Meet Product Licensing Expert David Liberstein

Protect your brand, product or invention from the hazards of consumer product launching and go from idea to product to big brand. With guidance from retail product design and development experts Tracy and Tom Hazzard. Get the insider secrets to put the right things in the right order with the right resources so you can out design, outsource and out profit your way to retail success.

Hey, product launchers. Welcome to another office hours and this one is with my friend David Lieberstein and David's company, dream product guru. Doesn't that sound awesome? Like dream product? Don't we all want our dreams to become reality? David's one who knows how that happens. He's also a brand and licensing expert. A lot of you out there really want to make a product to be licensed, but there's a lot of nuances to that. And David's been on both sides of it and worked in within that. And so you really got to hear from him, his expertise in those areas. But first I want to just get to know him because this is our Meet David. David, tell us a little bit about how you got started in the product launching product development world here.

Well, thank you, Tracy. I've enjoyed being in the business world for over 40 years. I'm a serial entrepreneur. I started my first company before I even got into college with my passion of photography. I saw an idea and I created photographic note cards with little inspirational verses in my parents house. Launched that while I was in college and had that for about 10 years and was very successful. And during that period I had artists approach me at the trade shows that had whimsical animals and whimsical children. And that's where I first actually got introduced to licensing because companies came to my booth and said, hey, we really like these cute little pen and ink colored drawings of these animals or these children and we'd like to put it onto our products. I learned how to license our designs to different companies and I actually ended up having Sony Corporation in Japan represent us through their licensing division. And back in the 70s, both of my artists, we had over 20 different licensees doing all kinds of children's products and such. And they were doing over $50 million a year in retail. And at 23 years old, we got a check for $100,000 for six months of sales I spent with my artists.

It's a really challenging world, sort of that art and design side of licensing, then licensing industrial products. There's so many other categories where there's a clear need and you've got the solution, but there's Lots of preferences and trends that happen. That's a lot harder licensing route. So to be that successful is amazing.

That's a great introduction.

So, yeah, you're talking about being. I'm going to call it the maker side of it. Right. So the producer side of things and helping with the why you would license and why you would bring that in, because you kind of played right in.

Both worlds that particular situation. I licensed the artwork to put on my greeting cards and other products. And then I became the licensing agent for the artists to license their artwork to other companies to put art graphics on their products. My second company, I had for over 25 years wine things Unlimited in the wine accessory housewares industry. Again, I worked with a number of different artists, more for partly for art work to apply to ceramic mugs and glassware, but also with an artist to design functional shapes of ceramics. And I ended up licensing the rights to characters to put on our figurine bottle stoppers such as Looney Tunes, Betty Boop, Star Trek, Cirque du Soleil. And then we got into glassware and eventually got into licensing colleges. We had collegiate glassware line. So I really understand the whole gamut of as a licensee and as a licensing agent.

Well, you know, that is such a unique experience because we have a lot of people who have gotten licensing advice from attorneys. It's important. You've got to have contracts, there's contracts involved. You should understand what that is and you should have an attorney. But to get advice about whether or not it makes business sense to really evaluate, am I going to make money doing this? Is this worth it? Is this going to hurt my brand or help my brand? That's a big question. And there are not a lot of people with your experience on both sides of that who are able to advise, well, so you have people who have only been the licensors all the time. And so they have their viewpoint. And to be honest with you, it scares me because they have to burn through a lot of people in the process to find the right person to license the right brand to license.

As a matter of fact, I took on a client about three years ago, housewares product. They had the fully patented issued for their invention was called a sweater hammock.

This is how we met because that was a mutual acquaintance.

