How to Build a Global Tribe and Truly Connect with Daniel Levine & Steven Pulver – AOTK 241

Roy Morejon:                    Welcome to Art of the Kickstart, your source for crowdfunding campaign success. I’m your host Roy Morejon, president of Enventys Partners, the top full service, turnkey product development and crowdfunding marketing agency in the world. We have helped startups raise over a hundred million dollars for our clients since 2010. Each week I’ll interview a crowdfunding success story, and inspirational entrepreneur or a business expert in order to help you take your startup to the next level with crowdfunding. Art of the Kickstart is honored to be sponsored by BackerKit and the Gadget Flow. BackerKit makes software that crowdfunding project creators use to survey backers, organize data, and manage orders for fulfillment by automating your operations and helping you print and ship faster. The Gadget Flow is a product discovery platform that helps you discover, save, and buy awesome products. It is the ultimate buyer’s guide for luxury gadgets and creative gifts. Now let’s get on with the show.

Roy Morejon:                    Welcome to another edition of Art of the Kickstart. Today I’m joined with Steven Pulver and Daniel Levine with the Fireside Conference. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me today.

Steven Pulver:                   Thank you for having us.

Roy Morejon:                    I’m really excited about the opportunity to talk to you guys today about the Fireside Conference. This is going to be year four. I’m really excited, obviously, to get up to Toronto with you guys, or even further in the woods than Toronto for this all-inclusive, immersive, off the grid, off the record retreat with some of the brightest minds out in the industry for businesses, startups, investors, entrepreneurs, et cetera. So let’s talk a little bit about your backgrounds and how you guys got connected.

Daniel Levine:                   Well, first of all, thanks for having us on.

Steven Pulver:                   Thanks so much for having us. Honestly, it’s great to be connected. So happy to have you joining us this year, so thanks so much for having us on.

Daniel Levine:                   A little bit of background on us, we’ve been running Fireside since 2014. It started really as a passion project. Steven and I were getting sick of the idea of being in concrete buildings and consuming great conference content by looking at a stage and with our name tags on and exchanging business cards. And we sort of turned to each other and said, “Why don’t we rent out the summer camp we grew up going to as children?” Steven, I think you’re going on what, year 24?

Steven Pulver:                   Well, I finished 24.

Daniel Levine:                   You finished 24.

Steven Pulver:                   And then I retired.

Daniel Levine:                   Then you retired. But Steven still goes up from time to time to play music up at camp. And we thought, “Why not just rent it out? Bring up some amazing people in our community. And instead of watching folks from a stage and maybe having 15 seconds to ask a question, why not sit around the campfire and learn and share knowledge that way?” And in our first year, we were 60 people, mostly from our community here in Toronto, and this year, we will be at a hard cap of 400 people. It’s a global audience. Over half of the attendees are coming internationally, and we have amazing people coming in from as far away as Australia. So we’re really, really excited for our fourth edition of Fireside.

Roy Morejon:                    So I love this, and obviously, I’m super stoked to get out into the woods, disconnect from the world, and sit by a fire and talk shop with a bunch of startups and entrepreneurs and other people that are like-minded. So going into year four, what have you guys seen in terms of not necessarily head count, but in terms of the people that are looking for these opportunities out there? Are there any trends that you’re seeing?

Steven Pulver:                   The first thing is that there is a huge trend towards just disconnecting in general. Obviously, we think we’re at the forefront, or know we’re at the forefront of that, but know that there is some great pushes across organizations across various demographics and geographics to actually push towards this idea of disconnecting.

Steven Pulver:                   In our first year, to be honest, we were terrified of what would come when we actually told people on our FAQ on our site that there was no cell reception and that there was limited wifi and sometimes that goes out as well. That was really a terrifying thing even for Dan and I until we realized we can own that. We can address that head on and say that we need to be at the forefront of this trend of disconnecting because it’s so important, this idea of digital detox. So I think that’s a first trend that we noticed.

Steven Pulver:                   We’ve also noticed the types of attendees that have been coming have changed quite a bit over the last few years. And that in many cases is a result of how we’ve changed our messages, and how we’ve done our marketing, but also as a result of a few other factors that we’re happy to get into over the next little bit, pricing being one of them, our broader reach being another. We started out in our first year, really just with our own … the closest people in our networks. That’s how we ended up with 60 or 70 people, of people we really knew or were one degree away from in terms of knowing. A lot of tech companies at the time, a lot of early stage, early, early stage companies, even founders that just knew they wanted to start something, but didn’t even have a startup yet.

