Launching Without A Runway With Tracy Hazzard From Live To Grind Podcast With Brandon T. Adams

Welcome to the University of Young Entrepreneurs. My name is Brandon Adams, lifestyle entrepreneur and inventor. Passionate about helping others with creating something great and becoming unforgettable. Each week we discuss helpful tips on becoming a successful entrepreneur and interview other entrepreneurs and inspirational people. Our goal is to help take your business and lifestyle to the next level. Now let's get started.

Welcome back to the University of Young Entrepreneurs. I'm Brendan T. Adams and on today's show we have Tracy Hazard. Tracy is going to jump into what she does with helping people get their product to market. We're going to learn about the whole process and this is very refreshing for me to do another interview like this to teach you what it takes to take your idea from start to finish and hit it to the market. So she walks us through. I actually had her walk me through as if I had went to her three years ago when I had first had my idea, Arctic Stick. She walks through the whole process. What she would do to help me get a licensing deal, what it would consist of, what they do to go the manufacturing route where you actually want to create your own company out of your product. And it really surprised me the approach they take, which they basically go backwards in the whole process, which gives them an 86% success rate. So a lot of great content in this show. If you want to know what it takes to get your product to market. She goes through all the details and then we talk about crowdfunding too, about how to use crowdfunding for taking your product to market. There are some interesting things in this show that I was, I was even learning myself in the industry as I know about this. I was learning too. So Tracy has some great content and you won't want to miss it. Before we jump into the show, I want to remind you we have our company Keys to the Crowd and we have now a seven day free course for you. If you go to keystothecrowd.com and subscribe, you get a seven day free course to teach you everything about crowdfunding. You guys demanded it, so I created it. That's keystofthecrowd.com and you can learn everything you want. Just subscribe and. And you will get everything you need and learn about crowdfunding. 7 day free course. And then also we're doing weekly webinars and you can find them on our site. Stay updated with us. We have one actually here tonight. It's at www.keysofthecrowd.com.

Pro tips. So you don't want to miss that.

I'm giving you guys a lot of.

Free value because I want to help you out. And maybe you can launch your next billion dollar idea with crowdfunding. And we'll start by you learning from T.R. about everything she knows. So let's jump right into it with Tracy Hazard and with her company's has design and mentors to inventors. Let's get started.

Welcome back to the University of Young Entrepreneurs. I'm Brendan T. Adams, and on today's show, we have Tracy Hazard with has design and mentors to inventors. I'm excited for this show because, as you know, everyone, I'm the inventor of the Arctic stick. I've been in this field for a while. I've made a lot of mistakes. I don't know as much as Tracy here. That's why I'm really excited to learn from her and how her success rate is so high. But, Tracy, tell me about how you even got into this field of the inventing field, the product development. How you got into this lead, into your story, where you got started, how it led you into where you're at today.

Well, I went to art school. I went to Rhode Island School of Design, where I met my husband and partner now. But at the time, he was the industrial designer, he was the inventor. And I was working for companies like Milliken and Herman Miller. I worked on the Aeron chair. And so I was doing the corporate design route and loving it. And then he came up with this crazy invention at the time.

A stylus pen for a handheld computer. Back then, it was the Palm Pilot. And he wanted to do this and he wanted to go into business. And I had just left Herman Miller and was sort of unhappy in my current position. And I said, well, if you really want to do this.

I believe in your ability to invent things to, but I don't believe in your ability to manage a company. So if you're going to do it, I'm going to manage your company. And so that's what we did. And we started and went into business together in the late 90s.

And then at about 2001, early in that year, Palm Computing and Ideo, the largest industrial design firm in the world, infringed on our patent.

They did.

They did. And I literally went to bed in tears. We spend all this money, we have all these employees. What am I going to do? And I just cried myself to sleep. And the next morning I woke up and I called the 13 angel investors I had and the employees I had. And we sat in a room and we said, what are we going to do? And we decided to fight it. Which, looking back now, that might have been pretty youthful and stupid, but it was what we had to do, and it actually ended up working out for us in a really unusual.

