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Crowdfunding Expert Roy Morejon Has Helped 1000s of Product Owners Raise Funds with Kickstarter Campaigns

Roy Morejon is the President and Co-founder of Enventys Partners, a product development, crowdfunding, and digital marketing agency. He has helped thousands of entrepreneurs raise more than $300 million using crowdfunding, and has also advised dozens of global startups on their digital marketing growth strategies.

As a thought leader in online marketing, Roy is frequently featured on CNN, Entrepreneur, Forbes, Huffington Post, and Fast Company. He is also the host of the Art of the Kickstart podcast.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Roy Morejon discusses how he got started with crowdfunding and created his digital marketing agency, Enventys Partners
What is crowdfunding and how does it work?
How Kickstarter’s all-or-nothing platform protects both funders and entrepreneurs
Roy talks about his team’s process for helping entrepreneurs innovate and launch new products
How to set a successful initial funding goal
The industries and products that Roy and his team work with the most
Roy discusses the importance of obtaining a patent to protect your product
Roy’s experience consulting with AOL as a teenager in Freeport, Maine

In this episode…

Are you full of exciting new product or business ideas, but don’t know how to bring them to reality? Do you need funding and support to launch and grow these amazing ideas into profitable businesses? If so, you’re in the right place!

At his digital marketing agency, Roy Morejon and his team of experts help entrepreneurs transform their ideas into successful ventures using crowdfunding. Crowdfunding brings a group of investors together to pre-purchase or show monetary interest in a product or service before it is produced. With crowdfunding, you can determine whether or not there is public interest in your product before incurring manufacturing costs, making it one of the best ways to seek out growth opportunities for your business.

In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Joe Valley sits down with Roy Morejon, the President and Co-founder of Enventys Partners, to discuss how to use crowdfunding to grow your business to new heights. Roy shares his insights into launching new products, working with Kickstarter, and developing your ideas into profitable investments. Listen in to learn how to establish tangible and clear growth opportunities for your business today!

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Quiet Light Brokerage, a brokerage firm that wants to help you successfully sell your online business.

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Episode Transcript

Intro 0:07

Hi, folks, it’s the Quiet Light Podcast where we share relentlessly honest insights, actionable tips, and entrepreneurial stories that will help founders identify and reach their goals.

Joe Valley 0:29

Hey, folks, thanks for joining the Quiet Light Podcast. I am Joe Valley, the Co-Host of the show. Mark, My business partner is the other host. We don’t do it together anymore. He does one and then I do mine. Just to just to let y’all know how even it is. today’s podcast is sponsored by Quiet Light Brokerage, where everyone on the team every advisor has built, bought and sold their own online business. There are no junior advisors here. If you want to understand the value of your business, even if you’re not going to exit for 12 to 24 months, which is really what you should do in advance planning training. Getting ready in advance, please reach out to us anybody in the team will be happy to help. Just go to quietlight.com and fill out the evaluation form or check out our current listings. Today’s guest I’m telling you is a very impressive one. His name is Roy Morejon. And we’ll be talking about crowdfunding. Roy is the President and Co-Founder of Enventus Partners right here in Charlotte. They’re a product development, crowdfunding and digital marketing agency. Roy’s a frequently featured guest on guest this CNN, Entrepreneur, Forbes, Huffington Post and Fast Company. And he actually consulted for AOL and Microsoft, in his teens. We cannot record an entire podcast podcast on what I wasn’t doing in my teens it was just surviving High School is what I was doing. So I’m pretty impressed with that Roy. Roy’s helped thousands of entrepreneurs raise more than $300 million using crowdfunding. And if you don’t know what it is, it’s an approach that often allows you to determine if the public is even interested in your product before spending the money and going out and manufacturing the product. Several Quiet Light clients have worked with Enventys and Roy, I highly suggest you listen to the entire podcast. Maybe we’ll get that story about what Roy did with AOL and his teens. And definitely visit enventyspartners.com. Roy a fellow Maine-er, welcome to the Quiet Life Podcast.

