GoSunrevenue

hello everyone my guest today is patrick sherwin he's worked with solar for over 20 years and maintains a diverse background in design social enterprise and manufacturing volunteering in developing countries has inspired patrick to create solar solutions that meet essential needs like cooking cooling and sanitation that is what he's doing with his new company gosun dot co patrick great tickets to the top yeah buddy all right so is this a pure hardware play is that how you're making money here largely yeah we we manufacture we design manufacture market and move product that's right very interesting okay tell me where what year did you launch your first product and what was the product it was about seven years ago 2013 uh launched it on kickstarter and it was a a solar oven that kind of blew away all other fuel-free devices uh cooked a meal in 20 minutes for two people uh basically uh vacuum insulated so you can use it in the winter freezing cold clouds um it's a survival tool great for recreation boats rvs camping and the like and we just keep running with that same market base and same kind of needs of you know meeting people where they're where they're outdoors and sort of off-grid what was it called sorry go the what the gosund sport was our first product launch ghost on sport interesting okay so that was in kickstarter uh in what year 2016. uh 2013 20 okay wow 2013 and how did it do on kickstarter it did well i had about a thousand emails from you know people that i had gathered colleagues i've been in the solar space for a long time but i'm very different you like kind of doing integration you know installation work and uh those people responded super well uh and then of course it took off organically on its own because there was very little like it and with that goeshun was born and i went after that 80 to 100 hour work week so you seated it with 1k sort of email subscribers how much did you end up raising from kickstarter for ghost on sport yeah it was a 213k over seven weeks okay and did you deliver yeah oh yeah we delivered over a thousand units it took us about six eight months to deliver um you know i thought the business model was sound and golden i thought we would be you know close to a profitable from well that was a long long way off it took uh it didn't take a ton of capital to keep gosun alive and well um you know took the better part of of 200 grand to keep us alive during those first three years of you know startup doldrum uh we captured another 5 000 customers and uh we started paying ourselves and what year was that when did you start paying yourself i didn't pay myself until 2017 so about four years after the first launch um and you know i uh i own the bulk of the business and that was you know that was how i paid myself was just you know equity um now i pay myself a sort of average you know wage which is which is quite nice and still own the company to a large extent that's great so how many product launches have you done since 2013 oh nine uh and we've done most of them on crowdfunding indiegogo and kickstarter and they've all been successful uh the average is somewhere around four hundred thousand dollars in pre-sales yeah i'm looking at go sun right now which you launched what was this last year i think made may 2019 which product go sun the ghost on sport the one you're talking about uh so we've launched about four different ovens uh we've launched a solar cooler uh a you know series of uh charging and lighting solutions we recently did a sanitation and water purification system i see so this one i'm looking at it's it's you have in the description it's the go sun sport portable high-efficiency solar cooker the ghost on stove and yeah 955 backers pledging 203 000 to bring the project to life so my question to you is i mean i would consider you an expert right top one percent in terms of kickstarter launches right what is key to making these things work and successful um uniqueness i think is important um let's see uh i think we put a good spin on on stuff that that is also resourceful you know that it's not just wow look at this but man i could use that um and you're really good at that by the way i don't think you probably give yourself enough credit but i mean i'm looking at highly technical drawings here on the kickstarter page where it looks like it's something out of a physics textbook but like your labels are like infrared radiation and then like yummy food so like the average person can understand how they could use this thing definitely that's super important bring it down to earth we see a lot of people put real heady stuff on kickstarter that might work for you know a few applications but the mainstream we're all about trying to address mainstream and we're here in cincinnati ohio so it's kind of ground zero uh with respect to the country and if it doesn't work uh like in the gut of a lot of the viewers then then you're in you're dead in the water uh and yeah we do a good job doing that and and i i'm not afraid of uh letting the authenticity roll from from my own like my iphone for example like a lot of our videos early on were just shot on the iphone and it was me kind of saying like look this is cool i use it all the time you might like it look at these different applications where i'm using it how do you a lot of people only set up a kickstarter where they struck with the most is how to set up the prize packages you know pledge x get x you know x y and z how do you do that effectively how do you drive scarcity and get people paying you like a lot of money there well the key to kickstarter is that you want to provide like a 40 discount off of your intended msrp um for us since like the first products that we launched were so unique and different um we we put a pretty healthy margin uh so you know we would say for example have like a 70 profit gross margin and then for the kickstarter it might be like 60 or 55 so people are getting you know a much better deal um and you know pricing and packaging is definitely a big part of the you kind of have to you kind of have to look into the future you grab the crystal ball i can't really explain it across online product launches how many customers have you driven uh we have about uh we have about 50 000 customers and um our emails are you know a couple about a quarter million our our sort of social following is about a quarter million so 250 000 on your email list now how did you build that obviously i imagine kickstarter gives you the emails of your backers but how are you getting the rest of these opt-ins we did a lot of that and then early on we were going to events like crazy and way too much i'm actually kind of happy that we're in the covet world where i don't have to go to trade shows it was exhausting