Dale Backus on lessons learned building SmallHD to a market leader, selling and starting again.

Chris Whyte (: 00:00

Hello and welcome to the Design Journeys podcast. I'm your host, Chris Whyte. And in this podcast series, we explore the career journeys of founders and leaders from the world of physical product design. In today's episode, I'm joined by Dale Backus, founder and CEO at Ohsnap, the phone grip that doesn't suck. Dale, welcome to the podcast.

Dale Backus (: 00:17

Hey, thanks for having me. Good to be here.

Chris Whyte (: 00:19

Yep, good to have you as well. so now I'm going to do my best to introduce you here. So please do jump in and correct me when I inevitably get something wrong. But so, so basically we move back backwards. So as I said, you founded O Snap in 2019, which is a mobile accessory business. And your flagship product is a phone grip that connects all snaps with magnets to the back of a mobile phone.

And you've recently moved from direct customer model and into retail. So we can talk around some of the challenges around that later on, but you're projecting $20 million in sales this year and you employ 20 staff. So for something that launched just less than five years ago, that's a terrific achievement, Dale. So prior to this, though, the achievements aren't done. You co -founded Small HD, having previously won an award

with your video agency to have a Doritos advert, live the flavor featured at the 41st Super Bowl in the commercial breaks. So small HD, you co -founded it from your basement, it says here and with zero dollars and zero experience to the leading brand for onsets, cinema monitors. So again, quite achievement and even more of achievement when we learn that

you did actually go through a traditional kind of product design or engineering backgrounds. You're from a marketing kind of background. So again, loads of impact there. You sold the business a few years into launch, that we continued with them for over 11 and that obviously brings us up to date. so yeah, things I'd like to go through on this, obviously we'll talk through your career history. We'll kind of go through kind of that initial kind of kind of

Dale Backus (: 01:52

No.

Chris Whyte (: 02:15

How did you get into product from the marketing aspect? Talk about kind of launching small HD, selling it, and then launching OSNAP. And also the differences there between kind of the different business models going from a highly technical, kind of high value, high quality product through to something much more kind of very high quality, would say, volumes wise somewhat different there. And also the retail aspect of that as well.

Dale Backus (: 02:34

Mm

Chris Whyte (: 02:44

And then we've mentioned previously when we met to discuss this, you believe there's three core areas that are important that you execute well in that being product marketing or branding and operations. So we'll get into that. And then obviously we will touch on the retail piece as well. So is there anything I've missed there or kind of excellent? Right. No edits then from this moment forward. We'll get into it.

Dale Backus (: 03:06

I don't think so. I don't think so.

Chris Whyte (: 03:13

So let's rewind the clock then, All I've got here is, and I think this is correct, you didn't go through a traditional, I'll do that in air quotes, but a traditional kind of technical background, technical kind of qualifications. You did your high school diploma, I guess. then how did you then get into, well, was kind of video agency, ad creation, wasn't it? Kind of your first kind of real career, I guess. But how did that come about?

Dale Backus (: 03:42

Yeah, I've always been technical. As a young kid on, know, I just, I've just always enjoyed creating things, right? What are you just the process of creation in general, bringing things in the world from your, from your brain. But then in high school, you know, I got, I got involved in just media. I just found it, you know, I got a little, you know, DV, you know,

video camera and I was filming like skate videos with my buddies and just a random other thing, school projects, whatever. was just like really, really into at the time what I was doing was pretty advanced and you know, was, and so I kind of got a thrill from it, but that was just sort of a, and then I met sort of my best friend who, who his, had a strong aptitude and passion for video creation and he was doing things like way ahead of his time.

back in like the early early: 2000

you know, they were, they were doing some crazy stuff. doing like, you know, matrix came out and they were doing like bullet time videos and stuff like that. I mean, we're talking 25 years ago. you know, it was pretty impressive. And so, and you know, me being technical, them being technical, it was, it was just kind of a good match. And so that's kind of that put me on that trajectory. So after high school, we set out to create a little video agency, just kind of felt like a good fit. And, and that was, you know, I mean, we were.

20 years old, right? it was an emerging sort of digital content media brand back then was rare. everyone doing like commercials and whatever was way bigger. And these sort of independent studio thing was pretty rare at the time because you needed a lot of money and capital to have big expensive equipment. Anyway, so my technical background and sort of passion allowed me to sort of figure out ways to advance our

production quality on a budget, right? It's just like, was just so I could go into this in great depth, I won't. But like, there was just a lot of really cool things that we were doing to kind of push the envelope, you know, very cost effectively, started doing, you know, ads, like locally for like car dealerships and, and, you know, just a bunch of like law firms, just kind of like corporate videos and stuff, which was pretty boring and very unsatisfying, and very hard to win jobs. And then this Doritos thing came around and it was just like, hey, we just created

we get to control the creative process and make our own ad for whatever we see fit and submit it and hey, maybe it goes well. And so we did that in a very short period of time. I found that the thing like four days before the deadline. over a weekend, stayed up all night, concepted it, went out and shot it locally in the day and then edited it and ended up winning that contest. And this is like...

very early days in this idea of consumer generated content was the term because before then there was really no such thing. No one really had the capability to create content using consumer hardware and all that kind of stuff. You had to be a big studio with big equipment. And so that propelled the agency, agency in quotes, further into getting some regional work and things. And that really put a pressure on our production quality and our ability to output high quality content.

And so I was, you know, constantly inventing all these little things like, you know, lens adapters to make the image quality look good, you know, uncompressed video recorders that were like wearable. So you could, you know, bypassive in camera compression. So the output would be, so you could grade the footage better and things. And this is all very like, you know, bleeding edge stuff at the time at that budget. And one of those things that I built was a monitor because

amera which ultimately became: 1080

that product, were like, this is actually like, you know, I think this is interesting, right? There's something here because this product doesn't exist. And I know there's a need for it, right? Cause we were in the industry enough at that point, back then everything was in forums. You know, there were some big video forums out there, like DVinfo and things like that, that people would, you know, kind of talk about these things. And I was like, hey, we're building this thing. People were like, that's really cool. So anyway, we built like 10 of them. was, I it was a piece of crap really, but like it, I mean, literally the buttons on it were like,

rivets like steel rivets that we grinded down. Like was, it was, know, like bent sheet metal and all this crazy stuff. But you know, worked and we sold some of them on eBay and they actually started selling and we were like, okay, well this actually seems like a fun business. So let's, pivot the agency to this because I like the model a lot more. I started to realize of building one product and selling that product multiple times instead of the agency model, which is like build one product, sell one product, build one product, sell one product.

Chris Whyte (: 08:55

Yeah.

Dale Backus (: 09:18

and so that, that sort of led into that and that's, that's what started small HD and I'll let you, ask any questions before I go in that whole story. Cause that's a, that's a pretty big. Yeah.

Chris Whyte (: 09:27

That's great. So first question, do you have any of the original prototypes for the first small HD? Yeah.

Dale Backus (: 09:35

Yeah, I'm sure we do somewhere. Yeah, probably, you know, my co -founder's dad's basement still probably. But yeah, I know we do somewhere, yeah.