Roy Morejon 2:28

Yes. It’s good to be here.

Joe Valley 2:30

You are wicked smart. We sorry, we just we just realized that we’re both from Maine we grew up 30 minutes from each other. He’s from Freeport, y’all know, LL Bean and I grew up about 30, maybe 40 minutes north of that in Gardiner, Maine. So welcome. I’m glad we’re finally getting to talk. Louis and I, your business partner have chatted many, many times, we’ve had many clients that have come to visited. Ramon, who many people on the podcast have heard, has has met with you personally and raves about you guys. So thank you so much. Crowdfunding is really the focus. And as Louis Louis says, flat out, you know more about crowdfunding, and if helped more entrepreneurs, ecommerce entrepreneurs with crowdfunding than almost anyone in the entire country. Is that is that? Is that true? Is that a little bit of an exaggeration? That’s true, isn’t it?

Roy Morejon 3:21

I go with the world. No. No, I mean, yeah, I mean, fortunately, right place, right spot, you know, in terms of where we got started in crowdfunding, you know, starting the digital agency I did back in 2010. The intention wasn’t to be a crowdfunding marketing company. I’m just good at SEO. And we ranked first on Google for startup marketing. And that’s when the first campaign actually reached out to us fill out the contact form. And we’re like, what, what is Kickstarter, I’d never heard of it back in 2011 2012. And that’s when, you know, we basically did some digital ads and PR, and some Facebook ads for them and doubled their funding. We’re like, Hey, this is pretty interesting. We get to work with startups, which we love, we get to be agile test lots of different things. And there’s, you know, money at the end of the day, at the end of the day, in terms of seeing a transaction come through. So, you know, that snowballed into, you know, what we have now where there’s a massive team of people running campaigns, doing production, doing product development. And we’re, you know, working with really interesting brand new products that the world hasn’t seen yet.

Joe Valley 4:29

And there’s so many questions that I have, and I wish back in the day, that, you know, I knew about you guys before I launched my last physical product because it would have been perfect for crowdfunding, it would have been perfect to determine whether or not the public had any interest in whatsoever. Before I went out to you know, find the manufacturers which is something you guys also do is you help the e commerce entrepreneurs with finding manufacturers but that’s an entirely different subject. You for the novice out there, including myself just define what crowdfunding is and how it works.

Roy Morejon 5:06

Yeah, I mean, in the simplest form, it’s a matter of bringing together a crowd to pre purchase a product or show actual monetary interest in buying a idea, a product before it’s actually made, right. So your market validating your product idea, and Kickstarter, Indiegogo, these are the main sites that we utilize to test an audience and test a product and see whether or not people are willing to pre purchase the product before it exists and comes to market. And so that word before it exists is that is that the key is that it can’t be an existing product, it just doesn’t make sense. It should. It’s an idea and a concept that you do the tests with. Yeah, so it has to be new novel, it can be an extension of a previous product. Kickstarter is also allowed, you know, different colors of products to come out as new. But there’s definitely a line there that the trust and safety team would look look at on the platforms themselves. But typically, this is a place for entrepreneurs, startups to launch their new innovation, it can’t have been sold anywhere else online, on your website, Amazon, wherever it may be. And really, it’s just the first opportunity for the true early adopters in the world to back and get this product at the best price you can afford.

Joe Valley 6:22

The early adopters being the buyers at the best price that they can afford. So I think getting a discount to buy it pre production

Roy Morejon 6:29

massive in some instances, yeah, I mean, hundreds of dollars in some instances where there’s been a product that pre sold for $100. And then when it finally came to market, it was seven or 800. Because that entrepreneur didn’t potentially quote the product correctly in terms of what they originally thought the manufacturing costs would be for it.

Joe Valley 6:48

So how does it work? If you do a campaign, and it fails, some people buy it and they fund it. But you and the entrepreneur say, look, this isn’t really a viable product, the public has told us that. Do you refund all of the money? Do you go back to the drawing board and start with a modification of that has it generally work?

