Uncover the Mysterious Power of the Ladybug Effect with Greg Porper – SYS Podcast Episode 535 Exclusive!
Again, being first dollars in was helpful, because people said, oh, like you’re not just, you know, looking for money, you’re putting in money yourself. Like, you know, that’s, that’s respectful, commendable, I think that’s the word. The other thing that was just fortunate with timing was, this was the time, while I was raising funds, Bitcoin is doing very, very well. And so when I was talking to certain people, I preface that as saying, well, you know, you could diversify, and, you know, invest in this movie, and you’re not just, you know, you’re not just, you know, It’s not about the potential return because I was honest with them. Like if that’s your intention, don’t invest. So, people appreciated that honesty, but it was saying like, just diversify. And on top of that, you’re supporting artists. Like the money that you’re investing is giving jobs to people. And that for some people that helped again, I probably pitched 500 people, 600 people truly in Zoom meetings or in person or over the phone. And ultimately, I think it was like 36 or 38 people, you know, came in. But it was like, again, it was a lot of no’s, a lot of, oh, this sounds really interesting, but I can’t do it. And I completely understood that. The other thing to some other people is that, you know, when investing in a movie, we kind of saw like the timeframe of we were going to be going into production in 2022, so that was going to be a year of a big loss. So as a pass-through LLC, I know this is in the weeds. This is something that I learned throughout this process. You’re going to get a loss on your investment. So, if you’re making profits on other things, you can kind of write off some of these losses. And so there actually is some tax benefits more so that you can get. So actually, that’s a few people invested actually, not for that reason, but that was just a kind of a reason of like helping them get over the hump. But yeah, it’s just getting really, it’s getting as creative as you can. It’s, it’s something that I encourage because it’s really hard and I felt really uncomfortable and it took a long time for me to get to a place where I can go to family and friends and to friends of friends and to friends of friends of friends and seeing on websites like WeFunder, which is a crowd funding website, I saw people who are raising funds for other movies and then I would look them up on LinkedIn and send them cold messages and say, Hey, I saw you invested in my friend Desiree’s movie, Desiree Staples. You know, would you be interested in investing in this one or do you know anyone? And a lot of people who invested were people I had never met before, but it’s through friends of friends or, and, or through friends of family or through, and you know, a few family friends, people I met, that was kind of like, just, it was a full time job that in itself and then the consistent follow up and at a certain point, we got Ed Begley Jr. on board and that was a reason to go back to a bunch of people to say like, Hey, I know back then it was kind of like a, an idea to make a movie, but now like, look, we actually have this actor and volatiles committed. Here’s the signed agreement. Like that helped get a few more people as well. It was becoming more real and people were getting excited.