Chris Whyte (: 09:42

Yeah.

quite a bit looking back at that's quite the journey isn't it from that kind of nuts and bolts kind of rivets in your case kind of early stage thing to where it ended up because it yeah.

Dale Backus (: 09:56

Yep. Yeah. And that was my first foray into like product design, know, physical product design. And again, not having been educated on this at all, you know, having to learn CAD and, you know, manufacturing and electronics and all this kind of stuff, right. It was, was a huge learning curve, right. So that first part was pretty indicative of, you know, our starting skillset. But it got a lot better over the years.

Chris Whyte (: 10:20

So you'd sold 10 units on eBay, you got a bit of interest and I guess a bit of capital behind you from that. What happened next? mean, was it still just yourself and the co -founder or had you decided to build a team at this point?

Dale Backus (: 10:35

Now it was still pretty much he and I, we, you know, his brother was involved, you know, helping out in various ways. And then once we realized that this had potential, we scrapped that entire design. Cause the trick with monitors is the screen displays themselves, right? It's a weird market where, you know, you want the highest quality display, but the people that make the highest quality displays don't sell them in units of like batches

right? Like you have to have huge order quantities or a specific contract or whatever. So we were basically having to go out there and source, you know, in the, we call the gray market, which is just like excess inventory. And like there's these brokers exist in, you know, Hong Kong and, know, over there in general, where you could just kind of like buy a little box of LCDs and, and, and so we found this one panel, was a nine and seven 20 P panel.

found a circuit board, this is all before Alibaba, this all before really like, this is, don't even know honestly how I found these people back then, but like some weird websites. anyway, so we found this candidate panel and then we redesigned the whole product. I taught myself SolidWorks so I could, because before that I was using this thing called, God, what was it called? It's like basically all sheet metal and it wasn't even 3D, you could like, you could draw it out in 2D and then preview it in 3D, but you couldn't actually edit in 3D. Emachine Shop, I think is it was called.

And it was like, know, turnkey so you could like, you know, draw a piece of sheet metal and then they would make it. So I taught myself SolidWorks. We found a machine shop here locally. It was actually in the family of my co -founder. And we milled a, like CNC'd a case. It was much higher quality. It still janky in a lot of ways. Cause you know, we didn't really know much about injection molding at the time and all this kind of stuff. But anyway, built the first real product called the DP -1. And we launched that like officially as SmallHD.

ember the year anymore, maybe: 2008

Chris Whyte (: 12:51

Yeah.

And did you, I imagine you used your kind of your video agency background to help market this product as well. Kind of, it's quite a handy kind of skill set to have actually kind of adding on the mechanical design side is quite good.

Dale Backus (: 13:13

Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. think you're starting a business, having some media confidence is really beneficial no matter what you're doing, right? Like being able to create a website, make the thing look, we always looked bigger than we were, right? And that's always been an asset of ours, still is today. you know, and that's, I just have always understand the, and appreciated the importance of, you know, just the brand aspect, the visual aspect, just being able to look.

inspire confidence or instill confidence in people that you're not some janky little startup in a basement, which we were. Especially in industry like that where you're dealing with professionals who's, you know, these pieces of equipment are usually their lifeline, right? Like if you're a monitor on a set and that monitor fails, well now everyone on set, 50 people are looking at you like, hey, you know, why aren't you doing your job? it's a high, a lot of these are high pressure situations where people are spending 10, 20, 50, $100 ,000 a day to have something.

you know, go through a lens and go on a sensor and ultimately record and the monitor store the window into that. So yeah, it was a weird business to choose for the first product company because it's a miracle that we ended up being the brand leader in the space considering, I mean, where we started and the sort of stakes of the industry, you know, and the technicality of it.

Chris Whyte (: 14:31

Yeah, massively, massively. And what were the kind of the main challenges for you then? Or some of the kind of the because there were lots because you were learning kind of new stuff every day, I imagine. what were some of the kind of the key challenges that you you overcome? You look back, think, yeah, really proud of myself for doing that.

Dale Backus (: 14:53

Yeah. God, man. There's, there's a thousand of them, right? I mean, I look back at this story all the time and I, I, when I'm talking to people and I'm just like, it is like, we, we should have failed, probably 50 different times, like distinctly 50 different times for, for one reason or another, right? But, the hardest part really was figuring out the software.

You know, like it's, it's not too difficult to, to cobble together like an LCD driver board or main board and an LCD and put it in a mechanical housing. Right. That's not that hard. There's a lot of off the shelf components. The first, the first monitor I'm talking about the DP one, we were literally buying TV driver boards. were like, this, but they were like really wide. and so to get it to fit in behind this nine inch panel, we literally had to band saw the PCB like a third of it off.

And just kind of like file down the edge to make sure it wasn't short on itself. that's the lengths we were going through just to get this thing to work because we didn't have the capability or money to like, do anything custom. And so, and then the software aspect became a, it was a massive hurdle like for the first like five years of the business because these monitors aren't just monitors, they're like tools. have to all these real time software tools that the color has to be really, really accurate. Everyone.

and people in this industry are so critical of color. So the color has to be good, is the LCD itself has to be a certain capability, but then the software, the driver has to be, have to understand the inputs the right way and do the conversions the right way so that it looks the right way on the target panel. And then there's all these tools like waveform and histograms and vector scopes and frame guides and all these other things that are off to be real time.

frame accurate, low latency tools. And so the architectures we were using at the time were these like consumer TV, know, pieces of hardware that didn't have this capability. And so it was like, okay, after we did the DP1, we started to realize all this. We were like, okay, people are asking for these features. This thing can't do it. So how are we gonna go do it? And that was a huge, huge stepping stone for us or sort of learning curve and challenge for us was how do we build the next thing that's that.

that so has these tools, was capable of this. And the next version of product actually didn't, it was called the DP6, it was a 5 .6 inch monitor 720p. And that was actually the thing that really propelled the business, like forexed us overnight because so unique in form factor, like it was a really small, at the time it was by far the smallest highest resolution monitor in the world. We just found this really cool panel, this five inch 720p panel, I forget what it was used for, it was designed for like a little freaking, like a weird mini laptop thing by Fujitsu or something.

and, and, and we had to go figure out how to make it have an SDI input, which is like this sort of professional input standard. It's like HDMI, but it's like a single BNC. So it's like a two conductor interface. So it's very high frequency. And so you have to have like, we had to have a completely separate subsystem to handle that input, which then would convert it into essentially HDMI. So the main board could actually handle and process and put it on the display. And we had to go figure out how to do that. and you know, so I found this Chinese company.

t out. You know, this is like: 2009

FPGA level, FPGA is like a type of processor. It's basically like a GPU, but it's like freeform essentially, and it's really hard to develop on these things. But it's the only thing I can, at the time, could do like the real time video processing we needed to do the waveforms and whatever. So I had to build an engineering team, which in itself is a saga. mean, God, man, when you're a tiny company trying to hire like high -end developers, right? Like imagine the sort of, you know, employment fiasco and just sort of like,

you know, talent acquisition and maintenance there. And, and ultimately though, we, developed our first in -house product called the DP7, which was like really capable display. It was very unique architecture. It actually had an arm on the arm processor in parallel to the pair of the FPGA, which gave it a really, we were able to build this really nice UI again, leveraging the marketing background and understanding user experience. We were able to kind of take this very stodgy industry that was so technical and everything had knobs on it. Everything was just.

like an old like, you know, DOS interface, like we were able to build this very, very custom, like high end UI that really innovated in lot of key areas. Product took way longer. The analogy I like to use for this is, you know, the Steve Jobs story of where, you know, Apple too was a massive success, grew the company tremendously. And he was like, you know what, we're going to go build this Lisa thing. right. Lisa was like this, his like big project that he wanted to do everything. He's like, me now, because I have this, all this capability and all these engineers.

I want to build this like amazing thing that can do it all. And it was like $10 ,000 and ended up being this over bloated piece of hardware that no one wanted. And it was ultimately a failure, right? And that was sort of my Lisa moment where the DP7 wasn't a failure, but it took like three years to develop way longer than it should have almost killed the company. Cause I was spending so much money on developers and engineers to try and get that we, we, we overdesigned the hell out of it. And, and it took so long and cost so much money and nearly bankrupt us.

but ultimately got it out. And there's a funny story in source slash challenge in there where we were like two years in or two and a half years in the development of the DP7. was clearly gonna take more time. We already had the panel sourced and we already had this other product we had launched in the DP6, which is the one I mentioned earlier. And we were like, okay, guys, we're gonna run out of money. We have like four months of cash left and then we're done. Can't make payroll. And that was one those moments where it's like, yeah, I don't know. How the hell do we get out of this? And so I was like, you know what we can do?

We'll take the DP6 architecture, like main boards, PCBs essentially, and we'll take the panels from the new product, the DP7, which at the time we had an OLED panel, was the first small OLED panel in the world. It was a 7 .7 inch, 8P OLED panel, brand new, it was so janky to work with, was horrible, and it was from Samsung, so of course you didn't have any developer support to figure it all out. So we had to make all these weird little interface boards. Anyway, so.

Chris Whyte (: 21:18

Wow.

Dale Backus (: 21:33

I was like, we're going to take these things, we're going to put them together in a monitor series called AC7, AC7 OLED. They're going to be like, you know, high value, like attractive price point products are just, Hey, here's a nice form factor product that's inexpensive for the independent filmmaker that has an OLED screen. And we basically cobbled that thing together in three months. So we had like, had the idea to do this in like, I feel like it was September and we launched it in like November or December.

which is crazy, like, we had to develop circuit boards for it, we had to figure out all the housing stuff, which was injection molded, so injection molds are just longer development times, so anyway, cobbled together, launched the product, it was successful, it did quite well actually, and that gave us the cash we needed to get to the DP7 launch, so there's a few examples in there, I could go through like 10 more, but there's this constantly in business, especially when you're I would say pedigreed.

Chris Whyte (: 22:03

That is rapid.

Dale Backus (: 22:30

Right? And you're just a bunch of kids trying to figure things out. You know, and you don't, you're not funded, right? Everything, small and she never raised a dime of capital, right? So it was always had to be self -funded. We have, we were able ultimately to get some lines of credit by basically putting our houses up for collateral. But it wasn't that much. And, and you know, was a, was very cash intensive business. The inventory was the people, the teams required, and we were completely vertically integrated too, because that's just what we knew how to do. All the assembly was done in house.

Chris Whyte (: 22:50

Yeah.

Dale Backus (: 22:58

All the marketing was done at house, all the development was done at house, all the operations and shipping and fulfillment was the repair was done at house, everything was done at house. It required a lot of people. Like you said, we're 20 people today at $20 million. When SmallHD was at $20 million, we had like 40, 50 people. So was very expensive, yeah. So a lot of lessons.

Chris Whyte (: 23:15

wow.

Yeah, sounds like kind of comparing where you are now to where you've been. You've taken some of those lessons and yet to get to 20 million with 20 staff. That's that's a huge improvement in terms of the. Yeah, per head kind of profitability there, so. I want to ask you about injection molding, because you mentioned that earlier and obviously that the kind of first couple of iterations were were metal based. Was it something that you taught yourself?

Dale Backus (: 23:26

yeah.

Chris Whyte (: 23:48

in terms of plastic or at that stage as you bought in kind of mechanical designers to look after that side of things.

Dale Backus (: 23:54

know, somebody to figure out ourselves. I didn't have a real mechanical engineer until like, because I was the principal engineer for the first like five years, hired a guy who's who works for me now David who, who also came in with no experience. He's a he's a fantastic engineer now, but I knew he had the ability was like a childhood friend, essentially. But yeah, we didn't we didn't have any sort of in house knowledge or experience in injection molding. was

figured out. the very first mole we made was for the DP one, which was the front bezel. And then there were a couple other little pieces for like a sun hood and things. But we did those molds with proto labs at the time. I don't know if you've heard of proto labs, but it's like a, you know, basically a rapid turn, like low volume. That's how they started anyway, like prototype house, they can do injection moles. And we learned a lot.

Chris Whyte (: 24:35

Okay, yeah.

Dale Backus (: 24:47

that first one, right? We learned about material thickness and sink and material finish and like in different, the different differences of plastic and, you know, flexibilities and all that kind of stuff that, you know, cause that was a problem with the part we didn't realize understand sink. Like what would happen is if the, the part isn't uniformly thick, the thick sections are gonna, when it gets a cool, it shrinks and you get these little sink marks in there, right? And so was because this was supposed to be an aesthetic front bezel. We had all these like, you know, plot marks on it.

and we had to come up with ways, like as we were building them, we're like taking Scotch -Brite pads to the bezel and like oil and trying to like basically just obfuscate it a little bit to make it look like it was more consistent. And it actually kind of worked. Wes's grandpa actually came up with that idea, because we didn't know what to do. Like what are we going to do? Redesign the We didn't have the time. So yeah, injection molding was something we just kind of like failed our way through enough to be able to do it consistently.

Chris Whyte (: 25:29

Haha.

Yeah.

Dale Backus (: 25:45

at high quality, I still to this day, I've been doing it for 15 years. I still hate injection molds. If I can avoid an injection mold, I avoid it. I avoid it because if you can CNC apart, CNC has gotten so cost effective. If you're it overseas anyway, if you're it the US, forget about it. Like there's going be a billion dollars, but, you know, depending on the market, obviously, but you know, for our market here, like it just, we just, there's no way US can compete with the CNC of China. And,

Chris Whyte (: 26:04

Yeah.

Dale Backus (: 26:12

And so, you know, if I can avoid an injection mold, I'll have to do my damnedest to do it because it takes long. There's all this verification. you know, it's just hard, revised things. It's expensive. Like it's just everything about it sucks. But at end of the day, if you can do it well, it's a lot cheaper. anyway, mean, metal just feels better anyway, you know, so.

Chris Whyte (: 26:20

Yeah.

Yeah, there's that kind of, it's the premium feel, isn't it, of kind of machined metal versus injection model, a lot of...

Dale Backus (: 26:41

Apple's the one who kind of like opened our eyes. So when we were designing the DP -1 and we were doing all the sheet metal stuff before, I didn't even realize CNC was an option until we started looking at the DP -1. And then that was the year actually surprising. It was like 2007 or eight. I don't remember where Apple came out the first unibody MacBook. So I don't know if you remember that. So that's what they're all that now, but like that was, what is that now? 13 years ago or so they came out this like CNC chassis.

Chris Whyte (: 26:55

Yeah.

Right, yeah.

Dale Backus (: 27:10

And we were like, my God, is a, this feels so good. This is amazing. You know, we're like, started looking into that and they're like, maybe we'll, we'll start doing that. So we, called our monitor, like a unibody design, like they did. yeah.

Chris Whyte (: 27:21

imagine an Apple product now in cheap feeling plastic. know they had the iPhones, didn't they? The SEs for a little while.

Dale Backus (: 27:28

Yeah, I had that. Yeah, I know.

I mean, all of of Apple's products are machine now like and they do it for a reason. Now it's amazing how cost effective they've been able to get. I mean, can't imagine the robotics and the quality of people and machines they have doing this stuff at the scale they're doing it. It boggles my freaking mind. Like if you were taking an iPhone apart and looked at the chassis, it's all CNC. It's just like, what? It would cost me a hundred dollars to machine this part. But they're probably doing it for like four bucks. And it's incredibly impressive.

Chris Whyte (: 27:39

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's amazing what that's part of a trillion dollars can do for your economies of scale.

Dale Backus (: 28:08

yeah. Volume fixes a lot, that's for sure.

Chris Whyte (: 29:52

massively massively so see, obviously, you sold small HD kind of five years in, you're able to talk about in terms of how how that kind of came about.

Dale Backus (: 30:00

Mm

ly, we started the company in: 2008

Chris Whyte (: 30:15

Okay.

Dale Backus (: 30:28

literally never gonna occur to us. It was just like, we're just building this business and we wanna build it and hopefully we can make some money off it somehow, some way. Again, this is just like kids not really knowing and this is pre -internet really like that we have today where there's just was a lot of like advice on the internet about business in general, unless you wanna go read like Harvard Business Journal or something. Anyway, so we started the business, just grew it to a certain point. By that point, we were 10 million in revenue in 2014. There's a company called Vitech that

has like a portfolio, like, you know, umbrella company for a bunch of different brands in this sort of film industry. They were looking specifically to acquire a monitor company. And at the time, the landscape of monitor company was weird. Like there just weren't a lot of independently owned monitor companies or sort of small mid -size monitor companies. It was like either they had weird ownership structures or...

They were huge like Sony and Panasonic like we used to compete with Sony and Panasonic. He's like, you know Canon and all these big companies which you know, basically small sd has taken over and So they came to us out of the blue I can't remember how we were introduced and we just started talking to him and they're like, yeah You guys are kind of right in the science range. We're looking for and man what a brutal process that was so it took about a year and what they do is is they

They come in, they look at you, they give you all these platitudes, they make you feel good, and you kind of start up here with a certain number, and then they do everything they can to slowly whittle at them. You come in at you over and over and over again, and you're just so exhausted. You're seven, eight months into this, you're like, wow, we started here, we're here now, but we invested eight months into this. So yeah, it ultimately ended up

Chris Whyte (: 32:01

Yeah.

Dale Backus (: 32:17

Working out okay, like I definitely got fleeced on the deal. Like looking back on it now, I'm just like, man, we were so dumb. And there's a million things I could say about that whole process, what to look out for and what I wouldn't do the next time. And things to look out for when you're building the business and when you are exiting the business. Happy to go with that if you're interested, but.

Chris Whyte (: 32:36

Yeah, I think that that'd be really interesting because I think you see these acquisitions and sales all the time, especially within the startup space. I don't think a lot of people going into it really that kind of clued up on what to look out for. And I think a lot of it can stem from how you set it up. So if you go in and you're, let's face it, a lot of startups come off the back of kind of

Necessity, don't they say necessity is the kind of the most of all invention. But you just find your way is in your case, especially you're kind of you find your way in a lot of aspects, kind of mechanical engineering, injection molding, running the business that the hardware business dealing with suppliers. And I guess, behind the scenes, there's a lot of kind of organized chaos, there's kind of admin and you mentioned it. Right, right. The start kind of operations being a key part of that.

And I imagine that's something that you learn kind of the hard way going through through the sale that kind of administration operations. But yeah, if you could give us your insights into this rewind the clock, if you to do it again, how would you prepare for that or do differently?

Dale Backus (: 33:47

Yeah. So it was a, it was a kind of a weird circumstance, the whole thing, because by that point in 2014, we were working on our sort of second gen in -house platform. we called it Genesis and it was like, just taking everything we learned from the DP seven product I mentioned earlier, which was just this, it was this unique architecture, but it was very inefficient and very expensive.

We found a much better way to do it. learned a tremendous amount from that first one and we kind of like distilled it down to its best parts, simplified things, but also enhanced the things that matter. But it was still very, very challenging to develop. were again, once again, spending lots of money trying to develop it. I engaged this New Zealand based engineering firm who had these, New Zealand's just great, they great engineers.

little expensive, but they have great engineers and we I don't even remember how I found these guys, but started working with them and I was like, Whoa, like these guys are really good. Like the problems that we were having for months, like especially this one guy named Russell who I'm still friends with today and they still just the smartest people I've ever met just came in there and was like beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep,

And so this is all during the acquisition talks, right? So we were burning cash at a high clip again, net losses every month. And we had a path to completion and this was gonna be a truly revolutionary platform. The platform we developed then is still the platform, the leading platform, entry of the platform that's everything still based on today. It was truly revolutionary, remarkable in terms of

rted talking with Vitek early: 2014

I think we probably would have made it. But the mentality we were in was like, this is a weird niche industry. We don't know how many opportunities like this to kind of detach from the company financially are gonna be. There's also things I'd like to do, visions I have for the company that I think is gonna be hard for us to take on because we don't have the financial backing. So we're have to go raise money or just have someone else's piggy bank to pull from. And this was an opportunity to do that. But what I would do differently is,

during the negotiations, we just again, not having done it before, you're all kind of caught up in the numbers and you know, and all this kind of stuff and just kind of the excitement of the process, the prospect of, of selling a company. we should have negotiated much, much harder on certain points, right? The fact that they, they ultimately just looked at the company and valued us based on essentially inventory and, and profit, which there was none at the time, right? We were, we were losing money. and so,

You know, and so what they did was is they gave us so you can look this puzzle public info. You can look this up. it was the deal was 4 .7 million in cash, but with a 25 million, earn out. I will always stay away from earn outs in the future. Earn out is basically a schedule, a forecast of financial goals on a timeline that if you hit, then you get these sort of extra payouts. And we missed every single one by like.

six months. Like we hit them all ultimately, but the timing was off and we just got destroyed on the deal. But what what I, what I, didn't appreciate at the time was how revolutionary the technology we were building was and how valuable it would be. Cause every dollar they've made sense has been on the back of that work that we paid for. and, and we didn't value the IP appropriately and we didn't value the brand appropriately. We didn't evaluate the people appropriately again, like

Chris Whyte (: 37:53

Yeah.

Dale Backus (: 38:02

the engineers we were able to ultimately get on this team. There's several of them now. There's like three key ones. They're still there today that were just made all this go and, and, and this, have the talent, we have the technology, we had the vision and we had the brand. And none of that was considered, right. And that was the problem, right. It was all based on revenue. So this company that we sold to by tech is a London based company run by accountants.

you know, very, very conservative accountancy, you know, types of people. it's just, even if we did push those agenda items forward, who's to say they would have went for them. And again, if we weren't in the situation we were in, right, like maybe it would have went differently, but again, we were sort of a little bit up against the wall, you know, our backs were up against the wall, you know, a fair bit just because of the financial situation we were in. So was just like this weird, you know, convalescence.

various factors that sort of forced us into a little bit. Just kind of A, being fatigued, B, being in the financial situation we were in, the phase of development when we were in, sort of the mental state of seeing an exit door, seeing an opportunity to exit the business that we weren't sure was gonna happen again. And ultimately I'm okay with the way it happened because, you know, even though I wish I would have done things differently, I'm okay with it because I would probably still be saddled to that business today, right?

maybe, maybe not. And the thing about me is I started to get bored. After five, six, seven years of doing the same thing, I just start to kind of get eyes for other things. so it was just timing and a bunch of other things and allowed me to go do this. So I'm okay

Chris Whyte (: 39:53

Yeah, massive, and it's a lot of people saying, you did quite well, but it must be so frustrating to, yeah, in hindsight, of be suckered into those kind of stretch goals to kind of get that kind of payout. So you didn't get any additional then. was like there wasn't like a grading.

Dale Backus (: 40:05

and thank

No, yeah, I got like, you know, was able to above my salary considerably and I made good money for the next several years, right? But like, you know, what would really, really triggered me was when it was like, a year or two later, they acquired another company called Wooden Camera, which was they were a $5 million revenue, revenue business, right? That got acquired for $20 million in cash, upfront cash.

Chris Whyte (: 40:17

Yeah.

Dale Backus (: 40:40

Right with that, but the thing is, is they were very profitable. The business model was unique or was never gonna be very big business, right? But it was like a 5 % gross profit or not gross, like profit. Right, so was as they were like, they were looking at something to add to their P &L really quickly to these shareholders. In a public company, it's very easy to go borrow money here to pay for something over there to kind of boost your posts without having to have the financial application hit you today.

Chris Whyte (: 40:46

Yeah.

Yeah, so it could see where it was, where it's going.

Yeah.

Dale Backus (: 41:06

And that was just like, come on. And then you fast forward to today, like SmallHD is so much more valuable than that company. company has, the founders left, like it's in disarray, it's way, smaller than SmallHD, right? But they got it for, you know, they got SmallHD for 25%, right, of what they bought Wooden Camera for when today is probably worth five, six, seven times more. So again, like it's just, you know.

Chris Whyte (: 41:14

yeah.

Yeah.

Dale Backus (: 41:36

Yeah.

Chris Whyte (: 41:37

Well, that fuels you, it? In terms of, I'm not going to fall for that again. it's It's I mean, you're five years in now with with OSNAP and it sounds like you've taken a lot of those lessons to heart and then kind of you're building something very different. But it sounds like, yeah, it's going to be a lot more profitable as well. it sounds a bit so. But yeah, difficult lesson to to learn. And thank you for sharing that because

I say, think a lot of people go into these that they are naive to the inner workings of it. And there are companies that will just acquire businesses and they've got the accountants that are emotionally detached from the whole thing. They're just looking at is this company going to make some more profit for the shareholders or is it going to give us a loss to save on tax? know, call me a cynic, but I think there's a lot that goes on as well, yeah, it's it's unfortunate.

dark side of business, so let's move on then. snap, a very, different business, still hardware. So tell us how did that kind of, I think you told me, I'm kind of off air, but tell us kind of how that business idea come about, kind of what started you, of what got you started on that.

Dale Backus (: 43:01

Yeah, was a bunch of, again, I think most things boil down to timing. But like it was probably 2017 and I went to a trade show, CES. And I was just, I've always just been interested in going to that show just to see, you know, what's happening in tech and just see what piques my interest. And I saw this little category of phone grips emerging and, know, this is still pretty early days in that, in this industry.

There were some players and I had some conversations with some of the founders of these companies and I was asking about like, know, the revenues or not revenues, but units they sold and all that kind of stuff. And there were some pretty big numbers. And I was like, huh, now this is an interesting industry because I think at that point I was just so fatigued on the complexity of small HD. It's such a complex business. Like supply chain is crazy. Engineering is crazy. Support and repair is crazy. Like it was just at the end. And then the tam of that market, the addressable market is

small, right? So when I looked at this industry, I said, I like this industry because it's simpler, the products are simpler, the TAM is much higher, the potential, you know, unit economics is a lot better. They're small and easy to ship. I just liked the profile of a business like this. When I found out the thing, very ironic, and I didn't leave saying, I'm gonna go start this mobile accessory business. I just I saw a pop socket and at the show and I actually was given one.

and I used it and I was like, okay, I actually get why this product exists. I like it. However, I hate having it on my phone, right? So that sort of created this, you know, this little engine in my head started running of, okay, there's gotta be a better way. And kind of stuck in my head for, you know, a few nights and then one night I woke up out of bed and I was like, my God, this is the way to do it. And I went down and started building something and I built this thing.

and showed some people and I was like, I think there's something here, you know? And by that point in small HD, was just kind of getting really, really just tired of it all. Working for a public company, the short sightedness, the unwillingness to just try things or invest in the future. And it was just, it was a constant service of the quarter. You know, there was no strategic element to it really. It was just like, make money. I don't care how you do it. Rehash products, you know, just get it done. Grow the channel. It's really all that mattered.

And I was just kind of frustrated with that dynamic and I was done working for a large company and so was like, I wanna go back to working for myself, I wanna go back to small company. I feel like I'm particularly effective in businesses from like zero to like where we are today. And then after that point, I start to get a little disinterested sometimes, not here yet, but like just because it's just, gets harder to move and you get slower and there's more politics and people.

You know, I've always said from day one here that I don't want to get more than bigger than 25 people before we, before we exit, because it's just that the culture changes is just a whole different animal. I'm not a seasoned operator. wouldn't say I'm the guy to come and go turn a business around from like a operational standpoint or, know, go and run some really operationally heavy company. That's not who I am. I'm just like a product good at like coming up with something from a napkin and then getting it to market and then, and then kind of innovating from there up to a point.

to that point, probably from: 2015

d steak houses. They get like: 2000

Chris Whyte (: 46:56

Okay.

