Here's what a yonder phone pouch is. It's this contraption that basically prevents you from accessing your phone, which is the greatest drug on earth. I just have this incredibly high level of conviction that some sort of locking phones away is going to be a part of kids' futures, you know, and in a lot of other environments too.
And here's where I think the potential for innovation is. There's a huge opportunity to like identify an elegant feature set around this pouch that just makes it work a lot better. If you were going to create, you know, yonder 2.0 or yonder for XYZ niche, how would you actually go about doing so? Adam Robinson, you've made it to the startup ideas podcast.
This is the highlight of my career. This is literally it's only downhill from here. I'm so excited to be here. I feel like I'm on a mountaintop. By the way, I was on a mountaintop all of last week. I was in the woods in Colorado, sitting like a monk basically reflecting on life.
I was getting nature therapy. You like really achieve deep inner peace if you're totally unplugged and in solitude. It happens to everyone. We live like that for a million years before we were evolved to do that, you know. But it's just hard for people like us, right? You're busy, you have, you know, family, maybe or whatever. And it's like maybe later, maybe when my kids are older and then you never do it.
So just keep doing it. And it's like so great because it actually helps you with the time with your kids. That's how to prioritize it. So anyway. So you were on that mountaintop. You were brainstorming startup ideas. You decided to text me. We're now here. And I'm ecstatic because you're the real deal you've built. I mean, you built businesses from zero to 20 million AR are completely bootstrapped. So when you talk, I listen.
That's rare. Yeah. Not many people end up doing that for a lot of reasons, which we agree are stupid. Some of them. Exactly. Exactly. So let's just let's just get into it. You know, what's on your mind right now and what could you share with with people?
So look, I, you know, to this nature theme, right, like we lived in the woods for a million years and then a couple thousand years ago, we started living in cities, which pulled our brains in a totally different direction that were not physically evolved to be it. Then 150 years ago, the industrial evolution happened. And for a large part of the population, it really made them live in a crappy environment. Then connectivity happened. Whenever it was 10 years ago, which is literally the worst.
So the yonder phone patch exists for a lot of reasons, right? Like this device is like fentanyl for us. And it's so powerful that we've literally had to create a pouch to like go in and respect to comedian, for instance, and actually listen to otherwise, we just be on our phones, you know, getting our monkey mind whipped around by like whatever.
Alert or text message that doesn't matter from someone that we received. So I think this like take this device that I know is absolute kryptonite for my well-being and like put it in a place where it proof this like put it in a place where I can touch it is like a massive market for the future.
And it's very in its infancy, you know, how many schools have a yonder patch that like hardly any my guess is in 10 years 98% of middle schools are requiring people to put their phone in a pouch and lock it during the day. That's my guess.
So there's probably people who don't even know what a yonder patch is. Yeah, yeah, okay, okay, so so here here's what a yonder phone pouch is and I hope that I'm going to inspire a lot of innovation out there because the yonder phone patch only works in one way, right, which I think is the tremendous opportunity because there's a lot of people who would prefer it to not work in this way.
So if you go in Austin like if you go to Joe Rogan's comedy place called the mothership as you walk in the door, they literally require you to take your phone out of your pocket, put it in this pouch, then they touch the pouch to a device that locks the pouch and you cannot open the pouch until you touch it to that device again. So your phone's there, you're holding it, but you can't access it so you it requires you to be you know it just helps you pay attention to the actual.
In participate in the environment that you're in right so that's the application for a comedy show you can see the application for movies and theaters. Education.
I mean, I just read this book called the anxious generation, which I would highly recommend reading it's it's by the guy who wrote the coddling of the American mind. I mean these these cell phones are just terrible for for middle schoolers, you know everybody's getting them earlier and earlier my buddy runs a charter school here in Austin. I'm like is there a chance that by the time my two year old is in middle school.
The parents will have agreed to have not given them smartphones he's like no shot there's always one that will because we're getting the point where everybody had smartphones when they were young who are having kids now so. So anyway, that's what it is it's this contraption that basically prevents you from accessing your phone, which is the greatest drug on earth and.
Here's where I think the potential for innovation is this device this the yonder pouch which i'm sure is just growing exponentially right I don't know but like. I just have this incredibly high level of conviction that some sort of locking phones away is going to be a part of kids futures you know and in a lot of other environments to. The pouch works in one way it's a very you know kind of 20th century device if you want to call it that it's very not tech it's just like.
