Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’ve got a different kind of interview. I’ve got Michael Topolovac here. He is the founder of Crave, which makes modern sex toys.
Michael, I usually go into a long intro here. We’ll talk about what modern sex toys means. What I’m curious is, before we even get into the actual interview, why are you on Mixergy? Why do you want to reach an audience of tech entrepreneurs?
Michael: Fair question. As I said earlier, you probably go days if not weeks without interviewing sex toy companies on Mixergy.
Andrew: I have never interviewed a company that makes vibrators. Not once. Not yet.
Michael: At a very high level, we view ourselves as a modern [inaudible 00:00:45]. If you look at our audience, it almost feels like woman have had the option of buying flip flops at K-Mart in the category of sex toys–low end buying experience available to toys. But we’re mainstream consumers and those consumers touch all sorts of verticals, from tech to fashion to any sort of walk of life.
So, for us, our audience is fairly broad. The tech community itself was fairly early, I think, in their support of crave, partly because there was some technology involved, but it wasn’t about the technology and I think we brought a more mature voice to the category. I think tech tends to be an area where new ideas come to life and they’re more open to that culturally and I think all the media around that.
So, we’ve got a very warm reception from early on. I think our first coverage was in Gizmodo, as I recall. So, it wasn’t in the Huffington Post or Glamour. Those came soon after. But it was the tech press that actually originally paid attention to us.
Andrew: I see. So, you’re saying, “Hey, Andrew, Mixergy has got some women in the audience. Women in tech seem to be much more open-minded about new technology and even less judgmental about sex toys. Let’s bring it on and see if they’re interested.”
Michael: Yeah. And I would say two other things. I’d say one, one thing that surprised us is half our buyers are men. We went into business assuming it was–I think they were buying for women. But a lot of men, they’re less in the category of, “This is competition and I can’t have it in my life.” It’s more, “This is a peripheral phallic bunny rabbit that’s pink. It doesn’t say, ‘I love you.'” And that’s historically what’s been the product. So, we see a lot of men who are buying products for people in their life because these products feel elevated enough that they can buy them.
I think the other thing that we’ve come to learn is that our customers don’t really fall along demographic lines as much as they fall along psychographic lines. It’s less how old someone is or where they live and what industry they’re in. It’s how they think and what they do around their sex lives. That tends to cross also to [inaudible 00:02:41], which is actually excellent. We love that. Our customers live in lots of places.
But to your point, I think the tech community tends to be more open to new ideas and I think we’re definitely a modern sex toy with more of a new idea. So, the origin of sex toys came in like the 1880s, the 1890s as a cure for hysteria, which is considered the pandemic at that time.
Andrew: Was it considered a cure for hysteria or was a cure for hysteria the excuse for getting it?
Michael: No. I discovered this when I was looking at the first patents in the space, mostly out of curiosity. They were all done by doctors in the 1880s and 1890s. They caught me off guard as I dug into it. Around the 1880s in that area, basically a healthy woman’s desire for sexual pleasure was considered a disease. It seems shocking from this context.
Andrew: Oh, I see.
Michael: It wasn’t until [inaudible 00:03:26] actually changed the terminology. So, these women would go to their physicians office to be massaged to cure so-called disease. And the doctors found it to be quite a lot of work and a fairly regular occurrence. So, they started inventing machines or devices. So, that’s where we’ve come from and I think we’ve come a long way from there.
Andrew: You know, I’m talking about this in a very clinical way. But we’re talking about sex.
Michael: Yeah.
Andrew: Are you at a point now where you feel like, “I just can’t get turned on by any of these stories anymore. Even women going to doctors for relaxation exercises to cure their hysteria is just not fun. It’s just an interesting point that I read in Wikipedia.”
Michael: Yeah. I think for me that was never a turn on story either.
Andrew: I see. Is any part of this still a turn on? Or is it now like, “I’m running a factory. I’m producing product. I have a design eye but that’s it.”
Michael: Yeah. It’s a really interesting question and a fair question. Going into it, there were a lot of layers to that. I was on my way as an entrepreneur in the Valley. I had done two pretty successful companies. I was one of the early guys in cloud/SaaS computing and went up to one of my then investors and [inaudible 00:04:31] what I was doing next. I explained this to him and he’s like, “I can’t invest in you. This is not tech. This is not software.” And I did have this concern that if I go down this path, if I’m successful, I’m sort of an entrepreneur who saw the next thing. If it wasn’t, I’m crazy weird sex toy guy at the beginning of his career. So, there’s that.
Andrew: Frankly, you can be the crazy weird sex toy guy no matter what, right? People are judgmental, don’t you think?
Michael: Potentially true to. But I think it’s interesting. From very early on, it was a business. It’s still a business. Sex is certainly a part of it. If you look at our employee handbook and our sexual harassment policy, it’s a little bit interesting. Obviously, the sphere of sexual harassment–
Andrew: What you mean? What makes it interesting?
Michael: In that the historical realms of sexual harassment that you can’t do quid pro quo or anything that’s disempowering of course applies here and we’re as strict as anyone in that regard. But in a lot of policies, you could have parts of the handbook that would say talk of sex in the office is considered sexual harassment because it creates an uncomfortable work environment.
Andrew: I see, but in this case it’s part of the job.
Michael: Yeah. We’re very clear on boundaries and we never ask someone about their sexual journey and that’s not part of their homework and their job description. But if people will share, it also needs to be an environment to share. But it’s just part of what we do. So, it is present throughout the day.
There are moments when I realize this day job is not like my last day job. So, May is Masturbation Month. Our PR person that we have will come in and say, “Okay, this is Masturbation Month. What are we going to do this month?” And at my software company, I wouldn’t go to the executive meeting and start the meeting with, “Okay, team, May is Masturbation Month. What do we have planned?” That would not sit as well.
Andrew: Yeah. I wouldn’t imagine for most people. It seems to me–I don’t know that much about your past company–but it seems to me you were burning out at the last company. Was that a fair assessment?
Michael: I think for me–and I can’t speak for other entrepreneurs–I guess I’m a serial entrepreneur because this is my third. But I’m not an entrepreneur that’s ever gone into a company thinking, “Oh, I’ll do this for two or three years then sell.” It’s always been about the journey. I’ve always been completely in it. I’ve learned there’s a time and place in my journey where I’m no longer the guy to be leading that company for any number of reasons–personal reasons, what the company needs.
For me at my last company, we had gotten out of the gate. We were doing quite well. It was one of the early cloud software companies. What the company, I thought, needed was a more seasoned GM, sales and marketing executive and I’m more of a product guy, early stage guy. So, I came to the board and said, “I think in a year, you’re going to fire me and that’s not a good outcome for anyone. I think there should be someone else to lead this company.”