And so I connected with them through CEO Space Entrepreneurial program. And I really liked the product. And they didn't want to venture themselves, they wanted to license. So I took it on as an agent. I went to the houseware shows Two years ago, shopped it around, went to the booths that had clothing racks and drying racks and such. And this is a unique product that mounts on the wall horizontally to pull a net across to the opposing wall above a washer, dryer or bathtub. Rather than a line, it's a 24 inch wide netting so you can lay your sweaters out or any kind of hand washable clothing. Found it was a really important category. But at the end of the day I found two very good companies that had some interest. One company really interested, probably three or four hundred million dollar company. He told me straight out, the vp, they had just acquired three new companies and after a couple months of communicating with him, he said, you know, it's a great product, it's perfect for us, but it's going to get lost. Because partly it hadn't been fully engineered, we didn't have a working prototype yet, didn't have hard costs and it's one item. And he just acquired three different companies with dozens of products, hundreds usually that.

They have to assimilate. So that is always hard. It is hard to get a lot of attention when you're in a company that is doing a lot of licensing. Basically they know that they don't have the best hit ratio. It's like having a large SKU counter, just having a large product line in general. You know you're going to have some failures in there and that's part of why you have so many. Let's break that down a little bit into some things that are common. You mentioned that they had this concept and some drawings. I know that they did come out of that where they give you patent drawings and pretty pictures and sometimes a webpage that you can pitch. Then they start upselling you on pitching you at the licensing show, pitching you at the next show and getting a booth. That's where it starts. And then it expands and expands and before you know it, you probably spent the amount you would have to do to buy a whole entire product line and see if you could sell it on Amazon yourself. It's usually actually more than that. That's what I see.

It's a huge rip off of inventors. And from those companies out there, I really feel that they pry on inventors, on creative people because they may not have a really strong business sense, but they're really passionate about their idea. They spend a lot of time and energy to get it design phase and patented. And unfortunately these companies take advantage of them and they'll end up spending 15, 20, 30, 40, $50,000, which as you say, you can venture your own company with production, tooling, inventory, websites, depending the product for under $50,000. You don't need hundreds of thousands of dollars for a lot of single products if they don't have a really complicated tooling involved and you know how to negotiate with the factories to get a lower minimums to begin with until you have your sales happen.

And this is the thing that we discovered so often that happens with these companies, but also in general with a lot of inventors, even if they've done it themselves and didn't fall into that trap, is that they have a design, it wasn't engineered for the cost that it needed to command in the marketplace. And that's really where it falls into the realm of that. Now then I have to give them the bad news that they have to redesign everything and they do not want to spend money again because they spent it the first time and they got a pretty picture and it should be good, but it doesn't work like that.

And that's a perfect example. Going back to clients of mine, I went back to the message, you know, this company, they're not going to go forward. The licensing, it's going to get lost. And I've talked to all the people that I feel are appropriate. I don't think it's licensable right now. It's up to you. But if you want to venture it, I'll be happy to help you and consult with you to take you through the whole stages of sourcing and through the whole production phase and launching the company, marketing it. At the end of the day, they said, we want to do that, but only if you come on as a partner, because we want your expertise.

That's where you get somebody in to help you, because that's more valuable sometimes than money in.

So I really believed in the product. I really liked them. I saw the importance of that product category. And so I did sign on as a full equity partner. And we launched the product a year ago at the houseware show with the designs that had been worked out with some tweaks that the factory made to make it more functional. And literally on the plane on my way to Chicago, I happened to be sitting next to a gentleman that I knew from another area of my old business. And he has a housewares company and he's not in this category. But we were talking and all of a sudden I told him the pricing on this product and he said, I don't know that category. But he says, I think you've over engineered it. It's way too expensive because we were looking at a retail of like $75 and our target really was 35 or 40 retail.

Right.

I got on the horn that night on email to a couple of my sourcing agents and said, hey, can you figure out how to make this simpler? We need to cut the price in half. One agency came through and boarded me a price 2/3 lower for a very simplified version of it. So we went into the show with the current sample, but I priced it completely differently. Home Depot was interested in some other majors and then we had production challenges with the new sourcing agent. You always do for months and months and by the end of last year we had to move on to another sourcing agent. We just got our first sample in from the new agency at a lower price, less than half of the original one. So we're going to move forward into tooling this fall. And I've sent out images of the prototype to Home Depot buyer and the other major buyer. So we're having to relaunch the whole thing. You have your venture and you have everything lined up. Stuff goes wrong, miss the forest for the trees of what pricing should be. But you have to simplify the design if necessary.

