SPI 622: A Big Announcement I’m REALLY Nervous About

SPI 622: A Big Announcement I’m REALLY Nervous About

Announcer: Welcome to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, where it’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, his son taught him how to finally solve a Rubik’s Cube, Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Happy Friday. I hope you are well. I wanted to share something that you might not know about because I haven’t really shared it with a lot of people, although if you have been following the Pokemon journey for a while, especially very closely, you might have heard this announcement, but I wanted to make this announcement here today, not to sell you anything, but rather to share with you something that I’m doing in the Pokemon space that is making me a little nervous, but that’s how I know it’s the right thing to do.

B, a lot of people seem to be really excited about, C is very, very challenging, but also should be very fulfilling. And D, there’s a lot of education around sort of the idea of this, especially when it comes to superfans. And this is something that I specifically talk about in my book, of course. So here’s the big announcement. June 9-11, in 2023, I’m putting on a live event.

Now I’ve put on live events before, a lot of smaller workshoppy type ones, like the one day Business Breakthrough Event with Chris Ducker and a lot of mastermind type things, accelerator retreats and whatnot. I’ve done one larger event for 500 ish people who came to San Diego.

This was FlynnCon back in 2019 before the pandemic. And really the whole reason why SPI Pro sort of was pushed forward because we wanted to have that community feel, especially during the pandemic, and that is just incredible right now. And every day it almost feels like there’s events happening in there, which is, which is really cool.

But this is like, if you imagine Comic Con right now, it’s not gonna be 25, 50, however many tens of thousands of people, but it’s gonna be hopefully thousands of people. I am four days since announcing this event on a live stream on the Pokemon Channel. On the Pokemon Channel, again at Deep Pocket Monster.

We just hit 250,000 subscribers and actually just a few days later, we hit 300,000 subscribers, which was pretty crazy. But we did a 250 K celebration giveaway, a pokeparty as we called it, and was a fun activity. We had 1800 people at one point concurrently watching live, and during that moment, I had announced this live event.

Now, there have been live events in the Pokemon space prior. There’s a lot of live events around the tournaments and the gaming, you know, the actual card play game. There’s a couple events that are more for collectors. One of them called Collectacon, which happens quite often. They’re sort of the regulars in the event space for card collectors.

It’s not just Pokemon, but it very heavily is centered around Pokemon. They’re amazing, but it’s more investor, right? It’s more collector versus fans coming together, and that’s what I wanted to do. Like that’s what Comic Con is, right? It’s fans of those shows, fans of those comics, fans of those series coming together to meet people who are involved with them and to meet each other and to have fun and celebrate and have activities and such and get to hear new news, and get new reveals and exclusive things.

Well, I wanted to create something similar in the Pokemon space because in my book, Superfans. And for those of you who don’t know, I’ve been really just following the recipe of my own book Superfans when building this channel, when it comes to getting people involved and when it comes to the community building aspect of it.

And one very important component of community building is offering opportunities for your community to meet each other. Now this can happen online and it’s already been happening online on our live streams. But I wanted to take it one step further and, and what I do talk about in the book is to actually create live events as a way and a means to bring your community together.

Because if you can facilitate those interactions and bring people together, it’ll only do nothing but heighten your brand because you’re celebrating everybody in the community and it’s not even about you. And this event is not about me, which is why it’s not called Deep Pocket Monster Con or something like that, or you know, that wouldn’t even sound good, but that that’s not what it’s about.

This is about the fans who watch Pokemon on YouTube, who watch either my channel or other channels, Poke Rev, all the other big names that likely you probably have never heard of. But that’s okay because this is a niche event. Those people, the fans who watch those people to come together to be with those creators.

That’s what this is about. This is a two day event happening in Anaheim, California. I’m very, very excited because I partnered with an event company. This is actually a company that I’m very familiar with. Never worked with this company before. Not in this regard, but I am very familiar with the founders of this company.