It was less about burnt out. But I just thought it was time for someone else to take that on. I think it’s a hard thing for an entrepreneur to figure that out before your team figures it out or the board figures it out. In this case, I’m lucky that I figured out it was the right time. But it wasn’t so much a burn out, but I think in a year or two that probably would have happened and that would have been the wrong time.
Andrew: “Arena Solutions provides affordable cloud product lifecycle management solutions that enable manufacturers to lower costs, shrink time to market.” That’s what their website says, right?
Michael: Yeah. If you look at Salesforce, the first two or three early cloud apps, it was obviously Salesforce, it was [inaudible 00:07:59] and I think SuccessFactors, but I might be wrong on that one. But if Salesforce did the customer record in the cloud, all the business process around that. Arena does the product record in the cloud–so, the ingredients, how to make the product, how to communicate with suppliers, who to manage change.
So, Tesla built their first Roadster with Arena as a platform. They [inaudible 00:08:21] and manage their supply chain. So, it’s in the cloud application for product data. That tends to be deployed across a very diverse global supply chain. Not everyone is in the building. It’s a very powerful tool be used at the cloud. It enables one version of the truth.
Andrew: Vibrators are so much more fun to talk about that than that. But it raised $43 million. You’re still a major shareholder?
Michael: Yes, still a major shareholder. My first company, Light & Motion was simpler. It makes underwater imaging equipment and bike lights. That was all bootstrapped, so, in a garage in Palo Alto. I eventually moved down to Monterey. And then Arena was traditional venture-backed. We raised about $40 million in my tenure there. Marvelous experience–I learned a lot about building a larger company and scaling organization. Arena, I kind of get the best of both worlds.
It’s hard to build something with no capital, particularly if it’s a manufacturing company. You have to buy inventory, parts, machines, engineers. But I didn’t want to over-capitalize it. I wanted to make sure we prove unit economics with the business before we scaled it. So, we had a lot of great angel investors. We’ve grown very quickly with that and enough capital I would say to properly finance the business.
Andrew: Which company are we talking about?
Michael: This is Crave.
Andrew: Crave. Right.
Michael: Light & Motion, bootstrapped.
Andrew: Light motion–fully bootstrapped. I’m actually looking at Light & Motion products here on Amazon. I think I even bought some. You guys make those headlights that people put on their bikes, right?
Michael: Yeah.
Andrew: The rear lights… I see there are a bunch of others.
Michael: Headlights, rear lights, there are camping lights now, there are lots of underwater lights.
Andrew: Underwater lights. And that’s all you creating it from scratch, all bootstrapped. What did you do with the business? Sold it?
Michael: No. I’m still on the board. I have sold a lot of my equity to some new investors that have come along. The CEO that took over the reins, he’s got a big stake right now. But I’m an active board member, but it’s not my day job. Obviously Crave is my focus. I think one thing about being a founder is you never get fired from being the founder. So, I think for me every company I’ve started has got a soft spot in my heart and Light & Motion in particular because it was first. So, I play an advisory role on the board but have no operational role.
Andrew: Is it inappropriate for me to ask you how old you were when you made your first million?
Michael: That’s an interesting question because both of my first two companies are still private. So, on paper, that probably happened in my 20s. In terms of liquidity, it happened probably in my 30s. Some of it’s liquid, some of it’s not.
Andrew: Do you remember the day when it was liquid when you could look at a bank account and say, “Alright, this is it. Take a breath, dude, you did it?”
Michael: That’s funny. I’ve never looked at it that way. I wouldn’t suggest that I wish I only had $10,000 and I lived in a hovel. I’m very grateful to have a few resources and to have a nice house and to be able to lead a life. But I’ve never gotten up in the morning thinking about a business in terms of personal financial return.
The finances play an enormous role when you think about taking other people’s money. Then it’s a different ball game. It’s other people’s capital. So, I think about that, particularly with Crave and how we financed it, that this is other people’s capital and you’re looking to return that. So, you care enormously about the business financials.
But I think my view is that if you focus on building a great business and building products customers deeply care about, you design products you can actually make for a profit. I think the financial returns come as a consequence of that. But it’s not why I get up in the morning. It’s not what gets me excited. It’s not…
Andrew: What does get you excited?
Michael: For Crave, it’s interesting. When I was looking at what I was going to do next after I left Arena, I was a photographer in a previous life and I was going to maybe go to the South Pacific.
Andrew: You told our producer, April Dykman that you passed out for four months essentially drunk on a beach, am I right?
Michael: That’s a little bit of hyperbole but not much. Yeah. I spent four or five months in Bali. I wasn’t drunk the entire time. I rented five villas and invited all the friends I’d blown off for the last eight years to come as my treat. We did drink fairly aggressively for four months. But I wasn’t always passed out on the beach.
Andrew: Did you at that point at least get to appreciate it and say, “You know what? I worked hard. I pushed myself. I came up with these creative ideas. I did it.” Take a look back at that point, was that your take a breath and look back at what you had done?
Michael: Yeah. I think it was. It’s a hard thing for an entrepreneur. Maybe it’s a different age than when I started. I started my first company when I was an undergrad at Stanford. This is pre-Yahoo. This is pre-Google. This is not what people were talking about. People were talking about, “David Packard and Bill Hewlett started a company,” which was many years obviously before me. So, it was an oddball to do that.
So, it was hard and capital was scarce. It was an 18-hour days, seven days a week kind of thing. That’s kind of how I grew up as an entrepreneur. I think I worked–I don’t want to say worked harder than I needed to, but I think I lost sight of some of the things that were part of the journey that is life, as much as I love my journey. But I think that moment where I left Arena and spent five months in Bali was like, “Oh, yeah, there are some other things that I want to make sure I have as a part of my experience and my journey.”
So, I think that was a transition for me personally. Also, I had enough capital that I could do that. I could start Crave and not have to worry about raising an enormous amount of money out of the gate. Even before I hired a team, I could look at the market and figure out what we wanted to be.
Andrew: You spent a lot more time than most people do thinking about it before you actually got into it. This is 2004. The idea happened because of a dinner.
Michael: Yes. That’s true.
Andrew: What happened?
Michael: I was at dinner with two female friends in San Francisco. I don’t remember the context of how it came up, but sex toys and vibrators came up in the conversation. Neither of them had ever had one and I was curious as to why. The response was based around two fronts. One, they’ve seen them and they look like a horrible object. Why would they want one of these things. At best they’re novelty. At worst, they’re sort of monstrosities. Two, you’ve got the buying experience isn’t particularly welcoming. It’s a dark alley. It’s Big Al’s DVD Shop.
Andrew: Well, you’re in San Francisco. You’ve got Good Vibrations here on Valencia.