It kind of like works like the theft things in retail stores you touch it to that device it locks you touch it again it unlocks right like. If you have a 2000 person high school. The practicality of that is not really great I think there's like kind of like what elanted to the car there's a huge opportunity to like identify an elegant feature set around this.
Pouch that probably is not that much more expensive than the just what they're doing right now that just makes it work a lot better like oh it charges your phone while it's in there or you know it like the the principle of the entire school when the bell goes off hits unlock and all the kids can like get into their phones without literally queuing up.
You know for a half hour to walk out of the building to like tap their device on this thing don't tell anyone but I've got 30 plus startup ideas that could make you millions and I'm giving them away for free. These aren't just random guesses they're validated concepts from entrepreneurs who build 100 million dollars plus businesses I've compiled them into one simple database.
Compiled from hundreds of conversations I've had on my podcast but the main thing is most of these ideas don't need a single investor some cost nothing to start I'm pretty much handing you a cheat sheet the idea bank is your startup shortcut just click below to get access your next cash
selling business is waiting for you I am fat if I were not doing what I was doing I would be like digging a right I would be digging a rabbit hole on this device keep my phone away from me market yes for sure yes because we're going to want that more and more and I think more and more people acknowledge that we don't have the power to do it ourselves right so
from a scale perspective from what I heard yonder was doing like 30 to 40 million in revenue they've got over a million students every day using the product in 21 countries which is crazy that costs about 25 to 30 dollars USD per student
another interesting thing is I just checked Google trends and I use this tool called glimps that add some search data on top of it the some of the top searches for Google trends for yonder is yonder stock how do I invest in yonder right in yonder is yonder publicly traded which is a really good signal that people believe in the company so if you were going to create you know yonder 2.0 or yonder for xyz nish how would you actually go about doing so
I would probably take the eulon approach and make a fancy one for rich people first you know like I just feel like rich people are also very aware of this problem a lot of them and like you can have you have access to them through social media so like
I mean this is literally what I would do I would just start talking I would whenever I was around my more affluent friends who have kids I would just start talking to them about this and I would probably buy yonder and show it to them and then I would be like what if this could do xyz right you know and then I work on what the x y and z was after lit i mean hundreds of conversations i would not build anything until i could say xyz and i would get like
a literal eyes light up asking me where they could buy it and then i would start prototyping something physical i would do an enormous amount of cos man it's like prototyping is expensive you can save a lot of heartache through talking i don't think people really understand that who have not started several companies before you know something's happening to me right now which is this great example of like not talking enough like we're building this other feature for rb2b
and we built a tangential feature first we put on i c p filter and ideal customer profile filter first and didn't really talk to people we thought we knew what they wanted we didn't think about the fact. that like okay so like if you filter down by i c p in linkedin you're filtering a in eight hundred million contact database yeah so a restrictive i c p filter makes sense a lot of our customers we resolved ten contacts today if they put a restrictive i c p filter which is like and instead of or.
it's gonna give them zero to one contacts like per month you know what i mean so so but we defaulted to the and right so i ask and we didn't realize this to like i ask the people who are trying to be a test other feature. to set it up and then we're like oh my god like ten out of ten people the way we built this.
are doing something that like we would want to nudge them the other way and the first reactions like oh it's fine like you know support can explain it or whatever but it's like no if it's ninety eight percent of people that we want to nudge one way like we want support to explain to the two percent why anyway so you know i just keep learning that lesson over and over again.
but but that is literally what i would do i would just go go start talking to people and then there's a bunch of interesting tangential kind of like if you can get people to unplug and disconnect for a few days universally people feel like it's an incredible experience so if you can start like.
like you know renting these summer camps in the fall in the northeast and like you know having family experiences are like you know people in their twenties can like bring thirty people there whatever like i'm just so interested in getting people away from their phones and i think that like more
every day people acknowledge how terrible this ongoing you know onslaught of of you know our lives now right like you and i are we're in it dude like we're you know we're the worst victims and perpetrators of this.
i was just checking twitter right now what i'm doing on twitter this whole conversation yeah it's like i talked to these guys one time in in in l.a. and they're like yeah we like help apps become more addictive and we also have a consulting firm that that helps the platform make the platform less addictive.
you know so we're like causing the problem on one end and then they're like helping you know consult with Android about how you can like layer the black and white on or whatever you know they're both sides you know the most guys they're like gray goose but they're also alcoholics anonymous.
yeah totally but i guess if you understand the problem that well you can you can help totally totally so i'm on the under website and i see something i'd like seeing which is if you go to the other website they have a bunch of different categories so it says.
