Gadgetory

the inspiration for omae's came as the two founders walked out of a high-end charity auction a very rich person had just paid a tidy sum to nab the night's top reward the proceeds went to charity but the founders thought what if we opened up this auction to everyone not just a small room of very rich people how much could we raise that a maze is basically charity giving meets Kickstarter they partner with movie studios or stars and organizations that they like to give to and offer the chance for these one-of-a-kind experiences we've done everything from have John Legend sing at your wedding to be in the next Star Wars movie to crush things in a tank with Arnold Schwarzenegger but we're we're different than most companies that do this is then rather than make these available to one wealthy person you can donate twenty five or fifty thousand dollars to have this experience they make it so that anybody in the world can donate ten bucks well Matt and I started this there wasn't really anything that was taking talent partners causes and fan bases and bringing them together as one community that supports a campaign individual of giving in the u.s. is a two hundred forty billion dollar market annually right now only six percent of that is online so it's incredibly inefficient we see that this is a huge opportunity to really go in there and focus on building a charitable giving platform and make fundraising much more fun and easy for a much larger base of people omae's had a big idea but they were also having a hard time convincing investors to back them traditional charity was well not-for-profit and that doesn't appeal to venture capitalists looking to find the next Facebook we didn't have a model we really spent two years trading ideas back and forth to try and come up with something that could leverage our passion for storytelling around causes but have a sustainable revenue stream to it and could really grow in scale we got told several times that there would never be a series a or venture capital in the charity space that that was impossible and we were foolish to have that aspiration what we knew was our talent with storytelling around caused content and that if we built a technology that could ultimately support that we can pull it together just through our own hustle the charities that we've worked with historically the talent partners that we've worked with historically and put up these ones on lifetime experiences we did combat training with a team of Navy SEALs we did play a game of risk against four-star general Anthony Zinni but it turns out that if you're gonna market something to the masses when you're working with a four-star general who doesn't really have a facebook channel it becomes difficult they're a non-traditional startup so getting awareness I think is you know probably an issue for them not just amongst their partners but also amongst Zoomers one thing that's really really smart about what they've done is that the founders have ties the entertainment community so all of their big moves have been tied to that we first became aware of them largely they had a big deal about Star Wars Episode seven we could go and be in the movie I think a lot of people first became aware of them and what they're doing through that it gives them a level of visibility that a regular charity organization on its own is probably not going to get we did a Lincoln Park experience and we blasted that their entire fan base and that made nearly $100,000 and we're starting to see that the success was coming then we did a Breaking Bad experience and that raised 1.7 million dollars at that point in time we knew all right there's a model we can really build off this model and grow omae's was the first to create a threeway marketplace for charitable giving online but so far it has had to personally engineer almost every campaign critical to reaching scale is finding a way to become a software platform that anyone can tap into for their own charitable giving no matter how big or small the opportunity to democratize these experiences to the masses has really changed the way that fundraising is taking place for causes these last three years we've worked with over a hundred different charities and now we're raising anywhere from two to 20 times what they could do through traditional models our audience is actually very brought leveraging social media and cutting-edge technology in the way that we do obviously appeals very much to a younger audience but that notion that like only younger audience has engaged in social media that's not the case thing well my mom's a social media and she like she knows what's going down people inherently feel more connected to each other now as a result they get more it's very impressed with what they've done I think they've gotten a lot of people's radars very quickly with some very very smart strategic partnerships but long term what's going to stop somebody else from coming around offering a better service that can steal all those partnerships away and have you know their own version of a maze that everybody will run to because ultimately people are coming to a maze for the experiences not for whatever Oh maze calm has on their site Oh maze earns money by taking a percentage of what's raised in each campaign to defend that business and avoid being undercut they need to create a community like Kickstarter that will thrive from the network effects of the audience that gives historically investors have looked at the philanthropic sector and a much current way then they looked at the for-profit sector but those worlds are merging right now we see this as a huge opportunity for us to basically be at the epicenter of that change and provide tools for anyone out there to raise money for those causes there's our self-service platform but we're gonna make its a school or a charity you can actually use our experiences to fundraise for themselves and then there's other things we can do to support that marketplace which is build out high aim high quality merchandise that is branded with the cause and can do live events we're actually mobilizing this community around giving in and really making an impact you know they first started out a lot of investors didn't think there could be a non-for-profit related you know stirrup like this that would actually work or be worth investing in they did the heavy lifting of proving that can work and now it's a question of what is the next level for them look like and that you know is still very much unanswered thank God