Omaze

“Our first experience was to be a guest judge on cupcake wars and it raised 784 dollars. We now raise that in 12 seconds.”

“They offered that at auction and one person bid 40,000 and then they did it with us and it raised 1.7 million.”

“A seven million dollar house can raise, call it thirty three million in sales. A third of that goes to charity and VAT. A third of that goes to the price and costs. In addition to the house, we cover all the taxes for the winter. We give away cash prizes. We h…”

“It inspired me when I came back from this to change the business being from Being focused on celebrities to focused on prizes. That was a huge change for us. We got a lot of resistance from our board and the team, but I was not scared of what people thought of…”

“We had done a campaign with Daniel Craig six months before I went into the hospital where you got to go to the Aston Martin track. You got to ride around in a one of a kind Aston Martin, and then you got to keep the Aston Martin. And it was supposed to raise 3…”

“I think we should go buy a 250,000 dollar McLaren offer it with just omaze distribution, no talent... We only had 900,000 in the bank, so 250,000 was a big, was a real bet at that point.”

“And she said it raised 1.9 million.”

“A car changes someone's lifestyle house changes someone's life. And it's the person perfect product to storytell around. You know, like a house like represents all of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, its safety, its security, its status, its relationships, its sel…”

“You know, we had 20 people in the UK. We passed the sales of the US at a hundred, had a 180 people in like 15 months.”

“We put it in the category of a consumer subscription entertainment, you know, like a Spotify or a Netflix and the retention rates. Are at that level.”

“I mean, it meant like letting go of, you know, a 180 people that were amazing people that a lot of which had been there since the beginning of Omaze and were uber creative and uber resilient and super talented, but it was just the reality of where we were.”

“We're, I won't, I don't give exact numbers, but we're past a four hundred million run rate.”

“I did flatline for four and a half minutes.”

“They then built a product that included selling experiences with Cristiano Ronaldo, The Pope and a Lamborghini, Arnold Schwarzenegger and a tank, before pivoting to a model giving away houses and making hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.”

“If we make it so anybody can donate 10 dollars for the chance to win, you could raise so much more money, so much more awareness, open up a whole new donor base.”

“Our first experience was to be a guest judge on Cupcake Wars. That raised 780 dollars.”

“And that one raised 1.7 million.”

“Like we were meeting with Disney and Bob Iger. They didn't know that we were only six people and like, we didn't really even have the tech stack to support. That kind of traffic.”

“That raised 4.4 million.”

“It did. I think it raised like 3.1 million, something like that.”

“We thought being Call of Duty, you got to have a character in Call of Duty would raise a lot. That did not. Without Ronaldo, get your haircut and play football with Ronaldo would raise a lot. That's a knot.”

“Whereas like a guy named Sam Heughan, who's on a show called Outlander, which is a kind of a sci-fi romantic show set in Scotland. He's our highest grossing talent of all time, more than George Clooney or Brad Pitt or Matt Damon, or you name it, because he has…”

“We had done a campaign with Daniel Craig, where you got to go to New York, you got to ride around in a one-of-a-kind Aston Martin, and you got to keep the Aston Martin. And it was the first time we'd offered a prize. We thought it would raise 300,000 and it ra…”

“And so I, then I went to our CFO, Nina, and I said, hey, I think we should offer a car. We should go buy a 250,000 dollar McLaren, offer it with just a maze, no talent. Because if we could do that on our own, then we would control our own destiny. We would rea…”

“Well, yeah, bad, but it turned out to be great, because when I came back, I was sitting down with her, and I had all this distance and all this perspective, and said, by the way, whatever happened with the McLaren, did it raise the 500,000? She said it raised …”

“A car changes someone's lifestyle. A house changes someone's life.”

“Really well, I guess it's an overstatement for this podcast. For us, it was really well. It was like a hundred million. You know, it wasn't nothing.”

“We have to be seven houses ahead in our purchasing.”

“It's not that cleanly correlated. We've had some of our best houses have been three million pounds and others that were five, not as good.”

“We've tested, you know, we've had over ten million different performance marketing ads.”

“It's right up there with the top consumer subscription companies in the world. I mean, it's comparable to Netflix, Spotify.”

“We shut down our whole US team because to focus on the house model in the UK.”

“The best way to think about our business is like a third. So a third goes to VAT and charity. So 16% to VAT, 17% to charity. Spend about a third on prizing. So the house plus the taxes, we cover all the taxes for the winter. We cover all the furniture. We give…”

“You know, at scale, this will be roughly a 30% EBITDA margin business. We're not there now.”

“We're only 57 full-time people at that revenue, so it's like... We have another, like, almost 52 contractors that are doing production, so you could say our company is really a 109 people”

“At one point we were producing 400 celebrity videos a year, you know, and our team, like, figured out that process, was really good at learning from that process. Like, that's why we, like, that's why we were the only ones who did a celebrity that made it. We'…”

“It's not our 10 year vision, but it's our 15 year vision, is Fortune 500 impact number one. The Fortune 500 is right now is eight billion in revenue to be on that list. Impact number one means the number one source of charitable funds in the world outside of g…”