Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart.
So, you guys might have known that I had a kid about a year and a half ago almost. So, a few weeks ago when this toy came for him, I got excited. I said, “Great. One more thing for us to play with.” In this box that came as a surprise were a few things. There were stickers with his name on it, a backpack with a robot and his name on it and a puzzle with his name in wooden blocks that he could assemble and keep playing with and learn how to spell his name.
I recognized the name because the guest, the creator of the company, is a Mixergy fan and also someone who has been on my calendar to do an interview with. So, I said, “Oh, on my calendar to do an interview–let’s go look at my research to go back and see how big a company can this be, a company that sells this stuff.” And I was surprised. Wow. Go us for having landed this guest and for having someone with this kind of company in our audience.
So, today we’re going to find out about the company behind those gifts I got and so many other products. The company name is Tinyme. The founder is a longtime Mixergy fan. His name is Mike Wilson. Mike, it’s good to have you on here.
Mike: Good to be here, Andrew.
Andrew: And my sponsors, which I’ll tell you guys about more later, are HostGator.com. If you need a web hosting company, I urge you to check out HostGator. And Toptal–if you need a developer, go to Toptal.com.
Mike, welcome.
Mike: Good to be here.
Andrew: Thanks for sending the gift over.
Mike: It’s a pleasure.
Andrew: Before you built it, you were a designer who was working as a freelancer. What kind of work did you do?
Mike: A bit of graphic design, web design. Early on in my career I did a lot of furniture design. I studied industrial design originally.
Andrew: Furniture design?
Mike: Furniture design. Yeah.
Andrew: What kind of stuff?
Mike: My first job out of uni. was doing a lot of flat pack furniture for Target.
Andrew: Really, the stuff that’s in Target you created. And by flat pack you mean it’s got to not just look great when it’s sitting in someone’s house but it has to be packed to flatly and small that it can be shipped easily from target and be carried to people’s places.
Mike: Yeah. So I did it for Target and a few other of those folks. It was a good job straight out of uni.
Andrew: Yeah. It doesn’t suck. Usually people will talk about how their job sucked and they had to startup something. For you that’s not the case, huh?
Mike: No. It was good.
Andrew: And then you saw a routing machine. My producer said that helped change the course of your life. What is a routing machine and why would that have so much impact?
Mike: Yeah. It was a computer controlled wood carver, essentially. You can carve all sorts of things with them. During my course I had sort of grew up around all these machines. I was aware of all the different digital technologies. But this one was sitting at my previous employer, never been used at all.
So, I’d just sort of think, “If it’s not being used, it’s unutilized capital. I wonder what I could use it for.” I had a bunch of ideas. One of them was our first product, which ended up being what launched Tinyme, what was then called Moo. Yeah.
Andrew: I see these machines. I did a Google Image Search for them. They look like this flat bed with an arm that can move on anywhere on this flat surface and I guess carve and cut whatever is underneath it, right?
Mike: Yeah. That’s right. Yeah.
Andrew: And the magic of it was that you could control it by computer, which means that whatever you could design on your PC could actually end up showing up on this flatbed and be ready to sell or play with.
Mike: Exactly. So, similar to a laser cutter but now a 3D printer, but this one carves instead of prints.
Andrew: So, your first products, the ones that you built and sold were created on your employer’s machine?
Mike: They were. Yeah.
Andrew: Wow.
Mike: They’re pretty good about it. I’d left them about 12 months before starting the business and left on real good terms. They weren’t using the machine. So, they rented it out to me at very good rates. I must say they were pretty generous. I didn’t know how to use it so my friend and now business partner actually used the machine to make the product.
Andrew: So, what does that mean? You created it on your computer and they showed you how to get it printed out?
Mike: Yeah. He essentially did the carving component, so to speak, of all of our first orders until we bought our own machine.
Andrew: Okay. I see.
Mike: So, I rented time on the machine and got my friend to run it. I did sort of everything else.
Andrew: So, I get the idea of seeing this uninitialized piece of hardware that as far as I can see online costs–I’m looking at the Rockler CNC Shark, just a random one that came up.
Mike: Yeah.
Andrew: You know it. That one is $3,000. I can see how you see this thing and it’s just such a gem and no one is using it. I can see how it would open you up to find a use for it. But how do you end up with children’s wooden puzzles as the first product?
Mike: Yeah. It’s a good question. Pretty unstrategically, I must say. I knew that product had been around for a long time and was typically made in a very manual way and probably would be around for another 20 years because it’s a bit of a classic, a lot of sentimental value, educational. So, I just thought, “How could I do a slight, small innovation on the product and actually use this machine to make it?” So, often my ideas will come about via a process, a process meeting and market need.
Andrew: What do you mean by market need? It seems like you were looking around for what existed and did well that you could create yourself.
Mike: That’s right. I’d seen these products around and knew there was some demand. I wasn’t very strategic about it and knew that I had a hunch that the kid’s market–I had two kids at the time–was a good–it’s quite a good market to be in. Online seemed to be the place where people bought stuff nowadays.
It was very much–I had never had particularly big ambitions. I just quite liked making stuff and wanted to work myself. It sort of went from there. Fortunately, our first product or my first product was just me at the start. It was pretty underpriced, to be honest, and just sold really well.
Andrew: Because it was so low-priced?
Mike: Yeah. I didn’t have to be a marketing ninja. If you’ve just got a really good–
Andrew: What was the first? What did the first puzzle look like?
Mike: Yeah. It was just a plain bit of wooden plywood. It had an integrated storage box and little wooden letters with pegs on them. You could pull it out. I think the integrated storage box was kind of a novelty. It looked like one of those old school wood pencil cases.
Andrew: I see.
Mike: And that sort of–we used to market it as have your puzzle and store it too.
Andrew: Was it all personalized too from the start?
Mike: It was. Yeah. We only ever did on-demand digital.
Andrew: I see. So, did this stuff exist in a personalized way before?
Mike: It did.
Andrew: What’s your twist on it? What was different about yours? Sorry, I’m talking over you.
Mike: No. It’s a good question. It wasn’t vastly different. The main difference was we were using a hybrid of offshore and onshore. So, getting the letters made and the wooden box made in China, we could scale it out relatively well and keep the price, which was very cheap when we started, very competitive. And then having the slight innovation of the puzzle base became the lid of the storage box.
So, it sort of shipped to you in this little wooden box. No one else was doing that. As is often the way, there is some slight almost novelty. In this one it had quite a bit of utility as well and sentimental value. It’s a good story, educational. But then it’s in a little wooden box. So, that was sort of the innovation, so to speak, which wasn’t huge. But it was enough for the product to go, relatively speaking, from my expectations, I guess.
Andrew: Today I think of you as an internet company. You’ve got all these domains–Tinyme.co.au. You’ve got one in the UK. You’ve got Tinyme.com. You’re an internet company in my mind. But the first sales, do I understand this right, came from direct mail?
