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Guests: Mat Hofma and Erik Polumbo, founders of Mini Materials.
Host: Kevin Mako, founder of Product Startup and the leading expert in hardware startup consulting. A hardware entrepreneur since 1999, Kevin has advised more than 1,500 founders and built and scaled MAKO Invent through its acquisition by TriMech in 2024.
Testing Novel Product Ideas for Less Than $500
Mat Hofma and Erik Polumbo explain how Mini Materials brought miniature cinder blocks to life and began generating sales. They share a low-cost approach to 3D printing, prototyping, testing, revenue growth, and choosing which adjacent products deserve development.
Episode transcript
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Filip Valica: Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Product Startup Podcast, a podcast that helps bring your product idea to life by chatting with successful inventors, product designers, and other industry professionals. This podcast is run by Mako
Filip Valica: Design + Invent, and hosted by Filip Valica. Our goal here is to get to the bottom of what makes a product successful, from initial idea to putting your product on the shelf. We're taking you step by step to build a functional product and scale your product business. Now onto the show.
Filip Valica: The Product Startup Podcast, episode five.
Filip Valica: Welcome to the Product Startup Podcast. Helping you turn ideas into successful products step by step with your host,
Filip Valica: Filip Valica. Hi, everyone, and welcome to the product startup podcast. In the last episode, we heard from Brad Summey, the founder of Savage Jerky. He shared how he built Savage Jerky without any food industry experience. It's a great listen if you haven't heard it already.
Filip Valica: Brad talks about his success with three Kickstarter, and we get into product packing, among many other details. Today I'm joined by Mat Hofma and Erik Polumbo from many, materials. They make miniature cinder blocks and pallets and sell them online. They started with
Filip Valica: 112th scale construction materials like cinder blocks made with real cement, bricks made with real terracotta, wooden pallets, and concrete mix. And now they've moved on to other miniature products. We'll talk about how Matt got the idea, prototyped and started selling. Matt and Eric will get
Filip Valica: into prototyping quickly on a budget, manufacturing locally in the U.S., and marketing tips for small product-based businesses. So let's get started. Hi, guys. Thanks for joining me on the show today. How are you doing? Good, how are you? Good, good.
Filip Valica: So can you introduce yourself to the audience real quick and tell them a little bit about what you do? Yeah, Erik Polumbo, one of the owners with Mini Materials, handling mainly the operations fulfillment and research and development for the products.
Filip Valica: And I'm Mat Hofma. I'm another owner of mini materials.
Guests: I pretty much handle the creative side of it, along with a lot of product development in the market. Great. Before you guys leave today, I'd like to have you talk a little bit about your partnership and how you formed that because so far you're the first guest that talked about being a partner
Guests: with somebody else and I know that's a thorny topic sometimes you're basically in a relationship
Filip Valica: with somebody right a business partner yeah it is very much can you tell everybody how you got started yeah I started out I started it by myself at first I am a graphic designer and I had been
Filip Valica: wanting to start a website that sell something for a long time because I knew it really didn't matter too much what I sold I could market it and design it and probably be successful and I saw these miniature center blocks out there and I was like, I saw them, I don't remember where I saw them, I saw him somewhere
Filip Valica: and I love it. I was like, this is, I don't know why I like it, but I like it. So I went to buy him and the guy was sold out and the price was ridiculous, like $50 for a little 24 pack. I was like, you know what? I can do this myself.
Filip Valica: And so I learned how to 3D design. I made a 3D print. I poured some molds and then I put concrete in the molds and made the bricks. And from there, I just kept trying to
Guests: make new things and make little pallets and miniature construction stuff. And it's really just taken off from there. So let's back up a little bit. You saw something that was already selling and you basically made your own prototype to see if you could do it yourself and what that would, I guess, what that would cost you.
Guests: Did you have any reservations about anybody else wanting to buy that product?
Filip Valica: Or was that basically validation because you already saw it for sale so you knew that there was a market?
Filip Valica: It was a really small validation. And honestly, I did take a risk because I didn't know if it would sell. I knew a few people would buy it, and it justified my, it's such a big learning opportunity
Filip Valica: that I knew I could sell enough to make up the cost at least, and if I could learn how
Guests: to do all this stuff for free, and with a chance of making money, that it would be worth it at the end.
Filip Valica: And that's what actually happened. So it was worth it.
Filip Valica: That's awesome. So how did you start selling the product then? I like Shopify a lot. So I set up Shopify, and I pretty much based my pricing. off of what the other guy was selling minus like $15
Filip Valica: because I knew I can do it and the cost at the time was not enough to even worry about the price too much so I set it up on Shopify took the as much images as I could and the main key was I documented the entire process
Filip Valica: of how I started, how I made the bricks and my first day I hit the little button on Shopify to publish your store I posted to Reddit everything that I had done up until that point.
Filip Valica: And I believe in the first 12 hours, I got 33,000 page views from Reddit and just
Guests: that, from just posting. Wow. That's insane. And I mean, that that equal, you know,
Filip Valica: several thousand in sales in my first week. Jeez. Yeah. So it was quick. So did you have any help at that point to help you with any of that stuff? The only help at that time was my wife who helped be packed orders. It was we pretty much,
Filip Valica: you know, I work at nine to five. So come home at six o'clock and we'd pack orders. And the first week I was up until three in the morning pretty much every morning. That's crazy. It's making bricks, which, you know, but it was very time as we
Filip Valica: making the bricks. So it was a lot of work in the first part. So yeah, you had a little sweatshop going in your garage, I guess. Oh, yeah.
