The Power of Accelerator Groups with Multi-Million Dollar Earners Lou Childs and Katy Mallory

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind.

I'm Larry Weddell.

And before we get started, if you want to know exactly how to win again and again, go to Wydell on winning.com webinar now to watch something I've put together for you. Now let's get going into this episode of Million Dollar Mastermind.

I am back with Lou Childs. Hello, Lou.

Hi, Larry. Thanks for having us again.

And Katie Mallory. Hey, Katie.

Hey, Larry.

Hey.

And we're back with the founders and creators of Slumber Pod. And it is a sensation. It's basically almost a cult among parrots in the, and especially in the child care business, which we found out last time was a baby care is a $67 billion business and in a couple of years they've created a cult following. 1500 reviews averaging out like 4.9 on Amazon. And absolutely amazing how people respond when they get something that, you know, a product that really works. So you've hit the bullseye and are solving a major problem. And this is not going to go away because babies don't seem to be going away. And so congratulations on your success and also the potential for this to be not only recurring, but I'm sure it's going to be a platform for other expanding other products. So congratulations on your start and we want to dig into your lessons you learned along the way. As we learned last time. Lou had experience in marketing that really prepared her to make the right moves with Katie and maximizing their time and their contacts and their resources and collapsing probably in collapsing timeframes to get this thing really fine tuned and then also get it out where people know about it. Because I've told people for years you could actually have the cure for cancer that your genius brother in law and nephew had been working on 18 years in their basement. And then they've actually figured it out. But then getting people to accept it, that's probably going to take twice as long as it took for them to figure it out. So getting people aware of this thing is every bit, you know, you got to sell stuff and it's not, they're not going to beat a path to your door. You got to go out and beat a path to their door. So talk about Lou, I'm gonna let you lead off on this one. Talk about how you things you did right to get this word out. I'm kind of out of gear because we really, I really want to investigate how you got the product right. But let's talk about how you got the word out from.

Well, one thing, maybe not so much to get the word out, but to help us propel our business so that we could be successful was join an accelerator group in Columbus, Georgia. So it took us from product idea to launch, and I do think that that helped us tremendously. So if your listeners have a product idea, I encourage them to look in their communities or surrounding cities to see if an accelerator program is offered. But we knew, because we have both been in marketing communications, we had an idea of what is needed for getting a trademark and starting the patent process and how big social media is for the mom space especially. So both of us are on Facebook and Instagram already, so that wasn't foreign to us. So knowing those tools, but also just knowing how to talk to the target audience. And Katie's in it. So that was beautiful in and of itself that our co founder was our target audience. Katie, what would you add to that?

I think that's a great segue to talking about the affiliate. The affiliate program, which has probably been our biggest marketing success to date. And we talked about this last time we spoke with you, Larry, just a little bit. But the idea is that we give a discount code to affiliates or ambassadors that they can pass along to their clients. And every time that discount code is redeemed, the affiliate gets a kickback. So in our case, it's a $20 off coupon code that they give to customers and they get $10 back themselves. So we realized early on that sleep consultants have the exact same target market as we have. And that is really helpful because our product's a premium product. It's not inexpensive. But for sleep consultants, they are a hero if they introduce our product to their clients because their clients are going to be able to sleep better when they are traveling. So it really is a win win. And it also is a win win because these sleep consultants generate original content for us. So they are writing a weekly blog for us that we post on our Shopify e commerce site or slumberpod.com they are putting together tips that we reshare on social media. They do takeovers of our Instagram where they give advice about helping babies adjust to a new schedule or a time change. So those affiliates truly are gold. They continue to talk about us to their clients, both live and in person, as well as in their digital presences. So we're just incredibly thrilled with how that program's going. Who are thinking about launching an affiliate program. There are several pieces of technology that can help with that, but the one that we use is called Grin G R I N. And it helps not just for sleep consultants, but for other mom influencers. It helps us measure what their engagement and authenticity levels are like. We're contacted about a potential collaboration. We are well informed to say, you might not be a fit or oh, okay. This person will probably really do great things in terms of spreading the word for us. And that platform also is what we pay our affiliates through. And it allows us to capture things like product photos that we're able to reshare in our social media as well. So that it's not an inexpensive program. But especially once you get to a certain size, it can be tremendously helpful for tracking everything.

