Getting That Business Idea Out Of Your Head And Making It Work For You.

Everything starts out as an idea, and everybody has at least one good idea. What seperates the sheep from the flock is the ability to turn a business idea into an entity. You will never know if your business ideas will be a success until you put them to work. From prototyping to patenting Matt and Brandon share their views and experience to help you finally get that business idea from your head and into reality. They also talk about the best ways to protect your ideas and businesses and how the automated business model works at this level.

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Links from the show:

• Alibaba.com
• Café Press
• Elance
• Odesk
• Patents.google.com
• Yahoo
• Bing
• Google
• US Patent and Trademark Office
• Google Adwords
• Legal Zoom
• CAD

Transcript:

Welcome to Automate My Small Business where we show you how to set up and run your own automated business on the cheap. So get ready to take back your life and add a little spice. It’s time to build something automated.

MATT: Hello and welcome to episode #11 of Automate My Small Business. I’m Matt.

BRANDON: And this is Brandon.

MATT: And today we have a great show about developing products. Well, before we get started with that, let’s kind of check in see what we’ve been doing. What have you been up to, Brandon?

BRANDON: Well, let’s see. I just got to through the patent process on my latest product development so that’s actually good timing that we’re talking about this product development and kind of goes hand in hand with patent protection, you know, the details of that. How about you, Matt, what’s going on?

MATT: I took a trip up to Yosemite with my wife and we went to take some pictures and the dogs saw their first deer so they were really excited about that, really just kind of relaxing these last couple of days and then a little bit of a headache with some shipping stuff. I had some supply chain problems and so I end up having to ship a few things out of my house and it just reminded me how much I love my fulfillment company. I’m glad I have that resolved now so I don’t have to do that anymore. But for a couple of days, I have to ship some stuff and I was just, reminded me how bad that used to be.

BRANDON: Yeah, I’ve gone through that a couple of times. It’s a headache, especially when you have a supplier that is so consistent over and over again and then all of a sudden they’re just not there and you’re going, “Wait a minute. What happened? Everything breaks down.”

MATT: Yeah.

BRANDON: And you got to jump in even though you know you try to set up all the systems to be so fluid and automated but every once in a while the wrench gets thrown in there.

MATT: Things just got delayed a little bit and everything is good now but a couple of days makes a difference.

BRANDON: Yeah. Well, today we’re talking about product development and you know I have a lot of friends and family members who listen to our podcast and watch what we’re doing and I hear very commonly you know, “Oh I think that’s a great way to run a business but I just don’t have a good idea or I just don’t know what I would do.”

And you know there are a lot of opportunities out there and my gut reaction to most of that is it doesn’t matter what you do. Because the first one or first few may not necessarily be the perfect product or the perfect service but learning the process of going through and building or designing the product or putting the business plan or business model together, I think, is more important and more valuable than anything. So I think that’s something to keep in mind here as we go through our product development.

MATT: Yeah, we definitely didn’t succeed both of us on our first product. So …

BRANDON: Oh, yeah. I’ve failed many times the first few times and I’m proud to say it because it’s because of those experiences that I can talk to you guys about the things that we’re talking about and bring that experience to you so that you’d hopefully don’t do the same things but I think it’s almost necessary that we all kind of trip and fall a few times to see how the real world works and kind of see how a real business can run profitably.

You know you might learn that there are just certain things that seemed to be a good idea, certain business ideas might seemed to be the next Google or something like that and you start to realize you know maybe I should take this in a different way or have a different angle at it that makes it a lot more reasonable and so I think we’re going to talk about some of those ideas today.

MATT: Yeah, so even though you don’t need the perfect idea, you still need an idea. So let’s talk a little bit about how we go about coming up with those ideas and what do we do in our daily lives that allow us to look at things and look for new opportunities.

BRANDON: Yeah, well, you know I have that kind of way of looking at life where if I see a problem or a solution that has a problem that could have fit hand in hand with you know you kind of want make mental note of that and it’s very common for all of us to say, “Oh, wouldn’t that be great if this was a product or wouldn’t that be great if my laundry can itself.” You know so whatever the problem might be you make up some idea of why you think that’d be a good idea but most people stop right there.

MATT: Actually I think most people try to think of a solution right there and I like to try to separate that problem from the solution so if I just notice a problem in my daily life, I just want to record the problem because whatever solution I come up with right at that moment it’s probably not going to be the optimal solution. So if I just write it down, keep that problem somewhere and just look at it every time and you know weeks or months or years later, maybe I’ll look at a different way with the new perspective and say, “Oh now I know the perfect way to solve that problem.”

BRANDON: You’re absolutely right. I’ve had ideas that had been boiling or just kind of simmering, I should say, for years that I haven’t moved on because the full solution hasn’t really come to me or the right business model hasn’t come to me but I might write down in my idea notebook which I think is a good thing to have and to keep is an idea notebook.

If you write down an idea and you know you think somehow this will be a good business or great opportunity but right now I just don’t know how it would work or how I can get the costs down to make it work or how I might be able to market it so it could work.

MATT: Or even the market is not ready for it yet.

BRANDON: Or the market is not ready for it which is actually very common. My first business which I can say failed was back in 2001 where I developed and designed a product. You can kind of imagine that being an iPod but it was along the lines of a VCR sized entertainment system that was basically to download music and play it in your home as an entertainment device. And …

MATT: Kind of like a little mini jukebox for you.

BRANDON: A little jukebox, right. And so I developed this back in 2001 when digital music was being ripped and pirated all over the place as we all remember but that was kind of the thing. And I developed this prototype based on this idea and went very far with it only to learn that this was an industry that first of all had a lot of capital intensive parts you have to pretty much fund up front.

It was very difficult to get into that business, not to mention the copyright issues that we’re going about which brings me to the point which is at that time, copyright issues were flying, legal issues were flying all over the place. There was no settled legal court case that was saying it was okay to even own digital music in the form of you know being able to download it.

So even if I did have the product all done and have it capitalized, the market wasn’t ready at the time. And clearly as we can see from the years behind us now, Apple definitely took the right approach and was able to get the studios to come together and sell music digitally downloadable and all that. They had the power to do it. I didn’t. But that’s good example of maybe you have a great idea but the market is not there yet.

MATT: Okay. So we talked about capturing some of those ideas and the problems and the opportunities that we see in daily life. What do you do like should I kind of keep it secret? I kind of always like to bounce my ideas off to someone.