Mike: They did. We had a website from day one, but the first bit of advertising–we actually did put an order form on it. It was the only time we physically put an order form. Most of them even then still came through the website. But the first bit of advertising was kind of like just a bit of direct mail that gets put in, like those envelopes that they put in 30 different offers and they’re pretty spammy and send them out.
Andrew: But unsolicited mail in your inbox–I’m sorry, unsolicited mail in your physical inbox is fine. Unsolicited mail in your inbox, in your email, is a huge problem, right?
Mike: Yeah.
Andrew: It’s so interesting that you would go to that. Why do that instead of buying Google ads or Facebook ads? Why buy pieces of paper in somebody’s envelope?
Mike: Yeah, probably because I didn’t have a clue, to be honest. I wasn’t from a marketing background. I started looking into AdWords and signed up to Perry Marshall’s course back nine years ago pretty much from the get-go. So, I think I got AdWords going pretty early on. But it was a bit of a learning curve. So, like literally before I had sold anything–I knew how to do–I turned a bit of outwork really quickly because I was a designer.
So, I pretty much just got my competitor’s list of–they didn’t actually make wooden puzzles but made kid’s stuff–their list of, you know that drop down, “Where did you hear about us?” And I just rang every single one of those and said, “If you’ve got any last minute print advertising space, I’m your man.” And they’d just ring me up and I would haggle a $150 ad because I didn’t have any money. I just did heaps of these. And then that plus having an underpriced really, really good value product, it sort of solved itself.
Andrew: Let me emphasize what you said there. You said you went to your competitor’s shopping process. Under the dropdown menu that says, “Where’d you hear about us?” You saw where they were advertising and they were checking in to see which ones of those worked. Then you said, “I’m going to call those places too and buy ads at the same place and negotiate like crazy because I’m new.
Mike: That’s right. That’s what it was. I said, “I’m not going to buy ads, but if you’re about to go to the press or remnant space, give me a call.” This is often the classified section at the back of some parenting magazine. We kept doing that a lot. We just got more sophisticated. That sort of approach–
Andrew: Tell me more about the scraping data. When you say you got more sophisticated–I understand the first time you were just looking at people’s shopping cart. The second time, what’s the next step?
Mike: We did quite a bit of that. I don’t cut codes. But conceptually I sort of know what’s possible. I’d sort of say, “If we need to do fundraising, how do we get a list of schools we can go to?” And I’d find some site that might be a directory and either just pay someone through oDesk or Upwork I think it is now or whatever it was to go and literally scrape it manually for me or get a friend to write some sort of script just to automate stuff.
Partly because from the day one we’ve been really into automation from the manufacturing perspective because that’s sort of my background, lean manufacturing. It just came into everything we did, from all of our systems to enhance the whole lean startup stuff, which is based on lean. That’s what we’re into already. So, we’ve just sort of kept the ball and run with it.
Andrew: All right. So, you start doing that. You start to get–I remember the first day you went to your mailbox you told me you got how many orders?
Mike: It was probably at 20 orders or something.
Andrew: That’s pretty exciting.
Mike: It was a bit of almost like getting addicted to that–like clicking refresh to see if you got sales, but this was actually going to the PO box to see if I got orders. It didn’t last too long because we didn’t do any more advertising of that sort of ilk. We didn’t measure it back then. Now I realize that it actually got a pretty good result. But then I was thinking I should 10x my money on my first bit of advertising. So, in retrospect it actually was really successful but I didn’t think it was particularly successful enough to do it again. So, I tried other stuff.
Andrew: What was the company’s name at the time?
Mike: It was Moo.com.au.
Andrew: Moo.com.au.
Mike: Yeah. I think it’s still probably floating around. I haven’t looked for a while.
Andrew: It redirects.
Mike: Of course, yeah. It redirects. It redirected it when we rebranded.
Andrew: I’m checking your site just to see if you have a drop down list of all the places where people could have possibly heard about you. No. You don’t have that on your site.
Mike: No.
Andrew: The more I interact with your site, though, what I do see is how smart you are about your sales process even though the whole thing comes across as this cute little kids’ site created by an artist. In reality, as I go through it, I see you’re upselling really intelligently. You’re taking me through the shopping cart experience really intelligently.
Mike: Yeah. We try to. We’re actually doing a lot of work on that at the moment, some really interesting stuff to make the user experience far more, what we call relevant, but what the industry calls personalized. It confuses our staff when we say personalized because everything we do is personalized. But how do we make every single design and color that you’ve chosen on that SKU be relevant to all the other products you look at, not on a SKU level bit on a design and color level plus a personalization level.
Andrew: I see. What I did just now as we were talking was I took the stickers, I put them in the shopping cart. I went to check out and it showed me my price, allowed me to buy more than one if I decided I wanted more than one collection of stickers. I said my kid’s name was Test Test. I see in the shopping cart, the stickers actually have my kid’s name, Test Test.
Immediately on the bottom, there are other things I could add like wooden basic shape buzzle, not cars, butterflies I can add to his wall, etc., and a button that says no thanks if I don’t want any of those. But it’s just a one-click edition, which is really sweet. That’s what you want to change?
Mike: At the moment, those don’t match necessarily the design you’ve chosen for your stickers, but watch this space.
Andrew: I see. And so if, for example, I pick some boys stuff, you might show me boys stuff or if I pick butterflies on the first product, then you might show me more butterflies later on.
Mike: That’s right, either an exact match or detuned more serendipitous discover more sort of match, we’re looking at both of those options.
Andrew: Even as we’re talking here, you keep saying, “I didn’t really know what I was doing.” I’m looking at the site–dude, you obviously did know what you were doing. Where did you learn how to do all this considering your background wasn’t in marketing?
Mike: Probably just like a lot of people that get into this stuff, I just soaked up–I’ve always been one to soak up, very much an enthusiast and soak up heaps of information. Listening to things like Mixergy, listening to–just reading following podcast and email newsletters and being very inquisitive and thinking, “What conceptually could we do?” And then just deep diving into it all. Also I think because I actually love it, I love the digital marketing and all the processes involved in the customer journey. It’s pretty easy to get enthusiastic about it and get my team pumped up about it like, “We can do this and this and this.”
Andrew: Why did the initial checks come to you in a post office box instead of coming in as credit cards online?
Mike: No, we actually offered the option of a check.
Andrew: And people took you up on it?
Mike: Yeah, partly grandparents, which are now far more–like nine years ago, the interwebs were a bit like, “Eh…” So, I’ve always been one to push for, “Yay, there’s no more disc drive in a computer. Get rid of it all.” But I was aware that our customers, quite a few of them would still want it. We’d offer it until the data said we shouldn’t offer it.
We offered checks for probably five years. They were a big hassle, but until the revenue mixed, then we just took them out. By going down to the bank–whoever walks into a bank nowadays? We had to go down to actually deposit the checks. It was just a major hassle. The money doesn’t clear for a while. We did it for a while. But we did take credit cards. We did actually have them from the get-go as an option.