Michael: There was then and there is now. But I think the general perception of the community–I don’t want to speak for the community of women–but largely speaking, Good Vibes isn’t accessible to most people. And there are a few Good Vibes and even then there were less. So, that’s what I did. I took them shopping to Good Vibes. But that was their first time experience with it. They had assumed everything was Big Al’s DVD Shop.
Andrew: What kind of friends are these that you can take them into a Good Vibrations store and just look at vibrators together?
Michael: Good friends. They’re very sexually liberated, empowered women. It was an interesting conversation. They were like, “Hell, we’d like to give it a go.”
Andrew: Is this like a typical thing you do?
Michael: Well, now it’s more typical.
Andrew: I see. But back then?
Michael: No. It wasn’t. It was just more, “Oh…” It was the first time I had actually done that. But what was interesting from that is that I bought them each whatever they wanted. The products weren’t very elevated. These is pre-LELO, pre-Jimmy Jane, some of the more elevated brands that came soon after. But I bought them each whatever I wanted.
My friend calls me back a few weeks later and is like, “Michael, you’re my best friend for life. I had no idea. This is cool. I learn more abought my body.” There’s physiology. There’s empowerment. I think that planted the seed that women desire to have a much better experience in this category and deserve one. They shouldn’t be novelty. They should be sophisticated. They should be modern. They should be able to buy them in a comfortable environment, whether in the store or online.
So, that’s where the idea got planted. I’m not a jump from A to B startup kind of guy. I loved what I was doing. I was enjoying the [inaudible 00:16:12]. I think as entrepreneurs, we’ll often say ideas are easy excuses to kind of bitch. Lots of ideas–this one got shelved and I continued that journey with Arena. But when I left Arena, I looked at it again and it looked even more compelling.
I think to your other question of what gets me excited, there were three things that I thought were really important about the next journey I would take in this realm as an entrepreneur. One, I wanted to have a business that had enormous potential.
My first company, Light & Motion, it’s changed now. But then it was a lot of fun, cool products, but really a small market. So, maybe 1,000 people a year bought underwater housings and that was kind of it. No matter how good you were, you couldn’t get very big, hard to attract capital, hard to attract a great team. At Arena, I made the mistake–I mistook a clear view for a short distance. So, we were very early in cloud. We were very early in KLM and didn’t have as much capital that Benioff, for example, had at Salesforce, nor was I Benioff. He’s kind of magical.
So, PLMs now are a mature awesome category going really well. But we were maybe ten years early. That was hard. So, I wanted a market that was ready and I wanted a market that was big. So, that was one key point. So, again, it’s not about the money, but if you want to have an impact, you want to be able to get a lot of great people involved, you want a market that’s big enough to put some muscle behind.
The other is I wanted the visceral element of it, to wake up every day and what I got to do was intriguing and it’s fun. And then the third, some day I’m going to die and it’s going to be over. Maybe whatever Wikipedia at that time, I’d like that page to be worthy of saying, “The world is better that this guy was here than if he wasn’t.”
For me, Crave met all three of those. Enormous opportunity–it’s still early, it’s still nescient, but it’s massive. It’s a really interesting problem. It is sex. We’re never far from that. Sex is a big part of our lives. It’s a part of who I am and it’s kind of fascinating to have that be in the ether every day. It’s an incredibly fascinating design challenge because you’re designing for an experience you generally can’t see. You can see it in a personal experience, but you can’t presume that matches the global community of women. So, it’s a really hard problem and interesting problem to design for.
Andrew: Wait. If you see my eyes moving all over the place it’s because for some reason–I like to have a lot of research up on my screen in preparation. But for some reason, we had the wrong URL for you. It’s LoveCrave.com. LoveCrave.com is where I get to see these vibrators. These things just look beautiful. I was going to say they’re like jewelry, but some of them are jewelry.
Michael: That’s actually is a thing that’s a big part of the brand. That was part of the vision early on. I just got lucky. Just after we started, as I looked around there were too many male voices in this market. All the entrepreneurs were men. The designers were men. All the advocates were mostly male-dominated.
So, I wanted a female design cofounder, kind of like a female Johnny Eye who was my vision. And I got lucky. A few years after we kind of started doing research, I bumped into a woman named Ti Chang. She’s trained at the Royal College of Arts in London, a phenomenal industrial designer who’s done great products worldwide.
Andrew: You know what? I was introduced to you through her boyfriend who told me about her work, told me about Crave and then said, “You should interview Michael because she does the design. Michael does the business side. I know you like business,” which I do. So, how do you find someone? When you say, “I want to find my own Johnny Eye, the female Johnny Eye,” how do you go about finding someone like that?
Michael: A few lessons I guess I’ve learned on my little journey is that it’s sometimes better to be lucky than good. But to unpack that a bit, a lot of these businesses, you’ve got to be smart, you’ve got to have a good idea, you always have to be true.
But I think for me, along the way, you get a break, sometimes you get an opportunity. I think where the skill comes in is realizing you just got lucky. So, I think with Ti, that was the vision. But it’s hard to stop this company like, “I’m going to wait until the perfect person shows up.” So, we went forward. We hired some consultants who were amazing female designers. We started chipping away at the problem.
I was actually in a tradeshow in Florida and I bumped into Ti there. She had already started this jewlry brand and she had some traction. We hit it off. When we first met, I complimented her. I’m like, “Your work is amazing.” And she looks at me like, “Who’s this guy? Is he going to try to hit on me?” I’m like, “I think you’re just a great designer. I just want to tell you.”
We became quick friends and talked for hours on end. We realized we had the same vision. I brought an entrepreneurial capability. I’m a designer/engineer by training. She’s an industrial designer and more of a brand strategist. She became part of Crave and became a cofounder and off we went.
So, I think part of it, to answer your question, perhaps a long-winded answer to it is to be out there and be active, be working on the brand and be open energetically and to that moment when they arrive and be able to realize, “Aha, this is the right fit,” and then work to bend space and time to make it happen. “I’m going to make this happen.”
Andrew: You know what, Michael? One of the things I realize from that story is I’m finding that lately the title of founder is now an honorary title, not just a descriptor. So, you already had the idea. You had the business. You had a team of people. The company was already founded. But you needed somebody who was going to be a designer but also that you could call a founder to give credibility to this very real vision that you had that it was going to be women-led women’s vision too.
Michael: And I think that happens a lot. And I think how a founder’s scope is broadened. But in this case, I think it’s also an element of she was there very early and she had built a company that had done jewelry and sex toys. Three of those products still live in the Crave brand. So, it was much more than–we hadn’t shipped a product. We had prototypes. We had a balance sheet and I had some entrepreneurial DNA. She had actually shipped some products.
