Invent With Me is live!

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:00]think it matters, but ask me anything.

[00:00:04]There we go. People are going to ask whether I put that up there or not. But I learned in the journey of marketing that if you don't tell people to do something seven times, they won't do it, let alone once. I got a good one for you today. Good little little uh hot take.

[00:00:30]Uh, it's no secret that I was running a business that uh that was doing over a million a year in revenue. And that sounds cooler than it actually is.

[00:00:39]It's cool. Don't get me It's It's freaking awesome. Let's uh make that clear. But uh it it was enough to be very comfortable.

[00:00:49]And I uh I took a break mostly for the podcast. I tried to turn it into an Amazon brand. And I I I just kind of it worked for a while, you know, for 6 months it ran as an Amazon brand and did pretty well pretty much, you know, the whole making money while you sleep thing. But sales really did slow down and uh that's why I got to make some changes and I'm doing those and it's great. But it brought something to mind.

[00:01:16]Can you run your invention business as kind of a side hustle?

[00:01:23]Can it just be a little extra income dealio?

[00:01:28]Maybe. But I caution you because what's going to happen is you're going to start to find out that your revenue levels unlock new complications that you can't really go back on. For example, we were selling four to $5,000 a day of torque straps for a long, long time, for years.

[00:01:52]Now we're selling like, you know, a lot less than that. Maybe maybe a,000 bucks a day. A,000 to 2,000 bucks a day. Uh, still good. But the systems that I set up when we were at $5,000 a day, they I can't afford them at $1,500 a day. The math just doesn't math.

[00:02:14]For example, you're going to start a product company.

[00:02:18]Okay? You're making your little widget and it's small. It's lightweight and you can assemble it and ship it from your house for the first year. You have no problem with that.

[00:02:28]So, your plan is that when you get to like maybe 30 units a day, you'll outsource to a fulfillment center, and that's fine.

[00:02:39]So, you start making your widget, you print them on your 3D printer, some nuts and bolts, some assembly. You got yourself 500 units, a thousand units, whatever. You did it at a fair cost like I've told you to. and you start running your social media and you're starting to get more than a,000 views on your videos cuz you're out of that 100 view jail and people are starting to buy and you're starting to run some meta ads and now things are moving. So now you're selling 10 of your $10 widgets a day. It's a hundred bucks and with your profit margin and you know factoring in your time you're making 50 bucks a day in profit.

[00:03:17]So you think, well, this is nice, but I really need to, you know, at my day job, I make about 200 bucks a day. So I need to I need to make 200 bucks a day. So you So you up the ante and you start selling 40 units a day. So now you're selling 40 units a day and you're making 200 bucks a day in profit. Now you're good. You just replaced your day job.

[00:03:39]Uh, however, after three or four months of that, you are just really sick and tired of printing shipping labels, sticking it on, reading the orders, uh, finding out a week later that you sent somebody X when they ordered Y or they ordered a two pack and you didn't see the little two. You just tired of the bull crap. So, you think, well, I'm going to find myself a fulfillment center.

[00:04:03]So, you go and you seek out a fulfillment center and they say yes. and they say, "Okay, we charge a $3 pick and pack fee." So, your little $10 item, you know, the margin just got cut down by quite a bit. So, now in order for you to make your $200 profit a day, instead of selling 40, you got to sell 60.

[00:04:25]So, now that you're in the caliber of selling 60 a day, you're doing a little bit heavier marketing and things like that.

[00:04:35]And then you want to bring on an employee to help you with maybe customer service, maybe uh social media. So to make your $200 a day and pay that person, now you need to sell a hundred a day.

[00:04:49]So you saw the wall that we hit right away.

[00:04:53]And the wall is usually fulfillment and scale. If you want to hit the next tier, you're not going to be able to do it alone. So, you're going to buy into a new system, but then you're kind of locked into that system. Unless you're going to pull out of your fulfillment center, ship the stuff back to your garage and and regress, which I've thought about doing many times along this journey. That doesn't make any sense. You have to push on. You got to nut up and you got to find the next thing that you're going to do.

[00:05:22]So, a lot of inventors tell me, "Well, I just, you know, I'm going to keep my job and I'm just going to be a little side thing for me." Well, that's that's cool.

