Pod Insights The School of Greatness 112 How to Cultivate Creativity, Cash In On Crowdfunding, and Turn Great Ideas Into Millions with Chris Hawker About this episode "The leader's job isn't to have all the ideas. It's to make sure all the ideas are heard and that the best one wins." - Chris Hawker If you enjoyed this episode, check out show notes, links, and more at www.lewishowes.com/112. Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX
Transcript 10,912 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Lewis Howes? This is episode number 112 with world renowned inventor Christopher Hawker.
0:07 Lewis Howes? Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.
0:33 Lewis Howes? Welcome back everyone to the School of Greatness Podcast. My name is Lewis Howes. Thank you so much for tuning in today. I've got my good buddy and friend Chris Hawker on and we're going to be talking all about how to cultivate creativity in your business and your life. Now, Chris Hawker is a dear friend of mine. He is one of my early on mentors. When I got out of playing professional football, he really kind of took me under his wing and taught me a lot about product design and development and PR and marketing and sales. I traveled all around the country with him at trade shows and just learned a lot about the, the business of turning ideas into products and then turning products into sales. So, early on, he really helped shape a lot of the information that I learned
1:18 Lewis Howes? and how I apply that into my strategy today. Very brilliant man. He's taken over 80 products to market in big box retailers from Walmart to Target to Bed Bath and Beyond. Any type of big box retailer you can think of, he's got a product there. Some very cool wins he's had. It's one is called the Power Squid and he licensed a product, Power Squid, to Phillips and was making a lot in sales off of royalties every single month for a number of years. Also, a little famous invention is called the Onion Goggles. And if you do a hashtag search of Onion Goggles or go on Google and search it, you'll see people wearing these and posting pictures of themselves constantly all over the place in the world. So, he's had a lot of cool products.
2:01 Lewis Howes? Some of his products have sold over millions of units and he has also become a crowdfunding expert. He was part of one of the big Biggest crowdfunding, I guess it is the biggest crowdfunding project ever called the coolest cooler that did thirteen and a half million dollars in sales on Kickstarter. He helped redesign a product that failed on a Kickstarter launch previously and he was part of that redesign that did thirteen point five million. He's also taken a couple of his own products to market with crowdfunding on Indiegogo, one that did about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in sales called the quick key. And he'll talk about all of this in the interview today. Very excited to dive in. Good friend of mine and I hope you guys enjoy this interview. Now let's go ahead and dive into
2:45 Lewis Howes? this episode number one twelve with the one and only Chris Hawker.
2:56 Lewis Howes? Welcome back everyone to the School of Greatness podcast. I'm very grateful for today's guest. His name is Mr. Chris Hawker. What's up, Chris?
3:06 Speaker 01 Hi Louis, thanks for having me on the show.
3:08 Lewis Howes? Yeah, man, I'm very excited about this. We've had you on before. I forget the episode number, but I'll have it linked up in the show notes at lewishouse.com/one12. But I wanted to bring you back on for a couple of reasons. One, you've done a lot of great things over the last year since we had you on and you're up to some big things right now. So I wanted to talk about creativity. And for those that don't know who Chris is, he's, you know, taken over eighty products to the market. He's a world renowned inventor, but really overall brilliant creative mind as well. And he's developed a lot of different products around the market right now, but he's also done some other new things with crowdfunding, which we're going to talk about today. But I wanted to dive into
3:53 Lewis Howes? your thoughts on creativity. You're like the king of creativity. You really, people hire you to come up with names for products, for companies, for branding, creativity, for, you know, how to design something. They're hiring you constantly to figure out how to take their idea or an idea that they want to have and turn it into a reality, into a physical product or into something that has value in the world. And so I wanted to ask you about how does one cultivate creativity in their, in their life or in their business? How does someone become creative or let out their creativity? Cause I think we're all born with creativity, but somewhere, somewhere along the line, and we
4:38 Lewis Howes? talked about this earlier, we like, we, someone told us that our drawings suck. I know me specifically, I drew like horribly and then I stopped drawing and you know, and I stopped thinking I was creative in artistic ways and I became creative in other ways. So how does one, um, you know, kind of unlock their creative potential and turning into profit for themselves or for their life or for their business? So how do, how do you use creativity or cultivate that for your life and your business?
5:09 Speaker 01 Well, first I'd like to, you know, draw the distinction between creativity and being artistic, because one of the things that I hear so often from people is that they're not creative. They say, wow, you're really creative. I wish I were creative. I'm not creative at all. And I think to your point, everyone's actually very creative, but because people may not be good at drawing or painting or some form of art, they don't think that they are creative. And that to me is a tragedy, because as soon as you start saying to yourself, well, I'm not creative, then you know, you probably become less creative than you actually are, because you're telling yourself you're not creative.
5:47 Lewis Howes? Right.
5:47 Speaker 01 You know, you're going to believe yourself.
5:50 Lewis Howes? You become what you believe.
5:51 Speaker 01 Right, exactly. And, and if you're mantraing that to yourself, it's hard to resist. Meanwhile, being creative is only, you know, it's related to being artistically talented, but it's actually a different thing. Being creative is the ability to come up with alternatives, alternative ideas, and What I call divergent thought. So as you take on a particular creative task like coming up with a name for a company, the question is how are you going to effectively do that? And so sort of the process I use for coming up with creative ideas is by following a process I call conversations
6:32 Speaker 01 for creativity or innovation. And so it's recognizing that there are a series of phases that you go through as you're starting with ideas and narrowing it down to, you know, the final idea. So the first step in any creative process is coming up with a lot of different possibilities before you start analyzing them and winnowing down to the one that you want to go forward.
6:59 Lewis Howes? Let's give it, let's use an example. Let's use like, say someone wants to come up with a name for a product. It could be like an online product, a physical product, or a website name, or a podcast name. Let's, let's use an example like that. Can we, can we kind of just make something up here?
7:16 Speaker 01 Sure. Yeah, absolutely. We can. Do you want to make up a specific podcast and name it?
7:21 Lewis Howes? Oh, shoot.
7:24 Lewis Howes? Uh, let's go, let's go with something that you use for your podcast, or a product, let's go through a product that you've used and like an example of how you went about coming up with that name.