Roy Morejon 7:08

depends on your definition of failure, right? So for Kickstarter itself, it’s an all or nothing platform, you set a public facing funding goal, I need $50,000 to bring this product to market. If you don’t reach that number, no credit cards get charged, nobody gets their product, right. If it does reach that goal, you take all that capital comes into your accounts, and you are then liable to deliver that product, should you not be able to deliver that product. Many campaigners return the funds or give some sort of discount code for other products that that company may have. Or try and explain why there’s no money left. And certainly there have been campaigns that have raised millions of dollars and said that they lost all the money invested all the money into product development, and they just can’t bring the product to market. And that’s where you get upset backers. But overall, you know, with Kickstarter, it’s an all or nothing platform with Indiegogo, you do have flexibility of what’s called flexible funding, where if it doesn’t reach the public facing funding goal number that you’ve shown, you are still allowed to collect and keep all of that money, but in turn, obviously still need to deliver a product at the end of the day. Okay,

Joe Valley 8:23

big difference between the two. So in the audience, we’ve got, you know, SaaS content business owners, but a lot of e commerce business owners as well. And some of them might be buying a business. And we know that one of the ways to continue to grow a business and stay ahead of competitors is to innovate and launch new products. So in this case, if all they have is a concept and an idea, and they want to expand their total SKU count, and I always, for some reason go back to grilling aprons. You know, a perfect match with grilling aprons might be something to clean the grill with right, or whatever will go into it, there could be lots of different things. If somebody has the idea. You’ve got a team that helps them take that idea from their head onto paper into design. And that whole process. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Roy Morejon 9:12

Absolutely. Yeah. So I mean, being probably one of the only turnkey product launch companies in the world. We have a team of engineers that can truly take that napkin sketch idea, build out the prototype, do the ergonomic testing, the engineering, the electrical, mechanical, IoT, whatever it may be, if it’s a smart device, or a dumb device, if you will, we have an entire team dedicated solely on building product. Once that product is then made prototype to build out, we then take it over to our studios, where we do the filming and the product photography and all of the asset creation then around the product. And it goes upstairs to our branding and content team that start building out the story. What is this product story, you know, how is it going to be used? What are the features, benefits, those sorts of things. And then it brings into you know, the crowdfunding campaign where we’re raising capital for that product to then be made and manufactured. So in the case of your apron, there may be a few different variations of that apron that we may want to test and try, maybe we say, hey, let’s try the grill brush, or let’s try adding a towel feature to it. So you can clean something off with it, let’s add these different features to it, where we’re now able to actually test each feature, you know, through market validation in terms of building out a quick website, even before we take it to a Kickstarter campaign, where it’s very public, and the world can see exactly what you’re thinking about launching, we can run small tests and iterations of that product and see what truly resonates, what gets the most engagement, setting up these trap doors with people, you know, clicking to buy, like, Oh, it’s not ready yet, but we’ll notify you when it is. So there’s a variety of ways to bring in test products before you actually bring it to market and spend money on manufacturing where there truly isn’t an engaged audience around that product idea.

Joe Valley 10:59

Yeah, we’ve we’ve talked to several folks, actually, you had mentioned you’ve done a lot of folks that were on Shark Tank and whatnot. And we’ve, it’s a funny, you know, thing with Shark Tank. Everybody thinks that every Shark Tank entrepreneur that gets a deal on TV is a big success. Not the case at all, in my experience and so many of them that I’ve talked to never really got the contract signed, but they end up selling the business. We actually have one under lLoY right now that was a unknown to the Shark Tank, folks. I don’t know how I got on this tangent, by the way. But the shark tank? They all said no, I think Mr. Wonderful actually said you’re dead to me, even though, and that the business wasn’t gonna be valued, but under Li for like five or $6 million. Now. Anyway, why was I saying that? Right? It’s because I think you you take those ideas, and you innovate and you grow them. And one of the shark tank people, actually, we did a podcast where they actually did what you just suggested, which was you create the website, puts an ad spend behind it, and see if the public is interested in if, if there’s a enough people clicking on the order button, then you go ahead. And in that case, they went right to manufacturing. But in your case, you’re doing crowdfunding, which is, I think, a much smarter way. Because you’re, you’re raising the money to build a product out, obviously, on average, and I know this is hard, but so many questions come to mind. How much money are you typically shooting for? How do you determine how much to raise? Does that cover the cost of manufacturing? Are they looking typical? is a typical client trying to make money on the crowdfunding process? and so on and so forth? Can you just dive into some of that for me?

