SPI 427: Since Launching a Physical Product, Here’s What We’ve Learned—SwitchPod Updates

SPI 427 – Since Launching a Physical Product, Here’s What We’ve Learned—SwitchPod Updates

Pat Flynn:
One of my favorite things to do here at Smart Passive Income is to have you follow along the journey of some of the businesses that I run. And this episode today is about the business at SwitchPod. SwitchPod is a physical product, an invention that me and my videographer created. We had an idea back in 2017. We eventually launched it on Kickstarter February 2019 to the tune of $418,000, which then allowed us to build this thing, to ship it out. And now we’re on Amazon, other retail stores. People are buying it who we don’t even know. It’s awesome, but we’re learning so much as we go, and we want just to continue this journey and share all the things that we’re learning along the way with you because whether you choose to create a physical product or a digital product, we know that through our journey we can teach you and hopefully help you fast forward your success too.

Pat:
So make sure you stick around, I got Caleb Wojcik, my partner in today, and we’re going to talk about all things SwitchPod. That means updates on the new products, some of the mistakes that we made, money, margins, all the things. I mean, there’s just so much to unpack here since we launched this thing and we can’t wait to update you, so stick around. But first of course, the intro.

Announcer:
Welcome to the Smart Passive Income podcast where it’s all about working hard now so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, he’s a certified Enneagram three married to a six, Pat Flynn.

Pat:
What’s up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to session 427 of the Smart Passive Income podcast. My name is Pat Flynn here to help you make more money, save more time, and help more people too. And today we’re talking about the SwitchPod. You can find it at SwitchPod. This is my invention along with Caleb Wojcik, my partner, my videographer, my brother. We’ve done so many amazing things with this product, and I’ve learned so much and we just want to pass them along to you and keep you up to date with what’s been going on. He’s been on the show a few times, and I’ve talked about this product several times in the past. We’ll link to those other episodes in the show notes page at smartpassiveincome.com/session426 in case you want to start from the beginning with us. But for right now, let’s just dive right in. Here is Caleb Wojcik. What’s up, Caleb? Welcome back to the show. Thanks for being here.

Caleb Wojcik:
Yeah, thanks for having me on. Always a pleasure.

Pat:
I know you’re staying super busy these days because we’re all locked in our houses right now.

Caleb:
Yeah. We were just saying before we hit record, it’s not that much different for people that work from home or their families are home a lot, but it’s just like the economic and business landscape is changing a lot right now.

Pat:
Yes. And we have been affected by that in some capacity, and we’re going to dig into that as well as just give you an update on SwitchPod. For those of you listening right now and you’re not sure what this SwitchPod thing is, hopefully by now you’ve heard about it if you’ve heard of us for a while. But if not, a really quick intro. SwitchPod is a product that Caleb, who was my videographer, still is. He and I got together, long story short, we invented a product, we Kickstarted it. We raised $418,000 on Kickstarter. This is February 2019. We took six months to get it manufactured and then into the hands of the backers. We’ve been since selling it on places like our website at SwitchPod as well as Amazon, B&H Photo, Adorama, Moment and many other places around the world actually.

Pat:
And we’re learning a ton because both Caleb and I have never done this before. And the purpose of us coming on today and the other times he’s come on as well as on the YouTube channel at Pat Flynn, we’re just here to share as we learn because we know there’s a lot of people who—maybe this is you—you have ideas and you’re not quite sure how to get it done and you just need somebody who’s done it maybe a couple of steps ahead of you that you can learn from, and that’s why we’re here. What’s been the best part so far about this whole journey for you, Caleb, up to this point?

Caleb:
I mean, the best part of having SwitchPod launched and in the wild now is just seeing people that I don’t know at all, never met, never heard of before just posting about SwitchPod and being excited about the product; versus really I’d only launched things in the past that people had to know who I was to buy, like it was a course I was launching, or it was a community I was leading or what have you, or it was a course I filmed for someone else that people bought it because they trusted that person. Now we’ve created this product that’s bigger than us, and it’s helping more people than we know.

Pat:
Yeah, it’s crazy. The tweets are coming in everyday, you could check out our @switchpod account on Instagram to see a lot of the … We love to repost things people have shared too, and it’s just really incredible to see, like you said, people we don’t even know using it and enjoying it. And I just recently went to an event at Social Media Marketing World and I saw it several times in the wild. Many of them I knew, that’s sort of a home conference for me here in San Diego. But many people I didn’t know, and it was pretty incredible. So we are just so thrilled for the success of it so far. But we also both understand that there’s so much more upside and so much more growth here. We didn’t take any outside investments, this was all purely funded by ourselves, bootstrapped, and we continue to remain as such.

