GoSun Revenue (2022)

[00:00] 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 gosun products environment are environmentally friendly and ideal for recreation, off grid power outages, disaster relief, which would be useful right now down in Louisiana, developing countries that have minimal power infrastructure. Patrick, you ready to take us to the top? [00:23] >> Patrick Let's do this, Nathan. [00:25] You last came on pre COVID, and I remember being really impressed because I'm summarizing here. So correct me if any of this is wrong, but you said your first product was gosunsport back in like 2017. Seeded that with like 1 k raised $213 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 [00:48] 4,000,000 of top line revenue and grew a massive email list. Is that all correct? [00:52] >> You're nailing it. [00:53] That's amazing. Okay. So what's happened since then? Update us over the past eighteen months. Any new products? [00:57] >> Oh yeah, plenty of new products and plenty of growth. 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. That product is basically a kitchen sink in your backpack. It can also turn into like a camping water purification system, [01:26] >> 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 fueling people's outdoor lives where kind of recreation and preparation kind of coincide. [02:00] Let's talk about that filter plus sink plus shower you won in last year. Well, year, the CES Innovation Awards, it's billed 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? [02:13] >> 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 LifeStraw, where you can drink straight out of a stream. And so instead of hanging out next to a stream, like [02:38] >> 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, course, because we're gosun. [03:01] >> And 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 [03:26] >> typical faucet. So it's kind of like the LED of water consumption. [03:30] Now I'm curious, people are always tinkering around with the right filters to use here. You say specifically that this filter is out, I believe, 99.9% of sort of things that can be, you know, harmful to pathogens and things of that nature, harmful to humans. You chose to go with, I think, a polycarbonate filter plus nano alumina and polypropylene. I'm saying all those things like I know what I'm talking about. Have no idea what I'm talking about. [03:54] I'm just reading off your website, but why are those the right materials? [03:57] >> Well, it it 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 still push the water at a fairly quick rate using that tiny pump. And then it's long lasting and doesn't require any maintenance. So like the LifeStraws, which are beautiful ceramic filters, they require a backflush after just about every use. With a backflush is really [04:32] >> challenging, most people don't do it. It requires distilled water and therefore the filters get clogged pretty quickly. We're And not designing people to have to maintain after its usable life, which is about a thousand liters, you just replace that filter element. And it has three stages. Like I said, filters It also has an activated charcoal filter, so you can reduce any kind of flavor issues in the water. [04:59] Patrick, there's lot of people listening right now that are software people that tinker 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 of units, etcetera. Walk me through how you do that. 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 [05:19] to list it for $223 on your website? [05:22] >> You know, that's a great question. I 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 [05:50] >> stringent specification. And then, we have an assembly facility in China as well, where we have all these parts and pieces come together, where we put together. We have, like you mentioned earlier, we have 10 solid unique SKUs that we assemble ourselves and manufacture more or less ourselves in China. So we're up to speed to be able to deliver. [06:14] And so what are your COGS specifically on this $223 product flow up? Like [06:20] >> off the top of my head, it's going to be somewhere around $80. And so we try to push for margins, gross margins that are over 50%, somewhere around 60 on something like this. [06:33] Is that how you figure out pricing? You always just look at your costs and then market, you you want to then optimize top line for 50 to 60% margin? [06:41] >> Yeah, I mean, you know, 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 pretty big and we do move a thousand units. We have containers on the oceans every day. We just aren't the Coleman or the Yeti of volume. And so we have to keep our margins high. [07:05] Who do you use to track like your freight? Do use any like freight forwarding or shipping planning tools? [07:12] >> You know, we've tried and we've kind of struck out with a lot of like 3PL logistics partners. We basically 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. [07:35] Now you mentioned in 2020, I believe that you passed over 50,000 unique customers. What will you pass at the end of this year? [07:46] >> I think it's gonna be over 100 k. We delivered Oh, wow. In the last year and a