BRANDON: Yeah, I think it’s a common myth. There might be a lot of people that would disagree with me but the myth is you have to hold your ideas very, very close to you and never tell anybody. As if somebody is going to take your idea and figure out how to build a business around it and somehow profit off of it without you ever knowing or you know take it from underneath you.

MATT: I guess conceptually it’s possible so I mean…

BRANDON: Oh, absolutely it’s conceptually possible and by all means it has happened before. No doubt about it. The real truth of it though is it’s very, very rare that it would happen because ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s not the idea that’s so valuable; it’s the person being able to execute that idea. As we all know, all of us have ideas all the time and you know I have uncles and aunts and family members that all say, “Oh, I have this great idea.” But have any of them done anything about them? No. None of them have.

I have dozens for friends that have all this ideas but have any of them done anything about them? No. The real rarity is the person that executes on them. So the chance of somebody taking your idea and executing on them is rare. Now the chance of you sharing that idea with them and them actually coming back to you with some good ideas is very likely. So I think the trade off is a good trade off. I’d rather share the idea and get some good feedback from somebody who might have some good insight or maybe even a contact or a network of people I could take the idea further with than to worry about it.

MATT: Yeah, I’d even go another step and share it with my potential customers and try to figure out if they like it and get feedback from the people I’m going to eventually try to sell this to. You know my peers, my mentors, and things like that are great but no one’s going to tell me more what they want than the people who are going to try to buy it.

BRANDON: Absolutely and that brings us to kind of the next stage here if you can get to find out some market research and find out how to analyze your ideas and learn what the market wants, one of the best ways to do that is through you know customer surveys, getting some information about what competitors are out there, some industry data.

MATT: I think looking at competitors is really important and a lot of people make the misconception that they want to find the product that they have no competitors or no one else is doing this.

BRANDON: First to market, right?

MATT: Yes, first to market and you know you could make a lot of money if you’re first to market but you can also lose a lot of money and spend a lot of money trying to educate buyers of what you’re building if there’s no pre-existing market for that.

BRANDON: Yeah, that’s so true. You know it’s funny I used to think that first to market was the place to be. I now have changed my tune on that and I’d like industries or markets that have competitors. I’d say two or three is a good one. Two probably is good but especially competitors that you’ve identified as weak competitors, mainly because they have a great product but they are just, they’re not really marketing that well or sometimes they don’t even have a website that you know or they’ll local company that hasn’t reached out past their county.

MATT: Or they’re trying to serve everyone and you see a specific niche within that market or they’re marketing doing niche and you think you can make it more general, right?

BRANDON: Right, or they’re over pricing they’re product and you know you can make the product a fraction.

MATT: Although over pricing as we both know might be a sign that you can get in there and make some good profits as well.

BRANDON: Oh, yeah. That’s what I’m saying. It’s a great thing to see when you have a competitor that’s overpriced and you know that you can make it cheaper. Even if this was like a service business, if you see competitors that are just not being customer focused or they just aren’t ever getting back to the customers. If they’re not responding to their emails maybe it’s a company you’re a customer of and you’re thinking, “God, I could do this so much better than they’re doing.”

MATT: Yeah, that’s really close to like my electronics business I created was you know I needed this product and I knew they existed out there. Like I search on Google and I search and I search and just couldn’t find anything, which is why I started that business and that was my competitive advantage.

There are people that produce this in you know very large electronics companies but no one would do marketing or you know optimizing your product with search engines and those are really my competitive advantage.

BRANDON: You know the Alibaba story is a good example of how you can find product that are poorly marketed. Alibaba.com is one of our favorites, I think we’ve talked about it in the past. It’s a website that you can get products very inexpensively mainly high volume though. You have to buy a couple hundred of them or more. Sometimes a couple of thousands depending on the price but we’re basically able to purchase product from say China or Asia or India and you go to and see this products and you’d be surprised they have some great products ready to sell, already packaged with you name. You can have your name logo and everything put on them and they just don’t know how to market well.

MATT: That kind of brings us into the whole build versus buy discussion and you know if you decide to go with the buy a product, branding it with your own brand name and kind of OEMing it is a great way to distinguish yourself from whatever else is out there and people selling the same product because you can make it look different or have your brand name and then you’re slightly differentiating yourself and you might be able to charge a little bit more for that new brand name that didn’t exist before.

BRANDON: Yeah and it’s a great way to get into the business without putting too much capital in because if you don’t have to build and design the product from scratch. That may not be your long term goal but you could get just started and it can get your cash flowing pretty quickly. In fact, tell us your story, Matt. You found a product that you were going to build and you found it in China and were able to sell it and you were able to cash flow within a month, right?

MATT: Yeah, I mean basically I was looking at manufacturing PCBs and all the different electronics manufacturing stuff and I kind of run into some stumbling blocks as I was trying to do that and I started looking around for some different ideas and I found Alibaba website and you know there were people that were building probably 80 – 90 percent of what I wanted to build and so I just kind of said, “Well, maybe I don’t need those other features. I can just try it out and sell this.” And like you said, within you know a month, I was profitable selling things online you know.

Alibaba is a really good site for finding that sort of stuff. There are some scams on there so be careful. Verify the people that you’re buying from but you can get some really great deals and one way to really get started—since all the suppliers really want orders of 200, 1000 and things like that, the trick that I used when I started was I said, “Oh, I just want a sample of like 25 or 50 of your units, can you send me that and then I’ll decide if I want to buy more?” And most of them will do that and that’s enough to get started and get cash flowing.

BRANDON: Right and it gives you also an idea of whether there’s a market for the product so you don’t have to spend too much money up front to know if the product sells.

MATT: Yeah. Now, the cons of like just going out and buying a product is that you’re going to have lower margins than if you’re building it yourself because you’re going to have competitors that might be selling the exact same product. And as whatever product this is, it gets more and more popular that margin is going to go towards zero because people are just going to keep lowering and lowering their price and you’re going to have competitors that are buying millions of these things. That’s the downside of buying something.

BRANDON: Yeah, I like to use it as kind of the first six, eight months of building a business. You’re probably going to want to test the market using somebody else’s product and then if you find that it’s really a great product and it selling well, you can make the decision whether you want to continue reselling somebody else’s product or build something better with better feature. Maybe your customers are saying, “Hey, I wish it was smaller or I wish it was lighter or you know different features.”

