The One Thousand Dollar Cup of Coffee...

I’m not kidding.

I sell coffee for $1,000 a cup.

This idea may work for you. It may not. At its core is a story with an imbedded technique. Spend 4 minutes reading and walk away with a powerful sales tool that I’m about to give you FREE. Read the whole thing because this article is not fluff. It is news. The case study in it is still live on Kickstarter. It is live.

You see the idea came to me after about 1,382 people had asked me out for a FREE cup of coffee. I almost always said yes, I’m a nice guy. I like to help people. I help a lot of people. Every day. Every week. All year.

I have drunk more free cups of coffee in exchange for strong tactical and strategic advice. I give away more secrets than Wiki-Leaks. It proved to be a mistake for me as well as the people I was advising. It was slowly killing my ability to actually get anything done and still have a life, sitting around ideating with people for FREE.

Sure, it was gratifying for my ego but after ten years of doing it I realized it was of no help to anyone. Only a small fraction were taking the direction I was offering. There was no price. It was literally valueless. My business partner had been begging me to quit wasting my time and energy on the leeches. So one day I did. What I discovered?

The second I changed the paradigm for them, the paradigm changed for me. About six months ago my phone rang. It was a former client that hunted me down, a CMO from a large organization that had changed companies. Pretty common occurrence at this guys level.

He said he had a new company and product and wanted to pick my brain, wanted to buy me a free cup of coffee. I said “Jim, I appreciate the offer. I am flattered but I get this offer six times a week and I have to say no for two reasons. One, my time is too valuable anymore. I can’t sit around, drink coffee and give away my tactical guidance for free. Two, if I give it away for free you are most assuredly not going to follow it. So you can’t have it for free. You know I give advice that may only change your business by 1 to 5 degrees. But if we are in an airplane in Atlanta flying east and I change the flight path by 3 degrees. We may land in Tehran or we may land in Vienna. I’d rather go to Vienna this year. I will no doubt positively change the destination of your business. So now I simply charge $1,000 for a cup of coffee with me. If at the end of that coffee you decide it was not worth it, you will not get a bill. If you like what I have to say, I’ll send the bill. If you like what I say so much you hire us, I’ll apply the bill to your first invoice as a discount.”

Jim replied. “How’s tomorrow, 10 a.m., Starbucks on 290 next to St. Edwards?”

“See you there.” Boom. One coffee, $1,000.

Yes, the meeting went well. Yes, Jim got billed the $1,000 for coffee. I wrote a really killer viral advert on the spot.

Yes, his company hired us to do their complete strategy. Yes the strategy worked. Of course I had the advantage of knowing Jim earlier and the history of our friendship predicated that sale. Doing it once gave me the understanding that it was in the client’s best interest and mine to do it this way. It raised the bar on everything including the result. I am a pretty engaged fellow. The challenge of putting myself behind the cup for 1,000 bucks focused my game. I got better. I thought deeper. I was more creative.

The second cup was sweeter. I might be stretching it by calling this the second cup. Realistically it was probably the 6th or 7th.

I am fortunate to sit on several boards, one a local Austin company that is in the food business. One of the other board members is a seasoned winning businessman in the natural foods space with a long history of success in retail grocery food products, Doug Foreman. I liked Doug the second I met him and we had a lot in common. In the cocktail hour after the board meeting Doug approached me and asked if he could run his product by me knowing I had a background in infomercials.

What am I going to say in front of these guys? Yes, of course.

                                                            Doug Foreman- Founder of Biem

Doug launches into his elevator pitch, and like me, Doug is a guy you might think gets paid by the word sometimes. He’s an engaging storyteller...funny, knowledgeable and insightful. I discovered we had a lot in common. He asked if I thought his product had a shot at success in infomercials. As we were in a group of folks, I said...”It could but it’s risky on TV. I’d like to help you but I don’t know if you are the kind of guy that will take my help.”

I think that I might have put Doug on his heels for a nano-second. He seemed a little hurt almost at first and then fired back, “I take good advice when I hear it.” I said, “Fair enough not all entrepreneurs do. Frankly that’s why some make it.” You’ve got to stick to your guns sometimes.

Now if you’ve read my other articles you know I don’t, as a rule, close anyone on anything the first time I meet them. I made a tactical decision to break that rule only because Doug was about to head full steam into shark-infested waters. I liked him instantly and I thought, even though I am too busy for his business, I want to help. The following result came out of appreciation for his passion and his novel idea which I am about to share.

I told Doug that I sell a $1,000 cup of coffee. He said, “That better be some cup of coffee.” I replied “I don’t know, you’re gonna make it. How’s Saturday at your house?” I reminded him that if he didn’t like what I had to say, no charge. I was under a bit of a time crunch as we had just landed a large account and I really only had a few days between now and the time I was leaving thus the rush to Saturday.

Doug asked if he could bring his production partner Tom Taylor, who would need to buy into me. I nearly spit out my bourbon. Tom Taylor has been in my inner circle for 15 years. “Sure bring Tom”. I revealed my connection and we exchanged info and laughed. Small world. 

Saturday morning came and I arrived at Doug’s limestone home in the hills outside of Austin, not far from my place. There were a couple of workers pressure-washing the winter mold off the stone in the morning fog. Tom’s Camaro was in the driveway.

Doug made coffee and we began to chat. Now, Doug is a guy with style. His kitchen alone is classy and clean, modern cabinets that snugly fit together almost seamlessly, a built in slick espresso maker. He likes things done with incredible finish quality. His house is meticulous. I have three teenagers in the house. I envy the perfection of his nest.