Dale Backus (: 47:19

And then one day I was just like, nah man, this is another small HD. It's risky, it's complicated, it's heavy, it's expensive. And again, the TAM is relatively small. So anyway, the HoloSnap thing kind of pulled me out of that mentality and said, okay, let's go do this. It's either gonna be a quick win or a quick loss and I can move on. I don't have to go add 20 people to go build this company. I can just get me and a couple buddies essentially and we can.

Chris Whyte (: 47:24

Haha.

Dale Backus (: 47:48

try to get it and we did. We got it from zero to five million in the first year really quickly with literally four people. And so that was, you know, that's kind of where the idea came from was just like, started out as a single focus of can we make a pop socket that just doesn't suck to have on your phone? That was, that's why we were the phone grip that doesn't suck. That's where all that came from. was simply, you know, we want this utility, but we don't want all this bulk or this like, you know, just, just the way it looks and all that kind of stuff.

re, when max safe came out in: 2020

ey were with MagSafe in early: 2020

Chris Whyte (: 49:07

Put it in.

Dale Backus (: 49:16

It was like now we're like, no, we can make a competing magnetic standard with Apple. Like there's no way we can compete with that. So then we had to quickly redesign the product around MagSafe and blah, blah, blah. But you know, that's, that's set off this like rapid iteration cycle of this core product, trying to find the right sort of combination of features and aesthetics and cost and quality and user experience and all these things. And now we're on gen five with the Snap4Lux and you know, working on the next thing.

Chris Whyte (: 49:43

So do you, prior to MagSafe, was it a full case with the detachable pop socket now?

Dale Backus (: 49:49

no, we've never really made cases. I'm really trying to stay away from that. Although we are about to launch cases. But like up till now, like we've, we've tried to say, I just think the best sort of scenario for us is to make a single skew as agnostic as possible to phones or cases. That's always been the pursuit here. The first part was actually just another thing you stick on the back of your phone or case had this

I don't remember the the slap bracelets from the 90s. They use it's called a bi -stable spring and it was you can lay really flat then you push on it and it folds up like this and then you could put your finger and I made this little clasping thing so you create this loop. It was really fun and fidgety and tactile and fun to play with and it was really comfortable and it worked well and it rotated it could be a stand and it was also magnetic and had all the things the product has today more or less but it was relatively long like it was a it was like a slap shape like this big and

Chris Whyte (: 50:21

Yeah.

Dale Backus (: 50:46

But then when MagSafe came out, it was like, you know, well, it has to be a circle now. We can't really do this design. It's going to change our architecture. We're on our third like architecture today. I'm working on the fourth, but, but yeah, it's a really hard product to design because, know, this thing is, this thing's two and a half millimeters. I mean, it's really, really thin, but it has to, you know, has to fold open and do all these like articulations and be able to, you know, put your finger either like through it or around it and stand, rotate.

Chris Whyte (: 51:05

Wow, yeah.

cool yeah. Yeah.

Dale Backus (: 51:16

and be durable and be cost effective. So you look at this thing, and Nod's sure did look at it and said, this is easy, but it's really quite difficult. And then there's the whole like minefield of other companies and their IP and all that kind of stuff that you're ultimately, inadvertently just gonna end up dealing with at some point.

Chris Whyte (: 51:32

you

Well, yeah, especially if you're it made in China, it's given, isn't it? It's going to be copied sooner rather than

Dale Backus (: 51:45

Yeah, so we haven't dealt with too much of that, honestly. And think part of the reason is we're not on Amazon. I think Amazon is where products go to get cloned. But I mean, we have had some and we just recently a product came out that's like essentially a copy, but they changed some things, but it's literally they copied our ads one to one, like our marketing verbiage, all this kind of stuff. And like it looks very similar, but they did change the design. So kudos to them. not going to, I don't care. Fine. Go do you. But

Chris Whyte (: 51:51

Okay.

Dale Backus (: 52:14

Yeah, we haven't seen any of this one anyway. This one's been out for over a year and we haven't seen any like carbon copies. And I think partly the reason is because we did see carbon copies of the previous two generations. I think the reason we haven't seen a clone of this one is because it's quite difficult to manufacture and design. Like it's quite difficult to make this thing. And I think people, if they have tried, they're like, my God, I don't even, how do they, again, not like we're, you have like NASA engineers trying to copy. We're talking about like,

know, little shops in China trying to copy this, and I think it's just outside their capability level or their desire level.

Chris Whyte (: 52:48

probably quicker wins, isn't there? For the return. Imagine that? Yeah, so. OK, so you obviously mentioned you're not selling it on Amazon. You're you've just moved into or you're moving into to retail. So perhaps you could talk just briefly around kind of. That and the motivation to get into retail, which I think is potentially fairly obvious, but maybe not. And then kind of some of the core challenges that you're facing.

Dale Backus (: 52:53

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I mean, we're in year five when we just started retail, right? And the idea from the beginning was, you know, we're not going to touch retail until the product gets to a certain level of acceptability for us, right? We have very high standards here. Everyone here is so freaking particular, which is great, but also really annoying sometimes. And so we need to make sure the product was up to standard, up to our standards before we took on retail because retail can just as easily kill you as it can make you. And so

But the theory here is we make a product that a lot of people aren't thinking about actively, right? People aren't laying in bed going, ooh, I need to go shop for phone grips, right? It's more of a impulse type of product. And so when you're in that category of impulse type of products, you have to be where people are. You have to get in front of people's eyes as passively and as consistently as possible at scale. the way we do that direct is ads, right? And that's kind of how we do that. It's this equivalent of someone walking through an aisle

at a target, right, and seeing something. And that works with a certain group of people. But if you want to move beyond that group of people, and also the cost of ads is rising, has risen dramatically, it's getting less cost effective to where the margin difference between direct and retail isn't that significant anymore. So really it's about how can we get in front of people, right? And retail is kind of the next step in that. And so we've launched Best Buy nationwide.

back in may, and we just, just launched in AT &T nationwide, or at least all like, corporate AT &T, which is like 3 ,500 stores. There's a lot more of them, but they're all like franchise. just recently, like a month ago, and we're about to launch into a bunch of Verizon stores, a franchise, not corporate Verizon, but franchise Verizon and, Target as well. and it's, it's been a massive learning curve, like just the speed at which we're used to moving at in the direct model, right.

completely different from the speed at which you can maneuver in retail, right? Like it's put an enormous burden on the business in every area. And more than, everyone always talks about this, like retail is really hard, retail is really hard, it's hard on cash, it's hard on forecasting, it's hard on, you know, the marketing, it's just, there's so many things that touches it. so it's not been like, I'd say the smoothest experience. I mean, the retailers are happy, right? But internally it's been a lot of like,

Chris Whyte (: 55:18

Yeah.