7:33 Speaker 01 So let's talk about the process I used to come up with one of my more notable names, the Power Squid, which is one of my more successful inventions, which was a power strip with little extension cords coming off of it called the Power Squid. So as we set out to come up with a name for the product, initially, you want to come up with as many possibilities as you can. And we want to generate ideas without necessarily evaluating whether or not they're good, because the part of the brain that you use to evaluate ideas, to analyze them and decide whether or not they're good or bad, or if they work, is different than the part of your brain that generates possibilities.
8:12 Speaker 01 And when you're engaging the one, you're not using the other at the same time. And so the biggest mistake people make in creative processes is too quickly moving from generating possibilities to analyzing them.
8:27 Lewis Howes? What do you mean? What do you mean by that?
8:28 Speaker 01 I mean, like, let's say you're coming up with names and the first name you come up with for a product like the Power Squid is the Power Multiplier. And then you're like, okay, is the Power Multiplier a good name? Does it work? Is it have the features we want or people can understand it? Now you're starting to analyze whether or not it's a good name.
8:47 Lewis Howes? So don't analyze it until you come up with like 50 names is what you're saying.
8:51 Speaker 01 Right, because now you're switching gears. You're switching gears from like coming up with tons of ideas. Until you're now just coming up with one idea and then you're spending all your time analyzing it and then you finally decide whether or not you think it's good. Now you're like, okay, now let's switch back to coming up with the next idea.
9:08 Lewis Howes? Interesting. So you you basically write out a bunch of names first before you even think, is that a good name? You're just like, we're just putting it out there as ideas.
9:17 Speaker 01 Right. And and the brilliant thing is that when you start coming up with ideas without analyzing whether they're good or not and coming up with more and more and more ideas. Then you get into a flow and you might start jotting down things that don't make any sense whatsoever. Or are totally, you know, off the wall from what you were originally thinking. And they may not in the end be the right name. It's not to say that that's the name, but it may trigger a thought that leads to the right name. So getting all these ideas out, like when I start a naming process, I'll start thinking of colors. And like, what are the colors I want to associate with it? What are the emotions that I want to associate with the product?
9:57 Speaker 01 So that it's capturing as I start the process of coming up with more names, I'm sort of preconditioning my mind to think of the kinds of things that are associated with those adjectives I come up with. So I want something futuristic. I want something sleek. I want something technical, but I want something with humor in it. I want to come up with some things then. That have emotional attachment or create visual imagery. And I want, you know, I the colors that come to mind are black and blue and purple and. Uh, I think, you know, just when I come up with names, words that might be related to the product or incorporated in the name, just start making a list. They could be multiplier or extension or many or few or.
10:41 Speaker 01 You know, tentacles, or arms, or legs, or spiders, or you know, you're just coming up with all these names. And then you can start mixing and matching the words. And then because you've sort of got some idea of like the kind of feelings you're trying to evoke with the name. It helps you evaluate them once you get to that point. But part of the creative process is that usually your brain starts in the analytical zone, where you're coming up with things that are based on what you expect. And what you want to do is exhaust all the obvious answers. Cause the most exciting possibilities usually occur outside of what's obvious.
11:23 Speaker 01 Because the obvious ones are, you know, obvious, they're by nature not that exciting. So it's when you get to that moment where you're like, I can't think of anything else. But you start forcing yourself to try to think of more ideas. That suddenly your brain switches modes and it goes from like the analytical mind to the intuitive mind. And things start popping out that would never have come out if you'd stopped too soon.
11:46 Lewis Howes? Right.
11:46 Speaker 01 And if, and if you switch into that other mode too soon in, in that process, then you're not going to get to that place where you start to come up with the really creative ideas.
11:56 Lewis Howes? Yeah, it sounds like it's a, you know, it's something that takes practice as well. And the more you do it, the probably easier it flows and it comes to you. It's just like creative writing or anything like that. The more you, you know, throw it on the, on the paper, you know, whatever's coming in your head and you just keep writing and you don't stop, then eventually it's going to start, you know, flowing into beautiful poetry.
12:16 Speaker 01 Right. And, and really the skill is, is learning to do less and less and just let the words flow without trying to control them and letting the part of my brain that's intuitive and not controlled by my cognitive thoughts start coming up with the ideas and putting them out there and making connections that I'm not able to make consciously, but that are somehow buried in there. So. Once you have this long list of possibilities and then you start mixing and matching within those possibilities and say, well, I've got these words spider, I've got the word squid, I've got. And I've got the word octopus and I've got the word power and electricity and then I could say electro squid, electro spider, power spider, and then you know, you can come up with all these.
13:00 Speaker 01 Mixing and matching of the names. I mean, actually, the original name for the power squid, when I first thought of it was power blossom. Which is like flower blossom was a power blossom.
13:11 Speaker 01 But then as I, you know, decided to do the naming process with it and not to stick with my first instinct, I was like, cause power blossom was really, you know, cutesy, but I wanted something more technical. And something more science fiction, because the product itself had a kind of a science fictiony aspect to it. The design arose out of another creative process that I sometimes use, which is I tried to imagine. Of the world and I used at the time, Star Wars. So I was like imagining the world of Star Wars and Luke Skywalker jumps out of his. X wing and he needs a power strip type device and he like pulls something out of his bag, you know, what's it look like? And so imagining the world in which the thing occurs and then seeing the thing in it and it appears fully formed.
13:55 Speaker 01 Rather than having to like, try to imagine what the thing looks like without the context. So if you can clearly imagine the context in which in. Your device is going to exist, then it helps it, it helps you to come up with both the design. And the name for it, if we're talking about a physical product, but you can use this exact same methodology for coming up with a podcast name. Or coming up with a, you know, a product, a service type product or an info product, whatever it might be.
14:26 Lewis Howes? Right.
14:27 Speaker 01 It's imagining the world in which it occurs, kind of an idealized word world. And then visualizing the product in it and then your brain fills in all the gaps.
14:36 Lewis Howes? I like it. I like it.
14:38 Speaker 01 Creates things fully formed for you. So you don't have to like piece it together.
14:41 Lewis Howes? Right. That's cool. I'm not, go ahead.