And while we technically bought the company to get her on board, which is the mechanism we did it, she became a founding entity because her products became our products and she became part of the team. So, it wasn’t like we were both around the coffee table day one, but it was so early and the impact of her coming on board was so profound that for us it seemed like the appropriate way.
Andrew: Did she have more than 15 percent of the business?
Michael: We keep the equity conversations, I think, private. But she has a very significant equity position for her role for contributing.
Andrew: Can you say more than 15 percent or less?
Michael: We can’t.
Andrew: No?
Michael: She’s got a healthy equity position. She also came in earlier when she had a much bigger salary draw early on and when we started to make more money, she was in a position to do that. It was a good output for all. It was complicated because we bought the company and there was earn out involved. It’s not simple math. She’s got, let’s say, founding equity.
Andrew: I forget the name of the entrepreneur that I interviewed here on Mixergy who said, “You know what? A lot of people want the title of founder. It reduces the salary you have to give them and it creates a better perception. Call them founder.” And actually, I did interview one person who it turns out traded equity for the title of founder. Anyway, let’s continue then with the story. I said that it took you a while from idea to first product. A lot of it was you talking to customers. How did you find potential customers to talk to about this?
Michael: So, early on before we had any product, it was a challenge because you wanted to settle for selection bias. I was talking to five women I knew that would be open to having this conversation. Who knows how much they’re telling me because they’re friends and what not?
So, it was a hybrid that we did start with our networks, but we started to propagate that through friends of friends or even random people I would meet along the journey and start the conversation. I think that one of the things that was related to that question that was really surprising to me about this was how open people were for the conversation. What we thought would be the case was that people would, both personally and as a business be buttoned up and be like, “Oh, you’re sex toys. I don’t talk about sex.” It was quite the opposite.
Ti and I early on, we’d go to a dinner party, network with investors. She’d go out with friends. I’d go out with friends. We would make a tactical decision that night if either was going to talk about the business. If we did, we would hijack the entire evening. This was before we had a product. This was the idea of Crave as an elevated brand experience, a modern product.
Andrew: How do you bring it up in a conversation at dinner in a way that allows you to get useful feedback? I’ve done conversations like that at dinner and they can go all over the place. The feedback you get you may or may not remember because you’re still in dinner mode, which means you’re having a wine, which means you’re focused on the conversation, not trying to take notes.
Michael: I think for us, our journey, I’d say we had qualitative and quantitative input along the way. So, if you’re in a dinner conversation, someone starts this. Usually the conversation usually began more with, “What do you do?” It’s not an uncommon question. Either you say, “I’m at a startup,” if you start to reveal what you’re working on, then that tends to open up that conversation. The qualitative stuff is, I think, very valuable in aggregate, but you don’t really take notes and put it all down and you can’t do an analysis of it.
So, I think for us, the qualitative conversations help us understand what questions were important to ask, the things that matter. And then we eventually did more quantitative surveys that were more structured. Some of them may have come from those people we met who said, “We’re real interested in this. Would you mind doing an ethnographic conversation with us?”
Andrew: And it was a formal conversation, you with a notepad.
Michael: Yeah. What it would tend to be, it wasn’t generally around, “Tell us how you masturbate.” It was more, “Tell us about your day. How much free time do you have? What are the things that are sexually interesting to you? Is life where you want it to be sexually or not?” Even that’s almost like a loaded question. But it’s more about getting people to start having that conversation. You do a lot of listening.
For our first product, the Duet, which you probably see on your site, it’s USB rechargeable. So, you disconnect the body from the tip, you plug it in and it recharges. What’s fascinating about that–that came out of the research, from talking to 60-70 women in more ethnographic, formal capacity. Not one person said, “Make a USB rechargeable vibrator.” It never came up in conversation.
But what came up again and again was that the whole battery thing was an ordeal. That whole part of that experience doesn’t work. I buy retraceable batteries. I go to Walmart. I’m pretty sure the guy behind the counter thinks I’m buying batteries for my vibrator. That’s not an uncommon perception. If it’s a rechargeable one, I’ve got the charger. I plug it in and the cleaning lady bumps the vacuum cleaner into my vibrator. It’s a vision I can’t get out of my head. So, they basically said, “Make that whole thing go away.”
So, that’s how we did a lot of our research. So, that was the experience they wanted to improve. It was our job as designers and people who understood technology to go, “Oh, let’s make it no cables, no fuss, no batteries. What if we built the whole charging thing into it? USB is a ubiquitous power platform. Anyone in the world can charge it up.” So, I think that’s where that research–that’s the kind of conversations we would have.
Andrew: I think in one of the photos on your site, there’s a vibrator being plugged into the side of a MacBook Air. How did you know that women would feel comfortable plugging their vibrators into their computers?
Michael: For starters, we didn’t. But we also didn’t design that product that it had to be plugged into your computer. The thing about USB is they’re ubiquitous. So, your charging brick for your iPhone is a USB.
Andrew: I see. So, you don’t have to plug it into your computer.
Michael: It’s the most common–cars have USB plugs now. And the other thing we did on the Duet is we separated what we call the stimulation unit, the vibrator unit, from the battery control unit. So, the thing that you’re charging isn’t what you’re actually using.
Andrew: Oh, interesting. You know what? I hadn’t noticed it, but you’re right. So, the thing that you use is actually not connected to your computer?
Michael: Right, just the battery pack.
Andrew: Got it.
Michael: So, it’s a lot more discreet. You wouldn’t know what it is.
Andrew: It’s just another thing plugged into another USB thing.
Michael: Exactly.
Andrew: So, you mentioned actually asking questions that lead you to that kind of understanding. That’s a really tough thing to do. So, you started out by saying, “Tell me about your day.” Why is, “Tell me about your day” an important question or did you just throw it out as an example?
Michael: If you unpack that even further, generally speaking, people don’t masturbate or have sexual experiences in public unless that’s part of what that experience is about that, which is less where we were focusing. So, if some woman’s day is spent eight hours at work, in meetings, picking up kids after work or going to the gym or going to a dance performance or whatever it is, the amount of private time they have either on their own or with a lover or a mate or whoever they’re with, tends to be fairly limited.
So, what you learn from that is that a lot of times when people want to have a private sexual experience, it may have been in the bathtub or in the shower. Let alone the fact that it’s private, but even those ten minutes or twenty minutes of the day, they can be doing something that’s about them.
Andrew: I see. So, “Tell me about your day,” helps you understand how busy they are, how pressed–
Michael: And what that experience looks like. Where are they? What are they doing? So, for us, that translates into product in that, “It better be waterproof. Not just sort of waterproof. It better be really waterproof.” This user, half of their private time happens to exist in a daily bath or a shower and that’s where they want a private, intimate experience, well, we can’t be there unless we’re waterproof.
