“Bendy Straw” Idea Raises $1.8M on Kickstarter

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

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It is a brand new week and a brand new month, kicking off episode 9-1-2-9-12, which will be published on the 1st of July, 2018. If you're listening later, this story is still relevant, just like the vast majority of our stories try to keep this entire archive evergreen at least as much as possible. Sometimes I'm traveling, so I talk about where I am, but it doesn't really affect the content of the story. So I've got a great story for you today. Got a lot of great stories actually coming up this entire week and beyond.

This one is a tremendous success. Maybe we could set it up by asking what do you do when you set out to raise $12,000 through crowdfunding, but you actually end up raising nearly 2 million, 2 million dollars actually, 1.8 million. It kind of falls into the category of a good problem to have, but it can still create problems, including a sea of knockoffs, which we'll talk about a bit today. We're calling it Bindi straw idea, raises 1.8 million on Kickstarter, but there's drama and intrigue. Also, I wanna give a shout out to a couple of our listeners who wrote in and asked me to clarify something from a recent episode.

We've got a lot of people out there doing all kinds of things. So I'm very grateful to those in our community who have skills that I don't. And so a couple of lawyers wrote in and said, you know, this thing about a provisional patent, which we'll talk about briefly in this episode, but I mentioned it another time recently. I may have suggested that a provisional patent is sufficient for some projects. And the reality is that a provisional patent application won't actually protect applicants at all, but all it does is it secures a filing date should they choose to file a non-provisional patent down the road.

Somebody else said, basically what this does is it just kind of holds your place in the patent system. So it's not without value, but it's also not the same as having a utility patent or other non-provisional patent. So thank you folks for setting me straight. I wanted to pass that on to the rest of our listeners. And thanks to Chris Menali, Karen Wade, Kavanaugh, and anybody else out there that I missed.

All right, stay tuned for the story. It's coming right up after this quick shout out to our sponsor. [Music]

Emma Cohen was always interested in sustainability. While working for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, she completed her master's in environmental management from Harvard Extension School. She was involved in important work, but wondered if there was a way to be more personally proactive about fighting plastic pollution.

And one day in Thailand, she found it. While traveling around Southeast Asia, Emma was walking along a beach that was completely covered in plastic waste. For her, it was the last straw. She became an activist against single use plastics, taking up the issue with friends, and then in a local TEDx talk about how plastic was harming our oceans. And it was through being vocal that Emma was introduced to Miles Pepper in 2017.

Miles had an idea that he'd been sitting on for a while, a reusable straw that can be bent into a small case, but was still capable of being stiff enough to not feel flimsy in a drink. With his idea and her professional background, it seemed like a match made in heaven. They got to work right away. They found a local engineer to create a CAD design, printed a few prototypes at a local machine shop in Los Angeles, and within just a few months, landed on a rough design they were proud of. A silicone interior wrapped in individual metal tubes that could be connected to create a firm outer straw.

The result was a collapsible straw that could fit into a pocket or purse, but still be strong enough once the metal pieces were connected to stir a thick drink. And they called it, of course, the final straw. Now, here's a great tip for someone out there. Emma set up a Google News Alert for anything that had to do with plastic straw waste or government bans. She would then take the names of journalists who were writing those articles and put them in a list to use later as her press or contact list once she launched her campaign.

And speaking of that campaign, Emma and Miles created the campaign from scratch, worked with some friends to make a funny video of a mermaid asking customers to stop using plastic straws, and then launched in March 2018, just five short months after they began working together. Now, guess what happened next? What happened next was nothing, crickets. Her press list was a dud. Nobody wanted to give the final straw exposure, at least not at first.

It seemed as though the dozens of hours Emma had poured into personalized messages to journalists had all been wasted. They got a few sales over the next few days, along with a couple articles on small websites, but nowhere near their $12,500 goal. But then, like a diver rushing into the water to save a plastic trap turtle in the ocean, BuzzFeed came along. Someone there had defied their journalist friends elsewhere and created a short video about the final straw and plastic pollution. And that short video ended up being an enormous hit with over 30 million views.