14:45 Speaker 01 Well, I was just gonna say, you know, going back to the process about generating possibilities. Once you've got a whole bunch of possibilities on the table, then you start to narrow it down and engage a different part of your brain. So instead of divergent thought, coming up with as many divergent ideas as possible. We're now going to converge and start to eliminate the ideas that are obviously non-starters. And narrow the field so that we can give more careful consideration to the ideas that seem to have more potential in them. This, so the initial thing we call a conversation for possibilities, and then we go into a conversation for opportunities. Which one of those possibilities actually represents something worth looking further into?
15:29 Speaker 01 And that point engages then like a different part of the creative process, which is not the creativity of coming up with more ideas. But the creativity of being able to use your mind to understand which one of these is going to serve your purposes best. By prototyping reality in your mind. So like in product design, if you're looking like, how could I make a better power strip? If you're going to make prototypes by hand, that takes a certain amount of time. Or if you're going to draw them, that takes a certain amount of time, but you can imagine things very quickly. And imagine hundreds and hundreds of options in the time it takes you to draw one.
16:10 Speaker 01 And so the more accurately you can replicate reality with your mind. The better you can prototype things with your brain, like and test different possibilities. So now as you've got all these possibilities lined up for the name of your product, you can start imagining them on the product. And seeing how people would react, seeing how it would feel.
16:30 Lewis Howes? Visualizing it as it's already happening.
16:34 Lewis Howes? I like that. Okay. Is there any other part to the, the process leading up to this or?
16:40 Speaker 01 Well, then, then you get down to the brass tacks of, does it work? Does it fit the functional criteria that I need of for the product? So like when it comes to a name like the Power Squid. Are there trademarks that other people have that I need to not infringe on? Is there a URL available or, you know, something attractive in terms of a URL? Based on the name, is the name easy to confuse with other names of other things? So like if you call it something that has another meaning that's very commonly searched. Then like if someone goes online and tries to search for your product. Then they're going to find something else that already exists in great quantity.
17:24 Speaker 01 So like it turns out there's a band called Power Squid and they weren't, you know, a really big band. But if you searched online that, you know, that's what came up. But if they had been a hugely powerful, successful band. And I was trying to name my product Power Squid and you searched it and you came up with all this stuff with the band. It would be harder to find your product. So you want stuff that's distinctive in the world. And sometimes it may be a product or something that's in a different market or industry. But it's still going to interfere with people finding your thing online, which is obviously where they're going to need to find whatever it is. So now we're like really getting analytical about like, does this name work?
18:05 Speaker 01 And that's, you know, not the process of coming up with new ideas, but just determining which one you're going to go forward with. But to, to know which ones are even worth pursuing, you first have to generate enough ideas. That you're not going with the immediate obvious one, which is usually not going to be the most interesting one. And you want an interesting name or design or concept, because interesting means it's distinctive. It's got something that other things don't have.
18:35 Lewis Howes? Right.
18:35 Speaker 01 And so that, so that's like the creative brainstorming process I use individually. It also translates into sort of a group creative process here. Trident, which is, you know, we're a product development and marketing firm. And it, and that's what we call, you know, typically people call brainstorming. And that's the group creative process. Though I prefer to call it a group mind, not a brainstorm, because brainstorm implies chaos. That there's no order to it. And really, that's not what's occurring. It may be like that very initial, like, let's come up with ideas part. But it's really not ideally chaotic. What it is, is the people in the conversation generating possibilities.
19:19 Speaker 01 And everyone has agreed to several kind of ground rules. One is you're not analyzing the products. So again, the ideas, people too quickly move into the analytical phase and start shutting down possibilities. So people are throwing out ideas for whatever the the product name is or the product idea. And other people who see themselves as, you know, they're the devil's advocate. They'll often say, well, I'm the devil's advocate.
19:48 Lewis Howes? Right.
19:49 Speaker 01 And they think they're performing an important role and they can. But that comes later. If they bring in their devil's advocate language and ideas too early in the process to start shutting down possibilities. It actually short circuits that whole process. Where the the people who are trying to come up with new possibilities in order to populate the field aren't going to be able to come up with those ideas because they start getting defensive and feeling like they need to defend their concepts. So you have to be able to turn that off for that period. Another thing is, as you ask questions, instead of asking questions of people that shut down possibilities, like, why, why that?
20:32 Speaker 01 You, you know, why did you say that? Or, you know, how come you think that's a good idea? It's more like opening up possibilities as like what's missing or what else? So some questions narrow things down, some questions expand things, open ended questions. And so asking open ended questions that expand possibilities.
20:53 Speaker 01 Is an important part of the conversation for innovation. Another one is what we call looking for the gold. So let's say someone has an idea and you don't think it's a very good idea, but there's something in it that's valuable that could lead to the better idea. If, if you are focused exclusively on what's not good about the idea, then you're going to miss the, the gold nugget in what someone's saying. So as people are presenting ideas and new possibilities, something they say, even though it's not the thing, may trigger that idea in you and you don't want to miss that. The next rule or guideline for a group mind is you're not waiting your turn.
21:37 Speaker 01 You're listening carefully to what other people are saying and then building on what they're saying. As opposed to waiting your turn, which is like, I'm letting them finish what they're saying so I can then give my idea.
21:49 Lewis Howes? It's kind of like improv class where it's like this and.
21:52 Speaker 01 Right.
21:53 Lewis Howes? Building on it, right?
21:54 Speaker 01 Right. Cause otherwise you'll never get to a new place. You'll only get to the place that one of the people in the group would have gotten. If you want to get to someplace that you would never have gotten on your own, then that requires building off of the ideas that other people have. So listening to what they say and then building on that rather than pulling the conversation back to the idea that you wanted to share. Now you can write down a note so that you don't forget it and then follow the conversation. Let the conversation evolve. And then later on, if you hit a dead end with some sort of angle, then you can say, well, here's another idea I had a while back. I want to put this into the space so that we can look at that and then introduce that into the conversation.
22:39 Speaker 01 So it's not that you abandon it, but if you're sitting there just waiting your turn, A, you're not building on what the other people are saying and B, you're not actually listening to them most of the time. You're listening to yourself.