Yeah. So when they met me three years ago, that's exactly the price that I gave them. I said I think if we don't engineer and design it to be this price then you won't be able to make enough traction in the market to be worth sustainable and worth doing a business around. You can sell premium products, you can sell higher priced items, but it's a more effort to start that business and do that. And it also plays you right out of the game of being able to either license it, then sell your brand and or get into the bigger mass market. So if you don't start at the right target price, that's really hard. Usually it's the design and engineering that holds you back. And as you had sourcing challenges, we have a lot of people who have those challenges here. Our clients and what we work with here is we do have a source that we've used for a decade Tom and I trust here. So if you guys need help with that, we can help anyone on the platform, including our experts. So you guys need help with that. And the issue that we had just happened to us recently was yet another client who runs into the trap of they had a price, they put a contract in place and then the factory came back and said, oh, we need $2 more per unit on it and you were already in purchase order mode. It even happens to us and we're good at this and we usually have that. But that brings me to the third major thing that you mentioned in that when you take this long in the process, and like you said, it took that company three months to tell you that they didn't want a license anymore. Right. So there's lots of time lost along the way. And licensing, to me, I've always found it to be a very drawn out process. And the longer it takes, the more risk there is that something else is going to come on the market, that they're going to think it's too much work and they give up on it from the licensor standpoint. So timing to market is a huge problem in the licensing plan world. Usually the inventors get impatient and you can't blame them.

I haven't come across any agents out there that act as a licensing agent for inventions. There's plenty of agents that will sell artwork because there is an easier thing to sell graphics to print on a product. But when you're talking about a product, you're asking a company to invest in tooling, engineering and inventory and marketing. It's a big investment. If companies license a product, generally depending on what the product is like on the sweater hammer, they would have had to put 100, 200 grand into the product. Between tooling, engineering, inventory and proper marketing.

Proper marketing is key. Right.

I have a client I've been working with on the licensing as a consultant. He's been at it for over a year and he was working on it for a couple years before me. And it's a very esoteric frying pan that collects grease. But it's so challenging to find the right company where your product fits their product portfolio, number one. Number two, do they have a program in place to work with an inventor on a license basis? Inventor doesn't want to show his pearls to a potential licensee if they don't have a licensing program. He just gave away his idea. And most ideas can be engineered around. You have a patent, it still comes down first to market, and you have a year or two advance before it does really well. Somebody's going to find a way to get around that patent off and do their own version of it. So you only want to show your design, your idea to a company that has a licensing program in place that they have a format to go through and somebody to work with directly that manages that.

Because otherwise this is also a drag on the timing and system. Because when you have a company who doesn't do it, they're like, well, do we have an attorney that we can call on this? And it'll drag out the time even more. And then also you get, I call it the not invented here syndrome. And so the internal teams are like, well, this is devaluing us, so let's make sure that it doesn't succeed. And so they actually undermine the licensing. So it is not a great idea to be approaching a company unless you've worked for them before, you have a track record with them or personal relationship with them, or someone on your team does, because that's what happens to it. And so you'll just find out months down the road that it's not working out.

And like I tell inventors, the average royalty these days is only 3%. You only get more, you get 5 to 7%. If your product has already been in the market, it's proven itself, it already has a track record, and then you license it out, they'll pay you a bit more. But at 3% average for an invention, even a million dollars of sales, which is a hit run for most companies, is $30,000. You're not going to be able to support yourself fully on that unless it's a hit run that hits, that's 5 or 10 million.

7 out of 10 consumer products fail. Right? You only have a 30% chance of success. That's not good.

