Born in rural New Hampshire with twisted legs, Tellman Knudson has become known as "The Barefoot Philanthropist" for achieving the impossible and helping others to do the same. At the age of 16, he defied his doctors predictions, setting the record for speed on his cross-country course and going on to run ultra-marathons.
A self-made multi-millionaire before the age of 30, Tellman took his company Overcome Everything, Inc. from zero to $2.8 million in under three years. Now recognized worldwide as the authority on Internet list-building, Tellman is currently running barefoot 3,200 miles across America, coast-to-coast, to raise $100 million for homeless kids through his non-profit, www.Tellman.org.
RIC THOMPSON: Let's give everybody a quick rundown of your background, where you came from, how you got the success online, and then we'll jump into what you are doing right now that's really turning some heads.
TELLMAN KNUDSON: That sounds awesome. I can tell you that what we're doing right now is the single reason why churches are successful in the United States of America. Churches; organized religion. If that didn't catch your attention, I don't know what's going to. We'll get back to that in a little while, but before we do, to quote Mark Joyner, here's what I'd like to talk about.
I'm not the most successful Internet marketer in the world, by the way. I want to make everyone very aware of that. There are people who make more money than I do, but we did $5.4 million in 2009. That was a 50% increase from 2008, which was pretty cool. I'm used to doubling my business every year since I started with $50 in a little tiny apartment on a side street with three other adult roommates, five cats, and a computer that barely worked.
My memory tends to be a little bad, but it's true that I remember clear as day, the day that I interviewed Ric Thompson for a project called the Nitro Marketing Mindset. You were working very closely with Kevin Wilke and Matt Gill, the co-founders of Nitro Marketing. After that interview you said, "If there's anything I can ever do to help you out, give me a call." I said, "Okay." I gave you a call.
I asked you if you had any way of connecting me with any bigger names in the marketing world or the self-improvement world for this project idea I had called List Crusade. List Crusade went on to be my first really successful project. I did $800,000 in sales my first year by really focusing on it fulltime online. That was a big deal. I only kept somewhere between 30% and 50% of that because I was selling other people's products through affiliate programs.
That's because I wasn't able to write copy that converted. I started with affiliate marketing and basically we doubled every year since, which is amazing because there was no loan involved. I couldn't get a loan because my credit was terrible. Basically, I kept buying Internet marketing products, reading them, listening to them, watching them and implementing them. Some worked better than others. I just kept on doing that and my business kept on growing, lo and behold.
RIC THOMPSON: Because you bootstrapped.
TELLMAN KNUDSON: Exactly. The real key to my business success is that, so far, we have 20 people with us who are fulltime right now, between Overcome Everything and our nonprofit. That is a really cool thing to be directly affecting that many people's lives. Extending out from that, we had over 50,000 customers, which is really cool. Over 50,000! That's a lot of people whose lives we have a chance to touch.
It's people who we've had a chance to help. That's just our list-building training alone. It's very cool. The point of all of this is that slowly over the last four-and-a-half years, we built up and built up this big successful company that's doing millions of dollars a year online. It's just mind-blowing. Then what happened is I decided to do something on a higher level.
I decided to run across America barefoot and raise $100 million for youth homelessness in America. At the moment that we're doing this recording, I am in my home office in Vermont. I made it 654 miles into a 3,200-mile run, raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the cause and got severely injured. I'm on pause right now for the moment while I'm letting my deep heel contusions recover, preparing to go back out on the road, hopefully in early to mid-spring.
We're raising money for all of that right now. What is comes down to is that we're running and we're doing well. We're doing our level best to help the over two million homeless youth in America and the youth who will experience homelessness in America in 2010. We're doing whatever we can to end it and to end it permanently. It's a big problem. It's a big issue.
While I was out running between four and six hours a day, you can imagine that I had some time on my hands to get some thinking done and to listen to audio on my iPhone. I listened to a lot of audio books. While I was listening to those audio books, I discovered some very interesting things. I discovered some new things that I'd never heard about in Internet marketing before. I'm all about new things.
New things are what drive my creativity and drive my excitement. I love checking out new stuff, and I'm constantly innovating. I discovered something that I hadn't seen in the Internet marketing sphere before that hopefully we'll be able to talk about a little bit here today before the call is over. It's very powerful. To date, it's the only way that I've discovered to actually get paid to come up with ideas.
