Today, Jeff Lieber of Turnkey Management interviews Kevin Liang, the 26 year old Founder and CEO of ADI Ventures, the company behind EcoQube and EcoQube Air as well as the CEO of AspeneowBox.
EcoQube is a self contained aquaponics aquarium system which built a 125k person email list off of 2 kickstarter campaigns that both wildly outperformed (37 times higher!) their minimal goal.
If you ever thought it would be nice to leverage product launches to grow your audience, Kevin is the man to listen to for tips and trick.
Key Takeaways
[1:33] Jeff introduces his guest and today’s discussion topics and gives him the mic to explain how he got started with such a complex product design and how exactly the EcoQube works.
Kickstarting [7:35] Kevin’s venture into kickstarter began with studying. He read everything he could and studied everything he could in order to control as many variables as possible.
His first campaign was set at 39k and closed at 80k.
His second campaign — having learned from the first iteration — was set at 10k and quickly reached 375k.
Who is this for? [13:39] Crowdfunding is the way of the future. If you have a new or innovative product — not sourced off of Alibaba — crowdfunding derisks the whole enterprise and provides you with immediate customer acceptance data and an audience before the product even launches.
Building an audience [16:00] Kevin breaks down how he built his email lists — it started with downloading his personal contacts because let’s face it, if you can’t convince your own email list to support you, it’s going to be hard to drive cold traffic to your kickstarter.
The second campaign was through Facebook advertising for giveaway campaigns.
Tip: emphasize on a discount on your product as opposed to a giveaway: it might attract the wrong audience when you’re building your list.
After crowdfunding [21:58] Kevin had gotten good enough at driving cold traffic and redirecting it however, the conversion rates are lower off of crowdfunding campaigns! After watching Ryan Moran’s “0 to 1 million dollars in 12 months” YouTube video, he made the move to Amazon.
In 2016, Kevin then became Turnkey Product Management’s fourth client ever!
Pain points [24:24] Kevin touches on where Turnkey’s team was able to help streamline and offer their experience to grow EcoQube.
Building a team [26:34] Kevin shares his super succesful hiring process:
For every position, Kevin aims for 100 to 150 applications.
1. The listing asks that the candidates write an email to a generic address containing 10 reasons why they’re awesome — no resume, nothing — this weeds out resume spammers and people that are not detail oriented!
2. The auto responder will then provide 10 interview questions and ask for the resume.
3. After that there is a 1 hour info session for about 21 to 28 of the applicants.
4. The 28 are pared down to a dozen who are paid to do a test project similar to the job they are applying for which showcase their problem solving abilities.
5. From that dozen, 5 or 6 are called for a final phone interview.
So from 150 to 5 or less without spending more than a few hours on info sessions!
Superconnector [37:38] At any event you are in, there is no need to feel pressure to talk to anyone and everyone, just find one person to have an interesting conversation with — the trick is finding that person.
Remember to keep in touch at small moments: Happy Thanksgiving!
Life hacking [41:09] making a 1% improvement every day creates a compounding effect.
[42:21] Jeff thanks Kevin for coming on the podcast, as well as where listeners can get in touch with him. Jeff then shares his takeaways from the show.
Thanks for listening!
Mentioned in this episode