1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:05,920 Kevin Mako: Hello, product innovators. Today we learn from the head of growth marketing for a hardware startup that accomplished hundreds of millions of 2 00:00:05,920 --> 00:00:10,380 Kevin Mako: dollars in sales on how to launch your product by a paid direct-to-consumer advertising. 3 00:00:10,940 --> 00:00:15,400 Narrator: You're listening to the Product Startup Podcast, a show to learn from top leaders in product development, 4 00:00:15,480 --> 00:00:18,760 Narrator: product development, prototyping, manufacturing, product selling, and everything in between. 5 00:00:18,760 --> 00:00:22,940 Narrator: hosted by Kevin Mako, the leading expert on product development for physical product startups, 6 00:00:23,480 --> 00:00:28,480 Narrator: sponsored by PTC's two best in class 3D CAD product development software solutions Onshape and Creo, 7 00:00:28,680 --> 00:00:32,880 Narrator: and produced by Mako Design + Invent, the original firm providing world-class consumer product 8 00:00:32,880 --> 00:00:37,260 Narrator: development services tailored specifically to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. 9 00:00:37,860 --> 00:00:44,520 Kevin Mako: Welcome back, everyone. Today I'm very excited to introduce Daniel Bischoff to the show. Daniel is the former head of growth at Purple Mattress. 10 00:00:44,780 --> 00:00:52,960 Kevin Mako: He took Purple from startup to over $200 million in sales in just a first two years on the market. He then spun out as co-founder of his own direct-to-consumer 11 00:00:52,960 --> 00:00:57,620 Kevin Mako: marketing agency called StoicYeti, which works with both hardware startups and Fortune 500 product 12 00:00:57,620 --> 00:01:01,340 Kevin Mako: brands. Today, Daniel's going to share some valuable knowledge for inventors, startups, and 13 00:01:01,340 --> 00:01:05,380 Kevin Mako: small manufacturers on what direct-to-consumer advertising is, what you can learn from the 14 00:01:05,380 --> 00:01:14,540 Kevin Mako: purple mattress story about scaling a hardware brand, and how to create an inexpensive yet powerful video to sell your new hardware invention. Now on to the episode. 15 00:01:15,500 --> 00:01:21,980 Kevin Mako: Hey, Daniel, welcome to the show. Hey, Kevin. It's good to be here. We're excited to take. to talk to you about scaling up a hardware brand. 16 00:01:22,200 --> 00:01:28,740 Kevin Mako: Now, you've worked with both large corporations and small corporations. Very notably, you worked with Purple Mattress at the early days, getting them 17 00:01:28,740 --> 00:01:34,320 Kevin Mako: to literally hundreds of millions of dollars in sales from zero. So a phenomenal gross story there at 18 00:01:34,320 --> 00:01:43,260 Kevin Mako: purple. But you also founded a company called StoicYeti with another partner that works with hardware startups and big Fortune 500 companies alike, getting them to grow their 19 00:01:43,260 --> 00:01:51,860 Kevin Mako: sales online, specifically direct to consumer, using advertising to sell product. Before we get into all the details of the episode. Give us a bit of your background. 20 00:01:52,060 --> 00:01:56,100 Kevin Mako: How did you get to the point where you're at? Purple and then for Purple onto StoicYeti. 21 00:01:56,420 --> 00:02:03,940 Daniel Bischoff: Yeah, I started years ago as a sports journalist. That's what I want to do is to cover sports and write about sports and go to games. 22 00:02:04,100 --> 00:02:11,560 Daniel Bischoff: Soon learned that that was a dead end job for me, working weekends, not getting any money. Pretty soon I started doing some freelance work for marketing companies. 23 00:02:11,760 --> 00:02:18,020 Daniel Bischoff: I joined an internet marketing company called SEO.com, where I learned a lot more about internet marketing and be able to apply 24 00:02:18,020 --> 00:02:23,880 Daniel Bischoff: the storytelling skills that I learned as a journalist to marketing products and do the digital 25 00:02:23,880 --> 00:02:30,760 Daniel Bischoff: marketing thing. I was in and out of different companies and started my own thing, a content marketing company in the summer of 2015. 26 00:02:31,440 --> 00:02:41,200 Daniel Bischoff: I came on to consult with, it wasn't a mattress brand yet, but it was a cushion brand that was licensing cushioning products. There was a couple founders that 27 00:02:41,200 --> 00:02:48,080 Daniel Bischoff: They were in their 70s, and they wanted to have one last entrepreneurship, hurrah, before they ride up in the sunset. 28 00:02:48,240 --> 00:02:53,980 Daniel Bischoff: They had licensed this cushion technology to Dr. Shoals, some of their mattress brands, too, 29 00:02:54,560 --> 00:03:01,320 Daniel Bischoff: and they had seen Casper and some of those companies kind of break away or carve a niche in 30 00:03:01,320 --> 00:03:07,760 Daniel Bischoff: delivering a mattress to someone's door to sell, and they wanted to get in that game and use their technology to do that. 31 00:03:07,760 --> 00:03:14,880 Daniel Bischoff: So in 2015, before the name purple was a name, I started working with them and helping then launch that brand. 