Filip Valica: Actually, we just barely made this podcast because I was just in the garage making more bricks and i had to get them done before the podcast nice so yeah it's been busy and that's one of the reasons that uh i was like i need a part of it because it was just way too much
Filip Valica: work for one person to be doing so how did you guys meet then we've met each other since college about 10 years and uh yeah i moved around he stayed put but uh recently moved back down here
Filip Valica: when he started i was living in uh dc area and we're in florida now but um I saw it on the Instagram and Facebook and was like, what the heck is this? It's cool. It's definitely Matt.
Guests: It's his personality and ended up moving down here. And he asked me to join in. And it's definitely been a roller coaster ever since. So let's talk about that for a little bit. You knew each other for 10 years.
Filip Valica: Sometimes friends don't make the best of partners. How did you decide that it was actually good to go into business together? Did you do any type of legal paperwork up front? front to make sure that everyone's going to get a square deal out of it?
Filip Valica: We did sign some paperwork, you know, stating ownership percentages and all that, and more duties. I knew it would work because my first real job, I guess, was working with him and he managed a sporting goods store.
Filip Valica: And I knew his side was the exact compliment to my side because I'm the creative side. I come up with crazy ideas and I can manage the marketing and design and creation of things. But I'm not a numbers guy.
Guests: I hate numbers. So he's really good at sales and numbers. And so we really, I really thought it would just be the perfect compliment to make a whole piece of ownership, I guess.
Guests: So far it's worked.
Guests: You know, and that's good.
Filip Valica: I've heard that a lot is that the best way to find a partner is find someone that will do what you don't want to do or what you're not good at. So that makes sense. You flew over to Florida, I guess. And then you started helping out. And how have you been able to grow the business since?
Filip Valica: My idea was, you know, more product. I thought when I first jumped in, we were very limited to what our sales were, our products were. And so the growth potential was limited on a strictly e-commerce side.
Filip Valica: And so by having more options, even small things that were add-on level sales that we've done, it's definitely grown our revenue rapidly just for that. And even though our bread and butter is the cinder block,
Filip Valica: and it will always be that.
Guests: It's given us the ability to add on sales and grow that revenue so that we can change scales with our cinder blocks, pay people to make the cinder blocks, and kind of given us that breathing room that we needed.
Guests: And the last couple months, we've definitely accelerated that. No, that's great. And I actually noticed that growth on your site. So when I first started my site, I thought, man, you guys would be an awesome interview. And at the time, you maybe had a couple products.
Filip Valica: and I just went on there this morning and I mean you have like a farmhouse table like a mini farmhouse table which is to me it's totally random but maybe you can share
Filip Valica: where that came from I'm sure you've had a lot of opportunities to speak with your audience and talk about what you know what they want actually that was exactly that's one of the
Guests: examples of as soon as Eric jumped on board suddenly I had time to to make content and to make products and so we just sat around a table one night and we We just had a few beers and we're like, well, we just make some things.
Guests: And so we just took all of our products out and started playing with them.
Filip Valica: And Farmhouse table was one of those things that, like, they came out from that night. That's really awesome. Was that like a concentrated effort to say, hey, you know what? Our typical demographic is male, this age group, and maybe we're trying to target some other demographic.
Guests: Or was this just, you know, what, I think this is fun. Let's try it out. That is strictly fun.
Guests: It's something where I, we've seen it online, you know, people love with like,
Filip Valica: when working with reclaim wood and we're like, you know what? Why don't we just make a little miniature version of this? You know, and see if it sells. And if it does, we'll do some more of it. And that's what happened. You know, that's fascinating. I bet there's like tons of content now that you control through where you're like, oh, you know what? This is like ultra hipster.
Filip Valica: Let's make like a mini version of that.
Guests: Things we really hope to do. We just came up with these little bison skulls that we had. Saw that. We're like, we need to, you know, get some deer schools. Like you see a lot of that super modern, retro modern kind of thing where they have the deer school that's all painted white in their
Guests: living rooms. So, you know, we want to go that direction, too. Yeah, I'm in Texas and if you go into people's offices, they'll have, like, straight, like, you know, mounts in their office. Like, it's the real deal. It's like Dallas, you know, like the show.
Guests: So, yeah, I bet there's a total, like, market on that where people want to play off of that and have, like, this, like, you know, miniature set of skulls behind them or something.
Filip Valica: Yeah. So, well, now I lost track because I'm, like, totally into skulls. I have to edit this part out.
Filip Valica: so let's talk about your design and prototyping process a little bit you know when you first started you said that you learned how to do 3D modeling yourself and then i guess at that time you had maybe
Filip Valica: a couple molds that you created to do prototyping has that changed at all it's actually the exact same when we still do it we're in the process of learning how we made a cnc aluminum solid aluminum
Guests: two piece mold but we we haven't gotten to the point of using it yet we're still learning of how, you know, it's a lot more heavy duty and there's a lot more room for error. And if you do make an error, that piece of machinery costs way too much the place.
Guests: So we still do it the same way. It's 3D printer prototype, pour a silicone mold over top of it, use the mold to cast things out of concrete. I love that you said that because that's super approachable. I love DIY and I love rolling up my sleeves and doing stuff.
Guests: Obviously, I'm recording in my workshop right now. And I've got a 3D printer as well. And I've actually found that sometimes the best way of prototyping is even,
Filip Valica: not messing with a printer at first and just doing popsicle sticks or cardboard models or going to the dollar store and just ripping stuff apart and putting it back together. Yeah. So that's awesome to hear that you're still doing just grassroots stuff. Yeah.