Steven Pulver:                   And then from there, we really moved to the point now where we’re getting people that I cannot even believe how lucky we are to have secured and have actually reached out to us to say they really want to attend. And it’s much broader now than tech and just founder specific. We have all kinds of different types of professionals, entrepreneurs, founders coming out. So the trend for us, at least, has been looking at this and saying, “There’s way more than just one subset of people that want to come out and disconnect from technology and learn and engage with one another.” It’s really much more broad and becoming way more mainstream.

Roy Morejon:                    One of the things I always talk about on my podcast is growing their tribe or growing their community. And it sounds like that’s what you guys have been eating for the last few years of doing this.

Steven Pulver:                   Right.

Roy Morejon:                    Talk a little bit about how that’s kind of grown naturally and organically to that you guys have almost like a waiting list and thousands of people that have applied now to get in there.

Daniel Levine:                   Yeah, so as Steven mentioned, we started from reaching out to our networks and leveraging that. And our biggest core focus was putting on an exceptional event. We wanted to set the table for serendipity to happen out in the woods with incredible people. And we had a feeling that if we put together a good product, the rest of the chips would sort of fall into place. And what happened on the Sunday after the first Fireside, when we left camp and finally got our cell phone reception, and this was many hours after everyone else had left, and we looked at our inboxes. They were filled not just with emails and messages from people that were at Fireside, but we had a ton of inbound requests from people that had, after three or four days of no cell phone reception, had gone and posted on Twitter and Instagram about their amazing experience. And then we had other people, people from their network, reaching out to us saying, “What was this thing? How do I get involved? Can I come next time?”

Daniel Levine:                   And that led us to go from 60 people in our first year to 285 in our second year, and as I mentioned, 400 in our third year. And now we have a hard cap on 400 going to our fourth year. And we have now a wait list. We’ve actually received over 4,000 applications globally for people to come and attend. So it’s amazing how we’ve seen that exponential growth by relying on our network, and then letting our network sort of speak for itself and get to those second, third, fourth, fifth degree folks in the community and really cement our tribe, but now becoming sort of like a tribe of tribes where we bring together tribes from all over the world.

Daniel Levine:                   And, to us, our vision it’s sort of like a Woodstock for this larger community where we all come together once a year for something truly magical.

Roy Morejon:                    Do you think you guys will ever do two a year now with the ever increasing demand?

Daniel Levine:                   It’s funny. Ever since we started having folks from Australia come in, and they’re probably some of the most amazing ones in my books, because in our third year when we first got a few Aussies joining us, they spent more time on a plane getting to and from Fireside than they did at Fireside, and to me, that’s a really humbling thing.

Steven Pulver:                   And they’re returning too.

Daniel Levine:                   They’re coming back.

Steven Pulver:                   It’s not like it’s a one off thing.

Daniel Levine:                   And so we’ve talked about a number of ideas of doing something out in Australia, doing something in the US, but right now we have this magic moment in our hands, and we’re lucky that it even continues to today, and so we’re really heads down focused on making Fireside incredible. We’re not necessarily looking to expand the business or the presence, but if we can expand the impact on the community, it’s certainly something that we continue to look towards.

Roy Morejon:                    Yeah, I love the fact that you guys have the full mix of an education time that’s there. Obviously, the talking and the networking side, food is obviously crucial, drinks and adventure, and all that stuff. And then you guys actually went a step further and created your own song. What was the caveat behind that?

Steven Pulver:                   I’ll let Dan take that.

Daniel Levine:                   Well, the number one thing for us with Fireside is fun. We like to have fun, and we try to inject that into the broader experience. We come without any background or pedigree in making and running conferences or events. And so we got to write our own rule book. And part of that was being able to reach out to people in the community, or having people in the community reach out to us that have unique talents or skills that you may not otherwise know.

Daniel Levine:                   And so part of the process, Roy, you will know as now being a Fireside attendee, is that we send out a pretty expansive information form where we ask a whole bunch of questions that you might not ordinarily be asked when you attend a conference. One of those is what is your, if you have one, your hidden talent? And so we get a lot of people that are CEOs and founders or investors and it turns out they are exceptional musicians or artists or rappers or it runs the gamut of potential talent.

Daniel Levine:                   We have one member in our community, who actually, a little more overtly than having a hidden talent, just has an amazing overt talent. His name is Jonathan Mann. He holds the Guinness World Record, I hope I don’t butcher it, I believe it’s for the most number of days consecutive writing, producing, and distributing a song. So he’s put a song a day every day for like I think over eight years onto YouTube. He’s at Song A Day Man, and so we said to him, “Jonathan, here’s a little bit about Fireside and our values. Would you be able to put together a little song?” And we were just blown away with what he was able to put together for us. It’s something we listen to quite often, and to this day never get bored of. And every year, he actually comes up and attends Fireside and performs it live and modifies it a little bit to adapt it to that particular year. And so we’re proud to have a couple of years now worth of the Fireside song.

