Kevin Smith is the director of Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, Clerks, Dogma, Chasing Amy and about a dozen other films.
He’s also a businessman who isn’t afraid to go into $25,000 of debt to make a movie or put up his own house as collateral.
Here are 3 things you can learn from Kevin Smith that will improve the way you do business.
Rule #1 – Go Into Debt as Long as You Bet on Yourself
You don’t have to rely or depend on the money of others, you don’t need that much money. Unless you want to create something absolutely epic, of course.
You also could launch a Kickstarter or Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign, but the truth is that, in this age of technological advances, you just have to use your creativity and take your phone, tablet, laptop and start to work on your dream. Check out what Kevin Smith said about this:
Money is a hurdle, that’s kind of easy to get over particularly in the age of technology where this magical box right and the ones we have in our pockets will shoot a movie you can edit and upload to youtube all from the same device all within like an hour.
Moreover, after the success of Clerks, Kevin Smith went through a bunch of different studio films. We have Zack and Miri Make a Porno, CopOut and other films with large Hollywood budgets.
His goal was to make a hundred-million-dollar film but he dropped all of that to go and make the type of movies he wanted to make.
Rule #2 – Once You Make it, Optimize for Happiness
The other thing Kevin Smith is really good at is by making use of marketing stunts to help his movies get funded.
One of the ways he’s been launching indie movies recently is by touring around the country and selling tickets to live shows.
Doing this he’s been able to score some of the highest revenue/show numbers in the entire film industry including selling out Carnegie Hall’s event “The Silent Bob Speaks“.
Rule #3 – Go for Cheap Press Over Ad Spend
One of his biggest “P. T. Barnum stunts” was the auctioning of his movie Red State to the highest bidder in a fake auction at Sundance Film Festival.
By saying he was gonna auction it before the film festival caused a lot of noise and filled the room with some of the top people in the film industry.
The result? He ended buying the film himself!
By doing this, Kevin Smith created a bunch more news after the initial news stories and ended up creating a bunch of free press for the movie to the point where we ended up profiting on the movie.
So that’s the end of our blog post!
I’m Alex Berman, and thanks for reading this material and feel free to share it on your social networks!
Don’t forget to check out x27marketing.com if you need marketing support for your digital agency.
- Kevin’s book: http://amzn.to/2bjP1Q9
- Videos and articles referenced:
- Go into debt (as long as you bet on yourself)
- Once you make it, optimize for happiness
- Go for cheap press over ad spend
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