Funded Today

Zach Smith spent nearly a decade as a small business consultant, charging hourly rates and retainers like an attorney or accountant. One of his Utah-based clients—unable to afford his upfront charges—proposed an alternative: what if Zach took a percentage of all money raised through crowdfunding instead of charging anything upfront? It was a simple pivot born out of necessity, but it changed everything. "Let's give it a shot," Zach agreed.

Zach's first campaign was for the Rusefort 2.0, a magnetic running wallet competing with products like the Flip Belt. Using his internet marketing expertise, Zach built a pre-launch strategy months before the Kickstarter went live. He created a simple landing page featuring the same video that would appear on Kickstarter, asking visitors to opt in for early-bird pricing notifications. Through paid media on Facebook, YouTube, and other channels, he built an email list of 11,000 people at roughly $0.30-$0.50 per new subscriber (depending on channel efficiency). The math was straightforward but expensive: to capture 11,000 emails with a 30% opt-in rate meant driving roughly 37,000 clicks. Between the list-building, video production, and landing page setup, Zach invested about $10,000-$15,000 before the campaign even launched. When launch day arrived, he sent a single email to his warm list and coordinated press coverage from local outlets with embargoed release dates.

The first Rusefort campaign raised approximately $50,000 in the first 10 days—a massive win for a product that had been generating only $2,000-$3,000 monthly through e-commerce. The success validated the model, but Zach quickly realized he'd exhausted his pre-built resources and couldn't scale further on his own. That's when he brought in his co-founder, Thomas Albert, who had experience running paid media strategies for political clients. Together, they structured what became Funded Today's signature three-tiered offering: paid media, press landing, and cross-collaborations (leveraging their growing network of past backers). This formalized system eventually raised the Rusefort campaign to nearly $150,000.

Zach discovered that successful campaigns needed what he calls the winning formula: **ubiquity + techie cool + compelling story + awesome video = huge success**. The Evolution Bra exemplified this perfectly. Its creator, Joanna, invented an 8-in-1 bra with silver technology that worked in offices and yoga studios—addressing a universal need (ubiquity) with innovative features (techie cool) backed by a genuine story (serial entrepreneur hustling against big competitors). Funded Today invested at least $100,000 in paid media and services for her campaign, which raised $1.2 million. Joanna paid Funded Today approximately 30% of total sales, but she noted she'd have paid 50-70% in retail distribution anyway.

Zach also learned that manufactured or inauthentic stories fail. Early in his career, he worked with a water bottle entrepreneur who invented the product to solve his own problem—dehydration headaches—but manufactured a generic fitness narrative during the campaign pitch. It flopped. When Zach later worked with the same inventor on a water bottle reminder specifically for desk workers (his original pain point), it sold dramatically better. The lesson: authentic pain points trump marketing narratives.

By 2015, Funded Today had grown to 31 fully remote employees (mostly based in Salt Lake City) and generated $8 million in revenue—a remarkable achievement for a company that takes no upfront fees. Zach planned to double that in 2016 based on refined processes and data-driven improvements. The company maintains a million-person email list of verified Kickstarter and Indiegogo backers, giving clients an unparalleled network effect. Funded Today's due diligence process—which lasts 1-7 days—uses statistical significance testing to project 30-60 day campaign outcomes before committing significant ad spend. At 28 years old and still single, Zach positioned himself as less essential to daily operations thanks to strong team members, allowing the company to scale without burning him out. His goal: help someone raise $21 million on Kickstarter within two years, breaking Pebble's $20.3 million record.