Pat:
However, we’ve had a lot of fun and interesting opportunities happen since launching it. We really struggled with getting it on Amazon, number one. But ever since then it’s been going up and it’s been changing rankings every day. But we are making sales, maybe $30,000 up to $40,000 a month. Again. that’s just gross sales. That doesn’t include the fees and manufacturing and shipping. So the margins are quite small here compared to our normal digital products. But what are some of the other fun surprises and opportunities that we’ve come across since launching this thing?

Caleb:
Well, I didn’t really understand how retailers even worked, like how stores work to buy products-

Pat:
How does it work?

Caleb:
So from what I’ve learned, basically you have regular pricing that people pay at the store. So for us, that’s $100. And then you have prices that retailers pay to buy things from the company that makes the product. And that price has a margin built into it so that they can earn their revenue by marking up products to the price that people will actually pay at the end. And I never really learned that. And surprisingly, I went to business school and stuff, maybe I just forgot about it. But it’s interesting to know that, okay, yes, you want to sell your product for $100 let’s say, and you want to be profitable. But if you want to be in stores, they’re going to want somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of that price that they’re going to sell it for as a margin.

Caleb:
And so you need to be profitable to make money also selling it to retailers if you want to be in stores and things like that, and they’re going to buy it for less than just an end consumer will buy it. So this is basically why any website you go to online will give you either free shipping or a 10 percent off coupon if you try to leave the site or just enter your email or what have you because they are going to make more money if they sell it to you than if you go to Amazon and buy it. And so I never really saw that. But now every time I go to a website, I see that they’re offering 10 percent or 20 percent off or whatever because that’s the margin they’re losing if you go buy it at Amazon or you go buy it at another store.

Pat:
Right. And if you sell it on Amazon at least through Amazon FBA, fulfilled by Amazon, it’s a little bit harder to reach the customer at the end versus if they were to subscribe and purchase from you. And so we have a really nice number for our product. It’s for sale for $99 on our website. We prefer people go to the website. So if you’re like, “Ooh, SwitchPod, that’s cool,” please go to SwitchPod and you can check out the bundles there. We’ll talk about also in this conversation how we’ve added accessories to the product and other things people can buy, which has been really neat. But yeah, we’re on Amazon too. And we have a really nice round number, about a hundred bucks. Would it be okay if we shared, and if not, just tell me yet to edit this out. People listening to this now, you know it’s in here. But what are the numbers?

Caleb:
Like what do we sell it to retailers for and what do we pay to make it and get it here and that sort of thing?

Pat:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And like if we were to sell on Amazon, how much are we keeping versus how much are we keeping if we were to sell it on our own website, for example?

Caleb:
Without pulling it up right in front of me, I believe if we sell it on Amazon, they take about $18 to $19 per unit sold and then there are some other fees associated with them like keeping them in their warehouse and stuff, but somewhere around $20.

Pat:
Okay. Minus the cost to make the product, right?

Caleb:
Ballpark around $30 considering we have to manufacture the product, we have to make the packaging for it, we have to ship it from China to our warehouse, pay to have it warehoused and then pay to ship it to Amazon, roughly around $30 per SwitchPod tripod.

Pat:
So we could probably say we’re keeping 40 to 50 percent. And then if we were to sell it on our own website, what happens?

Caleb:
Well, we don’t have to pay that Amazon fee of about $20, that’s twenty extra dollars in our pocket.

Pat:
And at scale, That’s huge, that’s massive. And you think about, I mean, we’re a small company right now, and we’re selling by the thousands, imagine a company selling millions of items or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. I mean, that twenty bucks goes to Amazon. This is why Amazon is so big and so huge and their stock is up and everything. And it’s hard because it’s like they also are the marketplace. People are searching for things there, so they kind of have that corner in the market, right?

Caleb:
Yeah. There’s an expectation that things are just on Amazon I feel like, at least here in the United States, that if you have a product you can buy on Amazon. And the expectation is that I want Prime shipping, I want it today, tomorrow, the next day, and I want free shipping. And so that’s the expectation of people and-

Pat:
We’re so spoiled.