32 00:03:15,280 --> 00:03:17,780 Daniel Bischoff: Long story short, the first year we did it. We launched it. 33 00:03:17,900 --> 00:03:24,540 Kevin Mako: We did over 60 million in sales. A couple of years, it went to public. And yeah, that's the nutshell story. That's amazing. 34 00:03:24,780 --> 00:03:29,020 Kevin Mako: So two years going from no sales to 200 million in sales and 35 00:03:29,020 --> 00:03:36,480 Daniel Bischoff: then taking the company public. And you're with them for the first few years of that journey. I was there for the first four, four and a half years, started getting a lot of other 36 00:03:36,480 --> 00:03:43,760 Daniel Bischoff: companies asking me how we did it and then launched my own thing with Chris, my partner, Chris, who was the actual CMO at Purple at the same time. 37 00:03:44,060 --> 00:03:53,120 Daniel Bischoff: I directed all the ad side, all the ad spend side, putting money where you can make more money and grow. So there's a lot of growing pains 38 00:03:53,120 --> 00:03:58,500 Daniel Bischoff: when you grow that fast too, you know, good and bad from learning that experience is great to have. So you got to be kind of lucky. 39 00:03:58,860 --> 00:04:05,100 Kevin Mako: You got to have a right product to the right time. And then you got to have the right creative and the right data around it and know where to spend your money. 40 00:04:05,100 --> 00:04:14,120 Daniel Bischoff: That's amazing, Daniel. What a story. And let's dig into the details of the purple mattress story. They saw Casper, if you were a Casper mattress. This is about 2015. 41 00:04:14,660 --> 00:04:23,480 Daniel Bischoff: Summer of 2015, I was pulled in. And they wanted to basically copy what they were doing. Casper kind of opened the door for mattresses to be shipped straight to your 42 00:04:23,480 --> 00:04:30,760 Daniel Bischoff: door. To be able to buy a mattress online. Before that, nobody would buy online. They'd go to a mattress store and nobody thought that you could buy a mattress online. 43 00:04:30,880 --> 00:04:35,040 Daniel Bischoff: People had to try it first is what you thought. But they kind of opened that door and stop there. 44 00:04:35,100 --> 00:04:39,380 Daniel Bischoff: for a minute. If you're developing a product, this is a good example of sometimes it takes 45 00:04:39,380 --> 00:04:45,760 Kevin Mako: someone else being a snowplow, like a Casper was. They pay a lot of money to create awareness that you could do something different. 46 00:04:45,980 --> 00:04:54,720 Kevin Mako: Yeah, that's actually a pretty important thing there, just as a side note, that a lot of entrepreneurs and startups are afraid of competition. And they look 47 00:04:54,720 --> 00:05:02,800 Kevin Mako: at a particular industry or whatever else and they say, oh, you know what, they've kind of made my thing or is my thing really that much better or whatever else? 48 00:05:02,940 --> 00:05:10,100 Kevin Mako: And they're afraid of it. But pioneering in industry is, of course, it's a great way to open up sales channels, but it has its own cons as well. 49 00:05:10,300 --> 00:05:14,420 Kevin Mako: So don't be afraid of also competing in an industry for somebody who's paved 50 00:05:14,420 --> 00:05:18,320 Daniel Bischoff: the way and possibly already spent, like you said, all the money on opening that door, 51 00:05:18,520 --> 00:05:23,220 Daniel Bischoff: opening up that awareness in the customer's mind that this industry is important that they should be looking at it. 52 00:05:23,500 --> 00:05:31,260 Daniel Bischoff: When they first heard about this, I thought it was a dumb idea, you know, itself until I started looking at like Casper and how well they did. Because the mattress industry 53 00:05:31,260 --> 00:05:39,500 Daniel Bischoff: is boring at the time. The mattress industry has boring ads. There's memory foam of temperapeutic and some other brands, and it hasn't really changed much. 54 00:05:39,800 --> 00:05:47,500 Daniel Bischoff: And the thing that Casper did, they didn't create a new product. They created a new way of being able to buy it and ship it to your door and really create that awareness. 55 00:05:47,660 --> 00:05:55,920 Daniel Bischoff: What what Purple did is they had that cushion technology, like Dr. Shoals. If you ever seen those ads, it's a grid type system, which if you lay 56 00:05:55,920 --> 00:06:03,640 Daniel Bischoff: on it, it gives where the pressure points are and supports where it's not. So if you lay on your shoulder, it cushions your shoulder, then supports your back in a different 57 00:06:03,640 --> 00:06:09,920 Daniel Bischoff: way than any of the technology does. they wanted to put that in the mattress, and they had license it's just a couple of their brands, too, in the past. 58 00:06:10,100 --> 00:06:15,820 Daniel Bischoff: So what they did is they basically were doing the Casper model with an upgraded product, right? 