22:51 Lewis Howes? Right.
22:52 Speaker 01 Instead of listening carefully to what they're saying.
22:55 Lewis Howes? Right. You're thinking about your idea and how you can like bring it to the top as opposed to supporting them. Gotcha. Okay.
23:01 Speaker 01 Two more points in, in these conversations. One is. No one gets credit individually for the output of the brainstorm. Like if you're like, oh, that was my idea in the brainstorm. Nine out of 10 times, half the people in the brainstorm thought it was their idea. Wow. And they're convinced it was their idea. Oh, I said that. And then I said that. And you're like, wait a second, that was me who said that. And like two other guys are thinking the same thing. And that's a sign that it was working really well. Because everyone thought it was their idea because the conversation led to the point where like some suddenly something became obvious, the right thing became obvious. And then it occurred, arose in several minds at the same time.
23:44 Speaker 01 And now if everyone's trying to take individual credit, again, it short circuits this process by which we come up with the ideas and then suddenly people are protecting their turf and trying to like hold back their best ideas or make sure they're presenting them in a way that they get the credit for it. And therefore it's, you know, it short circuits the ability of the group to come up with the best possible idea. And so like, it's important that you give up credit in order that the whole group gets credit for the output of it, because some people play different roles
24:24 Speaker 01 in that type of conversation. Like there may be one person who is never the person who gets the basket, but is great at doing assists. Right. And without that person, the team could fall apart. But if they're not ever getting credit because they're not the one who actually mouths the idea. And so you think, well, we don't need him in the room. Because they're not the one who mouthed the idea. And then you kick them out. And then later you'll find that you're not coming up with this good ideas. Good of ideas. It may be, you know, that that person was asking questions that were triggering the right ideas than other people. So it's not just about being the guy at the front who has all the ideas. It's about being involved in this conversation where everyone's aligned on the outcome.
25:07 Speaker 01 But not, you know, trying to take individual credit. And then, and then the last piece of it is uh, the conversation that we have is like, the saying that we have on the wall in our conference room at Trident is when egos drop away, the best idea wins. And so this is related to that last point about no one gets particular credit, but it's also about, you've got to like, drop your ego and it's not about your idea. It's about the best idea, the idea that's going to serve the outcome the best, whether it's a name or a concept for a new product, whatever it may be, as a solution to some social problem, an angle on an article, whatever you want to brainstorm about.
25:49 Speaker 01 The leader's job isn't to have all the ideas, is to make sure all the ideas are heard and that the best one wins.
25:55 Lewis Howes? Hmm.
25:56 Speaker 01 And so that's how we create a culture of innovation or creativity here at Trident. It's, it's not just an action that we take, but it's actually just creating these types of conversations that lead people to coming up with ideas and knowing that they're free to come up with ideas. They won't be criticized for coming up with ideas that it's not wrong to have a bad idea, quote, bad idea. It's good to just be coming up with new possibilities that can expand the thoughts. And so people feel free to present things all the time. And that doesn't mean they're all great ideas.
26:33 Lewis Howes? Right.
26:34 Speaker 01 But the most important thing is creating an atmosphere where all the ideas come forward and no one feels like they shouldn't bring it forward.
26:41 Lewis Howes? I like that. Yeah, I like that. Um, definitely a good process to follow uh, for anyone, even if you'd only have like, uh, you know, two people to run an idea by, if you don't have a whole mind group or brainstorming mind group, uh, but if you have, you know, a couple of people to run it by, this is a good process to follow. Now, uh, you know, I work a lot in the online product space. I create a lot of online courses. I've become really effective at creating and launching and selling online courses. And you've become really effective at creating, launching and selling or licensing physical products and you've brought over eighty products. To market and some of them have been huge successes where you, you know, sell it off to another company or you license it to a company. You've done manufacturing.
27:26 Lewis Howes? You've done pretty much every different type of um, style of product and licensing and manufacturing you can think of. And you've also recently in the last year got into crowdfunding. So I want to ask you, first off, what are the best or most effective ways to launch a physical product today? Now that there is crowdfunding and I see you doing more of it. I know you're also still doing licensing and I think manufacturing a little bit, but what's the best way today to take a physical product and bring it to market? And maybe talk about the pros and cons of, you know, traditional ways of manufacturing and licensing and now
28:08 Lewis Howes? new ways of crowdfunding and getting your product out there before it's actually created.
28:13 Speaker 01 Sure thing. So the traditional, you know, the original way of bringing a product to market was to start a company to manufacture it and sell it. The, you know, other traditional ways licensing where you take an idea, develop it into a prototype at a certain, to a certain level of completion, you know, it could be a rough prototype or an advanced prototype and then apply for a patent and then license it to a company who will make it and sell it and then pay you a royalty. And then crowdfunding is actually not an exactly third option, but what it is a way to do is pre-sell a product to raise money. So you have the capital to launch the product, to create it
28:54 Speaker 01 and then bring it to market usually with the idea that you're going to then start a company to make and sell it. So it's really a way to launch a product for then starting a company to make and sell it. Or alternatively, you can use it as a way to prove interest in a product and then go license it. So it's really an interim step or a Pre-launch step before one of the other two models, but it has a huge implication for bringing products to market today. So what I would say, the best way to bring a product to market today is if it is crowdfundable, meaning it's a type of product that would work in crowdfunding, then you would want to do a crowdfunding campaign.
29:38 Lewis Howes? Before, you'd want to do that first before trying to manufacture it or get the mold yourself or anything like that is what you're saying?
29:47 Speaker 01 Right, right. For several reasons because, you know, I guess, I shouldn't assume everyone's familiar with crowdfunding. A lot of people probably are, but just really quickly crowdfunding, the two main sites are Kickstarter and Indiegogo. And you can put up a project on one of those sites. And it doesn't have to be a physical product. It could be a CD you want to make or a book you want to write, but it's most, you know, it's used for all those things. But for my world, it's for launching inventions and products. And you can present your product as something that you want to make, but you need to make, raise money. And the real breakthrough with crowdfunding is that is it gives the ability to raise capital to entrepreneurs without having to sell equity
30:32 Speaker 01 and without having an unproven product in terms of market demand in order, before they get that money. So using an example would be easy. It's last, earlier this year, I launched a product called the Quick Key, which is a little multi-tool that was the size and shape of a key that allows you to open up boxes or mail or cut twine or it had a bottle open on it, cute little product. And, you know,
30:56 Lewis Howes? This is your first time launching a Kickstarter, right?
31:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, and we did it on Indiegogo, which is, which is the other platform. And we decided to try it because I've been watching it for a few years grow. And I was like, I need to try this because it's important to my industry and I should, you know, see how it is to actually go through it.
31:15 Lewis Howes? And how did it do? What were the results? What were you wanting and what were the results?
31:20 Speaker 01 Well, the, the goal on our campaign was $4,000, though we were really secretly hoping to raise about $20,000. And in fact, we raised $221,000. And so that was far exceeding our expectations, which really opened my eyes up to the possibilities here with crowdfunding. And and basically what you're doing is pre-selling the product to people who say, I want you to make this product and I'll preorder one, even though I know I'm not going to get it for a while because you still have to produce the molds in order to make it and then ship them all out.
31:55 Speaker 01 But I like it enough that I want to vote with my dollars to cause it to occur.
31:58 Lewis Howes? This is, this is interesting because this is what I've been teaching for the last two to three years now with my students in the digital product space is to actually sell it on a webinar or sell it on a landing page first. Bring in sales to see if people actually want it and then create it over the next couple of weeks and deliver an educational course. Where a lot of people spend all this time and energy developing the logo and the branding and the backend and then they create the content and then they launch it six months later or they lose steam and they never launch it. And then they realize that no one actually wants it anyways. And for me, crowdfunding is like brilliant because it's kind of what I've been doing in the digital space, teaching people.
32:38 Lewis Howes? And so you get proof of concepts. Right now you've got the carbon flyer that I'm a part of as well. It's a, you know, something that we're both working on, but you're running with it and it's, uh, the goal is 50,000 and we raised that in the first four days. And now it continues to grow. So you're seeing that people actually want the product that, and then it gets the word out about your product for you. It does marketing for you. And so you have a built in audience already of buyers before you have to actually create it, which is really brilliant.
33:08 Speaker 01 Right. In the past, we would have had to invest, you know, a couple hundred thousand dollars in getting the product ready for market without knowing.
33:16 Lewis Howes? If anyone buy it.
33:17 Speaker 01 Right. And then to get that money, we would have had to sell equity in the company to someone else or come up with the money ourselves. And it's a lot of money. And then we would have launched the product without any customer awareness, trying to sell it to buyers at retailers just based on their opinion as to whether or not consumers would buy it and then they may or may not buy it. And so the risk in terms of money and effort and development is so much higher. And what crowdfunding it does is dramatically reduces the risk. So for, we still had to invest some time and effort and money to get the product ready for the crowdfunding campaign. It's, it's not a magic bullet. I mean, we had a couple hundred hours in developing the campaign.
33:59 Lewis Howes? The video, the, the, the rendering, the models, everything, right?
34:03 Speaker 01 Right, all, all the pieces, plus getting ready to launch the campaign, setting up our social media strategy and our PR strategy and our advertising strategy to push the campaign once it went live. So a lot of time went in the front end, as well as a lot of time in developing the product up to a working prototype. But not nearly as much as would have gone into it in order to get the product ready for manufacturing. Probably a quarter or less of the, of the investment and time and money to get it ready for the campaign than to actually launch it in the marketplace. And now, because it's launched and it's doing very well, we've got feedback from the marketplace that our target customers want the product.
34:43 Speaker 01 We've got pre-sales of the product that we can use to fund the creation of the molds without having to go out and raise equity. And when later we go to buyers at retailers to sell them the product, instead of saying, we think this is going to sell. We can point out to our campaign and say, look, we've already shown that thousands of people want this product and are willing to pay for it, even though it's not yet available. So they're willing to pay for it. We think there's a real good shot that other people in a normal retail setting would be willing to pay for it. So
35:16 Lewis Howes? Right.
35:17 Speaker 01 It's really compelling, though it only works for products that work in the crowdfunding space. Most of which are things that appeal to, when it comes to products, tech gadget males, uh, younger males between like twenty and fifty, maybe people with some disposable income. It's not a lot of ladies, it's not a lot of non-tech savvy people, it's not a lot of older people. When it comes to gadget type items now. When it comes to plays and CDs, it's a different audience and film that I don't, I can't speak to cogently, but when it comes to products, the stuff that's doing the best are those things that are like cool gadgets.
35:59 Lewis Howes? Right.
35:59 Speaker 01 For the most.
36:00 Lewis Howes? And the cool thing, you know, you've been a part of a couple of big successes. You've only done, you've only been a part of four campaigns now with your touch on it. One of them was the coolest cooler, which is the most successful Kickstarter campaign of all time. I think it raised over 12 and a half million. Is that right?
36:17 Speaker 01 It raised 13.2 million dollars.
36:20 Lewis Howes? 12 million and you, and he hired you to redesign the coolest cooler, parts of it at least.
36:26 Speaker 01 Right. So the story there is the inventor was a guy named Ryan Grepper and he'd run it on Kickstarter. The same exact product idea for a cooler with built in margarita blender and Bluetooth speaker earlier in the year and raised $125,000, but that.
36:42 Lewis Howes? Didn't hit his mark. Yeah.
36:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, it fell short of his goal. So he came to us to redesign it. So we didn't run his campaign. We just redesigned the product. But we really made it super cool. If you look up the coolest cooler online, you'll see it's a very, very cool looking item. And then he relaunched the campaign. It wasn't just the design. He also had a new campaign strategy, different marketing, and also very importantly, different timing for the campaign. He launched it in the summer when people were thinking about coolers, which made a huge impact compared to when he tried to launch it in the winter, hoping to be able to deliver it for cooler time.
37:20 Lewis Howes? But no one was thinking about it. No one was hot and sweaty and, you know,
37:23 Speaker 01 Right.
37:24 Lewis Howes? out at the lake.
37:25 Speaker 01 But the difference was, you know, between the first campaign and the second campaign was 13 million dollars. That was amazing.