Roy Morejon 12:47

All good questions, Joe. Yeah, so there’s a bit in art in the science to setting a funding goal, right in terms of the public perception of Oh, they only need $50,000, they must be far enough down the line where that makes sense for them to finish tooling, manufacturing, packaging, logistics, whatever it may be. But then there’s almost always an internal goal that is hidden from the general public, in terms of this is the true number, we actually need to manufacture our mo Q. And you know, that public facing funding numbers sometimes maybe set low arbitrarily, because of wanting to hit the funding goal on day one and show early success. No one wants to be the first one on the dance floor, right. But once everybody’s out there having a party and it’s a good time, that’s when everybody else wants to join in. So that same mentality flows through Kickstarter campaigns, where we want to get as many early adopters, early backers into the campaign as possible, setting a funding goal that’s based off of a lot of data as well, in terms of the pre campaign marketing that we’re doing. What does it cost us to acquire an email address or a potential customer back that into what our mo Q is, and then kind of figure out, you know, what the actual public facing funding numbers should be? So there’s a lot of back and forth. But obviously, we’re only making decisions based off of the data that we’re having, in terms of what we’re doing pre campaign marketing for all of our clients.

Joe Valley 14:09

is shooting for a day one success hitting the goal typical, or is it one week or three weeks? Or how does it vary?

Roy Morejon 14:17

It’s critical, you know, meeting and exceeding the funding goal within the first 48 hours is typically critical to an overall six figure campaign. And again, the average campaign, you know, is only raising, I think, $25,000 on Kickstarter, where if you raise over $100,000, you’re in the 1.8 percentile of all campaigns. So you know, it is critical to the overall success of many of these tech, physical products that need to raise lots of money to make and manufacture the products that they have early success and early traction. You know, right out the gate.

Joe Valley 14:50

You just said tech products. Are the majority of your clients tech related products, or do you work with a wide variety of them?

Roy Morejon 14:58

Yeah, we’d like to play in a theater. categories, product design being the largest category that we play in in terms of how Kickstarter categorizes these products. And that can be anything from you know, fitness gadgets, to kitchen gadgets, to you name it, you know, a nice design a physical thing, consumer product, we also play a lot in fashion. Fashion has a massive early adopter community as well as people that want the newest shoes, sneakers, pants, shirts, belts, you name it, we’ve fully funded an entire wardrobe, you know, all over the place. And then lastly, is the tech, you know, anything that has a hardware component to it, early adopters, again, that we’re focusing in on those folks who want the newest tech before it ever hits the shelves of Best Buy. And they find it all on Kickstarter. And this is where you know, an Oculus has come out a pebble has come out, you know, many of these massive big tech brands, hardware brands that have come out and seeing good success, post crowdfunding, because they built that community early on, and they were able to continue to tap into it. And again, that’s one of the other advantages of the crowdfunding side with the Amazon community on this podcast is just that you own this community, this is your crowd that you can continue to nurture, and ask for feedback for the next product that you come out with. So these people are in your database, they’re following your social media accounts, they know you, they feel like they had a part of the product development, and the product lifecycle and how it came out and how it came to market. And likely they’re going to be you know, your biggest brand evangelists as you continue forward, rolling out new skews and new product lines. So that’s a massive advantage of just getting feedback early from your actual customers.