Steven Pulver:                   Actually I’m checking it here, since 2009, he’s not missed a day of writing song or video.

Roy Morejon:                    That’s incredible. I’m sure he’s doing it from sick in bed as well.

Steven Pulver:                   I’ll also say, by the way, to your crowd as well, he’s amazing. And in terms of taking those complicated ideas and turning them into song, especially to your crowd, in the crowdfunding space, how many times you want to explain your idea or explain your product, this is a completely shameless pitch for him, just a friend of ours-

Daniel Levine:                    And he’s got a lot of notoriety, and he’s super talented, and he’s gone viral a number of times. And if you are looking for something unique, and magical, and different on your crowdfunding tour, that’s actually a great thing to look at.

Steven Pulver:                   One of his claims to fame, I understand that this isn’t probably where we thought the convo would go, but actually when Apple had the huge issue with Antenna Gate when their iPhones were losing signal with, what did they call it? The death grip. Steve Jobs actually featured one of his songs that he put on YouTube at the beginning of that … There was like this PR keynote that Apple did, and Steve Jobs actually opened the keynote with that music video. So he really does have a propensity to get really complicated ideas into really great songs.

Roy Morejon:                    That’s really awesome. So I think one of the unique things is I had never heard of you guys before and then all of sudden I get this really cool Instagram ad with the Fireside video in it and a bunch of cool outdoor scenes and all of that. So I’m really interested, because this is a higher ticket item for people and entrepreneurs, how the marketing efforts that you guys have gone about promoting Fireside itself have gone in terms of the overall interest that you guys have now growing and receiving?

Daniel Levine:                    First of all, I think when it comes to marketing, a lot of people who are not traditional marketers, they just look at getting the message out online as, okay, I need to do online or digital marketing, and so I’m going to post a couple ads. But I think it’s quite important to take a step back and look at your overarching goals and objectives.

Daniel Levine:                    For us, we’ve never had a problem getting incredible people to apply to Fireside. But what we’ve always wanted to do is expand that reach. So whereas we were originally a conference focused mostly on the Toronto community, and then mostly on a Canadian community, and then mostly on a Canadian and let’s say northeastern United States community, we’re now truly a global community.

Daniel Levine:                    As I mentioned, we have over 50% of people coming internationally. And so for us, the biggest thing was getting that message out there to the global community. And it started also with looking at what we had asset-wise to use. So over the years, any time we have made an investment in something like a song or a video that we’ve produced or even photography, we’ve always done it in view of how will we be able to leverage these assets in the future and make the most out of them so we can get one, two, three, four, five, X return rather than do just one photo shoot for one purpose for one off thing that we’re going to spend thousands of dollars on?

Daniel Levine:                    So it starts with understanding our objectives, which is reaching a global audience, and then utilizing and leveraging the assets that we currently have which are some fantastic photos that really exemplify the experience of being at Fireside, some of the core messaging that we’ve seen that has resonated over the years including testimonials from other amazing alumni that have attended. And then putting all that into online marketing channels where we see really good value and really great return.

Daniel Levine:                    So when you’re turning your minds to a campaign like this, you have any number of options in online digital marketing. There’s the obvious ones like Facebook and Google. There’s the less obvious ones, or perhaps the lesser used ones, like Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, and other communities. And so the first step is to test them all and see what drives the most value for you. Where are you getting the best conversions? You need to be data obsessed. And that was step one.

Daniel Levine:                    We are not a conference or entity that’s investing $100,000 in marketing. We’re very frugal, but we want high impact. So we do a lot of testing, and we look at a lot of data. And once we have a sense of the results and the data, we then continue to iterate and invest more in what’s working.

Daniel Levine:                    And so over the years, we’ve found Facebook and Instagram have been probably the best tools for us to reach the right audience. As it turns out, Google has been a very poor tool for us, mechanism for us to reach the right audience. And then we’ve spent quite a lot of time crafting our audiences. And it’s crafting our audiences through our landing page where we’re getting great contact information from people to build look-a-like audiences on Facebook. By crafting our audiences also by really getting to know them. So for example, when we do ask you to fill out that information form and we do interact with you, we get sense of what’s important to you? What do you like? What drives you? What motivates you? Crowdfunding, venture investments, startups, and we take all those bits and pieces to put together really, really, niche, narrow, and specific audiences on Facebook or on other outlets that we’re doing digital marketing on. And that really is the core of how we approach marketing.