59 00:06:16,220 --> 00:06:25,100 Daniel Bischoff: And the Casper product still today is like no different than any other product out there. It's memory foam or it's latex or, you know, because of them kind of foams, but 60 00:06:25,100 --> 00:06:33,640 Daniel Bischoff: it's rolled up into a box and shipped to your door. And what this does is, it's created a better mousetrap. So at first it was, this is kind of a dumb idea. Mattrises are boring. 61 00:06:33,640 --> 00:06:41,220 Daniel Bischoff: Cats were paid the way. They're kind of a big gorilla. I'm already going to beat them. But then as you start seeing it, I start seeing the marketing and these brands are boring. 62 00:06:41,420 --> 00:06:51,040 Daniel Bischoff: It's like big branding. There's nothing innovative in the story. Nobody was selling it with video. So we developed this. Then the founders wanted to name it purple. 63 00:06:51,740 --> 00:06:58,080 Daniel Bischoff: And at the time, they had a brand called My Comfort. But it was a color of the gel sort of material on top of the mattress. 64 00:06:58,540 --> 00:07:05,920 Daniel Bischoff: And in the development of it, my partner who's not here, his name is Chris. My partner was there as well. They wanted to slide that material underneath foam. 65 00:07:06,460 --> 00:07:15,600 Daniel Bischoff: And so Chris's idea was, let's put that material on top. Because if it's on top of the mattress, we can visually really show the difference of the mattress. Visually. 66 00:07:15,980 --> 00:07:24,180 Daniel Bischoff: If it's underneath, it's hidden and you can't show the video. You can't show the technology. It's a very innovative, different thing. If you're launching a product, 67 00:07:24,600 --> 00:07:28,560 Daniel Bischoff: sometimes all you need to be is different when you're doing advertising. You're different than someone 68 00:07:28,560 --> 00:07:32,780 Daniel Bischoff: else. If you're different than someone else, you have a way to say that you could be better fit for 69 00:07:32,780 --> 00:07:37,660 Daniel Bischoff: them if that makes sense with mattresses almost everybody in some ways does not like their 70 00:07:37,660 --> 00:07:41,820 Daniel Bischoff: mattress you wake up and if your shoulder hurts you hate your mattress you know you wake up your 71 00:07:41,820 --> 00:07:46,780 Daniel Bischoff: back hurts and this is a problem it's like do you sleep this is this is you're not going to be in 72 00:07:46,780 --> 00:07:51,600 Daniel Bischoff: pain anymore because we have this technology you can see it okay and the founders they used to do 73 00:07:51,600 --> 00:07:56,400 Daniel Bischoff: something these really bad home videos where they'd get an egg and they'd sit on the egg or 74 00:07:56,400 --> 00:08:00,460 Daniel Bischoff: they'd lay on the egg on top of the mattress and it wouldn't break and they were terrible made 75 00:08:00,460 --> 00:08:05,260 Daniel Bischoff: videos. So we took that idea because what you want to do if you have a product like this where 76 00:08:05,260 --> 00:08:13,680 Daniel Bischoff: you know, if there's inventors or whoever, if you have a product, you really want to be able to demonstrate a strong demonstration in video form for online. 77 00:08:14,100 --> 00:08:20,880 Daniel Bischoff: And that's going to be like the most powerful thing you can do. We took this A break on the match's idea and we hired a big video agency 78 00:08:20,880 --> 00:08:28,860 Daniel Bischoff: that did these big long form videos and they've already had success in viral videos, Squatty Potty and some others with the Hummer brothers. We decided to do a Kickstarter launch. 79 00:08:29,140 --> 00:08:35,160 Daniel Bischoff: We want to do with Kickstarter, we wanted to validate a couple things. Can you sell a mattress with video? That's 80 00:08:35,160 --> 00:08:39,300 Daniel Bischoff: kind of funny. That's a little bit, you know, not taking ourselves too serious. Because every 81 00:08:39,300 --> 00:08:44,300 Daniel Bischoff: mattress out there took themselves very seriously, very serious, very pretty, you know, 82 00:08:44,380 --> 00:08:50,180 Daniel Bischoff: just talking about how great their mattress is and very commercial and boring, frankly. The whole industry was really boring. 83 00:08:50,340 --> 00:08:58,840 Daniel Bischoff: So we want to take this and change it quite a bit. We did a Kickstarter video showing it, made a funny video. It was low quality, funny video. And the Kickstarter sold, 84 00:08:58,840 --> 00:09:07,720 Daniel Bischoff: And the guy that was funding it, only fund it if we had about 200 sales on the mattress on Kickstarter. And we did that. We did that in the first month. We sold that many. 85 00:09:07,960 --> 00:09:11,800 Daniel Bischoff: And we validated that a funny video, a video showing the mattress is going to sell. 86 00:09:12,120 --> 00:09:21,280 Daniel Bischoff: And then we went to this bigger agency to create a bigger viral video for the launch of the brand. Little did we know, though, that $200,000 about what we did in a Kickstarter, we 87 00:09:21,280 --> 00:09:29,780 Daniel Bischoff: started doing that in a day a couple months later. We did the Kickstarter in October. It was October of 2015, launched the brand in January. And we went to the Haram Brothers. 