Brainard Carey - Fund Your Dreams Like A Creative Genius; A Guide For Artists, Entrepreneurs, Inventors, And Kindred Spirits

Copyright 2018 by Brainard Carey

All rights reserved. Copyright under Berne Copyright Convention, Universal Copyright Convention, and Pan American Copyright Convention. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Allworth Press, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

Allworth Press books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Allworth Press, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or .

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Published by Allworth Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc., 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018. Allworth Press is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc., a Delaware corporation.

www.allworth.com

Cover design by Mary Ann Smith

Illustrations by Brainard, Delia, and Shiva Carey

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-62153-648-2

eBook ISBN: 978-1-62153-650-5

Printed in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to Delia and Shiva.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

If you only use one good idea from this book, the cost of buying it will be repaid many times over.

Want more cash? Read this intro quickly

This is a book for anyone who has an ounce of creativity in themyou could be an entrepreneur, an artist, a teacher, or anyone at all who is willing to go outside of traditional routes (a job) to gain income or a one-shot infusion of cash. You can use the money for a dream you have or a cause you want to support or an artistic or activist project you want to see realized. There are no limits or parameters on how the money is spent.

Sponsors, Patrons, Donors, Customers, and Angels are simply relationships, as well as parts of techniques you can use to have your event or visionary work sponsored by businesses and corporations to keep your dream alive and growing.

Sound dreamy? Its how almost every museum, filmmaker, and every individual dreamer raises millions a year, and it can easily work for you if you know the process.

So, if you want to know more in a short time, take this slim volume home and read it and then activate one of the possibilities I present. Read them all to see which one sounds like the most fun and easiest for you to do. Some of these ideas may seem impossible for you to do. Every idea will take effort for you to realize. Yet if you only use one good idea from this book, the cost of buying it will be repaid many times over.

How much are we talking about here? Anywhere from $500 to hundreds of thousands. In most cases, after raising money successfully once, you will find it easy to repeat the process, which is often a bit addictive because getting what you need and want is a turn-on for most people. An active person fundraising tends to raise more and more every year, because it gets easier once you understand the system.

Also, if you complete reading this short book, you can write and ask the author (me) questions, as well as send in your success stories. I plan to use the time you give me wisely so you can profit sooner rather than later with this book. Questions can be sent to .

An active person fundraising tends to raise more and more every year, because it gets easier once you understand the system.

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Chapter 1

CREATE A PRODUCT

Money. Its what makes a business or most dreams flourish and is also what stands in the way of growth. In the early stages of every new venture, the very first concern and top priority is always where the money will come from. It used to be that in order to start a business the route was to visit the bank, provide reasonable collateral, and secure a loan. These days, with an economy that is often highly volatile and with the advent of the internet constantly changing the landscape of how things are done, the era of the bank loan is rapidly fading. Crowdfunding has taken the place of traditional overhead capital in many cases through sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. But what if you want to circumvent even these modern traditions and find a way to raise capital even more independently? What if you would prefer not to give a percentage of all income raised to one of the many online platforms like Indiegogo, Patreon, and Kickstarter?

The fact of the matter is, there are countless ways to secure yourself a little extra green on the side; the only obstacle is the limit of your imagination. Just ask Brian Chesky, CEO and founder of the now ubiquitous vacation and short-term rental platform Airbnb. In the early days of this business, Chesky and his cofounders Nathan Blecharczyk and Joe Gebbia had a problem. They were rapidly running out of money to run their nascent, unknown start-up.

The business itself was the result of chance. When a design conference flooded into San Francisco creating a space issuethere simply werent enough hotel beds to fit every participantthe three cofounders used the lack of space to their advantage. Low on funds and needing to pay the rent, they opened their loft space to conference participants. Three air mattresses plus complimentary breakfast at $80 a pop not only helped three visitors find a place to stay, it got the rent paid and gave rise to what would become Airbnb.

There are countless ways to secure yourself a little extra green on the side; the only obstacle is the limit of your imagination.

Fast-forward to Denver, Colorado, in 2008. The Democratic National Convention was presenting the very same temporary housing need as the San Francisco design conference, and Airbnb was still in its very early stages. The team needed to solve a fundamental problem, which was figuring out how to fund their business enough to market it and bring in more paying customers.

They already knew that the DNC was a tremendous opportunity. The idea of people opening their homes to others was catching on. But things werent growing quite fast enough; they needed another way to keep their little boat afloat.

Thats when they came up with a most unconventional idea in order to capitalize on the convention in town. They would sell cereal.

You read that correctly.

They would sell cereal. The team ordered a thousand boxes from a local printer, got themselves a glue gun and some cereal, and went to work. They created a limited-edition series of politically themed cereals, namely Obama Os and Captain McCain. Each variety had five hundred boxes each, individually numbered and filled with real cereal. In the lead-up to the Democratic National Convention, the team sold off their cereal boxes for $40 each. It was thinking so far outside the... well... box, they had no idea whether their plan would pay off.