Product Startup Podcast Episode 156: Choose Hardware Product Sales Channels

00:00:00 Kevin Mako: Hello, product innovators. Today we learn from the founder of a multi-million dollar international interactive toy product on the evolving

00:00:05 Kevin Mako: sales channels to sell your product as a growing hardware startup.

00:00:09 Narrator: You're listening to the Product Startup podcast, a show to learn from top leaders in product development, product development, and everything in between.

00:00:17 Narrator: hosted by Kevin Mako, the leading expert on product development for physical product startups,

00:00:21 Narrator: sponsored by PTC's two best in class 3D CAD product development software solutions Onshape and Creo,

00:00:27 Narrator: and produced by Mako Design + Invent, the original firm providing world-class consumer product

00:00:31 Narrator: development services tailored specifically to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors.

00:00:35 Kevin Mako: Welcome back, everyone. Today I'm very excited to introduce Ben Drury to the show. Ben is the founder of Yoto Play, a connected hardware toy product for kids.

00:00:43 Kevin Mako: Yota has sold almost 500,000 units worldwide in just a few years. some explosive growth. Today, Ben is going to share some valuable knowledge for vendors,

00:00:51 Kevin Mako: hardware startup, small manufacturers, and e-commerce brands on the five different sales channels

00:00:55 Kevin Mako: of selling hardware products, how a hardware startup evolves through those channels, and how to maximize their sales growth just like Ben did with Yoto. Now on to the episode.

00:01:05 Kevin Mako: Hey, Ben, welcome to

00:01:06 Ben Drury: the show. Hey, Kevin, it's fantastic to be back again.

00:01:09 Kevin Mako: Well, a lot's happened since we talked to, you, I guess it was about a year and a half ago, you're nearing 50,000 units in sales, and now

00:01:15 Kevin Mako: you've 10x that in the time since, almost a half a million units sold

00:01:20 Ben Drury: worldwide. Yeah, we're nearly there. When you said it was a year and a half ago, I blew my mind because it felt like way more than that. A lot has happened.

00:01:27 Ben Drury: It's been a crazy time, but Yoda's doing great and we're still growing

00:01:31 Kevin Mako: nicely. That's amazing. And for anyone wants to check it out, that was episode 85. We talked there about

00:01:36 Kevin Mako: how to go from crowdfunding to then scaling up your business and sales after crowdfunding. And now we're

00:01:42 Kevin Mako: going to talk about the evolution of the sales process, starting from crowdfunding and then evolving

00:01:47 Kevin Mako: to direct to consumer selling on your website and then layers beyond that, which Ben will get into.

00:01:52 Kevin Mako: Really looking forward on your new physical hardware product and seeing what happens when

00:01:56 Kevin Mako: I design engineer, build this thing, get it to production, how do I sell? And Ben's been through

00:02:01 Kevin Mako: the whole gamut now five different sales processes, which really occur in a specific order. And he's going to talk about those different sales channels today and those which have

00:02:10 Kevin Mako: led Yoda to being such a successful product. But before we get into it, Ben, just give us a bit of a

00:02:14 Kevin Mako: background on how you got to where you are today and talk a bit about what Yoto is.

00:02:19 Ben Drury: Yeah, thanks. So we did the classic Kickstarter thing. We did that in December 2017. I remember it was

00:02:25 Ben Drury: it was around this time five years ago that we closed the Kickstarter campaign. The Yoto product is an audio product for kids.

00:02:32 Ben Drury: We have a connected speaker for children that they use physical interactions to trigger playback of music, stories, podcasts,

00:02:40 Ben Drury: radio stations, all fantastic audio for kids. Yeah, we launched on Kickstarter and then we spent 2018 pretty much making the first generation products, which was very manual.

00:02:50 Ben Drury: I think we only had around 250 orders from the Kickstarter campaign, so it was kind of modest. And we ended up selling around 750 units in total. We made that

00:02:58 Ben Drury: very manually up in north of the UK in Sheffield. And I always joked that it felt as much work to create

00:03:04 Ben Drury: that first 750 units as it was to do the next 100,000 units when we weren't doing the manufacturing. That helped us raise a bit of money.

00:03:13 Ben Drury: And then we started working on what we call internally V2, the version 2 of the player.

00:03:18 Ben Drury: And we brought on board Pentegram. The design isn't she. They helped us with industrial design. And we had some amazing electronics engineers working with us.