half, we delivered a product, a small product. In fact, I've got one here. A set of portable utensils. Basically, [08:00] >> can instead of throwing away plastic every time you eat a carryout meal, these will fit in your wallet. [08:06] Can you say dependable? Is it like tinfoil or is it sturdy? [08:09] >> It's made out of stainless steel. [08:11] Okay. It looks pretty sturdy. [08:14] >> 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. [08:24] We should Would that make it through airport security? [08:26] >> It does. And they actually love to look at it too. They're like, what is that? Yeah, I bet they 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 and more of that, [08:45] >> know, what are you, 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 entry or gateway into the gosun experience. [08:56] That's really interesting. So you charge $15 for this. Do you still have 50 to 60% gross margins on this? [09:03] >> Yeah, yeah. Wow, okay. Actually, they might be more like 70% because something like this, like we have such a volume on something like this, amount of plastic, amazing little These are like $4 and we charge like 15. So that's a healthy gross margin. [09:19] And then walk me through the consumer experience. Okay. So they find it. I wanna 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 more expensive items or more of your product catalog? [09:32] >> Yeah. I mean, we'll use email for the bulk of our upsells. We're starting to use more SMS as well to kind of introduce people into our sales and today's deals. And today's deals page is constantly curated with bundles and different arguments that we have in the fuel free frontier. We've definitely used a lot of Facebook and Instagram ads over the years. [09:57] How much? Like how much last month on ads? [10:01] >> I know that like in general, in 2020, we doubled down because of the pandemic. We saw the opportunity that our technology fit really well in outdoor rack and resilience. We spent around 300 ks in 2020 and that generated about 1,000,000 in revenue. So we get about a three, a little over three return on ad spend. And now I think we're still pushing pretty heavily, probably something around 75 ks a month for about 200 ks in revenue. [10:34] And so what do think you'll finish this year with in terms of total revenue? [10:37] >> It'll be over 5,000,000. So, you know, the pandemic wasn't just a blip in the radar for us. It was taking on a whole new diet of business, a whole new scale. [10:50] So 5,000,000 revenue up from 4,000,000 a year ago, 50,000 customers up to a 100,000 mainly because of those metal utensils. You're now working on driving and expanding them. You know, community is a real moat. Would you ever launch like a, or do you already have one that I don't see on the website, a community for backpackers, hikers, people that like these sorts of products? [11:11] >> We do have a Facebook community. It's called the Facebook community kitchen, facebook.com/groups/gosun. There's like 8,000 users in there that post on a regular basis how they're using our technology. We're trying to get more people to use other technologies of ours, like our coolers and our utensils and talk more about them, what they like about them, how do they use them, how do they hack their, know, how do they add different things together to come up with [11:42] >> better use cases. [11:44] Yeah, here's a good one posted twenty three hours ago from Adena Travis Floyd says, she's grateful for our gosun in Louisiana after the pass of hurricane Ida. We'll be without power for a couple of weeks, according to our energy provider. While we're in cleanup phase, tired and weary will stay. We'll be having hot cooked meals, thanks to our gosun sport and our gosun fusion. And then she showed a picture of her crawfish boiled and wrapped in [12:05] bacon in your oven there. So this is working nicely. [12:08] >> That's what makes all this worth it. And I think that's the biggest thing that's changed since we talked last is, I've always been pretty big into resilience. As you marked me, I'm a camping outdoor guy and I'd love to have my wherewithals when I'm out and about. Turns out that the pandemic really drove that into everyone's psyche. [12:31] >> You want to be able to be outside and be comfortable to have your services And we wanna move away from propane and fire and ice. And so gosun really provides a new way of doing this, but in fact is more convenient and better performing than the alternative. [12:51] How many total SKUs do you have? Mean, I'm scrolling on the page right now, including obviously your hat and your backpack, the collapsible sink that sold out. Mean, what you probably have like 30, what is thirty, forty, 50 SKUs? [13:02] >> Yeah. I think like core SKUs, it's about 20 that are like unique to us. Then we just combine and make bundles out of them. And if, you know, we don't really count the little accessories in that number. But you know, [13:17] you still have about 10 people? [13:19] >> We're up to about 15 now. [13:21] 15, okay. [13:22] >> We've had to hire another engineer. We've got a sourcing professional now. We just, you know, and we have a huge We have an even