first of all their tagline of phone free spaces like perfect really really well said so telling it so like like anytime you can get a super clear statement that's like under five words yes that really captures the essence of what you're trying to do like that is totally magic three words is the goal.
yeah if you can get the three words god bless you so so with our b2b real quick like yep there's like this weird thing where we're identifying website traffic but everybody does it different and the right visitors from us are not the right visitors from somebody else so my tagline use us to.
yeah i like that yeah that's really good that's really good so on the on the on the website phone free spaces you got homes all these categories homes school music comedy events and weddings courts workplace production hospitality and other what that says to me whenever i see something like that i'm like okay how do i create what yonder for x
yeah so totally totally i think going to your point like if you can like mock up some of these landing pages mock up the products for x and then just start talking to those people that's a great approach the other thing i usually do. also do your point is once i see categories i'm like okay these are categories but what's a what's a group of people that i would go target that has specific needs for this thing so yes you know yonder for rich people.
yonder for you know wellness people or or whatever just you know going down the list and and then seeing is there something unique that you can provide to them totally like surely i look at that and i don't know what it is yet because i have another conversations yeah but what i do know is that one dumb device is not the best. it's not the best for all of those different applications it's like eighty percent there for all of them it's not a hundred percent for any of them.
it might be a hundred percent for one of them which is where they started and then they realize it was eighty percent for the other fifteen or whatever right so like.
so like the way i love thinking about it is like i saw this thing that if you see made one time that was like Craigslist and then it was like all of the startups that have been started since Craigslist that have taken a slice of Craigslist this is like to me this is like that that's the story of startups it's like yonder's Craigslist.
go make right now one and then like other slices of like either a smarter a dumber like a what out you know whatever musicians need that like you know hospitals don't or whatever i think there's huge opportunity and when my buddy who runs a charter school is literally saying what the top search volume is like. i don't know much about this stuff but like if you can get in on yonder somehow like this is going to be in every school in American ten years like this idea right like.
and i understand why there i couldn't imagine something that is like interferes with learning more than a student having a smartphone on their desk. that's right like literally like maybe like when i was in middle school and raging hormones like a naked woman in front of me would have been worse but like not by much you know. i think you're told the right i think there's also an opportunity what when a market gets really big there's just an opportunity to be a me too and if you just.
innovate on like your five dollars less or your black you know your red red and black you know just a color color way yeah totally that could also be enough so you're a. i would consider you a growth guy or marketing guy if you are going to create yonder for rich people let's just say.
you did some you did some quick testing people are like yeah that's something i want if it looked like a i don't know really do cigar high in cigar case i would totally buy that for seven ninety nine seven hundred nine and instead of one forty nine or two forty nine what yonder charges how would you go about actually. growing the thing i would do what Ryan Bebunzian at jolly did and i would. do a. micro to medium. influencer u gc strategy. i would start before i had the device.
there's this apple there's this bdb app called clay who's also massive u gc motion i had the two of them on my weekly live show a few weeks ago and it was unbelievable. to grow this bdb app with legion agencies and to grow a shower head business with micro influencers it was the exact they were saying the same words.
guys don't overthink this it's literally just outreach right like we you know we had a novel thing in like these people tried it and liked it and they made content about it right so. that's why i would i would pick a few thousand influencers who. kind of like. had either either we're talking about things related to health and mental health or. you know there they they have an audience that like the subject matter are things that are like tangentially interested interesting to affluent people.
and i would go after them and i would say. if you don't like it throw it away. but if you think it's dope post about it right. and with interest based social media in the rammed in this of tiktok or whatever it's like if you get enough of that going. you know one out of every couple hundred goes viral like you basically what bb and see this is like before we started this. we were trying to come up with like how do you create.
a stream of traffic that was the volume of paid but the quality of organic. and that is what i would do it's it's basically a cold calling thing so by the way those guys got the shower head business jolly. you 50 million run rate in 36 months with three people they just hire their fourth full time employee.
they have double digit free cash generation off of this physical product business they send a ninety nine dollar filter every year to people who buy the shower head that does not get canceled has 93% gross turn. 19 million are with like 95% margin of filters right it's like one of the most beautiful businesses i've ever heard of.
and if you're like what's the strategy he's like it's all inbound now they all come to us but like in the beginning it was outbound u gc that was the only thing that we did. so that's what i would do. and you don't need to incentivize these people like it's really as simple as just sending them the product and being like if you like it. look here's the thing. this is what i. Ryan's a great entrepreneur he's a second time where he sold a shoe business to Steve madden.