88 00:09:30,100 --> 00:09:39,400 Daniel Bischoff: We hired a local comedian celebrity. So she had a little bit of a following. It's really good. It kind of ad-libbing in the script. And this was a purple Goldilocks video. 89 00:09:39,500 --> 00:09:47,540 Daniel Bischoff: If you haven't seen that, go look it up. It got about 500 million views in that first year. Wow. A couple years. So on YouTube and Facebook. This video starts off. 90 00:09:47,780 --> 00:09:53,920 Daniel Bischoff: This is going to be applicable to everything you sell online. You want to be able to sell in the first three seconds of a video, the hook. 91 00:09:54,360 --> 00:10:01,460 Daniel Bischoff: And so we wrote about 25 different intros to this video. And so we had the comedian name, his name is Mallory. 92 00:10:01,540 --> 00:10:08,960 Daniel Bischoff: We had Mallory act to all these and say all these different hooks. And then we tested them in YouTube just to see, put a few thousand 93 00:10:08,960 --> 00:10:17,180 Daniel Bischoff: dollars towards each one to really nail down what is the line that's going to keep people watching it and to have them buy, right? 94 00:10:17,300 --> 00:10:25,020 Daniel Bischoff: The line that won was, if you watch it, she's up, she's dressed with goal locks. And she says, what's a super easy way to know if your mattress is awful? 95 00:10:25,140 --> 00:10:34,220 Daniel Bischoff: And then it goes at the raw egg test. And then we have this big piece of glass with eggs smashing on these mattresses. And they're breaking on every mattress, right? 96 00:10:34,480 --> 00:10:42,180 Daniel Bischoff: And it goes to the purple mattress, they don't break. This is like a thousand pounds pushing down on these mattresses, right? So it's a clear, like really good demonstration. 97 00:10:42,740 --> 00:10:49,660 Daniel Bischoff: And it's really quick. It's this hook of like, how do you know if your mattress is awful? And that makes your brain think, oh, is my mattress awful? 98 00:10:49,780 --> 00:10:55,540 Daniel Bischoff: People don't buy a mattress every year. They buy a mattress maybe seven to ten years. Like they'll switch other mattress. 99 00:10:55,540 --> 00:11:00,780 Daniel Bischoff: But what this did was it made people aware that their mattress doesn't have to hurt your back. 100 00:11:01,120 --> 00:11:05,060 Daniel Bischoff: What you need to do in marketing is you need to make people a solution aware, problem aware. 101 00:11:05,860 --> 00:11:13,800 Daniel Bischoff: Like, some of you might not know that having a sore shoulder or a sore back is actually a problem on your mattress. It might just think that's normal. 102 00:11:14,160 --> 00:11:18,320 Daniel Bischoff: So you're making a problem aware. How you know if your mattress is awful is like making you aware of a problem. 103 00:11:18,660 --> 00:11:25,520 Kevin Mako: And then it's like, here's a solution, the right test. And you show all these eggs smashing it. And then you show the egg not breaking on a mattress. 104 00:11:25,540 --> 00:11:31,660 Kevin Mako: mattress. And then it goes into how that's going to protect your joints or your shoulder or your back, you know, your back pain. 105 00:11:32,020 --> 00:11:38,740 Kevin Mako: Anyway, so we went through that process. Yeah, that's pretty amazing. So basically, if I'm to put this into summary, the first thing you did is you looked at 106 00:11:38,740 --> 00:11:45,600 Kevin Mako: an established company that had broken through the market vertical. They've created essentially a new market and you realized it was successful. 107 00:11:46,140 --> 00:11:54,480 Kevin Mako: You had better technology or a better way of building that product. So step one was slightly better product of an already established, already 108 00:11:54,480 --> 00:11:56,640 Kevin Mako: proven model that had been done before. 109 00:11:57,300 --> 00:12:06,660 Daniel Bischoff: Then what you wanted to do is elevate that by figuring out not just how to be better than the competitor, but then testing ads via crowdfunding you did 110 00:12:06,660 --> 00:12:14,860 Kevin Mako: it in the early phases, just low budget, simple stuff, tested some ads to see if your theory would work. You've got a better product and you've got a new way of selling. 111 00:12:14,960 --> 00:12:20,100 Kevin Mako: Tested price and messaging, you know, the type of video. So you want to make a better product. You also want to make 112 00:12:20,100 --> 00:12:24,380 Kevin Mako: a better ad. You know, you want to be able to communicate that value better than anybody else is doing. 