bigger backlog development. So we have more and more products that we wanna get into the cycle and that's kind of the bottleneck. [13:42] Patrick, my big question for you is a lot of software companies struggle with distribution. I imagine there are some types of software that folks like you really love to use. Just look at your favorite apps on your phone. Have you ever looked at partnering? I mean, using your quarter million person email as partnering with software apps to drive more revenue and sort of more lock in your community into community? [14:01] >> Yeah, we've done a little bit, but I'd love to do more and I would love to hear more of the suggestions from your community. I'm a big believer in software as a driver. I mean, I think I mentioned last time we were on Figma has been super helpful for graphic layout, Shopify, of course, for just general web sales. We do have some plugins for like communications, Attentive. We use something called ShippingEasy to help our customers make [14:30] >> sure they're in tune with their orders. [14:34] >> I'd love to do more and I'd love to do more on all this amazing relevant social media to get more engagement with consumers. [14:42] What are your favorite like consumer apps? Like, are there like a hiking trail app or like, you know, the best way to position your thing, the direction of the sun or like, do you use any apps like that? [14:52] >> Let me look at my phone and see what using often. Obviously, [14:58] >> I love Clubhouse. I've been starting to listen in to a lot of stuff there. It's not that much related to your question. [15:06] >> Just looking through here, you know, outdoorsy, Airbnb, you know, get you out and about. [15:15] I just wonder what would happen, Patrick, if you emailed your full list with just a very simple question, which is, what are your favorite software apps for camping? And like, what people say. Because I bet you there's gonna be like a core five to 10. And I bet you, you could go out and either build a clone of one of those and then sell it to your community or go buy the thing, that actual thing yourself [15:35] and bring it in house. Where margins could be, you know, seventy, eighty, 90% and keep fueling your business. That's what I get excited but I'm biased though. It's not a good call. It's just I'm biased to software. [15:47] >> Hey, you guys are leading the world now, you know, the millennial, if you will, and you've got me convinced that the app life and the interconnect with tech and kind of the in crowd that who knows know, like people know what's good and they share that, And if you're aware and connected, you'll be you'll be given the good beta on the best place to go camp. So I'm all about it. So I'll definitely look into. [16:17] We'll see what happens. In the meantime, though, let's wrap up with a famous five, Patrick. Number one, favorite book. [16:23] >> Gosh, Crossing the Chasm. It's still one of my favorite books. [16:28] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [16:32] >> I continue to like Elon Musk these days. He's hot shit. [16:36] Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building the business? [16:41] >> I'd say Figma. [16:42] Number four, how many hours of sleep? [16:45] >> I try to get seven to eight. [16:47] That's good. [16:48] >> And situation, what, you're still one still one kid and 43? [16:52] >> Wonderful girlfriend. Yep. [16:54] >> One kid, 43, not married, but wonderful girlfriend. [16:57] What last question. What do wish you knew when you were 20? [17:02] >> I wish taking action was more important rather than watching the action. So invest, write about it, buy it and try it and burn it up. But action is really what we're genius wise. [17:22] Guys, he really grew during COVID selling $15 little flatware kits that cost him $4 to make. He shipped over 40,000 of them metal utensils over the past eighteen to, we'll call it sixteen to eighteen months. Did about $4,000,000 in revenue last year, past 50,000 customers. This year he'll break $5,000,000 in revenue, over 100,000 customers, mainly selling physical products with really interesting margin profile, 60 to 70%, but a massive community, 8,000 in the Facebook group, hundred two fifty thousand [17:48] on his email list. If I was a betting man, I'd say Patrick's gonna build a very successful software company inside of this community one day. Patrick, thanks for taking us to the top. [17:55] >> Thank you, Nathan. It's a pleasure. [17:59] One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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 1PM [18:24] Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central. To make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big [18:46] fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you wanna take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. Sign up [19:08] for that at nathanlatka.com slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. [19:27] We got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you.

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 subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan laca dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya