You Can Get BIG BRANDS To Notice Your Idea

Next, Jared. How can you prove your ideas have worth to— worth to even if you don't have a social following or a very small one? My ideas and solutions have a lot to offer big brands, but proving I'm of value is tough. Any suggestions?

Yeah, it sounds like the questioner is, is thinking about maybe pitching the idea to a big brand to market it, if that's the strand. I think you've got to stand out. So, you know, if you're a drinks company and you've got a big idea, you want to go along to Coca-Cola to pitch an idea, it's probably good to start the business, get the idea, get some success and momentum. But then how do you kind of stand out from the crowd? One of the things is a different idea that jumps out to is success. But again, actually, the company I mentioned before, Innocent, they got acquired, I think, majority stake by Coca-Cola. Natura for over almost $100 million. And that was an idea around smoothies. They spent a lot of time, months and months blending different smoothies, all organic, really appealing to the health market that was evolving there about 5 years ago. But they stood out. So I think with your idea, if you're doing a pitch to some of these big companies and you want to have them market your idea or you want to sell your company to them, then you've got to stand out. But what I would argue is you're much better off putting your energy into your idea of building a business rather than worrying about selling your business. Never worry about selling your business. Run your business, grow your business, and you'll get a lot of people knocking on your door to say, I want you to be a bigger part of a bigger family.

Getting a lot of, I agree, yes in the comments on that. You like it. You know, for me, this comes back to our last point of the idea is not enough. I have tons of ideas for big companies, right? I could walk into McDonald's and come up with 100 ideas for them from how they treat people to what's on their menu to the cleanliness of the place to their website. You know, the idea is good, but it's not enough. You know, is the— can you provide execution to these big brands, right? McDonald's is likely not gonna pay you for an idea or whatever big brand that you wanna try to connect with. It's the idea plus the execution. If all you're giving them is the idea and then they have to execute on it, They have a list of ideas too, right? You know how you have a list of 10,000 ideas? Every big company has a list of 10,000 ideas too. Stephen already mentioned today about he wants to get more done, right? He's got a list of 10,000 ideas that he wants to move Sage in the right direction. And so the idea is not enough. The only, the only caveat in terms of, in terms of that, in my mind at least, is if you have a patent, if you can patent the idea and you can get it protected, then all you're going to go is sell the patent to the company. But then it has to be something, to Stephen's point before, really unique, really different, something that people will recognize. But otherwise, if you can't get it patented, then just selling an idea to a company is not going to be enough. You need to have the execution.

Yeah, on that as well, I think it's fair to say it's all about execution and never ever kind of just stand still. You've got to innovate all the time. And also, just sometimes you get lucky. Or something happens in the marketplace that kind of shifts the dial and makes your idea relevant. Example, a company, great company that's a customer of ours called Glowee in France. Back in kind of 2013, they were watching kind of marine biology and stuff. And there's this really cool light given off by creatures undersea. It's just like a surreal idea in the area of something called bioluminescence. I can't even pronounce it. But basically, it's a kind of light that's given off undersea. And then the French legislators brought in some laws to stop shops advertising with big neon signs and stuff like that because it was bad for light pollution. And these guys at Glowee developed this kind of marine lumino technology that's environmentally very sensitive and compliant with the law. And they built a business where they're lighting up kind of advertising for companies after dark in France. So legislation, change of regulations, and also change in terms of market requirements. Just be aware and always sensitive. So not only has the idea got to evolve, you've got to market test it, but you and I know, and this is so true now in 2016, the market is so different today than it was 5 years ago. And Evan, maybe you give us some example in terms of the gaming industry and everything, people like Oculus, how did that happen? Virtual reality is changing so quickly that you've got to be really attuned to the opportunities.