Uncover the Mysterious Power of the Ladybug Effect with Greg Porper – SYS Podcast Episode 535 Exclusive!
Greg Porper
So, this was a situation for years, I’ve taken note of any time someone has said to me, you know, let me know like, oh, I would love to see that movie when you have it. Or, yeah, let me know when you’re doing this. Or there’s those people you kind of come across sometimes where you kind of have like that one ask. And I kind of plot like I kind of made notes of those people. And people go through all facets of life people I worked with people like grew up with whatever it may be. And it wasn’t always necessarily for funding, it was sometimes it was for ideas that the very first people I met with, first of all, I met with, I want to give my dad a humongous shout out because my dad encouraged me to, to move forward with this movie. And we there were some family friends who were just very business savvy, who, before even raising the funds, I needed to kind of know, well, what does that waterfall structure look like? What does the back end look like? What is a deal that works for investors that’s enticing for investors? And he kind of just worked with me on like, create like, giving notes on a pitch deck that I created. And then he suggested I, you know, reach out to some family friends to simply talk to them about it. And so by talking to some family friends, I got the input I needed to then kind of go out to other people, not necessarily the people I was talking to, but I use that as a tool then to go out to other people. But it’s also just like telling as many people as possible, this is what I’m doing is really helpful. And even throughout the stages of writing it, I was telling people I’m writing it, I can’t wait to show you the script when it’s done. Then when it came out to actual fundraising, and I had a pitch deck where I intentionally like made it like very as investor friendly as I can make it also completely upfront, the people I was pitching were people who weren’t in it to make as much money as quickly as possible. And in a few cases, I came across those people. And I said, it seems like this is not for you when they’re expecting, you know, 20%, you know, 120% back of their investment in six months. I can’t guarantee that I can’t give you, you know, first money back over, you know, what the distributor gets, like, that’s something I just can’t promise. And so, it was kind of quickly weeding out those sorts of people. But I reached out to nearly anyone I’ve ever met and brought up to them and said, hey, I’m in that, you know, I’m making a movie, I’m looking for investors, are you interested? Do you know anyone? And what the other thing I had, which was helpful was the web series was a proof of concept. And having a proof of concept was strong enough to show people like, oh, like, this is funny. Now, imagine if there was an actual budget to make this funnier and bigger. And that was really helpful, because I think seeing the web series out there, you know, the web series was featured in the front pages of Funny or Die and various websites. So, there was a bit of a proven track record, it was at multiple festivals won some awards, that really helped. Additionally, I made a pitch video with John and I’ve seen all these like videos that people post on Kickstarter before. And a lot of them kind of are all the same. And I’m like, well, how can we be different? And so John and I neither who are actors, again, going back to before I’m putting myself in front of the camera, we caught Kyle who plays Larry graciously agreed to be with us where we filmed over one day, a pitch video where John and I are pitching the movie, but very quickly, Kyle gets upset that he wasn’t invited to be or Kyle as Larry gets upset that he wasn’t invited to be a part of the pitch video. And so now some of the pitch video while john and I are trying to explain what we want from investors and what we’re trying to do. Larry’s now giving us a hard time and he’s getting angry with us and angry with us and he ends up tying us up and he’s doing all these crazy things. And when we show that to people, they kind of got it because it was like the tone of our movie like we’re self-aware, we’re edgy, we’re a little awkward, but like we’re funny and grounded in ridiculousness. And I think that like that tonal sense really gave people a clear picture of like what they you know what we were intending to do. And it was also proof that like, oh, we can execute it. Now, we were making these things on such a small budget. I think there was some confidence there that okay, if these guys had a bigger budget, we could do something with it.