So, we always try to back way up and ask the question, “What experience are we supporting? What experience are we trying to commit to?” That’s what comes first. The product comes as a consequence of that. Ti has this phrase I like a lot, which is, “Why does this object exist? What is its reason to exist?” And it always comes in the context of the experience. We try to design for that. Now, what’s interesting is sometimes the technology and the [inaudible 00:30:58]. Even then, you can still map it out. It all comes back to a human experience. That’s what we’re there to support.
Andrew: I’m looking over your shoulder trying to figure out where you are. Where are you?
Michael: We’re in our design studio in San Francisco.
Andrew: So, this is where the designs are created.
Michael: Yeah. We’re pretty unusual in our category and probably as a product company somewhat unusual. We do not just all the design in house, but all the prototyping. So, downstairs, we have this full CNC machine center. We have silicon molding in house. We have 3D printers too, but that’s sort of the easy stuff. So, any product that we’re going to bring to life, we will spend a fair amount of energy making not just a few conceptual prototypes, we’ll make 20-50 that look like, feel like, function like real products. We’ll then get them to users. We’ll get feedback. And sometimes we’re like, “That’s just a dumb idea.” Other times we’re like, “I think we’re on to something.” And then we’ll iterate it fairly quickly.
Because we have all the R&D capability in house, we can do it one, very, very quickly, which is a big value. But two, we de-risk failure. I would more phrase it we minimize the cost of failure. So, if our failure is two days and $100 of metal, who cares? If I have to build my first prototype from an ODM in China or a container full of products, I’m going to be pretty concerned with what I do.
Andrew: I see.
Michael: So, there’s a lot of freedom we get, the freedom to fail, by having that in house. So, what you’re seeing here is the upstairs design studio and there’s an R&D lab downstairs. We do a fair amount of production here as well. So, final assembly, QC…
Andrew: How do you make something so unique in an office like that?
Michael: Well, the uniqueness comes in the design. That’s how you design the product. So, what we try to do is emulate the capacity of our supply chain under our roof in small volume. We don’t usually make the parts in large quantity. So, we do a lot of metal. When we do metal that’s called die-casting metal. So, we’ll be pouring molten metal into molds and like injection molding. It’s a fairly heavy industry. We don’t have the capacity to do it here. Also the scale of it is such that we don’t [inaudible 00:33:11].
Andrew: Metal you don’t have, you’re saying, the capacity to do.
Michael: We can machine metal. So, we’ll machine metal that will look at feel just like the die-cast metal part. We can perfectly emulate what it will be. But then we’ll work with suppliers out of house to do the die-cast.
Andrew: And machine metal is what you’ll give to a client and say, “What do you think of this?”
Michael: They wouldn’t be able to [inaudible 00:33:29] because if we’re going to make metal out of die-cast zinc as the metal, we’ll machine out of brass. The density is sort of the same. It will look like, feel like–it’s expensive to make it that way, the user won’t see any difference. But the silicone, we do impression molding silicone in house, which is exactly the same process we use for production where we can only do 50 at a time and we can do 10,000 at a time for a few weeks at a factor.
So, we do invest and build a process that’s in house for small volume and then we partner with suppliers for scale. Things like batteries, we don’t make. We’re not going to make lithium batteries. But we understand the battery technology very well. We visit every battery factory we work with.
Andrew: The vibration is so important. How do you create a prototype of that in your office? Especially the latest product, right? Women can decide what vibration patterns they want, right?
Michael: Yeah. That’s one of the secret sauces. I’ll give you a little bit of a peek into it. That does come from having a R&D facility under our roof. So, we don’t make motors. But what we do make is custom counterweights. So, the motor is vibrated through an offset piece of metal that vibrates the motor. So, I’m not sure it’s [inaudible 00:34:50]. But most vibrators in the world use an offset counterweight.
So, we have a close relationships with motor vendors. We know the motor capabilities are. We often custom design those, custom capabilities. We’ll custom design the counterweight to be get the type of vibration we want. And that’s only half the battle because how you mount the motor, the materials around it is incredible important.
So, we spent a lot of time prototyping motor mounting technologies here, from the silicone to the metal to the isolation elements because we want to both get the vibration and we also want to isolate it so the user’s hand doesn’t vibrate. That’s actually a fairly difficult problem.
Andrew: I’m looking at a very old blog post of yours from 2011 where you show–there it is, September 19th, 2011–where you showed the inside of one of these vibrators. I see what you mean. I see how the tips, the metal tips have to connect to that handle to the bottom part.
Michael: All those are custom machined stainless steel tubes.
Andrew: And so you’re saying you can do a large amount of that at your space right now?
Michael: We could make every one of those parts at our space.
Andrew: Every one of them. So, if someone is listening and says, “I’m starting a new business. I want to experiment by creating prototypes like this. I don’t have my own office with my own machines, with everything.” Is there a place where they could go and have this stuff made?
Michael: There are two parts of that equation. There’s the prototyping part of that and there’s the scale production part of that. I think what a lot of people do for the Fitbit kind of products out there is they design for the supply chain that makes Fitbits. I’m using that term generically. And they’re constrained by that supply chain to that extent. But they build prototypes here and then they hire engineers that have worked with those kind of products before and that’s what they do.
I think there are some shops in the city now and design firms that can do part of that prototyping, but it’s very, very expensive. There are people now that are selling to startups that do enable you to conceptualize these products, but it takes longer and it’s a fair amount of capital. So, we’ve decided that that’s strategic to who we were. We’ve built it out internally. But I grew up my first ten years building as manufacturing company.
It’s kind of in my DNA. It’s one of the things that wasn’t very difficult to do relatively speaking. That’s not to say that it wasn’t difficult. I just spent ten years of my life with a lot of flesh wounds of learning how to do it. Arena was not that far from it either–a lot of times on manufacturing floors. It’s just a part of how I’ve grown up as an entrepreneur. It’s not something you figure out [inaudible 00:37:29]. It’s a fairly significant investment.
Andrew: Yeah. It really is. I feel like hardware is still very difficult and there’s still room to make it easier.
Michael: I would agree. I think it’s much more difficult than most people imagine, than they admit. I don’t know what the numbers are. But I have a suspicion that a vendor that’s starting to go to hardware products, I wouldn’t be surprised if half of them just [inaudible 00:37:51]. I don’t think this is mal-intent or people trying to fraud. They just don’t know how hard. They see, “I’ve got a 3D printer and I just print these parts out, have somebody in China make it and then I’ll be done.” It usually doesn’t work that way. It’s usually much more targeted.