Roy Morejon:                    So what’s been the craziest thing to happen at Fireside to date?

Daniel Levine:                    Oh, boy. Some of that, we do have a little bit of a Vegas rules policy, but I think we can break that rule for a couple of exceptions. And certainly in speaking to you, we really want to foster an environment where people can feel open to share thoughts and ideas that might show themselves to be a little more vulnerable than they ordinarily would be in a public setting. And so we do ask people not to share too much of what goes on at Fireside, but we’ve certainly had a few really interesting and also a few very impactful things.

Daniel Levine:                    So there’s the impactful things on the business side in terms of what comes out of Fireside. And there’s no shortage of stories and anecdotes with respect to things like business partnerships and growth opportunities that have arisen. But I always turn to this one anecdote that I love to tell, and then maybe I’ll turn it over to Steven to see if he has anything that he likes to share, and I’m curious what he would come up with.

Daniel Levine:                    One thing that we do that’s a bit unique and different at Fireside is, number one, there’s no VIP at all. Everyone is VIP. There’s no green rooms, there’s no speaker only area. Everyone’s treated the exact same. And in line with that, when you arrive, Roy, you’re not going to get a name tag. You’re not going to get one of those lanyards that says, “Roy Morejon,” and this is what you do, and this is the company that you’re with, so that people can start looking at your name tag to see what you can do for them and whether or not they want to talk to you. We want people to engage on a human level.

Daniel Levine:                    And so a couple years ago, we had a founder of a company that has a market cap of about $5 billion join us for the weekend. Now this was an incredible, incredible individual who ordinarily people would pay to go see on a stage in a concrete building downtown. But in this case, they got an opportunity to spend the weekend with him. And no one knew who he was just by looking at him. We didn’t have a name tag. We didn’t say who that individual was. And as it turns out, he also has as a hobby and interest, a very strong hobby of astro-photography and taking photos of the stars.

Daniel Levine:                    And on our first night, Friday night, this unassuming guy stood up in front of the group and said, “At just after midnight tonight, I’m going to go and shoot the Milky Way with my camera. And if anyone wants to join, you can find me in this location.” And of 285 or so people, I think 15 of them went and joined him. And they spent the night doing exactly that, shooting the Milky Way and getting just incredible, incredible photos. As it turn out, the venue where we hold Fireside has some of the darkest skies in North America.

Daniel Levine:                    It wasn’t until the following day when that individual got, not on stage because we don’t have stages, but sort of got into the middle of the area where we were doing a keynote presentation, and we announced him and who he was. And I’m not going to say his name just to be respectful to the story. We introduced him, and it was only then that we had sort of announced and revealed who he was and what his pedigree was. And this was already over 24 hours into the weekend. And if you looked around the room, you could see just by the expression on the faces of the individuals, who exactly those 15 people were that the night before had spent the whole evening shooting the Milky Way with this person who ordinarily they may not get ten seconds with at a conference when that individual’s up on a stage and in a VIP area.

Daniel Levine:                    So that to me is probably the most impactful sort of thing that we can help happen at Fireside. Steven, anything that-

Steven Pulver:                   For me, it’s not even that one most impactful moment, it’s these collection of little things that collectively add up. That whenever Daniel or I are able to connect to people that we know through their backgrounds and their applications would be a good fit. And when people feel as though there is this serendipitous moment where they’ve met, and they may or may not realize the magic that was underlying that was the preparation that it took to get everyone up and organized. Those moments, to me, those collection of moments are looking back on the last four or five years, really have become the most magical in my memory.

Roy Morejon:                    Yeah, that sounds awesome guys. All right, well, Steven, you drew the short end of the straw to answer questions in my launch round. Are you good to go?

Steven Pulver:                   Let’s do it.

Roy Morejon:                    So what inspired you to be an entrepreneur?

Steven Pulver:                   Wanting to create something where something didn’t exist before.

Roy Morejon:                    Who did you look up to growing up as a kid?

Steven Pulver:                   Business or personal or both?

Roy Morejon:                    Both?

Steven Pulver:                   Actually, Ted Cole, who’s the original owner and founder of Camp Walden, which is where we do Fireside. He was this larger than life individual for me. And professionally, it might sound cliché at this point, but it’s always been Steve Jobs.

Roy Morejon:                    What book are you reading or listening to right now?