37:34 Lewis Howes? Not too bad.
37:35 Speaker 01 Fun to be part of and watch from ringside.
37:38 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
37:39 Speaker 01 Couldn't have happened to a more deserving or. Great guy, Ryan Grepper is, you know, he's a serial inventor, he actually has an info product called The Inventor's Blueprint. And tries to educate inventors on the, on the process, but this was a huge, huge victory, but he's a very generous, very kind guy. Who is also very hardworking and dedicated to delivering on his product and. Um, you know, it could have happened to any number of people, but the guy it happened to happens to be a, a great dude who I really like and respect a lot for how he's handled. His success and, uh, you know, been very generous with everyone around him in the process.
38:18 Lewis Howes? So, and, and so you launched the Quick Key, which did two hundred and twenty-five thou- two fifty, two twenty-five?
38:24 Speaker 01 Two twenty-one.
38:24 Lewis Howes? Two twenty-one thousand, and now you're at seventy-seven thousand and growing every day. With like thirty something days left on the, the Carbon Flyer, which I'll have all these things linked up in the show notes at LewisHowes.com/one twelve. So make sure to check all these products out and, uh, feel free to back the Carbon Flyer, which I'm a part of. Also, what, can you tell me what has been the keys to being success as a crowdfunding? Like what have you seen has worked for you? You also did another product that only did, I think, like sixteen or twenty thousand dollars, not as much. So what works well, uh, for your campaign to be successful and what are some things that people can be doing to, you know? Pre-sell their product first before trying to do, go the manufacturing route first?
39:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, so first and foremost, you gotta have a product that is appropriate for the venue. And so that means appealing to the audience that goes to these places to back projects. Like I said, the, you know, younger male tech savvy guys. You have to then have a product that is visually appealing generally because it's, people are browsing around, there's lots of cool looking stuff. The stuff that does best is typically the stuff that looks the coolest, that people are gonna be excited by when they see it and that demonstrates well. That's got a good story behind it. So even if you have a really revolutionary, uh, you know, housewares product. But it doesn't look exciting, then it's, you know, not necessarily gonna do that well, that you're facing an uphill battle there.
39:53 Speaker 01 So having the right kind of product in the right kind of space, that's really important. Then preparation is the most important part actually of the whole campaign, what you do before you launch. Because once you launch. The, you know, the die is already cast, more or less like you're gonna either succeed or not based on what you do because right at the beginning, you have your opportunity to get a big burst of energy that you you build up through pre-work, build it through social media work, like with the Carbon Flyer, we built a Facebook page and then gathered a bunch of likes, interacted with the community, started talking to people in the RC radio control community and people interested in Carbon Flyer and gathered a bunch of likes.
40:37 Speaker 01 So that right when the campaign launched, we were able to promote it to those people as well as our internal network of friends and family who were prepared to know that we were launching on a certain date so that they could promote us early and back us early in order to generate momentum, which got us higher page rank inside Indiegogo, which then creates a virtuous cycle where because you have higher page rank, you start to get organic hits. And so those organic sales are where the really big money comes in because your own network, for most people, not Lewis Howes necessarily, but for most people is rather limited and compared to the amount of traffic Indiegogo or Kickstarter get on their own,
41:20 Speaker 01 which is, you know, millions of unique visitors a month, plus they have email lists that they send email newsletters out to that have millions and millions of people in them. And that's where you get your big money, but you only get into those emails and you only get high page rank if you have a really strong initial burst out of the gates. And so prepping the marketing in all those pieces so that right when you launch, you get a big surge is one thing that's just really important to success. And we've got probably 200 man-hours for the Carbon Flyer before we even launched, designing the campaign, but also preparing the marketing side of it so that on launch day, we had a good showing. And by the end of the first day, we were on the front page of Indiegogo and.
42:05 Speaker 01 Since then, we've we've fallen off the front page. We've gone back to it a couple of times just as we hit press and things like that. But generally, once you're near the top, you stay near the top. If you don't get to thirty percent of your funding goal in the first forty eight hours, your chances of hitting your total funding goal starts to drop precipitously as time goes on. So people will contact me regularly and say, hey, my campaign's five days old and I've only got like ten backers so far. Can you help me? And you're like, well, it's too late.
42:37 Lewis Howes? Wow.
42:37 Speaker 01 Like, you're better off cancelling your campaign and starting over.
42:41 Lewis Howes? Really?
42:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
42:43 Lewis Howes? So the key is to get, how much do you say, thirty three percent in the first what?
42:47 Speaker 01 Thirty percent in the first forty eight hours.
42:49 Lewis Howes? Wow.
42:51 Speaker 01 But I try to go for a hundred percent in forty eight hours. That's my goal.
42:54 Lewis Howes? Right.
42:55 Speaker 01 So part of that's like setting your goal so you can hit that. The setting your goal is, you know, you want to set it so it's not unrealistically low, but you don't necessarily want to set it as high as you might actually want to get to.
43:07 Lewis Howes? Right. There's a psychology behind it, right?
43:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, if you set it too high, it'll scare people off. And so you want to like, because they'll think, well, it's too high, he's never going to get funded or, and, and so they don't want to risk funding something that's not going to make it at the end. So setting that is important. The, the content creation of the campaign, like you spend a lot of time studying other campaigns that work in order to craft a campaign that's effective. So the video is the most important part of the whole thing. You got to have high quality video that's compelling and makes people want the thing that you're trying to promote. And then your perk structure is super important. How you're, you know, what you're offering to people at what prices and how you're presenting that in order to get people excited about it is also very important.
43:54 Speaker 01 And again, studying what other people have done, there's a lot of articles all over the place about best practices, plus Kickstarter and Indiegogo both have best practices information that you can get if you're running a campaign about perk structure. Um, I haven't worked with Kickstarter directly, but I know Indiegogo has consultants on staff who will help review your campaign and give you advice on improving it.
44:18 Lewis Howes? That's nice.
44:19 Speaker 01 So it's really important to, you know, both prepare for the initial launch and also then to have a campaign that once you launch, people show up and they, you know, back your project.
44:33 Lewis Howes? Right.