I know a couple of inventors where they have a number of inventions that are licensed in one product. They might make 5,000 a year, one they might be 50,000, one they might make nothing on, but they have a number of inventions that are licensed because they are very creative persons. They, they've got lots of inventions, lots of patents. Generally speaking, most inventors will have one really great idea. And so I often say, even though inventors think that it's an easier way to go to find that perfect company, license it out, and sit back and collect the passive income. Yeah, it works really well. But again, you're talking about timelines. Let's say you find the right company, it might take six to 12 months to go through the steps or longer to find the company, negotiate the licensing deal, and then we'd go on the run. Once the licensing deal is closed, it may be a year, 12 to 18 months before it even hits the marketplace because it has to go through their product cycle. Once it's in the marketplace, Most products take 6 to 18 months to get traction. In addition, beyond a small advanced royalty that you hopefully will be able to negotiate, which is, if you're lucky, you'll get 5 or 10,000. Very rarely that, but that's about as much as you can hope for. You're looking at two or three years out before, if it hits well, before you start making some serious money.

So Tom and I have 37 patents and many of them we developed with companies and with brands. So say we invented them outside of it and then went into a company. That's not true, but we do have some that were like that. But the reality is, is that with the exception of the products that we sold directly ourselves or we invented for our own company and own brand to bring to market, we have lots of successes, but they're mixed. And the ones that did the most volume, who are our biggest hits run, had the least royalty on them. I think our best product, and we had what was considered to be a platinum record product, sold $20 million at mass market retail a year. And it was only one sku, so there's lots of low complexity to it. So it's really easy to manage and everything. But that single SKU would yield us $225,000 a year on average. So barely 1%.

And you're very fortunate that you had that kind of a hit run.

That's right. And we had it for five years, which is really a long time in mass market for us to get that. So think about that and you're like, wow, those metrics are great. But I can't tell you how many did $30,000 a year. Probably the bulk of what we did during that time period. And it really was only the fact that we worked on so many projects with so many clients and had so many in that it could make sustainable income for us. And so many, many times we wouldn't be making a living off of our fees that we charge certain clients. We would be making it off our royalties of things we designed two years earlier, because that's how long it takes. You can't start up that way. No design firm could. There is really that hard place for an inventor as well. It's like, it's great, but you may not get that windfall to start this, like, invention brand. Of all these great ideas you have, you may not get it so that you can sustain your business or your growth of being able to do that.

And as you know, once you license your idea to a company, you're hoping they're going to put it through the pipeline and get it out there when they say they will. There's no guarantees and you don't have any leverage on them about that. And secondly, once they have it in the pipeline, if it doesn't just take off on its own accord, you have no control over how much time and money they're going to put into marketing the product and pushing it.

This is one of the reasons that Tom and I ventured out and decided to take matters into our own hands was because we would see that was like we would do these great designs and they were amazing and these products should have made it to market, but the company didn't market themselves properly. And this was back before the Internet, so it was even older than that. So we didn't make back our investment and our time to having designed for them. And so we actually started putting in a criteria over the years where we don't design for companies that don't already have a sales channel because it proves that they can market something. And we've expanded that in the last few years because there are Amazon sellers who understand the market dynamic, have great marketing programs, have things in place, direct response or whatever, they might, however they might do it, but the marketing piece they have down and they practice that. They just don't have as great a product as they could. And so now we can come in and we can help them with that. So I see that it's a different world nowadays where you can make it work, but that marketing piece actually should come first. Which is so crazy, right? When you think because you're such idea product people. Right?

And that's also why I encourage my clients and potential clients that if at all possible get the capital from savings, friends or family, do the numbers, do the math to see what this is going to cost to produce it. Maybe it's only $5 a unit and you only have to buy 3,000 units. That's $15,000. Maybe tooling is only $1,000 and a website is three to five grand. So maybe it's only 25, 30 grand. You need to get this going plus marketing costs. And that might be very attainable for you so that you're completely in charge of your future and your potential earnings rather than hoping that this company's going to do something with it.