he waited for years before he started another company because he was looking for the perfect combination of financial and product principles to build a product around and then. the skin was drying out and he's like oh the shower head it's perfect it's you know one size fits all it's like whatever it's not susceptible to fashion which was like killing him about this the inventory management is not a problem and.
he's basically like what you know it's a or there ugly it's a whole there's no brand story around shower heads so he just saw the opportunity there. the product is very good we have one. if you have a great product that is good enough to have word of mouth there are one thousand things in the world that you can do to speed it up this u gc thing would be one of them. the problem is. it's hard to get a product that's good enough to get word of mouth.
but my thing is you need to keep talking to people until their eyes light up because their eyes lighting up is a sure indication that if they get it in their hand delivered as. you promised they will tell somebody else right so like.
is this going to work if you have something like the product of the first company that I started 14 years ago no because the product wasn't good enough but like I have this company are be to be now we have an incredible u gc strategy because like the product is so good and so hot that these leadgen agencies when they post about it. it does more for them than posting about anything else right so like that's my point it's like.
that both of them said this it's like they did not incentivize these people with money at all not one dollar right. and that's why that what they also said was it's about. the breadth of the coverage of the audiences rather than going to one person and they were like. one person that a massive audience like Kardashian or whatever they're like they both had this view they're like. those people are way ever paid they haven't really helped the brands at all and.
the way to think about it is if you were going to pay rather than paying 500 thousand dollars for one post you should pay 500 dollars for a thousand posts from small people right like so those are just some kind of like core principles of getting it to work because. i would hope that with the experience that i have that i wouldn't even be at that point unless i was like.
i know that rich people want this because they're asking me where they can buy it right and then like i get the products i handed to them and they're like other people are then coming to me who know them and saying how do i get this right at that point i would start the u gc outreach.
i'd be like here's what's coming you know good sales copy if i get you one and you like it you know will you make content about it and if you don't like it we we throw it away right like quick ad break let me tell you about a business i invested in it's called boring marketing dot com so a few years ago i met this group of people that were some of the best SEO experts in the world they were behind getting some of the biggest companies.
The biggest companies found on Google the secret sauce is they've got a set of technology and AI like it help you outrank your competition so for my own businesses i wanted that i didn't want to have to rely on Mark Zuckerberg i didn't want to depend on ads to drive customers to my businesses i wanted to rank high in Google that's why i like SEO and that's why i use boring marketing dot com and that's why i invested in it they're so confident in their approach that they offer a 30 day.
Sprint with 100% money back guarantee who does that nowadays so check it out highly recommend boring marketing dot com someone's going to listen to this and be like yeah but i can't write copy as well as you at him and i think a really easy way to do it is if you find another product that has great sales copy like let's say jolly like go and sign up by a jolly for example.
Just study their copy map out their funnel and then just go to go to cloud or go to chat GPT and be like hey this is what i'm trying to write for this product i wanted to be in the style of jolly because i like it for the following reasons could you take a first stab at it.
Yeah totally and i think look you can't copy people that doesn't work if you copy people you'll get like 1% of what they're doing that's my deep belief it takes people a long time to learn that took me a long time to learn that it took me years to learn that like copying i don't know why it took me that long i don't know why i didn't like i just didn't.
I just didn't appreciate the kind of artistry of being an entrepreneur and like the fact that the world doesn't want something that's the same it wants something new. But like taking a lot from what's working over here and applying it over here does work.
You know what i mean like it what came to my mind immediately is like i want to boot on on a trip in 2011 and they're drinking this like butter tea which was like so good and a few years later i start seeing this bulletproof coffee and it's like the same idea it's like this dude was in the paul drinking this butter tea and he's like oh if you put that in coffee kind of does the same thing that has this like really make your body feel really cool.
And i didn't even know that that was a backstory until like a year ago and like that's literally what happened if every single person in the paul and butan is drinking tea a certain way then there are definitely a ton of people in America who do the same thing and if you're a great storyteller game over right like but all that stuff like i wasn't a good copywriter 14 years ago.
You know like like but like you said i was just like looking at stuff that i was like man like what about that do i think it's so amazing and then like how could i just like adapt it to what i'm trying to do you know.
You know and i think that's what all the greats do right like it's like still like an artist there's this great book called still like an artist like if you take from one person your playdress if you take from 20 people you're an artist right you just kind of have to do it that way and then i think the longer you're in the game the more you develop your own true style and the less you're doing that you know like i'm not really looking at stuff anymore when i write copy but men i've been been doing so long time totally you know.