113 00:12:24,480 --> 00:12:29,420 Kevin Mako: Well, that's what I find amazing, too, is that once you validated in a small way in crowdfunding, 114 00:12:29,520 --> 00:12:35,580 Kevin Mako: you then did basically another round of validation where you said, okay, let's try a number of different hooks for this video. 115 00:12:36,040 --> 00:12:40,480 Kevin Mako: First of all, that three second rule, I love it, right? Within three seconds, you have to captivate the audience. 116 00:12:40,680 --> 00:12:46,940 Kevin Mako: You've got the audience hook now, show them the problem, and then identify the solution, which is your product. That's right. 117 00:12:46,960 --> 00:12:55,480 Kevin Mako: You try different versions of that in a very small way in each of those to really hone down. What was the marketing message that worked both to hook them and to sell them? 118 00:12:55,700 --> 00:13:03,400 Kevin Mako: And that creates really great scale. So you're not just looking at testing by a small group in the beginning or friends and families saying, hey, how do you think this will work? 119 00:13:03,440 --> 00:13:09,260 Kevin Mako: You're doing that, A, with the market via crowdfunding, then B, you're doing it with a larger segment to the market based on something 120 00:13:09,260 --> 00:13:17,880 Daniel Bischoff: that you've proven. It's almost like in product development when you're trying to really perfect a key new innovation or technology, you're looking to theorize what will 121 00:13:17,880 --> 00:13:23,580 Daniel Bischoff: work, test it, tweaking and refine it until you really nail it. And that's what you did both on the product side, 122 00:13:23,680 --> 00:13:33,200 Daniel Bischoff: but then subsequently on the marketing and advertising side to really find scale. And the market advertising side, you have to keep tweaking it forever, honestly. 123 00:13:33,480 --> 00:13:41,060 Daniel Bischoff: What you want to do, and this could be a conversation, but you never want to stop doing that. Like you're always wanted to try to beat what is performing. 124 00:13:41,280 --> 00:13:46,320 Daniel Bischoff: You always want to knock that king off the hill constantly. One thing that really helped this business, though, 125 00:13:46,320 --> 00:13:54,880 Daniel Bischoff: People that know the brand know Goldilocks pretty well, and they think that's the Goldilocks video is really what catapulted this brand and in many ways it did. 126 00:13:55,280 --> 00:14:00,040 Daniel Bischoff: But after the Kickstarter video, there was a couple foundational things that had to happen to make this work. 127 00:14:00,500 --> 00:14:08,100 Daniel Bischoff: When people see a video, and I'll ask you, Kevin too, that's a question for you. If you see an ad for product, what is your next step? You're going to Google it. 128 00:14:08,380 --> 00:14:16,300 Daniel Bischoff: You're going to Google it every time. So what we did is those Kickstarter customers, we gave them gift cards. You can't do some of this stuff anymore, but we gave them gift cards. 129 00:14:16,320 --> 00:14:21,820 Daniel Bischoff: cards to go and leave Amazon reviews. We established the Amazon review. We also went to some blogs, 130 00:14:22,180 --> 00:14:28,880 Daniel Bischoff: some affiliates. There was a site called Sleepopolis at the time that did a lot of mattress reviews, some review sites. 131 00:14:29,280 --> 00:14:38,920 Daniel Bischoff: We gave them affiliate number, affiliate code, and asked them to write a Casper versus Purple Review. We sent them a mattress. We asked them write a review. And that one 132 00:14:38,920 --> 00:14:44,000 Kevin Mako: review was accountable for like 20% of sales right off the bat. That's the first thing people clicked on. 133 00:14:44,000 --> 00:14:50,160 Kevin Mako: They go Purple Matchers Review, they do Purple versus Casper, you know, they look at competitors, and that thing comes up in search. 134 00:14:50,300 --> 00:14:55,720 Kevin Mako: So you have to have those type of foundational things to make a, quote, viral video work. 135 00:14:55,920 --> 00:15:01,600 Kevin Mako: Because if you're not there on the Google side, if you don't have reviews, it's going to be a lot harder to make it work. 136 00:15:01,860 --> 00:15:06,900 Kevin Mako: Well, the nice thing about a hardware startup, too, is you can personally reach out to each of your first customers. 137 00:15:07,020 --> 00:15:13,140 Kevin Mako: If you sell 200 units, there's no reason as a founder that you can't reach out to all 200 of those customers. 138 00:15:13,560 --> 00:15:21,600 Kevin Mako: find out who's a raving fan and ask them to help support your product. The reason that they've bought into your product, or at least a big part of the reason in 139 00:15:21,600 --> 00:15:25,600 Kevin Mako: the early days, isn't just the product itself. It's because they believe in you as an inventor. 140 00:15:26,080 --> 00:15:32,340 Kevin Mako: Most of the time, especially if it's Kickstarter, they're buying this with the risk that they know it may not work out. It may not be what they think it is. 141 00:15:32,500 --> 00:15:41,000 Kevin Mako: So just imagine how excited they are when they take a shot on you. They take a gamble on you and say, okay, I'm going to buy this new company's product. I like the product. 