Latest / Pitch to Product / Guerilla Marketing: How to Hustle Your Way into Building an Audience
Transcript
- Venture Program Intro: But I had to go talk to my grandmother to say, I need a check. $1,200. And let me tell you, my grandmother is not the person you would ever ask for a dime. man. I could I come from let me say a different market when guerrilla marketing was getting flyers out there for music and ventues and clubs and stuff like that. It's just bombarding as much as you can get out there. To me, it's a different world now because of the internet. You know? So ways of getting your product out there now, and truthfully on the cheap, but try to get as much of it out there out there for the market. I'll I'll give you a personal example. back in the nineties, I'll date myself. I think it was ninety-two to ninety three. Me and three buddies decided that we were going to we were gonna do a New Year's Eve party on a boat. All right. So before there was anybody running New Year's Eve cruise parties, I started it. I'm gonna take full credit for it. Cause I saw an opportunity. I was running some DJs and some nightclubs and I had the I had a little bit of a list and I said, you know what? I don't have a venue. I couldn't find a venue for for New for New Year's Eve. So the venue I found was a a boat. Called the Northern Spirit. I can remember it like it was today. And it was in Toronto. And I I was twenty years old. I convinced this captain that we're gonna throw this party and that we were you know, I he saw my vision and he believed that we could deliver it. He wanted a check for twelve thousand dollars. So that's when my belief became real. And this is I'm a student, I don't have twelve thousand dollars, neither do the other two buddies of mine. So what we decided to do was you know, go out and hustle. And I wrote him a check and, you know, we we we came up with some people that helped us out. So we wrote him a check. I still I owed him the other six thousand dollars. So I I gave him six. I I had to six at the door. Six and I had to collect six at the door before anybody he would let anybody on. And you know, we picked the venue. We started hustling and we got kicked out of every nightclub because we were handing out pamphlets. So the gorilla marketing here was there was no traditional way to reach people. I had to go to where people were. And the guerrilla tactic was, hey, let's just go tell everybody. Well, guess what? All the other nightclubs that were we were now competitors, they didn't want us in. So the guerrilla tactic was we took a big flyer and we shrunk it down to a business card. And we we did was like, I don't want to call it pickpocketing, but I would slide in cards to everybody's back pocket. And we would just go from nightclub to nightclub. I'd probably put in about three to five thousand cards, I would put them. I'd go to the the the Danforth, which was like where people went to eat at four in the morning when they were coming out of clubs, and I would put them on windshields and I would put I just put out these cards everywhere and I would get home at five in the morning and at nine o'clock my phone would start ringing and I would take orders and I would have to go and deliver tickets. I actually convinced Ticketmaster at that point to like put us on the venue. So they were taking a fee and they were I was able to process credit cards. But that was all guerrilla tactic as we were growing the business and learning the hard way. Of what didn't work, how to get to the audience. But I will tell you, once I was committed, once I had my money and I had like I was on the hook to other people, failure was not an option. And I was short, twelve hundred dollars, but I knew I had door money coming in. There was people that were gonna pay cash when they came in at the door. Right. And I knew we were gonna make money at the end because I had probably about 30 to 40 people on that list. But I had to go talk to my grandmother to say, I need a check. $1,200. And let me tell you, my grandmother is not the person you would ever ask for a dime. She she is the most frugal person you've ever met. And I had to go with my humble pie in hand. And of course, I had to hear, why did you do that? Why did you put yourself in this situation? Why would you take that risk? Why would you do that? And I had the check in my hand. I never had to give it to the captain because I had the cash come in at the door. I gave him the check. I said, Don't cash it. I'll have the money at the end of the day. We exchanged the check back. I gave it back to my grandmother. And then I showed her what we made at the end of the night. Right. And I said, that's why I did it. And that is a little bit of not just guerrilla marketing, but guerrilla marketing goes in with the with the hustle. It goes in with when someone says, No, you can't do this. I I traded services. I gave some DJs away to get radio time. I bartered with everybody. That's the guerrilla tactic. Today, I wish I had social media. I would have my I I had to go out every night for six weeks. I will tell you, we were so exhausted. Because we couldn't fail and we wouldn't fail. And, you know, the reality is, we did it again for the next two, three years. And then it became like we just had another venue and we built it. And it was the starting point to something that, you know, I I if lifestyle changes was the only reason why why I'm not doing that today. Right. But the hustle is real. You tired the guerrilla marketing is real. It is by any means necessary that is still legal and not crossing lines.