And now you’re the one in the driver seat because you’re getting feedback from customers saying exactly what they want and maybe the people who are building the product for you aren’t listening to their customers. And now you’re going to be in the position to get a better product out there on the market, now that you have cash flow coming in you can maybe afford to build some tooling or get an engineer to design a new widget of some sort. So yeah, it’s kind of a good strategy to go.

MATT: Exactly. So once you kind of got that product out there and selling and you get all this feedback and now you decide you want to build, what are the pros like why do I want to build my own product?

BRANDON: Well, the margins are just so much better if you’re building on your own which everybody knows but when I say build it on your own, I in no way mean you hire people in an office to stand in an assembly line and build it you know, these parts go with these part. Absolutely not.

MATT: You mean that you’re going to hire some other manufacturing company to build something unique for you, right?

BRANDON: That’s right. If you guys are long term listeners of Automate My Small Business, you guys understand that we try to outsource as much as possible, really to keep our overhead low and to keep the business scalable so if it did ever take off, we have no problems with getting our product in the thousands or millions if we needed to without having to ever hire a single person beyond that.

So when I say build, that’s what I mean. If you’re going to go ahead and build it, you’re going to need to probably find sources for certain parts. You’re going to need to get whole sale price and not go buy it by retail. Although if it’s in the very, very early stages by all means go find you know. You’ll catch me at Home Depot all the time picking parts off the shelf just to see if I can put them together and build something.

MATT: Yeah, I mean, that’s really how you started, I mean, your first couple things that you build, you went to Home Depot and nailed and glued them together and …

BRANDON: Right. I mean whatever it takes to get a prototype put together and we’ll talk a little bit more about that process. But you’re going to want to get good pricing and you know you got to get a reseller license so that you’re not paying tax because if you call up a supplier that makes, oh I don’t know, screws. You know screws are probably a part a lot of things have. You know they’re going to say, “Hey, we need to charge you tax unless you have a resell permit.”

And for those of you that don’t know how that works, as long as you’re reselling the product that you’re buying from them, you’re a reseller and you don’t have to pay tax so it’s only the end user that pays the sales tax.

MATT: One other option that we might want to talk about is kind of the mixture between building and buying. You kind of look at these as platforms and I think a great example of that is the iPhone. Everyone kind of recognizes that the iPhone is the combination of an mp3 player and a phone but I mean it’s made so many other things obsolete, right, like the little level tool where you have little bubble level or a calculator or you know I use my iPhone as my guitar tuner now.

All these things were products that someone had where they could have built a whole physical device. But they looked and they found a platform that provided 75 percent of functionality and they went out and implemented that 25 percent. You can do these on all kinds of different industries. But I think finding a platform and standing on the shoulders of others is a great way to kind of get the best of both worlds.

BRANDON: Yeah, absolutely and there’s a lot of opportunities for businesses to use other businesses to create very quick cash flowing businesses. For example, I think this last week we had a commentor on our website, I think it was Joel who said he was in a t-shirt business and he was you know running his wheels as he was trying to get the t-shirt business off the ground. You know he thought he was doing everything right by going to India and getting some assembly put together and you know using the outsourcing tips and tricks.

And one of my suggestions was maybe there’s a website like Café Press. Café Press takes all of that headache out of this equation because they’re basically printing the t-shirts for you and they ship the t-shirts for you and even give you a website that you could brand yourself and you can put your designs on and they’ll do all off the business side of things. All you got to do is come up with a creative designs and its clever way to you know get a business started right away.

MATT: And you can always move to doing you know more of it in your own system after you get that up, right?

BRANDON: Yeah, I think we even got a follow up comment, I think it was even today, saying, “Thanks guys for your tips.” But there are some textures that he was wanting to have and some stitches that he likes that he doesn’t think Café Press could give. So clearly it’s not the most customized way to go but you’re at least cash flowing with the business that has something were you’re selling something, you’re getting feedback from customers, you’re having that quick iterative cycle that is so necessary at the early stages of any business.

Once you get that cycle kind of going and the wheel is turning, you can build enough cash flow going forward to venture out and do a little bit more customization. You can drop the Café Press model and move to a more customized model where you’re hiring contract manufacturers in India doing it for you. But if that’s too big of a bite to chew off, you might want to step back and take a look at a quicker way into the industry.

MATT: Yeah, I mean as we’re analyzing these ideas, you need to look both at the short term and at the long term way that you’re going to do things. You’re not going to end up with this full production system right off the bat or at least you shouldn’t. You should do the minimum you need to do to get it cash flowing and selling and then you can iterate on that. You know we keep coming back to iterate, iterate, iterate. Do a little bit. Measure how well it’s going. Make some adjustments and then iterate again.

BRANDON: Yeah, that’s pretty much the bottom line and the theme here of building the business to get up and running quickly.

MATT: Hey, don’t try to hit home right at the beginning, right?

BRANDON: Yeah, I call it elephant hunting. You don’t want do elephant hunting. You know there are entrepreneurs that do it and they do it well. There are very few that are successful at it. But there are a lot more success stories for people that can start small, build up cash flow, build off of that, get successful from that, build a lifestyle that they like instead of IPO investors calling you every weekend asking you to come in every weekend kind of lifestyle. So there’s all that.

MATT: So when you look at the various options with you know manufacturing a product, build versus buy versus some mixture of the two, the research that we need to do about the idea, figuring out competitors if they’re there. The other thing that we look at is the capital requirements for this, right? Both in the short term and the long term and how profitable we think it’s going to be. You have a great metric that you use to measure all your ideas. You want to share that?

BRANDON: Yeah, you know basically if you’re going to build a product you’re going to have to assume that the retail price is going to be about five times the cost that you’re going to be building with that.

MATT: That’s the cost of goods, right?

BRANDON: Yeah, the cost of goods. That’s surprising to a lot of people, you know, if you walk to any sort of store and you see a computer or even a door, a window at Home Depot and you see that it’s a $100, it’s actually $20 that made that door or window. And so it’s a big mark up but everybody needs their cut along the way.

MATT: Right. You got your sales people taking the cut. You got you know your distributor, the middle…

BRANDON: Exactly.