I want to hear this because I just got back from California. I spoke on the Patent act, innovation, and how patent trolls and the whole nine yards. So tell me what that process looked like for one, from the start, where they took your idea, infringed on your patent, and you attacked them. What did that look like? Tell me the process.

It was a really. You know, that's the thing about it. It's not straightforward. It's not like somebody's infringing on you. It's always complicated. It's always nuanced. It's always someone's judgment. But what happened was that Palm Computing was the very first kind of platform for developers. We know what that's like today with apps and itunes and the way all of that works and Google Play. But back then, that was the only game in town for that. It was the first time they had this cooperative between developers and they gave you their code and you developed a program or you got the specs for the PalmPilot ahead of time, and you developed a pen that worked with it or a case. And so that's what it was like. It was supposed to be this cooperative. And we kept trying to get in the catalog because back then it wasn't online, it was a catalog, and they kept refusing us. And then all of a sudden, this pen that looks almost exactly like ours comes out in the catalog. And they had endorsed it and not ours. And so luckily our patent had just issued. So we now, if it hadn't, we would have just been sitting there waiting for that to happen and out of business, because you have to wait before you can sue anyone. It's not infringement until it issues.

So did you. I mean, obviously you had to have a patent lawyer pursue this further. I mean, did you have to pay. Did the patent lawyer work off a percentage of the case? Or do you have to pay a lot of money up front?

You know, what we did was we bluffed it. We didn't have the money to pay him. He had enough money for him to write, like, the original filing, and that was it. So it was about $5,000, and that's all we had. So we put $5,000 in it, wrote the original filing, and then launched a massive PR grassroots campaign where we wrote things like, do we detect a bit of pen envy on our website and it went viral at that time, as viral as you could. Everybody was sending it around in email. And our site crashed multiple times because people were going to it because we wrote a complete timeline of the invention process on there which reveals. You save that because back then it wasn't a first to file. It was the conception date mattered. And you usually kept that secret.

So you ended up, did you end up settling out of court then?

We did because Pumpkin Putin was trying to go public and ideo indemnified them. So you have this kind of complicated thing going on with who's paying for what and who's in charge. And there's this pressure. They settled and.

And the problem is usually when you settle these deals and you settle for a percentage of the future royalties on whatever's going to happen, pretty much guaranteed that product will get killed and you'll get $0. So I think we maybe recoup the 5,000 we spent in legal and broke even. Never got another dime more than that.

You learned from that process?

We did. But you know what? We validated our patent. So I was able to able to later license and sell it. And we wouldn't have had that if it had always been sitting in this unknown contested realm.

Well, that is interesting to me on the whole patent thing because that's a really tough subject right now with the Patent Act, Innovation act, and actually my listeners know this. But every once in a while, if you have Pandora, there's a 30 second ad on Pandora with me talking about my patent. And I signed off of this and I didn't know what they were going to do with it. They did a whole documentary on me. And now every once in a while my friends are like, dude, I just saw you. On my Pandora ad when I was working out there, this Brandon Adams pops up and talking to me like, what?

That's so funny.

It's so random. But it's interesting once you get in that field, how involved you can get.

Well, this is what is about. Five years ago, I found out we were being taught this case study on tea tools. That was the name of the company, tea tools. And our tea tools stylus pen was being taught in 26 universities around the world through the Harvard Business Review from a student at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Business who I, who had a grad student who had worked on a project for a teacher there, and I had just kind of granted him an interview, talked to him about it. I thought it was just like a course project, didn't realize it was going to turn into this gigantic thing that was being taught. But people are always shock. Students contact me on LinkedIn, and that's how I started finding out about it, is they contact me because they're always shocked at the process we took. Like, none of them would fight it with the information we had. They would never have gone to the mat on it.

Yeah, you definitely have courage there because it's a lot of work to go through with that process. So I want to jump in. Launching without a lot of Runway. You know, you guys said you had 86% success, right? Which just blew my mind. I mean, they say 1 in 1,000 inventions actually make more than initially invested. So if somebody out there, they have an idea, they have this great product. Tell me about the process you guys go through with your clients to help them get that to market.

Yeah, so we have 35 patents, and that's our 86% commercialization rate is on those. But we also have 250 products that are in mass retail right now. Pretty much most of them are. I mean, mass retail, they cycle in and out. So, you know, might have been a year or two years that something was in. We have one that's been in Costco for four years, which almost never happens. So that's our platinum record product.

What's that product? Can you say?

Yeah, it's the Metrex office chair. It's a mesh office chair that sells for $99. In fact, today it might even be on sale for $79. You can occasionally find it for that. And yeah, it's really great. And people love it. And I go into people's offices all the time and I'm like, oh, yeah, I see you have a CMI chairs. So, you know, it feels really gratifying to be that kind of designer. But it only happens because we don't bring to fruition products we know won't succeed. And that's kind of our key is the process we do. Things is out of order. You'd think for a couple of designers, make would be first, but make it is last.

So tell me, how do you put them through that thorough process? I mean, because sometimes greatest ideas that are innovative, I mean, they may get shut down right away. So what is your process look like for deciding if it's going to succeed or not?

Well, really, we always start with a why. So we start with. We call it the prove it phase. And the prove it phase is kind of like your market and competitive research. But it has to start out with your why and your goals and budget. Because if you don't know that you only have this much resources or you only have this access to a particular target market, then you really can't be as successful as possible. We know exactly who our channel is. We always know how it's going to go. So sometimes inventors go into a product and they're like, well, I really want it to be on the shelf of Walmart, but I guess I'll sell it on Amazon. Those are two different design problems. Actually. Selling online has to attract your attention. With a little tiny thumbnail on a shelf, it's completely different.

It's a whole other world. I mean, I sell on Amazon and I love the convenience of waking up and seeing a few hundred dollars of sales go through. And I didn't do anything. Now, going into Walmart, and we've had on the show selling to the masses, Matt Pfeiffer, and I've been down to Bentonville, even looked at living there at one time. That is a retail universe. But it's one thing. I mean, there's brokers every which way down there. It's one thing to get your product on the shelf, but it's another thing to actually have it get off the.

Shelf, have it actually sell. Yeah. And so because of that, when we look at it, we say, well, if you're in this inventor entrepreneur short Runway launching. And we do this because it's sort of based on the Doolittle World War II raid, where the idea is that if you go 468ft off of an aircraft carrier, you're dead. You only have 467ft. I'm sure you've seen the movie Pearl harbor, but the more young version of that is Pearl harbor with Ben Affleck. But if you go 468ft, you're dead. And that's the problem is, for most entrepreneurs, is that any one of these things can be fatal. A big company just adds some Runway to the end, so they have a lot of money they can throw at it. And they make mistakes, too. They make mistakes because that's my job, to pick up the pieces for them.

Yeah, they can make mistakes because they have the money, but somebody starting out, they make a mistake and it breaks them.

Exactly. Our process is sort of designed to kind of weed out the biggest areas where that might happen and give you a direction to go that will tell you, hey, is this still fitting my criteria? Maybe I need to design to this. What would make me special in this target market. It's not all that different from what you do in a digital world when you're trying to find keywords that you want to impact, or when you jungle scout something on Amazon, all of those things are the same kind of process, but this is done with a much more understanding of looking at your actual market and what they want to buy.

So I want to walk through this process to give the audience a better insight. So I'm coming to you. This is. Let's look back two and a half years ago, or whatever it was, and I have this great idea called the Arctic Stick. And I have nothing but drawing on a piece of napkin. But I have this great idea to take it and make millions. And I come to you, what are you going to first tell me what are the steps we're going to go through together, to work together?

The first thing we're going to do is talk about do you want to have a company or do you want to have a product that's licensed and sold? It makes a big difference what you do.

Let's go put down both paths. And now, when I started, I wanted a company, and then I realized that now I just wanted to sell it. So let's go down the path of, let's say I want to start a company.