And this is Dan Franks and Jared Easley and their company who created Podcast Movement. If you’ve ever heard of Podcast Movement, which you know, maybe you’ve attended, the founders of that and the organizers of that have branched out to help other creators like me. Create large scale events, and this is, you know, we partnered on this and we’re creating what we’re calling, this is the name of it, Card.Party.

So if you go to Card.party, you’re gonna see the landing page, or if you’re listening to this in the future, you’ll see the. You know, event page, which should hopefully at some point have some speakers on it and, and those kinds of things. This is just a landing page at the current state. It is just there to collect a wait list cuz we haven’t even sold tickets yet.

But I’m collecting a wait list and there are several hundred people already on. It’s only been live for like four days and dozens of people who wanna be exhibitors at this event because it’s gonna be a mix of, actually I got a lot of inspiration for this event from a former guest of this show, his name’s Eric Nordhoff.

You might remember him because he and his partner came on, talked about the story of how they started their podcast, about The Walking Dead. That’s a TV show on AMC, Right? And it was called the Walker Stalkers Podcast. And as a result of starting their podcast and building such a following and connecting with the top players and actors there in that space, they were able to put on an event. And since then, dozens of events, I think over even maybe like a hundred events have happened where tens of thousands of people come together, especially the big Atlantic convention, but the Walker Stalker Convention now, Eric has since left that position and has started something else.

But it’s just been an amazing experience because I’ve gone to that event. Actually, Eric wanted to give me and April, my wife, platinum tickets to that event because as a thank you, because the podcast was really a big deal for the reason for all that happening. So thank you, Eric. I know you listened to the show and I just cannot thank you enough because those are some of the most fun sort of date, not even date nights, date trips, if you will, that me and April have gone on.

Now we don’t get to the point where we’re dressing up, but it got close. It got close. You know, we’re not doing cosplay, but I might have to do something at Card.Party. Anyway, at that event, it was really interesting cuz it was a large event, you know, thousands of people and there’s a exhibitor hall, right, where people are selling things.

You can, you know, do activities. There’s a lot of costumes for sale. Artwork for sale, nerdy gaming stuff for sale. I bought a lot of artwork there when I was at the San Francisco event. But in addition to that, there were opportunities to meet the celebrities, so we’re gonna have that as well. And the celebrities in this case are the creators and not just the big creators.

This was big for me as well, to to make sure as the focus, it’s not just about the large creators in the Pokemon space, it’s also about the small creators, those who have, you know, a couple hundred subscribers who yeah, it’s only a couple hundred, but there’s still fans of those channels. I could show up and meet with them and I can just be there and use my resources and use this team and my experience to facilitate and create those abilities for those people to interact.

And I think that this goodwill into the community is gonna always come back, right. And the big goal with this is a of course to bring the community together, to have it be fun, to have a lot of memories made because there’s gonna be a lot of creators there. I wanna create spaces for creation to happen, and shareability of course.

But like financially, I just wanna break even. Did I break even with FlynnCon? Absolutely not. It was gonna take maybe till year three or four for that to happen. And of course, year two, we pre-sold tickets and then just the event didn’t happen. It got delayed year. It got delayed another year. So we just decided to cancel the event and refund everybody.

So yeah, FlynnCon was a one and done situation, unfortunately. I didn’t know it at the time, but man, what amazing memories were created, my son and my daughter were on stage. My wife and I got to do a panel together. But I think that this is gonna be huge and I’m very excited. Again, hopefully to break even.

Probably not gonna break even, but if I, if I break even on this, I’ll be very, very happy. So it’s not a money making situation right now, It is a community building situation, but like at the Walker Stalker Convention, another thing, in addition to just having celebrities meet their fans, and fans meet other fans where the panels.

This was so fun to see a panel that was led by the host of those podcasts. I remember Eric on stage talking to, you know, one of the characters, Darrell and Rick, you know, Rick Grimes was on stage. That’s his character from the show and he was there interviewing him and people in the audience were just so thrilled.

