On this podcast, we talk about the inherent virality of outdoor games, how to come up with unique product ideas, the numbers behind a royalty contract/licensing agreement, and so much more!
Tim Swindle is an entrepreneur and investor, helping build and exit multiple companies.
As an early investor and employee at PointDrive, a Chicago-based sales software company, he had roles leading sales, marketing, and operations before the company was acquired in 2016 by LinkedIn.
During this time, Tim created Utter Nonsense, an entertaining card game that was quickly carried by several retailers and ultimately within all 1,800 Target stores. Utter Nonsense was acquired in 2017 by private equity backed PlayMonster.
In 2018 Tim co- founded Playtacular, a boutique publishing company that designs and creates innovative toys and games.
In addition to this, Tim is a Managing Member of Hubbard Street Capital, an early stage venture investing firm. Tim lives in Nashville, with his wife, daughter and very good boy, Tucker.
Scott Brown is the co-founder of Marbles: The Brain Store, a retail concept focused on building better brains through play, which eventually grew to 40 stores, a website, a catalog business and a proprietary product division.
While there, he headed the curation of all store products and formed Marbles: Brain Workshop, overseeing the creation of more than 150 proprietary products. In early 2017 the Marbles brand was acquired by Spin Master.
For the past three years, Scott has served as VP of Creative over Games at Spin Master, helping bring dozens more games to market.
Beginning in January 2020, Scott will be leaving Spin Master to form an independent game publishing studio. Scott lives in Utah along with his wife and four daughters.
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Chase Clymer
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Tim Swindle
My biggest feedback is go talk about your idea, but then also put it into action.
Chase Clymer
Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game.
On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.
I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.
Let's get on with the show.
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. I'm your host, Chase Clymer.
And today we're bringing to the show not one, but two founders of an amazing game. We've got Tim and Scott coming to us from PaddleSmash.
Welcome to the show, gentlemen.
Scott Brown
Thanks, Chase. Nice to be here.
Tim Swindle
Thanks, Chase.
Chase Clymer
Alrighty. So, PaddleSmash. Quickly, let's tell the audience what types of... What products do you guys bring to the market? What are we talking about here? What's the business?
Scott Brown
Yeah, the quick version of this is that it's the love child of Pickleball and Spikeball. So maybe some of your listeners are familiar with both of those games.
Little context, Pickleball [is the] fastest growing sport in North America. It's like a miniature version of tennis and ping pong and [it is] booming right now.
And then Spikeball, I can't pass my local park without seeing a group of kids out playing Spikeball. It's like the round net, hitting with their hands down in.
And we basically have combined the best elements of those games and created a new backyard game that has some of our favorite elements. It's like playing…
Think about playing Spikeball,with paddles and with a net system. That's the quick and dirty version.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Yeah, I've been all over the website, watched a few videos, I think it's a fantastic thing.
Unfortunately, it's getting cold here in Columbus. I'm gonna wait till the spring to bust mine out.
But you guys have a fantastic history in entrepreneurship and games into inventing products, actually. So we'll start with you, Tim.
This isn't your first foray into bringing a product to market. Take me back in time. Where do you want to start this story?
Tim Swindle
Yeah, so we'll start a little over 10 years ago. I was a software entrepreneur, building a B2B software company sales software. And it was venture backed, high-stress, running big teams, burning a ton of cash.
And as a side hustle idea, I wanted to create a board game. I read an article in Inc Magazine about a game called Cards Against Humanity, which most people know about these days.
And it laid out in this article, the blueprint for how these kids took this game to market because they're just a bunch of high school kids right outside of Chicago and that's where I lived. And I have known them through some friends.
And so I read this article, I was like, "Oh, that's interesting. I think I could take this idea for a game." Basically, we've been playing something when we go to lake houses. Groups of friends, late at night, drinking beers, running out of things to do.
And we came up with his game, which ultimately became Utter Nonsense, which is what I created. And it's basically [goes] just like, say funny phrases and silly voices.
It's nothing earth shattering as far as the game goes. But I launched it in the market as a nights and weekends project as I was doing the software company and did a little Kickstarter campaign.
I didn't crush it on Kickstarter. But it did enough to hit our funding goal, and started the ball rolling. So [it was] the first win, I'd like to say.
And then through that, I was introduced to Scott, who at the time owned some retail stores. Then he ended up being the first retailer to carry my game, Utter Nonsense. So that was kind of how I got started in the game space.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Meanwhile, Scott, what were you up to?
