Digital Social Hour
Crowdfunding Secrets: Raise Millions in Days | Renji Bijoy DSH #1209
Fri, 28 Feb 2025
Discover the insider secrets to raising millions through crowdfunding in record time! 🚀 In this episode of the Digital Social Hour, host Sean Kelly sits down with Renji Bijoy, the genius behind one of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns ever. From raising $2 million in just 2 days to building a revolutionary AR/VR product, Renji shares the strategies, challenges, and mindset needed to turn bold ideas into reality. 🧠💡 Learn why timing, substance, and leveraging your audience are game-changers in the crowdfunding world. Plus, hear firsthand how Renji’s team is shaping the future of computing with their groundbreaking visor technology and disrupting the tech giants. Whether you're an entrepreneur, investor, or just curious about the next big thing in tech, this conversation is packed with valuable insights you don’t want to miss! 🌟 Watch now and subscribe for more insider secrets. 📺 Hit that subscribe button and join the conversation on the Digital Social Hour with Sean Kelly! 🚀 CHAPTERS: 00:00 - Intro 01:14 - How Renji Raised $20M 04:52 - Next Generation Computing 06:34 - Future of Venture Capital 09:16 - Global Power Shift 11:28 - Power of Social Media 13:53 - Managing Raised Capital 16:36 - Immersed: $8M with 8 Employees 18:56 - Immersed: $1M from Meta 21:06 - Immersed: $1M from Twitch 23:14 - Immersed: $1B from Facebook 27:45 - Starting a Company Again 29:14 - The Visor in the Wild 30:32 - Elon Musk and Tesla 31:25 - Legacy of Steve Jobs 34:50 - Competing Orthogonally 37:00 - Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin 37:57 - How Immersed Started 41:34 - Importance of Networking 43:53 - AI and Job Security 45:10 - Humanoid Robots 49:15 - AI Creating New Jobs 52:27 - Differentiate Your Podcast 54:20 - Human Relationships Matter 55:26 - Post-Trump Authenticity 57:20 - Stop Making Pennies APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://www.digitalsocialhour.com/application BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [email protected] GUEST: Renji Bijoy https://www.instagram.com/renji.bijoy LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ #indiecomics #creativecrowdfunding #comiccrowdfunding #crowdfundingforartists #crowdfundingtactics
Chapter 1: How did Renji Bijoy raise $20 million in crowdfunding?
Yeah, I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
Yeah, I did not know that many important people were out there.
Yeah, it's a good spot. I think it's kind of the new Silicon Valley. Yeah. How long you been out there for? Six years. Okay. It's a really good spot. Yeah, I think because it has the chill vibe of like the East Coast, I think more like kind of Atlanta, you can raise a family, chill out there, but also has like a tech focus, business focus.
Chapter 2: Why is Austin a strategic location for tech entrepreneurs?
You guys like Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, the founders of like Airbnb, Palantir. A lot of people you don't realize are out there. It's a really good networking spot, especially because it's early. I think when you're in a saturated city like New York or San Francisco, it's just hard if you haven't been there for decades. That's true.
Because by then people are kind of shielded with their connection and they have their circles established. Exactly. Yeah. And it's like, hey, sorry, seat's taken. Yeah. So I know you've raised a ton of money over 20 million, right? Was moving to Austin kind of integral to that?
I would say that Austin wasn't integral for that necessarily because we did actually predominantly crowdfunding online. Right. Right. So if we wanted to raise more venture capital, probably would have been better to move out to San Francisco or something. Right. But I think for us, because we have sort of this army of retail investors, our users, our followers that really love our product.
it's really empowered us to get the word out there. It's really sort of a viral mechanism to get more users, more investors. I don't think we would have been able to, especially because we're focused on hardware. We're kind of building this advisor type product. Because of that, it's actually easier to crowdfund and not have to go through all these hoops that venture capitalists want you to,
But instead, why don't you just go to the customers who really love the product and get them to fund it? And so very quickly raised like $2 million in two days, $8 million in two weeks.
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Chapter 3: What makes a successful crowdfunding campaign?