Okay? So if you want to start a company, then you have to build it for a little bit slower growth. So it's slow at the beginning, but it can accelerate quickly. So we want to get you eventually in mass retail. That is going to be the goal if you're going to have a company, because you're going to have to, you know, handle that amount of overhead that a company has. So you've got to have the volume of sales. So we're going to design it for that. So that's number one criteria. So we say, okay, eventually we want to get you on the shelf somewhere. So first, though, we have to understand who's going to buy it, because if you're going to be on the shelf, it better be women.

And that's a big surprise for a.

Lot of people because women are the main buyers.

Women buy more than 80%. They buy or influence more than 80% of the purchases at mass retail.

Women.

Okay, yes. And I say that, I always jokingly say it's in every category, including men's underwear. And most everybody laughs and they like, think about it, though. Think about it. At one point your mom bought your underwear. At another point, you start buying it yourself. But what are you thinking about? I'm thinking about the woman who might see me in these underwear. And then later it might be your wife who buys your underwear. So it's just how it goes in a cycle. So there's always a woman involved in that process. And that's just, you know, whether or not they are actually doing the buying, it doesn't mean they're not involved in the process of saying yes. No, that's a good one. Yeah, you should buy that.

So are you going to assist the person with figuring out the fine engineers to do the CAD drawings and the manufacturing and for retail, I mean, you one stop shop or do you have partners to help you with that?

We do both. Yeah, but right now you're jumping ahead. So the next thing we do is we plan it. We actually don't make anything still. We don't engineer anything, we don't draw anything. We really sit down and analyze. Okay, I know that target market. I understand what drives them, I understand what else they buy. I understand who might be my competitors here and what features they have. And I look at that. But instead of making a minimum viable product, which is a big catchphrase today, we make a maximum valuable product and we define the criteria that has to be a part of it or I will not succeed. And we identify those one or two things. We don't go for tons. We go for one or two things that make it so special, someone stops and looks and that we call giving it impact. And we go from there to look at what team do we need, what resources, what equipment do we need, what kind of product materials should this be? And we define our design criteria and then we go design it. So we go prototype it is our fourth phase. But in that process of it, the next thing after plan it is price it. And so we price it before we prototype it. That's the major hole that most people fall into.

You're basically doing it backwards from what most people do it. But that's how it should be done.

Exactly. And you notice we haven't patented anything yet either.

Okay, you price it. How do you come up with what would be a fair market price? I mean, do you focus groups or.

No, we always do our market price based on other products in the market because it will give you even if you don't have a comparable product, we do other products that are similar in either look, feel, brand or in actual features. So we do that and then we do an assessment. And sometimes we do that with focus groups. We do things like really easy stuff like go for 100 people on an app and compare one side by side to another and say, would you spend $5 more for this one that has that. And so we value the feature that's important and see how much more it would be. Even if it doesn't have it. We just say imagine this product had that and would you pay $5 more for that over this one?

So after you figure out the pricing and who your market is, everything else, then you go to the prototyping stage.

Then we go to the prototyping stage and we do everything. This is the core of our business where we do colors, materials, product design, we 3D print things, we make it kind of materials with all of our resources. We source manufacturing at this stage, but only for sort of volume and quotations. We don't actually have them make anything unless we need them to prototype for us. And sometimes we do depends on the size of the product or the complexity of it. And we, you know, at that point start planning our marketing too. So we get involved in our clients marketing. So we feed all the information that would be a part of a website or part of a PR campaign. We make sure the message and the brand all has synergy. We don't do branding, we refer out.

You refer out for branding. You are still like the one stop. You can find everything you need to get the product to market.

Yeah. In fact we prefer people who care about the brand and work on the brand. So we like them to either have our resources or have someone and be already caring and doing about it. Because brand is the one thing that we can't fix.

No.

So no, you can't fix it later. And if you launch with the wrong brand, especially.

The higher price product and you launch with the wrong brand, that you'll never. That we know that that can be a killer point. And it's not something we do ourselves. And somewhere in that process we prototype. I should mention, I mean patent. I should mention it depends on the prototype process, where we are in it. Once we decide what it all has in it that's unique and patentable, then we patent.

Okay, so what about people that say that you should make sure you go get a provisional patent right away so nobody steals your idea. What are your thoughts on that?

We don't. We like to keep it a trade secret. We do sometimes when we have to. So if we have to disclose, you know, for instance, we have a patent on an interesting kind of 3D print filament right now that we're working on getting to market. And there's no way we managed to make one prototype of it. It was kind of weak. The method that we had to use to make it, there's no way to do it without getting a manufacturer involved and a big heavy piece of equipment that's going to need to be used for it. So we filed a provisional in that case because we had no choice. That way we use, we don't use NDAs ever. No non disclosure agreements ever.

So you guys are like, I've been on Shark Tank casting call and it's funny that there's people in line and they have like a box and they won't show anybody what's inside the box.

No, we're all for sharing it. We actually are. So we try to find ways to share it, but we share it carefully. So. So if we're going over and we have to have things made in Asia by sources, because there's no other way to make your prototype, we break it up into pieces so that no one actually knows the whole thing. So we split it between different sources. So we keep it a secret until we're ready because we want to keep your cost down. So $130 and maybe $1,500 with an attorney filing it. For you to file a provisional patent only gives you a year. The cycle to get on a shelf can take 18 months to two years. So you won't know if it's successful before you have to spend all that money on a patent. You won't have sold anything.

Yeah, and the thing is too, I always say success attracts success and money attracts money. So if you're making a lot of money, that's when they steal their idea. If you're not making any money, people aren't going to steal your idea.

Exactly. So we try to be really open about things and that's when we file a provisional, when we really need to talk about it. But most often we're just testing ideas. And so it doesn't have a conceptual framework. We just like. It's almost like we're doing like use testing, source testing, market testing. We're just doing like tiny little bits and pieces along the way and then we pull the thing together.

Okay, so you let's. That's the route for going to manufacturing. What about if somebody wants to go the licensing route?

So when they want to go the licensing route, we have the step after prototyping before we actually produce it, is predict it. And we move that process up. And predicting is all about high growth forecasting. This is, you know, we talk about the coolest cooler as being a having issues. One of the things that they didn't plan for and didn't predict was what happens when you have that high growth model. You have to choose different manufacturers, you have to choose different engineers, you have to choose different things than you would choose if you're doing it, the bootstrap method. And so that's where we always make sure we analyze that before we go into production, depending on how their funding goes. Because you never know with some of the people we work with. Are they going to go on Kickstarter? Are they going to get crowdfunding another way? Are they going to get an investor? It all changes based on that. So we have to set up a sort of prediction method to make sure that we capture all that so they don't go down the wrong path.

So that goes into a great topic. After my experiences, I mean I made a lot of mistakes in the process and most people do and they don't find you soon enough to help you. And after my $100,000 of education and three and a half years of my life, I have that degree to say I have a product called Arctic Stick. But what I found out is the two major factors. What people lack is a lack of funds and lack of resource and knowledges or knowledge on how to even do it. That's why I created my course Light Bulb to launch. But I want to hear your insight about crowdfunding. So. So I'm the king of crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is what I do. I help people raise money for an idea and that's how I actually got the last leg of funding for my invention Arctic Stick on Kickstarter. What are your thoughts on crowdfunding? If somebody's going to do it, what it look like for doing a crowdfunding campaign to launch your product to the market? What would you advise? What would be the process you would want them to go through before even doing that?