00:03:26 Ben Drury: And then we did production in China. And we started shipping that version in February 2020 in the UK. And then June 2020 in the US. That one, we did.

00:03:34 Ben Drury: just started off purely on the website. Remember it was COVID in 2020. So pretty much all the other channels were kind of closed to us anyways.

00:03:41 Ben Drury: We just started selling on the website. We'd built up a decent audience already for the product. So we had some kind of latent demand. And then we

00:03:49 Ben Drury: launched, our second channel was to launch on Amazon. And we went through that whole journey. So that happened later in 2020. And we continue to build up through 2021.

00:03:59 Ben Drury: And again, mostly due to COVID, other channels are kind of closed to us. Classic retail channels, wholesale channels. channels were closed to us.

00:04:06 Ben Drury: But this year in 2022, those channels are started to open up to us. So we're now on Target.com. We're on Best Buy, MoMA stores. And in Canada, we're in Indigo and

00:04:15 Ben Drury: mastermind.

00:04:16 Kevin Mako: And quite a few retail stores are stocking our product now. Amazing. So that's four different channels. Let's break all those downs. Basically, you start with crowdfunding.

00:04:24 Kevin Mako: Then you went direct sales via your website. Then you moved on to Amazon sales after direct selling

00:04:31 Kevin Mako: through your website, and then now into the retail frontier via mass retail chains.

00:04:38 Ben Drury: Why do you do it in that order? I think all along the way, it's been a partly choice and partly necessity. So the Kickstarter campaign was amazing for us.

00:04:47 Ben Drury: It was a very small campaign in general. If you look at some of a million dollar campaigns, ours was very modest, I think, $50,000 or something. But it was

00:04:54 Ben Drury: important for us to, it forced us to make certain decisions. It forced us to produce a video. It forced us to do

00:05:00 Ben Drury: photography. It forced us to come up with pricing and naming and marketing things. You know, it really forces you down a tight deadline thing.

00:05:08 Ben Drury: And I think what I've learned about doing hardware and I'd never done hardware before, Yoto, I'd never worked in any hardware product at all. I've been doing software and content.

00:05:16 Ben Drury: You need deadlines with hardware. Otherwise, things just slip and slip and slip and go on forever. So that's what's really great about

00:05:22 Ben Drury: Kickstarter. It forces you to hit certain deadlines. Although I know a lot of Kickstarter campaigns struggled to deliver, hit their deadlines after the campaign.

00:05:30 Ben Drury: But when you're running the campaign, if you don't hit the target by the date, you don't get any money. So that was important for us.

00:05:36 Ben Drury: Then it was kind of natural for us to start selling on our website because we wanted to really explain the proposition. It wasn't a straightforward gadget.

00:05:44 Ben Drury: It was something, it was a whole ecosystem we were launching with repeat purchases of content. And we really had to explain it.

00:05:51 Ben Drury: And it was clear to us, we had to go via the website first. And also, we had a lot of early adopters. So we had a lot of people that were maybe forgiving of bugs.

00:06:00 Ben Drury: When we first launched the products, it still had quite a few bugs. If we'd have gone straight to a big retailer with a slightly buggy product, would have been annihilated.

00:06:08 Ben Drury: The returns would have been too high. It would have definitely not progressed.

00:06:13 Ben Drury: So in a way, we worked with our earlier adopter customers to iron out all those early issues, try and get the product really ready.

00:06:21 Ben Drury: The product was not ready for mass market.

00:06:24 Kevin Mako: It took a good year before it was solid. to be ready for mass market. So that's interesting. You mentioned two big things here.

00:06:31 Kevin Mako: One is that based on your learning from the crowdfunding campaign, you realized that you needed to provide much more information.

00:06:38 Kevin Mako: And you could do that via a website to carry somebody through a long description on the website on how your product works, the benefits, all the rest of it.

00:06:46 Kevin Mako: And of course, what a great channel, because you can use probably a lot of the assets and a lot

00:06:51 Kevin Mako: of the materials that you develop both on your crowdfunding campaign, but also some of the learnings from the crowdfunding campaign to make a really compelling full

00:07:00 Kevin Mako: feature website, which allowed your customers directly to place orders from you. Then, the other thing that you've

00:07:07 Kevin Mako: recognized is that because of your early adopters and your early sales through crowdfunding and your website, you realized a number of elements of your product that weren't ready

00:07:16 Kevin Mako: for retail. I think that's one of the biggest misconceptions with a new hardware company, a new hardware brand, an inventor, whatever else.