[00:05:31]That's admirable, but you'd be hardressed to have it actually replace your income. It's kind of an all or nothing when it comes to is this invention going to change or better your life? Because if you keep approaching it as a side hustle, it's going to wear down your nights. It's going to wear down your weekends and it's going to make you some money. You know, it it might it might make you an extra 50% of your your day job income or 75% of your day job income, but you're going to adjust to that really quickly. You know, that's one new car for the for the wife or that's one u trip to the hospital, god forbid, from a family member. it.

[00:06:17]In order to quit your job and really start a business and and and really not be tied into anybody, you're going to have to start to implement those systems. And when you implement the systems, you're locked in.

[00:06:31]That's it.

[00:06:33]You kind of can't go back. So, why am I telling you this? Well, have the mindset from the beginning. Say, "I'm going to have a,000 units in my garage soon. I'm going to have 500, 100, 10,000. I'm going to have some units in my garage soon. I'm going to start getting orders on my Shopify and maybe getting orders via Amazon FBM, fulfilled by merchant.

[00:06:58]That means you ship it or FBA and you're going to be shipping stuff to Amazon and your little master cartons. That's going to happen.

[00:07:10]lost my train of thought when I pulled down my sun visor. Oh, how are you going to feel when you're shipping 30 a day? And really go through that go through that process. How you going to feel when you're shipping 30 a day? How you going to feel when those order that the last order comes in at like 450 and you got to pick up the kids and you feel bad not shipping it, so you wait till the next day, which is normal. That's fine. But all that is on you. The daily ping, you know, new order to ship. Ping, new order to ship. Oh, this one's express shipping. This one's ground. This one's expedited overnight. Uh, again, it's not hard to do. I'm not trying to discourage you guys from selling your first 500 units yourself.

[00:07:56]Do that. But really gauge how am I going to feel after a year? I'm shipping 30 a day. So, it's a big chunk of my morning.

[00:08:05]It's a big chunk of my night and I'm only making like $100 to $200 a day in profit.

[00:08:15]And that's if you're not trying to grow the amount of inventory you have or some ads, then that then that cuts in your profit margin. So, you have to be prepared to scale.

[00:08:32]I don't believe in a product business as a side hustle.

[00:08:40]I'm not saying it's bad. I'm not saying it can't work. I just think if you're going to start a side hustle, maybe it's not the product business.

[00:08:51]Maybe it is. You know, if you look at Torquestrap over the last year, it was the best side hustle in the world. I didn't touch the business and I basically paid myself a h 100red grand a year for it was fine. Uh but the money did run out because of the sales volume going down.

[00:09:12]And now I got to rebuild it. And I'm looking at all my income. I'm looking at the the inflows, the outflows, the profits and losses. And I realize this is a business that has a daily break even break break even of about $2,500 a day. Anything below that, you're below your break even, and you cannot afford the systems that you have in place, the employees that you have in place, the fulfillment centers you have in place, the Amazon PPC doesn't make sense anymore. You you you have to maintain that volume.

[00:09:47]So that's my spiel today. If you're watching the recap, you can pretty much turn it off right now. Um, unless you want to hold out for a question, but I haven't got a question yet. It's Friday.

[00:10:01]I think everybody's turned off their brain for work mode and they're ready to go crack open a cold one with the bros.

[00:10:10]I wouldn't mind doing that.

[00:10:13]Just gota just uh gota find a friend.

[00:10:19]Got to f find a friend who's not an inventor and a friend where we don't just talk about getting our butt kicked in our business. I need like I need like a neighbor Jed. A neighbor named Jed.

[00:10:34]He's got two lawn chairs. You know the ones I'm talking about.

[00:10:39]And he comes up to you every Friday night, cracks you open a cold glass bottle, not the can, and he says, "Sit down, buddy. Sit down.

[00:10:53]The beer's got you now.

[00:10:56]Talk to Jed. We're going to solve the world's problems right here in this driveway. You and me, buddy."

[00:11:04]So, you drink a bunch of the beers. You drink, I don't know, 3, four or five, and you just kind of stumble into the house 10:30 at night and you mumble to yourself how awesome you are. You catch yourself, you look at yourself in the bathroom and you kind of give yourself that look like you're is this what I really look like? Yeah, I do. And it's awesome.