Emma and Miles blew past their $12,500 goal, reaching over $100,000 in backing within a couple days. And that was just the beginning. By the end of the campaign, Emma and Miles had raised $1.8 million and sold over 100,000 straws to strangers. Now, they had to follow through. Emma contracted a team to completely redesign the straw, the prototypes that cost nearly $50 each, and she needed to get the price way lower.

The team worked directly with the manufacturer to create a cost-efficient design over the next six months. And Emma ended up with a product she could sell at a four to five X markup. Then, however, something weird happened. Months before she shipped her first straw, she got an email. This was an email from a disgruntled customer who was very upset at the low-quality final straw she'd purchased.

She wanted a refund. Emma was bewildered. How could she have disgruntled customers when she hadn't actually shipped product? Well, then she did a Google search. And sure enough, less than two months after her campaign had ended, before she even had her own products made, they were already copycats.

And they were using her exact branding, name, images, everything, they even created fake URLs, like final straw with two R's, final straw or final straw.net. The worst part was people were getting these fake straws, realizing how awful they were, and then throwing them away, which of course was completely counter to Emma's goal. Final straw was already approved for a provisional patent in the US, as I mentioned in the beginning, it just holds your place in the patent system. But to enforce her intellectual property, Emma spent about $10,000 to get the full utility patent. And from there, she started sending cease and desist letters, a few of them per day, to these knockoff manufacturers and sellers.

She also filed her patents with Amazon, Alibaba, and AliExpress to get their help with fighting fakes. Fortunately, once the real final straw started shipping out in October, the team was flooded with great reviews. Customers loved the straw, and those that had accidentally purchased a counterfeit emailed Emma to say how much better the real one was compared to the fakes. And the sales have been rolling in ever since. Emma knows that in order to keep the final straw as a sustainable brand, not just a one hit wonder that's endlessly knocked off, she needs to keep innovating.

So thankfully, she's not letting those knockoff troubles slow down innovation. She's gonna be releasing new products in 2019 to fight other areas of single use plastic waste, like reusable cutlery and water bottles. The best part of it, despite those real challenges, is knowing she's helping people all over the world get excited about doing something for the environment. And they're doing that with a straw that doesn't suck. [Music]

All right, so I get a lot of questions from people who have fears and worries that this is what's gonna happen with their project.

They're gonna have a tremendous success, and then somebody's gonna come along and copycat it. You know, it's my perspective, and I understand someone might have a different one, but my general perspective is to not worry too much about that, because it kind of falls into the category of good problems to have. All right, if you raise $2 million in your crowdfunding campaign expecting to raise $12,000, it's not surprising that someone else out there is gonna try to ride that wave. The far greater problem, actually remember this quote from Seth Godin years ago. He said, "Your greatest problem as an author, as a creator, is not piracy, it's obscurity." In other words, it's far more likely that your Kickstarter campaign or whatever it is, it's just not gonna get noticed.

That's the problem I think you should pay more attention to, which is not to say that you shouldn't pursue the patent or the trademark or get some counsel from someone much more qualified than me. I just think like first things first, let's make sure your idea is actually going to work and take off and have demand in the marketplace, because that's the most important thing. And I did like this tip though, about how Emma set up a Google News Alert, and she did it for anything in her field, her topic, broadly speaking, plastic straw waste or government bans. So there's been a lot of news about various municipalities, even cities banning the use of plastic straws. So in doing so, she's able to create this list, this database of journalists that she could then pitch.

And as we heard in the story, a lot of them didn't actually do anything about it, at least at first, but then the BuzzFeed connection worked, because big media coverage tends to create other big media coverage. It's kind of the circular thing. So I love that tip. I think that could be helpful to anybody out there who's planning a big product launch or a big crowdfunding campaign, where it's especially important to get a lot of attention in the beginning. All right, that's a lot for today.

I hope it is helpful to somebody out there. Don't forget, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. My hope is that you'll listen to the show and get an idea or get support for your idea, or just get a little bit of a nudge, to go out and do something for yourself. Maybe do something for yourself and for the rest of the world, like what Emma is doing here. I think you can do good and do well.

Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/912, episode nine, one, two. Thanks so much. You better subscribe. Much more is on the way. My name is Chris Guillebeau, and you are listening to Side Hustle School.

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From the Onward Project.