00:07:24 Kevin Mako: Everybody imagines like the Walmart edition. They imagine walking through the store shelves and there their product is. So that's one of the first channels that somebody

00:07:31 Kevin Mako: thinks about in terms of how to sell a product. But the reality is, first of all, it's difficult to get into retailers.

00:07:37 Kevin Mako: We can talk about that in a little bit, especially without any kind of preexisting sales before it.

00:07:41 Kevin Mako: But really important about what you describe here is that your product likely isn't ready for the level of manufacturing and usability scrutiny that

00:07:50 Ben Drury: will result once you're actually on the shelves of a retailer.

00:07:54 Ben Drury: That's completely right. And just things like packaging design, for example. If you're mostly selling off your website, then you're only a certain level of packaging design.

00:08:02 Ben Drury: But once you go into retail that, you have to work really, really hard of making sure that packaging not only is attractive to customers who are passing by the aisles, but also

00:08:10 Ben Drury: hits a lot of the regulation compliance stuff that the retailers will demand. And they go above and beyond kind of the statutory regulatory requirements that there are.

00:08:19 Ben Drury: Yeah, the big retailers have a lot of requirements. So a lot of hoops you have to jump through. So I would advise anyone to try and prove out your product first direct.

00:08:29 Kevin Mako: Amazon's always a good place to go second and then and then go for retail. That's not the right strategy for everyone, but it was certainly the right strategy for us.

00:08:36 Kevin Mako: Well, and it's interesting that you added Amazon in there. You use that somewhat as a stepping stone between direct a customer on your website

00:08:43 Kevin Mako: and of course the pre-existing campaign before that on crowdfunding. Put Amazon in there before you actually went to retail.

00:08:49 Kevin Mako: What was the decision making behind that and what would you have

00:08:52 Ben Drury: advise to hardware startups when considering moving from direct-to -consumer sales to direct-to-consumer sales via Amazon.

00:09:00 Ben Drury: Yeah, so we really viewed Amazon as a kind of an extension of our direct channel because we are a marketplace seller. So literally anyone can sign up to Amazon. I think you pay

00:09:09 Ben Drury: $25 a month or something and you can become a marketplace seller. They give you a bunch of tools.

00:09:14 Ben Drury: Amazon's algorithms and tools are really, frankly, not the easiest to use. And it's you know, a good couple of years to get good at it. But it's open to everyone, you become

00:09:23 Ben Drury: a marketplace seller. They also operate as a proper retailer. So they have a vendor center when they start actually buying product from you.

00:09:30 Ben Drury: And that, for some people, that's the right route. But you lose control of pricing. The important thing for us is to see our presence on

00:09:36 Ben Drury: Amazon really is an extension of our own website. So we have our own Amazon brand page. We can set the pricing.

00:09:44 Kevin Mako: We can kind of explain the product, not as well as our website for sure, but but pretty well and different to a retailer where you kind of lose control at that point.

00:09:53 Kevin Mako: That's amazing. We went through these processes. What I kind of see is that you're using each of the prior sales channels to amplify

00:10:02 Kevin Mako: the next sales channel. Essentially, you were using your crowdfunding campaign to learn from it.

00:10:08 Kevin Mako: And I think that's one of the other really important lessons here is that even you mentioned Amazon, it took you a while to get used to it and figure it out.

00:10:14 Kevin Mako: You have a continual feedback loop here. So you used your crowdfunding campaign to generate feedback, both on the product and how you're selling it.

00:10:22 Kevin Mako: You created a website which had more information based on what you learned from selling before. Through that, you were able to use that to leverage Amazon as a platform

00:10:31 Kevin Mako: to get access to even more sales. Now, let's talk about that last transition when you went from Amazon to retailers.

00:10:38 Ben Drury: How much did the sales channels prior to that help in securing the deals to actually get into the retail stores?

00:10:46 Ben Drury: Oh, massively. And we made some false starts with retailer. We tried to go into retail, even back in 2020 when, you know, COVID was shutting most

00:10:54 Ben Drury: of them. We wasted a lot of energy on that. We didn't get very far. It was only really until the end of 2021 where people could start seeing this was a popular product.

00:11:03 Ben Drury: The retailers monitor Amazon sales. And they could see that Yoto was selling quite well. And they could see the reviews we were getting, the customer feedback we were getting.

00:11:13 Ben Drury: And so it gives you a better position of negotiation. where you've got something that is in demand.

