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Kevin Mako: Hello, product innovators. Today we learned from the director of product marketing at a 65-year-old manufacturing company on how to beat the competition and grow your product business.

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Narrator: You're listening to the Product Startup Podcast, the show that helps bring your product idea to life by chatting with successful inventors, product developers,

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Narrator: and hardware industry professionals. Our goal here is to get to the bottom of what makes a product successful, from initial idea to getting your product on store shelves.

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Narrator: you step by step to build a functional product and scale your product business. Hosted by Kevin Mako, one of North America's leading experts on hardware development for small product businesses. Now, onto the show.

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Kevin Mako: Welcome back, everyone. Today I'm very excited to introduce

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Kevin Mako: Jamie Lebrecht to the show. He's the director of product marketing for reliable corporation, a 65-year-old manufacturing company that produces high-quality consumer and commercial garment care products all over the world. Today, Jamie's going to share some valuable

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Kevin Mako: knowledge and how inventors, startups and small manufacturers can best compete both with a new product and when updating an existing product. Simply put, how do you think about the market and scaling a product right from the product development phase all the way through to multiple

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Kevin Mako: manufacturing routes? And finally, how do you continue to innovate to always be the leading one in the industry? Now on to the show.

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Kevin Mako: Hey, Jamie, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. excited to have you on.

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Kevin Mako: Not often are we talking to folks that are part of a story of 65 years in business and being a major market leader with many product lines now. It's exciting to talk about

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Kevin Mako: one of those products, the Uber Lite. You know, what's been happening over the last few months. I know that Reliable has had some great growth and have found some opportunities throughout COVID. So

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Kevin Mako: just talk a bit about what's happening with Reliable. And then we can jump into the Uber Light and the success story there and talk about how to really scale products and be a market leader.

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Jamie Libregts: in a certain market vertical. Awesome. Thank you. So, you know, we've been having a lot of great success lately. You know, we've had a couple industries that have been strong during COVID. Obviously, we have other parts of our business. So we have a nice diverse business.

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Jamie Libregts: We've purposely created a diverse business with many different channels that, you know, when stuff does happen and within a pandemic, you're not reliant just on your one kind of of revenue stream. You have different areas you can focus on. So that's been really good. And then we also recognize the opportunity.

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Jamie Libregts: So we've been really hunkered down, doing a lot of problems. product development. We have over 25 new products launching this year, next year,

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Jamie Libregts: just really trying

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Kevin Mako: to, you know, capture as much market share we can during what we see as an opportunity.

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Kevin Mako: Yeah. And, you know, that's great to see. Obviously, it's great to see as a client of ours, as reliable, but really great to see just that, that motivation and innovation, because while a lot of folks were kind of closing their doors and batting down the hatches, whether or not

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Kevin Mako: they were shrinking or growing, you know, it's good to see that, that, you know, looking at that opportunity in a time like this, a tough time and saying, okay, well, where can we develop, where can we improve so that when the economy comes back out the other side, you want to have a front row ticket to that show.

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Kevin Mako: Exactly.

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Kevin Mako: Yeah. So let's talk a bit about Uber light. This is very exciting. This is one of those projects. And we talk a lot on the show about owning your, your niche, really being the winners, focusing on a very small vertical, creating a great

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Kevin Mako: product for that vertical, winning in that space. But what I really am excited to, to talk about today is after that happens.

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Kevin Mako: So after you win, then what happens? So let's first and foremost go back in history about the Uber Light.

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Jamie Libregts: What niche did you serve and how did you end up winning the game in the product space there? I always like to say we were Uber before Uber came out. So about 13 years ago, we introduced the Uber light into the solar market.

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Jamie Libregts: So we have a very strong market within the sewing and alteration world, selling industrial sewing machine.

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Jamie Libregts: And everyone is using old bulb lights. They burnt out. They weren't very strong. So we introduced LED lights into that sewing 13 years ago with our lineup of Uber lights. Tremendously

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Jamie Libregts: successful. We got a lot of great market share, became market leaders. But with any product over time,

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Jamie Libregts: people started to copy us, came out with cheaper versions, started to evolve. And, you know, we just kind of became another light. So we said, okay, well, what are we going to do and how are we

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Jamie Libregts: going to develop something that can be more than just a number light. So one, you got to focus on a great design. You guys did a great job on that. Obviously, focus on that, but it's really talking about

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Jamie Libregts: the, what else does it do to meet that consumer demand? Like, what are those pain points when a customer's using the product? What are those pieces that they need to update that put yourself in their shoes,

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Jamie Libregts: right? So when you're using this product, what does it mean? And then from there, start to look at verticals, right? Start to look at different areas we can grow and different areas we can, we can, we can attack and try to take over market shares.

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Jamie Libregts: So, you know, we've had tremendous success after the launch in the audio market with audio files, high-end people with high-end record players, something we would never have thought of when we were doing this.

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Jamie Libregts: But they ended up when you have a really high-end record player, you like to be able to see the groove, see that it's all clean, see that there's no mark so you don't ruin your record players.

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Kevin Mako: And the technology that's in the light really made people excited about that. And it looked great. And so that market has really kind of taken up. And it's almost created another market for us, which has been very interesting and very exciting. Well, this is great. There's a lot to unpack here.

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Kevin Mako: First and foremost, you notice that there was kind of a missing gap in the industry. And you created the Uber Light to serve one specific market in the sewing space. It was a better light for sewing.

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Kevin Mako: And then that became successful, which is the dream of many product startups, many hardware startups. The dream is to get there. But I think it's also very important to think. of the evolution of the line. One of the things when we're talking about developing a product

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Kevin Mako: from scratch is focusing on a very, very small vertical with a very small feature set and doing a great job. But that doesn't mean that the dream of what you eventually want the brand to be, what you

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Kevin Mako: want the lineup of products to be has to die that day. Realistically speaking, you can focus on that to get to market, but never lose sight of what are the additional features that you want to have? What's a second version of the product? What are alternative types of products? Or

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Kevin Mako: What are there other things that you could add to that brand? And then one of the things that, you know, I really want to kind of unpack in detail and a bit is looking at other verticals for your technology, which is what you did very well.

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Kevin Mako: So first and foremost, when we look back in time at that Uber light when you won the market, what were some of the things that allowed you to be better than using just

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Jamie Libregts: other lights or, you know, just have it using the light in your room or just using something you could clip on easily? like what was it then that really made the Uber light the best light specifically for people in the sewing application?

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Jamie Libregts: So obviously it was introducing LEDs, right? So they last longer. You had 50,000 hours of bald life. We had a honeycomb design that was anti-glare. So when you're looking at the light like this, you don't get a glare in your eyes.

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Jamie Libregts: And obviously, we have a flexible neck so they could flex and put it. Obviously,

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Kevin Mako: one of the key features of the Uber light is being able to move your neck around and it was a very heavy metal kind of neck that bent into shape and so it really kind of checked off a lot of boxes for them right so it was a better light longer lasting you could put

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Kevin Mako: it into the shape you wanted and that really resonated with the consumer brilliant thing there is that if you look at any of those features none of them were overly complicated at the time it was

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Kevin Mako: just it was you were using the technology that you had at that time packing a handful of great features into one application,

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Kevin Mako: obviously doing good design, making it work well together so that that thing would hit that, that market need.

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Kevin Mako: And hindsight's obviously, you know, we look back now and a lot of things use that technology. But at the time, that was fairly revolutionary, which is interesting because you've now done it again with the redesign of the Uber light.

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Kevin Mako: So 13 years ago, you made the best sewing light. then like you said it started to start to be copied and people made alternative versions of it and

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Kevin Mako: whatever else so you you took the reliable model and said well you know technology has evolved and so will we and now you've made this really enhanced version of that we were like so what was

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Jamie Libregts: it now if we look years later that you decided to do to say okay we're going to recapture this market and then we'll talk about how you then leverage that to actually enter into new markets as well so let's focus first on the recapture like what was really some

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Jamie Libregts: of the key ideas that made you want to reach out to us and work together to create, you know, the current best sewing light on the market.