Dale Backus (: 55:44

upheaval trying to figure this out and all the software systems you deal with and the people you have to deal with and the packaging requirements and the labeling and the cartonization and the distribution and the fact that they want to pay you net one million. You know, all those things have to be constantly, but we have a great sales team here now that handles all this and it's going well. It's going well. And I think we're going to continue pushing into retail, right? Amazon, man, they've been trying to get us to come on there forever.

got an email this morning from our contact there. was just like trying to convince us to come on the platform. But man, I think people like me and my type of business are souring on Amazon. think you're in one of the camps now. You're either on Amazon, you've been on Amazon and you're beholden to them because they probably represent 50 plus percent of your revenue and you can't just cut it. Or you're like, man, you haven't yet and you're really heavily weighing the decision. It's not an easy decision anymore because

Chris Whyte (: 56:20

Yeah.

Dale Backus (: 56:42

A, again, like it's the breeding ground for copycats. Amazon doesn't give a crap about IP or trademark infringers. mean, they say they do and for trademarks, they kind of do. But like, you know, there's a famous situation going on with Ridge, Ridge Wallet now where, you know, they've done nine figures on Amazon, right? They're a massive Amazon client and there's people straight up carbon copying their product with the logo and everything and Amazon basically gave them the finger and said, we don't care.

Chris Whyte (: 56:50

Hmm.

Yeah.

Dale Backus (: 57:11

You know, and it's just like, that's how they treat their nine figure accounts. How the hell are they going to treat them? You know, so, so I think it's like Amazon's like a drug, you know, it's like, it's so tempting and you, and you want it's such easy, like we could turn on Amazon today and probably add 30 plus percent right to the top line. But at what cost at what long -term cost, you know,

Chris Whyte (: 57:14

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And how sustainable is that really? So I'm interested. When did you switch over to retail then? long has that been kind of going?

Dale Backus (: 57:37

Mm

May was the first account. Best bye.

Chris Whyte (: 57:47

May this year. and have you got some kind of figures in terms of kind of the uplift from where your sales don't have to give me revenue, but maybe kind of volume of units kind of sold prior to May to or monthly prior to May.

Dale Backus (: 58:02

I actually don't have those numbers offhand, generally speaking, the retailers, when we started talking to them, were like, what kind of revenue or volumes can we expect with you guys? We had no idea, right? And it's hard to forecast for this stuff considering the lead times and everything. they were like, yeah, we expect to be up 0 .8 units per store per week is kind of like the numbers we were getting from people, right? And we were like, wow, really? it? And so we've done quite a bit more than that. I'll say that. I don't want to get necessarily numbers.

just because it's new and there's some things going on that I don't want that out there, but, but yeah, it's, gone, it's gone well. And a lot of that's due to positioning, right? I think in retail it's where like so much of the story is in where are you in the store and how are you presented? are you presented well and in Best Buy, we were able to get, not in all the stores, but about half of them really, really.

nice big four foot end caps with great imagery and all that kind of stuff, standing alone kind of in the right section and all that. And some of it's in line, but that, so getting that representation and kind of pushing for that, getting people excited about the product, buyers in the team at Best Buy, like the category manager for Best Buy, right, uses the product, loves the product, the whole team uses the product. That's just given us so much ability to negotiate these things. We haven't had to pay for this placement, which is very unusual.

Chris Whyte (: 59:22

That's awesome, yeah.

Dale Backus (: 59:23

We had to pay for the displays, but not for the placement. Same thing with the Verizon deal we're doing now, the not corporate, but like, you we're getting displays in there. And so, so much of this comes down to what you're able to kind of negotiate and you can leverage the excitement, you know, because we make a product that kind of applies to everybody. If we can get the product on their phones and actively using it, it endears us to them in a way that kind of gives us some leverage.

in these scenarios, which has been great.

Chris Whyte (: 59:54

Massively, yeah. And I think if you're running really great ads as well, which you guys are, it's a no brainer for the retail, isn't it? fantastic. we're kind of running close to time, but I wanted to touch on, if you've still got time, that is, the importance of executing in three key areas of product, marketing and branding and operations.

If you want to talk around that, that's something that came up on our pre -call.

Dale Backus (: 1:00:28

Yeah, I think to clarify on that, I think you have to be really good at at least two of those things. Ideally all three, I think those are the primary pillars of business. You can have finance for that. And I think you want to have competent finance. And I think as you get bigger, it becomes more important. But when you're starting out, I don't think it's as important as the other three and also depending on the type of business. But it really comes down to product and

brand slash marketing. Right, so those are the two that my background aligns with, particularly product. Can I at least understand the importance of marketing? think, you know, it's like the whole like if a tree falls in the woods, is anyone here kind of thing, right? You can make the best product in the world, but if you don't know how to, you know, craft a compelling message and get it in front of people, it's completely pointless. The idea that like if you build it, they will come is mostly ridiculous. I think there are exceptions to that.

But, know, so the first step is building a great product and just truly being honest with you. think so many people fail because they're just not, they're either surrounded by yes men or people that aren't willing to be honest with them, and or they don't have a good sense of objectivity to their own work, right? So being able to build something that actually is good and, you know, that aligns with what people want and desire.

right, is a skill in and of itself, right? And then there's just like what industry you're in and what sort of what I call timing wave you're riding. think so much if investors, for example, they want to invest in hot industries, right? That's not a secret, right? Like AI gets like a bill, you know, 90 % of all of investment these days, right? Because it's the thing. And I'm not comparing us to that because it's just it's a, you know, tiny, tiny microcosm of it. But

when we entered the market in: 2019

fe wave was generated in late: 2020

people in general, right? Like just invest in people, man. Like I just, I'm a huge believer in that. Just find and attract and retain good people and it'll make your life a million times easier. And so on the marketing side, you know, again, like just people constantly, especially engineer background people, right? Like they constantly underestimate the importance and power of marketing and brand. There are so many amazing case studies out there of companies that were

I think more companies than not are led by marketing and get success through marketing more than product. Depending on how you look at it, think marketing could be number one and product number two, but I think they're very, very close. Marketing is kind the leading man though. have to craft a compelling message, get it in front of people. The product just has to be able to deliver on those promises. Then operations needs to just

Chris Whyte (: 1:04:08

Mmm.

Dale Backus (: 1:04:11

back that up and actually get the thing into people's hands and not bankrupt the company. So it really is sort of this chain of things. But look at companies like Manscaped or Dr. Squatch or Liquid Death, Like none of these companies invented anything crazy. They're all fine, good products, whatever, right? But they've built these amazing, powerful brands that for whatever reason, people think it's cool to drink Liquid Death water over Aquafina for cool.

great, great, great job. It's a masterclass of marketing, right? it's like, water is innovative. didn't, on the product side, is, pale as a comparison to the importance of marketing brand and like that, think, Manscaped, you know, you could argue that they, you know, tweak the razor to make it a little more friendly, you know, to, to what they're targeting, but, but really it was the brand. They just did a great job building the brand. And Dr. Squats was soap. We're talking about freaking soap.

Chris Whyte (: 1:04:41

Yeah.

Yeah.