So the thing about it is that take the coolest cooler as a good example of that is that you'd think that that crowdfunding campaign would have just been a huge tremendous endorsement that they sold 60,000 units, 60,000 people want it. That's a great market proof endorsement. But then when you go wrong after that, you realize they're not really on a shelf today. If they had come through my process and come with me, we would have had them in Costco before. They would have had before that any delivery problems would have happen because you have to have a good plan for that. You have to prove that you can deliver in a mass retail world. And that's why we Say we slow down at the beginning and we use only the things that will give us market proof that we can't screw up. And crowdfunding can very easily be screwed up. And that's really where you could have a campaign that goes wrong because you didn't do your job on the marketing side. You didn't have a big enough email list, or you didn't have the right email list and have nothing to do with the product. But when that crowdfund fails, now all of a sudden anyone you might be meeting with at retail will see it and they'll go, hmm, well I don't think there's a market for this. And it's the kiss of death. It's very, very risky. Depending on your plan it is.

And it's a double sided story. I mean, you look at it this way, you could have huge success, the world can see it. You can have huge failure, the world will see it. That's, that's why, I mean that's why we help people figure out how to actually do it right, how to make sure their funding goal is enough. Because you don't have the problem the Coolest Cooler had, which I mean, in my mind that would be a better problem to have than no funding because they'll figure it out. But you got to learn these process and it's come to you to understand before even doing that crowdfunding process because you got to have the things in place, the CAD drawings, your what your plan is after getting all this money and actually knowing what it's going to cost to manufacture. Because most people have no idea and usually ends up being double what you initially think it's going to cost.

Yeah, and see that's the thing is a lot of them do it too soon. You're at the prototype stage, but you really didn't go for the right manufacturing sources. You didn't do that prediction model. You didn't really look at all those things. Also you don't understand them because you've never done it before. That's really where you have to get someone involved who does know the process to advise you at minimum.

Thing about it is that you didn't account for a whole load of things that are going to go wrong or going to be more difficult than you imagine. And so your actual cost of your rewards, for instance, are all wrong. They're undeliverable at that stage. And that's a little bit what they found out. Like their delivery costs were way off at Coolest Cooler. And so those type of things are mistakes that can be avoided by just getting the right advisor in there. You don't have to pay anyone to do anything. Yet at this stage, what would be.

The main mistakes you see people make when they come to you for their idea?

The main mistake. So, you know, you mentioned that.

You know, the biggest problem is funding and all of those things. I actually, in my research and in some compilations from research from Forbes and Inc. And other places, Entrepreneur magazine, I've come to realize that actually the three biggest areas are market fit, product fit, and the wrong plan and the wrong resources. That funding is actually only about 12% of the problem. Really, 88% is all the other things. And all those other things are solvable.

They're also ones you can head off before you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on tooling and product development and all of those things. So that's why we do our process the way that we do. So you head it off. You head in. If I can check the fit between the market and the product, I'm going to get more than 56% of the problems that go wrong in a startup right at the beginning. And maybe I spent $20,000.

Do you help your clients, I mean, find funding then if that's a less important part, like how do they. Because a lot of people, I mean, come with ideas, but the average person can't afford to launch a product in the market.

Yeah, you know, the thing is, if your market is right, if your market is right and your product is right and those two things are a fit, the money will come is what I found from the clients that I work with. There is no problem when you have market proof and social proof and product proof. So you're, you know, you've got, you don't have to have a patent issued. In fact, I highly urge you not to have an issued patent before you start the process. And it's just those things are the most, are the hardest and the biggest risk for an investor to get over. When they say you hear it all the time in shark tank. Well, do you have any sales? Sales is a form of proof. But what do you do when you don't have sales? When you can't have sales because you haven't made it yet? That's the proof that we look for. We have proof that you have competitors. The investors care that you have competitors. They don't want you to be the first in anything.

That's true. Because that's one thing. Like if you have no competition, then that must mean there's a sign that nobody wants your product.

Right. And I mean even the mass retail buyers. I can't tell you how many times I go into Costco and they say, well, we don't want to be the first to launch this. How's it doing at Target? You know, they don't want to be, how's it doing on Amazon? And actually that's the really funny part, is that when you try to get a meeting with a retail buyer, they are Amazon checking your product at that moment.

