Meet the Experts: Chad Rogers from Lemonlight on Creating the Perfect Crowdfunding Video

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, an 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 Backer Kit and the Gadget Flow. Backer Kit 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 cool 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 am joined with Chad Rogers, chief revenue officer and cofounder at Lemonlight. Chad, thank you so much for joining us today.

Chad Rogers:
Thanks for having me, Roy.

Roy Morejon:
So Chad, we had a chance to, to bond. You guys shared some space with us at the Consumer Electronics Show, but I wanted to tell everybody in the audience that Lemonlight is a video marketing company. You guys truly have mastered all of the ingredients that go into creating beautiful videos and crafting stories basically for people with videos. Over the last four years, you’ve guys have done over 4,000 videos. You’ve worked in almost every single state in this great land and you guys are on a mission to create high quality, affordable video content for businesses, as well as crowdfunding startups. So let’s start with where it all began. What inspired you to cofound Lemonlight?

Chad Rogers:
Yeah. You know, when we first started the actual focus was we believe video is incredibly important in the future of marketing. And we believe that every brand, every company, everyone deserves to have their story told. And we figured out the way to do it scalably and that was by a looking at production budgets and saying where’s all the waste happening? And the waste was happening in bloated crews where there were multiple people on set and doing nothing while only a couple people were actually doing all the heavy lifting. So we really broke down our crews to minimize the expenses there and as well as utilizing local crews. So at this point Lemonlight media has over 40 teams in the US and we have started to expand internationally as well.

Roy Morejon:
That’s killer man. So you know, we talk about for startups, a lot of challenges that are encountered in the early days. What sort of challenges did you guys have to overcome and how did you do it?

Chad Rogers:
Yeah, I think one of the biggest challenges was, it sounds like it’s not a challenge. It sounds like it’s a problem we all wish we had, but when we started to move up market, I think that that’s where a lot of the difficulty came from, was kind of transitioning from this very much a local commercial production company working with a lot of small to medium sized businesses, to working with, you know, everything ranging from eCommerce brands to mid market to enterprise level brands and really pivoting our company from a very templated model of only selling let’s say to visit two different types of videos to selling really a mixed bag of content.

Roy Morejon:
So you guys scaled very quickly over the last four years basically. You were on the INC 5,000 list last year. Talk about that growth. I mean you guys grew over 1300% as a company. You are one of the top 10 media companies now on the INC 5,000 list last year. What advice would you have for someone looking to start their own business that wants to scale like that?

Chad Rogers:
You know, I would really find something, find a problem that exists in the market. Don’t try to make the most money possible, right? Don’t look for the easy home run. Don’t look for the best new app or try to be the next Facebook. Really find something, problem that you really believe exists in the market and something you’re passionate about. Because at the end of the day, it’s a lot of hard work and there’s little pay. I mean, it’s still to this day, going on five years now, it’s still, we’re not gonna retire anytime soon and it really requires a lot of passion and patience and you got to love what you do. So really find a problem and make sure it’s something that you’re really passionate about.

Roy Morejon:
So let’s jump into video. So let me hear the Chad Rogers version of why someone should make a video.

Chad Rogers:
Yeah. Video is, it’s not really an argument that video’s the most powerful way to tell your story. At the end of the day, if you are trying to convey a service or a product or sell your service or product, there is no better way to do it then then through video. You’re able to convey it through moving pictures. You’re able to convey it through voiceover, through graphics. It’s a very dynamic medium.

Roy Morejon:
Indeed. So let’s move into talking about crowdfunding and crowdfunding videos specifically.

Chad Rogers:
Sure.

Roy Morejon:
What would you say are some of the most important considerations when creating a video for their crowdfunding campaign?

Chad Rogers:
Of course. Yeah. I mean I think one way you really want to break it down is how are we using the video? Right? Obviously the first one everyone thinks about is I need a video for my crowd funding page, right? Well, we really drive that back to the video marketing funnel and when you’re crafting campaigns, it’s very much like running any other type of ecommerce campaign. You have to drive traffic to that page. And that’s through creating some type of commercial. A shorter spot. That would obviously be tailored towards Facebook or Instagram or YouTube, depending on how we’re running that ad. And then you’d have your kind of your traditional crowdfunding video, which lives on the crowdfunding page. That’s meant to engage your audience. It’s meant to tell them a deeper story about the history of your brand, why you created this product and how it’s solving the problems that are out there.

Roy Morejon:
Absolutely. So what types of information or footage should always be included in the crowdfunding video, and what footage isn’t usually good or recommended to have in it?

Chad Rogers:
Sure. You know, I would say that most crowdfunding videos really have a very similar, they have a very similar structure, right? It really kind of opens up with a hook. After that you really want to make sure that you are having a little something about the team, about the people behind it, right? You want to provide validation and trust in the brand. You want to isolate the problem, tell them how you are solving that problem, and then there’s always a secret sauce, right? Something kind of fun. Something that really separates you from all the other competition out there. So a hook or an opening. A little bit of background about the company or the team. The problem, the solution, and then again the sauce. And then finally, call to action. Where you’re asking them to [inaudible 00:07:40].

Roy Morejon:
Absolutely. So what’s the typical process like for script writing for a crowdfunding video?

Chad Rogers:
Sure. It always breaks down to the length of the video, right? Because a rule of thumb is two words per second. That is just across the industry standard. It’s about how much we can kind of process words at a given time. So if you’re looking to do a 32nd video, a 60 words script. A one minute video is 120 word script. Two minutes, 240.

Roy Morejon:
Interesting breakdown. So is that just the amount of content a consumer can retain, or is it just because they’re introducing something brand new and it takes a little bit longer to resonate with the potential consumer?

Chad Rogers:
Yeah, I would not be a good voiceover artist. I speak really fast. So you on the other hand, I think that you would make a great one. It’s really the amount of words per second that we can process as a consumer. Yes.

Roy Morejon:
Interesting. So what’s the process like for you guys when a creator works with you to create their video for their crowdfunding campaign?

Chad Rogers:
Yeah, I mean look, at the end of the day, again it really starts with why we’re creating the video. Again, are we creating a commercial, are we creating a crowdfunding video? Do we need to create photos? Do we need GIFs? Do we need mixed media? It’s really kind of isolating what we’re doing with that content. It really gets handed over at the end of the day to the marketing team. It’s helping them run their campaign and what they need. And I would say typically with a crowdfunding campaign, it’s a combination of a crowdfunding video, a commercial, an assortment of images, both product shots and lifestyle shots, as well as GIFs are a common request as well. Once we kind of isolated what we’re creating, we then need to really, it really always breaks down to budget, right?

Chad Rogers:
There are campaigners that have a lot of money to spend and they know that this content can be evergreen and they’re going to use it after the fact, and they’ve run several campaigns successfully before. And this is just a good way to enter the market for them. And they’ve got a lot more spend. We also get first time campaigners that have very little spend. And just to kind of break it down for you, there is a type of video for every budget, right? There is kind of the quick and dirty way to do it and still produce some really good content, and then there’s the really dynamic commercial content. So the really next, once we’ve kind of figured out what our content strategy it is, the next thing to do is determine the budget. Once we’ve determined the budget, then we can get started talking about creative.

Roy Morejon:
Got It. So you guys kind of back into it.

Chad Rogers:
Yes.

Roy Morejon:
So how would you work then with creators to determine, let’s say the best messaging? Is that something that you guys would provide typically or a client would provide?

Chad Rogers:
Yeah, I would say a lot of times we are … We are [inaudible 00:10:39] the executer, right? So we are the ones that kind of take what’s you’re looking to say and putting it into a script that make sense in video, right? So if you’re looking at an overall brand, brand guidelines and the target audience and a lot of that type of market research, we’re not the best fit for you. I would typically recommend working with a marketing agency or your internal marketing team. That’s going to help you kind of come to that, really kind of provide all that information. So we’ll typically say, “Great, your target audience is females between the ages of 20 and 40 that live in the urban areas.” We will then take that and we will craft a script and a storyboard that targets that audience.

Roy Morejon:
Nice. So what video, if you can remember, that your team has produced, has created or generated the most revenue?

Chad Rogers:
There’s a couple. One of them is, one of them is Kudrone was a a $99 drone. Did extremely well. That’s a really good example actually, because when we originally wrote the script, we didn’t really have a lot of information on their target audience. So the original script was written towards a family. It was actually targeting a family. And when we actually got some market research from the marketing agency, it actually gave us a little bit more information on the fact that they were targeting men between the ages of let’s say 18 and 30. so we rewrote that script to target more like college age guys playing with the drones on the beach.

Roy Morejon:
Interesting. So what would be your number one piece of advice for a crowdfunding creator right now at the beginning processes of creating their first video?

Chad Rogers:
Unless you went to film school, don’t try to do it yourself. Again, it’s the most, especially with the crowdfunding video, it is the most important piece on the page. And if you don’t respect the video, how do you expect the people that are the customers investing in your product to really respect you? It really builds a lot of credibility in your brand. It is, again, really the most important piece.

Roy Morejon:
Absolutely. All right, Chad, you survive. This gets us into the launch round where I’m going to rapid fire a handful of questions at you. You good to go?

Chad Rogers:
All right, let’s do it.

Roy Morejon:
All right, so if you could meet any entrepreneur throughout history, who would it be?

Chad Rogers:
Richard Branson.

Roy Morejon:
Branson. Nice. What would be your first question for Sir Richard?

Chad Rogers:
How did you start so many businesses in so many different industries.

Roy Morejon:
I think we’re going to get a chance to see him at Traffic and Conversion, aren’t we?

Chad Rogers:
Oh yeah. Are we? I didn’t see that.

Roy Morejon:
I think he’s a keynote.

Chad Rogers:
We got to interview him, but I was not on set so I was heartbroken about that.

Roy Morejon:
That’s on you buddy. All right, so who did you look up to growing up as a kid?

Chad Rogers:
This is really weird. James Bond.

Roy Morejon:
Nice, nice, good choice. What book would you recommend to our audience?

Chad Rogers:
I just finished Traction, which I really loved.

Roy Morejon:
Nice. What has been one of your favorite projects that you’ve worked on so far?

Chad Rogers:
We just finished a project for Gillette for their Indiegogo campaign and it was really fun and very different for us. Very different experience.

Roy Morejon:
What’s your favorite part of your job in terms of your day to day?

Chad Rogers:
Meeting amazing founders and entrepreneurs.

Roy Morejon:
Last question, Chad, what does the future of crowdfunding look like?

Chad Rogers:
I believe it’s going to be, it’s going to move forward from crowd funding to fully integrated with ecommerce and, again, kind of going back to Gillette really quick, seeing everything from a entrepreneurial businesses all the way to enterprise level companies trying to invent and create using crowdfunding.

Roy Morejon:
Awesome. Well Chad, this is your chance to give our audience your pitch. Tell people what you’re all about, where people should go and why they should launch a video with you.

Chad Rogers:
You know, again, there’s a lot of great video production companies out there. Make sure you work with one that you believe you really have a great relationship with. Make sure they understand your vision and make sure that … Again, there’s a way to make a video at any budget. So whether you’re working with us or anyone else, make sure that you’re doing right by your company and you’re not overextending yourself.

Roy Morejon:
Absolutely. Audience, thanks again for tuning in. Make sure to visit artofthekickstart.com for the notes, the transcript, links to everything we talked about today. And of course thank you to our crowdfunding podcast sponsors, the Gadget Flow and Backer Kit. Chad, thank you so much for joining us today on Art of the Kickstart.

Chad Rogers:
Thanks again, Roy.

Roy Morejon:
Thanks for tuning into 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.