And I was like, man, I've done six-month VC roadshows before, venture capital roadshows, and still come up with nothing as opposed to you just give your audience, your customers an opportunity to invest in something they believe in. man, it really just ramps up out of nowhere. And so I'm super thankful for pretty much everyone who's really backed us to date. I love it.
And I know crowdfunding, a lot of people attempt it, right? So what do you think made your campaign so special? Because you might have the record for most amount.
Yeah, yeah. So I think the main thing is having something of substance. I think a lot of people try to crowdfund with an idea on a napkin, but they haven't proven themselves yet. So for us, because we're the most used app in all of AR VR, mainly because it's kind of a work app, right? Put on the headset, connects to your laptop, creates multiple screens.
So you have kind of like your workstation with you anywhere you go portably. The main thing is we had a product that users loved. A lot of these other people who try to crowdfund, they're like, oh, hey, I have this cool idea. Will you invest in this? And then they raise like $5,000 as opposed to $5 million. So it really depends on do you have something of substance?
So the question is, okay, well, how do you build something of substance first? You need to have a genuine desire to build a product that people love. And if you don't do that, I wouldn't recommend crowdfunding. It's going to flop. Yeah, something they love.
And also the timing is important, right? Your space is hot right now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I would say that when I joined, it definitely wasn't hot. So I think in 2014, Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus, sold to Facebook for $3 billion. Then 2014, 2015, 2016, all these startups were trying to do VR this, VR that.
But then by 2017, when I joined the space, because all these startups the past three years had failed, I ended up not being able to raise any VC money at all. So I was really kind of heads down focused, you know, living off of savings. I went through an accelerator program called Techstars, similar like Y Combinator, if you've ever heard of that.
But what ended up happening was just heads down focused for about two or three years building this product. Got our first, I don't know, 50 users. But then when COVID hit, everyone started working from home and everyone's like, oh crap, well, I can't really bring my computer screens from the office back home. So, you know, I found this kind of headset thing. Can I, you know, use that for screens?
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Chapter 4: What is the future of venture capital according to Renji?
You want to wear something like very, very lightweight. So our visor is six ounces, very, very lightweight, and it's higher resolution than Apple's headset. And so that's coming out this year and actually a couple of months here. And our goal with that is to make this relevant to regular people, right? Like I don't want to focus on the niche VR gaming hobbyist world, nothing against them.
It's just, I'd rather focus on the world of everyone who uses a computer, right? So if we can become the next Facebook, the next Apple, man, like, I'm super happy that we have all of our users who invested in this thing early on because now you're going to have one-off random millionaires who never historically had a chance to even do that before.
Crowdfunding really unlocked that for the first time. I think it was like 2016. Before that, it was literally illegal for you to be able to invest. If you weren't already rich and you weren't an accredited investor, you weren't able to actually invest in a startup before. But now, finally, post-2016, now you can put your money in a startup. And if that becomes the next tech giant, well, cool.
You can be the next person who says, oh yeah, I had an early check in Facebook and that's why I'm retired. Yeah, because it's really hard to make stupid returns on the stock market. Exactly. Yeah. 7% a year on average if the stock market is doing well, which it hasn't been for the past few years.
So that's kind of why the rich has always been getting richer because only angel investors net worth over a million already were able to invest in these high return tech startups like Facebook and Airbnb and all these companies. I wish I was one of the early, you know, even a $10,000 check in Airbnb, but that wasn't even legal back then. Right. Yeah.
You had to be accredited and you had to know the right people. Exactly. A lot of hoops you had to jump through. Exactly. Whereas now with crowdfunding, you go to a website, you put in your dollar amount that you want, and then your money's now in the company.
And so that's why I feel like I'm starting to see a wave of new companies who realize I don't have to, as a founder, jump through hoops of getting venture capitalists to, um, I guess, be on board with whatever I want to do with my company. Like I could just do this by myself. I believe in my company. So does my followers, my users and our customers.