Joe Valley 16:36

And what stage Do you work with the customer? And then at what stage? Do you generally finish? Because, you know, from the product design concept to the industrial designing, and engineers and all that to the crowdfunding, you know, you just said they, you know, they then own that that customer, right? They’re able to reach out to them with a next product that they develop? Are you working with them? In many cases on that, again, design and concept and sending emails out to that database to get feedback? Or are you going straight to the crowdfunding and those who succeed again? How does it How does it work? Typically?

Roy Morejon 17:13

Yeah, I mean, so our hope is that most of the clients use every room in our building, right? You know, so they come in, we do their product development, manufacturing, sourcing, whatever it may be, that we’re creating all their assets for them, then we’re running their campaign. And then we are in charge of, you know, constant communication with the community that we built. While they’re developing the product, getting it ready to ship, then the shipments go out. And then it’s, again, more communication with those backers. And then it’s starting engagement of, hey, we’re thinking of improving this, this and this based on your feedback. And then it’s surveys, text messaging, SMS, email, marketing, whatever it may be, to continually communicate and have that one to one relationship with those customers, in terms of what’s the next thing we should bring out. And we have many clients that have done well, we have a handful of clients that have done more than five or six campaigns with us. Some have run, you know, 15, or 16, campaigns just on Kickstarter, because they keep going back and saying, hey, you like this one? What do you want next? What do you want next? What do you want next. And the crowd truly feels like they have a buy in in the next product that comes out. And they’re more and more likely to obviously buy it, but then tell their friends of, hey, there’s this cool guy that keeps creating these cool products. Maybe you should get involved.

Joe Valley 18:25

Every room in your building, you just went through a whole list of things. You’ve got engineers, industrial designers, people that are doing the digital marketing, buying media for you relationships with manufacturing, are you managing inventory for them as well? Or does it? Do you do any of that? Or is that left in the business owners hands?

Roy Morejon 18:46

Yeah, inventory side, we typically don’t get into usually there. There’s an expert team that needs to handle that. And obviously, I’m sure you’ve had many of those folks, you know, it’s through your buildings. And yeah, it’s a challenge. And it’s something that we’re not experts in. So it’s not something that we try to do.

Joe Valley 19:02

I had somebody on the podcast recently, right, they did 300 million in revenue on Amazon, and had to build their own inventory management tool, because there’s really nothing out there that does it the way that it should be done. There’s lots of different products, but nobody raves about any particular one. So okay, but really Enventys Partners is is doing it, it almost everything from a product marketing standpoint, from concept to putting it on paper to helping people with the crowdfunding and getting it launched all the way to you need some help with sourcing manufacturers. We’ve got those relationships as well. Am I missing anything?

Roy Morejon 19:39

No, I mean, that’s all of it. We even have inventors that simply are, you know, creators, and they just drop off products. Here’s an idea. Here’s an idea. Here’s an idea. And we run them through our own personal test and we say yeah, we like that one. And do you know licensing deals or partnership deals with those folks as well. That don’t want to quit their day job. Don’t want us to be a founder of a startup but think they have a great invention. We we agree, and we launch campaigns with them. So again, there’s a variety of different ways that we can work with, you know, all the entrepreneurs or idea makers out there.

Joe Valley 20:10

It’s interesting on the licensing and whatnot. Let’s talk a little bit about that you talked about designs, do you guys help with or refer people out to, you know, patent attorneys design and utility patents? And how much does that come into play in the success of some of the campaigns that you do?