Scott Brown
Yeah, meanwhile...
So I got recruited into this venture capital firm called Sandbox Industries in Chicago.
And the premise of this VC was that they were hiring young entrepreneurs, not necessarily with any ideas already but they were giving an office space to them, giving some mentorship and some capital if they liked their idea.
It was a little bit like Shark Tank, but more formalized, but more formalized. So you'd sit in this office space, you'd come with ideas, you present it to the group, and if they liked it enough, they'd give you a little bit of cash to try it out. And so we would do this...
It came to the table with this idea for a Brain Health Store. And people liked it enough that we launched a kiosk at a local mall.
That thing grew to an opportunity in a brick and mortar location in downtown Chicago. And it was sort of just like this test and learn and test and learn. And we kept learning enough that we felt like we could open more stores. It started as a brain health concept.
It evolved to be more of a toy and game concept, because that was what people were buying in our stores. And so ultimately, we grew to have 40 retail locations across the US. And we were like...
It was almost like we were at Kickstarter in brick and mortar retail. So we would look for these small, brand new ideas that we could help bring to market. And we gave a very hands-on experience in our stores that people could come in and try before they bought.
And so I was looking for ideas just like Tim's. So it was this nice fortuitous meeting. He had a brand new idea. I was looking for brand new ideas, and it gave us a nice chance to launch his game. And we hit it off.
We were like, "You know, whatever happens here, like we should figure out something to do together down the road." And that's what brought us ultimately together to do what we were doing. Tim got his game into Target.
He got his game ultimately into a bunch of big mass market retail stores, and was lucky enough to sell that game to a big private equity backed toy and game company. And so he was...
He got out of that game but fell in love with the industry. I sold my chain of stores off as well to a big Canadian company called Spin Master.
And so we both found ourselves with nothing to do anymore, but a passion for the industry. And we're like, "Alright, maybe this is our chance."
And this is what leads us up to where we are now, which is we were looking for ideas and we came across this idea: PaddleSmash.
Chase Clymer
you had both exited your previous kind of things. And you were actively looking for a new passion, a new concept, new business to bring. And you wanted to work together, but you didn't have Pickleball... Sorry, not pickleball.
But paddle Smash, wasn't there yet?
Tim Swindle
That's right. Yeah, we were... Interestingly enough, we were circling around this concept.
So Scott's a really big Pickleball player. I've just kind of dabbled in it. But we know enough to pay attention to what's going on and look for trends. And that's something we've looked for.
In the past, we've launched a couple other things together and it's trying to find trends in the marketplace, social media...
Obviously, what's happening in the news. And you can just see that Pickleball is exploding. And we're trying to figure out what angle to get in there. Because it's like, "You could do paddles, you could do balls. The game itself already exists."
And so we actually had a sketch in one of our brainstorming sessions, where we were trying to come up with a concept. And it ended up being very similar to what is now PaddleSmash.
And not two weeks after we had that brainstorming session, Scott was introduced to a local gentleman in Utah near where he lives, who actually came up with what is now PaddleSmash.
He had actually built a prototype and had been playing with it for a number of years. And so Scott went and took a look at it.
And it was just like, we knew that we wanted something like this, he went and played it, and it was pretty immediate that he was like, "I think this is worth taking a harder look at."
Chase Clymer
That's amazing. I do want to take just a quick step back. I know a lot of our audience listening to this, they want to be entrepreneurs, they have that passion and the ideation, coming up with that idea to run with is something that oftentimes is difficult. So do you have any advice there with how to spot these trends or where to go to get inspiration, anything with that part of the entrepreneurial journey?
Scott Brown
Yeah. So one of the fortuitous things was that my chain of retail stores, I was in the middle of looking for new concepts. So I was constantly having inventors come and pitch to me. And we were coming up with our own ideas.
And it's maybe too easy to say it's formulaic. It's not formulaic, but there is a bit of a recipe for how to come up with ideas. And for the most part, there are no new ingredients.
It's a little bit like cooking where there are no new ingredients. There's just rearranging the ingredients. And that's what it is in the toy industry, certainly. You could pick any game off the shelf and at its core, it's a mix of things that already existed.
So you take Tim's concept, this mix of accents, and there's sort of this arbitrary judge that all came back ultimately to a game called Apples to Apples. And really Cards Against Humanity borrowed its mechanics, from Apples to Apples. They all just kind of borrow these little, these little pieces.