44:34 Speaker 01 And then. Then the last piece of, so that's, you know, before the campaign, the launch and then during the campaign is the next thing and you can't underestimate how much energy it takes. It's a full-time job. We put about forty man-hours plus each week into running the campaign. So there are people who are assigned to building the campaign and there are people who are assigned to kind of like running it, responding to comments, coming up with, you know, posts for Facebook and updates and video updates. It's an ongoing project. And so, once you start it, you gotta be prepared for forty-five to sixty days of intense work. It's not free money. It's hard-earned money, but it comes with.
45:18 Lewis Howes? It's not just launching something and hoping it works out. It's like constantly working it until the very last moment. I know my friend Manish Sethi runs Pavlok, which was a really successful campaign that just finished. I think he got two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollars. And he was constantly hustling every single moment of every single day for like forty days. And it wasn't just like, let's throw it up and hope something happens. That's where you're gonna fail, it sounds like. And all the ones that are very successful that we've looked at, the videos are like highest qual-, they're like music videos almost, or like commercials. And the production value is really high. They're just like, they crush it because their attention to detail. The ones that are doing like a million dollars
46:00 Lewis Howes? plus, it's like super quality video and attention to detail throughout and their team is on point and everyone's hustling constantly to get attention. I think that's really the key, is to know that it's gonna take work to make it happen.
46:14 Speaker 01 You make it happen. It doesn't happen by accident. And in the end, the campaign itself isn't necessarily that profitable.
46:23 Lewis Howes? Right, because it costs money to then deliver those products and make those products, right?
46:28 Speaker 01 Right. And they're, you know, Indiegogo or Kickstarter has fees and the payment system has fees. And if you get other, you know, the paying the people who do all this stuff, that costs money. We're buying Facebook ads, reinvesting in advertisements to grow it. So, at the end of the day, the campaign itself isn't necessarily super profitable, but it creates for you that. You know, ideally the money to fund the tooling so that you can create the product without having to go into debt or sell equity. It creates notoriety and awareness and it gives you coverage. It gives you proven salability of your product. So it sets you up to win after the campaign.
47:09 Speaker 01 And that's whether or not you want to set up a company to manufacture and distribute the product or whether or not you want to go and license it. So like with the quick key after a campaign ended, we decided we got approached by a company who wanted to license it called Night Eyes. Who sells keychain accessories in in ten, you know, twenty thousand retail outlets there in Home Depot and Lowe's and many other REI, lots of different retail outfits all around the world. And we're like, they gave us a great offer, a much more lucrative offer than we would normally expect for such a small, humble item. Based on the fact that we had this proven success and it fit perfectly in their product line.
47:49 Speaker 01 So we're like, well, we can license it and they can get it into twenty thousand locations. That'll take us how many years? You know, it took them twenty five years to build up that distribution.
47:58 Lewis Howes? Right.
47:58 Speaker 01 So why not take that shortcut, let them take over that product and collect the royalty? And we can move on to the next thing, which in our case is Carbon Flyer. And now Carbon Flyer, I don't want to license after I'm done because it's a fun and exciting project to be a part of. And I have a carbon fiber.
48:18 Lewis Howes? Did you explain exactly, do you explain exactly what it is?
48:21 Speaker 01 The Carbon Flyer?
48:22 Lewis Howes? Yeah, go ahead and explain it.
48:23 Speaker 01 Sorry. Yeah. So the Carbon Flyer is a carbon fiber airplane, remote controlled via Bluetooth. So you can use your smartphone, iPhone or Android to steer it by tilting your phone. And it's got a built in camera. It's not a streaming camera, but it's a camera that records your flights and it's a tech toy. It's not a quadcopter that you use for shooting high quality. Video, it's it's much more of a toy that captures its flights, but it's just a really cool looking carbon fiber airplane and on our campaign, it's a hundred bucks. So again, because we're selling direct to consumer, we're able to sell it for a lot less through the campaign than it would go for at a retail store, which would probably be about a hundred
49:07 Speaker 01 and fifty bucks. We're we're thinking once the campaign is over. And so you're able to get it for a lower price and get this exposure. And this is a really cool product. It came to me. I had a vision for this carbon fiber plane when I was walking through the park one day. And in the past, and that was last summer, in the past, I would have had to spend years developing the product, getting it to market in all kinds of expense and rig and roll before I found out whether or not people really were interested in so much effort.
49:40 Lewis Howes? You've done that many times.
49:42 Speaker 01 I have. The first eighty products I brought to market, you know, were that way. And in like Power Squid product was five years from the time I had the idea till I made my first dime.
49:53 Lewis Howes? Wow.
49:54 Speaker 01 Carbon Flyer was like, you know, maybe it was a year from the first idea till I got, you know, the first dime. And not only that, I now know it's a viable product as opposed to like Power Squid. I spent all those years before I found out it was worthwhile. I had other projects that I've developed and spent five years on before they finally got to the market and found out that no one was interested. No one cared, even though the buyers liked it, the consumers didn't. And it failed.
50:24 Lewis Howes? You put all that energy into something or five years and it doesn't work out and it's can be probably pretty frustrating.
50:32 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah. And I mean, that was the game I played and was used to. And it was very stressful in certain ways. And
50:41 Speaker 01 So crowdfunding has dramatically shifted the landscape for people with ideas for products because you can dramatically reduce the risk. You don't have to get investors and it's also exciting because it's super hip right now. Maybe it won't be as exciting in a few years. It'll be more old hat. But at the moment, it still gets a lot of press and a lot of excitement. People talk about this stuff. And the other cool thing is that products that never would have seen the light of day, because they're too out there, like the coolest cooler, you could have come up with that idea, done such great design, and then try to take it to the iglues of the world, and they would have never taken the risk. To develop and commercialize a product like that is hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Like, it's a complicated, expensive project.
51:25 Speaker 01 And companies like Igloo are risk averse because they're big companies and they're run by lawyers instead of entrepreneurs. And for the most part, I don't want to besmirch Igloo. I don't know who's actually running that place, but, you know, bigger corporations are risk averse. Now, because Ryan Grepper saw this idea and was able to fund it through this method, this product turns out is something that tons of people want, over 60,000 backers on Kickstarter.