Even for somebody like us, we’ve done it for years, I’m always surprised at how hardware [inaudible 00:38:14]. Software, when I did cloud-based software, when you had bugs, you feel bad about it and your engineers work through the night to fix the bug. They push the patch and everybody is all better. You ship hardware that’s got a bug and you’ve got to recall it.
Andrew: You guys had that issue?
Michael: We had a small issue, yeah, early on. It was actually one of the biggest challenges we had. The first Duet, the tips were pretty close together, much closer than now. We did a lot of research with a lot of testers. Everybody seemed to love it. We shipped thousands of units. We got a few reviews here and there like, “I think it’s a little bit too close for me. It’s a little bit uncomfortable.” And we dug into it and it was like, “Shoot,” there was like five percent of the audience, maybe more that this wasn’t the right fit for. That’s five percent too many.
So, it was the hardest thing we did at the company. But we did is we reengineered the front tip design. We designed 12 different tips. We turned up for 12 different tips. We got them to about 60-70 different testers, got tons of quantitative feedback and eventually found that there were two tips that really worked well that had no downside.
So, each tip was different. We went to production with that. The new line, they contacted every single user that had bought the product before and said, “If you don’t like this tip design, we have a new one and we’ll send it to you for free. If you don’t want the old one, here’s a self-addressed envelope, send it back.” So, that’s how we handled it. So, we placed everything out there.
Andrew: Three months is how long it took to do it.
Michael: To fix it? I think so.
Andrew: It must have been a really painful three months for you.
Michael: Yeah. It was tough. Hardware is hard. You can ship 10,000 pieces before you realize you have a problem.
Andrew: I feel like someone should create a Mixergy for hardware startups. The difficulty of creating it, it’s substantial and it’s something that people would want to listen to other people talk about how they overcame it.
Michael: Yeah. It’s a good idea. Hardware has continued to emerge. It’s exciting, the maker movement. But people are both making more things and consumers are interested in how things are made. We live in a physical world. None of that’s suggesting that things like software aren’t amazing, but we’re physical beings and we live with physical objects. We care more about how they’re made, how interact with them.
I think there’s a community within the Valley now that that’s part of the movement to be more involved in that. I think it’s awesome. I think more conversation around that, more war stories, more sharing of insights is good for anybody. I think there is an opportunity there.
Andrew: I don’t think that I should create it. But I do think there’s absolutely that. The one thing I could do–I don’t know much of a need there is for this–but even just create a chat group for people who are all in hardware of any kind to be able to talk with each other and exchange ideas for manufacturing, for getting over issues. I don’t know. I’ll just put it out there. If anyone is interested in that, they can contact me.
You overcame it, three months of this kind of struggle. Here’s the other thing that I know you guys had some challenge with. I see your project was taken off of CKIE.com, the initial Duet. But that’s where it was.
Michael: Yeah. That was CKIE–
Andrew: Is that how you pronounce it? CKIE?
Michael: CKIE, yeah. So, it was early as a Kickstarter, the watch. What was it called? The first watch that we made.
Andrew: Pebble.
Michael: No, not the Pebble. It was pre-Pebble.
Andrew: Pre-Pebble?
Michael: This was Scott Wilson’s…
Andrew: Oh, the thing that turned your iPod into a watch.
Michael: Yeah. I think it was TikTok.
Andrew: Yeah, TikTok.
Michael: There was the little tiny iPod and it turned into a watch. It was awesome.
Andrew: They were huge.
Michael: They were huge, the first million-dollar crowdfunding project. They kind of, from my view, they really sort of opened up the opportunity for hardware companies to crowd-fund projects. So, we had seen that. It was several months before that. We’ve always been intrigued by community as a part of the brand even from day one from doing our research.
So, the company was well on its way before we realized we could do a crowdfunding project. But along that way before we had launched anything as a product, we felt like this could be our first reveal as a brand and get this community involved. So, we made this video. We wrote a script. We had our page. The whole Kickstarter thing was ready to go. Then we submitted it. This was early on. They came back and said no. We said, “What do you mean no?”
Andrew: You mean Kickstarter didn’t even give you a chance? They said no right away?
Michael: They said no. We’re like, “What do you mean no?” Then we get the form email back which was basically, “Well, we get so many projects. Not all of them are a fit for our platform,” basically saying you’re not good enough. We’re like, “Well, the video was pretty good and the product was pretty good.” There was a lot of stuff. We said, “Look, we don’t think that’s it. What’s really going on here?” They finally got back and said, “Yeah, we just don’t like vibrators.”
Andrew: So, they actually just said it openly to you, “We don’t like vibrators.”
Michael: “We want nothing to do with it. It’s not what we believe in. We don’t want it on our site. We want nothing to do with it.” I forget their exact words. But they said, “We don’t want any vibrators on our site.” And that was it. So, we didn’t even imagine. This was this brand that’s all about funding innovation. I forget their tagline. Like, “This is what we’re about guys. This is elevated. This is about women. This is about empowerment.” We were kind of at a loss. It was hard for us. We put a lot of energy into it. It never even crossed our mind that would be a problem.
I think part of it, if you had asked me a month into the idea Crave, I would have said, “I don’t know. People are going to maybe freak out or something.” But that was a couple of years into the journey and the response from the design community, the investor community was so overwhelmingly positive at every touchpoint, it just didn’t occur to us anymore that anyone would be anything other than, “That’s awesome.” So, it really caught us off-guard.
That’s how we needed up on CKIE. Indiegogo now has come into its own. But then it looked like it wasn’t sure where it was going to go. It was kind of more film-based. CKIE was brand new and they were trying to do Kickstarter for design-centric companies. They had a couple of products do [inaudible 00:44:36]. But we met the founder. He loved what we were doing. He basically said, “You should be on Kickstarter. You’ll go over $1 million with this thing.” We said, “Well, they kicked us off.” He was like, “Well, okay, I’d love to have you.”
So, we did really well. We did $100,000, which now is small. But then it may have been in the top ten. I have to go back and look, but it was up there. The platform didn’t always really work. It probably worked half the time. We had no community. We had nothing. But it told us that we were on to something. We got a lot of media. We had a lot of incredible supporters who backed us.
It was hard. We didn’t ship on time. We shipped later than we thought. We kept saying, “We’re so sorry.” But they were great, very supportive all the way along. When we finally launched, they became evangelists, a lot of them did and helped us, I think, come to life as a brand. It’s been a very big part of who we are from day one. We feel that. We believe that. We really respect our community and we try to honor it the best we can.
And then this latest one with Flex is, I think, the next generation of that. We’re saying, “Okay, we kind of understand about the motors and this part of it. But which vibrations do you really want?” We’re not going to really presume. It’s complicated. We’ve gotten phenomenal feedback. It’s amazing the data we’ve gotten. It’s really helping us ship a much better product. We didn’t get the answer was 42 per se. There’s no one perfect vibration. But we got a lot of insight of the types of patterns and vibrations that more people tend to gravitate toward.