And so grin, is that grin.com or is that.

It's.

And so that's a platform for finding affiliates in all markets or just in the baby world?

In all markets.

In all markets.

It's an influencer and affiliate platform for any, any product.

Okay.

We didn't, we didn't start with Grin because as Katie mentioned, it is a little pricey. We started with affiliate Ly, but there are others. They don't have the bells and whistles. They don't give you the insight, but they do allow you to manage your discount codes with Shopify and other platforms and know what to pay them at the end of the month or however often you're paying them. But we did get to a point where we needed more insights, as Katie mentioned about if somebody. And we get. We get requests all the time to collaborate. So we wanted a way to be able to analyze these people before we say yes and send them a product or whatever the partnership entails. And Grin gives us that insight. It's an amazing platform.

Go ahead.

We would encourage your audience, Larry, if they're trying to increase awareness of a product or launch a product to find an affinity group, a community that has the same, like, overlapping because they could be a megaphone for your product. And that's where networking all handy too. Not just creating those relationships, but facilitate or, you know, maintain building them up as well.

Okay.

Talk about how you actually find an accelerator group and an affinity group.

So the accelerator group kind of fell in our lap because I've hung out with the entrepreneur types in Columbus, Georgia, and this group had paired with a local university to offer this program. Now they call it Startup Columbus. It had a former name, but I heard about it through my network there. But if you. If someone is in Atlanta, there's several there. I believe there are incubators in most major towns. And I'll let Katie Talk about the.

So for finding an affinity group, it probably depends on, you know a lot on what your product is. So of course, launching a new fishing lure, you need to get connected in with fisherman groups, whether they are active on LinkedIn or they have, I would think about your product and that would be influential in telling other people about your product. And that might be a club or a community of some kind I used as an example. But it also, it also could be an influencer, somebody who is highly visible in that space that you want to partner with. That will help you get the word out as well. And sometimes you will have to pay that person, especially early on in your product life, to talk about you. But the results could pay off tremendously. In fact, we've seen affiliate and influencer marketing be more successful than paid Facebook ads, even targeted.

Listen, there's a lot of information online, but there aren't a lot of people who have actually done something. In my case, I've actually built a successful business as accrued over 5 billion billion in assets under management and has done well even during trying times. Now, if you want to know exactly how I've done this, go to Whiteellumwinning.com webinar Now I've compressed a decade of learning into five short weeks. Just for those of you who want to give yourself an incredible advantage and are tired of waiting and watching others move up.

Yeah, and I'm thinking about, I've never thought about them as an affinity group, but when my boys were growing up, my oldest son was a big, he loved to bow hunt. So of course he drugged me into it and we, you know, did all kind of, you know, that was a 20, 20, 30 year and he still bow hunts. But the point is they have bow hunting clubs. You know, I don't know how many bow hunting club meetings we went to. And there's like you say they bring in the speakers and you meet people from around the country that are in bow hunting and you wind up going to the conventions with a bow hunting gear and stuff like that. So it does depend on what your product, where your product lies. But whatever it is, in every area of life, it's always amazing how many people there are that are interested in anything. I mean, it's not just like dogs, but like any breed of a dog that you could come up with. I've never even heard of this breed. But there's a million people that, you know, they're fanatics about that kind of talk. And if you start looking, you get, you know, they have their, their magazines and their conventions over it. You know, it's just like people join things and people hook. It's a natural thing to hook up with people that are interested. There's a friend, a lady who used to help me with a lot of my books and publications and things. Early on, her husband was big into pipes and he started doing a podcast on pipes and going to pipe conventions. And pretty soon he became the guru. Since he wound up being the only guy who interviewed all these pipe experts. He became a big name in the pipe business. And then everybody wanted to buy his pipes.

That's really cool.

And he doesn't do normal pipes. He does pipes out of just found objects. So he would find something out in your yard and turn it into a pipe. And people just love the stuff, know they collect it. So it's why the idea that you were so smart about was to tap into these and let them be your teammates. Expand your, your build a team of like minded people. But it had to be in their interest too. And it's all. They already had momentum going in that market and you just kind of hitched along with them. Would you, would you say, did you get that idea from your affinity group or just from previous experience in marketing or where did that knack or that instinct to pursue those because you only had so much energy? I mean, you both said, you said you had your jobs, you had part time, this, that and the other, but somehow your instincts told you do this, follow up with this.

