Packaging

Packaging

The next thing I want to talk to you about is packaging. And I want to tell you how important packaging is. We’re going to go back to Bitcoin, and we’re going to look at the start of Bitcoin — for example, it’s okay that it was a disruptive asset, platform, creation.

And even though that is true, and it faced many, many years of mass adoption before more people would even look at it, let alone exchange their dollars for Bitcoin — all those years, Bitcoin, what it was, was totally unclear. And it was unclear from the banks, it was unclear from the market. It was deliberately attacked. And it was made to be on a perception level that it was not worth getting involved in.

What we didn’t know — many of us didn’t know — was that the big players in the world were involved in it. Many of the banks were involved in it. Many high-profile individuals were involved in it. But the public was not allowed to understand what it was.

Even when I interviewed somebody on my show, Andreas Antonopoulos — one of the Bitcoin first adopters, pioneers, teachers, articulators, right? — and Reggie Middleton and others, Bitcoin miners, even somebody from the SEC that we had — even from that interview that I did, I still didn’t know what it was.

Somebody sent me a gift of a hundred bitcoin and they told me to sign up with Coinbase. So I signed up with Coinbase. I was on my way to live in Europe. And when I got back, the Bitcoin was sent back to the person who sent it to me.

I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t know how to download anything. I didn’t know what the interface was. I didn’t even know what Coinbase was. Everything was confusing. And nobody could really explain it to me.

You see? So imagine people that are not in the market. Imagine people that just have savings accounts, 401(k)s, IRAs. They don’t know what it is. And for years they’re told by the pundits it’s all about, you know, gambling. So the problem was the way it was communicated.

And the fact that a lot of hackers got involved, and programmers got involved, and people that wrote code that wanted to escape the system — that were then talked about and perceived as anti-system, you know, or not wanting to pay taxes, or people that didn’t want to be in the world the way the rest of us are — all that was put onto them.

This is about the way it was introduced, the way it was communicated. And even some of the biggest proponents of Bitcoin today are Bitcoin evangelists that still do not explain what it is and why it’s so important. There’s a lot of talk about it.

But there are hundreds and millions of people that have not adopted it and are late adopters because of the way it is articulated and not explained. And a lot of the people that are in it don’t want to explain it to other people and don’t want to show people how to use it.

And then you have an entire marketplace — an entire marketplace of financial analysts, brokers, people who buy traditional assets: stocks, bonds, treasuries, derivatives, money markets. Even the gold and silver people were putting down Bitcoin for years. All of that pressure in the financial system, all of the financial people that were hovering in the system and inside it — stockbrokers.

And so the way it was packaged, the way it was not ushered in in its fullness, is part of the reason it took so long and is still taking so long to be adopted. And then there’s this mystery creator, you got some shocks coming. The human beings are a test bed for a new financial system through Bitcoin. Anyway, that’s packaging.

In 2006, I worked with a company called Oxyband, by an older gentleman. And when he showed me the product, and he showed me the look of the product, and he showed me how it was packaged — it was a disaster. It was a total disaster. There was a perceived market for it. There was no business plan. There were no relationships with hospitals. There was no relationship yet that was strong with a manufacturer. It had trade secrets. It had a patent that was almost gone, had to be renewed.

And the whole point is that it would take the nasal cannula off people’s faces who had to be on oxygen all the time. So that whole venture was repackaged — the manufacturer, I set up everything in that. The Rainmaking Company set up everything. And then a year later the guy — a year and a half later the guy — or two years later the guy passed away. Anyway, that’s a whole other story. That’s a great business story for some like Caltech Business Enterprise Forum or some major business VC forum.

But the point is that the packaging of something could totally get in the way of the utility — the real utility of something that’s not being communicated effectively. So just because you have it doesn’t mean people are receiving it. What it is. What is it?

I worked with a scientist who had this remarkable water product — he used lasers, high-end lasers, changed the physics of that water and how it would operate in the body, and it would help people heal. And his name was Dan Nelson. He passed away a few years ago. And the way that that was packaged was also not helping his venture at all. The way it was languaged, the way it was articulated, the way it looked.

So The Rainmaking Company repackaged the whole thing, came up with a trade name for him, a slogan for him, and consulted with him behind the scenes on the visioning and the setup and how he needed to proceed in the marketplace. Packaging makes a huge difference. And it can make the difference, believe it or not, for publishers, whether people are going to buy your book.

It’s not just the name — it’s what the feeling of it communicates. So packaging is very important as a service. The Rainmaking Company can provide that for you. Thank you very much.