Caleb:
You have to be on Amazon because people will go, “Well, I need that tripod for this trip I’m taking tomorrow, I’m just going to get a different one.” And so you lose out an entire sale versus, “Oh I’ll just go to your site,” or what have you. People also, like you said, they’re shopping there, they’re searching for the solution. They might not know what tripods are even out there. And so they come across our product through Amazon. And so it’s also marketing, and you could run ads like we’ve experimented with on Amazon where people search travel tripod or other terms that we would want to rank for and they find out about us that way. So there’s all these other ways that Amazon is beneficial for us to be on as a platform. And if we were just looking at it at a scarcity kind of mindset of well we want the most amount of margins for every sale that we make. I try to view it as it’s an additional sale we would not have made if we weren’t on Amazon.

Pat:
Exactly. And on the retail side of things, when we sell in bulk to these retailers, which is largely in your camp, again the margins are quite low. And we’re going for scale here, we’re not going for higher margins. If we were going just for higher margins, it would be all things pointed to switchpod.co basically.

Caleb:
And they also do other things. So retailers take even more than Amazon, there’s about a 30 percent cut on us where we’re selling them to retailers for about $70. And then they turn and sell them for $100, and they handle more stuff than we do. Like B&H for example, or Adorama. If I go to B&H or Adorama and I look at a SwitchPod, I might open Instagram and get a SwitchPod ad or I might go to another website on the internet and have a Google ad that shows the SwitchPod to me. So they’re actively marketing our product advertising wise, they’re handling things like returns or customer support on the order and things like that versus if someone orders a SwitchPod through our website, their package didn’t show up or it’s delayed, and they have questions about it or they want to return it. We are handling that. So in a way retailers earn their margin. But in the end, it’s less profit for us. So it’s a give and take: They’re going to do more, but they’re going to take more of your money.

Pat:
Right. This is a very similar conversation we’ve had with people here on the show about selling books. You could sell your own book like old school Nathan Barry style on your website with three different price tiers and make more money that way. But then you don’t get the advantage of Amazon and the algorithm and the marketplace and the people being affiliates for Amazon who want to promote your book too. And there’s a give and take I think, and it’s just really interesting. You kind of have to figure out what your goals are. And our goal is to get into as many people’s hands as possible right now versus margins. And we are putting essentially every dollar we make back into the business to grow it, to order more product. Tell us where we’re at with inventory and how things have gone since the promotion. If you wanted to remind people about how many backers we had, how many we ordered, and what the life cycle has been like so far, that’d be awesome.

Caleb:
Yeah. So timeline wise, our Kickstarter campaign ended almost exactly a year ago.

Pat:
Happy anniversary.

Caleb:
Yeah. About six months after that, we delivered the first batch. And there were about 4,000 Kickstarter backers, which ordered about 4,500 total SwitchPod tripods. And our initial order that we placed with the factory was for 11,500 units. So we basically doubled what the amount of Kickstarter backers bought. So we have about 5,000 in inventory. and then there were 1,500 of those 11,500 that were very specific for the VidSummit event. So VidSummit purchased that many in partnership with us and Prouduct to give one to everybody that attended. So after the Kickstarter backers, we had about 5,000 more that we could sell. And we’re almost out of those right now. I think we’re down in the like 500 range in our warehouse as we’re recording this.

Pat:
That’s crazy dude. We’ve sold over like 10,000 of them.

Caleb:
Yeah. But we ordered 5,000 more a couple months ago, I don’t know. Around the end of last year, we ordered another 5,000 tripods.

Pat:
Before all the craziness.

Caleb:
Yes, before all the coronavirus stuff going on. But we also have another product, we have an accessory that we launched on our anniversary of our campaign. So that was about two months ago—we launched a ball head. So the accessory that everyone had been asking us for, that was the most requested thing from our customer base. We developed that faster and we launched it differently this time. Instead of doing a Kickstarter campaign where we crowdfunded, we already knew we had a chunk of customers, 10,000 people that had bought the SwitchPod before. We already knew that they were asking for this thing. So we reversed it, we made them first. And we had 2,500 of those made, I think we only have about 500 of those left right now. So we’re making more of those as well.