[00:11:30]And you you stumble into bed and you lay down. Next day you wake up, you don't feel too well, but you had a good time.

[00:11:37]You let off some steam. You remember what you and Jed talked about. And even though Jed's batshit crazy, even though you don't have a lot in common with them, it was nice to sit down and turn it off.

[00:11:55]So, if you're in the Miami area and your name is Jed, please hit me up. My number is 555 Okay, guys. I think the ship has sailed.

[00:12:13]I don't know that there's a lot left to touch on or anything.

[00:12:17]Nobody's chiming in.

[00:12:21]Then again, I got 10 minutes left in my journey, so I don't need to rush to get off the the live.

[00:12:39]I hired my new ads guy. My new old ads guy. I rehired my new old ads guy today.

[00:12:50]He lowered his prices by quite a bit and he changed up the structure of his business. So I unshunded him and rehired him back into the business. Third party contractor, fair rate, $1,250 a month. He's going to run my meta ads.

[00:13:09]Um he's going to do it with a lot of intention with weekly updates. You know, lately I've been kind of I've been kind of feeling like, hey, I should just do the hard work and find overseas contractors to do these little jobs. And I'm doing that with a few things like the SEO on my website, writing blogs and stuff. It's it's good, but it is very hard to communicate with your overseas contractors. And there's something really nice about just having somebody in the US paying a little bit more, but when you sit down for your weekly meeting, you can kind of just have that casual, you know what I mean, conversation. You don't really get that with the the guy in Bangladesh.

[00:13:58]You kind of just get a lot of head nodding and smiling.

[00:14:02]And you have to constantly follow up with the things you say verbally in email afterwards.

[00:14:08]And that gets kind of old because you think you're talking about one thing on the call, but you're not. Maybe you're not understanding what they're saying.

[00:14:16]And it's just so fatiguing and you you don't want to be on that call for 45 minutes. You have so much to do that day. So you're just And it's so fatiguing to lean into the to the computer to try to hear them better, to try to watch their lips, and they're talking so fast and they're clicking and it's usually a data guy. Just saying.

[00:14:36]It's just the truth. It's usually a data guy and he's talking about conversion rates and CTRs and da da da and stuff that it's hard to keep up with if you're not really in tune to it or you speak Indian.

[00:14:51]So, I'm hiring the new hired the new ads guy. I sent the I paid the invoice today.

[00:14:59]But I learned even when you hire an ads guy, it's just a part of it. You have to be on them. What is the campaign strategy? What is the angle? What does our top ofunnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel look like? What's the what's the action that we want out of the customers? Do we want them to click shop now? Do they do we want them to click buy now? Because the actions that those ads point customers to take uh they change everything. For example, it is very hard to have a customer see an ad, click shop now, navigate your entire website, find the product that they like, hit the purchase button, enter their zip code, enter their credit card details, and still select order now.

[00:15:53]They have to understand the shipping.

[00:15:54]They have to understand that the product's going to make their life better. They have to go through so much friction.

[00:16:00]Now, on the other hand, why I'm hiring my salesperson, what if when the person sees the ad on Meta, they like it, they think it's interesting, and they're bored. They got nothing else going on. And instead of buy now, the button says get a free cargo consultation or the button says call to see how you can claim your free torque bag.

[00:16:30]Well, that doesn't cost anything. That's not a very big commitment.

[00:16:35]So, they click the button, but then they're stopped because we don't just want people to click the button and come call us because we're going to get drunk calls in the middle of the night. So, they click the button and they go to a form that makes them answer three qualifying questions.

[00:16:51]What type of cargo are you hauling? pick recreational, watercraft, uh camping gear, construction gear.

[00:17:01]What is your question number two, what is your biggest concern with cargo needs? Heavy duty straps, quicker hauling, um better product.

[00:17:13]Question number three, boom, another qualifier. And then fourth, they go through a verify capture. They have to slide something or they have to verify that they're human and they're not totally wasted and then they call us and who picks up the phone? Well, in the ad there was a picture of your sales girl and says, "Call Ding now." And they hit the button and they call and sure enough, Ding picks up the phone and she's friendly and personable and she guides them through. Now, now Dalene has just removed all the website friction.

[00:17:52]All the website friction. You don't that customer no longer has to ask themselves, how do I navigate to the strap that's right for me? Where do I start? Well, well, what am I hauling?