It's like the idea of stealing like an artist. You steal these little elements, and then you use your little artistic ability to mix them up and put them together. And so that's what we were looking to do. We just are trying to put our finger on the pulse of what we're seeing out there.
Like Tim said, Pickleball was taking off. We were like, "There's something here but where... What is it for us?"
And then, Spikeball has been the biggest success story in outdoor games in the last 10 years. My stores were one of the very first retail stores to carry it.
And so I got to watch their rise and learned a lot from what they were doing. It was really an exciting space. And then, the other thing is that we were just looking at the toy industry, the trends in that space, and the outdoor game space was booming and is booming.
Part of it was COVID-related where people were looking for something outdoor and activity to do, but they could do it in their own backyard. So just...
My advice to anyone looking is you just have to keep your ears and eyes open for opportunities. And when you spot them, it doesn't necessarily mean...
So if I saw that there was an opportunity in burger restaurants, you could go smack dab after that. You can say, "Alright. Well, everyone's doing burger restaurants. I'm going to do a burger restaurant."
But what I would advise is you'd say, "Alright. Well, burgers are trending. Korean food is trending. I'm going to do a Korean food burger hybrid." And mix those ingredients together and create something unique. That's at least my take.
Rather than go head on against this really crowded space, you try and come up with something unique there.
I was given advice once that if you're the only one doing something, you're either a genius or an idiot. And I still don't know.
I'd say the jury's out on whether we're geniuses or idiots for doing something unique in the Pickleball space.
We could have gone right after it and created our own paddle brand, and maybe would be having a lot of success.
Certainly there's some very successful paddle brands right now. But it's not what I want to do. It's not what Tim wants to do.
We like to take unique angles, and try and find something that's tangential to the crowded space, but that we can ride the coattails of that space.
Chase Clymer
No, I think that's an amazing advice. And I think that this is gonna be an episode that I definitely refer a lot of people back to when it finally airs.
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Chase Clymer
Alright, so let's fast forward a little bit. You have the idea. You somehow found a local gentleman with a prototype that you go play. What happens from there?
Tim Swindle
So yeah, let me give a little more backstory to this gentleman because he's not only an important piece of the story, it's a cool story as well.
So this guy's name, his name's Joe Bingham. He's an older gentleman with seven kids. Their youngest is probably like 12.
And so he and his kids love playing Pickleball. And like a lot of people right now, they have Pickleball courts. Yes, they're all over the place, but not literally everywhere.
So he had to drive like 20 minutes to go to the nearest Pickleball court, which is now typically crowded because of everybody getting into it. So they're just like, "Ah, that's annoying." And then on top of that...
Well, they used to play Spikeball as well, but they've outgrown it. Again, Joe is a little bit older [and] can't really keep up with his kids.
And Joe happens to be a structural engineer by trade. So he's just a very handy guy who likes to tinker around in his garage. He's familiar and comfortable with a CNC machine or router.
So he starts playing around. He's like, "What can we do in our backyard that we can all play together?"
And so he brings these two concepts together, buy some big sheets of plastic, order some netting, and just basically Frankensteins this thing together, but actually made like a very nice prototype that he, and his family, and his neighbors, and his friends ended up playing this game for like 2 years. And he just really didn't know what to do with it.
And so that was where he was introduced through a mutual friend to Scott, and we ended up licensing the idea. So one thing...
We can just pause here for one second. At least in the toy and game space, there's like a couple different routes you can go.
Sometimes that means being a self publisher. So we are publishing this game in this instance. With my Utter Nonsense game, I created it, but I also published it.
The other route is to go get a royalty. So if you've got an idea where you want to bring it to market, but you don't have the know-how, you don't have the money, the chops, there's people looking for great ideas all the time in this space.
And so if you're able to get a meeting with some of these folks...
It's kinda like what Scott's role was in his past life: Meeting with inventors. If they liked your idea, they'll pay you royalty. And so that's exactly what we did with Joe. So we have a royalty agreement with Joe based on sales. And we're then taking all the risk of...
Because we had a rough prototype from him, he worked out a lot of the kinks in terms of the design and the gameplay, but it was by no means production ready, ready for mass retail.
So we had to start over, get an industrial design and engineering firm to help us create a version that was portable, lightweight, could sit on store shelves, bringing it into the price point that consumers could purchase... All that stuff.
And then manufacturing, sales, all that...