Caleb:
So you kind of have to play the inventory game when you’re in the physical-product space, and your margins and your profit really are towards the end because there’s a lot of upfront costs with developing and engineering and getting molds made to make these. And once you start getting into the higher quantity numbers, then you’re just paying unit costs, you’re just paying. How much does this unit cost to make? I don’t have any of the upfront fees that I had before, those are all paid for. So as we, let’s say, sell the next 5,000 whatever amount of money we get from that, we might be able to make 20,000 or 25,000. And if we sell all of those and reinvest all of that, then we could make 100,000 of the SwitchPods.

Caleb:
And so you kind of play this step-up game. It’s kind of like gambling you’re picking up your chips and going to a higher limit and be like, “Okay, can we sell all these? Can we make all these and sell them and make even more money?” It’s an interesting timing thing too with how long things take to make, and are you going to run out of money, and time the payments? And that’s where it gets really complicated to manage this right now.

Pat:
Yeah. We are heavily relying on a lot of other people’s experiences and a lot of very knowledgeable people who have done these kinds of things before. And just a quick lesson for everybody, ever since we started this whole thing. If Caleb and I were just alone doing this, we would have not been able to do it. There’s been so many people from Richie and Thiefaine and Jase and Cole of Prouduct.com, like proud product, Prouduct.com. They’ve truly helped us and still continue to help us from our 3PL, our [third party] logistics person, which I want to get into it in a little bit here in terms of fulfillment and shipping because I think that’s a big thing that a lot of people who are thinking about creating a physical product need to think about to a lot of the …

Pat:
Actually we’re connecting with a lot of other retailers and other CEOs of companies who are just willing to lend a hand. And it’s just so amazing to see that there’s so many great people out there who are willing to help people like us. And there are people that are willing to help you too. Can you speak to anybody out there who might be like, “Oh, well, how might I even find people or do they really exist? How do you attract help in that sort of way?” Because definitely it’s been a key component for us.

Caleb:
Well, I think there are two ways you could go. You could either hire a mainstream popular company to help you. So for third party logistics, which is having a warehouse, shipping our product out all over the world, we could work with a Shipwire or some of these other companies. But if you are a small fish that only has a few products with them trying to get someone to help you might not be very easy; or, you could kind of go to what I like to call it, like your mom and pop kind of warehouse. So that’s kind of the direction we went through the introductions that we got to our warehouse and shipping person. But I love working with him because he’s a text or a phone call away, if there’s an issue we’re having or if we have a shipment coming in from our factory and I’m like, “Hey, are you going to be there to pick this up at three o’clock on Thursday?” He’s like, “Yeah, I’m going to be there.”

Caleb:
I would much rather work with those kinds of people than the bigger waiting on phone support to get ahold of somebody kind of things. So to meet those people, it’s about asking, it’s about reaching out to maybe some of the favorite products that you buy and asking them, hey, who do you use for third party logistics?” Or, “who do you use for manufacturing?” Or, “who does your prototypes,” or your paint or what have you? That’s the way that you can find these other companies to work with is by asking people that maybe make something similar to you as long as you’re not like stepping on their toes and trying to take over their business or just people you look up to. Because things like shipping and prototyping or metal fabrication and things like that, there are definitely people out there. But to choose which ones are the best, I always try to go through recommendations.

Pat:
Yeah, for sure. That way if something goes wrong, you have somebody to blame, just kidding.

Caleb:
Exactly.

Pat:
I want to go back to our second product, the ball head. And I want to go to launch day. What was launch day like? How did we plan that? What tools did we use to get the word out? Because it was exactly like you said the opposite of Kickstarter. The Kickstarter was to prove our product, to validate it before making it. And in this case, we already made them. And again, we had to guess, but we had 2,500 of them made. And then we announced it to our existing customer list. And I think this just speaks so highly to how valuable your existing customers are, especially if you’ve provided a great experience. And having that email list has been absolutely huge. And so tell us a little bit about launch day, what was that messaging like and then what were the results like?

Caleb:
Well, it was important that we had been collecting email addresses from before we ever launched this thing. So we had people that were interested in SwitchPod before we launched the Kickstarter campaign. We had 4,000 plus backers that we could send a Kickstarter update email message to. There were also people that had bought through our Shopify store, and I had set up Shopify to tag people properly in ConvertKitbased on whether they came to the site and bought a specific product or they had not and they were just interested. So I used different messaging for all different groups on that email list. For the Kickstarter backers, it’s, “Hey, thank you so much. One year ago we took the risk to launch SwitchPod on Kickstarter. You believed in us, you backed it. This is what you’ve been wanting, that you’ve been asking us for. Now, this is available, it ships next week.”

