Inventor Unclogs Profits With Innovative Drain Solution

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[Music]

Inventor Unclog's profits with innovative drain solution. Welcome friends, welcome to Side Hustle School. My name's Chris Guillebeau. I often talk about how providing solutions to problems is a great way to think of side hustle ideas. And let me just give you some practical examples.

Today's story is gonna be very, very practical. And the concept here is like, you think about problems, you just notice problems as you go around your daily life. You look around your house, you look around your office or work site, as you run errands and such, you notice like efficiencies or things that could be done better. And you're probably not gonna find a solution to every problem. In fact, you won't find solutions to most of them, that's why they're problems.

You also won't be able to act on every proposed solution you find, 'cause you can only try so many things. But the point is by identifying problems and asking, what if you're gonna develop more of the side hustle mentality? So today's story follows this model precisely. Let's get really specific here. A guy who is a father of two girls, well, he's a husband and father of two girls.

He's the only man in the house. He keeps finding a lot of hair in the bathtub. So he invents a special tool called the tubshroom to keep the hair out of sight until it can be cleaned up. So you think, well, that's kind of cute, but here's the thing. He then produces and launches this tool and they go on to make seven figures in profits.

Seven figures. So if you're new to side hustle school and you're like, oh, great, I'm gonna hear about how to drive for DoorDash and make minimum wage. No, no, no, we're talking about real money here. And so we're gonna break down the how in this story, like how does he actually do it? But it really does follow that concept of provide a solution to a problem, okay?

So stay tuned. I'm gonna bring you the story of tubshroom, tubshroom. Come on right up. [Music]

Sergey Carnegie is an inventor. Just like Thomas Edison before him, he has a knack for coming up with novel ways to solve difficult problems.

His friend, Saliman Najemi is a business whiz. He has a wealth of experience in retail distribution and manufacturing. And together they've created a highly successful side hustle with a one of a kind product. Let's start with the beginning of their partnership. 10 years ago, Sergey and Saliman met when they were both working for an energy drink company.

And they realized they were kindred spirits, each enjoyed brainstorming product ideas. And they had skills that were different but complimentary. Sergey had more of an inventor's touch, whereas Saliman was all about getting ideas out to market. Sergey's first attempt fell short. He put a lot of work into something that just didn't work.

In fact, you could say it went down the drain because drains are what came next. So Thomas Edison, let's go back to him. He invented the light bulb, but it didn't happen right away. When he spoke of the process, he said, "I didn't fail a thousand times. The light bulb was an invention with a thousand steps." So in the spirit of Edison, Sergey continued to invent.

And here's where that practical problem came in. As a husband and father of two girls, he noticed a lot of long strands of hair scattered throughout the home. Day after day, hair kept clogging up the drains. So he created a small mushroom shaped drain plug. It was filled with holes so that water could flow freely, but it also caught any excess hair and kept it out of sight.

He called it the tub shroom. He took the concept to his friend and they decided to partner up. Sergey would be the inventor and Saliman the business mind who would take the idea to market. Since they already had a prototype, they decided to launch the product on Kickstarter before spending too much money. They learned from some previous mistakes.

They marketed the listing and message boards. And starting with a modest goal of $12,000, they ended up raising $59,267 from 2,059 backers. A huge win. They knew they had a winner on their hands. So Saliman used his experience and distribution to build on that traction.

He approached Bed Bath & Beyond, convinced them to give the product a trial. And why would they say yes so quickly? Because they'd seen the Kickstarter success. They knew the product had market validation. The Bed Bath & Beyond trial was a huge success which led to them stocking the tub shroom in over a thousand stores.

But the success wasn't lost on would-be competitors and several similar products began to show up on the market. In fact, knockoffs and counterfeiters have been their greatest challenge. As Saliman put it, I guess imitation is the greatest form of flattery. Fortunately, patent law is an area that Saliman knew a lot about. In the United States, a patent is an official way of proving that you're the one who created something.

It gives you legal protection if a competitor tries to copy anything unique to your invention. Saliman and Sergey took the time to patent the tub shroom which helped them ward off at least some of the copycats. What started as a little invention between two friends turned into a thriving business. One that's allowed both Sergey and Saliman to leave their jobs and go all in with tub shroom land. And the last year, at least the last year that we first broadcast their story, their little drain unclogging solution generated more than a million dollars in profits.

Million dollars in profit, not just revenue. 35% of that was from retail sales, 65% from online sales through Amazon, their own website, eBay, et cetera. Like any great inventor, Sergey is always coming up with new concepts. That's how they plan to keep the business growing. They have launched a tub shroom for the kitchen.

It's called the sink shroom and have other products for all other drains. The goal is for the tub shroom family of products to become synonymous with drain protection. They continue to tweak and improve their range of products to be better for customers. Although they deal in inventing products that make people's lives easier, the profits they've unclogged through this side hustle turned million dollar business could be their greatest invention of all. If you'd like to learn more about the tub shroom or the sink shroom or any other shrooms, well, mostly shrooms related to these products, to be clear, tubshroom.com, say goodbye to clogged drains forever, that's their tagline.

They've got bundles for sale. You can get the drain shroom, stop shroom, kitchen sink, drain stopper all in one. You can buy single products. You can learn more about them. I mean, I guess just whatever you want.

It's all on the website. I also think it's cool that these are low priced products. Like they built a million dollar business from low priced products, which is not easy, but they found again, a solution to a problem. Lots of people have this problem. They were really smart in how they built it both on the invention side and then on the marketing side, taking time to patent it, which is kind of a resource intense process.

It's not the easiest thing to get a patent, but then it can be valuable for the right product. So I think they've done a pretty great job. I hope you enjoyed the story. Remember there's something you can do as well. That's why I say inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better.

I make these stories as case studies for you. You can access the complete archives of Side Hustle School, nine years of consecutive daily episodes at sidehustleschool.com, more than 3,200 episodes. Those are always free as well. Everything is free. Thanks for tuning in.

My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]

From the Onward Project.