Vance Lee is the Co-founder of Playground Theory, an agency that provides a product launch system for brands looking to scale. He is an ecommerce entrepreneur with 13 years of experience as a brand growth and marketing strategist. Since starting with Amazon FBA in 2015, Vance has mastered crowdfunding and the preorder launch strategy to launch products and grow brands. He has raised over $7M in successful launches and broken records with two of his launches — both classified #1 most-funded in their niches and ranking in the top 1% of crowdfunding projects.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Vance Lee shares how he launched his first brand and transitioned to agency work
- Vance’s system for leveraging wholesale distribution
- Achieving product launch success and brand growth using Kickstarter
- How to structure a profitable campaign on Kickstarter and Indiegogo
- Common mistakes brands make when launching their products
- The benefits of launching on Kickstarter
- Crowdfunding strategies to develop customer relationships
- What is the Launch Accelerator Blueprint, and how can brands get involved?
In this episode…
When launching a campaign, many brands lack an effective strategy and fail to plan accordingly. So, what are some strategies you can leverage to launch your products and scale your brand?
Vance Lee recommends leveraging Kickstarter to generate a launch campaign. To maximize the platform’s effectiveness, it’s essential to develop a unique brand story that captivates your target audience. Next, utilize your campaign to build a community among your audience and involve them in the product launch. With Kickstarter, you don’t need to order inventory before developing a campaign. The platform’s crowdfunding model allows you to scale your brand instantly.
In today’s episode of the eCommerce Profits Podcast, Joshua Chin talks with Vance Lee, Co-founder of Playground Theory, about launching a profitable brand. Vance shares how to launch a product and scale your brand on Kickstarter, common mistakes brands make when launching their products, and crowdfunding strategies for developing customer relationships.
Resources mentioned in this episode
- Joshua Chin on LinkedIn
- Chronos Agency
- Chronos Agency’s email: sales@chronos.agency
- eCommerce Growth Hackers Facebook Group
- Playground Theory
- Fly By Jing
- Kickstarter
- Indiegogo
Sponsor for this episode
This episode is brought to you by Chronos Agency.
If you are a direct-to-consumer ecommerce brand that wants to unlock the optimum customer lifetime value through email marketing, then look no further than Chronos Agency!
Our team of passionate email marketing experts has helped hundreds of brands generate over $70 million in return from email alone, and our clients receive an average of 3500% ROI from our efforts.
Chronos Agency has worked with a variety of brands, including Truly Beauty, Alya Skin, and many more. Our mission is to help real businesses achieve real results.
If you want to take your revenue to the next level using email marketing, be sure to email our team at sales@chronos.agency or visit chronos.agency to learn more.
Episode Transcript
Intro 0:04
Welcome to the eCommerce Profits Podcast where we feature top founders and experts in the ecommerce Industry and take an in depth look at their struggles and successes and growing ecommerce brands profitably.
Joshua Chin 0:18
Alright guys, Josh Chin here. I’m the host of the eCommerce Profits Podcast where we feature top experts and entrepreneurs in the ecommerce Industry. And we go behind the scenes of the struggles and successes in growing a brand. Now this episode is brought to you by Chronos Agency. If you run the direct to consumer ecommerce brand that is ready to scale and to double your customer lifetime value true retention marketing Chronos is your company. We’ve helped hundreds of brands scale profits of email, SMS and mobile push, while getting an average of 30 500% ROI from our efforts. We’ve worked with brands like truly beauty, the UI allows skin and many more. The next step is to email us at sales@Chronos.agency. Or you can go to Chronos.agency to learn more. Now, today’s guest is Vance. Lee Vance is an ecommerce entrepreneur with 13 years of history and background as a brand growth and marketing strategist. Since starting Amazon FBA in 2015, he’s mastered crowdfunding and pre order launch strategy to launch products and grow brands. He’s raised over $7 million in successful launches, and broke records with two of his own launches, both number one most funded in their niches, and ranking in the top 1% of crowdfunding projects of all time. Now, Vance is originally from Canada, but now he is a full time Nomad, traveling living different countries around the world. He’s currently in Mexico. And he’s calling in from his little boat out in Mexico. So welcome to the show. Vance, thank you for taking the time.
Vance Lee 2:04
Hey, Josh, man, thank you for having me. Excited to be here.
Joshua Chin 2:08
Now, let’s dive into your background. It’s really impressive what you have achieved and what you’ve done. And you took a really interesting route post launch. So talk to us about what’s happened. In launching your brand, what that brand is all about what the products about then what you’ve done, beyond the launch?
Vance Lee 2:29
Sure, yeah. So I mean, I started with crowdfunding kind of by accident. I mean, I did pretty well with a launch or two when I first started in 2015, on Amazon FBA. And in 2016, if you remember, I mean, this seems like a lifetime ago. But back in 2016, was when Amazon decided to change the terms of service and back then you could do honest, unbiased reviews. That’s when they said, Okay, no, you can’t do this anymore. And a lot of people started panicking, and I was one of those people. So I had a product that was in the works. And I invested a lot of time and money into it, and wasn’t sure how I was going to launch it because of this switch. So started exploring things like Shopify and started exploring crowdfunding as well. And it turned out that a lot of the skills that we had with my team, me and my business partner allowed us to have a really successful Kickstarter launch, our first product ended up raising about almost a million dollars like 950,000, after upsells from the Kickstarter and Indiegogo initial launches, so we ended up having a really successful launch that was in that category. And, and just found this model that worked really well to be able to, to be able to get some cash flow upfront and not have to get inventory first. So which is I mean, I’m sure we’ll talk about that, but which is one of the really, really appealing parts of, of this type of this type of model. So since then, we’ve launched other campaigns for our own brands through that my main brand that I work with, with, you know, in this example, is a coffee Rancocas Rios, and the most recent product that we launched was a coffee glass. And this is going to sound like it’s kind of a little BS, but it’s a it’s a coffee glass that actually enhances the way that your coffee smells and tastes. So it’s similar to the idea and the design. Behind wineglass. Yeah, and whiskey sniff exactly. I was about to say those types of things. Yeah, exactly. So I mean, it works. It’s worked for those for like, hundreds of years. We just, were one of the first to bring this to coffee and just kind of created this market for for products and coffee, that that enhances your, your, your, your, your, essentially your sensory experience from drinking coffee. So this most recent one launched on Kickstarter, we did about 220,000 in in 14 days. And actually 14 days was just a mistake. We wanted to run this for 45 days. And when we started the campaign, it just showed 14 days and we were just panicking and we couldn’t get them to change it. So 14 days $220,000 And when we moved it over Indiegogo, so about $330,000 pre orders before launching this into, into the into the real world outside of crowdfunding. So that’s that’s a little bit about the brand. And since then, I mean, since our very first launch, we’ve had a lot of friends that are all ecommerce, we have a lot of friends in the ecommerce community and colleagues and people that are just like, hey, what what are you doing? Like, how did you do this thing? We want to launch our brands as well, we want to launch a new cool product. Yeah. How did you get to doing that? So we ended up doing quite a bit of agency work and consulting work for people that were looking to grow their brands and, and launched through crowdfunding. And this is where we are today. So we’ve, like you said, we’ve had over 7 million in successful launches alone. So not, these are not like ecommerce, like sales numbers. These are just just from the launches. Yeah. And a lot of people have been really excited about that. So it’s a it’s an interesting kind of alternative on strategies, it’s starting to become. Still, I wouldn’t say it’s still very popular, but it’s definitely something that’s becoming becoming more appealing because of the benefits from it.
[Continue to Page 2]