And we're just going to do this thing, whether or not there's some VC who tries to like, I don't know, most venture capitalists, if you don't, if you don't realize, like they're incentivized to plummet your company evaluation so that they own more of the company. Right. Like when a lot of people ask me, oh, have you ever like been on Shark Tank? And I'm like, I feel really bad.
No offense to Shark Tank, but I feel really bad for the founders who go on that show because you'll get offers like, oh, I'll, for 30% of your company, I'll give you 150K. That means your company's worth only 450K when this person had like a million in revenue. So it's like you're giving away a third of your company.
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Chapter 5: How is Immersed changing the AR/VR landscape?
She went on just very organic. Let's just shoot the breeze. Let's just have a conversation. I feel like people would really, she would have humanized herself and people would not really think she's BSing all the time. Absolutely. And I feel like she probably would have had a fairer shot.
Yeah, podcasts do a great job at humanizing you. And shout out to All In because it's four billionaires. When have you ever had that opportunity to learn from four billionaires on a podcast?
Yeah, and that's why I love living in Austin, because they're there quite a bit. We're kind of in the same sort of poker game there. It's really fun to kind of see how that world is starting to really mix into, it's interesting. Austin, Texas is kind of like a melting pot, right?
You have the far left, you have the far right, you have people in the center, and everyone's like, all right, I don't really care what your background is. Let's just have a relationship. Let's be friends. Let me hear from you. Let me just be okay with the fact that, hey, we're a blue city in a red state, as opposed to just far left or far right in any particular state. Yeah.
One thing that I will say though, as far as building or kind of building a company, having social media presence, it's been really cool to kind of see how even guys like Elon, right? Like he uses his X account a lot, right? People say that he kind of saved, what do you call it? Free speech in America, right?
And when you look at guys like Zuckerberg, he posts more on Instagram, obviously, and threads, that's his thing. But it's been cool. Like when have you ever been able to really have access to some of these people, right? Elon will tweet back to just a random Joe Schmo on X, right? Whereas back in the day, like Steve Jobs, how could you ever really reach him, right? From Apple.
It's been really cool to kind of see how social media is the great equalizer, right? It allows, it blows my mind that you just started this podcast two years ago. 11 and a half million followers on Instagram, like congrats to you. Thank you. And I think that, man, this is sort of the new age of what is going to build leverage moving forward.
If you want to build a company, if you want to figure out how to get it funded, if you want to figure out how to get your product in front of customers to try it, get feedback, I would say the easiest way is social media. Like for us, The vast majority of the $20 million that we've raised to date was from Instagram. I had like maybe 2,000 followers when we raised $2 million in two days.
It was just people from like my high school and then our customers who followed me on Instagram. And then I ended up that, I guess my follower count grew from 2,000 to like 9,000 on Instagram. And then again, these are not big numbers at all. And the 9,000, I guess the new 7,000 people came from, they heard about the $2 million round that they missed out on.
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Chapter 6: Why is social media crucial for modern startups?
And so the fact that he sold for 300x, it was very clearly Facebook didn't give a crap about the 10 million bucks. They had all the money they needed in the world. They cared about, we need that technology. Immerse is very similar. For us, the reason why we're the most used app in the world is because we built very difficult technology to pull off what we can or what we're able to.
And for us, our revenue has never really gotten to the point where it's been tens of millions yet. I think that that changes this year because we're now coming out with our own headset. Candidly, it's been very difficult to monetize. We're a productivity app subscription model on a historically gaming Oculus store. So to get children... to pay for a, it's just not a good fit.
It's a tough sell, yeah. It's a very tough sell. And it's been very difficult for us, like as we've been trying to take Meta's headsets and sell it directly to enterprise companies, the main feedback we would get is, I don't want to wear this big brick thing on my head.
I got one of those, Oculus, right?
Yeah.
And it's like a head workout.
Yeah, exactly.
I can only wear it for like 30 minutes.
Exactly.
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Chapter 7: How does Renji plan to compete with tech giants?
For me, look, there's a world in which we never even get the opportunity to really see our revenue potential to its max because some company might want to make a good offer to buy us for a quarter billion, half a billion, whatever it is. And then the offer makes sense for our investors. We sell the company and then we go build the next thing.