00:11:20 Kevin Mako: Otherwise, you're just, you know, you're the mercy of the buyers and you have no leverage at all. So you kind of want to get to a position of strength

00:11:27 Kevin Mako: where you can try and negotiate terms. That's really interesting. So you actually tried going the retail avenue. It didn't work so well, but no big deal.

00:11:36 Kevin Mako: You continued forging ahead with your plan. You got to the point where you were making more and more sales and then you used that success

00:11:43 Kevin Mako: to re-attempt going back to retailers again, but with more ammo in your marketing toolkit. Exactly right.

00:11:50 Kevin Mako: What are some overall lessons that you would give to a hardware startup that are going through this journey

00:11:56 Ben Drury: in terms of getting a successful relationship with a retailer after they've proven that their business works in other platforms

00:12:05 Ben Drury: like you did with Amazon, direct website, and crowdfunding? Well, the main thing is to prove you've got a product that people want, first of all, supply and demand.

00:12:12 Ben Drury: if you can prove that, that it fits with the retailer. That's the other big learning is we did a whole exercise of trying to map our customer-based

00:12:21 Ben Drury: and our brand values, what we stand for, against retailers. And don't go scattergun. One point we were talking about shaking the tree.

00:12:29 Ben Drury: Let's just try and go after everyone and we'll see what lands. But actually, no, we were a lot more targeted.

00:12:34 Ben Drury: We needed to see which retailers were the right fit for us, both in terms of our demographics, but also in terms of brand fit. That was an important thing.

00:12:42 Kevin Mako: It kind of works for the retailer. If you've got a proposition that fits their demographics as well, that also helps. You go in with the right approach.

00:12:50 Kevin Mako: And ideally, you get to a point where they're approaching you, not the other way around. That's interesting.

00:12:54 Ben Drury: So did you have some retailers see your success on Amazon crowdfunding direct to website sales

00:13:01 Ben Drury: and reach out to you directly to bring on the product? Yeah. In most cases, it's people that we'd kind of planted the seed with a while ago.

00:13:08 Ben Drury: We'd sort of made them aware of us and we'd got them on. we got on their radar and then they eventually came back to us that retailers can operate on very long

00:13:16 Ben Drury: cycles like Target and Best Buy are talking about stuff for Christmas not in 2023 they they can even

00:13:22 Ben Drury: be talking about stuff for Christmas 2024 and even now to think long term and so you kind of need to

00:13:28 Ben Drury: get in the door get some awareness early maybe even if you haven't proven it

00:13:32 Kevin Mako: out almost not expecting to go into those retailers but just make them aware so that when their meetings you know their quarterly

00:13:39 Kevin Mako: meetings or whatever, and they check out the cool new brands. They'll remember you and then they'll

00:13:44 Kevin Mako: come to you. I love how you mentioned planting a seed, because if you do this across a number of

00:13:48 Kevin Mako: different contacts that you meet over the years, it doesn't always work out right away. And I think

00:13:53 Kevin Mako: that pairs with your comment about long planning cycles of the actual retailers, because that's

00:13:58 Kevin Mako: a big thing that a lot of inventors miss is that they're trying to maybe develop a product really

00:14:02 Kevin Mako: quickly to try and hit some sort of holiday season or whatever it might be. And what you have to

00:14:06 Kevin Mako: realize is that they're planning a year or two or sometimes even three years out for these sorts

00:14:11 Kevin Mako: of cycles. So your job isn't to try and hit some sort of arbitrary target for a specific seasonal event that you want to achieve as a product developer.

00:14:20 Kevin Mako: Your job is to make the best product possible and sell what you can in the methods that you can to build your portfolio to the point where the retailer says, okay.

00:14:29 Kevin Mako: And if you don't land it on the first shot, plant that seed, understand that it's a long sales cycle for these retailers, continue to reinforce your

00:14:36 Kevin Mako: business by selling more products and improving the quality of your product, which is something you guys did very early on and probably continue to do so over time.

00:14:44 Kevin Mako: Eventually, they'll see both

00:14:45 Ben Drury: the combination of a product that has got to a very robust state, as well as enough users and

00:14:51 Ben Drury: buyers that are out there for them to say, you know what, we're missing out as a retailer by not having this in our stores.

00:14:57 Ben Drury: Now we need to get back into the ring with the inventor and make a deal. Yeah, exactly right. And just to add to that, when you start dealing with the bigger guys,

00:15:05 Ben Drury: like the targets and the best buyers, you have to be prepared, really be prepared. They're going to want a lot of systems integration.