MATT: Yeah, whoever is …

BRANDON: And the retailer, the retailer needs about 40 or 50 percent. The distributor takes about 30 percent of that, any sales people under them. You know, if you have manufacturers rep they will take about 5 percent of that. So you’re down to pretty much nickels and dimes by the time you get your cut. And that’s one of the reasons why I think retail is the last place you want to go because the margins are so much better direct to the consumer using internet and then also if you’re catalog and through TV and infomercials and things like that. You know a lot of people I think feel like they’re not successful with their product unless it’s in a hundred stores or something and I disagree. I think it’s successful if you’re selling them online, you know.

MATT: Yeah.

BRANDON: You know a hundred a day or a hundred a month even. So it depends on your margins.

MATT: Yeah, when you’re trying to figure out that multiplier, the best you can do estimate where your production cost are going to be. Not necessarily the prototype class where you might be buying stuff at retail to assemble things together, right.

BRANDON: Right. Another requirement you have to think about when you’re trying to estimate capital that would be required, your advertising costs are going to be a good portion of it. I’ve been using Google Adwords or well over a couple of years now. I get about anywhere from 1 to 3 percent conversion rate which you can calculate how much dollars that means per sale. And you know you get a real quick idea of how many dollars you need to spend when you’re advertising even online and you know that those dollars are affected because they’re easily measurable especially with Google Adwords. But you have to put that in there.

MATT: Yeah, you really want to look if you’re in competitive market or not, right. Because you know there are some key words where it’s going to cost you 25¢ a click and other one is going to cost you $2-$3 a click. So that could have a huge impact on your profitability if you know you’re in a very, very competitive industry.

BRANDON: Yeah and you know Matt and I have different experiences. I think with your electronics product, you were finding that the cost of the advertising for that product was just not covering the margins that you needed.

MATT: Yeah. It definitely was not the most successful way for us to get customers.

BRANDON: So you kind of ended up pushing towards more organic marketing strategy versus Pay Per Click.

MATT: Right. Organic and getting links in certain forums and reviews and things like that.

BRANDON: Right. Whereas I have a different experience, you know. It all just kind of depends on the product and the market and what the competition is paying for their advertising and so it turned out that advertising on Google Adwords was a good investment. The ratio turned out to be good. I mean it was like every $1 I’d spend on advertising, I’d make $4 in profit. So clearly you want to increase that as much as possible.

So those are the kind of things that you can figure out by using the keyword tools and Google and finding out what competitiors are paying for the keywords. We can show you a little bit more about that in our video series when you sign up for our newsletter. As they come out, we’ll be sending those out to you guys.

MATT: Yeah. So you know I’ve captured some great idea I had, I’ve gone through the process of analyzing it and I feel pretty good that I have a good product and there’s a good market for it and it’s going to be profitable for me to make it, what’s the next step?

BRANDON: Well, absolutely, you guys got to prototype, prototype, prototype. You learn so much from prototyping. It’s just unreal. And you never think you do, you never think that it’s worth the time. You never think that it is you know that you’re going to be getting as much out of it as you would just sitting down and thinking and putting on paper. But I’m telling you, it surprises me every time I do it. You prototype something and you come up with new ideas so randomly. You just can’t predict that you’re going to have that kind of thought unless you just go and put the idea into a physical prototype.

MATT: This is also the point where you’re going to find out some of your assumptions that you may have in your analyzing phase were wrong.

BRANDON: Exactly. And this is where iteration comes again. You’re going to cycle back all the way to the beginning a few times before you figure out whether you have a successful product or not. So in order to stick with our message, one of our pillars is to fail fast, fail small, and succeed big. This is part of it.

You want to get the prototype done so that you can see that the product you had was a complete failure and you change it all around and it’s going to be a completely different product and it will send you back to square one but you did it in a week. You didn’t take a year, two years. You did it in one week. You did it in a couple of days or you did it, maybe it took you a month whatever. But it’s not years of your life, right?

MATT: Right.

BRANDON: This is very, very important. So you get this done. You get this prototype put together and you use things off the shelf, you go to Home Depot, you can make it out of wood, you make—whatever it takes. People make it out of clay even the big guys do this: GM, GE, Ford, all these guys, they make their prototypes out of clay, you know. They do it in the CAD you know if they have an engineer, they can do CAD models of it. CAD is good because it’s quick and easy and doesn’t cost anything.

MATT: And it’s easy to outsource.

BRANDON: And it’s easy to outsource so you know, one of the things that I would recommend if you wanted to get an idea of the ground very quickly and you had just couple of hundred bucks you have to play with, get a designer. Get a mechanical engineer off of Elance.

MATT: Or an industrial designer, right?

BRANDON: Or an industrial designer or off of Odesk. And you know for $200-$300 you’ll be able to get a CAD model of your idea and you know what, they’re going to have so many new ideas that you haven’t thought of. It’s going to be worth their price just by having them do it and having their suggestions put into the model.

MATT: One of the other things you’ll get from that is probably the bill of materials that will give you a better idea of the cost of the final thing.

BRANDON: That’s right. So when you go through your bill of materials which is basically a list of all the parts that are going to be required in your idea, you’re going to go and get prices of what those are going to cost you because this is a critical part in finding out whether this product is going to fly you know. Is this going to be manufacturable at a low cost, low enough that it could be profitable.

And so you’re going to have to get real good at finding parts through Google. Really understand how to search using some of the search operators that Google has. If you’re not doing this already, Matt, go ahead and tell them the minus, the plus.

MATT: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you guys search on Google, if you have minus sign before a word, that will say you know I want all the results except for ones that include whatever you put after the minus sign. You know sometimes you find a site that you know they have the products that you want. They have thousands of products but they’re search functionality just sucks on their site. You can actually have Google or Bing or Yahoo built through the search that just show you results from one site. You do that by putting the words site:sitename. So I just want to search you know abc.com, I’d put site:abc.com.

BRANDON: And the last one I’d say as the essential is the quotation mark. If you put quotes on anything of like a phrase or two words or three words together, you’re going to get only the pages half to have those words together.

MATT: The other one I used is the plus sign which means you know don’t try to break it apart, don’t try to make suggestions that you know, did you really mean this other word. Use the word that exactly as I said. Sometimes you get some weird part names and Google wants to say I think you meant this other thing so I added a hundred million results that you didn’t want.

BRANDON: Right. So I do this all the time when I’m looking for new parts or alternate parts you know. Let’s say I’m looking for a rubber gromate, you know, that fits into a hole that I need 2 ½ inches exactly diameter. So in Google, I’ll put you know rubber gromate, maybe I’ll put rubber gromate in quotes so that I don’t get rubber condoms or rope gromates, you know. I just want rubber gromates. So I’ll put rubber gromates in quotes and then I’ll put 2 inches and not use the quote mark for inches because Google doesn’t understand that. But you put 2.5 inches and hopefully the website has that measurement on it and they’ll pick it off.

And I’ll put minus patent because a lot of the search terms when you’re searching for parts have patents that are related to it and you don’t want to get a list of patents that are related to a part that you’re looking for. You just want to find somebody that makes that parts. So I’ll put minus patent on there so that it filters out all the websites about you know the part getting patented and all that. I might put another minus in there saying minus rope, right. Because if I’m finding that a lot of them are rope gromates which is a common selling part, I don’t want to use a rope gromate. So I’ll put minus rope because it’s showing up a lot.

So these kind of things once you get really good at it, you can really find parts that are really, really deep into the internet world that you wouldn’t normally get off the surface if you just you know were an average person looking at Britney Spears.

MATT: Yeah.

BRANDON: That’s a common term. So you don’t need to do any sort of manipulation but we’re looking for stuff that is so far deep in the internet, you really need to get good at these operators.

MATT: Okay so you found your parts, you get them you know. Are you going to assemble them yourself? Are you going to hire someone out? I know you can do both. I think you build your own, right?

BRANDON: Well, I like to build my own prototypes. There are companies that will do prototypes for you. They’re a little pricey and if you’re not good at it, it’s clear you should rely on somebody that knows how to do it. Maybe you have a plastic part that you want to have made. Maybe down the road, not necessarily right away and you know you go to company that does plastic injection molding or you go to somebody that does vacuum forming. You mention your idea to him and sit down and they’ll say you know it would be much better if you did it this way because we can make it twice as fast and probably half the cost and also you’re getting feedback from them and they could probably prototype it for you, you know. It depends on the product. For example, I needed a box made so I called up my box guy and he hand-made it or if you’re going to a trade show, sometimes I go trade show, I say, “hey I need, I have a display or something.” They’ll hand make it and a lot of times they’ll do it for free just because they want your business. So …

MATT: Yeah. I mean I use this similar approach with remodeling my house. I had a bunch of contractors come out and give me quotes about things and you know every contractor came out and gave me a new idea about a different way to do something or you know I should add some lighting here or do something different. So maybe you’re familiar with that in your home.

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: You do the same thing with your business idea.

BRANDON: And so part of the prototyping process is to not only get a part or design put together so that it’s functioning but it’s also how do I get the part or product to be assembled and manufactured for less. So you might come across ideas that would eliminate parts all together or combine two parts into one or they might be some labor cost that you’re trying to avoid. You kind of want to get rid of anything that requires screws or fasteners.

MATT: Right. Like you might have assembly that’s a little bit more expensive to produce material wise but if it saves you a couple hours of human labor, that might be a profitable thing to do.

BRANDON: Yeah. Labor turns out to be probably the number one cost ratio wise most of the time. Some parts have no labor and they’re just a part.

MATT: I still think all cost are labor costs.

BRANDON: That’s true. I mean eventually if somebody is having to put their time into it. Otherwise it’s really kind of just material out of the ground, isn’t it?

MATT: Even that is labor, right? Someone had to get it out of the ground otherwise it’s free.

BRANDON: That’s true. So along those lines you might even think, “whoa, how about the customer assemble it?” I mean Ikea is just known for this…

MATT: That’s a great example.

BRANDON: Ikea figured out a great business model. They figured “how about we just put the furniture in a box all flat pack and we don’t do any assembly, and the customer comes, takes the box home and assembles the whole thing for us.” They take out the entire labor cost and put it off for the customer. It’s a fantastic business model. I mean you know if you’re okay with assembling your own furniture and …

MATT: Which millions of people apparently are.

BRANDON: And they’ve made a billion dollar business out of it. So you know those are the kind of things that maybe you can consider. If you can’t figure out how to get the labor cost out, maybe the customers are okay with it.

MATT: So it’s one really, really, probably the most important point that we need to make about prototyping is once you built your prototype and you have you know something functional that is kind of your future product, sell it to somebody. You can’t sell your prototype you’re not going to be able to sell anything else. And once you sell it, you get even more feedback.

BRANDON: Yeah. You might think it’s not a complete product and I think we’ve talked about this before but when you’re selling it on the internet and you kind of make it clear that this is kind of a new product, you can even call it a beta product if you wanted to. People buy it. They want it. They want the functionality. They don’t mind that it’s half baked and you know you may not get the full price for it but you’re going to get customers and you’re going to get feedback or you may not get any customers. Maybe nobody buys it but they might say something on the website like, “Hey I like the idea. I’d get it if it had this or if you got rid of that part, I’d buy it.”

MATT: If you get no customers, you just saved yourself a lot of money because you didn’t spend thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to do a full production run on something that no one wants.

BRANDON: Right. So you know basic theme here is you know prototype quickly, learn quickly, and then you know fail fast, fail small, and succeed big so that you can get that iteration going through and through until you finally find what work.

MATT: Yeah. My first iteration I probably just do the bare minimum, whatever the minimum out of functionality is that I could call it whatever my idea was. I wouldn’t try to do any of the fancy extra ideas that I had, I just try to get the minimum thing out there and try to sell that and get feedback as soon as I could.

BRANDON: Yeah and going out with an open mind, there might be some businesses out there like Café Press where it takes all the hard work out of it and you’re making lower margins but you get your product out there immediately you know, especially in a digital world, for digital products, it’s much easier to do. I mean even if it was a Photoshop version of the product, maybe you can get feedback off of that. Whatever you can do, you know, just think outside the box. There are lots of opportunities.

MATT: Yeah, I was just kind of reading back through the 4-Hour Workweek, the new edition that just came out and I saw that Tim Ferris used to put up products before he even had them on his website, right. So that’s his prototype. He has this Photoshop image of something or description of something, and he tries to sell it and if it sells he says, “Oh, sorry we’re out of stock right now. Come back later.”

BRANDON: Yeah, which by the way could be a great experiment to see if the product is a marketable product. There are some laws here that you can’t break, which is you can’t take their credit card especially you can’t charge it without having a product. But I think the law states that you’re not allowed to accept payment knowing that you have nothing to ship and so what he does is he says, “Alright, they’re going to click the buy button but without me taking their credit card or any sort of payment.” They buy button is pretty much a buy. He counts that as a buy so he’ll say at that point, “Sorry, we’re back ordered or we don’t have the product. We’ll take your email address or if you leave your email address, we’ll let you know if we have more.” That’s not illegal.