Filip Valica: Are you able to turn around new product designs really quickly because you're basically doing it at home and you know the process really well? Yes. Actually, we're coming out with one sixth scale center blocks. So they're twice as big as our ones now.
Filip Valica: I was able to come home from work two or three days ago, make the 3D design in about an hour and get it to a 3D printer. And we use 3D hubs.com, which is a great 3D printing resource.
Guests: I have a guy who I've been using and he lives really close to me. And he does a great job. And I gave it to him that night at like 8 o'clock at night and he started it that night. And it's such a big print, though. It took three days. So we're expecting it tonight.
Guests: And that was Thursday when I sent it to him.
Filip Valica: that's really awesome so yeah it's been a lot of fun but i mean we can knock stuff out really fast so you you make a new product you can obviously make a small limited run yourself in the garage or i guess
Filip Valica: big if you stay up until 3am yeah what's the next step do you go to any of your existing customers and say what do you think about this or do you just put it up for sale we just put them up for sale um we've got
Filip Valica: enough of a following on instagram we'll get them out on our email newsletter to where when we send out
Guests: and a blast about this new product, we'd get a pretty good view right away if this will work or not. For example, this 3D print was a bit much, but our typical 3D prints only run around $300
Guests: combined with a $40 worth of silicone, and the concrete is near negligible at that point. We're not in it for more than $500 to get a product going. So if we think it's even sort of worth it and we'll at least get our money back, it's usually worth a shop.
Guests: I'm really happy that you mentioned that because on prior episodes, people have talked about
Filip Valica: using services or all these all in one companies that will do prototyping for you and that's kind of new to me being an engineer i do all my own prototyping especially in the office we've got our own equipment and usually it's just the guys in the back and you just figure something out
Filip Valica: and so it's good to hear that there's something that's so approachable i mean 500 like you said it's an easy call to create a new product and expand on your existing line we've had
Filip Valica: people you know reach out to us and say hey can you scale them so we know that the market's already there. It's a matter of we put it on the internet. Once we know it's a go, it's going to sell.
Guests: So we know already based on, you know, the amount of activity and inquiries that come from
Filip Valica: our market already made. That's one of the things is we get a lot of people asking us to make things. So all of our products, or aside from the table, the farmhouse table, but all of our
Filip Valica: concrete-based products, we take all of these requests from people and we see the ones that are getting asked most and then we we so do you have any type of threshold that you're like you know what once we hit x number all right this is a go or are you just like you know what
Filip Valica: i'm tired of hearing about this we just need to make it a little bit of most yeah well the one six skill specifically we have a lot of people asked for that but what made it really different is that
Filip Valica: there we we really want to get more marketing done as far as good photographs of our stuff in use
Guests: but we find that to be the hardest part so with this one with the one six scale the people who use them or a lot of superhero figures and stuff. And I guess any figures at all are all on six
Guests: scale. So there is, who has these ones, they take photos. There's a lot of people who do photography for figures. And like, I need these to photograph with my figures. So we figured with doing this,
Guests: we're going to get a lot of good stuff out of it. So it's a whole market a product.
Filip Valica: It's a crazy niche market. I wouldn't have thought that there's a market in that, but it's totally logical. Go to certain companies where you've got a lot of three-e animation designers. These cubes are littered with these figurines, and the figurines are themselves, you know, a couple hundred dollars. And like collector's edition,
Filip Valica: you talked about pricing, you know, and it was definitely value price, not cost plus. It was, you know, you're going top down from the market. There's definitely a lot of room there for a product like yours. So that's really cool. It's a good idea. That's smart. Yeah.
Filip Valica: So that's another thing, too, is we have another big group of Cinderlock people is the 150th scale.
Guests: And I guess there's a lot of construction diaramas out there that people do. and a huge market.
Filip Valica: I didn't know it existed either.
Filip Valica: But these people, they make little dioramas and have little diecast construction, which themselves, little tractors that cost thousands of dollars sometimes. Wow.
Guests: Everybody's asking for a little centerbox, but we can't at the moment make one-fifty scale because they're too small and they will break. That's kind of interesting. Imagine at some point you're going to have to move to maybe a slightly different material, some type of polymer or put some fibers in there or something to give it some strength.
Guests: Yeah, we looked into like plastic and stuff like that.
Filip Valica: So there are a few options, but it'll probably be one of our next products, our major 3D print products, but we got to really work hard on that one because of the size. No, that makes sense.
Guests: Speaking of the size, I guess you had to basically teach yourself about molding in a way, or did you already know something about molding? Because there's some certain particulars about, you know, relief angles and making sure that the part line is where you want it
Filip Valica: and all sorts of technical stuff. was that kind of a trial and error or did you just go online and yeah pretty much went online and learned how to do it that was about it we keep it super
Filip Valica: simple it's it's a one piece silicone mold and the top is open so we pour everything and then scrape the access off that's pretty much how it works no that's great so talk about some of your other products really quick the pallets and other wood-based products you have like little
Filip Valica: miniature circular saws or something that you uh to prototype on we wanted to come up with sauce too as well But the finish for palettes are actually a local woodworker we have.
Filip Valica: We made them ourselves for a while, but the fact of the constant making center blocks, making palettes, we'd be in the garage all day and wouldn't have time to run a business. So we contract those out to a local woodworker who makes the pallets for us.
Filip Valica: We just give him the design and the size and everything's like, hey, cut these up.
Guests: And he's got a big enough woodshot where he can cut these little slats out very quick for us.
Filip Valica: So we have them making our little two-by-fours, our little pallets.