And that's the thing is hope is not a plan here. Product launch hazards. You know how I feel about that, David? So hope is not a plan here. And you know what? There's so many things nowadays where we find that there are factories that are very, very comfortable with small minimum runs. There's disruptive technologies like 3D printing as you know, there's a whole bunch of. Whole bunch of technologies that we can utilize if we're doing textiles or materials and getting minimum and low runs on those. So you don't even have to take that big of risk in the early days. And there's a whole bunch of marketing strategies on which you sell a product that's not quite exactly your invention just so you can test your marketing vehicle and make sure you test the sales. And then you have a little fan base so you don't have to market to your friends and family. You might be able to market to your fan base to pre sell something. You could maybe make your first run doing that. So there's lots of these ways to be able to make that work. We've got a few of those on the office hours, so I just want to remind people that they're there. We've got a whole episode on small order quantities and minimum runs and manufacturing concerns that Tom Hazard has done. And we also have one on prototyping. We can do low runs in prototyping mode with digital technologies and disruptive technologies. So those are your concerns and you're seriously thinking about what David's suggesting here and I think you should, that there are also alternative ways to keep that cost down to that under 30,000 metric for. For you, if it seems like it's not. So that's definitely time to get in touch with the rest of the experts on the platform here, please. David, back to what you were talking about. I want to talk a little bit about what's changed over time. There's still this, I'm going to call it old school mentality about what licensing is like and you sort of given us the reality of the new pictures, but in a sense, bullet point that for us this is the way it used to be. You have a myth about this perception and this is reality of how it is. Licensing is fast and it's really not. What are some of those?

Good question. I have a good relationship with a licensing agent out of Chicago and he's been in the business over 35 years, primarily licensing artwork. I saw him at the licensing show last year and I've seen the houseware shows and he said the business has changed so much in the last 10 or 15 years. Back in the 80s 90s, they could get licensing deals all day long at 10% real royalty and the deals would be good for three to five years. Nowadays, he says you have to work so hard to even get one deal on a really good artist that's well known and A very low royalty, 3 to 5% even on artwork. And the sales cycle is much quicker now because people are so add about what they're interested in, both the consumer and the retailer, retail, the buyer for the stores. That a product may only have a life cycle of six to 18 months, where in the past it was five to six, 10 years. So it makes us all have to be much more creative. We're coming up with a product that is very simple, generic, and has an evergreen potential. Those are a couple trends that I can see addressing what you've just mentioned, and that's significant.

So my mom is a fine artist, and she's been approached by many, many licensing agents over time. And I keep looking at the numbers and I'm like, mom, it doesn't make sense of just what you said. It doesn't make sense that you would spend your time and do this because Laguna beach is a big art community out here. She's going to be all summer in the art affair, which is a very, very big deal out here. They actually warned them that they would get approached by these unscrupulous agents that come through and they won't get deals. And they try to get signing fees, which you should never do, never ever.

As an inventor artist, pay someone for the opportunity to make money with your design or your idea. They should only receive money as a percentage of the royalty they receive. There may be a consulting fee involved or some upfront faith money. Because an agent is working on a percentage of the royalty, he or she can't put a whole lot of time into your program without some type of compensation. So there may be a minimal amount up front, but it's not pay us and we'll pitch it. That's not the good way to go.

I'm so glad you said that. I really wanted to be clear on that. There are sometimes consults, and I think there should be because there's an evaluation standpoint, prepping materials and really getting the program in. And there's a lot of time put in before you ever sit in front of someone to talk licensing. But to be able to say that that's ongoing month after month after month, that is not the way to go.

And also for your mother as an artist, if her artwork is unique enough to extent that it would translate onto coffee mugs or tote bags or apparel or things like that, there's a handful of agents out there that I'd be happy to refer you to.