i mean we went to like two trade shows a month there for a while and we always focused on hey please give us your email you'd have an ipad or something to sign up drop your business card in whatever we got you know we must have got a hundred thousand emails that way wow one of so many events wow that's incredible okay so that many on the list that basically means any future product you launch you can raise money for it because you send one email blast and you hit your fundraising go on kickstarter and then supply and demand takes over right it helps so much and you're you're i know that you're real savvy on all of this so you're right i mean you know your your product has to resonate but i think you know big part of it is that we have brand loyalty you know people can trust that we'll make something that works and fits their needs and we price things valued oriented too we're not we're not just gouging you know we're real honest folk so i think um you're right it's pretty fun we just recently launched a tiny house uh which is literally you know an entire home on wheels 22 foot long and uh and it generated a huge amount of interest and we're getting into manufacturing tiny houses now super interesting okay well hold on so let's stick with the the other products pre-tiny houses so nine launches fifty thousand customers how much total top line revenue i think the numbers like like around four million uh on on all of our crowd funds and then we've we've done two equity crowd fund raises as well and um those have uh brought in about one and a half million in capital why did you do those why give up equity when you can raise via pre-selling well it's still really hard to build a business and you're gonna need you know you need money to to to meet your payroll or development and largely it's development for us you know what's on the next horizon what tools do we need uh what are we gonna do with international partners and you know far away expensive places uh so you know growth and the reason we went to the crowd is because we're already you know so accepted in in the crowd you know uh we went we were a crowd-funded company and now we're an equity crowd-funded company how many folks are on the team today full-time uh about ten oh ten of you guys okay interesting and how many of them are engineers uh well officially three uh and then unofficially people myself uh there's about five people that really had play a heavy role in engineering i see interesting okay so on four million then in total sales at a average margin i've caught 70 percent i mean it's fair to say you know you basically were sitting on something like three million to pay out salaries and r d and all that stuff over the past three four five years well this is the piece where where uh my model is different from a lot of folks you talk to is because half of that money pretty pretty much uh goes to my cost of goods sold i mean it's not half but you know a big chunk because i've got a manufacturing tool and i've got to bring it across the oceans i'm doing a lot of our manufacturing in asia and so that's included that's the gross you said 70 gross margin i imagine the 30 percent is that right the cost of goods sold right yeah yeah i think i think what i don't include in my cost of goods sold is the logistics and the shipping uh you know customer support returns things like that that you don't have to deal with in a in a software play interesting okay so so you launch these nine products you do four million in sales you're you know you're making a healthy salary but more importantly you're sort of doing what you love right why get into tiny houses it's just to grow um you know we i've been interested in in like green building my whole life i mean solar has been like a gateway for all these things you know how to how to make uh great compost and gardens and manage water and waste and efficiency you know heating and cooling um you know and so it was natural for us my two lead designers are both very into you know building science and uh we were watching the tiny house trend just continue to ratchet up but nobody was really addressing it from an efficiency standpoint uh the houses are cute but they're not very green uh they they use a ton of propane or electricity to stay warm yeah cool depending on the season so that was the main reason we saw this huge opportunity and um since we have that loyal following you know we want to always be growing and uh and it's sort of like we've got the cooking cooling cleaning and now we have the shelter to go with it how do you how do you let community members like get excited together what opportunities you create for them to like hang out in one spot and like get excited because like ultimately when i look at what you're doing right you start off with a mousetrap which is a launch in 2013 of a product that you really like that's also really smart looks pretty got a lot of pre-sales you grow your list you hustle at trade shows now you have 50 000 paid customers you've got 250 000 on your list you're launching a tiny home i'm looking at tiny home right now and it's a great it's basically this is the new shopping center floor instead of you paying your ghost on products on an end cap at walmart your audience members or your community can pay to go stay at these tiny homes where they're going to experience and you're going to upsell all your other products to them right at scale right i mean is that is that an intentional strategy so how do you accelerate that oh no you're absolutely right um and there are several models that are doing that like an airbnb uh and you're you're reading my mind um who else is doing this though like besides airbnb there's a cool startup called um getaway i don't remember their exact url they don't have your products i i've used them i've stayed at a getaway before but they don't but they don't have like cool solar products that they try and up that like they build into the experience at the getaway yeah well you know uh they we should talk uh you know we we have a pretty robust audience on um facebook uh we have this the gosund solar community kitchen i think it's called and there's like 7 000 people in there and they share their experience um we don't we don't do it enough on other social media platforms um you know i i'm fairly out of instagram tick tock snapchat myself i regret that that i kind of missed that that vote um and so facebook has been kind of where i interplay and of course youtube uh and a bit on linkedin but we're also not super communicative on on twitter or reddit or you know we're well mostly represented on facebook you're listing the dream call go sun dream you're listing the dream the solar off-grid tiny house for between 69 000 and 99 000 and they can put down a 