Andrew: You know, I take checks for sponsorship messages. I’m surprised that companies still prefer to do that. I guess it’s kind of a hassle for them to ask for wire information. Even though I offer credit card payment, I guess for big ad deals, they don’t want to spend money on credit cards. I would think they’d prefer it, but I get it.
Mike: From what I understand, it’s still more prevalent in the states as well, checks, than here in Australia. But also for a $25 sale of a puzzle or something it’s a real hassle. A sponsorship message, I’m kind of guessing it’s more than $25.
Andrew: Yeah. It’s like $25,000. I’m like, “What do I do with this?” If somebody’s going to the bank, I’ll give it to them. But who’s going to the bank? And I’ve called up the bank to see, “Can I put it in my mail or something?” And they never have a really good answer. So, I think, “I’ll take it on the way back home.”
Mike: Yeah.
Andrew: Right. There are worse things in life than having to take money into the bank.
Mike: Exactly.
Andrew: I’m happier to do that than go out and get lunch. I’d much rather sit here on my butt for lunch.
Mike: Yeah.
Andrew: You know what? Speaking of sponsorship, I should say to everybody who’s listening that my sponsor for this interview is Toptal. If you need a developer for anything, if you’re doing something that’s really simple and beautiful just like Mike’s website and you say, “A little bit of technology could help increase our sales. A little bit of technology could take us from being just another site to being a really good sales site that gives our customers a great experience and allows us to grow.”
Well, if you’re looking for that extra developer, the place to go is Toptal. Some of the biggest companies got here, including guys like Airbnb and some of the smallest people, including some people in my audience who are jumping on Toptal. Toptal is the place to go.
Let me ask you this, Mike. I know you’ve got developers already. In fact, a lot of Toptal customers have developers, but developers don’t always have enough time. If you could have a Toptal do any one thing, take on one little project, what would that project be?
Mike: I’d probably get them straight into working–we’ve got a bunch of development projects, mainly front-end coding stuff for the website. So, I’d probably get them just a really good front-end dev.
Andrew: Like what? And you could do that. You could say, “Here’s specifically the kind I want. I want a front end dev. Here’s my site and so on.” What would you change?
Mike: At the moment, we’re doing all this stuff around making the site more relevant. We’ve got a pretty big backlog of projects we’re working through.
Andrew: That’s what we’re talking about earlier. So, if someone wants butterflies on one page, you give them the upsell and show them butterflies on the second page.
Mike: Exactly. The same through different contact points with the customer. So, that’s a project. Another one is we’re completely rebuilding out sort of production systems. That’s probably an in house, a harder one to outsource. But it’s not impossible.
Andrew: Well, I think it is possible. One of the cool things about Toptal is that they aren’t exactly like outsourcers. The people who you hire from Toptal will often be–if you want them to be they will be–part of your full team. That means you’re on Slack, they got on Slack with you. You do your company meeting in the morning, they’re there with you. They do what you need like–not like–yeah, I guess like, like they’re a full employee even though you’re hiring them through Toptal and Toptal is helping you manage the whole experience.
So many other companies have gone to them. Let me give you a secret URL that you should go to. When I mention this, people keep writing it down. The URL is Toptal.com/Mixergy.
Toptal.com/Mixergy–when you go there, you’re going to get 80 free Toptal developer hours when you pay for 80. They also have a no-risk trial period. I’ve never seen a company that gives you developers that are such high quality–we’re talking about the top three percent–offer so many incentives to make it easy for you to hire them.
My belief is once you try them, you’re going to thank me. I mean personally and I meaning a very real way. You’re going to thank me for introducing you to Toptal. So, I urge you to go Toptal.com/Mixergy.
You know, for anything that people heard me say in this interview or any other interview, whether in it’s in an ad or whatever, if you forget, this guy Ovie in our audience reminded me that if you want to take notes while you’re driving, while you’re running, while you’re doing whatever, all you have to do is just activate Siri if you’re on an iPhone.
Say, “Note to self: Remember that I should be hiring a developer.” Boom. And then it does it. That time it actually didn’t do it. It’s not 100 percent guaranteed, but it’s like 95 percent guaranteed, which is really helpful.
If you’re running, you just hit that button on your earpiece, hold it for a second or two and then Siri will come on and you could say, “Here’s my note, what I just learned in Mixergy interview.” And you’ll remember it. Are you Android or iPhone?
Mike: iPhone. Yeah.
Andrew: I want to know what it’s like on Android too so I can give the other side of it. I know a lot of our audience are Android people.
The first puzzle does well. The price is low. What do you do next? Do you start increasing the price or do you start looking for the next product?
Mike: Looking for the next product. We’ve always been very much product-focused. So, we bought another cheap, second hand sort of digital printing, cutting machine and got–by that stage, my friend who I went to uni. with who was making the puzzles as well, he quit his job and came in. So, we just started launching heaps of products. We could launch product fast because we’re good on a mix of the design and production systems. So, we just started launching stuff really, really fast.
Andrew: How do you know what to create? I know that in the software space, minimum viable product is the word, right? You have an idea. You just create a minimum viable product. You see how people like it and then you can adjust it or you can just completely stop creating it. But when you’re creating a physical product it doesn’t seem that easy, especially when parts of it are coming from China.
Mike: Yeah. That’s true. Particularly the dinosaur stuff, it’s a bit harder to do an MVP on. With those product, a lot of it was made completely locally. So, the stickers or stretched canvas artwork or wall stickers–we just sort of got going on that stuff that we could literally design up and then the next day you could conceptually be selling it.
Often it might have been a week or two to get it up. We had some production systems because of all the personalization. To that extent, we sort of started doing an MVP on that stuff. But we still automated it. In retrospect, we shouldn’t have automated it immediately. Partly because we’re sort of geeky, we thought, “Let’s just automate it.”
Andrew: What’s an example of something you automated too fast?
Mike: So, just that you go to our website now and you type in something, click a preview and you get a photo realistic preview. That comes down to us through the system and it will essentially get programmed into a ready to print piece of artwork that’s go say it’s got all of the crop marks or if they need to be banked up on a wide sheet of paper–nowadays we’ve got barcoding information and all that sort of stuff on them as well. But even the more basic version of that we actually kind of automated to a certain extent in a different manner than we’re doing now, but from the get-go.
So, the very first time someone purchased off us, for a lot of those products, we have sort of had automatically the product created or at least semi-automatically. In retrospect, some of the products didn’t sell that well. We should have just been sort of doing it manually, copy and paste and tweak it in Adobe.
Andrew: I see. So, an order comes in, why does it automatically have to go to the machine and have the machine automatically create the product and then take from there and you put it in an envelope or box and ship it out? The first few ones before you know that you’re going to get enough to automate, you could have just manually taken off your system and put it into the machine.
