GoSun revenue, CEO Patrick Sherwin, team size, customer count, churn, and more in 2022.

hey folks my guest today is patrick sherwin he's helped innovate off-grid independent solar solutions for cooking cooling phone charging lighting and now is developing products for water purification and shelter all of the go sun products environment are environmentally friendly and ideal for recreation off-grid power outages disaster relief which would be useful right right now down in louisiana and developing countries that have minimal powerful infrastructure patrick you're ready to take to the top let's do this nathan you last came on pre-covered and i remember being really impressed because i'm summarizing here so requiring if any of this is wrong but you said your first product was go sunsport back in like 2017 you seated that with like 1k raised 213 grand on kickstarter took eight months to deliver it but since then you've been nine product launches over 50 000 customers that have purchased at least one of your skus i think you did in 2020 about 4 million of top line revenue and grew a massive email list is that all correct you're nailing it that's amazing okay so what's happened since then updated us over the past 18 months any new products oh yeah plenty of new products and plenty of growth um i think you mentioned briefly we launched a water sanitation and purification system basically in response to covid we accelerated the development of something that we knew would be really helpful for people that are seeking more times away from home outdoors we're all feeling pretty trapped at home uh that product is basically a kitchen sink in your backpack uh it can also turn into like a camping water purification system as well as a shower so stay out longer feel clean we work on a coffee brewing system so we came up with an all-in-one travel mug french press and heater so you basically can make coffee anywhere anytime as long as you have a 12 volt port we're now also working on a bunch of power kind of mobile solar generator systems ultimately just feeling feeling people's outdoor lives where kind of recreation and preparation kind of coincide let's talk about that filter plus sync plus shower you won in last year well this year the ces innovation awards it's built right on your website at 223. help describe a little bit more why did you win that award from ces what makes the product so unique yeah i think what we ultimately do well is we combine existing technologies into a new ecosystem so to speak i took a usb powered pump that i found from an aquaponics system in a classroom just this tiny little water pump and then i combined that with a three-stage water filter which is similar to like the life straw you know where you can drink straight out of a stream and so instead of hanging out next to a stream like if you've ever gone backpacking you have to make your own water or you're pumping it or you're squeezing it through a bottle this little usb powered pump does the job of pushing the water through the filter and then we use that same pump to run a little faucet and the faucet has a little switch on it that then activates the power bank that comes with it it can be run directly on solar of course because we're go sun and you know that whole ecosystem come together has never been seen before and then it just happens that it turns into a really wonderful shower and what's cool here is you're talking water conservation so when you are off grid you don't have to haul around huge amounts of water whether that's in your van or your vehicle your rv or if you're just like i said backpacking it sips on water it uses one-tenth the water consumption of a typical faucet so it's kind of like the led of water consumption now i'm curious you know people are always tinkering around with the right filters to use here you say specifically that this filters out i believe 99.9 percent of sort of things that can be you know harmful to uh pathogens uh and things of that nature uh harmful to humans you chose to go with i think a polycarbonate filter uh plus uh nano alumina and polypropylene i'm saying all those things like i know what i'm talking about i have no idea what i'm talking i'm just reading off your website but why are those the right materials well it's there's a million directions to go here and keep in mind this is fresh water not desalination and ultimately it's able to maintain a low head pressure so we can we can still push the water at a fairly quick rate uh using that tiny pump and then it's uh it's long lasting and doesn't require any maintenance so like the the life straws which are beautiful uh ceramic filters they require a back flush after just about every use with the back flush is really challenging most people don't do it it requires distilled water and therefore the pump or the filters get clogged pretty quickly and ours are not designing people to have to maintain uh after its usable life which is about a thousand liters you just replace that filter element and it has three stages like i said it filters um it also has an activated charcoal filter so you get you can reduce any kind of flavor issues in the water patrick there's a lot of people listening right now that are software people that tink around with physical products in their free time but it's just tinkering they never really systematize operationalize find a manufacturing plant sell a couple units etc walk me through how you do that i mean how did you go from camping guy that wants like clean water out of the stream under five pounds a thousand liter life to actually manufacturing this thing and being able to list it for 223 bucks on your website you know that's a great question i use a lot of spreadsheets we do a lot of evaluation we have a bit of a formulaic process for product development and launch and then we have a lot of great partners in asia we found someone making something very similar in taiwan we found another similar manufacturing product in china we kind of partnered together when we would basically just ask them to refine those products to meet our more stringent specification and then you know we have an assembly facility in um china as well where where we have um all these parts and pieces come together uh where we put together we have um like like you mentioned earlier we have 10 solid unique sq skus that we assemble ourselves and manufacture more or less ourselves in china so we're up to speed to be able to deliver and and so what are your cogs specifically on this 223 dollar product flow hub like off the top of my head it's going to be somewhere around 80 bucks and so we get we try to push for margins gross margins that are over 50 percent somewhere around 60 on something like this is that how you figure out pricing you always look at your costs and then market you know you want to then optimize top line for 56 margin yeah i mean you know we whenever we go into the 50 gross margin realm and below we need super high volume and we're not a high volume manufacturer even though you know we look we look pretty big and we do move a thousand units we have containers on the oceans every day we we just aren't the coleman or the yeti of volume and so we we have to keep our margins high who do you use to track like you're afraid do you use any like freight forwarding or shipping planning tools you know we've tried and we've we've kind of struck out with a lot of like 3pl logistics partners we basically have have resolved to using people that we've used a bunch in the past who they often don't have the perfect transparency of where something is but at the end of the day they get it to us at a pretty good rate now you mentioned in 2020 i believe that you you passed over 50 000 unique customers what will you pass at the end of this year i think it's going to be over 100k we delivered um in the last year and a half we delivered a product a small product in fact i've got one here that's a set of portable portable utensils basically you can uh you can instead of throwing away plastic every time you eat a carryout meal these will fit in your wallet and when you say dependable is it like tin foil or is it it's made out of stainless steel okay so it's pretty it looks pretty sturdy yeah you can definitely you can cut in fact the spoon has like a little serrated edge so one of my designers was tired of throwing out plastic we hate plastic so will that make it through airport security it does and they actually love to look at it too they're like what is that yeah look at it we shipped 40 000 of these so that was like a whole new and the main reason we did this was to try to get more you know younger customers uh and more of that um you know that that uh you know uh what a loss leader type of customer you know get a higher volume of customers that will then hopefully see our whole ecosystem and this being our our entry or gateway into the gosun experience that's really interesting so you charge fifteen dollars for this do you still have fifty to six percent gross margins on this yeah yeah okay yeah actually they might be more like 70 because something like this like we have such a volume on something like this tiny amount of plastic amazing a little these are like four bucks and we charge like 15 so yeah that's a healthy gross margin and then walk me through the consumer experience okay so so they find it i want to talk about how you sold 40 000 if you use facebook ads or how you did that but once they find you how do you upsell them on on more expensive items or more of your product catalog yeah i mean we'll use um we'll...