Roy Morejon 20:29

Yeah, patents is an interesting one. And it’s definitely something that we advise all of our clients to get, um, you know, one of our, we typically source that out to answer your question. It’s not something that we have an in house attorney on. But we have, you know, local resources here in Charlotte that we utilize for that for that service. But I mean, there’s, you know, the biggest case out there on the patent side was one of our early clients, bunch of balloons, with Josh Malone. And, you know, he had to go through a lot of challenges there to win the rights. And, you know, when a court case against the folks that ripped off his product, and then there’s still a lot of issues, you know, going on with the patent office and P tab and all that I’m definitely not going to dive into that, because I’m not the expert on that. But, you know, it’s always our recommendation to get as much protection as possible, because Kickstarter, is getting viewed by a million people every day, right. And there’s a lot of nefarious folks out there looking for the next great invention that’s already getting traction and ramping up their factory because they can see that this product is going to be a success long after Kickstarter is over. And I think you can look at Fidget Cube as one of those campaigns in terms of very simple, easy design, very elegant, but he put all the blueprints on his Kickstarter campaign to get backers right to show what it looks like. But a factory ramped up very quickly and was already shipping product, I think, a half a million dollars with a product even before that campaign ended. So you know, there’s, there’s a balance there in terms of how much you show, in terms of knowing that, you know, if you’re patented and protected, hopefully that gives you a leg up and months, a year in advance, you know, of other people trying to, you know, duplicate product.

Joe Valley 22:08

Yeah, I’ve heard some sad stories like that as well. So you really can’t just jump into this, you’ve got to think well in advance, obviously. And, you know, some patent some, probably more products than not are not patentable. So it is what it is, but it allows you to expand on your current product line. Let’s talk about Enventys Partners a little bit. The firm itself 19 years old? Is that about right?

Roy Morejon 22:35

yeah. So Louis Foreman started that back in 2001. And then we merged with Enventys, to form Enventys Partners. I know very creative, back in 2016. So my firm before that was called Command Partners. So we took half of my name and all of their name, and combined them together. But yeah, I mean, so our agencies, you know, came together basically to be the world’s first turnkey product launch firm. Awesome. And

Joe Valley 22:59

I visited your facility, you got some pretty impressive products laying around. Can you throw one name out there, we’re gonna spend 10 seconds on it, what’s the most famous client that anybody listening might know of or seen a movie with the product is featured or anything like that,

Roy Morejon 23:16

oh, Featured Products. We just had a picks backpack in one of the Netflix series The other day, but like, my personal favorite product that I’ve ever worked on was with Josh Malone, and bunch of balloons. I mean, I think I think last year, they shipped over 2 billion units. So I mean, it’s incredible the growth of that product. And it was just, you know, amazing that we got to be able to work with Josh, before that product became such a mainstream hit, you know, we got him on the Today Show before any other Kickstarter campaign ever got on the show. So it’s just amazing to really bring crowdfunding to the light into the masses, at least the early adopter community through the National PR that we were able to get for that campaign. And you know, it’s been it’s been a lot of fun. We see a lot of different product ideas, a lot of different innovations. And, you know, we’re very fortunate to have such a full funnel of new innovations coming in every day.

Joe Valley 24:04

And what is Edison nation part of your group down there?

Roy Morejon 24:09

So Edison nation was part of Enventys. And again, I don’t have any affiliation with Edison nation on that was on Louis’s side, and we did end up helping them do a regulation, a plus campaign and equity crowdfunding campaign, I raised over $5 million, I believe, for that project before it actually went public. But they deal with more on the inventor side of taking products to market, more licensing side of things. So they’re more of like, kind of like a sister company, if you will. But I don’t have any, you know, day to day or affiliation on that side. And at the beginning of this, I don’t know

Joe Valley 24:42

if you said it in the recording or if it was in our initial conversation, but your podcasting as well. What’s the name of your podcast and what are you covering?

Roy Morejon 24:49

Yeah, thanks for the shout out, Joe. Yeah, so my podcast we talk with early stage entrepreneurs and founders that typically launched a crowdfunding campaign or about to launch a crowd fund. In campaign so the podcast my plug is called Art of the Kickstart. So check out artofthekickstart.com we are probably the longest running crowdfunding podcast out there started. took that over I think back in 2015 2016. We’ve done about almost 400 episodes now. So you guys are getting there. I think you’re at about 100 or so. 150 Joe

Joe Valley 25:19

150 more weeks Yeah, we’re way behind you we’ve got a double lock in order to catch up and I don’t see that happening.

