How to get Ashton Kutcher to tweet about you

Back in Jan 2011 Ashton Kutcher tweeted to his 6+ million Twitter followers that he loved one of my demo videos.
Here is Ashton’s tweet:

Within 3 hours from this casual tweet over 30 thousand fans checked out my video.
After one year it is still one of my most watched and loved explanatory videos.

I just had started doing animation for a living and inadvertently Ashton had given me the biggest marketing push anyone starting a company could ask for, and for free!

I got even more lucky when a couple months after I met Ashton and Demi Moore in person and they commissioned me to do a demo video explaining their recently launched campaign against child sex slavery.

Since Ashton tweet I had many people asking me how I managed to get such a huge celebrity to look at my work and tweet it.

Well, I can easily say it’s just luck, but the reality is that there is a lot more to it than that. Here are all the “secrets” that enabled me to get in front of one of the most popular Hollywood celebrities.

1. Find what you love to do

This is the hardest part and for many people it can take an entire lifetime to figure out.
Many settle with something they kind of like and give up before finding their true passion.
You will know what your passion is when working doesn’t feel like work anymore, when you do what you do because you love it and wouldn’t do anything else.
So if you don’t know what your passion is then keep trying different things until something sticks.
You may find your passion by trying many things like Sean Aiken who for one year tried a new job every week.

You may find that you have more than one passion, may be two, may be tens of them.
Im my opinions many passions are temporal and fade away, and I think that is natural.
We are constantly evolving, physically , mentally, what we liked 5 years ago is not what we like today or will like 5 years from now.

If you happen to discover you like many things there is a catch, make sure you become really good at least at one of them. Put your 10,000 hours like Malcolm Gladwell explained in his best selling book Outliers.
Reason is, no one is going to tweet about you if your stuff is no good, and for your creations to be good you need to put your hours, there is no work around that.

2. Never Give up and Welcome Failure

I was going to put these separate but they are the same to me.
regardless of what you choose to do, you will fail, many times.
So you better get used to failing and develop the discipline and persistence to never give up.
Before Ashton tweeted my video I had spent over 10 years failing in many ways.

Just a few months ago I had ran out out of savings after putting over 1.5 years developing a product that went nowhere. 1.5 years of no vacation, hundreds of 12 hour days sitting in front of a screen, dreaming of building a successful subscription based project management service.
I could have given up and gotten a 9-5 job, I did not. I went back to the drawing board, literally, and try to figure out what else I could do next.

I tried animation and it turned out I was pretty good at it, not by chance. I already had spend many years animating industrial equipment before. That was boring so I took filmmaking classes to learn to write scripts, I mixed both and fun demo videos came out, and people liked them.

Have a long list of “Plan Bs” because most plans will fail. If animation would have failed I had and still have an excel sheet with over 40 different startup ideas.
Eventually one is meant to work out.

3. Create your own luck

There is never a sure formula to get what you want, that would make things to easy and boring.
What you can do is stack as many odds on your favour to ensure lady luck strikes at least one.
Here is what I do to maximize my chances to get what I want.
Get in the mindset that every single decision you make counts, because it does.
So when you have 2 or more possible choices select according to 2 simple criteria.
Interest and Leverage.
Interest: Try to only devote your energy to things that interest you. This is why finding your passion first is so important. You won’t be able to create your own luck if you don’t know where you need that luck!
Leverage: given two options with equal interest ALWAYS choose to do the one that can yield more exposure, reputation, or/and connections.

Here is an actual example of how I applied the Double I decision making approach to maximize my “luck”.

My first demo video ever was created for a startup called Summify.
At that time I was not even sure I could produce even a half decent demo video for a startup.
It turned out that it was pretty good and everyone was happy.
However, I was so burned out from my previous failure that I had to make sure that if I kept producing animations could turn into a business quickly.

You see my next animation could have been for any other random startup and most likely they would have liked it too but the road to profitability would have been too slow for me to afford at that time.

So I applied interest/leverage approach to the max!
I needed to find a startup I loved and I had to make sure that if they liked my video they would have enough leverage to jumpstart my animation career in a big way.

After a few weeks I zeroed in a up and coming hot startup called Hipmunk.com.
I loved their service, their founders, their story and they had a lot of leverage in Sillicon Valley because it was founded my the creators of Reddit.com.

Next step was to dedicate my time to produce de coolest animation I could with my modest animation skills, give it to them for free and pray they liked it. If they didn’t repeat process at least 5 times before moving down my excel sheet of ideas.

It worked! in a big way, Himpmunk;s Alexis Ohanian loved it, promoted it on Hipmunk’s blog and emailed it to all YCombinator startups.
Suddenly I had over 40 startups asking for demo videos and Grumo Media was official born.

One of the YC startups would turn out to be PadMapper, I produced a video for them, which happen to catch the eye of Ashton Kutcher.

Was all of this luck, yes! but a big part of that luck was fabricated strategically by me and this means that you can also create your own luck. I just taught you how 😉

Follow these four steps and you will succeed in anything cause you just made yourself unstoppable.
Follow these steps and you will get noticed by people of influence, may be Ashton, may be Lady Gaga, or Justin Beiber, or even better, someone that really believes in your work and can open many doors for you.

But most importantly, if follow these steps, you may win fame, money, or get Ashton tweet about you but you will realize none of that will be more valuable than getting to do everyday what you love to do and be happy doing it.

And that’s how you “may” get Ashton Kutcher to tweet about you 😉
Peace, love and cookies.

Originally this post was written upon request by Udemy.com staff for their blog at -> http://www.udemy.com/blog/how-to-get-ashon-kutcher-to-tweet-about-you/

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