: [00:55:13] Well, that's that's what we're thinking in the crowdfund real estate context. So something we could take offline. But really, I want to thank you a ton, Zach. It's it's been an absolute blast. The last, last last question, I guess, is how can everyone get in touch with you if they have questions, they want to connect with you, they want to learn more and they just can't wait till you come up to Canada next. How do they how do they get in touch with you?

Zach Smith: [00:55:37] Yeah, you can give me on any of the social platforms. Most of the time I'm real Zach Smith or though real Zach Smith, but I'm also I'm I'm just real. Zach Smith Aureole Zach Smith. Get me an email, Zach@Funded.Today. Zach had funded today all my websites today. If you want to see a list of all my companies agile ag.com, That's, agile holding group, ag.com, you can look at everything I got going on and see if any of those interests you. We always have job openings, we always have internships, so hit me up. We'd love to help you. You got a great idea. Funded Today is where you want to start.

Craig Asano: [00:56:08] Well, there you go, guys, and ladies and gentlemen, Zach Smith, CEO and co-founder of Funded Today, has successfully raised four hundred and twenty six million dollars and counting, and we're going to have you back when you hit half a billion. Sounds like a blast unless the real estate idea just catapults us to a billion, right?

Zach Smith: [00:56:28] For sure.

Craig Asano: [00:56:29] So that that was incredible. Thanks for sharing your time and expertise. I had a ton of laughs here, so we we will see you soon, Zach, and thanks so much for joining.

Zach Smith: [00:56:41] Likewise, thanks again for having me.

Craig Asano: [00:56:43] So if you're new to Fintech Fridays, please check out some of the incredible past episodes on the site. Think you'll be surprised what you find? We look forward to seeing you next Friday for another episode of Fintech Fridays. Have a great week and everyone.

Outro : you've been listening to Fintech Fridays brought to you by NCFA and partners. Tune in weekly for the latest fintech Friday podcast by subscribing to this channel. The National crowdfunding and Fintech Association of Canada is a non-profit actively engaged with social and investment fintech sectors around the globe and provide education research industry stewardship services and networking opportunities to thousands of members and subscribers. For more information please visit ncfacanada.org. Oh yeah.

End of Podcast

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