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Jamie Libregts: So I think, you know, when you kind of go through any kind of product development, you start off with, especially when you're replacing a product that's been in the market for so long, is you look at the negative points, right? You know, everyone knows your positive points. You know why it's the best. We say it was always the best,

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Jamie Libregts: but you start to look at the negative point. So technology would grow. There's newer technologies. There's newer lighting technologies that had come out that we weren't leveraging.

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Jamie Libregts: There's, you know, people who would complain the neck was very hard to bend and it needed to be softer and easier to move. The clamp was very bulky because it had a lot of electronics in the base. And I don't know, we did a lot of work going back and forth trying to figure something out there,

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Jamie Libregts: which really led to the big aha moment with this entire project is we changed vendor. partners. So we'd been with a vendor partner for many years. They were a sewing light

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Jamie Libregts: manufacturer and they just didn't have the technologies that we needed.

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Jamie Libregts: And it opened up, you know, kind of a search. We found a man, you know, got lucky, found a really great partner to be able to produce the light for us that had access to the technologies that were more modern. And we were able to then take those technologies and put it into something that

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Jamie Libregts: is a way better light that has features that, you know, you can change the color. So it's softer on your eyes. So if you're doing a lot of work for a long period of time, it's nice and soft on your eyes. You can make it as bright as you want, really, really bright because

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Jamie Libregts: some people like it really bright. Or you have like a daylight setting. And these are, some of these are really standard features. But again, it's a little bit of the marketing into the marketing world where how you sell these features. Updating the silicone neck,

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Jamie Libregts: introducing stuff like USB. So now it's low voltage USB, which is really exciting for us because it just uses a power adapter plug that the USB plugs into, just like your phone. But it

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Jamie Libregts: it opens up all the markets around the world because now, yes, I've developed a 110-based product for the North American market, but we can now, just by changing a plug and a little certification

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Jamie Libregts: on the side, I can go to any market. So now we're going into the UK, we're going into Germany.

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Kevin Mako: We're talking to West Australia. So it is allowed us to make a global product by just looking at the different technology within it. And a very simple innovation by just changing it to USB, which sounds

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Kevin Mako: very simple has opened up a lot of great opportunities for us. We were able to take out a lot of the electronics because it's lower voltage, a much smaller LED driver, not getting in all the technical things, but it really allowed us to make a sleek design with some really cool

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Kevin Mako: features built in, but open up other markets, which is super exciting for us.

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Kevin Mako: It's amazing how hardware products can really scale and grow and how you can, once you have your first version or your MVP or whatever it is out there, it's almost like a world of opportunity.

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Kevin Mako: And obviously you mentioned just that one key change. And all of a sudden, now it opens you up to dozens more countries that you can sell it, looking at other verticals, all that sort of stuff. Now,

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Kevin Mako: before we go into looking at verticals, I remember talking to your team in the early days of developing this product and coming up with the ideas for it.

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Kevin Mako: And something that stood out to me is like, Reliable always wanted to be the best.

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Kevin Mako: always wanted to use a new technology, wanted to be high quality, wanted to have great user experience and user reviews. But that isn't always the case, whether it's a startup or an established

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Kevin Mako: company. In fact, a lot of the times we find that the more established a company, the more resistant they are to these sorts of changes. The old adage, right, if it works,

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Kevin Mako: don't break it. So what is it really in the reliable culture that allowed you to be so progressive and always looking to,

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Jamie Libregts: to kind of be the leader kind of going forward as opposed to just relying, which you could have easily relied on your loyrals of the past and continued, I'm sure, to have been successful, but obviously much more successful when you innovate and when you really want to create a great

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Jamie Libregts: experience for customers. So what is it about reliable culture that you would advise to, whether it's startups or whether it's existing corporations that are thinking about

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Jamie Libregts: and are having those mental gymnastics struggles, whether they really should innovate now or whether they should just hang on to what seems to have been working in the past, right? Looking forward as opposed to looking back. Yeah.

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Jamie Libregts: I think it's very important to understand what your brand is and where your brand wants to be and and drive within that. So, you know, if you're a person making, you know, $2 screws, you need to have to do you

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Jamie Libregts: doing the best $2 screws and really staying within that where reliable we are about, as you said, that we're premium or the high end, we're the expert. A lot of our business is that B-to-B side, working with the professionals.