So that's on us. And so we're actually the ones that are bringing this thing to life.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And I guess a follow up question there. And obviously, you don't have to share specifics.
But when you're getting into a licensing agreement like that, you mentioned that one side is assuming a majority of the risk.
So if there's an entrepreneur out there right now, what does a typical deal like that look like? Or what should they be expecting in those conversations?
Scott Brown
Yeah, I'm happy to be transparent here. In the toy industry, it's almost always 5% or less for a brand new inventor.
I'd say 5% is typically kind of a ceiling for a brand new inventor. You can get above that if you have...
Chase Clymer
Because they don't have a track record?
Scott Brown
If you have a track record, if you have brand recognition. So if you could say on your packaging, something like "From the inventor of Scrabble", then that means a lot.
The other thing is if that person had some social proof or some validation of that concept. So if they've already been selling it for a period of time...
And what that allows you to do number one is have more confidence in the idea.
But number two, the games, hopefully are already pretty far along. So you're not having to write the instructions, you're not having to do the graphic work, potentially.
And when that happens, you'll see some licensing deals that are 7% and even up to like 11% or 12%. If it's up to 11% - 12%, it is a big name and it's a game that already has traction.
But yeah, I'd say it's almost always around 5%. I myself have licensed 5 or 6 games, and I get 5%.
Even with my experience in the industry, 5% is very standard.
Chase Clymer
Now that's a fantastic answer. And just the advantage of that is, you're basically done right? You just sit back and collect a check if everything goes according to plan.
Scott Brown
Yeah. So obviously, the upside is, of course, that you don't have to worry about it after that. It's like, clean your hands of it and you get a check every quarter. It's a really nice thing to do.
There are hard parts about it. You lose complete control of your idea. So if it is an idea you feel very passionate about, you don't have any say in what that looks like when it comes to the market.
I have one personal experience with this.
I came up with an idea that I really liked and thought there was a big opportunity around, but I just was swamped with other stuff. And I was like, "I don't have time to bring this to market."
So I pitched it to a big company. They licensed it from me. And they took it in a direction I completely disagreed with. They decided to go after the adult party space. I was like "This is perfect for a tween age kid."
They're like "No. This is adult party."
And I disagreed. But I had no control over it. I had no say in what they did with it. And I will say that as a result I don't think the game did as well as it could have. And so I got small royalty checks, but I had...
It wasn't my decision anymore once I decided to license it off. So it is a decision every single time whether you want to do it yourself or you want to license it off.
If it's something you feel very passionate about and you feel like you have no power around for getting it to market --because it is hard to get again to market-- then try it yourself.
But I think Tim is a really good example of when it makes sense to try it yourself with his game Utter Nonsense. It checked a few boxes.
One, he could make it domestically. Minimizes risk a bit, but I'd say like the big thing there is you can do really small order sizes.
So I don't know how many, Tim, was ordered in your first order. 1000 pieces, you remember?
Tim Swindle
Yeah, something like that.
Scott Brown
It's like 1000 pieces, and what are they? $3 or $4 to produce?
Tim Swindle
Yeah. Probably [it was at] that value. And probably a little more. But yeah, around there.
Scott Brown
So let's say it's $5,000. So your risk is $5,000. If you start doing plastic tooled items and you're doing it overseas, you're in it $20,000 to $30,000 before you even know if someone's going to buy this thing from you.
So I'd say if you're going to go the self publishing route and don't have a lot of industry experience, choose a type of game that's really cheap to produce.
You don't have to tool anything up for [it]. It's always a big decision.
But I'd say generally, licensing is a far safer route to take. You just get a smaller piece of the pie.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Thank you so much for that answer. Let's bring it back now to your game. So you've licensed this product. What now?
Tim Swindle
Yeah. So as I was starting to say, the first thing we had to do was make it so that it was ready for mass retail.
So, for the past year or so we've been in design, working with an engineering firm to create it almost like from the ground up of what he had a version that we can now take to the stores and take to mass market. So we then had to find a manufacturer.
In our case, we have a very large injection molded plastic base, which is not something that a lot of people can do. We almost have no one in the United States that can make this product for us. So we are building it offshore in China. Fortunately we have...
That's where there's little pieces of the story that because of Scott and I's background in this space and just knowing some of the different people to work with, we fortunately have really good relationships with some of these manufacturers overseas.
And so we work with a great company in China that's creating the game for us. Right now, it's manufacturing it. And we just got our first shipment a couple of weeks ago. And so we now live in the market. And it's like a...