142 00:15:41,100 --> 00:15:44,800 Kevin Mako: I like the inventor. I like the story. whatever else. It's a whole mix of things usually. 143 00:15:45,320 --> 00:15:46,340 Daniel Bischoff: They place the purchase. 144 00:15:47,040 --> 00:15:54,540 Daniel Bischoff: They get the product and they like it. That's a raving fan. Even those who aren't raving fans, I mean, that's great opportunity for feedback as well. 145 00:15:54,720 --> 00:16:01,560 Daniel Bischoff: So listen to those people who are upset, figure out why they're upset. And that'll help you forge the product or the sales or whatever else going forward. 146 00:16:02,020 --> 00:16:09,160 Daniel Bischoff: But really, it's easy as a hardware startup to get in front of a lot of people quickly in your early sales because the number's just so small. Totally. 147 00:16:09,420 --> 00:16:18,320 Daniel Bischoff: And what I do a little bit differently today is I would also, ask them to send in some of their own video from their cell phone. Today, one thing that 148 00:16:18,320 --> 00:16:25,560 Daniel Bischoff: I would do differently today in the launch is I would want this user-generated content, a lot of it to make for ads. So I'd redo it today, that's what I'd do as well. 149 00:16:25,740 --> 00:16:33,520 Daniel Bischoff: They do not pay attention to the brands telling their own story today. It's way more powerful to have customers tell the brand 150 00:16:33,520 --> 00:16:41,500 Daniel Bischoff: story. And so right now, what I would do is I would get as many of the user-generated content from these customers as possible. That's what I'd do today. 151 00:16:41,500 --> 00:16:48,420 Daniel Bischoff: And there are about a hundred and 30 touch points before someone buys a product, meaning they see an ad, they Google it, 152 00:16:48,560 --> 00:16:54,500 Daniel Bischoff: they look at a review site, they go to Amazon, they go to somewhere else, they look at reviews, they ask their friends on social media. 153 00:16:54,740 --> 00:17:00,660 Daniel Bischoff: That ad for awareness is key to make them aware, but you have to have all those other things in place. I'm not going to buy. 154 00:17:00,880 --> 00:17:08,880 Daniel Bischoff: Another thing to think about is especially a product that's a little more expensive, like a mattress, maybe it's furniture, maybe it's like an e-bike. 155 00:17:09,020 --> 00:17:15,580 Daniel Bischoff: If you're in the $1,000 plus range, there's a lot of people that need to talk to someone to answer a question. And one thing 156 00:17:15,580 --> 00:17:23,440 Daniel Bischoff: you need to do is list down, what are all the objections to buying this product? What are all the objections people have to buy in a product? 157 00:17:23,900 --> 00:17:31,860 Daniel Bischoff: Make sure you are listing those, all of your website, that you're in your ad. We're working with the company right now. Companies were asking 158 00:17:31,860 --> 00:17:38,360 Daniel Bischoff: for help on having the same kind of experience. So now you work with different brands now. We have a brand that sells trampolines. 159 00:17:38,460 --> 00:17:44,920 Daniel Bischoff: They do in-ground trampolines where you dig a hole and you put the trampoline in the ground. And so people are worried about it filling up with water or getting 160 00:17:44,920 --> 00:17:52,280 Kevin Mako: snakes in their hole. And so we're making that out right now about like, you know, myths, common myths, like, and we're answering those questions in the ad. 161 00:17:52,460 --> 00:18:00,440 Kevin Mako: If you think about a late night infomercial, just the structure of that ad, it's the same thing. It's problem, it's solution, 162 00:18:01,000 --> 00:18:10,980 Kevin Mako: and it's given more reasons to believe in the product, it's answerless questions throughout it. But you got to make that long form infomercial into a short TikTok ad today, into a 163 00:18:11,020 --> 00:18:20,040 Kevin Mako: short Instagram data today in like 10 seconds sometimes, right? I really appreciate how you mentioned a problem, solution, reasons to buy in, but also objections. 164 00:18:20,400 --> 00:18:26,440 Kevin Mako: If you look at that format, I mean, that format's been around for a hundred years, it's already forever, right? So that's something that you 165 00:18:26,440 --> 00:18:32,740 Kevin Mako: just have to distill into today's modern methods. And one of the best ways is, A, to make sure that you're structuring it correctly. 166 00:18:33,520 --> 00:18:40,360 Kevin Mako: And B, make sure that you're doing the testing. Like you say, you should forever be tweaking and refining the biggest ad companies in the world. Do you look at Pepsi 167 00:18:40,360 --> 00:18:48,140 Kevin Mako: ads and they're constantly tweaking and refining their messaging, trying to find whatever is the latest and most effective way to engage new customers, right? 