Mike: Exactly. I think that’s more the legacy of us being in love with automation and trying to keep labor costs down. Australia has the highest labor cost in the world.
Andrew: Really?
Mike: Yeah, in terms of production labor, it’s probably two to two and half times the states. So, for manufacturing, you have to automate. But you don’t have to automate when you’re tiny and it’s day one. But we love automating as well.
Andrew: Okay. You said that you have some minimum viable products. What’s an example of a minimum viable product that you have?
Mike: Previously our minimum viable product was just get it to market as quickly as we could. Nowadays we try and do that as much as we can. Getting it to the market is the first stage. You sort of then got to iterate from there. So, most of the things we’re launching now, as much as we can, we’re launching an MVP. The product might still be the same, but even just the front-end UX.
So, those puzzles that I sent you, a name block puzzle–the user interface for that, I think we’re just updating it at the moment. I’m not sure where the devs have gone up to for that one. We launched that one in the user interface, which is often where the work is with personalization and mass customization, can be done in quite a simple way to start with and then can be improved upon. And so often, just like a lot of projects, we’ll have this big B-list of stuff we can do next, but let’s get it up in 8 story points as opposed to 22.
Andrew: Eight story points, you’re talking about Scrum.
Mike: Yeah. Probably your audience is fine with it.
Andrew: How strictly do you adhere to the Scrum project management system?
Mike: Not like a lot of people who have sort of adapted it. We use it for all of our developers, design team and marketing team. We’ve sort of adapted our own version. We have our own methodologies that we’re using and then when we learned about Scrum we thought some of it’s familiar because some of it’s based in lean systems as well. We just adapted it because that sounds better than our idea.
Again, we keep changing it over time, but it works well for us. A lot of the time, many of these systems come down to discipline. It’s really hard to be disciplined.
Andrew: I’ve got to recommend a book. I don’t usually give book recommendations because it’s hard to pick a book that everyone’s going to love, but “Scrum,” by Jeff Sutherland is such a good not just book–I actually heard the book. I didn’t read it. The audiobook is so good.
Even if you care not even a little bit about project management and development, if you just care about organization in any way or if you just like to hear good business stories by someone who’s actually got the credibility to tell them because he’s had a part of them, “Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time” by Jeff Sutherland and his son, JJ Sutherland, who’s an NPR reporter, such a good book. He’s such a good reader of his book because he tells the stories in an interesting way. It sounds like he was there because he frankly was there.
Really good book–I can’t recommend it enough. I’ve heard so much about Scrum for years and I understood little parts of it. It wasn’t until I heard this book that I got it. And he doesn’t even get too deep in the mechanics of it. He just tells you the story of how he figured this out and how companies have used it. And then in the appendix he gives you the infrastructure for putting Scrum to work.
Mike: Yeah. Amen. I listened to it as well.
Andrew: So good. A book like that I thought I shouldn’t be listening to, I should actually be reading because I want to take notes because it’s going to so detailed. It’s not that detailed. You really could get it by just listening to it, especially if you’re an auditory learner. The part you can’t, you can go and read because he has the framework, I believe he has it online. The stories behind how to do it will stick with you and help you implement it.
Mike: I’ve actually given it to even my designers to read. It’s very accessible. I love those books where you come away with, “Yeah, I could be twice as effective in half the time.” We haven’t quite got there, but it’s an easy read. I like easy reads.
Andrew: Yeah. He wants you to break a big task like you just talked about into small tasks. But he doesn’t call the tasks tasks or to-dos. He calls them stories. You call it a story so you understand how does the user interact with it? How does the customer interact with this thing that you’re creating? If it’s a to-do list, it doesn’t feel like it’s something that someone will really interact with.
And then he says don’t estimate how long it’s going to take because we’re really bad at estimating how long it’s going to take. Think about how if you have to leave the house at a certain time, you don’t’ realize how long it’s going to take and go. Instead, give it points. Like, is this going to be a three problem or a five problem, a three task or a five, or in your case you were saying a three story, five story.
Is it fair to say too, Mike, that because you have the hardware in your office that you could just throw up an idea tomorrow, see if anyone buys it and if they do, then you just manufacture it in real time and you ship it out.
Mike: Yeah, pretty much everything we make with a few exceptions is all made to order. It all exists as materials in our factory, in our studio until someone orders it. So, most new designs, the first time a designer will see it, if it’s a new illustration to go on a bag or whatever, the first time they’ll see it is the first order that’s placed. That’s really good in that sense. You can literally get up a new design and have it selling tomorrow. But actual new processes and systems do take a lot longer.
Andrew: So, I see you’ve got the over-the-shoulder messenger bag-type bag, which is what my son’s got or the backpack with two arms and so on. If you wanted to have a third one, let’s say one that was a fanny pack, just to come up with something, that’s not something that you could test.
Your process seems to be you source the fanny pack that you want. You have the manufacturer create it for you so you can have the Tinyme label added to it. You buy it in not bulk, but in some number. And then the sticker that goes on top with the kid’s name or the design of the dumpster truck or whatever, the watermelon, that you guys create in house and attach. That you can change as you need to in real time.
Mike: That’s right. So, something like bags is a long lead time. It’s relatively unavailable and it takes too long, really. I think if we had ability to prototype our own bags in house, that would make it quicker. We often do heaps of changes and it’s back and forth with the supplies and it takes a while. So, those ones it’s harder to do an MVP. We’ll obviously start with lower order quantities to see if it takes off and that sort of stuff as much as we can. I wish that was as simple as doing a new book title or that sort of thing.
Andrew: Yeah. It doesn’t work that way for you.
Mike: It doesn’t.
Andrew: But there are ways to test more simply. I see. Do you remember when you hit $1 million in sales?
Mike: I remember when our bank account hit over $1 million.
Andrew: Oh wow. That’s even more significant.
Mike: I think $1 million in sales–cumulatively, we didn’t have the KPIs in place to… I guess they were there in Google, come to speak of it. I don’t remember. I probably at the time paid attention to it.
Andrew: But you didn’t stop and look at your finances from week to week and say, “Look at this. We just hit $1 million in the bank. This is huge. I’m going to take a moment here and in my head at least celebrate, if not out in the real world.
Mike: We looked at weekly sales a lot, like, “This week is up on last week.” Now we’re about over the top. We have a whole room called the war room that is full of KPIs that the whole team looks at every day. But yeah, we always highlight any record. So, whether it’s the quickest return time on customer calls or the sales in a certain category in a certain country. We have a hall of fame for records.
So, we sort of celebrate the wins. I think we did, but less strategically or in a less organized manner early on. But I remember it ticking away, seeing the bank account and thinking, “Yeah, that’s awesome.” I think because we never had any particular goals setting up, it was always quite serendipitous, like, “Yeah, isn’t that good?” But it wasn’t like, “Yes, we’ve sort of hit that target,” because it wasn’t a target at that stage.