00:15:12 Ben Drury: You know, they're dealing with probably hundreds of thousands of suppliers and retailers.

00:15:16 Ben Drury: And sometimes you have to go through a rep agency, sometimes you have to go through a distributor.

00:15:21 Ben Drury: But in any case, one of the things that I think we got lucky with, we just had a great internal team who's done some of this before, but the amount of

00:15:28 Ben Drury: systems integration work, data feeds, really gnarly stuff is super important. because the world of retail is changing.

00:15:37 Ben Drury: And Target.com, for example, we're not physically in Target stores yet, but we're on Target.com, and it's been doing a huge business for us.

00:15:43 Ben Drury: But we're operating under a drop ship model.

00:15:45 Kevin Mako: So they're actually taking the orders.

00:15:47 Kevin Mako: And then we're fulfilling the orders from our fulfillment centers in the U.S. And that's almost like a hybrid model, which wasn't the old way of doing things.

00:15:55 Kevin Mako: The old way of doing things is you send everything into a distribution center and then they send it out.

00:16:00 Kevin Mako: The beauty about there's, too, is as you scale, especially as you're starting from crowdfunding,

00:16:03 Kevin Mako: where, as Ben mentioned, he was doing a lot of the manufacturing himself. Like he said, it was almost just as hard to make 750 units as it was to make 100,000 units in production.

00:16:12 Kevin Mako: I understand that as your business sales scale through these various sales channels, so did your operations. And Ben, obviously, this isn't something that you do alone yourself.

00:16:21 Kevin Mako: As you've been able to scale, you bring on more

00:16:23 Ben Drury: and more people that can help with these various things. It may seem scary to a new inventor getting their product to market now.

00:16:30 Ben Drury: But know that over time, you're going to bring on the level of expertise required to enable best practices in a number of these different verticals.

00:16:38 Ben Drury: Yeah, I mean, one of the things that's definitely been the key to our success is to bring on

00:16:41 Ben Drury: experience people in both supply chain procurement and operations and logistics, because I had no previous experience of this is not something that was natural to me.

00:16:49 Kevin Mako: And navigating the China supply chain during COVID and I mean, that's still ongoing. There's still craziness going on

00:16:56 Kevin Mako: in China. And just navigating all of that without some experience hands, I think it would have been nigh on impossible for us.

00:17:04 Kevin Mako: Well, it's important you mentioned it too, that you yourself didn't have the experience there, but you've been able to pull it off by bringing the right people on board.

00:17:10 Kevin Mako: I think that's important for a lot of hardware startups to remember. You're not going to be the strongest all these things.

00:17:15 Kevin Mako: A lot of product inventors especially say, well, I'm not good at marketing, or I'm not good at supply chain distribution, or I'm not good at website design or whatever it might be.

00:17:25 Kevin Mako: I'm not good at Amazon or I'm not good at crowdfunding. That's okay, because many founders will tell us.

00:17:31 Ben Drury: you, I would say almost all founders will tell you the exact same story that they also didn't have the experience in those different elements.

00:17:38 Ben Drury: But over time, you get more and more people on your ship surrounding this great product idea, which is really the core, the heartbeat of

00:17:45 Ben Drury: this whole thing that allows you to create a successful business out of it, just like Ben did with Yoto. That's absolutely right.

00:17:52 Ben Drury: I mean, I'm astounded one of look at our team. The amount of different things we're doing as a company, we're doing like at least four different types of

00:17:58 Ben Drury: software. We have software that runs on the hardware. Then we have. the software that powers our apps, we have apps that parents use to control the players.

00:18:07 Ben Drury: We have software that runs a website and then we have the platform side of the software all runs in the cloud. So four different types of software.

00:18:13 Ben Drury: In hardware, we have hardware engineering,

00:18:15 Ben Drury: industrial design, supply chain and QA and testing and all that kind of stuff. And then on logistics,

00:18:22 Ben Drury: we have the logistics team and the operations team, making sure things move around to the right three PLs and handle all the customs and the duty and all that kind of stuff.

00:18:31 Kevin Mako: And then we also have content. So people creating content for Yoto and licensing content. And then that's not forgetting all the back office stuff like finance and legal.

00:18:40 Kevin Mako: It's incredible. We're 80 people now.

00:18:42 Ben Drury: Wow. It's a business. And I still think that that's not many people for all the different things that we're doing. That's amazing here. What a success story.

