Lucas is an entrepreneur, startup founder, designer, digital marketing expert, startup mentor and monetization expert based in Los Angeles. He can also show you how to own the first page of google.
Longer Bio:
With over 21 years experience in Digital Marketing Lucas has founded of the fastest growing tech networking organization in the US. Lucas knows how to Get funded raising $26 million and is an expert in Digital Marketing, User Acquisition, Retention and Branding Expert, Social Influence Marketer & Advisor, How to Start Your Startup Advisor, How to start your podcast Advisor. How to run a lean startup and take over the world.
Lucas Bean is a high Energy Executive at an expert level in Building & Leading Teams, Marketing, Monetization, High Level Business Development Partnerships. A team player who's not afraid to get his hands dirty.
Senior team & Executive team member Creating, Developing and Monetizing startups to fortune 500 Internet companies with incredible teams:
1. LowerMyBills.com (scaled over 10x in 3 yrs and sold to Experian for $400M including earnout)
2. Traffic Marketplace (scaled 3x in 2.5 yrs and sold to Epic Media for $500M cash)
3. Sony Pictures - Crackle.com - scaled 4.5x in 2 yrs and is now the Digital Hub for all video content growing
4. Hellomusic.com (scaled user base 4x in 11 months, took social media channels from $0 in daily revenue to accounting for 25% of daily revenue) Sold in 2014 for an undisclosed amount
5. Silicon Beach Young Professionals - (Founder & President) Scaled group from 50 people to 21,000 in Los Angeles area in under 36 months. added business partnerships & sponsors such as: Google, Facebook, Elance, Curb, Evite, Aquent, Robert Half
VENTURE CAPITAL RAISED: $26,000,000
Company Life cycle expertise: startups too late stage to Fortune 500 companies.
Business model expertise: Entertainment, mobile and social platforms, ad network operations, lead generation, subscription, ad revenues, freemium, B2B & B2C experience, crowdsourcing, social commerce, eCommerce, mobile and social gaming
Expertise in: Marketing and Monetization, Executive Leadership, Team Building, User Acquisition, Retention, Branding, Online/direct response marketing, change agent, P & L Management, high level business development.
Building and mentoring great teams and platforms.
Current Adviser to:
Adfora.com
airfive app
Silicon Beach
1. Have a sweepstakes/giveaway (product specific to the audience you want). It will be slow from the start but once you start posting winners from your giveaway it will set the ball into motion and create a network effect with everyone sharing the event (use facebook or google connect for one click registration to your sweepstakes)
2. Have an event. allow users who signup via email to your event to come for free.
First question you should ask yourself:
What value am I bringing contributors?
If you are going to pay them (much like this site) for their time it's an easy sell and you should make a hit list of the most asked questions (80/20 rule) 80% of revenue will come from 20% of your requests.
Then make a list of experts in those fields you find through researching the web and then offer them % of the revenue to answer or help with the questions.
If you're asking for where they are the answer is on all social networks (if their worth their weight in GOLD).
If you have customers asking a lot about a certain service
i.e.
mobile interface design
It should be really easy to make a list of mobile interface devs who are willing to get paid by you to help others.
If you're trying to sell leads to them, give them a few for free and get feedback from them.
Did they get business from it?
Did these people looking for services flake?
RESEARCH will get you everything you want. It's a lot of work but if it were easy, everyone would be rich with business.
Do both. Verify but continue to let them use the site in a limited capacity or even better have a message at the top reminding them to verify as they use the site. Keeping the message up will drive the right people to verify and the wrong people to continue to not verify.
Advertising disguised as content always works best. Advertorial it's called. You're not tricking people into working with you, you're educating them.
Always use a problem then discuss solutions to this problem and make sure you're one of the solutions. Make sure you have more than one solution or you will come off as spam and make sure that it's a well thought out piece of content.
Content just for content sake is noise. I would rather see you produce one blog post, video, image message a month that is great then 1 a week that is mediocre.
Editorial Calendar is crucial to this process, it will help you plan out exactly what message you want to get across (the problem you're addressing), what medium to use to best demonstrate this message (blog post, image, video), the solution and of course where and when it should be posted.
Good luck.
Trust. You have to get in with someone who is embedded in the community (like myself) to have people recommend you and put out a few products at a greatly reduced cost to show what you are capable of.
I am the founder of Silicon Beach Young Professionals 22,000+ member group which is comprised of early to late stage startup CEO's, founders and digital executives who are always looking for trusted tech.
Until you have something out there (call it the cost of marketing) for the reduced cost for someone who can vouch for you it will be tough.
Help someone else and it comes back to you 10 fold. TRUST.