I don't know. It was a little bit of a hope and a prayer.
We were like, "Let's just... Let's get this thing out there before we really talk to anybody as far as retailers go." Because we built up a Shopify website, we built up an Amazon listing. So those are the things that obviously we can control our own destiny with.
That's the trend these days. It's that even for direct-to-consumer folks that...
Even for people who want to go into retail, excuse me, it's nice to be able to have this leverage by having your own sites that you can control to get some of that traction that Scott's talking about before you're having these conversations with potential buyers at these retailers. And so that's our strategy.
It's like, "Let's get the reviews going, let's get sales going, let's get the word out there, and then we'll approach some of the retailers that we want to work with."
Well, we diverted from that strategy a little bit and just said, "Eh, screw it. Let's just give it a try. Let's talk to a couple that we'd want to work with. Who knows?"
Well, lo and behold, they all said yes. So [it's] very unusual, to have a product that was pre-launch and pre-revenue get accepted into mass retail.
And so I can speak publicly now that we will be in Dick's Sporting Goods here shortly. And then next spring, we’ll be in SCHEELS, which is like a regional version of Dick's.
And then there's another company called Chicken N Pickle, which is like this eatertainment…
Think of it almost like a Pickleball for...
Like a Topgolf Pickleball concept, where you go eat, play pickleball, etc. But they're exploding in the Midwest in the Southwest.
So those were the 3 that were high on our list as far as companies we want to work with. And we just said, let's see if we can get a meeting.
And fortunately, we're going to be working with all 3 here shortly.
Chase Clymer
Now that's fantastic news. I know that my listeners would be mad at me if I didn't ask this question, which is you're launching this on your own website.
What are the strategies that you're using to get this in front of the end customer through digital channels?
Scott Brown
Yeah. This is our testing phase. [Let's] back up just a little bit.
When we were originally working towards getting this to market, we had hoped to launch it in the spring of 2022. So, call it seven months ago, we hope to have the product ready.
Everything just takes longer than you ever think it will. It always does. And somehow after I've made 160 of these things, I still haven't learned my lesson around how long it always takes. And so we didn't get it until this fall.
And so we said to each other, "Rather than go aggressive, let's use this as a test and learn phase." And so that's what we're doing.
We're trying a bunch of stuff. Some of the stuff, we've been lucky to have some pioneers in this outdoor space that we've been able to be friends with and learn a lot from. Spikeball being one. CROSSNET for those…
Hopefully, some of your listeners have heard of CROSSNET, it's a quickly growing outdoor game that's like a Foursquare meets Volleyball.
Again, the mixing of recipes, mixing of ingredients. They've had a lot of success over the last 3 years.
Chase Clymer
Chris was one of the first 20 guests, I think. .
Scott Brown
Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. So Chris has been a good friend to us and has been helpful and given us a lot of advice.
And one of the things that we've learned from both of them is you just have to get it out. There's this inherent virality to games --and I'd say especially outdoor games.
When you are out playing, people see it and they want to know about it. And so you get a set of... If you take... If I were to take PaddleSmash right now to my local park, invariably, someone would come up and ask me about it. And they want to know more.
And if I'm able to kind of say, "Well yeah, go to this site and get $20 off, and you can buy it." Well, there's a little bit of a snowball effect. And we've already seen that.
So I'm here in Utah, and we said to ourselves, "So let's start in Utah in many ways, and test this snowball effect." So I went to...
Here's all I've done so far. I've gone to one local festival and I went to one event at the local sporting goods retailer SCHEELS, and spent an afternoon on a Saturday showing off the game.
And between those 2 things, I think something like 95% of our sales so far have happened in Utah. And it's just become this like...
I was at the festival for 2 days and enough people saw it, enough people bought it that then when they bought it and started playing it, their friends saw it. There's just this funny thing. You start to see these little pockets form.
And Utah's really right for this for some weird reason. We all know each other. It's like a tight knit community. But Spikeball is the fastest. Spikeball...
It's like the epicenter of Spikeball is here in Utah as well. And so we just spread things quickly. So we're like, "Alright, let's take advantage of me living in Utah and try and use a little bit of that snowball effect." So that's one thing.
We actually have on our site a way to kind of formalize that. We call it PaddleCash and it's basically an ambassador program and our affiliate program.
When you transact on our site and buy our product, you immediately get signed up to be an affiliate. You'll get sent a code that you can use.
