Posts Tagged ‘Snapchat’
The gift of a Lifetime: Garrett Gee
Posted by: adonis49 on: June 29, 2017
He Sold His Startup For $54 Million, Then Gave His Family a Gift of a Lifetime
What do you do when SnapChat buys your startup and you become a millionaire? If you’re 25-year-old Garrett Gee, you put all the money in savings, sell everything you own, and take your family on an endless trip around the world.
Gee is the founder of Scan, a QR code-scanning mobile app he pitched on “Shark Tank” in 2013. He appeared on the show wearing just a hoodie and flip flops, an ensemble he wears when pitching investors.
“I wore them in every investor meeting before ‘Shark Tank,’ including my meetings with Facebook, Google, Menlo Ventures, Lady Gaga, and more,” he told NextShark in a 2013 interview. “Actually, they were part of a ‘uniform’ I put together while raising money for my company. To me, it was very important for potential investors to see me for who I really am.”
Although he failed to get a deal in the tank, Gee had already raised over $8 million in funding from various venture capital firms prior to getting on the show. After launching his company in 2011, it was acquired by SnapChat in 2014 for a whopping $54 million, making Gee an instant millionaire.
He recalled: “I kept looking at [my bank account], then looking away, then looking at it to make sure it was still there and that this was all real. I took a screenshot for my journal — OK, I took like seven screenshots for my journal. I didn’t show my wife — not at first. We were just about to have our second child so I waited about one week until she was literally in labor. Then, to take her mind off the pain, I pulled out my phone and showed her our bank account. It worked.”
About a year after, Gee — now a father of two kids, Dorothy, 3, and Manilla, 1, with his wife Jessica, 29 — were trying to figure out what to do next. At that time he was still a student and captain of the soccer team at Brigham Young University.
“A new house and cars didn’t feel right,” Gee told People. “We didn’t need that stuff. We were young, healthy and really didn’t need much of anything. So we started joking about putting our money in savings, selling everything and using those funds to travel the world. Where would we go? What would we do? And as we began to add more plans to our bucket list, it just became real.”
After putting their newfound fortune in savings, the couple held a large garage sale and sold literally everything they had except journals, photos and Gee’s lucky sandals. They made a total of $45,000 in the end, which would end up being the money they used to fund their travels.
“We will travel until that runs out,” Gee told NextShark. “We will see how long it lasts. Perhaps some of my entrepreneurial skills will come into play and I’ll figure out a way to make that money stretch further and further. Or, if I’m really good, $45K will give me enough time to make our travels fuel themselves, or better yet, profitable. Anything is possible, right? Just keep intentions pure and attitudes positive”
On why the couple decided to travel, Gee explained: “We hope to learn more about life and become better people. We are excited about the memories that we will surely create together and the opportunities around the world we will have to serve others. Already it has become clear that the world is a big, open place with endless mindsets, cultures, and beliefs, none better than the others — just different.”
The couple met in Russia in 2007 while they were serving as missionaries for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and have been married since 2009.
To make sure their $45,000 travel fund lasts as long as possible, the family is living as frugally as possible.
“[Being frugal] just comes kind of natural to us. It makes us uncomfortable to be thoughtless with money,” Gee explained. “We still buy the cheapest flight we can find, even if that means waking up at 4 a.m., and we still only drink water with our meals. I believe the best way to show gratitude for the blessings in life is humility, and one of the best ways to show humility is to live frugally.”
The family has spent the last four month traveling in the South Pacific, Australia, Thailand and New Zealand. They’re currently vacationing on the beaches in Bali, Indonesia.
“My personal favorite adventure thus far was back in Tonga. For over a year I had been researching and preparing to freedive in the waters of Tonga — with humpback whales! It was the most epic moment of my life.”
When it comes to his kids’ future education, Gee is a little hesitant in settling somewhere permanently.
“I’m very open-minded to the option of not settling down,” he told NextShark. “I’m open to non-traditional forms of education. I wasn’t a very good student. The typical education system actually made me feel stupid and bad about myself and gave me less confidence in my own ability to be creative and valuable.”