That’s actually very common. They did that back in the catalog days when they’d run ads in the paper and catalog and they’d put an 800 number and if the customer called the 800 number, it would be considered a buy or an order taken and they would tell them the same thing. So you know, “we don’t have a product but thank you for calling.” And you know they would do that just to test the market or products back 30 years ago, they did that.

MATT: Or we’re sold out. Unusual demand.

BRANDON: Yeah, anything I mean you don’t want to be deceitful. You want to let the customer know that you know this is kind of an early stage product and we’d like any feedback. Maybe you ask them for their feedback at that point. You know make them part of the solution. You know sometimes they’re very happy to give that. So…

MATT: Okay, so I had my idea. I’ve analyzed it. I’ve proven the business kicks for my idea. I’ve gone through a couple of rounds of prototyping and selling my prototypes and I’ve really proven there’s some demand and I’ve made my product better and I have you know a much better product now than when I started with my original idea. Let’s talk about patents.

BRANDON: Yeah, you know, patents are an interesting animal. I would say that there’s a lot of myth around patents also because people know about them, they know what they do but they don’t really know any details of it. So there’s lots of misinformation I’d say about patents. First of all, patents are not the end all be all. There’s a lot of gray area. There’s a lot of ways to get around patents so let’s say you had an idea and you found a patent that was something similar. There’s so much to do to not only get around the design of a patent, but there’s ways to find prior art. I’ll tell you a little bit about what that is in a second.

But just know you know patents are more like trading chips to be honest, you know. It’s like those war masks that the warriors wore to scare off the enemy or the competition, right? It’s really just a way to kind of beat your chest and say, “Hey, I was here first and you know get out of here,” you know and hopefully they’ll listen, right? And if they don’t then there’s a big litigation and everybody loses money on lawyers. And nobody really wants to go to that point so unless there’s some real money to be made and they’re willing to give up a lot of money which in many cases there are and you hear it in the news all the time.

The patents rarely get used, so know that upfront. You know a patent is nice to have. It cost a lot of money. It’s about $10,000. You can get it done for little less if you want but usually comes out to be $10,000.

MATT: Well, there’s really two types of patents, right? A full patent cost $10,000 but a provisional patent is closer to what, like $200?

BRANDON: Right. Yeah. That brings up a fantastic point. So knowing that a full patent cost $10,000 and you’ll very rarely ever use it. You probably would like to go with a much less expensive way to protect your idea that can kind of get you where you need to go. So you mentioned a provisional patent. A provisional patent is basically you know they use to say is you can send yourself a drawing of your idea and never open the envelope. They don’t do that anymore nor do that…

MATT: I don’t know that they ever do that. I think that was an urban myth.

BRANDON: Well, maybe that’s an urban myth but it’s kind of same concept. Here we are you have an idea, you sketch it out on paper, you kind of describe it to your best ability and you file a provisional patent and you need to do this before one year is up after you’ve made your idea public.

MATT: And this is important. So you know when I was first starting out, I went through you know generating idea, analyze the idea and then I went out and got my provisional patent and then I went to prototyping and my idea completely changed because of the things I discovered in prototyping. So make sure you’re getting your provisional patent after you’ve done your prototyping and after you’ve sold a couple of your products and figure out a way that it’s really going to be.

BRANDON: Yeah. You kind of want to wait until you do your provisional patent because it buys you time after the provisional patent. It gives you a whole year to get the full patent filed.

MATT: That’s a really good point. I’ll say that again because once you filed that provisional patent, you have to get the full patent within a year, right?

BRANDON: That’s right.

MATT: Or else it’s a public domain idea and you can’t get a patent after that.

BRANDON: Yeah. You’re completely barred from ever getting a patent and so is everybody else. So that idea is now public domain and there’s nobody able to have a patent on it. So you don’t want to necessarily get a provisional patent right away. I’m sure there’s plenty of patentattorneys that would disagree because they feel like you know the most protection is the earliest protection which is absolutely true in a technical sense but …

MATT: Unless your product changes I mean now you have to get another one.

BRANDON: Right. Exactly. So now you know in a more practical sense you want to first make sure your idea is complete. You’ve gone through your prototyping stage and you got something you really think that’s saleable. And then you sell it. You actually sell the idea without getting a patent on it. I know that sounds so odd and weird but this is one of the things that I think the general public, the laymen don’t understand about patents, is you want to actually get a good idea that this is going to be worth patenting because down the road it’s going to be costing you a lot of money.

MATT: Yeah.

BRANDON: So once you realized that it’s worth patenting, you go ahead and get your provisional patent. It cost around $200, maybe $230 I think with all the fees, and you can do it yourself. You go to US PTO, the US Patent and Trademark Office, uspto.gov. You can do it yourself. Yes, it’s a little technical with all the secure certificates you have to install in your computer to get it working but you know once you get through all that, you basically have a log in and a password to the uspto.gov website and you file your provisional patent and that could be short as a one page figure and a description with the covering letter on the top and it’s all uploaded digitally. You never even have to use paper. From that point on you get one year.

Well, since you could have sold that a year before that, you actually could get one year from the time you go public with the idea to get your provisional patent. Then you get one year after that to file your full patent and that’s when you have to really make sure that you have something worth patenting because you’re going to spend at least $10,000 on a full patent. But the good thing is you get to back date that full patent. The date that is essentially effective of that patent to the date you filed your provisional patent. It’s good that you get this provisional patent in because you can get the date posted on the full patent all the way back to the time that you put provisional patent in, and that’s worth it a lot. Because if somebody came out with an idea similar to yours, and it happened during that one year when you had your provisional patent in but you didn’t get your full patent filed, you can pretty much prove that you had that idea first by having the provisional patent already filed. So that’s good to have and it’s only about $200 to do.

MATT: Okay, so you mentioned other ideas and other patents, let’s talk about fire art and you know all the things that you need to search as you’re trying to figure out if you should file a patent or provisional patent.

BRANDON: You know some basics about what a patent is, pretty much you need to prove to the patent office that you are the first to have the idea and that it’s a novel idea. It’s not an obvious idea. It’s actually something new and novel. And in order to show that you are the first, there needs to be no prior art. So prior art is basically defined by an idea that somebody came up with that anybody in the art of that industry would not already have known or could come up with obviously you know. If you came up with a pink door knob, you know, just because nobody has made a pink door knob, doesn’t mean that that’s not obvious you know so somebody that’s in the art of making door knobs.