But in a world in which we go down, I would say, the IPO route, I for sure want to maximize that. And so I don't want to prematurely just shove something out there and then kind of be the Facebook that charged a buck a month or whatever up front and then never had the large user base that then became the giant that it is today. Yeah. You got to play the long game.
And it's uncomfortable too because you're... Because you have a lot of stakeholders. You have a lot of people who are applying pressure. Even customers apply pressure. Investors apply pressure. Your team applies pressure. I would say that's the most difficult part about building a company is... You're trying to make everyone happy.
You're trying to, I guess, sort of thread the needle of this triple Venn diagram. How do I make sure this group, this group, and this group are all still happy? And ultimately, the hard part is no matter what, if someone's on the other side of that argument, someone's going to be unhappy. And so you kind of just need to bite the bullet and be like, look, in the end, everyone will be happy.
My job is to not make you happy. My job is to make you money. And I love that line from the movie Ready Player One. It's funny. The antagonist in that movie says that. And I think that's something that, I don't know, a lot of companies struggle to do. They struggle to build long-term value. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Again, the Twitch founders selling the company for a billion bucks, their investors made a great return. It's better to sell early than to sell too late, right? Or not at all. And so I think for us, yeah, I'm more open to it than I've ever been in our company's history. That doesn't mean that we're not going to continue to do crowdfunding rounds, right?
Like I still want the retail investor to have a good return. So we're doing one right now. So I'll continue to do that to make sure that the little guy, so to speak, or even just all the people, friends and family who've loved and supported us all throughout the years get a good return, not just the VCs who've also invested in our company.
So, I think when it comes to building companies, it's not an easy thing at all. I think if I look back on what I know now, had I known all of this and thought, okay, should I start a company? I would for sure say no. It's so difficult. I think you need to have a level of naivety and delusion, so to speak, of like, man, I can be the next Elon Musk.
without realizing what you're actually asking for. The level of depression, anxiety, the war that he has in his head, having done it for 35 years, it's a difficult thing to do. And even at the expense of work-life balance or good relationships with your friends and family, it sucks. But people would argue he's had an insane impact. So the question is, what type of life do you want to live? And
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Chapter 8: What are the challenges of building a successful tech company?
some of these founders, people don't really give them enough credit. They don't realize the amount of strategy and IQ and just cleverness that goes into really becoming the world's best. The fact that people critique Elon and Zuckerberg, say what you will about those guys, but there's something crazy clever, not just building such difficult technology,
But also even the business side and the PR management or handling press and all that type of stuff or handling users and customers, investors. It's this multivariable problem. No one, when it comes to building a company, no one ever said it was going to be a single variable problem. It's going to be this crazy complex thing. It's funny.
Someday I'm going to create a shirt that says, I just wanted to be a coder. Like all the crap I had to deal with in the history of the company. legal, hiring, finance, fundraising, marketing, like all these things. I was a coder, dude.
Like when it came to, you know, investor relations, like when it came to building this company and all the things necessary, you know this as building this kind of podcast and then now wanting to build a larger company. You got to wear a lot of hats. Yeah, you're going to do a lot more than just talk. You have so many hats. And in the end, you might be like, I just wanted to be a podcast. I know.
Talk to people.
Yeah.
Doing emails. Yeah. Eventually investor relations. Yeah, it's a full encompassing business. Yeah, man. Yeah, but that vision that you just described with Jobs, man, to think that far ahead is impressive.
Yeah, it's hard. I think that even guys like Elon, it's funny. He and Bezos, that's another thing. When people talk about how, oh, Bezos copied SpaceX with Blue Origin, it's like, I think Elon one time said in a fireside chat, he's like, I'm pretty sure Bezos was talking about space before I was. It's so crazy. Bezos was talking about space back when he was in high school.
Amazon was a good business. It did very, very well. And it afforded him the ability to build Blue Origin, which is the SpaceX competitor. But all the while, Bezos was obsessed with space. And fast forward to today, it's actually really cool how him and Elon have become friends really just in the past couple of weeks, post-Trump and all this stuff.
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