500 deposit sort of like a tesla put down a deposit model you know elon sells a billion dollars of down payments before the thing even exists how many sales have you done how many down payments of 500 bucks have you got yep we're we're well over 10 uh and and we're you know we're definitely on our way to our first 10 units in production oh wow for 20 so is this i mean is this going to be a margin thing from what can you produce this thing for yeah you know we'll make well like i think you're nailing it and that um a lot of this is just a point at the overall lifestyle um we're not going to have a great margin on the tiny home you know 10 or 15 percent uh on something that's a hundred grand that's 10 grand great um but but it's really about you know getting people into using our products and relating to our products in these different ways whether it's for you know family fun or for kind of preparedness and same with the experience with the home in general uh and like you said sort of the opportunity to upsell or to help people you know absorb the different use case scenarios of cooking or cooling on our devices we think of it almost as a giant brand building marketing exercise as well yeah this just to me is fascinating like i because i talk to so many founders like it is crystal clear to me that you and getaway around should be the same company right they've got like software to allow bookings like manually i assume you could probably actually it's probably easier to do what you've done sorry you've built the harder part which is the physical brick-and-mortar like the atoms they've sort of built the bits right it's easy for you to add bits it's probably harder for them to add the hardware so you're probably more valuable than them but i feel like you could do a model like what they're doing pretty darn easily if you raise some capital to build a bunch of these units and put five outside of every major city definitely no i love it um you know and i do have a developer tinge in in my blood so that's uh you're kind of reading my mind and our future growth opportunities that's we're doing a lot to um to communicate that vision in 2021 yeah that you're going right after you're you're a step ahead of it you should keep me like i mean i don't know how but i'd love to participate in that somehow whether it's from a capital perspective or just even just brainstorming once everyone's like this i really enjoy this i think it's the future these curated sort of content houses whether it's a tiny house in the middle nowhere or a in in beverly hills where content creators are saying that i love the same thing yeah i mean and you can make these houses super smart you know there's this opportunity where like you know you log you pull in our app and you jump in the house and all of a sudden the app connects you to 20 smart devices and you're just like whoa this is so cool i could do all these things now and be super human you know this is great and you're still personally doing i'm looking at the tiny house consultation your face is right there you're still doing all the onboarding huh well um that's just how we set up the calendly you know we we have some you know i i don't talk to everybody we're not we're not a a big corp you know and i love interfacing especially with somebody that wants to buy the dream uh but but i don't i'm not a part of every interaction there yeah very interesting yeah i do try to be as connected to our customer as possible we we do have like a customer board and and we're always like pitching surveys and trying to get more feedback uh you know it it really has brought us a lot of incredible ideas and improvements that's really cool what else am i missing what else should i have asked you about that i haven't asked about oh you're good i um you know there's a part of our business that's about social entrepreneurship and we're trying to bring our technology to three billion people in the world that still cook with wood and charcoal every day and that's like sub-saharan africa um uh you know latin america uh in areas where impoverished regions where people um need to break a cycle of poverty because cooking is this huge burden not to mention you know clean water and and you know refrigeration and things so so basically we do have sort of a dual business uh and our strategy is to um is to really work towards benefit and uh we're in fact launching something tomorrow goes on gifts of gratitude anybody that wants a ghost on fill out a form tell us why you want it you know what you're gonna do with it and we'll give it good consideration and ship you one by the end of the year if you if you are a recipient i love that very good patrick let's rep appear with the famous five number one favorite book oh man i didn't do my research i i'm sorry i don't know your um last one you read uh the last book i read so um i really liked um crossing the chasm yeah jeffrey moore good one number two is there a ceo you're following or studying i dig um richard branson yep number three what's your favorite online tool for building go sun well shopify has been hooking it up i know that's a pretty big tool yeah but number number four how many hours of sleep to get every night you know the other one i want to say is figma figma has totally changed our business in the last uh six months yep uh i sleep seven eight hours and situation married single kids uh a girlfriend long-term girlfriend no kiddos running around she has a a daughter so i have a basically a 20 year old stepdaughter okay fair that's great a stepdaughter and a whole company how old are you patrick i'm 42. last question what's something you issue when you were 20 uh something that i wished i had done that you knew when you were 20. did i do oh boy um i wish i wish i'd have known more about the financial side of things you know put put your money in the you know and get that eight percent compounding annual interest that simple little trick i should have done that guys go gosun launched back one product in 2013 called ghost sport today they launched over nine products four million in sales he hustled to build an email list of a quarter million people starting at trade show capturing business cards back pre-pandemic in 2013 2014 2015 now scaling into tiny homes just launched one 70 000 bucks got his first 10 pre-orders at 500 bucks a pop but most importantly he's a definite example of how you build a great community around a product line you're building and then with a powerful community can really expand to anything you want patrick we're rooting for you thanks for taking us to the top nice you nailed that nathan thank you very much for having me one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the 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