Yes. It's tough to think about the exact point where we realized that that would work. But one of the influences is that I personally hired a sleep consultant for my newborn twins, a woman named Natalie Carney, whose company is called Slumberosity here in Atlanta. And she helped us out a few nights a week and created a custom plan to help our twins start sleeping more throughout the night. And I asked her, you know, do you think your clients would like this product? And you know, would, would you tell them about it? She was like, oh my gosh, of course I would. And a light bulb did go off then, like, oh, wow. Well, other people, like Natalie and I had also read the moms on Call. I bet that they also would be interested in telling their clients. I don't know if we realized that early how much the influence of the affiliate program would take off, but there are some months where they generate more than $150,000 of our sales. Wow.

And Lou did. I mean, you guys had to learn how to design this thing, how many steps and how long did it take before you to get get it designed down to its basic form that it is today? How many iterations did you go through.

The slumber pod itself?

Yes.

Oh, my goodness. If we could show you pictures of our first prototype. It's hilarious. So we got a friend to do some industrial designs based on what the end gold was. And then we had somebody build a prototype for us during the accelerator program and it did not work. We used wire. It was that pop up thing design like you have on your windshield on a hot day. It did not work at all. So we've come a long way. But that is one thing that we had to learn is you can't wait for perfection to kick in and go. You'd be close. Get it out on the market and make changes. And that is exactly what we did. The very first one, our Kickstarter version, had a pouch with a zipper that you could put a baby monitor in so that you could see your child. Well, it was flat. It wasn't 3D. The zipper wasn't quite wide enough for a lot of baby monitors. So we have made that better over time. And it perfected it, perfected it. And it is really good for most models now. And there are a lot of models, so that was tough. We've improved the airflow. Not that the first 30,000 were unsafe, but we did have some feedback from moms, especially the ones who have warm sleepers, that they would like more airflow inside. So we worked with the ATDC people, in association with Georgia Tech, some airflow experts, to design a fan pouch that is in the lower corner and it makes a chimney effect up through a brand new style of ventilation flap in the top. So those types of things we've developed over time.

Wow. Something good came out of my alma material. Who could believe it?

We love Georgia Tech. In fact, I'm talking to them right now about a new product idea where we will be submitting that for a capstone project for the fall semester.

Wow. You know, a couple points I want to make in response to that is, if you're listening, take pictures of your product, of, of your business, your team as you go along the way, of the people involved, of milestones of your start, because that will be priceless to you down the road. And we've all seen the pictures of the evolution of the iPhone over the years like that. But think about that. Like the product that you're putting together now is realize that you're working for success. Well, plan for success and realize this thing will probably be improved, you know, 50 different times along the way. So record it. So that kind of helps get you thinking more long term. And one of the success. One of the difference in people that win versus fade out is the people who fade out are thinking short term and the people that win are thinking more long term. So they put more effort in it. They don't get that annoyed and impatient. When they get annoyed and impatient, they stay on track because they know the efforts, the payoff for the efforts will come the longer you can continue to stay on track, keep improving, and give time for your efforts to compound and. And multiply. It's the multiply payoff that you're going for for that. Not that year in 2019 when you just launched. You said you did 2 million in 2019.

And yes, in 2019. In 2018, it was about 100,000 or more.

A little more, yeah. And then 4 million. 4 million in 2021 or 24. Sorry.

Yeah, and 4 million there. So, you know, you're looking for this thing to give it a chance to like, multiply out there and get in that exponential growth thing because the market is big enough to have unlimited growth for probably the next 20 years. So prepare for that. Take pictures. And the other thing is that, you know, if you had not launched, it sounds like the thing people need to realize is if you launch and you get it just about the way you want it, but it's workable, then you can get them out there and you can get really the most priceless feedback, which is feedback from. People are actually liking it and using it. But they've got. They spent time with it and they can see what would really make this better is this. So if you have those suggestions, you can make it really, really better. But probably a lot of ideas you might not have thought about that quickly had you been in charge of coming up with all the improvements just yourself. And so that having those 30,000 first, 30,000 units out there gave you, I would imagine, priceless feedback about what direction to go moving forward. Would that be?

