You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden; nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house.
Matthew 5:14-15
Depending on who you talk to, it takes somewhere between 3.5% and 5% percent to start a movement. 5% of 335 million people is 16.75 million. That’s a lot of people. 5% of 5% of 335 million is 837,500 people. That’s still a lot of people.
In a sea of darkness, one flame can be seen from a long way off.
Our logo is a flame for a reason. We’re trying to give people hope – hope that there’s people out there who care and are trying to do something to make the world better, to fix the problems that we have. We’re trying to inspire people – inspire them to stand up and to be leaders, to be voices. And we’re trying to give people courage – courage that hopefully if they see other people standing up and speaking out and leading, that’ll give them the courage that, “Hey, I can do this too. I should do this too.”
Efysus is a flame to light other flames. Efysus is also a business. We need to pay our bills, and we need to put food on the table and keep a roof over our head, keep the lights on, and keep the water running. There’s a handful of ways that businesses can earn revenue, can make money.
For content creators like myself, ad revenue is probably the one that springs to mind for most people – when you see ads playing on videos. Ad revenue is not near as much as you think it is. The golden age of making it on YouTube is a thing of the past.
Another is affiliate links. If someone says, use my link to go buy this thing, it lets wherever you’re buying it from know where you got the idea from, where your traffic originated from. An example is if I were to say, I have this link for Amazon, when you click through, Amazon would know that I sent you and they would give me a little piece of that sale.
Another is sponsorships. There’s overall channel sponsorships and there’s also individual video sponsorships and business sponsorships. Anytime you see an in video ad read, that is another form of sponsorship.
One that’s gaining in popularity is products. There’s a whole variety of products, ranging from online courses and classes to in person courses and classes to merchandise.
The last one is memberships – offering access to some kind of community with exclusive perks.
Over time, Efysus is going to leverage all of these. The catch is that for a lot of them to work and to make the business sustainable,
you have to have a pretty good size audience. We’re still growing and we’re not there yet. That’s where the Firestarters come in.
The Firestarter is a sort of pre membership. It’s a one time payment of $1,000. That large upfront payment gives us operating capital. It gives us money to run on while we’re working on building the other parts of the business and those other revenue streams.
What do Firestarters get? They get all the perks from our top tier membership level. You can head to the Join page to see all the details of what that is, but you basically get full access to how we run Efysus, and it gives you a lot of input on the content that we put out. That payment covers membership from now until whenever we officially launch our community, plus an additional 12 months. After that 12 months, Firestarters will have the option to renew at whatever membership level they choose.
Firestarters also get Firestarter branded gear. We have a version of our logo that is specific to Firestarters, that only Firestarter members have access to. For Firestarters only, we also make this guarantee: that if you have something, a hat, shirt, water bottle, whatever that is damaged or destroyed, if you can either send us the damaged or destroyed item or provide proof that it was damaged or destroyed, we will replace it at no cost, forever.
The idea of being a Firestarter is to help us get Efysus started to grow it to where it is self-sustaining. To that end, there’s only ever going to be 250 Firestarters – that is total. It doesn’t matter how long it takes us to get there – if it’s 10 minutes, 10 months, or 10 years, there’s only ever going to be 250 Firestarters.
We are committed to Efysus. This is what we’re called to do. This is what we’re supposed to be doing. This is what we are passionate about doing. But we’ve got to pay the bills. I have a family to provide for, and anything that I have to do to provide for my family that is outside of Efysus takes focus away from Efysus. The Firestarters will allow us to put more focus and more emphasis on Efysus, because of the trust that they’re placing in us by that investment. What that ultimately boils down to is more involvement from us and a better and faster launch of the Efysus community.
It’s a big ask, that is a significant amount of money. Before you do anything, especially before you give us that much money, please pray about it. Make sure that it’s what you’re supposed to be doing. God has blessed all of us with finance, time, and talents. We are to put those to use to glorify him. What is the right use of your time and your finances and your skills might not be anything to do with us, and that’s okay. You should do whatever God wants you to do with that stuff.
If you’re in a point where, “Man, that sounds awesome, I would love to be there, but I can’t do that right now, but I want to be part of the community”, that’s awesome. Go sign up for our newsletter, we will let you know as soon as the community launches, and we would love to see you there and have you participate.
Another way that you can help us if you can’t invest in that is to go buy some of our merch. If (for whatever reason) you hate our logo or you don’t want to buy merch from us, there’s also an option in the store to keep the lights on. That is literally just to help us keep the lights on.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read this post. It feels really weird for me to make this post. I told myself when we started Efysus, I was never going to just ask for money from anybody. This is a way that I think you can help us, but we can provide value back to you.
If you want to keep up on what we’re doing and what’s going on, sign up for our newsletter.
Most importantly, God bless.