Andrew: Was it only the first handful–not first handful–but first customers who got to give you feedback on the vibration and everyone else gets vibration based on their feedback?
Michael: Correct.
Andrew: I see.
Michael: So, for several hundred people, we sent the first batch that were programmed, limited edition. We were able to incorporate that into the surveys. That’s now driving the data since. And then the shipping public product will also be like the greatest hits that we determine in our research.
Andrew: So, what were your sales last year, 2014?
Michael: We’re private on sales. We’re a company north of $1 million.
Andrew: North of $1 million in sales.
Michael: North of $1 million. We’re doubling every year right now.
Andrew: So, obviously these crowdfunding campaigns aren’t where the majority of your revenue is coming from. This is just where you kick off your product, get feedback and community engagement.
Michael: You look back to the early CKIE program, that was in October of 2011. That year, that’s all the revenue we had because we had no other revenue. It was until we released at retail and what not.
Andrew: So, where did your revenue come from last year?
Michael: So, we do about 70 percent direct online.
Andrew: People coming to your website, typing in your URL and buying. How do they come to your site?
Michael: So, we don’t spend a dollar right now on customer acquisition. We’ve looked at it. We’ve flirted with it a little bit. But right now we’re doubling every year. As a manufacturer, it’s a little hard to grow without introducing a lot of risk into the equation. You’re making products, inventory. You don’t want to push too fast.
But what we find are three things, essentially. We get a lot of media. So, people write about us. So, that has long tail SEO and that builds more SEO that starts that conversation. And then we do get [inaudible 00:48:04]. That’s sort of two things. You get SEO. You get media and there’s some cross talk between them. And then the third one, we get a lot of word of mouth. Nobody would have thought the best product, which is the necklace, helps that a lot because it’s a public object. It can be. It doesn’t have to be. That’s one of the challenges.
Andrew: It’s this beautiful thing that just looks like a metal–what material is it made out of?
Michael: It’s metal.
Andrew: What kind of metal?
Michael: Stainless steel.
Andrew: Stainless steel. It looks kind of like a nail but not really. I don’t know how to describe it but that’s a vibrator that women can wear around their necks.
Michael: It’s the magic of Ti. She made this beautiful object and then we have these engineers that made it all.
Andrew: So, I can see how that creates word of mouth. You wear it. Someone compliments you. Then you whisper, “Hey, you know what this is?” And then it becomes this inside secret. The other part that I think I’d like to explore a little bit more, which is how you get so many people to write about you. I see that Gizmodo wrote about you and is still sending you traffic according to SimilarWeb. Forbes.com is sending you traffic. Playboy.com is sending you traffic. BuzzFeed, Fast Co.Design, which is from Fast Company, PornHub, Cool Hunting, Elle, Men’s Health–so many places–TechCrunch. I should just stop reading and ask you how are you getting all this. What’s your process? How can we learn from it?
Michael: You know, it’s interesting. Pretty much it’s all what I tend to look like–and it’s a gross over-simplification of the media–but if you look internally there is earned media and paid for media. So, paid for media, you’re buying web traffic of sorts or you’re hiring a PR firm.
Andrew: Did you say you did hire a PR firm?
Michael: Conceptually, you look at paid media, part of that is hiring a PR firm.
Andrew: Okay.
Michael: You’re not paying for the media, but you’re putting dollars to go try to connect with that media. That can lead to some great product. I’m not saying that PR doesn’t have a place. It does, I think. But most all of our coverage, I would say at least 80 percent of it, has been purely organic earned media. So, it tends to be either from a crowdfunding campaign that gets attention.
It’s a little bit [inaudible 00:50:06] one person may think the idea is great, writes about it, it gets some coverage and someone will find it and go, “Oh my god, that’s amazing.” It’s a little bit of back and forth. The Vesper was that way. With the Vesper, we just sent a note to a number of reporters and said, “Here’s the latest thing. Love your thoughts on it. We’re going live next week. What do you think?” And they look at it and go, “Oh my gosh, that’s really kind of awesome.”
Andrew: Who is this? Who’d you send this to?
Michael: A lot of the coverage we get, mostly Ti and I’ll do a little of it, more Ti will reach out as a designer and say, “Here’s what we’re working on. Here’s my latest design. Here it is. Here’s my product.” I think a lot of the media likes to have a direct connection with the brand, with the entrepreneur or the designer versus being handled along the way. I’m not trying to say there’s not a place for PR firms for a lot of the longer stories that take more time to connect them. But for us, it’s mostly been we reach out. We have a conversation.
Usually when we do an interview, it’s [inaudible 00:50:59] and they write about it. And then other media sees that being written about like, “That’s kind of an interesting story,” or write a follow up piece on their own or they contact us. So, that’s where a lot of it gets, I would say, originated from, the product. At the end of the day, we’re a product company.
Andrew: But there’s something very acceptable about you where there isn’t about others.
Michael: As a company?
Andrew: As a company that makes sex toys. It feels like it’s not acceptable to talk about certain sex toys in public. TechCrunch is not writing about the latest vibrator to come out.
Michael: Yeah. I think that’s the brand we try to build. I think that’s how we are. Ti and I both come from not the sex toy world. We come from the design community, me more on the engineering, entrepreneur side, her more on the industrial design side. So, I think we’re more accessible. As a consequence, that’s our goal, what we aspire to, to make the brand more accessible. On our very best day, what we’re trying to do is not sell a vibrator. We certainly don’t discourage that.
We’re trying to get space for a conversation around sex, about sexuality, on intimacy, around pleasure. We don’t have any opinion on what people’s sex life should be. It’s way too complicated. It’s way too divers. We celebrate and love that diversity. What we do give an opinion on is we think there’s too much stigma. There’s too much judgment. There are too many cultural roadblocks where people [inaudible 00:52:26].
What we believe is by using design material, by supporting these experiences with the product, we help create space for them essentially. That’s what we aspire to do. On a really good day, we do that. On a less good day, we need to work on it a little bit harder. And I think that hopefully transcends the brand, that it is more accessible and that it does make it easier for Elle and Time to actually write about us to tell that story.
Andrew: You guys don’t buy a lot of ads though?
Michael: No. We don’t buy any.
Andrew: You bought one at least for a test. I can see in 2014.
Michael: We did. We did a little bit of paid search.
Andrew: Right.
Michael: But that mostly was sort of marketing study of where people are searching. But now I don’t think we have any spend. It’s not part of our marketing budget.
Andrew: I like this landing page, though, the one that I uncovered. It’s Hi.LoveCrave.com/SilentVibe.