Caleb:
So it’s different messaging for each group to target them with, “you helped us with the Kickstarter campaign, here’s the email copy we use.” “You bought on Shopify last month, here’s the copy we’re using. You’re interested in SwitchPod but you haven’t bought one yet? Have you looked into the Ball Head bundle we just launched?” You can use different messaging if you’re tagging people properly. If you just have one massive email list that everyone’s on, it’s really hard to do that. You just have to send a mass thing of, “Hey, we have this product.” But when you are tagging people properly or you have different ways to communicate to people, that’s how you can target the messaging to them. Another thing is we’ve tried to build up a following on Instagram. I wouldn’t say we’re doing anything fancy on there. All we’ve really done is tried to post a lot during the Kickstarter campaign, post when people were shipping them out to all the Kickstarter backers and then reposting when people were getting them and getting excited.

Caleb:
Anytime someone posts on an Instagram story and tags us, I’ll reshare it. Just kind of organically trying to grow an audience through Instagram. And now I get DMs from people all over the world, they’re finding it in their explore page or what have you. So having different avenues to reach out to people not just email, not just social media, not just your website, but kind of being in a lot of places and just kind of seeing what works has really helped.

Pat:
Yeah, that’s awesome. And what was that day like? We sent emails out, and then what happened?

Caleb:
Well, we did, I want to say it was like a 72-hour or something sale like that where it was $5 off or something like that. And by the end of that, we had sold a thousand of them. So 40 percent of the inventory that we had just ordered, which I didn’t know what to expect. I knew that we had eight or nine or 10,000 people at that point that had a SwitchPod. I figured, “Oh, maybe they had already bought a ball head by now.” But I think people wanted one that fit perfectly on it, looked exactly the same, had our branding on it. And we tried to showcase why it was different or what was special about it or things like that. And it was different of a response compared to the Kickstarter launch because the Kickstarter launch, there was so much energy in those first couple of days. We had launched something that was kind-of underground. We’d shown it to people, you and I had talked about it on our platforms a little bit.

Caleb:
But the combination of Peter McKinnon and other people talking about it in that first day, everyone heard about it in the camera space and stuff. And then you see the public number going up and up, and up and everybody sees that and they’re getting excited and they’re messaging you and stuff like that. I had friends from high school that I hadn’t talked to. They’re like, “Oh, I saw SwitchPod on Facebook.” So that was a very different, very public experience. And it was just a higher dollar value. But we had similar results in success just launching to our existing customers, but people didn’t know how much it was making or how many we were selling. It was a different experience, it was also a very positive thing. But it was a not as public exciting thing to watch. So I don’t know if we’re going to have another product that is as revolutionary or a new version of a SwitchPod someday or what have you that’s more of that public launch, but it’s a different experience to be sharing how well it’s doing in front of everybody.

Pat:
Yeah. It was no nowhere near as the first few days of our normal Kickstarter sequence. But I still felt a rush for sure, and I’m trying to look at the numbers here. We were at almost $7,000 on February fifth alone for a $35-product that we offered with a discount on top of it, unreal. It was completely mind blowing. Although a lot of this sounds amazing and we’re talking about pretty decent numbers here obviously, and things have gone really well. I wouldn’t take anything back. That being said, there are some mistakes that we’ve made or things that we’ve discovered along the way that could have been better. And I have a few of those things, I know you do too. I might ask you to start with maybe what’s one or two items that you wish were better?

Pat:
I just always want to be up front and vulnerable with people because I think it also shows that you don’t have to be 100 percent perfect either to still launch something that does really well and makes people happy. So what are maybe one or two things that come to mind when I say, well, wish this was better or improved?

Caleb:
We’ve spent money on advertising both during the Kickstarter
campaign, and since then that I don’t feel like we really understand what’s working with it. And I feel like we kind of throw money at it. And I don’t fully understand the numbers, I don’t fully understand what the company might be sharing with the advertising to know if it’s giving us the result that we want. So that’s something that … I think we’ve paused all advertising right now, at least that I know of. And so that’s something that I haven’t had the time to dive into, we haven’t put much energy behind it. So it’s like, let’s not keep throwing money at this and trying to fix something until we … Now it’s an inventory thing, it’s like don’t pump too much into advertising or we’ll run out of stock. So we just let stuff naturally sell. So that’d be one thing. How about for you?