Andrew: Do you have one now? Are you aiming at a certain amount? We’ll talk later about what your revenue is today, but do you have a target?
Mike: We’ve got various targets in different parts of the business and sort of goals. Revenue-wise we’ve sort of adjusted it at different times, but we’re pretty keen to get more into the multiple tens of millions. So, I know my two business partners, if I gave you the exact number wont’ like it.
Andrew: Okay. I get it. I do have a number here. I’ll ask you about it later. You know what I should do? I should do my second sponsorship message and then we should talk about some of the challenges of a physical product. It’s not really so simple as buy this one machine and everything comes out beautiful on the other end and you can start charging people lots of money for it. There are a lot more complications in creating the finished product than maybe software would have.
But first I’ve got to tell everyone that if you’re looking for a web host, I urge to check out HostGator. Now, specifically, if you are looking for a host for WordPress, let me tell you something. There’s now this new thing called–it’s not that new, but it went from being really, really expensive to suddenly being more accessible to the public and still expensive but not really, really expensive.
Well, then HostGator came out with their own WordPress managed hosting that is actually incredibly reasonable, about the same price as you’d pay for regular hosting with other people. So, why do you need WordPress managed hosting? Well, I just did a search for “malware WordPress” in Google News.
Here’s what I see. PC Magazine headline, “Visitor Tracker Malware Effects Thousands of WordPress Sites.” Here’s another one, “Active Malware Campaign Uses Thousands of WordPress Sites.” That’s from Ars Technica. Here’s another one, “A Spike in New WordPress Malware Detected.” Here’s another one–that one is from IT Portal. It just goes on and on and on.
What’s happening is that there is malware in WordPress sites. You may not know about it. Your users may not know that it’s coming from you, but it’s on your site and it’s spreading viruses that then help take control of your audience’s computers. You’re the reason that it’s happened, you as the person who’s hosted a site that has malware on it.
It’s really hard to avoid malware, especially in an environment where you have to constantly update your WordPress installation, where you have to constantly make sure all your plugins are up to date and that you didn’t install some jerky plugin that you shouldn’t have installed. All these issues can create an opening for malware.
Let’s suppose you don’t get malware. I did. It’s much more common than you’d expect. Maybe if you have a WordPress site, what happens is you have plugins that are out of date that cause security issues or that cause your site to go slow or that cause other problems on your site.
Well, what you could do is you could hire someone to manage your WordPress site or you could hire a company that does this on a regular basis. The company that I recommend that you check out, that you sign up for, that you work with forever is HostGator. In fact, if you go to HostGator.com right now and you will see WordPress hosting right at the top.
If you’re not happy with them, are you locked in? Of course not. The whole idea behind WordPress is you can take your software and move to another hosting company if you want. But they know that’s a possibility, which is why they make their WordPress hosting so easy for you to use and so dependable and so fast that you will stick around.
And if you ever have any issues, you’ll see one of their bullet points when they sell is superior support available 24/7, 365. There’s someone there on Christmas Day. There’s someone there tonight. There’s someone there tonight who will be there and support you.
I’m not just talking about sales teams. I’ve worked with WordPress managed companies where their sales teams are around all the time. I call them up and say, “Are you a customer?” I go, “Well, you can’t call us because you’re a customer.” Wait, a guy that didn’t pay you, he can call you, but once I do I have to go use your stupid ticketing system. That’s the way it is with other sites. It’s not the way it is with HostGator, really.
I can’t even give you a discount on this. I can’t even get credit for converting you into a WordPress managed customer at HostGator. But I still think it’s so important for you if you’re using WordPress to check them out. I’m going to urge you to go to HostGator.com, sign up. The price is too low to give me a discount to offer to you. So, there’s not real way for me to get tracking. I’d love for you when they ask you where you heard about us that you say on Mixergy, but there’s no way for me to enforce it.
All I can say is go sign up. It is really good. You’ll be glad and you’ll thank me for having done it. It’s HostGator.com. Like here, like this–so many hosting companies you forget. So, they sent me their mascot right here, this gator. Think about this alligator like chewing my head off, like that, or chewing my mic and you’ll remember HostGator. You want the gator to host your site.
Cool, Mike. So, now HostGator creates this. It’s all up and running. It’s not so easy for software companies either. But it is, I think, especially challenging for someone who’s both selling physical products and manufacturing them. You told our producer there are a lot of moving parts in your business. Talk to me about some of them.
Mike: Yeah. For better or worse, everything we sell, we only sell through our website. Everything we sell we design. Everything we sell we make. So, we’ve got sort of a manufacturing capability, customer service capability, dev capability, design capability and we have to market it all. So, a lot of moving parts.
I’ve had other business ideas probably motivated by my own business that are a lot simpler. It is just–there are a lot of areas you have to sort of be across, which makes what is our core strength. We often ask ourselves that. Often times it’s putting together a whole bunch of different bits and pieces. And on the production side, yeah, there are multiple different processes and so many different products all sort of going through the system all at once.
Andrew: What do you mean? Be more concrete, if you could. What’s a process that’s complicated that you guys are going through?
Mike: Yeah. It’s just that we might have 1,000 orders in the system at one time. Each of those might be, on average, three and a half–I don’t know exactly what it is–but three and a half items for each order. And each of those items, one might be a wooden puzzle. That wooden puzzle has got to be printed in a certain machine and other things have to be printed and guillotined and bound into a book and another one has to be printed and then die-cut and put onto a bag.
So, you’ve got multiple different products and each of those might have multiple different processes. Just to make sure the whole system isn’t a complete mess, we’ve just had to–it’s been in a complete mess at certain times as we’ve grown. We’ve had to build systems in place.
Andrew: When you say build a system, do you mean write down documentation for how you take three different products and ship them out to the same person or is that software that’s doing that for you at this point?
Mike: It’s mainly software. We do also have lots of visual standard operating procedures for people in production. A lot of the lean manufacturing is very into visual workplace. But a lot of it’s software, which is an interesting kind of load-balancing process, like sub processes, particular items and then full orders. Essentially an order will come through. One item is finished but it’s waiting on the other two, which are still being made. You want to load balance that so it’s not a massive mound of work in progress, so to speak, that’s half done.
Andrew: How do you learn how to do that? I remember taking a class on that at NYU. It was one of the hardest business classes I ever took. There is a problem there. One machine operates faster than another, so it keeps spitting stuff out. Do you pause that machine? Do you find a way to store the other stuff? How do you keep it so there isn’t a bottleneck in your system with the slow machine?
Mike: Yeah. To be honest, it’s not my main area of the business, but I’ve kind of been into it for quite a while. Learning about it, we just got, again–probably before we got into the digital marketing stuff, we read into books like “The Goal,” “Theory of Constraints” and one called “The Machine that Changes the World,” stuff on lean production systems and the tighter production systems.
So, we’ve been kind of loving that stuff and just doing lots of in–where we live, we can do lots of site tours and going to visit other companies into that sort of stuff, just get ourselves educated, essentially.