Steven Pulver:                   I’m actually not reading or listening to a book right now, so I can’t give you an answer. What I can say is I need to find one. So do you have a recommendation? Can I throw this back at you, Roy?

Roy Morejon:                    That’s a fair question. I actually just started listening to a book, yesterday I just finished it, called Skin in the Game. That was really interesting. But the one I’m listening to right now is very interesting, it’s called Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son.

Steven Pulver:                   Cool.

Roy Morejon:                    It’s this gentleman like from the 1800s basically writing letters to his son. And there’s so many good nuggets of information in each one of these letters that still work today. So definitely a quick read, but really, really interesting. I’m about a quarter of the way through it so far.

Steven Pulver:                   Okay, amazing. Thank you.

Roy Morejon:                    You are welcome. Don’t put any more questions back on me now. All right, so if you could grab a beer with any entrepreneur throughout history, who would it be?

Steven Pulver:                   That’s a hard one because, obviously, I’m not going down the Steve Jobs route again, but that is who it would have been. I would have also put someone like, I don’t know, I’m gonna say Steve Jobs again, and I’m gonna own it.

Roy Morejon:                    What would have been your first question for Steve should you have only had one?

Steven Pulver:                   My only question. Now I’m going to sound like a mumbling idiot, as I probably would with him in any event. Dan, what would-

Daniel Levine:                   The conversation probably would have gone exactly like this.

Steven Pulver:                   Exactly. I would be sitting there, and I would say, I would just turn it on him and say-

Daniel Levine:                   What’s your favorite book?

Steven Pulver:                   I would say, “What piece of advice would you …”

Daniel Levine:                   What’s your one question for me, Steve?

Steven Pulver:                   I would say-

Roy Morejon:                    There you go, that’s it.

Steven Pulver:                   I think I would just freeze to be honest. Probably the worst answer to that question you’ve ever received.

Roy Morejon:                    All right, last question, Steven, then I’ll take you off the hook. What does the future of entrepreneurship look like?

Steven Pulver:                   The future of entrepreneurship, in my mind, is people from all over the world realizing that the resources are out there, that you don’t need to come from money, you don’t need to come from certain geography. That you can make something happen with really anything. And the future of entrepreneurship, in my mind, looks like we can create things all over the world and make an impact. We’ve seen it with social. We’ve seen it with different technologies. The future of entrepreneurship is really harnessing the global community and technology in a way that is going to allow people to create ideas faster, cheaper, in the far reaches of the world. To me, that’s where we’re looking.

Roy Morejon:                    Awesome. All right guys. Well, this is your opportunity to give our audience your pitch. Tell them what you’re all about, and why people should go apply to Fireside Conference.

Daniel Levine:                   Thanks, Roy. So we just announced the final 50 spots for Fireside are now open for application. We’re looking for incredible, top, amazing entrepreneurs, founders, investors, media influencers to join us. It is a very exclusive group. We top out at 400, unlike most conferences with thousands and thousands of people. If you are interested and have a bit of a sense of adventure, you want to go out and explore the woods, go through a little bit of discomfort and adversity, but find an incredible, global tribe of proven leaders, then you need to go to firesideconf, C-O-N-F, firesideconf, like conference, dot com. And hit Apply, and just let us know you’re a friend of Roy’s, and your application is going to be reviewed in priority above anyone else’s.

Roy Morejon:                    Well, that’s bad. You don’t want to do that, man. No, I’m just kidding. Well, this has been awesome. Audience, thanks again for tuning in. Make sure to visit artofthekickstart.com for the notes, the transcript, everything we’ve talked about today. And of course, thank you again to our crowdfunding podcast sponsors, the Gadget Flow and BackerKit. And if you guys loved this episode as much as I did, make sure to leave us a review on iTunes. Steven, Daniel, thank you guys so much for being on Art of the Kickstart today.

Daniel Levine:                   Thanks Roy.

Steven Pulver:                   Thank you Roy.

Daniel Levine:                   Looking forward to seeing you in September.

Steven Pulver:                   Indeed.

Roy Morejon:                    Thanks for tuning in to another episode of Art of the Kickstart. The show about building a business, world, and life with crowdfunding. If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, awesome, make sure to visit artofthekickstart.com and tell us all about it. There, you’ll find additional information about past episodes, our Kickstarter guide to crushing it, and, of course, if you loved this episode a lot, leave us a review at artofthekickstart.com/itunes. It helps more inventors, entrepreneurs, and startups find this show, and helps us get better guests to help you build a better business. If you need more hands-on crowdfunding strategy advice, please feel free to request a quote on enventyspartners.com. Thanks again for tuning in, and we’ll see you again next week.