So we teach our clients, and this is where I work with partnerships, on getting it on the shelf there on Amazon shelves and getting it ranking is that you need a trifecta at that right moment when you're trying to get the retail buyer to take a meeting with you. So you're getting the right person calling them who can get a meeting. You're getting publicity. Not in a major magazine that consumers care about, but in a magazine where the buyer cares what the buyer cares about. What do they follow? You know, we do it. We've done a lot of products in the furniture world. They care what furniture today says. Who's ever read that? In your normal world? No one. But that's where you want your article written and then that you are ranking right at that moment. Even if it's like, you know, one of those things where you just throw a bunch of money into the campaign for 60 days just while you're calling on the, on the buyer, you do it because it makes the difference.

So how do you feel about selling on Amazon? Because that's. I got the experience and that's how I launched my product. And it's a very easy, simple way. And for me, because I, I don't want to be creating into a company. I hands off, sell the product and I have a lot of other ventures that I'm working on. What are your thoughts on selling Amazon for anybody that is looking to take that route, benefits or disadvantage to it.

I think Amazon is amazing. I am a huge Amazon shopper. Women are huge Amazon shoppers. If it's going on Amazon, then you are absolutely going to succeed. So if it's succeeding there, that's why buyers look at it. They know it's going to fly. So, you know, for me, if someone's not on Amazon, I almost don't take them. If they're at that stage, I almost won't take them as clients. I was like, if you don't want to sell on Amazon, then it's a path to, to every stage of retail business.

No. And they actually help you drive traction. And then obviously reviews are big and you build it up and then you really can get a lot of traction. It's a snowball effect. But how does that affect if you're selling Amazon, if you're going to go to a retailer because of the pricing strategy?

Well, what we do with our big clients is we make different products, slightly different products. So we make a different product for Amazon than we do for Target.

So you may be selling.

So you might be selling, let's say for me, I'm selling the Arctic stick. I sell a six pack online, maybe in a store, I'm selling a two pack or selling a different variety of the product.

Yeah, exactly. We do. A different flavor is really what we call it. And so it will be a different finish, different color. It might be. You know, the thing is, is that on Amazon you want to have a little bit more variety in terms of brightness of color and the way your photos look because you're on a white background. That's like the Amazon thing. But in a store it's super busy. There's like all these things on a shelf and it's a self assisted environment. No one's directing you there, no one's making the suggestions for you. Like on Amazon suggested you should buy this. You can't advertise to them right in the store except to get yourself an end cap, which costs a fortune even for the biggest of vendors.

So that's where it's just a different environment. So it should be a slightly different product.

Okay. You've gave a lot of great content and it's really refreshed my knowledge on this area because there's so, so much to learn. For this show we've had people from Bentonville talking product, the brokers, inventors and everything else. And you have your own podcast show too, right?

Yeah, it's called WTFFF, which stands for what the FFF and FFF is to use filament fabrication 3D printing. It's totally geeky, but it's not like it's for those that don't know what the heck this 3D printing stuff is and do I want it. Why should I care about it?

Nice. Well, I suggest people check it out if you want to learn more about the whole process of taking your product to market and prototyping. My last couple questions for you, I always ask people is what would be your top tips to give any young entrepreneur out there for success in business or life?

My top tip is really to hire resources. I know it sounds Intimidating that you should be like, I don't have money. I need to do it myself. But the reality is that time is money, and so the right resources are accelerators to your business and accelerators to your product. They get you money faster. They get you revenue faster. So the five top ones that I go for, and it's different for every product, but these are the five I consider every time I do a project, and that is branding. Because you want to do it once, you don't want to do it twice. So you want to make sure your branding is right, and you also want the right level of branding expert. You don't need to overpay for this and hire, you know, the amazing New York branders. If you're really not that kind of level of product, your audience should dictate the kind of branding expert you need. Design and engineering. I mean, I say that as a designer, but I don't take every project because I don't do every category. I highly recommend finding a designer or engineer in your category. So we hired an engineer once to do a chair for a client that had a power in it. You could charge your phone and that kind of thing.

Wait, you're kidding me.

No.

You know the guy.

