Funded Today Funded Today promises big; delivers lies and scams

This is Thomas Alvord. I'm one of the co-founders at Funded Today.

First off, I'm sorry to hear you did not have a good experience. We strive to make sure all of our clients have a good experience and gain value when working with Funded Today. Sometimes that value might be helping a campaign raise $1 million+. Other times that value might be helping a campaign that doesn't work out see new ways they can pivot and make their campaign still become a reality. In any case, I apologize you did not have a good experience. 

If there is ever a complaint by a client that comes to my attention, such as this one, I typically review the emails, conversations, and marketing we ran for that client to understand the situation. I do this not only to see how to hopefully remedy a situation, but also to take measures to avoid any similar issues in the future.

Unfortunately, and mystically, this complaint does not say who the creator is, and what the campaign was. Based on things said in this complaint, I looked in our backend to find someone who matches the date range, platform, and other items mentioned in the complaint. However, I couldn't find anything. Funded Today has worked with over 1,500 different campaigns in the past 3 years, so it is difficult to know who it might be. But notwithstanding that, I can't find anyone or any campaign that matches this description. I even sent an email two weeks ago to the email address provided in the complaint, and have not received a response.

In trying to determine who wrote this complaint, the date it was written was September 20, 2016. Right now it's July 25, 2017. This Rip Off Report is being promoted on google adwords. I don't think it is being promoted by the alleged campaign in an effort to gather support for the supposed lawsuit. The reason I think this is because the email address that was included in the complaint is not being attended to. My suspicion is that one of Funded Today's competitors is trying to promote negative perceptions about Funded Today.

Again, with all of this, I don't know what the situation is, as the complaint is strangely veiled in secrecy, not disclosing who the creator or campaign is. So without being able to dive into specifics regarding this alleged campaign, I'll address the complaints as if they did happen, so any reading this might understand how Funded Today deals with each of the situations brought up in this complaint. I'll address the complaints one by one:

They claim to be the best crowdfunding marketing partners but all they do is take your money and run.

This is true. Funded Today does claim to be the best crowdfunding agency. This is based on the fact that Funded Today:

• Has worked with more campaigns than anyone in the world
• Drives more traffic to Kickstarter than anyone in the world except Google, Facebook, and YouTube
• Has raised more money than any other agency in the world
• Has more marketing channels than any other agency in the world

Regarding the claim that Funded Today takes your money and runs, that is not true. For a typical campaign, Funded Today will charge a due diligence fee, which ranges from $2,500 to $5,000. This covers the initial set up, testing, analysis, and some of the initial advertising spend to see what marketing channels will perform best for a campaign. The insights and information we gather from this are shared with the client. If a campaign is converting well, we tell the client, and we scale our marketing. If it is not converting well, we tell the client, providing information that can help them understand how they might pivot and pursue a modified or different approach to crowdfunding successfully. This is far from taking someone’s money and running.

Whether a campaign raises $0 or $100,000, Funded Today takes the same approach to every campaign. Just because one raised money, and the other did not, does not mean that Funded Today took a client’s money and ran. If you go to the doctor for cancer, and aren't healed, it doesn't mean the doctor took your money and ran. It means the treatments didn't work in you case.

For the record, it doesn't make me happy when we work on a campaign, the client pays the due diligence fee, and the campaign doesn't convert, and things don't work out. I understand that for many people, that due diligence payment can sometimes be a bit of a sacrifice. At Funded Today we regularly wrestle with how best to structure things. When Funded Today first got started, we didn't have a due diligence fee, we only worked with campaigns we KNEW would convert, and therefore rejected many campaigns. As more and more campaigns solicited Funded Today's help, we had to balance taking on more campaigns, but also realizing they might not all convert and work out. Hence the due diligence fee was born.

Because of the due diligence fee, and only because of the due diligence fee, have we been able to work with campaigns like Spine Gym. See here: http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/767539469/spinegym-strong-back-and-abs-for-the-rest-of-your/#chart-daily On April 18, Spine Gym had only raised a few thousands dollars, and were NOT going to hit their goal. Typically we would have rejected this campaign. The risk would have been too much.

Spine Gym hired Funded Today and paid a due diligence fee. That allowed us to cover our initial marketing tests, and pay our team, even if the campaign didn't work out. In the case of Spine Gym, the campaign ended up raising $463,996 on Kickstarter. Our invoice to SpineGym was $136,707. Why would we take someone's money and run if we could invoice $136,707? The answer is we wouldn't and we don't.

They initially tried to coax me to fraudulently start a KickStarter campaign

We like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. We typically recommend Kickstarter over Indiegogo, but we wouldn't coax or force someone into launching on a specific platform. 