Guests: Using real nails and everything, there's no glue, miniature nails.
Guests: And we've got some even new palette designs coming out because we've got our 24 packs.
Filip Valica: They come on a little bit larger palette right now. We're coming out with new pallets that fit the 24 packs perfectly so we can come out with some clear packaging so that we can get them into retail stores. Definitely want to talk about retail before we finish.
Filip Valica: I was just thinking that you guys need to come out with like a shipping container or something like that so that you can have the whole line. That's a good idea. I'm going to write that.
Filip Valica: The last guest that we've had has talked about going to China for manufacturing. You obviously have kept yours in the U.S. Can you kind of talk about your reasoning behind that? Right now, cost-wise, it doesn't make sense to go overseas.
Filip Valica: It's not necessary where our margins are great. And secondly, we coincidentally just got an inquiry from a domestic company that specializes in selling domestic products.
Guests: And so, you know, there is still that market out there that truly likes to buy American-made products. And so for now, we have no desire to go over into China or Vietnam or what have you.
Guests: Matt's wife is actually Chinese and has lots of hookups and family over there. So if the timing makes sense or if our costs are drastically influenced by going overseas, maybe we'll dabble.
Filip Valica: but for now it's it's all American made and we're happy to proclaim that no I'm happy to hear you guys say that at my work we do a lot of our manufacturing and
Filip Valica: sourcing comes from the US actually I would say most of it does just because it's not practical between shipping and customs and all sorts of other things and I think people have this
Filip Valica: misconception that they have to go abroad in order to be competitive and I think that is true for a lot of products I think and especially in products where you've got tons of competition but in this case as far as I know you dominate
Guests: the market. I don't know if anybody else that does what you do.
Guests: There's two more guys that do it, I think. But I think it's more of a side gig for fun, not taking it as seriously as we do. Right. Another thing, too, about the manufacturing in China is
Guests: plastic is the main, anything plastic in China is, you get it for a great price. But for us, wood, you can't get anything out of China. I mean, it would. And concrete, I haven't found much that you can get made well from China for a little price. So,
Filip Valica: our products really aren't too conducive to get made overseas either that's that's a really great point because on the surface people would normally say hey look it's a small product it's relatively
Filip Valica: lightweight it's durable to a degree what's the hold up why not ship it abroad so i appreciate you guys explaining all that um so let's talk a little bit about you now so now you started outsourcing
Guests: manufacturing to a degree and so you're spending most of your time more or less kind of running the
Filip Valica: business and trying to grow it can you talk a little bit about how did you
Guests: you get funded and have you done any like kickstarters or any type of crowdfunding or projects like that we have not done any kind of Kickstarter any kind of crowdfunding it has
Filip Valica: literally been funded for well from my going to start by myself i funded the first five hundred dollars and honestly with the way sales have been we pretty much made all the money back from
Filip Valica: the first month or two have not needed any funding so right that's amazing that's a great that's a Great feeling, I bet.
Filip Valica: Absolutely. Less than a year in, we're, you know,
Filip Valica: easily monthly. Congratulations, guys. That's awesome. Thank you. Can you talk a little bit about what your sales might be or if you're at least able to have a full-time income, both of you from the business? Not yet.
Filip Valica: You know, we kind of have an idea of in a plan to get to that point. Probably Matt first will pull off from his 9 to 5 just because of the sheer creativity and thought.
Filip Valica: that Matt kind of produces, more time would be more valuable for him to be fully vested into Mini Materials. But we're not quite there yet, although last two days have been significant.
Guests: And if we remain that way, it will be quicker than we probably thought. But once we get into retail, and we really truly believe we were walking through Hobby Lobby
Filip Valica: today, and we know we'll fit right in there. Absolutely. And, you know, Home Depot, small things, cash wrap style purchases where people, just think they're cool and unique. I think we can get into a lot of big box retailers and really
Filip Valica: quickly, we're just not able to produce yet enough product to fulfill those orders. Once we have that down, then we'll both be able to pull off and work Mini Materials and kind of be on autopilot
Filip Valica: in that sense. So can you talk a little bit about that volume then? What volume would you have to be at in order to approach a major retail chain like that? Probably around 10,000 units.
Filip Valica: of our standard 24-pack to fulfill any style of big box retailer.
Guests: We can get into a boutique or a small store like that, but if we're going to get into a hobby store or a train store, dollhouse store, or what have you, we've got to be able to fill 10,000 orders rapidly, probably within 30 days and consistently.
Guests: And we're not quite there yet.
Filip Valica: We're happy to meet about 1,000 right now. We're close, and we've made some adjustments on our materials. and a guy that's doing a lot of our concrete work right now is helping innovate that process
Filip Valica: so we can build quicker and maybe higher on to put more hands into the coffer.
Guests: No, that's interesting. So you talked about material. It just made me think of some of the other concretes that I've seen that are blended with styrofoams or injected or aerated. And so they're a slightly lighter build, but you don't use a whole lot of strength for it.
Guests: And so you're able to save some costs on the material without necessarily sacrificing quality. Anyway, tangent.
Guests: Well, actually, for us, we like the weight, we like having a heavy product is good.
Guests: You know, heaviness indicates quality to most people.
Filip Valica: But for us, it's dry time. That is the most important part. We need something that can dry as 20 minutes, 15 minutes, maybe, too. And that's really what we focus on as far as getting the material, the right material, and the bright mix.
Filip Valica: That totally makes sense because otherwise you're limited on the number of molds you can create. and you're investing tons of money into molds that are just, you know, waiting for things to dry.