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Jamie Libregts: So if you do bring a product into that market, even if you take it to the consumer level, which this light kind of goes back and forth, if you want that quality and that field of that customer, because that's what our brand promises, and that's who we want to be.

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Jamie Libregts: I think the other important thing is to understand where you want to be philosophically. So I've always said, reliable, we could be a $200 million company in a week,

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Jamie Libregts: but at risk of what? And where do your margins go? And, you know, I've worked for other larger corporations doing hundreds of millions a year and we still make this and you go to a smaller company and you do a lot less than that

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Jamie Libregts: and you make this in the end, right? So it's understanding what that bottom value is and what you really take home at the end of the day and how that relate to where your brand positioning is, where you want to be and where that

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Jamie Libregts: product positioning is because it's very difficult to say, like this is, you know, we're talking about the light. It's a $49 U.S. light. Like, it's not like we've developed something here that's

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Jamie Libregts: $3,000 that are a $100,000 car here. It's something that's really great value still, but

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Jamie Libregts: it's really a premium product within that space. You can go get a $29 light that's out there, but what makes it premium? What makes it have those features that resonates with the consumer?

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Kevin Mako: And then how does that brand experience really meet that consumer need? So, you know, when you get the box, the first part when you open the packaging. So it's nice packaging. It's got nice clip-in folds. You open it up. There's a welcome message there.

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Kevin Mako: The packaging is very modern. It's a matte finish. It's not this glossy,

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Kevin Mako: cheaper-looking package. So it's really putting an experience into it. And then with all of your launch and your marketing materials, making sure that it's still,

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Kevin Mako: that look and feel is what you want your brand to be. So if you have a very high-end brand, you've got to have beautiful videos, commercials,

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Kevin Mako: marketing materials, and really match the brand presence. to the product that we've developed.

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Kevin Mako: That's great advice. One of the biggest things that we always get into conversations with, especially when you're dealing with a new product and a new innovation and something where, even if, like you said, if it's a slight modification, but it's better,

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Kevin Mako: then you really don't need to be focusing on price as being. So a lot of clients, they'll come in and they'll say, okay, I've got this great, no idea. It's going to kick the butt of the competitors out there because we have all these amazing new features.

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Kevin Mako: it's going to be better quality and I'm going to price it cheaper. And that's my first warning flag where I say, look, it's one boat or the other boat, right?

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Kevin Mako: If you're trying to make the most cost competitive thing, then that's a completely different design language than if you're trying to make something premium.

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Kevin Mako: And realistically speaking, for the vast majority of our clients, I would say 90% plus of our clients that are making a new innovation, whether it's a 65-year-old company like Reliable

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Jamie Libregts: that's coming up with the next Uber light, or whether it's somebody who's making a go-fish underwater fishing camera or the tri plungers,

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Jamie Libregts: something. Either way, no matter what way you look at it, they're creating something that is new proprietary and has tremendous value, especially in its launch, especially before they've saturated the market. So, Jamie, when you're thinking about

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Jamie Libregts: price and when you're advising kind of early stage startups, do you agree with the notion of kind of price high, ensure that you have a higher quality product at least to start

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Jamie Libregts: before you start trying to be cost competitive with the existing competition or alternative

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Kevin Mako: products that are indirectly competition that you might be fighting with? What are your thoughts around that? It's a lot easier to bring the price down and it's impossible to bring the price up. So once you've created that market position and you've created that market

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Kevin Mako: price. That's your price.

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Kevin Mako: And, you know, unless you're going to, again, go back to the drawing board redesign and introduce something that creates that value and makes it that higher price point, you've set your price point. So a lot of conversation, a lot of back and forth goes on when you

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Kevin Mako: are developing a product to really make sure you set that price point right. You know, too high is too high. I think that's the concern anyone would have when they're doing something is, oh boy, that's high or, you know, too low is, you know, that hurts your margins. And it's the margins.