Absolutely. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And our sleep consultants also gave feedback as well.

Now, how about making the thing, you know, getting the thing made, you know, you said you had brought in a designer. It's hard for outside people, you know, when we hire these experts thinking they're going to solve our problems, but they've got to be managed. I mean, there's very few experts you can go to that are going to solve some big problem. You got to look them as a member of your staff. And you got to coach them to a solution to use their expertise and resources to give you exactly what you want. Talk about how you got from that initial thing with the, you know, where it came back as a wire mesh type, chicken coop type thing or whatever, and you really got it refined. How did that work?

So we hired a, this is a great lesson for those who are develop products. But we hired first Seeds Dud, you know, for the product design that didn't work out well. But then we walked up and we got some recommendations for a product design firm here in Atlanta called Creature Product Development. We want to let remind people how important it is to get reference vendors that you're going to be with, both so that you know that they're on the up and up, but also so that they do, you know, that they do quality work. We've been reminded that there are a lot of product design firms out there that claim that they can make prototypes and do a great job for you. But when you dig into their portfolio, they actually brought many product ideas to life all the way through successful manufacturing and strong sales. But this particular company that we, we ended up working with, Creature, they had a great process where they had several brainstorms with us and we talked about what we wanted to accomplish and not as much about what it had to look like. So they think through different ways the product could be shaped, how it could be assembled, what materials it would use. And we narrowed it down to two top ideas and then from there made a list of pros and cons and got manufacturing costs for those two final ideas and narrowed it down. And then as we mentioned before, we got feedback from friends and family from the Kickstarter, et cetera, to continue innovating. But we'll add too that we did not want to compromise on quality. So while this is expensive, those who have that, we don't use cheap fiberglass poles, we don't use cheap non breathable fabric. Because we want to make sure that not only does our product work and it's safe, but that people get it and feel it and say, okay, this justifies the price.

So how many, how many, how many reinventions or how long did that process take?

Let's say, well, we worked with Creature Product Development before we started manufacturing. So they helped lock down really the basic design that we still use today. We've just made small tweaks to it actually. So yeah, yeah, they helped us with the basic design. I did want to give a shout out to our manufacturing partner, right. So he has locked arms with us in so many different ways. He's in Columbus, Georgia. He has an office in China as well. And he has also helped us in product design. So we've got new product coming that is something that you'll be able to use with your existing slumber pod. And actually the idea of how it is designed came from him. And we are working directly with the factory on making this prototype.

And when is this coming out? When?

We hope by the end of the year. End of the year or the end of the year? Yeah.

Fantastic.

Really close.

Yeah.

To the design.

Yeah. And let me give. You know what I would say to you is always have new ones coming. Always have. You know, you got to always have because it keeps everybody excited, you know, and it gives you an anticipation, it gives you hope. And you've also got a ready made market out there looking for, like, what else can these people come up with? We love the first product, you know, and so we love the slumber pod and they're going to be already prepped to try out whatever you bring. So that's a great move for you. I'm glad to hear that. Thanks so much. And I'm looking forward to having another chance for us to get together because I want to ask you how you keep yourself on track and through this thing from the idea to where you didn't even know, you know, didn't even know what it could turn into. But you're following, you know, you're chasing mysteries and dreams. You know, Tom Petty's got some great lines and lyrics about that, you know, and you don't know where it's going to end, but you're chasing it because you know there's something there. But I want to hear how you stayed on track to do that. But thanks so much for this information about the accelerator groups, the affinity groups, how you went about the marketing and expanding and getting your product built. Thanks so much. Appreciate it, Katie. Thank you.

Thank you, Larry.

And thank you, Lou.

Thank you. Our pleasure.

If you enjoyed what you've heard and are dead serious about finding out for yourself exactly how this works in the real world, I've taken the most valuable business lessons I've learned over 40 years and put them into something for you to watch, go to whiteellawinning.com webinar now in order to move up as fast as possible, I'm Larry Wydell and I run the Million Dollar Mastermind. Go, go, go.