Guests: Have you looked at approaching those single stores, those mom and pop boutique stores, as your first step to going to retail and maybe just being in one store? Or are you just looking to just hit it really hard, go to Home Depot or nothing? Yeah.
Guests: The strategy is to go bigger, go home. I think our e-commerce side alone is solid.
Guests: And so if we don't do so great in a retailer or we fall off and can't meet their demands, you know, then we're comfortable with e-commerce instead of a boutique.
Filip Valica: But that's kind of our philosophy right now. It all really goes along with how quick we can produce. Until we get that down, Pat, we're not committed to go into retail until we know we can meet those demands.
Filip Valica: And that must be pretty difficult to find manufacturers that specialize in doing something like this. It's not like you can go on mfg.com and say, I want to do it. bid on a couple tiny pallets,
Filip Valica: as I can with a lot of the products that I make, it's really easy to go and get quotes from 15 manufacturers. How have you been able to manage that? Or now that you know the type of contractors or suppliers that you're using, are you reaching
Filip Valica: out to those types of people that are maybe a little bit larger, those types of companies that handle the same type of deal? Right now, the way we're doing it, we kind of got it down to a science. And I think the way we're doing it is really efficient and will work really well.
Filip Valica: It's just about having more people doing it.
Guests: We contract out someone right now, one of my friends, he works in his garage and makes the bulls. And for the pay that we give him for the pieces, it's really good for his amount of time that he's working. And it's good for us as far as margin.
Guests: So our goal right now will be to find more people who want to make some extra cash from home. This is kind of a thing where it would be great for a stay-at-home mom who wants to make some side cash if she wants to make bricks for us.
Guests: So we're going to start advertising those kind of job opening soon and get our guide to come with us and teach everyone.
Filip Valica: You know, it's pretty simple, but teach them how to make it so we can have different people out there making bricks for us.
Guests: More people do it and more power we can get and better everything will be.
Filip Valica: I see an awesome Facebook advertisement in the making. Stay at home mom, want to make bricks? I'm saying.
Filip Valica: So that's interesting that you're actually going a model that I wouldn't have thought of.
Guests: you're basically hitting up individual contractors one at a time and amassing your own kind of
Filip Valica: little army of people that are working in their own spaces. And so you have basically minimal
Guests: investment in terms of space. So you're not hiring employees and you're not having to manage employees and all the tax implications and insurance and everything like that. But then on the flip side, you're also not working with larger companies that maybe would erode some of your
Guests: margin. Yeah, exactly. It's kind of a situation that it works out really well for both sides.
Filip Valica: That's very cool. That's interesting. Are you worried at all about someone selling black market bricks? And we've thought about that, but it's, if someone wants to do it, we'll catch on eventually, but they're not going to market it as well as we do. So good luck.
Filip Valica: That's an awesome attitude.
Guests: And I guess on top of that, do you have them sign anything like an NDA or anything like that? Or is it? Not yet. Handshake deals. Yeah, we will. We'll look into that, but right now we don't. We will.
Guests: Well, if you think about it, in order to scale, you have to really ship a lot of, you You guys were saying that you're shipping, you know, a thousand a month. That's a ton of work, especially if you're packing it yourself.
Guests: Actually, are you using any type of fulfillment service or are you just doing it yourselves?
Filip Valica: That's where I spend my evenings fulfilling, wrapping boxes and shipping them out.
Guests: So it's a process, but, you know,
Guests: sometimes it gets annoying, but then you think about it every time you drop one off at the post office, that means you made money. So it's worth it in the long run.
Filip Valica: Well, and I was going to ask you guys if you use any type of fulfillment software, especially since your home-based, like Shipstation or Stamps.com, or some of these others that do
Filip Valica: integrate with your e-commerce solutions, because they do give discounts for a lot of the delivery providers like DHL and UPS and whatever. So you can save maybe 15% off that, plus it might make your process smoother.
Guests: I didn't know if you'd looked at any of those or decided that you're not at that stage yet.
Filip Valica: Well, we use Shippo right now. So the Shopify app that goes with it. But that's about as far as we've gotten so far. Yeah, I think Shippo has some of those discounts integrated, right?
Guests: So you're not paying retail for your shipping. Correct. And explain how Shopify works a little bit. So someone places an order at your website. How much of it is automated before it hits the post office? And how much do you physically have to do?
Filip Valica: Well, first of all, we get an alert on our cell phone. It's a cash register sound. So we both get very excited. And it's kind of like a Pavlop's dogs kind of thing. Every time you hear it, it's like heroin or something.
Filip Valica: Like, every time we hear that sounds, I need more of that.
Filip Valica: Did you set that up yourself, or is that just something that's integrated in the app? They just integrated that into the app with an update two or three months ago. That's awesome.
Guests: And I can't tell you, like, just the little thing of changing a notification sound. It just changes everything. So someone places an order, and then from there, you're basically,
Guests: you go into your warehouse, your garage, and you find the product that's already been packed, I imagine. It's already in some sort of the packaging, and then you put it into a box, right? Correct.
Filip Valica: Yeah, it's basically as simple as that. We get notified that we get an order. We live in two separate places. So I have the majority of the product. Cinder blocks are basically made here in Orlando, and then it brought down to me,
Filip Valica: which is about 30 minutes away, or shipped down to me.
Guests: And then all the rest of the products there, and we put it in a box, and we kind of have a method so that they all look the same.
Filip Valica: And they go out, you know, the next day or roughly about two days. And I've heard that you have to set expectations a bit because now with Amazon Prime, everyone's been conditioned to getting stuff immediately.