[00:18:03]How much does it weigh?

[00:18:05]And how do I find the strap associated with that? If my lawn mower weighs 1,200 lb, how many 500 pound straps do I need to cover it? Or is it is it the one straps load rating that covers the whole item?

[00:18:20]This is very confusing. I'm just going to not buy anything and go about my day.

[00:18:31]So, the ads guy was again another piece of a complicated puzzle that I'm working on right now. He's the guy who's going to set up the forms, set up the campaigns.

[00:18:41]He's the guy who I'm going to talk to every week and I'm going to verbally abuse because the cost per phone call we're getting is too damn high. And we need to do whatever we can to lower that cost per call.

[00:18:54]Because if I'm getting the calls at too expensive, like $5, and then I'm paying daily 16 an hour plus a 7% commission, pretty soon it just cost me $15 to talk to a customer for 20 minutes and they only ordered a $40 item.

[00:19:15]That is not good. That's like a 40 That's like a 35% CAC t cost to acquire a customer. I've budgeted a 15% CAC.

[00:19:31]Anytime you're marketing, anytime you're doing sales, you want to aim for a 15% of your retail price cost to acquire the customer.

[00:19:42]If your item costs $100, you can budget $15 will go into your meta ads, will go into your Google ad, will go into your customer service, whatever, whatever that uh marketing model was to get to them. This is why it's so important to do email marketing, to do meta ads, to do Google ads, to post on social media every day because these things all work together symbiotically and you're never going to trace the data perfectly, but you can trace it well enough to say, "Yeah, we're definitely acquiring customers below 15% CAC or above." And if you're above, find out what's the expensive part and dilute it.

[00:20:27]Don't get rid of it. Never get rid of anything. But if you have a piece that's too expensive, dilute it. Take budget away from that and start to strategize your next move.

[00:20:38]I know it sounds like a lot. I'm just telling you how to make a lot of money.

[00:20:43]You're still going to make money, but you're going to learn that you work your balls off and you don't see a lot of returns for a long time. I certainly didn't because I didn't have these resources or I didn't understand how to I couldn't put them in I couldn't understand what people were telling me because nobody spoke English in this world. They spoke for people who just had a higher cognitive ability for that stuff or a higher interest. I was never that interested. I had to learn by losing lots and lots of money to get interested.

[00:21:17]Anyway, let's I got a couple questions here. I better park up. Find a shady spot. Oh, that looks nice right there.

[00:21:27]Yeah, that's just nice.

[00:21:30]Got 10 15 minutes before I got to get the kiddo.

[00:21:34]How do you balance work life slashcommunication with China when prime time is between 11 p.m. and 5:00 a.m.?

[00:21:45]Prime time for China.

[00:21:49]Uh, it's it's China. Text them before bed, then go to sleep, and then wake up to a message. Text them back.

[00:22:00]Make your plan solid during the day.

[00:22:02]When you're awake, it may generally you have an engineering problem or a packaging or some kind of change. You're trying to get quotes. Make your information clear during the day.

[00:22:13]deliver it to them at 9:00 at night, go to bed because, you know, some nights you'll have to stay up for an hour to keep the chain going. Uh, but then tell them, "Dear honey, I got to go to bed." Go to bed the next morning. Check the progress.

[00:22:27]This is why communication with China takes so long. If you can't afford to stay up all night and talk to them, that's fine. Just plan on what would have taken one night taking about seven nights.

[00:22:41]Um, that's what I do to this day. Like communicate with China. It's like, "Oh god, I got a message from China." I wait till I'm in the right mind frame.

[00:22:50]Usually takes me a day to read the message. I read it. I think about it. I come up with a plan. How am I going to fix it? How am I going to make the information clear? I draw it out. I put it I usually it's just a text message.

[00:23:03]I'll be honest, but sometimes you have to draw something out on like Keynote or SketchUp, whatever. You make the change, you deliver it to them, and then you just hope to God they understand, and the next morning you wake up to a text that says, "Okay, dear honey, no problem." So, how do you balance it? You just get used to it. You don't you don't really you just get used to a lot of this stuff. Same with your nights and your weekends. For three years, I was so anti working on the night and weekend because I was a nineto-fiver. And where I come from in the trades, and you know this too, Frost Shield, don't call me after 5:00 unless you're paying me double time. Do not call me after 5:00.

[00:23:46]Well, it took me a while to get out of that. I had to swallow a lot of pride, but uh I I've seen how $20 million companies operate and they're on 247 and they don't hate it. They love it. You know, it's fun to them.

[00:24:05]Where you going? Can I see your car?

[00:24:09]Yeah, I'm going to pick up my kid and there's no way I'm getting out of this seat.

[00:24:15]George the Canadian engineer, is he expensive? Is it worth it versus hiring a guy in Delhi?

[00:24:24]Um, no, he's not expensive. And yes, it's yes, it's far better to hire Lance than uh somebody in Delhi. Um, there there could be good engineers in Delhi.

[00:24:36]I've not found one. And uh the communication has always led people to frustration.

[00:24:42]This engineering thing, it's a problem in our industry. I'll be honest, because there's two extremes. You have small engineers who charge sub $150 an hour.

[00:24:54]Uh those are the ones we love, but they're hard to find and they get over booked. And then you have firms that charge insane flat rates. And a lot of times you get no results because they're hiring lowquality engineers under the lead engineer. So you're dealing with a lowquality engineer and you're paying 10 grand, but you feel warm inside because it's a big giant firm.

[00:25:16]Uh what happens is you you lose twice.

[00:25:18]You get a bad engineer and you pay more.

[00:25:20]So yeah, Lance is totally worth it. And we're trying to develop an army of engineers like Lance so that we can handle the volume and help people. And again, I won't be affiliated with that in any way. I just want to develop kind of the circle of people we can trust. So I need to make a engineer validator. I need to find a bunch of engineers in the Reddit forums and all that good stuff and I need to invite them to be in the circle and I need to make them go through an engineer validator. ask a lot of really tough questions about how they view clients, how they view money, uh how they respect inventors, the types of rates that they want to charge, their expectations for the for their career as a freelance engineer.

[00:26:08]So, yeah, there's uh definitely a lot lot of value in Lance. And I'll say this about Lance, get him while he's cheap.

[00:26:20]Yeah. I hear you. I am a consulting engineer. QAQC.

[00:26:25]Definitely the problem when you're running a lot of projects on a budget.

[00:26:30]Yeah.

[00:26:35]Yes. Huge problem. You when you get too busy, when you get too desperate, you make huge financial missteps.

[00:26:47]uh you get busy, you get desperate, you don't know where to go, and you think that the bigger bill means the better solution, but that's that's not always that's that's never the case.

[00:27:01]Am I still doing engineering?

[00:27:04]I'm assuming you mean now.

[00:27:07]Um no, I haven't had to do any engineering work for years. In fact, I never really did any engineering work. I I did all my prototyping myself by hand.

[00:27:19]I did crude pictures of the products and the prototypes I was making. I did sketches on Keynote on my MacBook.

[00:27:27]Uh trial and error probably took me longer than it should have. Probably would have come to some pretty um some better conclusions sooner.

[00:27:38]Like the first product I started selling, had an engineer looked at that, he would have been like, "Well, why don't you put this where this is and turn that around?" Like a good engineer like Lance, he would have identified those things. For instance, instead of using bungee for the flexible power band, use a steel spring. Well, it took me a year and a half to come to that conclusion myself.

[00:28:00]Um, would an engineer have helped me found that? I I don't know. Maybe. But no, I'm not doing any more engineering myself.

[00:28:16]And what a relief.

[00:28:18]What a relief to just be able to focus on the business and the sales. Sometimes I have to like stop and remember what it took to come to a three model mix. I guess that was the last engineering I did was on my Pro, but I did it the same way. I just talked to my manufacturer said, "I want to make a two-inch strap. Can you do you know of any spring makers? I'm going to draw up a picture of a spring that I want. It's a special oval spring, not like a round spring." Okay. Talk to this manufacturer. I sent them the pictures, the dimensions. They made me the custom springs. They made me a sample of 12.

[00:28:56]Sent them to me. Started sewing together straps. Started testing it. I had to reconfigure it 10 times before it worked. I sent the plans to the manufacturer. They said, "No, this is too expensive, too hard to do." And uh finally I I designed it in a way that they agreed. And once they agreed, I flew out to China for that one because it was like, "Okay, I have my three model mix. I've never visited the manufacturer. I'm going to go out and I'm going to verify a the current straps they're making for me, my small ones are still on point and b they nailed this new pro 2 in. And that was that was I did that was a very fruitful fruitful trip.

