A FOUNDER’S STORY
You’ll find negative things about me online — and that’s what will Earth Points successful?
If you’ve Googled my name, you’ve probably found some unflattering articles. I’m not going to ask you to ignore them. I’m going to explain them — because the story behind them is the same story behind Earth Points.
I took hundreds of millions away from a Media Mogul
Decades ago, I worked out how to sell new investment properties for $150,000 each — and structure them so they cost the buyer just $15 a week to hold. Brand new builds: higher rent, full tax depreciation, no maintenance.
The same buyer looking at an older property would have been out closer to $100 a week. Lower rent. No depreciation. Constant repairs. They couldn’t afford one even if they wanted to.
We had 5,000 people purchase from us; ordinary Australians, and we did not have one unhappy customer until the Media Mogul noticed me. Those same properties are now worth about a million dollars each.
There was a problem with what I was doing as far as the Media Mogul was concerned though. The builders and developers I worked with stopped needing to advertise in the newspapers — because I was their marketing as well as their sales channel – the problem for the Media Mogul was that my marketing system was cheaper, more effective and they did not pay me $1 until settlement.
In those days, real estate classifieds were called the rivers of gold for a reason. They made the major newspaper proprietors hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
I took a serious chunk of that away.
What happens when you take MILLIONS from a Media Mogul
You don’t take hundreds of millions of dollars off a media empire and walk away unnoticed. The man at the top noticed. A smear campaign followed. He noticed because the Weekend Real Estate Section halved in size, and therefore so did the newspaper’s revenue.
That’s why, all these years later, you’ll still find unflattering articles when you search my name. In fact, I even created a precedent in Financial Services law, taught in every university. But the articles don’t mention that we won 53 out of 55 points of law, and the last 2 were overturned on appeal, but because I did not appeal as I was out of fight and money, it still shows that I lost those 2 points. It’s like 9 people appealed a speeding fine because the speed camera was faulty, but because the 10th person did not appeal, they are still guilty of speeding.
It took many years, but finally ’m not bitter about it. I’m grateful for it. Because that lesson — what genuinely threatening an advertising giant looks like, and what it costs you personally — is the most valuable qualification I bring to Earth Points.
Most founders don’t get to learn it. I did. The hard way, it wasn’t the school of hard knocks, I got a double doctorate at the university of hard knocks.
The rivers of gold flow somewhere else now
The newspapers don’t have the rivers of gold anymore. Google and Meta, the internet giants do. A handful of multi-trillion-dollar tech companies pull more than $15 billion a year out of the Australian economy in advertising spend — money that used to circulate locally now goes offshore untaxed.
Every Australian small business is feeding that machine. They pour their marketing budgets into platforms that don’t pay Australian tax, don’t employ Australian workers, and don’t care whether the local football club, the local church, or the local charity survives.
What Earth Points is actually doing
Earth Points isn’t just a loyalty program. It’s a redirection mechanism that combines loyalty and marketing where businesses only pay when the customer pays them.
A business pays 3% on a completed sale — not a click, not an impression, an actual sale. That 3% is split four ways:
· 20% to the customer who made the purchase
· 20% to the customer’s chosen charity, club, or community organisation
· 20% to Rewards4Earth Foundation Limited — environmental restoration and humanitarian efforts
· 40% to the Earth Artificial Intelligence business that makes the whole system work
I challenge anyone to search for companies that give back three fifths of every dollar they earn in the community they earned it from.
Every transaction quietly takes a slice of the marketing budget that would have gone offshore to a trillion-dollar tech platform and routes it instead into the customer’s pocket, the local community, the environment, and a sustainable Australian business.
Expect the pushback. It means it’s working.
I’m telling you this now because I expect it to happen again. When Earth Points starts pulling real volume away from the big ad platforms, there will be a response. There always is.
The difference is that this time I’ve seen the playbook before. I know what it looks like. And I know that the noise the giants make is the clearest signal that something underneath them is finally working.
If you want a quiet founder who has never threatened anyone’s revenue, there are plenty to choose from, but none have been to the university of hard knocks.
If you want one who has already taken hundreds of millions off the people who owned the rivers of gold — and who is about to do it again to the people who own them now — you’re in the right place.
Chris Bilborough
Founder & Chief Visionary Bloke, Earth Artificial Intelligence Limited