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Kevin Mako: day is what we're really driving towards, you know, sustaining and keeping. Well, and that's the mechanics of a business, and especially an early stage company, but really any new product launch, right? If you don't have margins, that seriously

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Kevin Mako: limits your ability to use those margins to scale, whether it's your marketing message or redesign or whatever else. Margins are key. And if you have the luxury, and that's the way I

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Kevin Mako: really look at it, it's the luxury of having an innovation in that space. You are lucky to have that innovation, have seen the innovation, have understood that, right? That's really your

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Kevin Mako: golden nugget of opportunity that you've found. Don't waste it on burning your margins until I believe, and if somebody really wants to have the most cost competitive market, then at least show first

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Kevin Mako: that you can saturate that premium market. And once you believe that worldwide, you have sold to all of your customers, right? You truly have saturated that market. Now you could look at potentially doing a cost down if you want to hit the market below it, maybe a cheaper,

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Kevin Mako: version that uses the same brand and doesn't sacrifice on certain qualities, but maybe is smaller

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Jamie Libregts: or easier to produce or whatever else so that you could bring that down and sell to a different demographic. But when you're starting out,

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Jamie Libregts: I say this quite often on the show, there's seven billion people on the planet. If you can't find a handful of people that are willing to pay a premium, then that innovation really isn't that innovative. You're not really solving a pain point. realistically speaking, most innovations, even if they seem like a niche within a niche within

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Jamie Libregts: a niche, realistically speaking, that still is probably a fairly large market, if you look at it especially worldwide, which then comes into the second thing that you've touched on a couple

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Jamie Libregts: times, which is, okay, let's say you've even partially believe that you've saturated that specific demographic. Now you can start looking at other opportunities for your technology.

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Jamie Libregts: So what did reliable do with the Uber light in terms of using that technology of the Uber light to expand into other market verticals? Yeah.

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Jamie Libregts: So, you know, we really wanted to, when we launched the product, focus it to show people the vitality, the different areas that you could use the light.

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Jamie Libregts: So obviously working with a great video partner that we have, we created this in a really great launch video that showed the product in many different places. And it was kind of a fun video. daughter going back and forth.

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Jamie Libregts: And it's really engaging, which is really key. You know, I think a lot of people talk about doing really short videos because, you know, they all say, well, you only have seven, 10 seconds to get, but you have that time to get their engagement because people will watch

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Jamie Libregts: longer videos. It's a, it's a two-minute launch video, but you don't feel like you've watched a two-minute video. It's, you know, and people think about how many times are on social media and all of a sudden you've watched the video and you look down it was five minutes long. But that's because it was engaging.

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Jamie Libregts: And so when you're launching something, you got to find that what is going to be engaging to them as well as you want to show off your product and you want to show it in different places. So the video shows it in different areas. The beginning of the video starts with a father

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Jamie Libregts: and he's really getting into the light. Like he's showing how it flexes and he shows how it can plug into a computer with the USB. And he's painting a little Warhammer toys at his desk. So it's just kind of showing that you can use it as kind of anything you want to do. And

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Jamie Libregts: And the response we got from these Warhammer toys, because it's such a big community, which had nothing to do with the video, but it was that social response was pretty amazing. It was really good. But it opened up to now you're talking to model hobby market.

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Jamie Libregts: So now we've gone out to the model on hobby markets to get it done it. Then you see the daughter takes it and now it's in the sewing world because she's doing sewing. And then he goes into the workshop and he's using it in the workshop. And then she's using it at their desk. So now you're into the office world.

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Jamie Libregts: So by showing the light in the different areas that you can use it, which is what the intended purpose is, but really focusing in on some of the demographics that we wanted to use and some of the areas that we wanted, the verticals that we talked about that we wanted to go after,

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Jamie Libregts: when they watch the video then, when you're using that as a launch video, when you're trying to engage buyers and all the purchase people and the decision people that are out there, it gets them excited because they see the product to their customer, right?

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Kevin Mako: Like where if I just showed it on a sewing machine, I said, hey, office place, like, it could go on it down. It's going to go, well, yeah, but that's not what you're marketing it towards.

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Kevin Mako: So it was very important for us to find a way to market to the different verticals that we saw and create a video that was engaging. So that was great work by the entire team to come up with what they came up with.