In fact, the associate asked for 2% of proceeds to be given to him as a fee for the service. That is illegal.. KickStarter prohibits something like that; so, I refused.

I've not heard of any situation or case like this that we have had with clients.

Then they wanted to get a 5000 Due Diligence fee which was negotiated to 3000 for mainly getting more ppl visit the campaign page through ads.

When anybody signs up for Funded Today's services, they are not paying for Funded Today to simply turn on some ads. If that is what this client thought, or what anyone who might read this thinks, let me explain.

If a due diligence fee is simply to get more people to visit the campaign page through ads, then don't hire Funded Today, and go run ads yourselves. It will cost you however much the ad networks charge you, and there is $0 in additional charges.

The reason a campaign hires Funded Today is because of our expertise. We know where to buy ads, who to target, what to look for, how to segment, how to tweak, what baseline metrics are to determine how things are going, etc. You don't hire Funded Today to turn on ads. Anyone can do that. You hire Funded Today for their expertise in HOW to do it.

During the initial conversations, I was promised backer emails that would be made accessible at the beginning of the campaign in a effort to accelerate raising funds. That never happened.

One of Funded Today's services is email lead generation, whereby a client pays an additional amount, and we do prelaunch email lead generation. That way, on launch day, you can have X number of potential supporters who can go back or support your campaign. If a client ever pays for email lead generation, we provide all of the emails we captured for the client, 100% of the time.

(This comment regarding backer emails is what made me think that a client, who launched on Indiegogo, around the time frame of this complaint, had signed up for email lead generation as well. However, I was unable to find any client that matched this description.)

Also, I kept asking before the campaign started as to what needs to be done as prep work and was given wrong instructions including a sermon on the '80-20' rule thereby giving an impression that Funded Today had all of it figured out.

I am not sure what is being reference here as I do not know any of the details outside of what was written in this complaint.

As the campaign started, I did not see any traction in the number of ppl coming onto the page; when asked why they said, 'Oh, in the beginning it will be slow and will pick up later on'; even once the campaign started, I kept asking what needs to be done in the crucial first week and if we need to course correct, I did not get any proper response from them and was kept in the dark all the time.

Again, I'm not sure what is being referenced. For every campaign we work with we send traffic, we make sure it is statistically significant as we test, and we report to the client on the metrics. 

As the first week went by, I kept asking why there arent that many visitors on the page and did NOT receive any appropriate response to my questions.

Again, I am not sure what is being referenced. We make sure we update all of our clients regularly, and if there are outstanding concerns, that they are addressed. Funded Today actually has 2 reps whose primary responsibility is to see that no clients have outstanding questions, and to make sure they are addressed.

So, I reached out to an attorney on my dilemma and he suggested that since Funded Today had not met their contractual obligations I need to cancel my engagement and ask for a refund.

Again, I am not sure what is being referenced here. If a client feels Funded Today has not met their contractual obligations, I would recommend talking with a Funded Today rep first and make that known.

When I told the same to Funded Today, their CEO went off on a rant on who my product is a loser and I should drop whatever am doing and so on. When I pointed to him the google analytics report that there were hardly 52 sessions per day on my funding page (which is extremely extemely low), he did not have an answer. Just 52 session a day meant they spent very small amounts on getting more ppl on my campaign page. For example, if I spend $100 on Facebook ads for a day, I would get atleast 200 sessions minimum; so you can imagine how they actually spent on marketing my page.

Without knowing the specifics, I can't review and see that our CEO went off on a rant. If a campaign doesn't convert, we often tell the creator that their campaign and product likely is not going to be successful, and that it won't work out, and that they may want to pivot.

Regarding the traffic, I also don't know the specifics. On day one though, we likely will never go spend $500, or even $100, as the first few days are testing different audiences and ad copy, to see which might perform best. This obviously varies campaign to campaign, but on a campaign that is dead in the water, we proceed with the budget as judiciously as possible, to make sure everything is optimized as much as possible before we being to spend more and more.

I have recorded all conversation with Funded Today (including skype call conversations) and my lawyer is confident of a successful lawsuit against them. Anyone else who have gone through similar experience with them, please reach out to me (ftfraud@gmail.com) as my lawyer is keen on exploring different options. I think its I think its high time people call out this fraud. Please join me in bringing out truth and justice.

As mentioned, I've emailed that email address and have had no response. I'm not sure what high fraud this creator is talking about. We strive to be honest and forthcoming in all of our interactions. I suppose after working with 1,500 campaigns, the ones who don't have a good experience will be vocal. In any case, if this review was a legitimate review from an actual campaign that worked with Funded Today, I apologize for the experience you had. I would be happy to talk with you to see how we can address the situation. So if you read this, please email me at thomas@funded.today and we can schedule a time to talk.

Sincerely,
Thomas Alvord