Pat:
For me, want to talk a little bit about the product, And I know that you’ve had first hand experience hearing from a few customers here and there about things breaking or things not being glued on properly. And these are anomalies, but they still bother us because we want everything to be great for people. How have you been handling any product related issues that have been coming in, which is honestly out of our control because a lot of it is just maybe an edge case as they call it, something with that particular product in the way that it was shipped? I know, for example, sometimes people open their boxes and maybe the one of the rubber pads is off or the rubberized sort of ring around the screw eye whole thing at the top just fell off. Those kinds of things. How are we dealing with that? I know that’s mostly you on the front lines of that.

Caleb:
Well, I think the first thing is to take it personally is a hard thing because it’s your product, it’s your thing that you’ve developed and made.

Pat:
Did you take it personally?

Caleb:
I think at first I did, but eventually you definitely want to side with the customer and treat them how you would want to be treated. So if that’s sending them replacement parts or it’s sending them a new unit and having them return the one for no cost or what have you. But unless I was going to personally inspect all 11,000 of them as they came out of the factory and hand deliver them myself. You can’t have complete control over everything, and you have to know that just numbers wise, statistics wise there’s going to be anomalies or issues with, like you said, rubber feet that fell off in the package or didn’t make it on. So you just have to know that, okay, whatever percentage of our product is going to have to be returned or you’re going to have to like make quick repairs or what have you. So having those elements is helpful.

Caleb:
So if there’s some part of your product that is prone to breaking or maybe you are having manufacturing issues with it, ask your factory for extras of those things. So we can send people a three-pack of rubber feet and be like, “Here’s a couple extra. You can stick them right back on, you should be good to go,” and trying to be timely with that. So I think at first it was very frustrating, and I did take it personally because I just felt bad. I felt bad that they paid the price and they waited for it through the Kickstarter campaign and everything and then they got one that had a missing foot or what have you. But you then have to use that and be like, okay, so how can I keep this from happening again?

Caleb:
So I would send pictures to the factory and be like, “Okay, this is what’s happening. The rubber feet seem to be coming off, a) can I have some extras? b) how can we in the next batch make sure that this doesn’t happen? Is it how they’re put in the box? Is it making more foam or more room around the foam cutout so it doesn’t pop off when you’re taking it in and out of the box? Can we make the product better? Can we adjust the manufacturing process or the glue we’re using or things like that?” So it’s a combination of catering to your current customers if there are issues they’re having as well as, okay, how can we improve our processes to make sure that this doesn’t happen again because opposite of the product problem is shipping issues, which was not something I was anticipating.

Caleb:
I was like, “Oh, we’ll just ship 4,000 of these things around the world in a week and it’ll be fine.” And I wasn’t ready for the incoming support email of “mine’s stuck in customs!” Or “when’s it going to be here?” Or “my tracking number quit updating,” that kind of thing. So you kind of have to be ready for supporting your customers with frequently asked questions. And I started using HelpScout and making templated emails for the kinds of emails I kept getting like, how do I put my phone on it, or those types of questions. So those are things that I don’t know if I would have changed anything if I was to go back and do it again. You just kind of learn and adapt along the way.

Caleb:
But I think it’s important to always make sure that you’re trying to make sure that this doesn’t keep happening. So if you have issues with your product, you have issues with shipping, talk to your warehouse, figure out, hey, can we ship these a different way or can we charge people more to make sure it’s going to get there faster? Those are all things that we’ve been doing and things start to settle down and start to get more streamlined eventually.

Pat:
And thank you for that. And I think that’s really helpful for people to hear. As far as expectations, these things definitely caught us by surprise. So I’m so thankful that we were able to rebound from that. And I did take things personally as well. And I remember Richie, we reached out to him and we’re like, “There’s all these problems coming in, what’s going on? Please help.” And he’s like, “Dude, like this happens, this is always the case. It’s just a matter of how much.” We calculated it out, and it was a fraction of a fraction of a fraction that was actually having an issue. And he’s like, “Dude, we’re doing a way better than most companies in terms of just problems with manufacturing and shipping.” And these are things I’ve never had experience with because the problems with digital courses is, “Hey, my login password is not working,” and that kind of stuff versus this.