Her work is amazing and beautiful, but it's abstract, which is harder because they're looking for more whimsical things, more illustrative things. I see that on merchandising, as you call it, when you spread your art on merchandising, it's just not in that world. So the best that you can do is go to Home Goods and you buy paintings there that you put on your walls and they are done by artists. It's not like some machine did it somewhere. Right. They're reproductions of someone's fine art and they were licensed or rights were purchased from someone. That's probably the world she falls into for her particular style. But it is important for people to realize that there is that out there. That difference has happened over time and the margins are going down. People used to say that, oh, it was just minimum guarantees were easy to come by. We're going to sell 10,000 of your units and if we don't, then we're going to pay you for that. It goes the other way when you try to license Disney or Universal trolls, whatever you want to do, they're going to charge you. Collegiate is one of the bigger ones. It's hard on the college. USC charges a different amount than Yale. It's crazy as to figuring out what package you're in, but it'll cost you over time. And all those minimums to each of the colleges too. So that's there from that side, but you don't get to command that on your side typically. Right, right.

I mean, we were a licensee with colleges. We had 25, 30 colleges on our products. University of Texas, University of Florida, they were a higher minimum guarantee annually than other ones. There's a couple of key companies that act as a fiduciary for all the different colleges. So it sort of streamlines that. If anybody wants to venture on themselves and get into Collegiate, I definitely consult companies on how to do that whole process. You know, when you're negotiating a contract for your own product, you absolutely want to try to negotiate the most possible advance guarantee, the faith money. And also you want to try to negotiate a minimum guarantee per year. I was working on. You might remember Abraham from CEO Space.

I talked to him a few weeks ago.

He was a client that I took on a couple years ago. We made a connection through CEO Space. I really liked him. He's a young guy, wanted to support him and I took him on as a licensing agent and I went to the licensing show, the Houseware show. At the Houseware show two years ago, I found a company, mid sized company, about $20 million. Company loved the concept of his spin cup, which rotates a design on a double walled acrylic mug beverage glass like you see at Starbucks. And he had a patent pending and everything. And this company loved it. They had hundreds of licensed characters for all the games, Marvel and all this stuff. And the owner had a license agent that he'd used for years to help him negotiate deals. He hadn't negotiated a deal with an inventor before. He's always just on the artwork. It took us a year and a half to finally get a deal. That was March 00:16 and by May 00:17 I finally got a contract with them. And when they sent me back the contract that we all agreed upon, which was minimum guarantees for 5 years advance, etc. They had changed it to a 10 year. There was no guarantees or advances for the first three or four years and there was no guarantees they wouldn't shelve it. I said to my client, to Abraham, you can do this, but you're just giving away your idea and it could be shelved. And I had a conversation with their agent and she said, you're absolutely right, this should be a very simple, clean deal. Three to five year proper advance and guarantees. And at the end of the day they felt that didn't want to go forward with it until the patent was fully issued. They said to me, you know, it's going to take us a year and 100 grand plus in development costs and mold costs and to translate into art with a plus all of our designs and get approvals from all the licensees to put their designs on it and they put on the back burner until the patent got fully issued. It took me a year and a half of my time managing it ongoing. And at the end of the day I was not compensated because I didn't feel it was appropriate to ask him because I was going to get a nice piece of pie. The patent hasn't been issued and the whole project is basically back burden.