Roy Morejon 25:26

But you need Mark to start pulling his weight right

Joe Valley 25:29

exactly doused Come on get on it He doesn’t listen to this so I can say anything I want to Ivana people listening don’t send actually send them an email Mark at quietlight.com, tell him to get on it and start recording some more podcasts,

Roy Morejon 25:40

or deliver this podcast Mark, it was all for you. I love doing it.

Joe Valley 25:44

So I don’t mind that he he’s a slacker in that regard. Let’s let’s talk about how in the world did you as a teenager from Freeport, Maine, consult with AOL, and what was it Yahoo or something like that Google MSN? Yeah. I mean, okay, so as a teenager, I was trying not to lose my license, and it didn’t work out very well, and a whole variety of other things. You’re consulting what we doing? And how did that come about?

Roy Morejon 26:13

Uh, so I forced my parents basically to sign up for AOL. So you know, I had like, my, I forget what computer it was, it was either like a Compaq Presario or one of those Apple LC twos, you know, back in the day ones in the early 90s, and got on AOL. And you know, as a 13 year old, I think, at the time, basically, it was the wild, wild west, and anything, anything when, so you could do anything. So then I learned how to code and script programs and Visual Basic and c++. And through AOL, you could do a lot of things in their chat rooms, and emulate the Community Action Team cat watch. So you could go in there and do lots of nefarious things. And one of those things that I used to do back in the day was those sorts of things, or mail bombing or spamming or changing my username to get other people’s information. So that led me down a path of getting in trouble. And, you know, consulting with the authorities in terms of things that we were doing, or the vulnerabilities that AOL had at the time, right on their platform. So it was just consulting for that in terms of patching some of the holes that they had on their software that all of us teenagers were taking full advantage of in terms of pirating wares, and those sorts of things on the site. So did some small consulting there for just showing them everything that I was doing, so I could stay out of prison. And then and then

Joe Valley 27:38

jail time. Yeah,

Roy Morejon 27:39

exactly. Right. Yeah, sure. Here you go. And then that led me to doing some short term consulting, as well for MSN, as they were launching their platform to say, here’s some of the gaps that AOL had here, you know, things that you should plug in doing some more tech support for those folks. So that’s, you know, that’s the long short of it.

Joe Valley 27:56

That’s pretty amazing. It must have been really scary for your parents as well.

Roy Morejon 28:00

They didn’t really have a clue. Fortunately, my father was a special agent for the government. So that definitely assisted and helped.

Joe Valley 28:07

Okay, it’s always good to know the right people, for sure. It’s all amazing and pretty impressive. I gotta tell you, I’ve talked to Louis again, often on for the last couple of years, we’ve had clients go down and visit with you work with you. But the work that you do is so all encompassing, it’s almost hard to comprehend. The crowdfunding part of it, I think, is simply brilliant, I think it’s a great way for new and innovative products to launch get the money before going to the manufacturing, and the fact that somebody can come to you with a sketch on a napkin or an idea in their head, and use your design team to put that on paper and then into the computer and then visually present it and do a crowdfunding campaign is simply simply incredible. I thank you for all the work that you’re doing for all my fellow entrepreneurs out there, I appreciate it. And I know you’re helping people first and foremost, which is the most important thing and at the end of the day, it comes back and helps you as well. And you’ve been doing it for, you know, a decade plus now any any any changes in the future you guys going to continue to do what you do any new paths or tracks that you’re going to go down.