That's no BS and no hype-to get paid to be an idea person. I don't know if you resonate with that or not. However, if you do, if you're the type of person who's ever had a good idea that you really think could make a lot of money, can you imagine if you were able to get paid to come up with the idea? That's an astonishing thing.
RIC THOMPSON: Yes, absolutely
TELLMAN KNUDSON: I'd never seen it before and it's exactly what we're going to be talking about here in a little bit.
RIC THOMPSON: Before we get into that, Tellman, I want to acknowledge and bring out the point that a lot of people give this lip service. On the other side of the spectrum, to a lot of people, this is their dream: "I want to become a super successful entrepreneur. I want a company bringing in millions of dollars. Then I want to be able to apply myself to the issues that really matter." You have this bigger goal and bigger dream that really impacts you. That's what everybody wants to be able to do.
It's really cool that here you are, someone who is living that. Of course, more importantly, you are really living it. You're out there putting your life at stake, at times, doing the run. Of course, you have dedicated so much time and resources from not only your life, but your business, to support this run. I'm not sure what the number is up to now, but at one point you had put in a half million dollars from your business just to fund the run across America, right?
TELLMAN KNUDSON: Yes, we spent over half a million dollars so far on the run. Yes, it was a pretty expensive project.
RIC THOMPSON: You have to have a successful company in order to make big things like that happen; that's just a fact of life. It's really cool that you've been able to do it, and it's really cool the fact that you are doing it. Kudos to you.
TELLMAN KNUDSON: Yes, it's a lot of work. For anybody who's going for anything greater-again, when I say greater, that could mean something as simple as not wanting your parents to be in a nursing home, or whatever it is. It could be that you want to give a lot more money to your church. It could be that you want to give money to a political campaign that you truly believe in.
It could be that you want to make sure that your nephew can afford to go through college because his parents aren't doing so hot right now. Whatever. It's okay. Whatever it is that means something to you is a possibility. It's not so far off. It really isn't. There are a lot of ways to get there, but I've found there are some really interesting ways to get there. Using this principle, we did two experiments, actually.
For the first one, we raised $36,000 from stage, and then over $100,000 from teleseminars and sales videos using this one principle just recently. We then proceeded to do something on a much more realistic level and raised $6,000 online for a short film that we're producing called "Run Tellman Run," which is also the name of the initiative in which I'm running across the country barefoot raising all this money for youth homelessness.
We raised $6,000 in two weeks. It was tremendously successful. It was the coolest thing. It had nothing to do with business. It had nothing to do with marketing. We raised over $6,000 in two weeks to fund the editing of our "Run Tellman Run" short film. It was just the coolest thing ever. I thought it was great.
RIC THOMPSON: I think this is magic. Here you are talking about being able to, in a way, test something without risking anything from yourself. You put this concept out there. You hadn't actually done the movie. You just put the concept out there. You made your $6,000 and that's paying for the movie to be done.
TELLMAN KNUDSON: Yes. Let me stop being so cryptic. Here's what happened. I'm out running. I'm listening to audio books. There are a few audio books I listen to. One was called Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe. One was called Wikinomics, which is going to make your brain hurt for the first half of it, but the second half is a little bit easier to read. It's called Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams.
The third book is called Groundswell. I really like Groundswell a lot. I like Crowdsourcing a lot, too. I had a hard time understanding parts of Wikinomics. Basically, I was introduced to a concept that I'd never heard of before. This concept allows you to come up with an idea. By the way, I'm going to be selling a course at the end of this call.
The course is the home-study program that's going to allow you to learn how to do all of the stuff we're talking about on the call. If you're offended by that, you don't have to listen to the rest of it. Cool?
RIC THOMPSON: At the same time, we're absolutely going to get some great tips and suggestions from you, Tellman, because I know you don't resist throwing those out there.
TELLMAN KNUDSON: That's the whole point, but I want to make it very clear that we're going to be selling the course at the end of the call. It's the coolest thing I've ever seen, and I had to create a course about it because people wanted to know more and more about what the deal was. Maybe you feel that way too, and maybe you don't. Either way, you're going to be able to walk away from this call with some cool things that you can do.