It failed because the batteries exploded because the electrical engineer didn't know what he was doing.

Well, there's a. There's actually. That's so random you brought that up. Because I just had somebody reach out to me. They're doing a Kickstarter campaign now, and his. He has a chair that. It has a battery inside the chair, and he plugs in for his phone to keep it charged along.

Yep.

Is that a different person or is that.

No, no, no. This was a long time ago. It was a chair that was an ipod chair because that's how old it is. It was an ipod chair. Really? Not an iPhone chair. And it was an ipod chair, and the batteries exploded. It went into staples, and the batteries exploded, and it had to be returned. And it was a rookie error someone made who thought that they could just handle batteries, but they didn't. You have to group batteries in a certain way when you do rechargeables. And it was the bat. The. It was never designed to be rechargeable. And that's what went wrong when it. When the buyer said, I want to have it rechargeable. You needed a new engineer, but when you don't have someone who's done it before, they make those mistakes.

Well, this kid's out of Florida now. He's doing A charging chair.

So where you, you know, battery. I mean, take a look at what's going on with, you know, all the products that are exploding on the market. Anything with a battery is dangerous.

Hoverboards. Yeah, all of it. So you.

So let me just really quickly, the last three sourcing. If you're going to source, it doesn't matter if it's in the US or in China or anywhere else in the world. You have to have someone in person. So if you can't do it and you don't know what you're doing, you need someone who knows what they're doing there. And then cfo. I recommend finding yourself outsourced cfo. They're there. Hire them. If you're not good with numbers and you don't know how to make predictions, if you don't know how to do an analysis on am I making money? Is this profitable or not? Hire someone. And then quality assurance, this is where most people make the mistakes, is you don't follow your first run of your product. You have to have somebody on the ground at the factory watching it every day.

100% agree. Yeah, great, great advice there. One other thing. Do you have a book that you would suggest for anybody to read if it has to do with product development or maybe just motivational?

So for IP and product development, my favorite book is Rembrandts in the Attic, and it really talks about how intellectual property, how patents and assets can become a significant asset to your company. And we know that because for a lot of the companies we work with, we take them, Maybe they're about 150 million, and we double their business through design and intellectual property additions and they get sold off, they get bought out, and they were never on the path to do that before. So we know that those patents have value and really change your valuation. At the end of the day, Tracy.

You'Ve provided a lot of great content and it's good to refresh remembering this and have the audience understand better for the product development process. Where can people find you?

They can find me anywhere at hasdesign. So on social media. My website is Has Design, and that's H A Z Z because my last name's Hazard with two Z's. And you can also find me at Mentors, two inventors, and that's the number two in there, and they're both plural.

Tracy, great insight. I really appreciate you coming on the show.

Thank you so much for having me.

Well, that's it for the show, everyone. You know what time it is. Go out there create something great and become unforgettable because life is too short not to. I'm Brendan T. Adams. Have a great day everyone.

Really hope you enjoyed the show with Tracy. I enjoyed it myself. Some great content there. Be sure to check out the notes@brennantadams.com under Show Notes. We've got more information about the show and also links to our site. That's hasdesign.com and mentors2inventors.com reach out to her if you have any ideas or if you want to take your product to market. She can give you some great insight. And also, like I said before, the crowdfunding course. A free crowdfunding course. I got a free seven day crowdfunding course for you. If you go to keystofthecrowd.com and subscribe, you can get that there. I'm enjoying all this stuff. I'm asking you to come and give me advice on what kind of shows you want. I've been interviewing some great people. A couple shows coming up in the coming weeks. Wow. Some amazing people that have taught me a lot and I want to bring them to you. But if you have ideas for different guests or different topics for shows, whatever it may be, hey, reach out to me brandonurnantaddams.com and just let me know who you want to see on the show or if you have somebody that you think would bring great content for this show. That is it for today's show. I hope you enjoyed it. And in the meantime, go out there, create something great and become unforgettable. Because life is too short not to. I'm Burden T. Adams. Have a great day everybody.