Filip Valica: Basically, you've done whatever you can to get everything ready to go. You're just putting it in a box and then dropping it off. I'm sure at some point you're going to have UPS just stopping by at the house every morning. I've talked to a couple entrepreneurs that just have it set up. up to where they're picking up 10 packages every morning. That's next.
Filip Valica: Normally, you know, we're talking about 10 orders a week and, you know, you go to the post office once or twice. It's not a big deal. But if we stay with this 20 orders a day type thing and, you know, it's going to be a significant change.
Filip Valica: So we'll need somebody to come to us rather than us go to them. Yeah, absolutely. So actually talk about what happened the last few days. So you've had an uptick in sales. Well, it was last Wednesday, I believe.
Filip Valica: the awesomer.com picked us up on their front page, which was second time that's happened. And that provides a gigantic boost in web page viewership. And so we got a bunch of sales from that. From that point on, it's like a cascading effect.
Filip Valica: Typically, other websites see that they posted it. So they post it. So we start getting hits from all over the internet. Other major websites start posting. You start seeing it on Tumblr, a lot of Facebook links. So immediately after that, we got a ton of different European pages.
Filip Valica: that link to our product, which is kind of tough because our shipping price is international, aren't too great right now because we're sort of our size. So we got a lot of people adding the carts and abandoning because the shipping was $18.
Filip Valica: So that's kind of tough. We were looking into a European supplier, hopefully soon that will take care of that. Went that way with a lot of European viewership. And then yesterday at around 1 o'clock,
Filip Valica: suddenly I get a, we get to start four or five sales instantly. And somebody messaged me, on Instagram to have Mini Materials and said, hey, I know, I follow you guys. I love your stuff. You just got featured on uncrate, but they provided the long rate with the wrong link to your website.
Filip Valica: And I just freaked out. And so I came in and I got on the computer. I emailed them. I went through their contact form.
Guests: I tweeted at them from two different Twitter accounts. I, uh, let's see. I Facebook them and everything. I was like, please fix this link, fix this link. So in the meantime, we were still getting sale after sale. Wow. So people were looking at it.
Guests: But Googling our name, going to our website, it's buying stuff. So we're like, you know, I can't imagine what happens if this actually links. It wasn't, what was it, like six o'clock maybe? Five or six, they finally fixed the link.
Guests: So four or five hours later, they fixed that link and everything blew up out of that. We hit our first $1,000 day yesterday. Congratulations. That's awesome.
Guests: So we were kind of at the bar last night, a little celebrating. And it was about 11 o'clock. we hit that $1,000 work, and we're just… Yes. That's amazing. Congratulations.
Guests: Thank you.
Filip Valica: So we did that, and then woke up this morning with almost $1,000 before we got out of bed. So that was great. What I found really cool about this whole story is that you didn't necessarily hit up any specific channels and try to promote in advance.
Filip Valica: It was the other way the audience pulled it through, or one of the editors maybe noticed that it was a cool product and that kind of fed everything. Normally,
Filip Valica: you hear about marketing techniques online where you're having to go on social media, see who the influences are in your niche, target those influencers, and then work your way up the chain until
Filip Valica: you get to the bigger and bigger influencers and then get guest posts on these product blogs, and that's when you hit it.
Guests: And I guess instead, you just, you kind of flipped it around and said, you know what? We're going to focus on delivering an amazing product.
Filip Valica: And naturally, that's just going to create this buzz and energy. is that do i have that right yeah exactly it's unique it it looks cool um it's different like like
Guests: we've said there aren't a lot of people doing it there's nobody doing it the way we're doing it
Filip Valica: and so it sells itself so we don't really have to go out and beg people to showcase us these sites are picking them up and it's easy to sell in fact uncrate once again without us being told
Filip Valica: sent out a email blast to their entire you know email newsletter list and one of uh matt's friends forwarded it to them and showed them. So we had no clue that this was going on.
Filip Valica: It lit up through that with page views and orders, and it's just consistent. So it's awesome. So we're hoping it's going to keep happening. So hopefully, like maybe tomorrow, another major site will pick us up.
Guests: Just cascade from there. And by that point, Hobby Lobby is going to call you, right?
Guests: We have actually, it's one other great thing is a lot of suppliers have been contacting us other e-commerce sites wanting to carry our products. So that's another great effect of all the size of sales.
Filip Valica: So in theory, once you get your manufacturing down, you could start shipping pallets of pallets to some of these fulfillment centers. Yeah.
Filip Valica: And that's another thing, too, and I want to talk about with the product marketing itself is there's a good side of it is that things like this happen. But there's a bad side in that, you know, I would love to do display ads and do Google AdWords.
Filip Valica: But I don't know what to target. I'm trying targeting all kinds of things through Google ads. Nothing I found works. So it's not as simple as just throwing money at some advertisements and getting sales.
Filip Valica: It's pretty much we have to make cool things. And that's the only way it's going to work. So that's interesting. Have you thought about doing maybe a survey of your existing purchasers or customers sending out, hey, can you help us out?
Guests: We're just trying to get a feeling of what our demographics are and ask maybe three, well, maybe three open-ended questions, you know, like,
Filip Valica: what are you into, and then maybe that would help you target certain niches? We kind of know our market, and unfortunately not to alienated it at all. We are trying to broaden our customer base. You know, it's figure borders, our main market.
Guests: And a lot of that has to do with the size of the center block. Once we change that a little bit or have variety, our market will open up inevitably.