Prior art would basically include anything like articles written, research papers, anything that’s been on the internet which basically now with the internet being the way it is and growing as fast as it is, there’s pretty much nothing that’s new. And if you do have something new, it’s going to be difficult to show that. But you know there are new ideas but what it also tells you is if anybody comes to you after you started making the business with your product and it comes to you and says that you’re infringing on their patent. One of the defenses you have is to say, “Well, I don’t necessarily agree your patent is all that new. In fact, I have a research paper from the University of Chicago or University of Illinois that says somebody wrote a thesis on this exact idea back in 1978 and your patent is in 1999.”

So you know if you did a little digging, you can actually prove that somebody’s patent is invalid which not only gets you off the hook but it actually invalidates their patent altogether and they don’t want that. And so in lot of times, people they’ll settle out of court because they realize that you could actually do damage and take their patent away from them. So you know these are the little tricks and tips you know your patent attorney might set down with you and tell you about certain litigation tricks that they have. So these are things to think of though when you’re wanting to protect your idea. Don’t go out and spend a bunch of money on a patent attorney until you really know that you have a profitable idea. It’s something that a lot of people make a mistake of because they feel like they can’t go forward with their idea even if they don’t even have a prototype. They feel like they can’t go forward with an idea until they have it protected and that is just not true. There’s just so much money got spent on that kind of stuff and it’s not necessary until you realized you have a product that’s successful.

MATT: And even if you don’t agree with us you know you can still get the provisional patent for pretty cheap.

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: We just think it’s a waste of money to get it before you know what you’re really going to build.

BRANDON: Right. And you know like I said before, a lot of patent attorneys might disagree with me on that because they’re very you know conservative. They want to make sure that you’re protected from day one and I just don’t think it’s practical. So that’s my 2¢ on that.

MATT: I just think your idea is going to change so much in the prototyping phase that you’re going to be you know different.

BRANDON: That’s right. So you know, a little bit more, you know you will want to probably do a quick patent search on your idea. It’s probably one of the first things you’ll do. You know if you have an idea you probably going to say, “Hey, I wonder if anybody else’s have this.” Not that it would stop you for the reasons I mentioned before but you know you’re going to go to patents.google.com. Google has a fantastic archive of every patent out there. They got together with the patent office and said, “Hey, we want to archive all this,” and they teamed up and do the fantastic job. It’s actually free. You know you type in patents in the Google search and you know there’s about two dozen patent websites out there that want to sell you archive patents and you don’t need to, you’d get it for free right at Google, patents.google.com.

MATT: And if you don’t want to search yourself, you can find someone to search for you. I know Legal Zoom…

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: … do some patent searching for you. I’d only recommend them to do the searching for you and not the actual file the provisional patent. Because as I learned when I did that, all they did was copy what I put in their website into a word doc and said, “Hey, thanks a lot. That’d be $200.”

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: So don’t go with them for actually filing it but I think they did a good job for you for searching, right?

BRANDON: You know you did have a bad experience with them but you know if you really didn’t want to go through all the hassle, I guess if you had an extra $200 and you don’t want to deal with all the electronic certificates that I mentioned before and if you’re not real techie, maybe having somebody like Legal Zoom do it for you is worth the $200 but that’s up to you to decide.

But you know so it goes like this. You do your free search with Google then if you want really deep searches like something that maybe you didn’t pick up on Google, you go to Legal Zoom get you know for $300 I think they’ll give you a full search and it’s really nothing big. I mean it’s not a huge value because all they’re going to do is do the same thing you did. It’s just that somebody that’s doing it has done it before so they kind of know how to search through Google patents and find the ones to pull out and then they put it in a binder and send it to you.

But to really get a deep search and to also get an opinion as to whether you’ll be infringing you’d have to get a patent attorney. You’d actually get a practicing lawyer and a legal opinion is not cheap. It’s going to cost you a couple of thousand dollars.

MATT: You want to explain what a legal opinion is?

BRANDON: Yeah, a legal opinion even though the term seems very unauthoritative, it is very authoritative. It’s actually a very high level of opinion to get from any attorney and then the attorney would tell you that if you ask for their opinion, they say, “Are you sure you want me to give you my legal opinion?”

Because what that basically means is that they’re going to put their entire career on the line because they’re going to put on a letter in writing that their opinion is for their research and their knowledge of the law is this and so you actually have a defensible piece of paper.

MATT: It’s basically a game plan if you ever had to defend that in court.

BRANDON: Yeah, if you needed to defend yourself, you could say, “Hey, I have a legal opinion here from an attorney that says this.” And so you know, it carries some weight. It’s pretty weighty. So you can get that done if you really want to you know make sure that you’re not infringing before you go spending thousands of dollars which I actually, I’ve done recently.

I was getting to the point where I was going to spend a lot of money on some tooling on a product that I was making and I didn’t want to go spend $20,000 on tooling if it’s going to be an infringing patent product that somebody’s going to come after me and try to sue me for. So I got an attorney to give me a legal opinion and that’s exactly what it’s for.

MATT: So that’s patents. You know, if you’re in the information business or software business or things like that, you know, patents they don’t apply to you. In digital business and accounting creation and you know if you’re making ebooks or you know software for your business then you’re going to start looking at copyrights because software and text and music and all things like that are copyrightable and not patentable. So that’s another thing you might want to look at and I think the last part is trademark.

BRANDON: Yeah. If you start a business and you come up with a good name, I’d say a good first step is to go to the US PTO you know, United States Patent and Trademark Office, do a quick boolean search for the trademark which just takes you five seconds to type it in and see if somebody trademark your name already. You know that doesn’t mean you can’t use it because it depends on what it’s used for if it’s a different industry, you can still use it if it’s being used I believe in a different state.

MATT: No. Trademarks are federal. Basically they’re trying to protect the consumer so that the consumer doesn’t get confused. So if like anybody can prove that you’re somehow confusing the customer with your trademark by using a similar name then you can get sued for it. And I think you know Monster Cable is like one of the most aggressive companies out there that they sue anyone that you know has the name Monster in their company names so you might want to avoid certain words.