Andrew: You just call them up and say, “Can I come visit your office? I manufacture children’s toys and I’d like to learn from you?”
Mike: In that case it’s a bit more unorganized system. They had group tours essentially of people visiting each other’s facilities. They visited us. The lean stuff is very sort of like a transparent and learn from each other-type approach. That’s been really good. Now, I’ve sort of applied some of that stuff to other areas of the business. Now it’s more my two business partners that do more of that, partly because they’re smarter than me and they’re better at it. I’ll just come and hassle them with questions about it and help them get a better result. A lot of it is experimentation and continually evolving. Like I said, we’re rebuilding our production systems bit by bit at the moment.
Andrew: What do your visual standard operating procedures look like?
Mike: Because we’ve got lots of printers, they’ll often just be literally a printed piece of paper. My business partner who handles all production, he says he never likes laminating things because as soon as it’s laminated it’s too permanent. So, he won’t laminate it. He’ll just let it get tatty.
Andrew: So, it’s just a piece of paper, not laminated. It’s going to get all kinds of dirty but you guys can always go back and reprint it. It’s a visual step-by-step for how to do something in your factory.
Mike: Yeah.
Andrew: What’s an example of something that you would do?
Mike: The other thing is we’ll often stick stickers on certain machines, like, “This is what you do,” and that sort of stuff. A lot of times you’re making a personalized drink bottle. You need to make sure you turn the machine on and wait until it heats up and this light comes on. You’ve got to print the design out in a certain way and wrap it around the bottle and leave it on the heat press in its case for I don’t know how long
Andrew: I see. All that is step by step, clearly explained on a sheet of paper in as few words as possible and as many words as it takes.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely, a real hybrid of manual training–we’ve got like a training matrix. So, someone’s like essentially trained in a certain work cell and they’ll be like–I forget the language you use–but kind of like an apprentice and then they do it by themselves. They get their L-plates and then they get their–essentially got the rank until they’re able to train someone else.
We just sort of do that for all the different cells. You can look at the sheet and say, “This person’s got capability in these four cells and not these four.” A lot of that we’ve just, again, looked at other people in production, in manufacturing and said, “That’s a good way of doing it. We’ll try that out.”
Andrew: How long did you go with just having one machine?
Mike: Well, to start with, yeah, we just subbed time on our previous employer. We bought our own router, computer router, which is our first machine, about six months into starting the business. We got a really cheap one from China, probably like the one you were looking at before on the internet. It was only a few thousand dollars. The ones we were actually using were more like $50,000, $60,000. But the first one we got a little cheap. Probably a couple months after that we bought our first digital printing/die-cutting machine.
Andrew: Do you think someone could create essentially what you have by buying one of these $3,000 machines and starting to make things and seeing what sells?
Mike: It depends on the product. Some of the machines are just a lot more expensive. So, certain products, no.
Andrew: What’s one product that you could easily create? If someone is listening for us and saying, “I am interested in more physical products instead of stuff. Let’s see if there’s an easy way for me to create stuff and send it out instead of digital products, to create physical things and send out,” what’s one machine that they could get and start off cheaply?
Mike: Yeah. Well, certainly things like stickers–they’re a relatively inexpensive machine. Having said that nowadays too, it’s so easy to outsource compared to nine years ago. There are so many people with the expensive versions of those machines that are sitting on a half million dollar bit of capital that can just pump stuff like that out.
Andrew: How do you find someone like that? If I wanted to do puzzles like that of some kind, how would I find someone that has that machine?
Mike: Puzzles, you’d probably just need to know what process it’s using and then in that case, just CNC routing, computer routing. In the case of a book, that’s photobooks, digitally printed books, you could probably just Google it and find the people in your local area. Again, for better or worse, we love buying machines and we’ve never outsourced. But I’d look.
In previous roles, I did heaps of CNC routing not on that machine, but specified it, like for furniture, its’ all done in CNC routing or laser cutting. My background is industrial design. I used to love those factory estates and just go around and see what sort of machinery they’ve got. Back in the day, it was using the yellow pages. I assume they’re yellow in America. I’m not sure.
Andrew: They are. I’m looking here at different places. Actually, I see someone asking that question on Stack Exchange. I see them asking that question on Quora. There’s something called 100K Garages, “Got an idea? Get it made. 100K Garages connects you with fabbers who can turn your thoughts into things.” That’s 100KGarages.com.
Mike: Nowadays, there’s one called T-Shirt Forums. It’s a big US–it’s worldwide now–again, it’s just a community of people sharing ideas around all this sort of stuff. Now because of all the maker movement, like even Instructables, those sites. It’s just a huge movement of people that are really into 3D printing, laser cutting, CNC routing and they just love talking about it, sharing ideas.
Andrew: Here’s another place I saw, CNCZone.com, which is a forum where you can get help making stuff and then there’s CNC Wood Router Jobs which is in SimplyHired.com. I’m not crazy about that last option. I see what you mean, a little bit of Googling even as we’re talking and I turned up a bunch of options. So, you’re saying don’t even bother getting the machine the way you guys did. Tinyme started about nine years ago. Of course they needed to own it. Today it’s just not that necessary. But you can still make stuff fairly easily.
Mike: I know that even–even just use a Zazzle or a CafePress.
Andrew: The reason I’m not crazy about them is they give you very generic looking products, I think at least on the t-shirt side and their costs are really high.
Mike: They are. That’s right. Even outsourcing, you’ll probably find the costs are relatively high.
Andrew: I talked to one entrepreneur. He wanted to sell yoga mats that were all environmentally friendly and all that stuff. He got that shipped from China for $6 a pop. You can’t get that kind of price if you go to Zazzle. And then he gets to sell it for $30 apiece.
Mike: Particularly if it’s a custom product, you often have to source it.
Andrew: If you make it, you’re also on the hook for any recalls. And in fact, you had an issue like that. What happened?
Mike: Yeah. Our first product, a puzzle that had little wooden pegs, some of the pegs came out. Percentage-wise it was very few. For a young child, that becomes a choking hazard. We had to recall, essentially recall the product. Because we had sold direct–we actually did wholesale for a tiny period between one and two. But apart from that, we’d sold direct, so we had kind of had the contact details of everyone.
So, we ran a very, very effective product recall in that sense. Not that many products came back because even though we said to send them all back, most people were like, “There’s nothing wrong with my product,” so, they didn’t send them back. Quite a few sent the letters back anyway even though there’s nothing wrong with them.
Andrew: And what do they get, a refund or a replacement?
Mike: Yeah. We just replaced the letters that they sent. But that was just a full on–
Andrew: But not it looks like an interesting thing that happened in the past, a learning experience that makes you better. But at the time, you told our producer, you had to keep reminding yourself, “I still have my wife and kids. Life is still okay even if I lose my business,” because what were you feeling about all this?
