E-Commerce-Marke für Sicherheits-Schmuck skalieren

0:00Unternehmer/Gast We make jewelry with safety technology hidden inside. It's got a button if you double click it, it alerts your friends, family, and police to let them know you're in an emergency and need help. I never meant to start a company. It happened by accident. I was studying engineering at the University of Massachusetts and one night I was leaving an event just like this one. As I was on my way to my car, a bunch of guys started following and harassing me and my phone on me, but what do you do?

0:27You can't really be like, "Hey, don't attack me. I'm just going to call the police." >> [laughter] >> I ended up running and thankfully I wasn't hurt, but when I got home I started looking for safety devices to protect myself and all I could find were big ugly panic buttons that even my 80-year-old grandmother refuses to wear. Um I ended up declining a job with Google to work on InvisaWear full-time. We raised $3 million to develop the technology, brought it to market, and then we've been incredibly fortunate.

0:56We've done over 20 million in lifetime sales mainly from happy customers and organic word of mouth exposure. And we've signed deals with ADT, the largest name in home security. Now it feels like still nobody's heard of us despite the fact we've done so well. So we need more capital and more resources to scale. My question for you is what would you do if you were in my shoes? It feels like we're drowning in opportunity. So we've been basically targeting college-aged women and their parents, but we're getting organically a ton of seniors that don't want to wear the LifeAlert-like products. We've got one of the world's largest retailers who's ready to give us a 4-ft display in their electronics section. We've got another major leading security company who wants to sign a deal similar to ADT. And we've got a really big name jewelry company that wants to do a collab. But I've got a five-person team and have been bootstrapping. So I'm a little stressed and like, "What do we do here? Do we go out raise like a really large round of financing, hire a big sales team, go after all of these opportunities?"

2:00Um Ed had some good advice. He's like, "Pick the one that would be most profitable and only focus on that." But do I say no to the big jewelry designer and no to the retail stores to focus on the security deal? Thank you so much and it's on for you. Thank you. That's very sweet of you. Thank you. Now that and my pepper spray. That's right. There you go. Um I think when you're when you're thinking about all the opportunities that you have, the question I have for you is like right now your best one is it a one-time purchase or do you have recurring Are there any other items they can buy besides that?

2:37>> Yes, it's a recurring revenue. Hardware retails for $149, and then it's $14.99 a month for the subscription. Yeah. Yeah. Um That's cool. What's the stick? What do you mean by >> do people stay? Oh, approximately 18 months is what we're finding. The subscription launched about 3 years ago, so it's still preliminary. ADT estimates that they'll stay on for about 7 years on the subscription.

3:04So question is right now, how long have you been in business? We started the company in 2016 and launched in 2018. So 6 years. And so your best customers, the ones that stay the longest and have the longest the the highest lifetime value, where do those customers come from? Um we have over 2.5 million followers on our social media accounts and a majority of our customers come just through social media videos they've seen. So then all these big deals, have you done any Have you executed on any of the big deals yet? Yes, sorry. So 50% of our revenue comes direct to consumer, the other 50% comes through ADT and ADT Canada's parent company Telus Communications.

3:44Alex >> Do you know the difference in how long like the lifetime value between those two customer cohorts? We don't know just yet, but that's a really good question that I will look into as soon as I'm back. Yeah, we were just making a video on this and that's why I'm thinking which we were talking about how to figure out which customer scenario to narrow in on, which is the first thing you want to do is segment your customers by cohort to figure out where do those customers come from, the ones that are staying the longest. And so that's the first thing I'd be thinking is like both opportunities could work and you can make them work, but it's just a matter of like what's your best customer, where do they come from, and then it probably do more of that one.

4:18Yeah, thank you. What do you think? Um well if if you've been around since 2018 is when you started selling, it's 20 whatever 24 now, so you've had 6 years, 20 million in lifetime sales. So you're looking at Are you doing like three-ish million a year? Somewhere in there? 5 million. 5 million, okay. So So you've been growing every year? So we experienced exponential growth initially and then we flatlined the last couple of years and I think it's because we've been bootstrapping. We did a million our first year on the market. We made national headlines for saving a young woman's life. Second year we signed a deal with ADT. We doubled, we did 2 million. Third year we signed with ADT Canada. We doubled again, did 4 million, and then we've been floating at that 5 million mark. So that's where we were like, "Okay, maybe we should pivot more to B2B if ADT and Telus are working really well." So I'll I'll zoom out and say that fundamentally you need more advertising aka distribution. And so I think it comes down to which skill set you have more in your existing toolbox. And so right now if you seem like you It seems like you do decently well with the corporate etc. just cuz like you started with a raising round, which is just a different level of sophistication in general. And so you've closed these other deals, which I think you could probably leverage into more of those versus me saying, "Okay, learn how to run ads really aggressively, learn how to like make creative and hooks and targeting and all that stuff." Which this business is so for that. Like this is like a national infomercial waiting to be like made.

5:49Alex Just as a side note. You But you lack marketing. Like that's the hat. And so I think that the the ultimate version of this business would have a killer marketer who really knows how to drive traffic. Yeah. Um but I think the easiest path for you would be just go close more of those deals and all of your attention is just like basically the acquisition channel of the B2B distribution. That one is what I would put as the highest likelihood path of kind of consistent growth. The like you could go from 5 million to 50 million this year if you had one banger ad that has that headline of the girl and you ran that as a short and then just blasted it to women who were in their in whatever age group that you're looking at. That's what I like that would murder.

6:31But if you don't have like that's a whole big box of skills that you might not have right now. And so I think just doing more of those um B2B distribution deals is probably the best bet. Yeah, thank you both so much. That's great advice. I really appreciate it. If you are a business owner and you are not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So my team and I put together the $100 scaling roadmap, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through and more importantly where they got stuck and how they got past it.

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