Pat:
So it’s just really interesting to be on this end of it in the physical product world. You had mentioned something about holding phones. I want to finish off this conversation by talking about the future of SwitchPod. And perhaps we could start there. We work were here in San Diego, we put our heads together for a number of hours to talk about the future of the company. And one of the things we discussed was, what are our next products? And it was a really fun conversation, but it was really challenging because I think the SwitchPod was so revolutionary. The ball head was something that people, everybody was asking for. And so we developed that. And this phone holder thing is—on paper—the next thing that we should be creating to attach people’s phones so they don’t have to get a third party one, they can use one of ours that fits perfectly and does all the things it needs to do.

Pat:
We are developing new products, and we’re essentially moving forward with a bunch of different ideas in terms of prototyping. But I think this phone one is interesting because I’m personally battling, I’m not sure how you’re feeling Caleb, with just how innovative the SwitchPod was and just creating another thing that already exists because there’s a lot of great solutions already. There were no great solutions for who we were targeting for the SwitchPod, so we created it. The ball head just kind of made sense because that’s sort of a part of it. But this next product is like, well, I don’t just want to make another one that exists, how do we make this SwitchPod like. And I’m just having trouble with it. So lots of sketches, lots of ideas being thrown around, lots of cardboard and lots of tossing it in the garbage can kind of thing or recycle can. Where’s your head at with this phone holder? I want to do one, but I don’t want it to be like just another product that just blends into all the others.

Caleb:
Like you said, why our SwitchPod stood out is we tried to invent something new or at least reinvent a way people did something. And I don’t know that our smartphone holder is necessarily going to do that. And so it comes down to, do we want to make something that already exists and just has our branding on it? Or we try to do it in a new way or how do we not infringe on people’s patents and things like that? So I don’t know. At some point you have to stop your product line. So it’s like we’re not going all the way to making cameras for people to film themselves or microphones to record themselves. Where do we keep stepping back until it’s like, okay, these are the products that we can make really well and there are other options out there for you to do these other things?

Caleb:
I don’t know. I keep going back and forth on it too because I know if we made one we would sell them. But there are other options out there and everyone has a SwitchPod that wants to put their phone on already, do they already have a phone adapter? Probably. But then they might just buy ours to support us or it has to be better in some way. So until it is better or it has that kind of satisfaction of opening, closing the SwitchPod with the magnets and things like that, we might not make one even though we could potentially white label one and throw our logo on it.

Pat:
Right. Which we actually did. This is an interesting time again because of the coronavirus. We made a bunch of just normal mobile phone adapters for the SwitchPod that we were actually going to offer at an event that we were going to be going to to promote the SwitchPod and be with a bunch of other videographers. We’re talking about VidCon, which happens in Los Angeles, which just recently got canceled. So now we have this inventory of smaller not “super innovative” but still really cool, I think mobile phone-

Caleb:
Not full feature, we didn’t invent it from scratch. This was something that the factory that we work with was already making. They own the intellectual property. It’s a basic phone holder, it’ll hold the phone. But maybe to Pat and I’s brains of all these ideas of what this phone holder could do and you could attach it and all these different ways and it’d be so easy to use. And so it’s maybe not that-

Pat:
It’s sort of an interim answer, right?

Caleb:
Yeah. It’s like an interim answer where, hey do you want a basic smartphone holder thing that has our logo on it? You can order that shortly from our site, but it’s not the revolutionary thing that we would hope to make some day. And it’s like you said, we were going to use them at an event where people would see them and feel them. Maybe it’s like, hey, if you buy at the event you get this thing free because it’s a lower cost item for us. But you can’t control whether an event gets canceled because of a pandemic. So there are other ways that we’ll market those and we’ll sell them to people, and there are other products we’re talking about, or refreshing what we currently have, or always continuously improving the product in a Tesla way where there might not be a new version of a SwitchPod. But if you buy one in a couple of years, it might just be better because we’ve been incrementally changing it.

Pat:
Oh, we add some over the air update feature, then that would be kind of crazy and probably very expensive and useless.

Caleb:
Like if you were about to run into somebody who was blogging, you could stop automatically like a Tesla.

Pat:
It would just totally open and close automatically when you want it. When you just think about it, it just does it. Ah, the future. I want to finish off this conversation, and I’ll start. And I’ll have you finish this off with this prompt in terms of biggest lessons again taken away so far up to this date. We are currently recording this March 26, 2020. Again, we’re right in the middle of the COVID-19 situation happening in the US right now. Who knows what might happen in the next few months or what will come out of this, or what the new normal will be. And, yes, our supply chain has been affected by this of course, but we’re a little bit lucky that we’ve placed orders ahead of time and we still have inventory for right now.