I'm a big proponent, and I know you are too, of getting started because some cases all that time you could have killed it yourself if there wasn't a market on it, or you could have proven and created a demand for it. They didn't know. Abraham's a really good example. So I had said to them it was a low amount I quoted to them under $20,000 I think to make a couple thousand piece run or something like that that I was able to figure out the pricing for from some of my factories. We would sort of make a hybrid. So a little more labor involved and a higher per piece cost. But you're testing the market so it's worth it. And you know what you can do in production. But to do that and create an event where you basically sell out of these 2,000 pieces all because you put them on display at a big surfing show that happened in San Clemente. You figure out an event and you create a traction for it and then somebody's going to go, I can't walk away from that. Oh, and look, there's already press on it. You kind of create your own hype and demand on it from making a run. Plus you learn a whole lot about the things like is it really going to be mass produced? Am I really going to be able to do it in the way that I thought I could or do I have to re engineer something or am I going to be able to get the cost down? You're going to learn some things on this process that is really going to inform you. And so I know we're both bigger fans of that because it makes your job easier and that you can command a better deal, but you can also command a faster deal, which is really critically important in today's world. If it's only a 6 to 18 month life cycle that you're seeing on the artwork in product, I really see it as 12 to 18 months as typical. It's a little bit longer only because it takes longer to get into the marketplace. So they spend an investment. So they usually give it a full year. Even still, to get something that's going to last beyond that or make you more than your minimum guarantee is slim to be able to command more because you have proof so much better.

Absolutely.

So that's. I know why you've been doing some things on your own. Tell us a little bit about some of the products and stuff you're working on on your own because you've got some cool stuff.

Yeah. Thank you. One of my early clients four or five years ago got me of all places into the funeral industry.

Seems like an odd choice.

My client, she and her husband own a couple veterinary clinics and she came with this idea of a product to go in the garden to grow a tree with remains of the pet and grow family tree from a couple seeds and she found it was already being manufactured or she started exploring it over in Spain. And one thing that the next thing she realized it was out of her wheelhouse to negotiate with a factory and import. So she hired me as a consultant. I worked with her an hour a week for six months. Ended up working directly with a factory and FDA and everything to negotiate to get the first container in this product called the bioearn. As it turned out, she wanted to just market directly to pet consumers online and didn't want to deal with the wholesale leads. I said, well, I don't know the industry but I know wholesale I've been doing for 30 plus years. So over a couple of years, just part time, I followed up on the leads that were coming in and I got it established maybe 150 different funeral homes and such and distributors. People loved it, but it didn't sell through that well. So I parted company at the end of O15 because I wasn't making much money. But that's such a great concept. What would make this sell better? I thought let's give people a real tree and maybe if we make it portable. Because if you don't own a home for decades, people usually move within 10 years. You're not going to dig up grandma or Fido out of the backyard.

Yeah, that doesn't seem like the most viable solution. Right.

This idea of a lovely ceramic pot with a bonsai tree so that you can keep the cremains of your family member, person or pet in a portable fashion. Whether you have a home or a condo or an apartment with a bonsai tree or any type of plant or flower arrangement to go in the center. And the design of the shape of the pot doesn't look like death, it doesn't look like the standard urn. So I launched the bonsai urn.com in January and I've been to two major trade shows in that industry. People love the concept, but it's been a whole journey of my going to get my first patent. Product engineering. The engineering was done incorrectly and then we lost about six months because the volume metrics were wrong.

There's so many things that can go wrong. Right. That's why you all are here. Product launch hazards. Because there are a bunch of them.

I tell my clients, once you launch your product or service, it takes two to three years to gain full traction and make a living out of it if it's going to succeed. But because I know what I'm doing. I've done this for so many years with wine things. I was doing 5 million a year plus sales agency and such. You know, I've done tens of millions of dollars over the years. I know what I'm doing. I want to get this done in two or three months. Well, reality is reality and it takes time for a product no matter how good it is. We have the bonds I earn on a number of websites that sell earns, but it's one of hundreds of thousands of items. How do we get people to know about it? So it just takes time for social media and advertising and marketing and people.

Getting confidence in a product, brand awareness to kick in.

Even the experts launching their own new product company. It takes patience and perseverance and positive expectancy. That's what I tell everybody.

