Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico

The crew reached out to Kate Erickson of Entrepreneur on Fire (EOFire) to record her and Founder John Lee Dumas in their new home in Puerto Rico. Kate accepted and the next challenge presented itself. The trip would cost around $5,000 between airfare, lodging and meals. This would take 25% of the entire IndieGoGo budget, thus limiting any future travels that would be needed.

Instead of seeing a challenge, Chris Krimitsos saw an opportunity and invited four individuals to join them on the trip. These four VIPs all had an interest in meeting John and Kate and had expressed a desire to support the movie.

Happily, every one of them said yes! They invested $1,000 each and became top-level contributors to the film! And that’s how the crew grew with Tyler Sheff (The Cash Flow Guys podcast), Nick Snapp (Make It Snappy podcast), Jamie Meloni (That Business Show), and James Van Prooyen (Ragnar Life podcast). As a thank you, Chris invited the spouses and kids of the crew to come along and everyone had a blast in Puerto Rico!

The trip became an inadvertent Mastermind* for the podcasters who went, as they would gather nightly to compare notes on their respective podcasts and the challenges they’d faced in growing their audiences and monetizing via different sources. These sessions were absolutely electric, and frequently lasted until 2 a.m. Upon returning home, the contributors converted the lessons learned from their discussions into massive growth in both audience and revenue, making those thousand dollar investments into the film literally worth many, many times that.

* A Mastermind is a peer-to-peer mentoring group that helps challenge an individual’s thinking and troubleshoot any challenges an individual might have.

Behind-The-Scenes Trivia

The ICEMAN Goeth

Niel Guilarte was flying his beloved drone ICEMAN over the water in Puerto Rico. Just as his drone cleared the water, the winds picked up, and elevated ICEMAN above the tree line and into an emergency landing on top of a palm tree. Twenty feet up and on a tree leaning precariously over a freshwater river that emptied into the ocean, the chances of recovering ICEMAN seemed grim. That’s when James Van Prooyen saved the day by clambering up the palm tree and saving Niel’s drone. This was one of many close calls where the crew almost lost ICEMAN.