Mike: Well, you never know, especially very early days of it. You don’t know what’s the extent. If we put a recall out there, is every single person–we’d never done a recall before. We knew we had direct contact with customers. So, we knew we were going to be able to do a good one from a customer perspective, not necessarily a good one from a shirking your responsibilities perspective because we, not that we wanted to, we did a very, very good job of getting in contact with all the customers.
But you sort of think, “Is it going to put the business under?” Because of the cost involved. I think you can also imagine all sorts of scenarios that could essentially put a business under. This was just one that had come about. So, even just in imagined scenarios, I think it’s quite healthy to think, “What would I think if the business went under? It doesn’t mean that much to me, which is kind of a healthy balance to have.”
Andrew: That’s still hard to think about.
Mike: It is.
Andrew: After my first company when all I had was the company and nothing else, when things got bad, I felt like everything was going to go away and my whole life sucked. So, I made a real effort to have something else going on in my life other than or in addition to work and that’s–more than one actually–my running, my friends, my family now, things that will still make life work living in case work goes bad. If I start thinking life is not worth living because everything is going the way, I can’t save the day.
Mike: Absolutely.
Andrew: Sorry?
Mike: I agree. It’s kind of like what’s the point, really, if you’re not going to be happy with all of that gone, are you really that happy in the first place?
Andrew: The truth is, if all that stuff is good, then yeah, then I’m really happy. But it’s not always good. So, I need something else. I used to think, by the way, if I had something else it would keep my from wanting to fight in the one thing that I’m doing, like if I had friends and life was good outside of work, then when work got bad, why would I even bother fighting?
It turns out I have an inner need. I just have an inner need to make work be as good as possible. It doesn’t have to come from some outside reason. I don’t need a whip over my head constantly telling me if I don’t do a good job then I’ll get whipped. I just have this inner need that makes me say I’ve got to be the best possible. I’ve got to be way bigger than I am now. If anything, I have to whip that part of myself sometimes and say chill.
Mike: Yeah.
Andrew: I’m hunting around on SimilarWeb to see where you’re getting your traffic to get an understanding of how you market it because magazines aren’t going to allow you to grow to where you are today. I see that one thing you guys to is there are all these sites that I had never heard of before because I’m not in the parenting world, things like, Bronto.com, InThePlayroom.co.Uk, CoolMomPicks.com, EverythingEtsy, I get that. What’s your marketing process to get into all these places, like HelpingKidsGrowUp.Blogspot.ca?
Mike: Yeah. We work a lot with bloggers partly because of our own blog, which hasn’t been going that long, a bit over a year. We do lots of free downloadable stuff, printable type stuff. And it’s really good quality.
Andrew: Where someone could, without buying anything, just get to print things.
Mike: That’s a good way of growing the email list now. Like we do like for Father’s Day, we’ll do like Father’s Day printables that are obviously more kiddie-focused. We’ve done a few things that have gone really well, but they haven’t been as good a fit with the right demographic. It’s a bit like giving away an iPad. Everyone wants an iPad.
So, I keep saying to my design team, “You’ve got to make sure the demographic is right, the buying context is right, the fit with our product is right.” But that organically just attracts bloggers because they just want to tell people about good free stuff you can download that looks really nice.
And then a lot of them also just like our product. They’ll just sort of–
Andrew: Do you have any outreach to them? I see now, the free Father’s Day printables for kids. It’s on your blog. It’s really well-designed I can see it’s things like a Father’s Day card with a way to stick a photo in there, ties that we can make at home and print out and put on a string. Is that one of your printables?
Mike: Yeah.
Andrew: I think that’s a called a garland.
Mike: Garland, yeah.
Andrew: That’s the kind of stuff that you do. How do bloggers know that this exists? A lot of them we’re friends with the bloggers. Just being in the kid space for that long, we’ve sort of kept track of them. And now we do a bit more structured kind of outbound, essentially trying to make friends with the folks, provide good value to them.
And now we’re just a bit more structured with it. So, we try to find someone’s that really good in that space and use Open Site Explorer and see who’s linking to them or use BuzzSumo, a bit of that data scraping-type approach. There’s some really good software for it as well, but some of it’s quite expensive.
Andrew: What would you do with Open Site Explorer from Moz? What would you do to market?
Mike: In that case, we find a site we know has got high traffic, put it into SimilarWeb. We just use the free version, which will give at least some–we normally try to get traffic sources from a couple, Compete.com, SimilarWeb, Alexia. They sort of all differ.
Andrew: I see. So, you say to yourself, “Who is in the children space that has products similar to ours that has our audience? Let’s see where they’re getting their audience.” So, you would type them into something like any of these tools you mentioned. Since I have SimilarWeb up here, what’s a site that we can type in here to see where they’re getting their traffic to know who we should befriend.
Mike: Well, say one of the ones you mentioned, CoolMomPicks.
Andrew: CoolMomPicks. I forget what it was. Actually, I’ve got it here on my screen, CoolMomPicks.com. And like you said, this could work with Alexa or any other number of sites. Chrome is so slow lately on Macs. So, now I see. Where does CoolMomPicks.com get their traffic? So, CoolMomPicks.com–I know this isn’t the most cutting edge mind-blowing thing, but it freaking works.
So, I take a look here and I can see they get some traffic from Swissmiss, a really highly regarded design site, so I might befriend Swissmiss’ founder. They get some traffic from CoolMomTech.com, probably a connection to the company. They get some traffic form DailyTechK.com, Blogs.Babycenter.com. That’s a good one. So, you put together a list of all these things. What’s your process for connecting with them and staying in touch and being friends?
Mike: We typically pull in the traffic data there, how many Facebook fans they’ve got, how many Pinterest fans they’ve got, get a lot of contact details from their Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook.
Andrew: Into a CRM?
Mike: Yeah. In that case, we’re using Buzz–I get all the Buzz ones confused. I think it’s BuzzStream. There’s BuzzSumo, BuzzStream. It originally started off as a link-building CRM, sort of an outbound link-building CRM. Now all of a sudden they have a blogger-type–
Andrew: It’s BuzzStream. I see it here.
Mike: It’s a CRM that sort of keeps data up to date. So, you can see the filter by, you can put tags on them. I want people to traffic above this amount. And then you can do a campaign to say, “Hey, we’ve got this new…” That might be 80 people once you filter things down. And we do an outbound, essentially just an email.
Now, we’re finding those larger campaign ones, we do it a bit more–look, we don’t have dedicated resources for it. So, we kind of do as best we can. But essentially once we make a contact, we just sort of keep in contact.
Andrew: And you’re saying you don’t have a clear process for staying in touch?
Mike: We kind of need to. It’s an area where we’re quite keen to resource up. I’ve got a lot of new content to share. We’ll share that out to the list, so to speak. We did this. We ran a Kickstarter campaign.