00:18:50 Ben Drury: So we've talked about four channels here in order, crowdfunding, direct website, Amazon sales and retail. There's one other bonus category

00:18:58 Ben Drury: that you talked about. Let's call it the fifth evolution, which is specialty channel. talk a bit about that so this one is really very much demand based so what we've seen as we've

00:19:08 Ben Drury: grown we're starting to get more and more interests i mean our business is direct to consumer

00:19:12 Ben Drury: that's you know our primary aim is to attract families to purchase yo to it but we've seen more and more teachers and schools and educators and other

00:19:21 Ben Drury: educational institutes buy our products so these are just coming on to our site and then they email us saying can you supply us 100 units and

00:19:28 Ben Drury: can you do an invoice to do credit terms etc etc so it's a new channel that's emerged for us and it's something that we are starting to dig into more and more.

00:19:37 Ben Drury: We had one interesting anecdote recently where there was a military base inside the US.

00:19:42 Kevin Mako: It was so big this military base that it has multiple schools on it for the families that live

00:19:46 Kevin Mako: on the base and they wanted to buy our products and we had to sign some specific forms to say we weren't using Huawei products and all kinds of things that we had to, you know,

00:19:56 Kevin Mako: adhere to to to meet the regulations to supply. So interesting for us. We also have a lot of homeschoolers in the U.S. as well using our products.

00:20:03 Kevin Mako: That's amazing because what is really happening here is a snowball effect is occurring of all

00:20:08 Ben Drury: these different channels starting to compound with the other verticals and other channels

00:20:16 Ben Drury: to allow for new sales channels and new opportunities that you guys hadn't even have thought

00:20:20 Ben Drury: of that really just came to you over time now that you're hitting a certain amount of scale and a certain amount of notoriety within the industry.

00:20:27 Ben Drury: Yeah, I mean, we had thought about schools but we were really put off trying to even think about schools because everyone we spoke to

00:20:34 Ben Drury: said it was incredibly fragmented schools have no money you don't know whether you're selling to the

00:20:38 Kevin Mako: school or even more if you're selling to the parent teacher association or the local authority in the

00:20:43 Kevin Mako: UK or the states or that you know all of these things and all the regulation stuff you have to go to

00:20:47 Kevin Mako: so we kind of said oh we'll go to schools much later on but we started to see schools actually

00:20:52 Kevin Mako: organically buying and it's become significant for us now so we are putting more energy into it in So many of the amazing pieces of advice

00:21:01 Kevin Mako: here really come down to a strong ability for you to listen to feedback that was coming in. It seems that at each of the verticals, you learn some

00:21:10 Kevin Mako: things and you are constantly re-improving both the product and your marketing channels,

00:21:15 Ben Drury: even including this specialty channel, sales channel, which wasn't really on your radar as a

00:21:20 Ben Drury: primary option, but you heard different people saying different things about the value that

00:21:25 Ben Drury: you're adding and all of a sudden now a new channel has emerged because you continue to have

00:21:29 Ben Drury: your ear to the ground about what people are saying about your product, about your business,

00:21:34 Ben Drury: about your marketing, about different sales channels that are opening up. That's a great point.

00:21:38 Ben Drury: That whole feedback loop that you have from customers has been crucial to our success so far.

00:21:43 Kevin Mako: We're still just getting going, but we have a very active, for example, Facebook community. I think there's 23,000 people on the Facebook community.

00:21:49 Kevin Mako: So it's a decent percentage of the base. We were speaking to them all the time and running surveys. we're getting feedback. They call us out if we've done something bad.

00:21:57 Kevin Mako: If we've run out of stock

00:21:58 Ben Drury: or something, they call us out. So they've keeping us honest.

00:22:01 Kevin Mako: But we learn so much from them. And they're part of helping us build a great product and great service. Ben, much appreciated for all your words of wisdom today.

00:22:09 Kevin Mako: And thanks for sharing the different sales channels and the evolution of those channels as your hardware product grows from its infancy on crowdfunding all the

00:22:17 Kevin Mako: way through to the retailers and beyond. So again, appreciate you being on the show today.

00:22:21 Kevin Mako: Kevin, an absolute pleasure. It's been great to speak to you. and we can speak again in another couple of years. Sounds great. Talk soon. Thanks. Bye.

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00:22:43 Narrator: That's podcast at MakoDesign.com. This show is hosted by Kevin Mako. North America is a leading expert on product development for physical product startups.

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