Recently I spoke with Anna Guenther, CEO and chief bubble blower of PledgeMe, a New Zealand based crowdfunding platform “helping Kiwis fund the things they care about”. I’d been wanting to chat with Anna for quite a while, her name was on the “potential awesome podcast guests” list that I keep for myself. I’d been reluctant about reaching out as I’d heard she was super busy and had thought, “Why would a CEO give up their time to chat with me if I’m just reaching out to them cold?”
Thankfully one day I managed the courage to reach out to ask if she’d be interested in coming on the show. The reply I received back the next day was awesome “Ha! I’m pretty used to being uncomfortable! I could catch up early next week if you’d like?” We caught up down at Creative HQ in Wellington and sat down to find out a bit more about each other over a cup of peppermint tea before the meeting room we were going to chat in freed up. I don’t know what I’d felt so uncomfortable about as we discussed favourite podcasts, why we liked them and why we didn’t, as well as what we were going to try at “Wellington on a Plate”.
When we got stuck into the podcast conversation we talked a bit about Anna’s background, her accent belies the fact she is from Dunedin. Then we got into the origin story of PledgeMe, it’s an interesting story and you can listen to it here. But as you know it’s the uncomfortable stuff around it that I find interesting. Anna discussed heaps of great ideas, but these ones are popping up for me at the moment with where I am at.
“That felt like the validation point where we could really start telling people about it”
There came a time in the development of PledgeMe that Anna and her co-founder were convinced that this was something that could really work. The idea was validated in their minds and they could really start to push it. It’s a tipping point that I’m sure a lot of us face when we come up with an interesting idea. I know it was when I started up podcasting. I had all sorts of thoughts going through my head; Who is going to want to talk with me on the show? Who is going to want to listen to me? Do I have the technical skills to pull this off? Do I have enough interesting things to talk about to pull this off?
The easiest things to measure were, if I could get people to come and have a conversation with me, and how many people were downloading the episodes. For some reason I set myself the target of getting 10 people to speak with me before putting out any episodes. I figured that if I could convince 10 people that I might be interesting to chat with, then I could probably go on convincing people. Looking back, I’ve put out over 70 episodes to date and have spoken with over 60 guests. I’d also set myself the target of trying to get 50 downloads for each episode, I have no idea why I chose that as my validation number (although I do have a big family, so maybe I thought that if I had that many at least someone that wasn’t related to me was probably listening). The first few episodes hit that number quickly and all of the others have surpassed it, some by quite a significant amount.
Hitting these validation targets is impor
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