He added: “But nonetheless I loved school for everything else. I loved the social life. I loved sports. I loved the challenges. So, it is kind of a toss-up. I want the best of the best for my children so hopefully I’ll soon be able to figure out what that may be.”
On whether he credits his success to hard work or luck, he said: “If you were to ask me in person I would say, ‘Oh it’s all luck.’ But, that would be a lie just to get past the question. The truth is it’s all hard work. There’s a ton of serendipitous and fortunate events where stars have aligned in order for everything to come together. But even each of those ‘lucky’ happenings can be traced back to extra efforts and hard work, extra efforts to network, extra late nights. So the harder I work, the ‘luckier’ I get.”
Gee also shared three factors to success he believes in:
1) Be impressive: success doesn’t just grace anyone and everyone. It seeks out impressive people — hard-working, talented, sincere, good-hearted people. Basically, be deserving of any success that wishes to find you.
2) Be yourself: it’s fine to learn from others and look up to those deserving, but let it stop there. The Facebook formula worked for Facebook — probably not for you. The Garrett Gee way was kinda cool for him, but not that cool. Always be learning more about yourself and always let that light shine bright!
3) Be successful: realize what success really is. That way, on your pursuit to ‘financial success’ you can enjoy real success. You can enjoy your health, your family, and the things that really determine success.
The couple plans to travel to the Maldives and Switzerland in the coming months, and Gee says he already has a new company in the works that he says is “something like never before.” He regularly blogs about his family’s adventures The Bucketlist Family
A Killer Loyal Audience? Snapchat
Posted by: adonis49 on: August 5, 2016
Why Snapchat Builds a Killer Loyal Audience
The platform is for everyone.
Snapchat is now more popular than Facebook for under 24s.
I know – it’s just for kids, isn’t it? Or perhaps for adults, but in a rude way that’s definitely not suitable for work…
That’s what I thought about Snapchat, so I didn’t give it a second thought. That is, until around 6 months ago, when I first found out about Stories. I mean the Snapchat kind, not just telling a tale. I’m not quite that out of touch…
Since then, I’ve been experimenting with the platform in every way possible. And, do you know what? It’s for everyone!
For the first time since Facebook became the dominant social medium, it’s been unseated in popularity. Snapchat is now more popular than Facebook for under 24s.
The thing is, not only is there a huge audience there, but it has the potential to engage at a higher level than almost anything else.
You can build trust, loyalty and fanatical fans, and all of that is great news for your content. Loyal fans are regular readers and prolific sharers after all.
So, how does it work? If you’re under 24, you probably don’t need me to tell you. But if you’re an ancient 30-something, like me, let’s take a look…
What’s Snapchat Good At?
In a lot of ways, Snapchat has really similar benefits to my own favourite subject: Podcasting.
I see the power of podcasting as honest engagement multiplied by attention. You project your honest, transparent personality through the airwaves, listeners engage with that and, because of the context (consume alongside other activities), they listen for a long, long time. This builds trust and loyalty, which naturally encourages them to read your content on a regular basis.
Snapchat is similar, to me, in two ways.
The Transparent Life
First, it does transparency so well. This is honest storytelling at its best. You can watch filmstars snapping about driving their kids to school, or business tycoons showing off their favourite little Italian restaurant. You get a real insight into their lives.
Similar to podcasting, that polarises people. But, it creates rabid fans.
Some people won’t like you, but others will LOVE you. Personality, honesty, transparency creates that divide, but that’s exactly what you want. So much better than a chorus of “Meh….”
Filling the Wasted Minutes of Life
Second, while Podcasting caters for the long haul – hour long shows are the norm – Snapchat caters to the tiny wasted minutes in your life.
If you watch anyone using Snapchat, it’s all **flick flick flick** rapidly through the app. When Snapchat users have a minute of boredom, waiting in a queue, they’ll immediately pull out a phone and flick through some stories. Clips are 15 seconds or less, so you can fire through them. As a result, people check in A LOT.
This is, again, a multiplication effect.