Even if you’re in the right, it still going to cost you a lot of money in legal fees. I think there was like a Monster Miniature Golf and like in New Hampshire somewhere they got sued and spend like $200,000 in legal fees to try to defend themselves.

BRANDON: Right. And you know that it’s ironic that you try to find website domains that have keywords that people would search for if they wanted to find a product such as yours that you are selling, and yet when you trademark the name, you really don’t have an ability to trademark common terms or common words that might describe the product by themselves. An experience I have recently was I was using the word Porch Potty in my trademark and those are two words that would have commonly been used to describe the product. And so when I went and filed for the trademark, it was denied because it was too commonly used words so I’m not able to get it registered under a certain level of trademark but I could drop that level down to I think they call it a supplemental trademark and I can get that registered that way.

If you can’t get it registered, the secondary way to use it as a trademark is to instead of the little circle with the R in the middle, you can put a little TM next to it. And basically what that’s saying out to the world is, “look I consider this my trademark. I don’t have it registered but this is a name that’s near and dear to me and I don’t want anybody else using it. But it’s not registered and it’s not something that I can protect other than using it in that sense.”

MATT: Yeah, there’s different levels, right, like you could register your logo and things like that being different from the actual words, right.

BRANDON: Right, that’s true and so you know there are certain terms and words that you just would never get away with like Coca-Cola. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to spell it with a little script or just spelling it out the words, Coca-Cola is basically nailed down. Nobody’s going to be using that. So there’s that and then if you can get with just the plain text of the trademark, that’s a higher level. So that’s something you want to go for but if you can’t get it, you might have to go with the actual design of the trademark.

MATT: Okay so disclaimer that neither of us are lawyers and if you really want to know the truth, talk to an intellectual property lawyer, right?

BRANDON: Yeah. They know this stuff pretty well.

MATT: Okay. So we came up with a great idea. We analyzed our idea. We did some rounds of prototyping and going back through and revising our idea. We sold it to people. We proved that we have a profitable idea and we’ve gotten a provisional patent. So what’s next?

BRANDON: You got to go out and make it. Maybe you can get it manufactured and you keeping this in mind the whole way through here, you know, as the product development goes through you’re basically always have the manufacture ability in mind because in the end if you can’t manufacture it for the price you need to get it done to, it’s not going to be viable in the market place and maybe your prices aren’t going to jibe. So this is important and so I would recommend for anybody wanting to do some product development to just get some basic knowledge of some manufacturing methods.

You know if your product is made of plastic, go and learn a little bit about injection molding or blow molding or vacuum forming. Go and learn about plastic extrusions or profile extrusions. If you’re using sheet metal, you know, there are a lot of methods to cutting the sheet metal. There’s CNC machines that cut it you know custom shapes or there’s stamping which is basically large machines come down and stamp out certain shapes and then they get bent and formed and they use bending and forming machines. If you’ve ever been on the floor of a manufacturer that does this, you could get a good sense real quick about how you can make products. I mean a lot of stuff is made with plastic as well all know and it’s a very easy material to form and to almost anything you need.

But you know think about your barbecue out in your backyard or if you have a stainless steel oven or stove top. That’s all made up of sheet metal and you know that sheet metal is basically stamped and formed and bent and then they polish the corners to make it look nice after the do a little of welding on it you know. So there’s a lot of products that use sheet metal. Electronics is a common you know. You’re going to have to learn about PCBs which are Printed Circuit Boards.

MATT: I mean the ability to get Printed Circuit Boards manufacturers is actually come down a lot and it’s very commoditized so you can kind of have them print out a bunch of different circuit board for you. And at first when you’re doing your prototyping, you’re probably going to be hand soldering some of your components or having someone hand solder them for you but as you get in production, you’re looking for automatic placement machines where the machine will actually place all your components and kind of do all soldering with like one baking in an oven. And so they kind of mass produced all these things and you’ll learn all about those processes.

BRANDON: And there’s a lot companies that do this as an assembly line process that you know I think Flextronics comes to mind. They’re the largest.

MATT: There’s a ton of them when you get down online. I mean basically once you have your circuit design everything, and your bill of materials, you can send those to a manufacturer in China or Canada or in the US here and they’ll within like a week or two they’ll ship you a full lot of your circuit boards. It’s pretty amazing.

BRANDON: Yeah. There’s a lot of people out there that are in the business of doing this for you. Again, I can’t stress this enough, don’t do this all yourself. You know there’s plenty of people that can help you and keep your cost low and still even though you think that this might cost a lot of money.

MATT: Yeah, I mean you have to pay them but they’re doing this in such scale that you’re going to be able to do it any cheaper with your kind of your lower level of capacity, right?

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: So you’re getting the benefits of this giant company doing it but you’re not really paying that much more for it. And then you know those are all the physical products. If you have you know a digital product that you need to go out and build, hire coders or hire authors to write some content or whatever you’re trying to build, just keep building it with those guys and outsource all that.

BRANDON: Yeah. You know and that’s the whole cycle. Your product development cycle is from concept to manufacturing and a hundred iterations again and again inside of that so I think we covered a lot.

MATT: And again with all these steps, look for places that you can get outside help or outsource to people or contract with the people that we’re talking about.

BRANDON: Yeah. If anybody has any questions about all these or if they disagree with us, send us an email or shoot as a comment on our website.

MATT: Or call us you know on our new phone number that’s on our website.

BRANDON: Yeah and we are opening up our website to more of a you know a newsletter and membership so I think we’re going to be offering a lot more to our listeners and we even have an ebook we’re putting together and it’s going to be coming out soon. So if you want to know more and get deep information about all this, sign up on our newsletter.

MATT: Or if you have something you really want us to cover in the ebook that you know you still have some time to influence it. So shoot us an email or give us feedback on one of the ways that we’ve given you.

BRANDON: And we’ll see you next time. Thanks for listening.

You’ve been listening to Automate My Small Business. We hope you enjoyed this episode. To get a list of the links we’ve just talked about or download more episodes and How-To videos, go to automatemysmallbusiness.com. Thanks for being with us and catch us next time on Automate My Small Business Podcast.

Podcast music features, “Nothing’s Got Me” by Big Bad Sun, distributed by Magnatune and licensed under Creative Commons. The Automate My Small Business podcast is engineered by Vincent Furlong and transcribed by Flo Umali. And licensed under Creative Commons Attribution No Derivative Works license and may be freely distributed to share with friends, co-workers and strangers.

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