Filip Valica: But we know our market, but it's a, the demographic of a finger border is a young, mail, you know, that probably doesn't have a lot of disposable income other than their
Guests: allowance that mom and dad give them. So, you know, and they're not necessarily on Google using those trendy words very often. They're buying because they're friends or their Instagram posts
Guests: or what have you. So that SEO will come into play for our target market as we open up our product line a little bit to meet those demands. Yeah, it makes sense. So basically you're just
Guests: going to create specific products for target audiences and let that drive everything there you go yeah there's some very specific like as far as like trains go model trains there's like four or five
Guests: different specific scales they use uh you know so we'll be coming out with different stuff sizes for that
Filip Valica: as well and so each one will specifically target certain markets funny that you say that i had some model
Guests: trains growing up and i know how much money uh friends and family spent on all that stuff and uh it's pretty insane.
Guests: I guess most of the age group is pretty high.
Guests: And probably people who do this for a hobby after they get off their job that they hate. So they probably would be willing to spend a lot of money on that. Right.
Filip Valica: No, that totally makes sense. I know they only make trains, or at least I've heard, that the train graphics represent whatever is current. And so whenever a company goes out of business or, you know, like a Santa Fe type line or
Filip Valica: whatever goes out of business, they don't make those types of trains anymore, and now they've become higher in value. And so I wonder if you could tap into that somehow with stencils or graphics or anything they could put on top of the cinder blocks after they're done with it to
Filip Valica: kind of go in with the existing train set. Everyone's got a theme where it's set in a certain time period and whatever. It'd be interesting. There's a huge market there. I have to do a
Filip Valica: more research than the sequel and we'd have to do you've mentioned instagram a few times um so i'll ask a two-part question what do you think is the best marketing tool for for a small business of your size a lot of people
Filip Valica: whenever they start on products they feel like they have to do ad words or cpc or facebook advertising you had a lot of success with instagram can you talk about that and then also what's given you maybe the greatest ROI?
Filip Valica: Instagram is definitely the best.
Filip Valica: Facebook,
Filip Valica: I can see how it used to be. Facebook has been terrible for us. Same here. You have to pay a lot of money. The only people who are successful that I found on Facebook are people who literally work on Facebook all day, every day.
Filip Valica: And they do a lot of, I guess, slightly shady things. I was in contact with some people who wanted to sell our stuff. And it's very, I don't know, it's very predatory almost for praying on an old
Filip Valica: people with with weird pages and you know it works you know i if i could make the money that they were making i would do it but i didn't i didn't care for it too much um but using instagram everything is so
Filip Valica: much more organic you don't have to pay even in a normal post you don't have to pay to get people to look at it like everything you post everyone sees so everyone who follows you so instagram is perfect
Filip Valica: and it was very hard to track stuff from instagram but just the replies i've gotten from people who
Guests: direct message it's hey i just bought something you know or hey you know i'm about to buy this you can
Filip Valica: get a discount code you know a lot of it i can track that way and just by i actually run an
Guests: instagram bot that will go and follow and like other people's posts and uh that is one of the things that's really boosted our page because i used to do it by hand so i don't consider it cheating
Filip Valica: so much on that end i used to do it by hand and go just like a bunch of people's stuff related to our product and this just takes it out of my hands and does it itself so that just gets more
Filip Valica: engagement with the page and then every time we post something it's getting more and more follows
Guests: and a lot of people find out about our products through our page so once they get there and click on the website and our bios and they start looking around and you know we also provide a little
Filip Valica: flyer with all of our packages to say hey post using hashtag Mini Materials on instagram you know we'll send you a discount code so people do that that he gives us good
Filip Valica: images to look at and to use our marketing and we can ask if we can repost it and then they get a discount code to buy more stuff so it works out for everybody so how do you give them that discount is
Filip Valica: there like a private message feature yeah message on instagram yeah we send um uh we usually i don't know once a month we go through everyone who posted direct message and what's the code i haven't used
Filip Valica: instagram myself and so i guess for the other people that haven't used it as well the one of the bigger challenges that i see with instagram is not being able to click a link everything is image base is that right
Guests: Yeah. The only link that you can click is in your bio, on your profile page. So it kind of keeps everything a little more neutral. So, you know, I'm not, people can't span
Guests: your page with links when you have a lot of followers, can't just link individual posts to things. But people will go to your page and they will see your website at the top every time. So it's not as bad as it sounds.
Guests: So if you were just starting out and you had a $500, $1,000, $1,000 budget for marketing, where would you put your marketing? based on everything I learned with Mini Materials which is very niche I don't think it's applies to a lot of people I would probably
Filip Valica: run out of ways to spend that $500 because aside from running the bot which is only $9 a month posting to Reddit has been the best or second best marketing tool and that is just posting
Filip Valica: and that's not like spamming things that's posting good content on how you do the stuff just posting a how to on how I started the site on Shopify You know, that gets a lot of engagement with people and it just reaches a hell of a lot more people than any other way I could.
Filip Valica: If I can set down $500 to market something, I would love to figure out how to do that because I can't.
Guests: I'm happy to hear you say that because I've definitely blown through probably, you know, $500 marketing on my own site and struggled.
Guests: Definitely put a lot of research into it, but I feel like it's actually easy to spend that much amount of money because you can throw it in all sorts of directions and the ROI on it.
Filip Valica: I've experienced the same issues as you had with Facebook and with AdWords. So, no, that's good that you guys have a really good return with Instagram. And I've heard that a lot about product-based businesses.
Filip Valica: I surprised that you haven't had to do scantily clad models with a little miniature cinderblock or something, because I feel like a lot of the Instagram stuff I see is a lifestyle. Well, we did have a customer fever, a little old old. A little mannequin form of them. That's awesome.