And so if you're out playing and someone asks you about it, you can give them $20 off. And if they buy using your code, you'll get $20 back.
So for us, it's just us saying, "Alright, what has worked for these other companies, and it's getting people out to play and giving them an incentive to spread the word and to evangelize for you?" So that's one big thing we're doing.
Tim, you can take some of the others.
Tim Swindle
So we are going the traditional digital marketing route. We have hired an agency that is going to be that's just engaged on the ads for Instagram and Facebook.
So we're getting going with that right now. And then we've also got the Amazon listing and doing an ad program for that as well. So those are the main ones.
We're on this podcast, that's another one. If you noticed, we are doing a podcast tour.
And yeah, I just like to say, we're just trying to increase our surface area of luck.
Luck = find us by getting out there and just spreading the word and evangelizing and hopefully that gets a few sparks going.
Scott Brown
Yeah, one thing we've learned is, we think pickleball... I'm sorry. We think Pickleball is our target audience. Pickleball players.
There's these 2 worlds: Pickleball and Spikeball and our products merged those [audiences] but we're picking one of those as what we think will be the market.
And as such, we're looking for Pickleball players, professional Pickleball players, that we can work with from a sponsorship perspective or product for posts. And so we've got a lot of that in the works right now.
Nothing formalized yet. But [we have] a lot of professional Pickleball players that we will be working with.
For them, it's not competing with their current sponsors. It's like we're not a paddle company. We're not an apparel company trying to come in and take over someone else's sponsorship.
It's something that they can add on to what they're already doing. And so for them, they...
When we talk about it, they're like, "This is great. It's like another thing that is like pickleball. But I can do it without treading on top of current sponsorships."
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. That’s fantastic. And this is a great segue to letting the listeners know where they can go to check out the game, to buy it. If they’re super interested, what should they do?
Tim Swindle
They can go to paddlesmash.com or find us on Amazon. We’re live on both of those.
I would say as much as people who probably understand the economics of direct-to-consumer, paddlesmash.com would probably be more preferable. (laughs)
Slowly, we will be in select stores like Dick’s next Spring. We’ll announce other locations
But for sure, paddlesmash.com. Or find us on Amazon.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Now, is there anything that I forgot to ask you about that you will leave with our listeners before we go?
Scott Brown
I don’t think so. I’m trying to think if we missed anything. I think we covered it all. You did a good job. Yeah. It’s.. Here’s what I’ll leave you with. I’ve made…
Like I said, I think I’ve made 160 games in my career…
And maybe it’s a recency bias but I don’t think so. I think this is my favorite that I ever made. There’s just always…
Every time I come up with a game, there’s this period when it’s out in the market where I’m like, “Is this good?” I forget if it’s good. And I felt that with this.
It was like after a year of working on it, you’re like “Is this even fun?” And I gotta…
I’ve gotten it back out, and we go to my brother-in-law’s house, and play with nieces and nephews, and it’s genuinely a great time.
People stopped playing Pickleball, and they’d come over, and they’ll start playing this, and it’s like…
It is really a great fun activity so it’s just like…
I think the overarching message that I want to say to your listeners is find something you love to do. It makes it so much more fun when you’re selling something you love.
And so when I’m out there slinging this thing, I am having a ton of fun and feel passion for it. So it makes it a lot easier.
Tim Swindle
I’m gonna. I thought of something. Sorry. I’ll just give you advice. Unwarranted and unasked for advice for the listeners.
Scott and I both meet with a lot of wannabe entrepreneurs, wantrepreneurs, and the one thing we realized is that they just want to talk about their idea. But even then, they’re hesitant to talk about their idea. And that’s…
I guess my biggest feedback is [to] go talk about your idea and then put it into action. It’s like signing an NDA, things like that…
Nobody cares about your idea like you do. And so go out there, get that wall of feedback from people outside of your family and friends, because all your family and friends are going to tell you that your idea is great so that’s not good feedback.
You want to talk to people that don’t know you, have never worked with you… Try to just get that raw feedback on your idea to understand if you really have something --[It will] cost you nothing-- before you even try to start thinking about the next step.
But definitely [take] the next steps also. You just gotta jump in. You just gotta jump in.
Chase Clymer
I love that. That’s amazing advice. Tim and Scott, this was an awesome interview. I can’t thank you guys enough for coming on the show today.
Scott Brown
Thanks, Chase. Thanks for having us.
Tim Swindle
Thanks, Chase.
Chase Clymer
We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes.
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