168 00:18:48,240 --> 00:18:54,720 Daniel Bischoff: So as a hardware startup, the nice thing is you can do it cheaper and easier and more nimbly than a big corporation can, especially 169 00:18:54,720 --> 00:19:00,020 Daniel Bischoff: in the beginning. When you're only spending a little bit, you could try small things and people are more lenient as well, right? 170 00:19:00,040 --> 00:19:09,020 Daniel Bischoff: You can try more basic videos as you did with purple. You started with a more basic video and then you continue to increase the actual cost of production of those videos 171 00:19:09,020 --> 00:19:13,580 Daniel Bischoff: as it evolved as you got more and more knowledge as to really what was working and what was not 172 00:19:13,580 --> 00:19:21,560 Daniel Bischoff: working. So you're spending more money but more efficiently over time. And most people are not to be able to afford that big video we did with Homer Brothers. 173 00:19:21,920 --> 00:19:29,880 Daniel Bischoff: I mean, that was a $500,000 video video. But we also at the same time, we hired a video guy who was really talented, but he was 174 00:19:29,880 --> 00:19:37,960 Daniel Bischoff: much cheaper. And we did $10,000 for 10 videos. And And these videos were very cheap and some of them looked lower quality. 175 00:19:38,260 --> 00:19:47,320 Daniel Bischoff: He had like a toy Hulk bouncing on. It was very childish in some ways. But one of those videos outperformed the big Goldilocks video as far as a 176 00:19:47,320 --> 00:19:54,800 Daniel Bischoff: return on ad spend and a cost to acquire a customer on YouTube and it had 40 million views and it cost $1,000 to make it. 177 00:19:55,000 --> 00:20:04,040 Daniel Bischoff: Sometimes it helps to do a big budget video, but especially today, you don't need to today. If I had to do this again, I would just start off with user generated content. 178 00:20:04,200 --> 00:20:13,500 Daniel Bischoff: I would get employees. I would get founders. I would get them talking in the cell phone. You know, I'd be pushing those and testing all those different messaging points with user 179 00:20:13,500 --> 00:20:20,860 Daniel Bischoff: generate content first because that's what I found most successful today. Like you can be cheaper today. And brand people hate it. 180 00:20:21,020 --> 00:20:28,000 Daniel Bischoff: A lot of what we do right now is we generate a lot of UGC. We have a big network now of hundreds of people that they're creators online. So they know how 181 00:20:28,000 --> 00:20:32,860 Daniel Bischoff: to create content for Instagram, you know, to create content for reels and for TikTok. And it's way 182 00:20:32,860 --> 00:20:37,460 Daniel Bischoff: cheaper than going and hired a big production company to make an ad brand people don't like it though 183 00:20:37,460 --> 00:20:42,440 Kevin Mako: because it doesn't look as pretty it's grainy and it doesn't someone's face is too close to the camera 184 00:20:42,440 --> 00:20:50,800 Kevin Mako: or they don't have the right colors or whatever to us though it's like we don't care about the branding to us if it sells if it sells product move product and make money that's 185 00:20:50,800 --> 00:20:57,160 Kevin Mako: a good brand to us but that's how i do it today that's actually good news for people that are creating their own product is you can make 186 00:20:57,160 --> 00:21:03,860 Kevin Mako: a video of yourself you can get videos of your employees you can get video of your of your significant other We have one client, that's what they do. 187 00:21:03,920 --> 00:21:09,780 Kevin Mako: They go with their employees and they go with their bouses and they make videos themselves. And some of those crush. 188 00:21:09,840 --> 00:21:15,940 Kevin Mako: Some of them don't do well, but you need a lot of them. That's amazing. Something that any hardware founder can do. Anybody can do this. That's the beauty. 189 00:21:16,540 --> 00:21:21,900 Kevin Mako: It's authentic and the threshold for quality isn't nearly as high as advertising used to be. 190 00:21:22,420 --> 00:21:31,960 Daniel Bischoff: And the customers want this because it comes back to that authentic being that somebody is buying, not just your product, but buying into the brand vision that you are portraying. 191 00:21:31,980 --> 00:21:41,680 Daniel Bischoff: as the founder, and your job isn't to appeal to everybody like maybe a Pepsi or Coke is going to try and do. Your job is to appeal to that small piece of the market that 192 00:21:41,680 --> 00:21:48,580 Daniel Bischoff: your invention attracts, that branding that you portray, the way that you see it, the way that you envision it in the 193 00:21:48,580 --> 00:21:56,580 Daniel Bischoff: world, finding the same tribe of people who are looking for that very same thing. And what better way to do it than to be authentic with your messaging? 194 00:21:56,700 --> 00:22:01,960 Daniel Bischoff: Totally. And there's a client worked with called Your Super. They're a supplement company. They sell, 195 00:22:02,860 --> 00:22:05,520 Daniel Bischoff: superfoods in powder form. And they have a really compelling story. 