Michael: Yeah. So, those were some tests we did a couple years ago. They’re probably still out there.
Andrew: You’re not sending traffic to it. What I like about it is that you’ve got this chart that shows how loud the other vibrators are in comparison to Duet and you even have a Soundcloud file of each one of them.
Michael: That’s something we want to do more of.
Andrew: That’s the Magic Wand. Here’s the Rabbit. It sounds like a vacuum. Here’s Duet. The mic can’t pick it up. It’s a really well done landing page.
Michael: Thank you. We’re looking at doing more. That was an experiment we did a little while ago. So, we’ve done some like ads to drive traffic to see [inaudible 00:54:11] but we don’t have any ad spend. But I think we’re learning that there’s more pump–we do that mostly as a test to see what sort of content is valuable to our customers and then look to build that out on the site and then organically drive that.
I’m not against doing paid. We might do some of that. But it hasn’t been a situation where we’ve needed to. But we do value–we do see it as important to create content of value to our customers, but it’s hard to know exactly what that always is. So, we’ll run experiments like that. That’s what we’ll roll out more later.
Andrew: What do you mean? How does that page that I just described help you figure out what content to create or what to do?
Michael: Well, do people actually care? Do the go to that page? Do they click around? Do they convert on it?
Andrew: Does anybody even care about the sound?
Michael: Right.
Andrew: Got it. And if they don’t, then maybe it’s too inside baseball. You guys care, but your audience…
Michael: Exactly. That’s always the challenge, to put the customer cap on and see what they say. It’s tough. We try to do a lot of listening. That’s part of us doing a lot of listening.
Andrew: Well, I’m glad that I got to listen to you and hear how you built this business. I just realized we talked and I forgot to talk about my sponsor. I think at first I was thinking, “Is this appropriate to talk about my sponsor or not?” I’m sure they would have been fine. But since I didn’t, I’ll have to save them for the next interview. Michael, thank you so much for doing this.
Michael: It’s been my pleasure. I’ve enjoyed it.
Andrew: Has it been? Do you think you got enough value out of doing this?
Michael: Yeah. I always enjoy the conversation. I enjoy talking about the brand. There’s a belief that the more we talk about it, the why, less the what, but the why of what we do, it’s all about that conversation. So, if this goes to the community and people are going to read it, they’re going to watch it, maybe that starts a conversation or a few conversations, that’s what we’re hoping to do. Again, if we sell some vibrators, that’s great. But that’s a fortuitous consequence of doing another part of our job well.
Andrew: Well, I’m glad I got to meet you. Thanks so much for coming on here. The website URL is LoveCrave.com.
Michael: You got it. And if you’re ever in South of Market and you want a tour of the vibratory arts, let me know. I’ll show you around.
Andrew: I would love that. Where? What’s your cross street?
Michael: We keep a low profile. But we’re based in the Artist Center, near–
Andrew: I’m right on Mission and Beale.
Michael: Oh, we’re pretty close.
Andrew: Yeah. Not far. I should say this, guys. If anyone is near Mission and Beale, you’re welcome to come up here for a scotch. I know I have a lot of Mormon fans, go figure. Water, guys.
Michael: I’d open up the factory publicly, but we’re not quite ready to do that yet. We’d like to do that. Occasionally we’ve done these things called Build a Vibe where we’ve brought part of our production in. We brought it to Cal Academy. This Valentine’s Day, we brought our production line to a half-dozen people, enough for like 80 to 100 vibes.
Andrew: Why? Why do you do that? Why bother taking your whole team, interrupting the flow of work in order to do that?
Michael: Again, it’s back to the conversation. What happened, we thought it was Valentine’s Day and I think it was called Craving That Night and so on. So, we went there because it’s about community outreach. It’s also about having the conversation. It’s also more of a grassroots exercise.
But it shocked us the response we had. We brought like 80 vibes. There were maybe 3,000 people at the event. It wasn’t about us. It was Cal Academy. And within like 20 minutes, those first hundred were basically in a line to be sold out. I pushed and turned away 500 people that were in line to build a vibrator.
The reason we do it is back to accessibility. It’s an easier conversation to have to talk to somebody you’re with, a mate or a friend, “Let’s go build a vibrator. This is kind of cool,” versus, “Let’s go talk about having an orgasm.” That’s perhaps a little later conversation. So, it makes it accessible. It’s like a sexy version of Build a Bear.
And it’s a story people can tell. They can tell their friends, “I built a vibrator. You wouldn’t imagine what’s in it. It’s kind of complicated. There’s like motors and batteries and so on.” That’s a conversation you might have. It’s something you might share on Facebook.” You’re less likely to say, “Hello, Facebook fans, I just had an orgasm. I’ll tell you about it.” More power to you. But that’s a little bigger ask. This is like a natural, more targeted.
Andrew: I feel like the way you’re doing it is by reminding the world that you’re a startup, reminding the world that you’re design-focused, reminding the world that you’re maker-focused as opposed to Hustler and what’s it called? Is it on Sunset Boulevard that they have their big store where they say, “Relax, it’s just sex.” They’re clearly beating you over the head saying, “Relax, it’s just sex.” You’re looking at, “Look at what we made. Look at how we care about design.” By doing that, you’re taking away attention from what would make people need to relax.
Michael: Yeah. I think that’s part of it. I think it’s also more trying to say that this is a natural part of who we are. These are products like other products. We’re product people. By having that conversation in that space, I think for a lot of people, they can say, “That’s a beautiful object. I’m going to have a conversation and look at that product now.”
Yeah, it’s about sex. We don’t want to want to pretend that what we do isn’t involving sex or sexuality. It’s very much a big part of who we are. But we don’t need to beat people over the head with it. I think they know that. We just need to make it more accessible. Also, people want these objects–Ti has a great quote. I can try to do it just it. If anything deserves great design, it’s what we get into bed with.
Andrew: Yeah.
Michael: Really, if there’s ever a high bar for quality, it’s really [inaudible 00:59:57]. And we’ve found people do really want that. We connect with that design element because it matters so much for that. Not that it doesn’t matter anywhere else. But it matters enormously here.
Andrew: Well, good point. It does look beautiful. I kind of wish we held some up here in the interview. Anyone can go check it out on your website, LoveCrave.com. Thank you all for being a part of Mixergy. If you like this interview, make sure to go and subscribe to the podcast. You can subscribe in whatever podcast app you like or just go to Mixergy.com/Podcast. I got my serious face on. This is my serious message–Mixergy.com/Podcast. Very important, life-changing if you go sign up right now.
Michael, thank you much for doing this interview.
Michael: Thank you much. I really appreciate it. Enjoy your time.
Andrew: You bet. Bye, everyone.