Filip Valica: We have actually, we've thought about that. there are it's tough because you want to you want to brand yourself and keep everything consistent so we want our page to look or instagram page to kind of have the same look every time so we we need to
Filip Valica: make a decision really it's like do we want to be hilarious and post women with it or do i could photoshop little center blocks into celebrity's hands and post you know photos but part of me you know wanting to market it is one side part of me being a designer want to keep a consistent message is
Filip Valica: the other side so it gets tough well i appreciate you sharing your struggles. And actually, that's one thing that I wanted to end on. I'd appreciate if each of you would kind of give your opinion on what you find the hardest part of the job and then also maybe a
Filip Valica: tip for someone that's already started their business or they're looking to start. Probably time. You can create lots of things in your life, but you can't create time. So if we had more time
Filip Valica: to do other things and really put it into the business, it would be probably bigger than what it is today but that's probably the biggest hardship both of us we talk about every day basically
Filip Valica: is that we don't have enough time to really do all the things that we want to do with Mini Materials as far as what has helped for us is the communication when matt brought me on
Filip Valica: i could tell that he kind of was in a lull he he didn't know if he wanted to get much bigger because it was a lot of work on his part and uh you know when i came in now we're both very, very eager. So having a partner, I think,
Guests: has worked for both of us. Yeah. That's one thing. I started listening to the startup podcast, which it was so interesting to me. But he talked about getting a partner.
Filip Valica: And it's not so much to just have somebody to share the workload. It's having somebody that can, you know, feel the exact same way you feel, that you could actually balance ideas off of. And it's hard to balance ideas off other people who are not in your situation because
Filip Valica: is anything they say, it's like, well, you're not living what I'm living through right now. So I can't really trust the thing you say, but we can both trust everything with each other,
Guests: we tell each other because we are living through doing this right now.
Guests: So I'd say that's probably my, the best part is having a partner now to do that with. And then as far as some of the struggles, I would say dealing with all the numbers stuff. I hate numbers.
Guests: I just got done doing all of my tax stuff. And that's what I would recommend, recommend for any one of these starting business, please keep track of every single thing you do from the very beginning because I did not do that.
Guests: And I just spent 14 hours last Saturday straight, really through all my credit cards, all the PayPal,
Filip Valica: calculating all the numbers of cost of everything.
Guests: And it was like the worst day of my life. So please keep track of it from the very beginning. Yes, do you use a service for that or anything? No, not yet, but I am going to now because it was terrible.
Guests: Good tips. Well, so is there anything else that you guys wanted to share? Check us out on Instagram. You want to see some cool photos. And I guess another thing I want to share is we are looking for more suppliers, especially overseas. There's a lot of people in Europe
Guests: and Australia that won our product. And I understand, you know, we got willing to pay $18 to ship a $20 items. So we could get some bulk orders over to a supplier. We would love to do that. And then, you know, check out our page menu materials.com.
Guests: Awesome. We'll definitely have all. all these links on the show notes. And so do you mind if people send you messages or anything like that if they've got questions? I love it.
Guests: Well, thanks again, Matt, Eric. Thanks for coming on the show. Really appreciate your insight and for sharing how you got Mini Materials going. I thought it was super informative and I love the product. So I'm happy to finally have you guys on the show. Thank you.
Guests: I wish you guys all the best. And hopefully you can come on in future episodes and maybe you can give a little bit more insight once you get into the retail source, how that happens. So maybe a year from now or something, you'll come back on the show
Filip Valica: and we'll have a different milestone to talk about.
Guests: That would be great. We will do that for sure. I'll look forward to it.
Filip Valica: And that concludes today's episode. Thanks for listening. I put all the links that we've covered on the show notes posted on the product startup.com slash episode five. Recently, I had a chance to listen to the Curious Minds podcast.
Filip Valica: It's well produced and mixes an interview style with great background music and an audio set to the content. It reminds me of This American Life, if you've ever heard that on NPR. It mixes history, storytelling.
Filip Valica: in science and explains technical concepts in simple terms so it's appropriate for listeners of all ages.
Filip Valica: The last episode I listened to was on marine navigation, longitude and latitude. I know the topic seems dry, but poor maps led to the loss of 1,500 sailors and four battleships nearly 300 years ago.
Filip Valica: It took a carpenter to solve the problem, and we still use this system, like GPS coordinates are based on this, so it's cool to see such an old idea of being relevant today. It's one of those podcasts that you can be entertained and learn something at the same time.
Filip Valica: You can find out more at cmpod.net or Curious Minds podcast on iTunes. So if you like this episode and you want to see more like it, or if you want to see something different, please leave me a review on iTunes by going to the product startup.com slash review.
Filip Valica: I really appreciate your support. I read all the comments and questions and I try to incorporate them into future episodes. Reviews also help me get guests on the show. See you in two weeks.
Filip Valica: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Product Startup Podcast with your host, Filip Valica. For more great content and to stay up to date, visit theproductstartup.com. Your guide to getting there.
Filip Valica: Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Product Startup Podcast, the show that teaches you what it really takes to bring your product to market and turn it into a big success.
Filip Valica: This podcast series is brought to you by Mako Design + Invent, the first firm in North America to provide global caliber end-to-end physical consumer product development to startups, inventors, and small product businesses.
Filip Valica: If you're looking for product development help on your invention, head over to MakoDesign.com. That's m-a-k-O-design.com for a free consultation from one of Maca-Design for design studios from coast to coast. Thanks for listening and see you next time.
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