Doug’s invention is a design reflection of his personal taste. He has created something everybody wants but presented it in a way that creates true desire. He has designed it in such a fashion that it is so sexy, you can’t say no. It is a device that is about the dimensionality of an electric wine opener on a slightly larger scale. It simply melts and sprays butter through a misting nozzle. It’s a butter sprayer; A butter sprayer that deserves to be on exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

This is the biēm, the equivalent of a countertop BMW German precision quality buttery blast weapon. It is a neoclassical modern marvel. You will want one the second you see what it does. It is one badass butter sprayer. It only melts what you need, as you need it. Keep it in the fridge or on the counter. I took one look at it and I said. We’re screwed.

Popcorn. Vegetables. Toast. Pans. Corn. Basting. There’s nothing I don’t want to cover with butter.

It is a genius idea but I’ll never be able to sell one through an infomercial. It must retail for $150 bucks. I want one but I’ll never be able to sell one on TV. At least that was my first thought. You see in the 1 to 2 minute formats, I viscerally knew I could never be able to create the full value build that would make a viewer shell out 150 bucks. Not enough time. There’s no way to do three payments of $49 in short form for a kitchen product. That’s vacuum cleaner money.

Then there’s the long form, a half hour show. The prospect of investing a couple hundred thousand in production isn’t that daunting for the price, but what the hell would I show after the first six minutes with a butter sprayer. I needed three to five minutes with the viewer. The five-minute time exists on the Discovery channel. There just isn’t enough media inventory to make it a good investment. Then Doug slid a $1,000 cup of coffee across the counter. “I guess this is free then” he said. The game suddenly changed in my head. “ I was kind of thinking about making a Kickstarter video. What do you think of that?”

“Kickstarter...The hamster in my head started spinning the wheel... Yeah...that’s a good idea, Doug. Kickstarter.” It was good coffee. Doug was right.

“I don’t need that much money.” Doug elaborated “I was thinking about Kickstarter but I have some capital, I am ready to go to tooling”.

I jumped in, “Perfect, we’ll save the money on media that we would have spent on TV. We’ll save the expense of a new transactional landing page and we’ll use Kickstarter as a media channel. It’s free media. We’ll save giving equity for angel investors and raise your tooling costs with the money we would have spent on media. We’ll use the remainder to actually sell real live product to real live humans. At the same time we’ll tell the story and seal the price to the William Sonoma’s of the world. We’ll enter the marketplace with a story and a price that matches the cost to build this techno monster. It will be the Bose of butter. ”

The thing to understand on the Internet which we try and teach over and over is that your website is NOT A WEB PAGE. It is a media page. It is a TV station without an FCC license. It is broadcast space. Kickstarter is a media outlet. I think Netflix helps cement this idea in people’s head. If you think of your web page as publishing, change your thinking.

Kickstarter is actually a better place to be than TV for certain items. It is way better than the Discovery network for a butter sprayer. After all, Doug is not selling a cheap toy. It is a quality, high-end tech savvy product. Doug asked how many Kickstarter videos I had done in my career and how effective they were. I confessed my grand total was ZERO. I had never done one. I have however made many five-minute commercials with great success. It’s the perfect amount of time for the viewer to get a complete sales argument. I suggested that he make “the ask” low on Kickstarter so that he could keep whatever money he raised. We agreed $40k would be a good threshold to feel legitimate to the audience, truly make the tooling happen and worse case scenario we’d lose a little money to make the devices. We calculated the loss at equal to what a failed TV media test could be.

Doug asked how fast we could do it. Tom said “Ronny write it.” I told them I could easily write it but I could not be there for the shoot due to my aggressive travel schedule. We spoke for another 30 minutes on what the pitch would be and I suggested that if I applied the proven psychology of direct response sales secrets to a Kickstarter video... he had a pretty good shot, in my estimation.

I wanted to experiment with my wizardry in the space.

Imagine the ability to have the sales argument be the perfect length it needed to be; not tethered by one minute, confined by two minutes or stretched to five. It would be like writing a song, for the sake of the song itself. I really believed that Kickstarter was just another media channel but we had the distinct advantage of people coming here to FIND products just like this. I loved the idea that the media placement is essentially free.

Now there will be the reader that says Kickstarter isn’t free. They charge a percentage of your raise. Fine. Come sit where I have sat for twenty years and I will tell you. It is friggin’ free in comparison. Sit down.

The Biem butter sprayer was in the sweet spot. Fortunately, Tom was there and with so much mutual history we knew we could pull it off while I was away. Tom enlisted the help of another filmmaker and good friend Mike Martin to help with the edit. From ideation to completion 20 days passed. I wrote the script. Doug made some technical corrections and tweaked some copy points for accuracy and we looked at maybe two passes at the edit.

Yes. Doug Foreman paid me $1,000 for that cup of coffee. The Biem cleared $50,000 in Kickstarter within the first 48 hours. As of this morning it has been funded 489% with support & sales of $205,699.00.

Doug will build his first consumer units and deliver them this summer. He has a zero interest sales advance on full retail price thanks to his innovation, our copy, the team’s film and the genius of Kickstarter...and one single cup of coffee, $1000. I’m very pleased with the job these guys did. Watch it here. Order one! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/biemspray/the-biem-butter-sprayer?ref=discovery

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