Its a site ran by John Young called
Cryptome.
Responsible for a lot of governmental information becoming public. Sorta like Wikileaks but better IMO. A lot of spies, industry and government insiders, etc. leak info to the website.
I agree its not very clear to someone who does not know about the website. Johns been doing this for 13+ years. For donating $100 you basically get a USB stick with 72,000+ leaked documents on it from over the years.
Send him $100 so he can mail you a USB stick full of classified GOV documents? No thanks, that donor list is a future hit-list. I'm surprised that anyone with any interest in leaks and whistleblowers would touch that with a 10-foot pole.
I'm sure he does good work and his heart's probably in the right place, but that's a horrible marketing strategy.
"Here's some horrible shit the Government does, why not make yourself a target? For only $100 I'll paint a bullseye on your back. You can pick from the FTC, NSA, CIA, FBI, IRS... Hell, if it's got 3 letters they can weaponize it and use it against you. Get on their radar today!
P.S. CHILL OUT. It's not like they can track your every move online. You'll be fine. Bradley Manning is still alive. I think."
Now regarding the Coolest Cooler, pretty interesting that it looks like he had Brendan Burchard on board for the first campaign. It looks like he hit 50% of goal in the first 2-days, and then it bottomed out. $35k came in at the "hangout with me and Brendan level".
This time he's got over 20k people in at the $185+ level, vs. less than 100 or so last time around. So people are actually buying to get the product, not to meet an author.
The main difference at a glance is a USB port. That's a big pain point for people. That lets people stay connected to their phone, email, GPS, streaming music, videos, games and the internet. That's a lot of value for a little USB port. I bet that's a huge reason why it gained traction this time.
Props to the guy. And yeah, the sales videos/prototypes are definitely much better this go around. It's a great product idea too.
I bet he was really bummed when he fell just short last time. He only went for $50k VS. $125k this time around. Well he's got almost 5 million reasons (and counting) to be happy it crashed and burned last time. It'd be interesting to know what kind of correlation there is with the goal amount vs. wild successes like this. I wonder if it would have still taken off if he hadn't dropped it to $50k.