That's right. Absolutely. So I want to mention to everyone who's listening that there are related articles to this interview with David because I have featured Biocern. There was an article featured about that that I wrote for Inc. A while back. And then there also is my interview with you where we actually talk a little bit about the Spin cup and that story of Abraham Sin actually in that article as well and Abraham's book view on it. And then there was a follow up that I did with Abraham a little bit later where he gave input onto another article. So there's like three licensing related and Biosar and they're all in there. So I want to make sure you guys check those out because you can read a little bit more depth into the story that David's been telling here today. So David, what do you think the biggest burning question, the biggest hazard out of all the things that you work on that derails these projects that gets quite great products to be unable to make it to market. What do you think the biggest one is that you've seen over the years?

I would say timing and patience.

Timing and patience. Interesting.

Is a much longer lead time than people think. Certainly money is an issue if you're going to launch yourself. You know, you need to have the capital, whether it's 25 grand or 50 grand or 100 grand and that can definitely hold up projects. But I think the biggest issue, that people just lose confidence, faith because they don't have the patience and the passion. If you're going to be an entrepreneur, you have to have positive expectancy. Temper that with the reality of the marketplace. Just because you think it's a good product. If it's going to be priced at twice what it should retail for and nobody's going to buy it and you look what else is on the market. Like we talked about the sweater hammock, you need to temper positive expectancy with what's real in the marketplace. But if you have a product, an idea that you see has a niche and you want to find a unique niche where you're not duplicating what's out there, but something that has a different twist to it, different niche. You just have to be patient and know that the timing is going to take longer than you think it's going to take unless you have the experience of doing this yourself. Bring in the experts. Include that in your budget, because it's going to help you save a lot of time and money. You can learn on the job and you'll make lots of mistakes that can be cost over two or three years. Whereas if you work with experts, there's lots of great people out there. It makes a huge difference in having a team that can get you there successfully and profitably on a timely basis.

Well, thank you so much for that, David. And your experience is really so, so valuable. And that's one of the things that I value, and that's one of the reasons you were invited on to be an expert here on this platform, is because what you're hearing here is that if we don't think that you can be successful doing it, we're going to tell you and we're going to either turn your business down or send you to the expert who should help you first.

Absolutely.

And so that's really what I value about all of the people that are on Product launch haz of our experts here. That's why I put them here, because I know they have the same philosophy that success at the end of the day for them isn't them making a check and their consulting fees and all that. It's that your product is out on the market and it's selling like it was meant to sell and it achieved its potential and we want to be positively expected about it, too. And if we think we can't, then we're going to refer you to someone who can either evaluate it or give you the help and advice to get you to that next step so that we can come back in and help you take it the distance or whatever is necessary to get it to market. Because we see too many great products and too many great people fall through the cracks of all of these things of what they know, they don't know, that they don't know. And all of these insider things that you don't know are going on around you. You're also falling victim to a lot of that. And so we're trying to operate really transparent here and give you a safe team in which you can ask the good questions and you know you're going to get a response that is in the best interest of you and getting your product to market.

Absolutely. I agree 100%. I'm here to be of service and if I can help a client have that wonderful experience in their lives, to have a positive experience and launch their company successfully, that makes me feel good. The money is secondary and I prefer to turn away a client than to say, let me have your money, even though I think this is a loser product.

Everyone remember that you can reach any of our experts, David especially. You can reach them through the Experts tab on your membership platform. And you'll find all kinds of contact information in the blog post for this Office Hours episode. But in that are all the links to some of the things that he's been talking about, those related articles to the bonds I earn. If you have a need and you want one, there'll be a link to that as well. So all of that will be in the blog post for this. And so please reach out to David, join the next call that he's on and ask him your burning questions. So thanks again, David for joining us. And until next time, this is Tracy on Product Launch Hazards.

Thank you for joining us on this episode of Product Launch Hazards. To get the most out of your membership, visit productlaunchhazards.com to join the Expert Office Hours Live and ask us your burning questions. Check out the resource library for document templates and guides and get exclusive articles and shares each day. Don't forget, you can always book a private call, consult with any expert so you can out design, outsource and outprofit your way to product launch success.