Check this out. You can come up with an idea, not put any work into it at all, put it out there to the world, have the world pay you to turn your idea into a reality, and cover all your costs to make it happen.
RIC THOMPSON: That's awesome.
TELLMAN KNUDSON: Ric, there is someone right now who is using this principle to fund a fusion reactor.
RIC THOMPSON: What?
TELLMAN KNUDSON: A fusion reactor!
RIC THOMPSON: Really?
TELLMAN KNUDSON: It's completely ridiculous, but it's absolutely true. I couldn't believe it. I saw this campaign to fund a fusion reactor.
RIC THOMPSON: These are scientists. These are not professional marketers doing this.
TELLMAN KNUDSON: Nobody who does this stuff is a professional marketer. The marketing world doesn't even know this exists yet. The people who do know it exists are musicians, film-makers, nonprofits, authors, people who cook, and basically people who create cool stuff in the world. The biggest and probably the most important thing is this.
If you're a person who's just in this to make money, and that's the only reason you're here, then please don't listen to anything I have to say. If the only reason that you exist is just to make a buck and to soak some resources out of the earth before you die, please don't listen to this. It's not for you.
RIC THOMPSON: This flat-out wouldn't work for them with this model, right?
TELLMAN KNUDSON: Not really.
RIC THOMPSON: You have to have something of value, right?
TELLMAN KNUDSON: The people who this is going to work for are people who have a cool idea, and preferably people who have lots of cool ideas. Here's the deal. It's called Crowdfunding. The idea behind a crowd is a group of people who band together and are all interested in something similar. Frequently, in the Internet marketing world or in the direct response Internet marketing world, we refer to this as a 'list'.
We might refer to it as a social network of a large group of people who have at least one common interest. They either read the same newsletter, or they hang out in forums or social networks together, or they chat back and forth on Facebook, or whatever it is. The way this works is by putting together your idea or concept and you put it out to the world on one of these Crowdfunding websites.
When you put it out to the world on a Crowdfunding website, there are several ways to do it. The most popular is through a site called Kickstarter, actually. You put an idea out there to the Kickstarter community, and then you drive as much traffic as you can to that page; whether it's telling your friends, telling your Twitter followers, telling your Facebook friends, telling the people you go to church with, telling your family, or telling people on your email list, if you have taken the time to build one, to go check out this page. Does that make sense so far, Ric?
RIC THOMPSON: I'm following it, yes.
TELLMAN KNUDSON: Then you say, "I need to raise this amount of money in this amount of time." Let's say you want to raise $5,000 in 30 days. I think most people can imagine that as a possibility.
RIC THOMPSON: Yes.
TELLMAN KNUDSON: Let's say you have an idea to write a book. Maybe you're not a book writer. Maybe you want to do a film. Maybe you're not a film-maker, and you have an idea for an invention. Maybe you're not an inventor, and you just want to start organizing community dinners. Whatever it is, if it takes money and it involves you doing some work, and ultimately providing someone with some kind of value doing something cool for somebody, this is what we're talking about.
Now you can put out one idea or 10 ideas or 100 ideas all at once and see which ones people gravitate toward. When they gravitate toward them they do what's called 'pledging'. They pledge money toward your cause. They say, "I will give this cause $100 if this cause is fully funded in 30 days." If it is, then and only then is the card charged.
If it is not, that's okay, too. If the project doesn't raise the amount of money in the given amount of time, that's no problem, because then the cards won't be charged and the project won't be backed by the community.
RIC THOMPSON: So there's no risk for the people making the pledges. They're not going to give the money to an initiative that's only going to raise half the funds and not ever happen, and they will be out their money.
TELLMAN KNUDSON: Exactly, and that's the whole point.
RIC THOMPSON: Do you have to pay, Tellman, to list your projects on a site like Kickstarter?
Member comments together with Member Names may be used by
InternetMarketingTNT.com for promotional or other media efforts.
Comments that include profanity, or personal attacks, or antisocial behavior
such as "spamming" or "trolling," or other inappropriate comments or
material will be removed from the site. We will take steps to block users
who violate any of our terms of use. You are fully responsible for the
content that you post.
Comments (0)
We invite you to be the first to post a comment regarding this article.