While podcasting has honest engagement x long attention, Snapchat has honest engagement x extremely frequent attention. And the best thing is, because it’s so easy to create Snapchat content, you can keep up, releasing equally frequent updates.
So, ready to give it a try? Well, here’s some things that I’ve found are working for me in growing that loyal audience.
Before you Start Growing, Start Showing (The Love!)
This goes for almost any medium, but even more so for Snapchat. Take care of the audience you already have first. Show them some love. There are a couple of good reasons for this.
First – and pretty obviously – if you want to guide followers from Snapchat to your blog, you need their trust. That requires really nurturing the relationship, building engagement along the way. It’s often easy to get lost in the race to find new followers and forget the reason you’re looking for an audience in the first place.
Second, looking now at growth, Snapchat is a word-of-mouth medium.
There’s no directory in the app, no search-by-interest, so your existing audience is one of your best sources of new followers. This, again, is something that’s based on trust, on building proper relationships with those that follow you. Once they trust you, once they’re fans of your work, THEN they’ll refer you to their own audience.
So, how do we build that relationship?
Question the People!
Every time someone follows you, you’ve got a golden opportunity to get talking. When you see that yellow-backed ghost at the top that signifies a follow, just click into the ‘Added me’ list and follow them back. Then pop over to your Chat window and refresh it. You’ll see those new followers at the top of the list, all signified by a cute little ‘new follower’ baby emoji.
It’s easy to send a quick: “Hey, thanks for following me! I’m interested to know, what’s keeping you busy right now?” Record it as a video, and send it to all of your new followers at the same time. It takes about 30 seconds in total once you’ve practised the process.
I’ve had some amazing responses to that, and it’s started many a conversation that’s led to far more than just a new fan. Talking of which…
Take it Over
A great way to build further trust and credibility is to ask your current followers to shout you out.
Do it for a few of them in your story, and you’ll soon find them reciprocating. Or, just make the ask: “Hey, if you enjoy my story, I’d love it if you could shout out my snapcode on your channel.” If you’re doing good content, that works surprisingly well.
Of course, not only does this build trust, but it grows your following at a rapid rate.
But, the next level is a full takeover.
A Snapchat takeover is when someone sends over their login details, and you contribute directly to their story for a set time. It’s brilliant fun! You get to speak to a new audience, show them a bit of what you do, and hopefully gain a good percentage of their followers as a result.
You can do this as a swap with people that you follow yourself, people that you know have their own engaged audience. If your niche overlaps in any way, then the results can be fantastic.
Show Them Off
I have one final tip that not only builds loyalty, but makes for more engaging stories. It’s a method that’s emerged thanks to the new Snapchat Memories feature.
Memories is a big move by Snapchat to move away from it’s historic ‘time limited’ approach.
In the past, the fact that images and videos only hang around for a short time has been a big USP for Snapchat. But, there’s no doubt that’s also held back wider use by businesses or even casual users that want to store their creations.
Memories changes everything. You can now store and reuse snaps much more easily. Most importantly, it allows you to insert external images into your story; something that has never been possible before.
This is a huge audience engagement opportunity, because it means that you can share your community’s responses.
Say you run a contest, asking your readers to show how they’re enjoying the current heatwave. You can share the best responses back out to your story, allowing the community to get to know each other. This is really powerful, showing a lot of love to those winners, and encouraging others to get more involved.
Start Engaging
I know a lot of you are still on the fence. Snapchat comes with a LOT of baggage, but the traction they’ve achieved is undeniable.
For what it’s worth, I’ve seen more engagement, more loyalty and more feedback on my content through Snapchat than ANY other social platform so far. If you want a demo of what it can do, and how I go about it, I’d love you to follow me over there.
Whatever you do, though, at least download the app and start experimenting. Keep it private initially, just a friend or two, but get to know the platform. Once you see what’s going on in there, I’d wager you’ll be hooked!
Colin Gray has been helping people to podcast, and combine it with their wider content, for nearly 10 years. He does it through courses and services at The Podcast Host, and via the Podcraft Podcast. He’s always happy to answer podcasting questions on Twitter or Snapchat, so get in touch!