Behind the Scenes of a Trump/Anti-Trump RomCom: Erik Bork Reveals Unexpected Twists in SYS Podcast Episode 541
Ashley
Gotcha. So, you did a bunch of reads. You finally had a script that you felt was ready to go. What were then those next steps to actually getting this into production? How did you raise money and actually get this green lit?
Erik Bork
Yeah, well, I greenlit it myself. But yeah, based on the revenue, and I was like, full, I thought, Oh, I could do for 100,000 least get in the can for 100,000 end up being more like 250 to 300 in the end to finish the movie, including post and everything else. And that I had two methods. The one method was we funder, which is a equity crowdfunding platform, which is like Kickstarter only instead of donations, people are investing in the movie, which means they own a piece of any, you know, money that comes back in for as little as $100 per person. I became convinced that Kickstarter, you know, was not great for six figure raises, you know, they’re more for smaller projects, because I considered Kickstarter. And I was intrigued as a couple other movies had done we funder, and I looked online, and it’s more for startup companies. But there are other movies that have raised, you know, two to 400,000 on there quite a few. And so I sort of looked at what they did. And I thought, okay, I’ll try this. Now, the first 50k, you basically have to raise from your own network, because they won’t put it on their platform, like they’ll put it on there as a private link. But once you hit 50k, it becomes public. And then that means other investors on we funder will see your project, anyone on we funder can see your project. And so some people might just discover you that way. So the first 50 was the hardest. And I actually got a tip from another filmmaker, like you can go and see other movies on we finder. I don’t know if this would work now. But at the time, a few years ago, other people that invest in other movies or even other startups, but especially movies, you can kind of like see their names. Sometimes you see how much or that they’re on LinkedIn, and you can sort of like, kind of stalk them and query them on LinkedIn about your movie. I did a few of those. And I got some people that way. But then eventually, you know, it goes public and more people just find you and might invest without you having to query them. The other parallel path was the nonprofits. I did a lot of cold LinkedIn connection queries, because you know, it’s easier to get someone’s LinkedIn than it is their email address often, right. So I started looking up nonprofits, connect to polarization, found a list of them where there was like literally hundreds of different organizations. So, I started doing a lot of querying of those, and a couple of those hit. And then those, you know, led me to people that were interested. And then some of them led me to other people who were interested. So I raised I think probably two thirds through we finder and one third through these nonprofits that were doing grants or donations that don’t have to be repaid, which is also great for the investors, because it means the investor pool stays smaller, even though the amount raised goes up a bit. So as a total win-win. And so between those two, I was able to get to in the end around 300.
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