Oh, hey! What's up welcome to side US school, I'm critical about if you ve been listening for a while, you know that every day, I'm telling you a story of a different person who creates an income generating project for themselves, but the whole point of doing this is to learn from them. How do they get the idea? How do they make it happen? What challenges that they have? What mistakes that they may? Perhaps they haven't failures to have any faster and sometimes I tell you a story, so you can learn what not to do for it lets say: What could have been done better, and this is not an- light of any one story in any way, but rather to illustrate that it's a learning process and you may not get it right the first time. But then you can regroup and try again or perhaps by listening to these stories. You might actually avoid some of those mistake. On the front end, if you listen for a while, you also know that one of the core values of this process is, I want your side of Sultana

costs a lot of money to start, and I wanted to not take forever to get off the ground. That's why the whole cycle school method is idea to income and twenty seven days again without spending any money and certainly without going into debt. While the final outcome of today story is a good one, it's about architect who sells and many blind repair kit, and that brings in an extra fifteenth dollars a year. However, since we often talk about challenges, it took some real time and real money to get to that outcome and I'll tell you more about it in just a moment but say thanks to our sponsor. Support for this podcast comes from progressive. Saving money on your car insurance is easy with progressive. It's an. Average savings of seven hundred ninety six dollars for customers who switch and save. In fact, customers concur five for an average of six discounts on their auto policy with progressive, including- counts. Just for starting a quart online or owning multiple vehicles get you quote online and progressive dot com and see how much you could be saving national average in your car insurance savings by new customer Serbian, whose habit progressive and twenty nineteen discussed very and are not available in all states and situations.

Today story is a bit different from some of the others. We feature, as I may have mentioned in the intro. The outcome of this project was successful, The guy who started it is bringing in an extra twelve dollars a month or so, but it took some time to get to this point that person today, side, hustler, Chad, router learned a lot o lessons along the way by day, chatters, an architect primarily working as a project manager for a nonprofit in Chicago, beside us is a mini blind repair tool. Called many blind are ex ante cells this tool, through Amazon, Dotcom, fulfilled by Amazon program. You get the idea for the two while working a previous job in commercial, realistic is company, was constantly spending money. Replacing damage blinds eager to find a more budget friendly solution. Chad's boss ask him if he could located to on the market. It might repair them, so they would not to replace them each time they were damaged. But after an exhaustive search, I couldn't find anything.

We know how this line goes, even decide it. Maybe he try and make one himself now shouted never done anything like this before and it is not being an expensive and drawn out process. First made a working prototype out of plexiglas. His tool fits around the latter string of many lines and lets people squeeze to essentially straightening out fixing any kinks or bins, but coming up with a design and making it it was only the first step. Even had a patent lawyer do a search to make sure nobody else would have been it's something similar that search cost about. One thousand five hundred dollars once he learned that his invention was in fact unique. He hired that way or to make up some sketches from the prototype and write the application and all that process costs just under five thousand dollars

Two, whole years later, the patent office came back with some questions that needed answering, so he had to pay an additional fifteen hundred dollars for the lawyer to answer them. It took three whole years, but at least he got the patent his idea with his tools that it wouldn't just be used by janitors and commercial cleaning services, but also by apartment, willing, pet owners or appearance of small children. Perhaps who were concerned about getting their security deposit back so even spent another year going to trade shows not like every day just often on throughout the year and go on doing that wish to see if anybody would licence his private

which he was calling many blind. Our acts like a prescription for many binds. You didn't renew both he would just go to the show, walk the floor and asked to talk to people. Unfortunately, that didn't late anything. He then spent another year trying to convince retail stores to carry the product. It still go to trade shows, but this time he spent more time collecting names and following up with the right people, he also made a database of independent hardware stores in cold call them or he would just drop by impersonate local stores to speak to managers in the two years. Since his patent had been approved, chatted found a way to manufacturers product all of those efforts of following up a trade show. Contacts and dropping into hard