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Kevin Mako: The success has been really good. But really when you want to show your marketing materials and show that product, when you're ready to get into that, you know, ready for long.

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Kevin Mako: It's really key to talk to your vertical, even if it is something very specific, then you keep it very specific. But if you have identified different verticals that you want to get to, make sure that you have marketing towards it.

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Kevin Mako: Even if we didn't do it in a video, new lifestyle, do a lifestyle shot and we can do it in different places. But when you're going in and you're marketing to one of those verticals, you've got to have, you got to show it in that purpose.

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Jamie Libregts: Otherwise, they're not going to make that transition to what you think in your head is a great vertical for them. them seeing it in practical use. By the way, for anyone listening right now that's out of computer or whatnot, and I'll put

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Jamie Libregts: the direct link in the show notes as well across every platform, check out that video. Just look up Reliable Uber Lite, and it's a great example of a two-minute video that shows all these different things that Jamie's talking about.

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Jamie Libregts: So if you're looking, you know, thinking about launching your product and you want to really understand visually what Jamie's talking about, look at that video because it's fantastic. So, and that really, it hits all these kind of cords. It's emotional.

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Jamie Libregts: It's got comedy into it as well, tastefully done and shows the different use cases. Now, in terms of those use cases, you know, obviously over the last 13 years, starting as a sewing light, you probably started to get some of that feedback or knowledge from the market.

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Jamie Libregts: How did you choose those, you know, four or five different use cases in the video? Was it related to the past or were you somewhat guessing forward or a combination of both?

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Jamie Libregts: It's a combination of both. I think the other thing is we spent some time identifying the market. So you got to do your market research.

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Jamie Libregts: It's great to say we wanted to get into the hobby world, but what is the hobby world using for life nowadays? Do they have something like that? And what are the stores that are within that? And then what is the market opportunity?

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Jamie Libregts: It would be great to go after XYZ market, but if the opportunity is two lights,

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Kevin Mako: well, it's not worth our time where if you identify something as a much large, larger opportunity. And then it also goes to who our strengths are and who our customers are. Right. So, you know, the great part about being in business for 65 years is we've

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Kevin Mako: pretty much dealt with everybody and we have thousands of different customers that we do deal with. But what are those customer segments that we need to ensure that we keep and we maintain?

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Kevin Mako: What are those market opportunities that we have with our current customer base, right? And making sure what we, if we identify that they're an opportunity. And then what are those new ones? And then what is the scale behind that? So we, a lot of

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Kevin Mako: homework and a lot of napkins were used to come up with some different ideas and really we just brought it down to focusing on our strengths and focusing on areas where we see growth that meet our

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Jamie Libregts: brand values, right? So it's an amazing light, but we're not going to put it into a dollar store because that doesn't meet our brand and who we want to be and what that want to be. But, you know,

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Jamie Libregts: you go into an indigo or chapters or something like that. That's in a different kind of world. That's a, that's very interesting and that perception and that brand value really ties back to what our brand values are. That's great. So kind of to summarize,

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Jamie Libregts: you know, develop great technology for a very specific niche, own and win that niche by creating a better product, a higher quality product, something that really wins with those customers. Then as you grow that, ensure that you keep up with

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Jamie Libregts: technology, look to expand your verticals. And of course, every time you do, be sure that you're marketing to those people.

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Jamie Libregts: That's been a great talk. Tons of insights, lots of knowledge there for whether it's an emerging startup in the hardware space or product developers or even a long-established

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Jamie Libregts: 65-year-old company that's continuing to innovate. So Jamie, before we say goodbye, are there any last nuggets of advice that you would give for somebody who's working on or developing

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Jamie Libregts: their kind of niche technology that's going to change kind of their market?

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Jamie Libregts: I think it's important to test and test the markets. I think one of the best part with the light is we changed the color almost at the last day from black to white.

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Jamie Libregts: And that was just, hey, let's get a sample of it in white and see what it looks like and ask a couple people.