51:52 Lewis Howes? Sixty thousand?
51:53 Speaker 01 Yeah.
51:53 Lewis Howes? Oh, my gosh.
51:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, incredible. And it never would have seen the light of day. Recently, on Indiegogo, some ladies, young ladies, came out with earphones with cat ears on them for like the rave scene.
52:08 Speaker 01 Cat ears without speakers and neon lights, which I'm really quite clear Sony was never going to come out with on their own. And they raised like $3 million.
52:18 Lewis Howes? Amazing. They're like 23-year-old girls, aren't they?
52:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, like Berkeley girls, I think. So.
52:23 Lewis Howes? Crazy.
52:23 Speaker 01 Really amazing. And again, a product that normal business probably never would have taken the risk on, that turns out there's a demand for, they're not for me, but the people, people want them. Lots of people, apparently lots and lots of people want them. I think you should get some Lewis.
52:41 Lewis Howes? Yeah, right. You know, for my girlfriend. Um, very cool. Well, I'm a, you know, I'm obviously excited about this because I'm a part of the Carbon Flyer and it's my first time doing any go-go and it's cool to be working with you on something to see it, to see it grow. And it's just amazing, you know, it's cool because again, I've been doing this in the digital space for a few years, launching something or selling something before I launch it and then delivering it after people buy it. And it's worked affect, it's been extremely effective for me and it's what I teach in a lot of my workshops for people to do, to save time and energy and see if actually people buy it. So again, this is kind of like a, a great way to do that with a physical product.
53:22 Lewis Howes? It's still going to take a lot of time, but it's going to save you time based on what it would, trying to manufacture it on your own. And the money that you would spend on your own doing it that way. So I definitely recommend checking that out. If you guys have a, a physical product that you want to launch that could fit in there and I'm going to link up a bunch of resources. There's a couple of blogs on Tim Ferriss's site and other sites about crowdfunding that I'm going to link up, that it gives you some, uh, some tips, some tools, some strategies on how to do that as well. Uh, but we'll have everything linked up about what Krista talked about with creativity and just developing creative ideas and following this whole process that he uses to find an idea and to take it to market. So we'll have that all linked up on the show notes at lewishouse.com/112.
54:07 Lewis Howes? But I want to ask you two final questions, Chris. The first one is what are you most grateful for recently?
54:15 Speaker 01 Ooh, what I'm most grateful for recently is I just turned 40.
54:19 Lewis Howes? Yeah, congratulations.
54:20 Speaker 01 That was great. I had the most unbelievable 40th birthday party that my wife Summer threw for me. It was a beautiful, touching and epic at the same time. And I'm, I'm really just grateful for the fact that the first 40 years of my life have been so blessed with opportunity and amazing experiences and amazing, amazing supportive people. And so I really count myself to be very blessed in the life I get to live. Very few people have gotten to do the things that I've done and see the things that I've seen and have the amount of fun I've had. So I, I really am very grateful for that, turning 40. Is also, I think, reaching, I call it the age of legitimacy.
55:04 Speaker 01 You know, it's really crossed that line of like, I'm not a kid anymore. I'm a kid at heart always, but you know, maybe what I say will carry a little more weight.
55:14 Lewis Howes? Nice. Okay, cool. A final question, which you've answered before, I believe, a year ago. The final question is, what is your definition of greatness?
55:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think my definition of greatness has probably evolved a little. I think being great is being 100% authentically you and passionately you and putting everything into it. Because you've got this one life to live and you know, no one can measure externally, whether or not you're truly being great, but if you're living fully into your own possibilities, that's my definition of greatness.
55:51 Lewis Howes? I love it. Well, before we tell everyone where to go, I want to acknowledge you, Chris, for your mentorship and your friendship with me and your creativity and what you've been able to open up in me and your inspiration in the world. You've developed so many ideas and products that have made people smile, that have benefited people, whether it be in their home, their kitchen, out at the, you know, when they're driving, whatever it may be, you've benefited so many human beings with your products and with your visions that you've turned into reality. And your hard work over 20 years has paid off to really serve on such a big level. So I acknowledge you, Chris, for that creativity and that energy that you've created in the entire world. You're making a huge difference.
56:36 Lewis Howes? I appreciate you and thank you so much for coming on and excited to see what happens in the journey moving ahead.
56:44 Speaker 01 Thanks, Lewis. I love you, man. It's always, always a pleasure to talk with you.
56:47 Lewis Howes? Love you too, man.
56:49 Speaker 01 All right. Take care.
56:55 Lewis Howes? Thank you guys so much for coming on today. I really appreciate it. And make sure to go back to the show notes at lewishouse.com/112 for episode 112. Again, lewishouse.com/112. Would love to see you guys sharing this one out there on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and everywhere else that you're listening to this. Go ahead and share it out there. Also, we'll have links up there for Trident Design where you can see Chris's website. If you have an idea, feel free to submit an idea and call their team to see if you want to take it to market. They've got a great service there. They've helped a lot of inventors. One of their most recent one, worked with them and sold a million units, over a million units of a product. You can see it on the homepage over at trident-design.com.
57:39 Lewis Howes? Also, check out our Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign right now. We are seeing a lot of traction with the Carbon Flyer. If you want a great toy for a male friend of yours or for a female friend for that matter, make sure to check it out and back and support us. Carbon Flyer campaign, it's a really cool tech toy. I think you guys are going to like. So you can check out the video there. You've got the links back to all of Chris's information and everything else we talked about here in this episode. I appreciate you guys so much. We've got some incredible guests coming up in the few weeks here in the near future. So make sure to subscribe to the podcast, School of Greatness, on your Android app, on your iPhone. We're on SoundCloud or Stitcher. Subscribe to the podcast. And
58:24 Lewis Howes? the really thing that helps us get the message out there, along with you sharing these episodes, is when you leave a positive review. So if you enjoyed this episode, please go back to iTunes or Stitcher and leave a review there. That really helps increase the ranking of the show and therefore getting more people to view this message and this content. So if you love the show, that'd be a great thing you can do to support and give back by leaving a review and sharing this with your friend. Thank you guys so much for being on today. And you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.
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