196 00:22:06,280 --> 00:22:11,260 Daniel Bischoff: And most of their content that worked was actually just the founders talking about the story. We ran those ads and we tried 197 00:22:11,260 --> 00:22:19,200 Daniel Bischoff: their ads and never beat the founders telling their story. It had an interesting story about why they started it. Crystal, her boyfriend Michael, had cancer. 198 00:22:19,600 --> 00:22:26,520 Daniel Bischoff: And they overcame cancer. She started giving like getting greens and whatever, giving her him kind of a diet of these 199 00:22:26,520 --> 00:22:31,840 Kevin Mako: superfoods. And they're not claiming that cured his cancer. He overcame his cancer. But then 200 00:22:31,980 --> 00:22:39,040 Kevin Mako: She developed those same mixtures into some powder forms and started selling it out of her garage. And they started telling the story of like, this is our story. 201 00:22:39,180 --> 00:22:43,260 Kevin Mako: This is why you made it. You're healthy superfoods that are for you in powder form easy to take. 202 00:22:43,540 --> 00:22:49,380 Daniel Bischoff: And they're so engaging just those two people, you know, in their video. And I just kept saying, let's go back and make, you need make more videos. 203 00:22:49,500 --> 00:22:54,440 Daniel Bischoff: You need to go in the kitchen and cook and talk about why you're putting these together and talk about your blends you make. And it was all them. 204 00:22:54,540 --> 00:23:01,340 Daniel Bischoff: Like it was all cheap video they made that were really worked for them. Their best year was probably $80 million. They crushed it. So it's just them. That's amazing. 205 00:23:01,340 --> 00:23:08,120 Daniel Bischoff: Daniel, if folks want to learn more about your agency, StoicYeti, and what you guys do to work 206 00:23:08,120 --> 00:23:13,200 Daniel Bischoff: with hardware startups and emerging brands, what's the website and how can they reach out? 207 00:23:13,320 --> 00:23:19,780 Daniel Bischoff: And of course, as always, I will put all the links below in the show notes for anyone to click through. Yeah, we work with startups. We work a lot of startups. 208 00:23:19,980 --> 00:23:24,580 Daniel Bischoff: We also work with Fortune 500 companies. It's a very different approach for both kind of companies. 209 00:23:24,880 --> 00:23:31,940 Daniel Bischoff: But we kind of come in the startup world, so it's very exciting for us to do that too. but we also scale brands, you know, over 500 million at the same time. 210 00:23:32,160 --> 00:23:36,080 Daniel Bischoff: So our website is Stoic, StoI-C, Yeti. 211 00:23:36,300 --> 00:23:44,400 Kevin Mako: We like Stoicism and we like Bigfoot. So we went to StoicYeti. So it's not cool. That's why we're named. StoicYeti can reach me at Dan at StoicYeti. 212 00:23:44,620 --> 00:23:52,380 Daniel Bischoff: Happy to answer any questions. We do ads. We do a lot of user-generated content. We do ads spend across all platforms. 213 00:23:52,880 --> 00:23:58,100 Daniel Bischoff: And we do a big data analysis around it. You have to know what is working, what's not working. 214 00:23:58,320 --> 00:24:02,740 Daniel Bischoff: matter how good your creative is and your messaging is, you've got to know the data around to make 215 00:24:02,740 --> 00:24:06,900 Daniel Bischoff: it work. We do a lot of data analysis with the power BI with our clients, so we know we're spending 216 00:24:06,900 --> 00:24:13,840 Kevin Mako: we should be spending money and we want to make great creative and make sales. Yeah, much appreciated for all your words of wisdom today. 217 00:24:14,100 --> 00:24:17,480 Kevin Mako: Thanks for helping out emerging startup brands get off the ground 218 00:24:17,480 --> 00:24:24,540 Narrator: through digital advertising. Looking forward to talking to you soon. Thanks, Kevin. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the product startup podcast. 219 00:24:24,760 --> 00:24:31,320 Narrator: If you found some value in the show, please do us a huge favor and leave us a quick five-star review. If you have any questions, guest suggestions, or anything else, 220 00:24:31,560 --> 00:24:40,260 Narrator: feel free to reach out to us anytime at our email, podcast at MakoDesign.com. That's podcast at MakoDesign.com. This show is hosted by Kevin Mako. 221 00:24:40,420 --> 00:24:47,360 Narrator: North America's leading expert on product development for physical product startups. Huge thanks to our sponsors, PTC, and their two best-in-class 222 00:24:47,360 --> 00:24:52,320 Narrator: 3D CAD product development software solutions, Onshape, and Creo, and Mako Design + Invent. 223 00:24:52,320 --> 00:24:59,380 Narrator: The original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored specifically to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. 224 00:24:59,620 --> 00:25:01,360 Narrator: Thanks for joining and see you next time.