How To Raise Money
Melinda Moore is a social entrepreneur, a seasoned digital marketer, and a frequent speaker at leading technology conferences with over fifteen years as a startup leader, two successful exits, and a Fortune 500 experience. Melinda combines her passion and experience in health and sustainability, female empowerment, Yahoo! tech and digital media. Her work’s been widely recognized by Digital LA as one of the Top 50 Digital Women in 2015, the Green Business Bureau and the National Association of Women Business Owners. She’s also written a book called How to Raise Money: The Ultimate Guide to Crowdfunding.
We were introduced by a mutual friend, Laura Wagner, at Digitzs, and that’s always the best way to meet people. I find that’s how I get my best guests. That’s how people get their network to grow and you’re a classic example of that with your expertise. Before we get into that, would you mind taking us back? You can start back as far as you want. You can take us back to high school, to college. When did you start saying, “I’m going to be an entrepreneur.”
It’s in somebody’s DNA. I’ve always been very adventurous and curious. When I was at UCLA, I was very fortunate that Peter Guber was running Sony Studios at the time and he had classes on entrepreneurship, motion picture marketing and technology. While I was at UCLA, I took his classes and it absolutely opened me up to how the future was going to be greatly impacted through technology. I decided back at that time I wanted to change the world and be in technology. My very first job out of college was producing educational software for Davidson & Associates, which then sold for $1 billion to the Ascendant Corporation. That was my very first job and it was understanding how much human information processing and technology was going to impact everything that we do.
That was like, “This is easy. I’ll do another company and sell that one.”
Unfortunately for that, when it was my very first job, so I was a producer, it was started by Joanne Davidson and her husband and so she was a teacher, but I essentially got an MBA, got the bug, and then after that I went on to my next company, which I had an exit in. It definitely got me excited and opened up the world of opportunity around entrepreneurship and making a difference.
I want to know about your successful eCommerce site, LovingEco to John Paul Dejoria in 2002. I met him several times. I used to call him in the John Paul Mitchell Haircare for advertising when I was at Condé Nast. He is quite the entrepreneur himself. How did you come up with the idea? How did you get the feeling enough to make him want to buy it?
I was born in Santa Monica, California, so I grew up surfing and hiking. I’m a little bit of a flower child and appreciate the planet. I was working at Rogers & Cowan running the convergence division. I thought to myself, “It’s time for me to get back into entrepreneurship.” I came up with the idea of LovingEco, which I knew women wanted to be healthier but they’re not going to sacrifice on style and they’re not going to sacrifice on price. I saw how successful the Gilt Groupe was at the time and flash sales. I created a green flash sale site called LovingEco. We guarantee that it had the lowest price on the Internet. We curated all the best natural products in beauty, health, fashion, accessories.
Loyalty Program: Most of us don’t fit into the profile, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t be fantastic business owners and create jobs and opportunities for others.
At the time John Paul Dejoria had started a company called JP Selects. LovingEco was started by myself and Justine Lassoff and we now have another company called LOVE GOODLY, which is based in Los Angeles. It’s like The Honest Company meets Bert’s Box. It’s a lifestyle company that gives back to charity and it curates all the best natural products. I’m an advisor to the company. Justine co-founded that company with Katie, who is another person who is on our team at LovingEco. What ended up happening and we were so successful that we got an offer to purchase the company about a year after we started it. We’re live by John Paul Dejoria. He folded LovingEco into JP Selects.
Did you have to pitch to get him to buy it? Did you have to pitch to get a co-founder? Did you have to pitch to get customers? Any pitching stories you have to share along that route?
I’m not Jessica Alba and not The Honest Company, but this was a little bit before that time. I’m always seeing what’s happening next, that’s just a talent that I had. It’s all about protecting the environment, so I thought the fastest growing segment of the beauty division was natural products and organic products and products that didn’t have chemicals because your skin is your largest organ. I knew that women didn’t want to pay extra, so I said, “I’m going to curate, do all the work for them and make it easy and I’m in to guarantee the lowest price.” That worked our cohort analysis, our lifetime value, all of the core metrics were very strong. In the combination of hardcore business metrics with the fact that natural beauty is the fastest growing category, that was the pitch.
When I pitched it to people on Sand Hill Road and as a woman, they’re like, “What do you mean natural products? What do you mean organic jeans and what do you mean you need to use dye?” It was almost as if I was speaking Chinese or a different language, which is partially why I went into crowdfunding and then wrote the book, How to Raise Money: The Ultimate Guide to Crowdfunding. Being an entrepreneur and recognizing that I’m not a male that went to Stanford or Harvard and wears a hoodie and a computer geek, then I wasn’t going to fit into the VC model. In fact, I’ve been a strong advocate for entrepreneurship, but leveraging crowdfunding and other methods to raise money. Because most of us don’t fit into that profile, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t be fantastic business owners and create jobs and opportunities for others.
That’s a nice transition. Usually, whether you’re starting a company or getting inspired to write a book, that’s because you see a problem that needs to be solved. Let’s take a deep dive into your book. How to Raise Money: The Ultimate Guide to Crowdfunding. We’re talking equity crowdfunding versus Kickstarter crowdfunding.
My book, it’s called How to Raise Money: The Ultimate Guide to Crowdfunding, which is available on Amazon for under $10. The book covers what is crowdfunding, what’s the history of it. It covers equity crowdfunding and it covers rewards-based crowdfunding, which is Kickstarter. Kickstarter has raised over $3 billion to date. It’s a huge industry and its surpassed venture capital. It also covers hybrid models. It’s a very comprehensive guide to my book that is available on Amazon, but ultimately, I am very passionate about entrepreneurship and ideas that can change the world. Whether somebody creates a hearing aid that allows somebody to hear for the first time. There’s so many innovations or they’re passionate about, electric bikes or a microbrewery or, in my case right now, I launched a company called iConsumer and I have a live campaign for crowdfunding. I’m very passionate about that, so I wanted to put that into a handbook. At the very end of my book, which is chapter ten, I put a guide of all of the leading platforms, their contacts, the marketing firms, lawyers, accountants so you can just literally, like I say, “Nike, just do it.” After reading my book, all the resources and everything are there to launch a successful crowdfunding campaign.
I’m interested in chapter nine about what works, what’s challenging, and what’s next. Can you give us a sneak peek on that?
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John Livesay, aka, The Pitch Whisperer, is a keynote speaker to brands and shares lessons learned from his award-winning sales career at Conde Nast. His keynote talk '"Getting To Yes" shows companies' sales teams how to become irresistible so they are magnetic to their ideal clients. After John speaks, the sales team becomes revenue rockstars who form an emotional connection and a compelling brand story with clients. He recently gave a TEDx talk on Be The Lifeguard of your own life.
Get your FREE copy of John's book "Getting To YES" and learn how to climb the ladder from invisible to irresistible! Download the Free Book here- https://bit.ly/2BbJ5kH