Here’s my dilemma.

telephones + marketing = telemarketing

I built a robot to thwart telemarketing. I’m kinda biased against it. But now I need your help to raise money to continue to thwart telemarketing. And I hate asking for money because I feel like a telemarketer. Do you see the position that I am in?

Since I launched this Kickstarter three weeks ago:

• My Facebook posts have reached 27,000 people. My “post engagement” is over 10,000, and I have 2300 likes.
• My WordPress blog has 217,000 views with my best day at 45,000 hits.
• My YouTube channel has over 1,000,000 views with 2200 subscribers, 2.8 million minutes of watch time, and 99% likes vs. dislikes (who are these 32 people?)
• My telemarketer robot has received 92,000 telephone calls. At peak (when I was on the front page of Yahoo!) I received 67 simultaneous calls. Each day, I get between 2,000 and 3,000 calls for about 3,000 minutes of “talk time”.
• My recordings have been heard on the radio in Los Angeles (and likely more); I have been interviewed on the radio on local and national radio programs in the USA. I have also been interviewed on New Zealand and South African radio, BBC World Service, and have appeared on Television in Australia and in-studio on TWiT.tv in the USA.
• I have been featured online on Gizmodo, Reddit, CBSNews.com, TheBlaze.com, Metro.co.uk, PCWorld, Sydney Morning Herald in Australia, Business Insider, Washington Post, Mashable, Mental Floss, Maxim, and have been translated into German, Swedish, French, and Dutch. These are not “re-posts”, but new articles.
• I have been interviewed for print stories in the New York Times, San Francisco Herald, and even a French trade magazine (unfortunately, none of these have been printed yet).

By all accounts, I could not ask for more attention or notoriety. I am extremely grateful and humbled by all this attention. My professional aspirations are to simply be a good telephone guy. I just want your phones to work and for you to use them and be happy with them. That’s it!

But now I can taste the opportunity to make a dent in unsolicited telemarketing – a practice that I loathe. It clogs the network, it reduces satisfaction with telephones, it causes people to change their numbers, or worse, disconnect their service.

Which brings me back to the opening paragraph. I hate asking for money. For my entire professional life I have earned my money through a simple exchange of my services as a telephone guy. This crowdfunding thing is out of my comfort zone. All this social media is too. I am confident that all of you reading this are better at raising money than I am. So please help. I only have a few days left and I am very far from the fundraising goal of $46,000. Can I make this work without the crowdfunding? Yes, I will probably make it work. But it will be much easier to build the infrastructure, partnerships, and legal protections with some working capital. I have a day job, kids, and a mortgage. And ironically, going viral has been very expensive.

Please take to Twitter and all other forms of social media and spread the word. You hate unsolicited telemarketing? The Jolly Roger Telephone Company has a solution. A realistic solution that, at the very least, turns your telemarketers into entertainment, and might even end them. Right now, Kickstarter is the key to making this happen as soon as possible.

Thank you all,

Roger