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Kevin Mako: And we asked some of our bigger customer base and it just looks so good on the white. It was a very unscategic change, I think it was something that we just said, well, let's just see this in different colors. And then test it and get out to your base and say, okay.

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Kevin Mako: Okay, what do you guys think? What are the problems you see with this? We have another great product that we're working on with you guys to redo some boilers that we've created. And we've given samples to our customer base and say, hey, how do you like this? Do you like where the buttons are?

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Kevin Mako: Do you like where the steam comes out? Is that too big or too small? And just to get their feedback, because as much as we think we're the experts, we don't use the products every day. Right?

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Kevin Mako: We don't necessarily, we're not the end user using the product, you know, a thousand times a year. We're with people develop it and we talk about it and we know a lot about it, but we're not

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Kevin Mako: the end user that's touching it. So I think it's very important to test, whether you get a sample to your brother and get him to use it for a week or really to a person that's a what I call

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Kevin Mako: a power user that's really educated with the product to really try it out and get some great feedback because if you have something that's bad, you'll hear about it.

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Jamie Libregts: You know, relevant product or process and doing all the testing, I think it's really beneficial in the long way. Well, that's one of the great things about prototyping, right? Once you have that,

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Kevin Mako: you know, prototype that you can actually talk and put it in people's hands and have them give you real feedback, that gives the opportunity to make any last minute tweaks or adjustments like you guys did right before it went to production on the prototypes. Okay, we think

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Kevin Mako: we've got, you know, this color is going to resonate better. And that's a simple change, but it happened through that small feedback loop, which is, which is easy to do. It's free to reach out to a handful of people with your product. Say, what do you think? How do we develop this for?

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Kevin Mako: We're about to cut tools or about to go into production and get that last minute of feedback. It also gives you that level of comfort because I'm sure that that Uber light was,

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Jamie Libregts: you know, I've got to give kudos to the designers. They really enjoyed working on that product. It was great working with you as a company, though, because you were trying to be innovative. You gave us the job. Say, hey, let's use the latest technology to make a high quality great product.

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Jamie Libregts: So it allows designers to really do their best work. But the reality is it was a beautiful thing at the end of the day, let alone the fact, obviously, had all these features and all that sort of stuff. But it's probably very exciting for you to reach out to clients to say, hey, this is our next thing.

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Jamie Libregts: Like, when clients looked at it, you tell me, right? What were some of the reactions in terms of their excitement?

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Jamie Libregts: It's, I want that in my house. Like, that's like,

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Jamie Libregts: when somebody says that, it's a, can I get one for myself? Because I want that in my house, that's, that's a, you know, you know, you've done something right when people want something that you have. Like, that just makes you feel good inside.

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Jamie Libregts: Yeah, yeah. So you get both ends, right? And you get feedback that you may have missed, that you may have overlooked, that you may have been caught in your bubble and didn't see

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Jamie Libregts: kind of out of the side that they would see, as you said, a user with a thousand views. And you also get all the positive reinforcements. Say, like, you're really on to something.

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Jamie Libregts: So no, push it. Get it out there. Jamie, really appreciate all your insights today. Very exciting for anybody that wants more information about reliable. What's the website? Where should they be looking? And I'll, of course, drop in the show notes.

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Jamie Libregts: all of your direct links as well as Reliables, links and the video link as well, because I really want everyone to check out that video so that you can understand how to really put a product out there for the first look. That's great. Just visit us at Reliable Corporation.com.

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Jamie Libregts: It's all nice and long. So Reliable Corporation.com. Thanks, Jamie. Looking forward to chatting again. Take care of that. Awesome. Thank you. Thanks for having.

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Narrator: Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Product Startup Podcast, the show that teaches you what it really takes to bring your product to market and turn it into a big success. This podcast series is brought to you by Mako Design and

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Narrator: Invent, the original and leading firm in North America to provide global caliber in-to-end physical consumer product development to startups, inventors, and small product business clients.

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Narrator: If you're looking for product development help on your invention, head over to Mako-design.com. That's m-a-k-o-design.com. For a free consultation from one of Mako-D-O-D-E-E-O-D-E-E-E-A.

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Narrator: design's four design studios from coast to coast. Thanks for listening and see you next time.