We did a similar sort of approach of how do we find a whole bunch of people that are sort of–posted on Kickstarter before but we were also in the parenting space. So, we sort of reverse engineered to get a big list and we did outbound. And just a very friendly email that’s sort of genuine, “Hey, we’ve got stuff we think your audience might find valuable. Do you want to work together?”
Like a lot of stuff in business, if we can provide them really good value and not ask immediately for anything in return or not even ask, often they’ll just want to–they’ll just send us traffic if they like the printables. Often they’ll end up posting on product or want to do a giveaway or something. And we’re never too pushy. I think that’s a bit of a trend. I think people generally don’t like being too pushy.
Andrew: All right. It’s working for you. I can see there are a lot of sites that are talking about you and linking to you. The other thing I saw as I was hunting through was–where is that? There was some email marketing company that you guys worked with.
Mike: One of them was Bronto, you mentioned.
Andrew: That’s it, Bronto.
Mike: They’re our email service provider. I’ve been with a few things. Before them we were with MailChimp and moved to Bronto.
Andrew: Why?
Mike: Bronto is pretty much an ecommerce only email service provider and just allow you to do a lot more things that you can’t do with a MailChimp. I recommend MailChimp to people all the time. It’s free or cheap, really robust and a great tool. But as soon as you want to do tricky automated workflows where if they’ve purchased this, you put them on a different sequence or you send them an automatic coupon code if they don’t use it, send them–if they do use it, you put them on a different sequence–all that sort of workflow-driven stuff.
Andrew: There’s other software that does that. I think even now Mailchimp is starting to do it. But what seems to separate Bronto, just based on my research as we’re talking, is their APIs are really flexible that will tie into your software.
Mike: Yeah. So, they’ve got a good strong API, which means we’ve got a network now of third-party apps. We haven’t really used any of the third-party apps because we just use their API and build our own stuff.
Andrew: You guys are on Magento, though, right?
Mike: We are. Yeah.
Andrew: Why are you on Magento? I’ve heard positives and negatives about them lately.
Mike: Magento?
Andrew: Yeah.
Mike: Well, they’re kind of building their next platform. They’ve been building it for years, it seems. It’s been imminent for years. We haven’t really shopped around because we’ve been on it and it’s tough to get off it because we’ve got so much custom build. It’s just a big job. Yeah, it’s okay. You’ve got to sort of hack it. It’s very good in terms if you can hack it to be. You can really do whatever you want.
But it’s quite heavy and buggy. Hopefully they’ll fix up some of that with Magento 2, but we’ll wait and see. I think when it comes out we’ll decide what we’re going to do next, whether we re-platform or re-platform onto Magento 2 because I think it’s going to be not a smooth transition.
Andrew: That site is also built by a Mixergy fan. I remember he and his wife came over to my house a couple of times back when we lived in LA. They’re such easygoing people who are so incredibly smart and they just nailed it with Magento and the thing just took off to incredible heights as a bootstrap company within the environment of the LA tech community where there was a lot of emphasis of wanting venture capital like it was going to solve everything. They were the envy of the startup community because they did this no venture capital, it just took off and then they sold it to eBay.
Mike: Yeah.
Andrew: Final question, right? I didn’t miss anything else here. The only thing I didn’t ask you is about your six kids. How do you even get to work with six kids?
Mike: Awesome wife.
Andrew: You don’t have a team of nannies? I have one kid. I have one 50-hour a week nanny.
Mike: Yeah. We wondered about getting a live-in au pair for a year because we’ve got a six-month old. But we didn’t go with it in the end. My wife, she’s a speech pathologist. She went back to work between kid one and two. But after kid two, she’s just been a full time mom. She’s pretty happy being a full time mom. So, it’s just a lot of work, to be honest.
Andrew: Yeah. I know. So, what about you? Do you have to get in by a certain time? When do you get to leave the house and do you have to come home by a certain time?
Mike: Yeah. We’ve got different schools for different kids and stuff as well. It’s really a lot of work. One of the kids I drop off to the bus stop at 10 to 8:00 in the morning. So, that’s a sort of fixed time. And then I get home at a reasonable hour, normally somewhere between 6:00 and 7:00 most nights. So, I help get the younger ones to bed. I’ll often just get back on the laptop later at night. I know my wife would like it if I was home earlier. I try to get home earlier. I think that whole work/life balance is really hard, I must say, particularly if you love your work.
Andrew: Or you love your family. I could understand if you didn’t love your family, then it would be great to not balance it.
Mike: I do. I’ve just been away on holidays with all the kids. They’re actually all down–I’m at home at the moment. It’s very quiet. They’re all down at the beach. I’ll go down tonight.
Andrew: All right. I want to close with this. What can you say about your revenues, your annual sales, gross?
Mike: Annual sales gross… We’re sub-$10 million at the moment.
Andrew: Above what? I’ve got the number here, but I won’t reveal it.
Mike: Above $5 million?
Andrew: Above $5 million. This is stunning to me. With this stuff that to me looks like it could have been created back in the 50s, when you get it, it’s got this old feel to it. Even the robot isn’t a modern robot on the backpack. I couldn’t believe that you could get to that level with something that looks so simple.
But the more I dig into the business and see the customization, the upsells, the incredible design on the site, the more I realize this is an internet company that creates stuff that is designed to feel timeless, right? You use a lot of wood. From what I’ve seen on your site, you don’t use plastic in your toys?
Mike: No. We use a little bit, but not much. Yeah. That’s right. We’re not against plastic. But it’s just not the best material for most of the things we make.
Andrew: All right. I’m so proud to have you on here. You’re a Mixergy fan for a long time, one of the earliest ones. How does it feel to have done an interview?
Mike: Good. It’s very good.
Andrew: For me too.
Mike: I’ve been listening for a long, long time. I was a pro member for quite a while.
Andrew: I’m really grateful to you for having been there and for saying, “Hey, Andrew you know this thing you’ve been wanting to do for a long time? You want to have an audience of people that come back and build up these companies that come back and do interviews?” You came in and you said to our team, “Guys, I’m ready. Let’s get it done.” And we got it done and I’m really proud to have you on here.
The website for anyone who wants to check it out is Tinyme.com. My two sponsors are Toptal.com and HostGator–I don’t know that I should spell HostGator, host and like gator, the thing bit my head supposedly during this interview. The book I really recommend is “Scrum.” If you’re into audiobooks, it’s on Scribd. It’s on Audible. You’ve got to listen to this book. If you’re into paper-based books, I think you’ll enjoy it too.
Finally, if you like this interview, if you like my interview style, please subscribe to this podcast and rate it. I’m trying to think of what else you should be doing. That’s basically it. Even above all that, as much as I’d love for you to subscribe and rate, just build an incredible company. That is the big win for all of us here. If you come back and do an interview, even better for me. thank you so much, Mike for doing that.
Mike: Thanks for having me, Andrew.
Andrew: You bet. Thank you all for being a part of Mixergy. Bye, everyone.