Dale Backus (: 1:05:06

like for men, they're telling me soap for men didn't exist. Of course it did. It's just like they found white space in a demographic that was being underserved and did a great job branding to it. And there's a lot of other men's soap brands now, but you've never heard of them, because Dr. Squash has sort of taken that market. And so I really think that's where the opportunity for us is here at Ohsnap, where there's very little brand affinity in accessories and cell phone accessories. Most people can't tell you what case they have, what charger they have, what mount they have. They don't care. And I just think because

most founders or business owners in this space are just driven by finance or engineering and they don't really understand the true value of building a brand. So from day one, that was part of the plan here was build a great brand, build a fun brand, build a brand that people actually care about and enjoy and want to hear when we have to tell them something. And then back it up with great product that actually is innovative. If you can do those two things, right? If you can do those two things and actually execute on those two things simultaneously.

I think that gives you a much, much, much higher probability of success. Then operations is of course important, but it's not really an area of innovation. And just like finance, it's a necessary backbone to the company that you have to have competence in. have to the right people in, you have to type A, attention to detail, rigorous people. it's not gonna be like being, if this company sucked at marketing and product with great operations, it wouldn't matter.

Chris Whyte (: 1:06:35

Yeah. Yeah. If you're like, say, if you're not telling people about your product, it's very difficult to sell it. So now that's that's that's lovely. So well, let's kind of wrap things up now because I appreciate we've run over the hour mark now. But I always ask people towards the end of the podcast, if there's any books or podcasts that they they would like to recommend from what a lot of what you're talking about in the marketing side. And I think we talked about this the other week.

I'm thinking about the Alex Hamozi book straight away in terms of the 100 million dollar offer and 100 million dollar leads, because that playbook is just fantastic for a product business.

Dale Backus (: 1:07:16

I highly recommend Alex Ramosi's content in general. think he's one of the most pragmatic down to earth types of people out there. listen to a lot of his YouTube videos when I'm driving and stuff. so he's really good. I've not been reading a lot of books lately. I know I've read a bunch in the past, but I'm just not like, I'm just in a podcast mode right now. So Alex Ramosi for sure, Operator's Podcast, is this specific to a DDC product company type of thing?

Chris Whyte (: 1:07:19

Yeah.

Dale Backus (: 1:07:44

So if you're a DTC product company, I highly recommend listening to that. This is the four founders of Ridge Wallet, Hexclad, it's not actually a CEO, but same thing with Ridge, honestly. Simple Modern and the Case slash some other product he has, can't remember the name of. So it's basically these four operators who all have DTC product companies and they're all really smart and I love that podcast.

Chris Whyte (: 1:07:52

Okay.

Dale Backus (: 1:08:12

And they have this little insider group where they, you know, if you're a listener, you can go in there and like interact with people. But my app got denied because we make, we make wallet products and they didn't, it was like no competitors. But if you don't make a wallet or cookware or drinkware or a case, guess, then you're probably, probably good.

Chris Whyte (: 1:08:34

Yeah, get it get on the show. So, but I'll definitely check that out because yeah, I'm fascinated to hear those stories. So brilliant. then just finally, one bit of advice that you would give to someone who wanted to work for for you or one of your businesses.

Dale Backus (: 1:08:36

Yeah.

advice for someone who wants to work for me or wants to start.

Chris Whyte (: 1:08:55

Yeah, how would they stand out and how would they get your attention?

Dale Backus (: 1:09:00

I think, I think the, just for me, exhibiting a high level of curiosity and competence and follow through, right. Are the, the big three for me. Like if you, you know, like just, if you can somehow show that you, you're the type of person that goes extra. right. That's, that's a huge, like, you know, if we have, we have like a, job portal thing on our website, right. Where we have open positions, we post a listing there.

People that just like throw in a generic crappy resume automatically get filtered out, right? If you send me a portfolio link or you write a cover letter or write a note or look, it actually indicates to that you've done some research on the company and that you're interested in the company and through what you link me to shows that you're just the type of person that is a highly engaged type of person and a highly curious person.

That's gonna stand out to me tremendously. I just like high motor people that really care. If you're just a button pusher, a nine to five button pusher, there's nothing not disparaging those types of people, that's fine, but for the state my business is in, I just like the people who truly care. My head of product now, Eric, came to me through LinkedIn. I was even looking for a product manager, head of product at the time. But you know.

He just, he, he, he displayed this motivation and interest and passion that, you know, piqued my interest and just started talking to him and ultimately hired him and, moved him up here from, from Florida. And, he's, he's fan freaking tastic. Right. And so there's just these sort of intangibles that your experience is probably the thing I carry the least about depending on the role, right? You have to have some actual experience, right? At this stage in the company, I'm interested in hiring engineers who don't know how to engineer, but, but.

It's more about like just who you are as a person and the types of character traits you have. Cause I think anyone can learn anything. Are you the type of person that actually wants to learn and is curious to learn and is passionate about learning and growing your skills? Are you constantly looking at the industry in your sort of area of expertise, understanding new technologies, emerging things? Are you leveraging AI? Are you just that kind of person? If you come in here, you said you've never used chat, GPT or AI. That's not a good look.

It means you're just not a very curious person. How could you at least not try it? I'm not saying you have to use it or you have to know what it is or be an expert, but I just like people that go down those rabbit holes because they're interesting to them. My most recent engineer we hired, we just displayed that in spades. He can program, he can engineer, knows a about material science, he knows a ton of math and science in general. He can kind of do anything.

Chris Whyte (: 1:11:23

Yeah.

Dale Backus (: 1:11:46

and because he's a very curious person, right? And that's worked out really well. And I just think that's why.

Chris Whyte (: 1:11:52

Yeah, absolutely. I definitely agree with you on that. think for me, curiosity and coachability are key. It's that willingness, isn't it? But yeah, it's brilliant. Wonderful. Well, Dale, thank you so much for spending the time and sharing your design journey with me. Yeah, if there's any last comments or any shout outs you've got, I'll link to your LinkedIn and stuff on the show notes.

Dale Backus (: 1:11:58

Yep.

Chris Whyte (: 1:12:22

Yeah, thank you so much for joining me today. It's been a pleasure.

Dale Backus (: 1:12:25

You know, I always enjoy this, man. I know it's, it kind of helps me almost like just process, you know, I don't take a lot of time to process things and it just, it's it's therapeutic for me. anytime.

Chris Whyte (: 1:12:34

Yeah. Yeah, it's something, Yeah, therapeutic rights, kind of telling your story out loud, isn't it? It's like, wow, yeah, I actually did that. No, but it's brilliant. Super.

Dale Backus (: 1:12:41

Yeah, yeah, that's good. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Whyte (: 1:12:50

Thank you for listening. I hope you really enjoyed this episode. And if you did, please like and subscribe and tell all of your friends. In the meantime, just a quick note from me. In addition to hosting this podcast, I'm also the founder of Kodu a specialist recruitment business focused exclusively on physical product development. For a little over a decade now, I've worked exclusively within physical product design and engineering, helping startups and established brands hire mechanical design and development talent from mid -weight up to C -suite. I've worked in consumer electronics,

e -bikes, femtech, medical devices, design consultancy, basically user focused stuff. And it's the wonderful people I've met over the years that have inspired me to create this podcast. If you'd like to learn more about Kodu and how we work, please head over to TeamKodu .com or message me, Chris Whyte on LinkedIn. Thanks again for listening.