And you know, there was like VIP spots up front. There was general admission in the back and it was huge lecture halls. It was incredible. So we have a space already in Anaheim, and all the information as soon as it’s available will be available at Card.Party. But this is, like I said earlier, making me really nervous cuz this is a big, big thing and a lot of people have a lot of things to say about events like this that have happened in the past in the Pokemon space.

So I’m not saying it’s gonna be perfect, probably won’t. But I do know that I’m gonna approach it with authenticity and transparency in mind. One thing I wanna do with this is be very open and upfront with how much things are gonna cost. So, I mean, I can already tell you that the hotel to be able to reserve that space and whatnot, it’s a couple hundred thousand dollars, right?

A couple hundred thousand dollars to get that space in the hotel. And that was actually after negotiation. So this is not gonna be cheap, but the event ticket prices hopefully will be with quantity in mind, some VIP packages. And, and of course, as you know, that I like to do, I, I, I like to create experiences through my content and the things that people get involved with.

And this is a, like, do I need to do this? No, I don’t, but I want to, and I’m very excited about it. And I wanna build a Pokemon event that is similar to an event that just I would wanna attend and I just am gonna be the host. I’m gonna be the mc, but it’s not about me. And there’s gonna be a lot of fun things happening.

So if you wanna check it out, Card.party, I’ll keep you updated because this is definitely, in addition to the content that I’m creating on the YouTube channel, you know, the YouTube channel’s doing very well, just hit 300,000 subscribers, 8.2 million views over the last two 28 days or 30 days.

Essentially some of our videos that we recently published, which internally we call Epic Adventures, these are more than just like, Hey, here’s a new set. Here’s some of the news. These are story boarded situations. I, if you haven’t checked it out, like I’m very proud of the work we’re doing there and the success that’s coming from the channel is just getting put right back into the community.

And so I’m, I’m following the Superfans step by step situation and if you haven’t checked out Superfans, you could check it out cuz that’s sort of the playbook. I am also working on a second addition of Superfans, which will include a lot of the case studies and stuff from the Deep Pocket Monster channel.

Other things that I’ve discovered and, and other case studies from other people. Outside of my brands as well. It’s just, I’m so excited about this and I’m so nervous, but that’s how I know it’s the right thing to do because there’s always something awesome on the other side of this kind of nervous, right?

This could be incredible. So Card.party, hope you check it out. It’s gonna be family friendly. You’re welcome to come and enjoy. And I know there’s gonna be a lot of things to do. Of course if you’re not into Pokemon, maybe don’t want it then, but I don’t think you even need to know a ton about it to be able to have fun and, and, and get involved.

And I know we’re gonna make mistakes. And when I think about that, it kind of like makes my stomach hurt sometimes. But I know we have a good team and I know that we’re gonna do our best. And I think just being upfront with everything, you know, there’s nothing to worry about. And that’s not true. There’s a ton to worry about, but I’m, I’m also gonna channel that worry energy and turn it into excited energy.

And I’m excited, I’m excited to share with you along the way how it all works and we’ll see what happens. So that’s the update. Thank you so much for listening in today. I appreciate you and I’ve gotten a ton of direct messages from a lot of listeners about just how you like hearing that I’m trying something new, that I’m doing something different, that I’m not just, you know, resting on my laurels, but, you know, experimenting and, and always trying new things.

And I do that on purpose. I do that because, I just like to have fun and try new things, but B, I also know that as I learn new things, if I share the things that are working and not working, I always know it’s gonna be a lesson for you. So I’ll continue to do this and I hope you continue to follow. So hit that subscribe button so you can continue to follow, and I look forward to serving you in the next one.

See you next Wednesday, and every Friday I hereafter. And yeah, don’t miss out. Cheers. Thanks everybody.

Thanks for listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host Pat Flynn. Our senior producer is Sara Jane Hess. Our series producer is David Grabowski. And our executive producer is Matt Gartland. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media. We’ll catch you in the next session.