[00:29:41]Um, oh, but anyway, I was saying sometimes I have to stop and think about what it took to get to the point of having this three model mix because now we have our our small strap, medium strap, large strap, we have an accessory bag, we have some accessory clips for like ERA. Now it's just time to sell, man. It's just time to get the word out more than I used to. And I used to a lot. Now my my job is just to champion the product. Try to be at every trade show I can be at. Try to be on every meta ad I can I can be on. Try to make new creatives every week. Be on Google ads. Be at the top stealing those clicks from my competitors. Be on Amazon. Be intentional about the PPC spend. Watch the budgets. Uh hire a sales staff.

[00:30:31]Train the sales staff. build systems for the sales staff so they know exactly what to say. Build out the Google Sheets to do the testing on what they're saying and what the conversion rates of those things are.

[00:30:44]It's it's it's a 10 10 10 task.

[00:30:50]It's 10% of everything and 100% of everything at the same time.

[00:30:55]Never, and I mean never, completely drop one channel. reduce it, dilute it, but never just what? Whack a channel. It will come back to buy you. Business is holistic. It all works together.

[00:31:15]It all works together. And that's why when people ask me, "What's one thing I could do right now?"

[00:31:24]I can identify one thing you can do right now, but I that's not the that's not the thing to get to a million.

[00:31:30]That's the one thing to get you to the next stage. It's usually to get you through prototyping or to get you to Amazon. But what's one thing I can do to be successful?

[00:31:41]It's it's it's 10% in 10 different things. 10% of your time and energy goes to 10 different things.

[00:31:49]If one of those things is a clear clear winner, then you can shift it and you can kill a couple things and and and go go all in on one thing. But um maybe 10 by 10 is too many. But it's about four different major channels. your sales channel, your marketing channel, managing your budget and your overall goal and strategy and messaging and your job as a CEO to represent your product and to be to be there to to champion it to talk about it to find the angio ranking and domain authority be higher okay we can write more blogs well I don't have time to write blogs so I need to outsource the guy in Bangladesh who can use his AI and his Semrush and he can run SEO analysis on the website and he can write the blogs that are targeted specifically for these key phrases that are being searched right now and we know that like retractable ratchet strap versus self-tensioning ratchet strap that's being googled like crazy right now and I have no there's nothing on my website to capture that search there's no excuse for that that's cheap work that's Easy work. That's your guy in Bangladesh for 200 bucks a month.

[00:33:09]Are all of your products at the same manufacturer or did you spread them out?

[00:33:13]They're all at the same manufacturer.

[00:33:16]The only time you spread out a manufacturer is if your product is your product number two is in a totally different category or if you are always trying to protect your IP from the manufacturer so that they didn't steal it. Uh, I didn't have that option.

[00:33:34]I tried that in my first year. I tried, oh, just ship me the raw strap with the sewing and you just ship me the springs and you just ship me the heat shrinks and you ship me the fabric materials. It was a nightmare. It was a logistical and coordination nightmare. We would either we would always run out of something that would bottleneck and stop all our operations and it was costly. I was assembling in the US. So, no, I went to one manufacturer. I said, "This is how you build it. It's really hard to make. It sucks. Please use your little Chinese fingers and make this happen. Make tens of thousands of these and never complain." And they said, "Yes, dear.

[00:34:14]Yes, honey." All right, guys. That's it for today. I got to go pick up the kids, start the weekend. Um Aaron, sorry we couldn't talk. This is why I couldn't call you on my way home cuz this is my last hurrah before I get my kid. My last bit of energy goes into the live. Hopefully you got something out of it. I'll see you guys on the next one. New episode dropping Monday. And remember, fill out the inventor validator. Find it in the description of any of my long form videos if you I know a lot most of you guys have already, but fill out the inventor validator. It is so important. It's going to tell you exactly where you are and where you need to go. It's going to save you a lot of money and save you a lot of time.

[00:34:58]All right. Thank you, George. Look forward to speaking to you soon. Have a happy Mother's Day, everybody.

[00:35:06]I love you.