Pat:
So we’re okay. But it could become a problem, but we’ll see. But as far as the start of this whole journey from us being together in 2017 at VidSummit. Was it 2017 this journey began for us?

Caleb:
Yeah.

Pat:
That’s insane, man. Up until now, the biggest takeaway that I have, and then I’ll have you finish us off was just the idea of being iterative in the process, iterative taking it one step at a time, not moving onto the next phase until we really hone in and learn this phase. So in the beginning, it was just trying to determine if people would even want this thing and coming up with ideas and sharing it. And then that gave us the green light after people seemed to get excited about it to move into the prototype phase. That phase brought us into further prototypes spending then a little bit more money on higher end prototypes and then continually just getting green light after green light, after green light. And then if we were to get a red light, we go back to the last green light and go, “Okay, well, that didn’t work. What should we try now?”

Pat:
And we’re still continuing to do that, we’re just in a different field now because we’re on the other side of the launch. And I think a lot of business owners, especially new entrepreneurs want to get to where we’re at now within the first six months. And I think you just got to give it time. But at the same time we moved fast for what we could move fast on. But then there’s sort of a waiting game in the physical product space. And whether it’s digital or physical, just actively knowing what your next steps are and trying to get a green light to move on, or if you get a red light, figure out what the deal is and then pivot from there. So that would be my best tip for everybody listening to this and hopefully you can take home with you to implement into your new businesses or your current business. Caleb, what’s your biggest takeaway so far?

Caleb:
For me, it would be work working in public or asking for help—because I’m the type of person where I will just work privately on something until it’s completely done and be like, “Here you go, world. Here’s the thing that I made.” You don’t bring people along for the journey that way. And so a combination of you and I sharing publicly on our YouTube channels and Instagram and going to events and getting feedback from people when we’re ready for it as well as making the launch a more collaborative thing as well by having launch partners and affiliates and things like that, it just makes it bigger. It makes more people hear about it.

Caleb:
And so I would encourage people that whatever they’re working on, how can you kind of bring people along for the journey as you make it— so that when you’re ready to launch it or publish it or sell it for the first time there are people that are paying attention that want to buy it already. Because it’s marketing, it’s advertising, but it’s not in the traditional way; it’s just showing the process, and people love to see the behind the scenes. They love to know how something’s made. And I think that if you do that, you’ll have more people there that will end up supporting you.

Pat:
Love it. Thanks Caleb. Everybody go check out the SwitchPod at switchpod.co. There’s a bundle there where you can get the Ball Head and the SwitchPod if you haven’t picked one up yet. Yes, of course like we said earlier, we would prefer that over Amazon, but we completely understand if you want to get it on Amazon too, that’s totally fine. But we just thank you so much for following this journey, and I think it’s a perfect way to end because we’re going to continue to share this journey with you as we move into other and newer territories including potentially we’re in talks right now with potentially getting into big box retailers, all companies that you’ve heard of before, stores that you’ve walked inside. That would be really cool. And who knows where this is going to take us, but we’re taking it step by step, and hopefully you enjoy following along. Thanks for being here, Caleb.

Caleb:
Yeah, thanks for having me.

Pat:
All right. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with me and my partner Caleb Wojcik over at switchpod.co, having so much fun with this as you can tell and learning so much. And we still have yet to really even scratch the surface of what I feel is possible with this thing. We are in as we are recording this a really interesting time of the world and the economy. So we will see what happens next. And of course, whatever happens, we’re going to be updating you on that progress. So make sure if you aren’t yet subscribed to the show that you are. So hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And of course, a review on Apple would be amazing. And finally, the show notes where you can get all the links and resources and other things that we talked about here right conveniently in one spot. All you have to do is go to smartpassiveincome.com/session427, again, smartpassiveincome.com/session427.

Pat:
Also, make sure to follow Caleb on YouTube or DIYVideoGuy orDIYVideoGuy, W, I can’t even. It’s hard to say his name and spell it, but I’m gonna try, W-O-J-C-I-K, Caleb Wojcik, W-O-J-C-I-K. Wojcik like logic. And logically, I just want to thank you because we’re at the end of the show here. So I appreciate you as always, #TeamFlynnforthewin. Peace.

Announcer:
Thanks for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at www.smartpassiveincome.com.