stories eventually paid off. At least some white. You thought about a hundred units to the hardware stores and then another thousand units wholesale, but he didn't get any reorder because wholesalers have to charge three times their costs, which then makes the price to high. At that point, he realized either have to give up on this project, which he had now spent several years on or find a way to sell, directly and cut out the middlemen threat that third year post patent process, he started selling online directly to customers through Ebay and Amazon. This is when he began to see real success, at least in terms of sales. He was getting orders every day, but then you have to the fellows order. So he worked his day job and at night you go to the post office. It was fun for a while, but it is also a lot of work, so he finally decided to just like Amazon, do everything and he switched to the fulfilled by Amazon Programme where he would just ship directly to Amazon they ship out to all the customers. He says that figuring out the fulfilled by Amazon model was reasonably simple, at least compared to the years getting the patent and walking the traitor force,

but getting his many blind, our actual to rank high when people were searching and get in front of the right people who needed it required more experimentation. When he first got started, he found it using key words in his title was what brought in the most amount of traffic. But these days Amazon prefers for the title to clearly state that the product is and perhaps who it's for. You says, if you're looking to sell your products using their fulfilled by Amazon Programme, focus on putting together a highly detailed description of your product, clearly explaining who its four and take lots of high quality pictures that will help you stand out and if you're thinking like, while this was a long time to wait, why did you stick with it for so long? His answers?

he'd, never done anything like this before he didn't go into the patent process. Thinking I was gonna be simple, so he just decided to see it through. Looking back, he can identify to make mistakes. The biggest mistake was spending so much money developing the product from the prototype to the two leading to the patent process. He spent almost forty thousand dollars twenty thousand dollars, that was for the product willing and Erasmus for everything else, that patent process, the design that development etc. He also says if he could go back, he wouldn't bother trying to get a patent. It took so long a cost so much after going through the process. He thinks. Maybe it would be better to just be first, not way all that time on the patent. Those are important lessons but, as I mentioned,

have a good outcome. After all this time he has recovered his investment. It's now profitable product, its bringing about fifteen thousand dollars a year in net income and again he's doing this through the fulfilled by Amazon model. There are still some customer service issues yes to handle, but for the most part the business can operate on its own. Many blind. Our acts was not an overnight success by any means, they are definitely things he would do differently if he had a chance to start over, but on the bright side he did make it through the product is out there. He is making money. He has recovered his initial investment of forty thousand dollars to know Nothing in and, of course, it's been a tremendous learning experience. He wishes it hadn't taken so long for those lessons to arrive, not to mention the money, but he knows what to do differently next time. So in the end, perhaps it was worth it. As the saying goes, hindsight is twenty twenty. There are always lessons that can be learned

Don't spend a lot of money and if you don't spend three years waiting for your patent, you can probably look back for at least I can look back on just about every product, extorted and think, and I wish I had done something about differently or I spent a lot of time on something that didn't actually end up having much a result, or maybe I did spend too much money somewhere. Maybe I just went down the wrong path in got distracted, had shiny object syndrome or something so I for she had letting a show the story. It does look like a great power I am glad that in the end he found a way to make it work, not by the way, if you're interested in the fulfilled by Amazon model, we have featured a number of stories on the show of people. Doing this in different ways to have my favorites are from episode one. Seventy, an episode to eighty six Add a reminder you can find any episode of the show by going to sign us, will school dot com forward and then the number that episode rights of one hundred and seventy is Titusville school dot com, one hundred and seventy one hundred and seventy

That is how it is about a numeric family who cooks up a forty thousand dollar project with a house where import business there going something really fine, I'm sure they're businesses actually well past forty thousand dollars now their building a real brand. In an episode to eighty six, that's a woman! cells here, grips earning not only fringe benefits, but also four thousand dollars a month, and I remember appreciate that story in particular because to ever largest target markets are orthodox jewish women and dragons how's that for a fund fact anyway much more to come. Thank you. So much for listening as always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action so much better today show now it's if you'd like to find some quick links to those episodes I just mentioned for check out. The many blind are ex product episode, four zero sex. So those notes are its articles. Four dot com slashed force euro. Six up, you have a wonderful day wherever you are in the world and critical about recital school.