Roy Morejon 29:18

Yeah, I mean, the hope is to launch more of our own products, you know, I mean, we have all of the resources but it’s cobblers kids these days, we’re very busy. We have you know, we’re very fortunate that we have one an amazing team around us that are all product experts in their categories, whether it be you know, the full omni channel marketing side of email, PR social Legion, we have an amazing advertising team and you know, leadership there. And just overall on that side really just trying to launch our own products. And you know, the engineering team is second to none with the capabilities that we have downstairs in our facilities to be able to bring products to market and we have the best, most amazing technology down there as well to do it quickly and rapidly. And cost effectively, you know, which I think a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with is just Oh, it’s going to cost me $100,000 to build this thing where, with 3d printing, and you know, some of the products that we have in in shop, we can do things very quickly and very rapidly, and then test very quickly to see whether or not you should continue spending on this thing. And if there’s truly a crowd around it, so the hope is, yeah, launch our own products, we’re doing more and more equity crowdfunding as well, which I think would be an interesting path. For a lot of the Amazon businesses that are out there, to be able to raise additional capital for your company, just by offering up, you know, 10% of your company and raising a million dollars for it through the crowd. You know, obviously, it’s a lot easier when you own the data, and you own the customers, which may be a challenge on the Amazon side. But certainly in terms of showing growth, there’s a lot of opportunities on the Start engines, and we funders out there of raising additional capital for your company based on the success that you’ve had so far. So we’ve worked with, you know, over a dozen different campaigns in terms of the equity crowdfunding side, many of them post reward crowdfunding, where they have a crowd deliver the product, the consumer loves it, and now they want to be a bigger brand advocate for them by owning a piece of the company.

Joe Valley 31:13

equity crowdfunding is a new term for me, and we just opened up a can of worms here, that could be an entirely new podcast and my goodness, cover it real quickly. It’s It’s literally you’re raising money. You know, we have people all the time that say, hey, look, I’m trying to keep up with inventory. All I’m doing is, you know, a HELOC more on the HELOC? Well, you know, wherever I can grab some money, there’s equity crowdfunding, where they can grab money from the public that’s willing to invest, and they can use that capital to grow their business and expand their product lines.

Roy Morejon 31:46

Exactly, yeah. So they can basically offer up a piece of the company convertible note, whatever it is, there’s a lot of flexibility there. And I’m certainly not an attorney. But there’s a lot of opportunity there to continue to raise capital for your company, giving up a little bit of equity and showing that, you know, you’re a high growth high trajectory company that they can invest into. And I know there are Amazon companies and case studies that are out there, and I’m happy to look into those and share those with the audience as well when you get this published. But it’s definitely a you know, an alternative way of raising capital from your crowd from your community that you’ve built. There is another company that we work with and partner with, I’m not sure if you’ve had them on the show are familiar with them called Kick, kick further, where again, you can fund your inventory by people, you know, pledging basically on their site or saying, you know, you give them a certain percentage return within a certain amount of time for you to fund your next inventory purchase. So, you know, again, another alternative for you know, the Amazon sellers out there.

Joe Valley 32:44

Okay, I you know, you’re blown my mind here. I wish we could do this in 20 conversations. Well, we don’t have time. So look, everybody, you’ve got to go to enventyspartners.com. And check this out, connect with Roy asked him about the flannel that he has on today, whether it’s actually an LL Bean flannel because he’s from Freeport, Maine or not, and why he’s wearing a flannel in September in North Carolina when it’s actually only 65 degrees out today. So that’s a good reason. And your former almost golf pro career there’s so much that’s crazy and fun about you. And then what you do in terms of helping the entrepreneurs is pretty incredible. Folks, definitely tune in to the Art of the Kickstart podcast. I’m going to tune into that myself definitely visit enventyspartners.com am I missing anything at all? No, I

Roy Morejon 33:34

you know, the Joe, it has been a pleasure. And I look forward to everybody reaching out from this so I can track the ROI of Judge Joe’s podcast and see if you guys are actually listening out there. But no, I really, I really do appreciate it. I am here to help honestly like I want to help out all the entrepreneurs and bring more amazing products to market. So I’ll make sure Joe has all my info and I appreciate the time.

Joe Valley 33:57

Thanks for your time. Appreciate it.

Intro 34:00

Today’s podcast was produced by Rise25 and the Quiet Light content team. If you have a suggestion for a future podcast subject or guest, email us at [email protected]. Be sure to follow us on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram and subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week.