Totally yeah i think what you can steal is not the individual recipe but like the the the direction of the recipe so for example you know one of my favorite websites is once calm Jason freeds company and it's just beautiful manifesto around how they see the world and how things have changed and all that.
i'm not saying go and like copy once calm but you can what you can copies the recipe of like a manifesto and and and you know i mean character having encountering problems and stuff like that and apply it to whatever it is you know you're trying to do because because recipes like that don't really change like human beings don't really change and it's really just. adapting that to whatever it is you're doing beautifully said thank you sir yeah these guys love being different you know.
They love being different but like did they invent the manifesto probably not right yeah yeah by the way like these guys were like one of the most influential you know i sort of read for our work so i worked as a trader. At Lehman Brothers for 10 years.
The day i arrived in Manhattan my roommate Jake Lodwick was building vimeo on a dream weaver instance baby blue homepage big letters and he's like i think i'm going to make this thing that shares video with you i was just like why would you do that you know like.
We didn't have smart phones like it was it was 2003 or 2005 now for anyway so that made me want to be an entrepreneur i was a trader for 10 years and when you're a trade when you're like it's really hard to describe the life how much of a fucking grind it was like i was getting up at 4.45 in the morning because the gyms were i had to get to the work at six gyms were not open until like 5.30 whatever i was running across a Brooklyn bridge on the coldest day of the winter.
At 4.45 in the morning in Manhattan every single day because i want to work out and that you know putting a tie on like getting on the subway like it was just brutal. And then financial crisis happened i had a good year than a bad year and then i got fired because i lost some money a lot of money at once but i've saved some dough and i was like okay what do i do now i don't want to do that anymore you know and i think i've got enough money to like.
Transition this to something else and if not i'll just go get another i go back right like but i was on the clock and. You read for our work week after you've lived that life for 10 years and it's like he was riding to me he said that he was riding to somebody one of his friends who was an investment banker right and it's like this idea that like.
If you're making a lot of money and you're living that way that's not actually good making far less money for far far far less output is actually a much better position to be in and like there's a lot of ways to control your expenses and then you have this free time to do you know whatever you want presumably.
It's just the way he thought about time versus money was like a massive paradigm shift and then i read rework and i was like holy shit this is it you know like this is the direction that i want to go in and then my first start up basically ended up being a rework business it was like three million air are 50% profit i had two co founders but it was like an email marketing business in the customer.
Count was shrinking by a percent a month but like it's it's a good it's a high a low term product category as net revenue expansion because like you're charging people based on their list size and they don't switch that much because it's like where the data is being stored so it was kind of just
that's not the way at three million are but like at some point it was going to end which was not a great space to be in and then I think the perfect combination is it's like rework fundamentals but why combination orientation towards growth.
So I can think about product market fit and growth from the why commentator lens which I really don't think rework emphasizes that much they're not i'm not sitting there reading the rework book and being like I need to strive to have a truly excellent product that has incredible
word of mouth before I even take anything to market that's not the vibe that I get from that the vibe that I get from why commentator is it's all about your product it will solve all of your problems the reason you're going to get burnt out is because it's not going anymore the reason it's not growing is surprised not good enough like if you kind of marry those two ideas I think you can be in this like perfect world of entrepreneurship where it's like
you have enough conviction to stave off vcs and in whatever not go down that path that's like stacked against you horribly but you still have the understanding that your entire life is only going to be as good as a product that you sell like that's just the reality you know and I don't think those rework guys emphasize that enough so maybe I'll be the guy who sort of comes out with this you know religion about how you know well
Jason Fried was spot on the why commentators are spot on in many ways but like they missed the mark and some there's this there's the third way. Totally well I thought you know I was listening to that I was like maybe I'll be the guy to yeah no I think we're really aligned the way we think about this right because my whole thing is like look if you have a chance of making a big company that would require venture capital it's going to be because you have a great product
you really shouldn't need venture capital unless it's a really capital heavy business right like if you're like doing vertical take off and landing helicopters like the you know one of my friends from New York right you're going to need to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to experiment with that and then to roll it out you're going to need to raise billions but like software strangely it's like the it is the lightest thing to create
but we have had the lowest standards for profitability right because just the multiple thing and what we can go faster whatever I personally believe there's like ways to structure pricing and go to market to where it kind of offsets the need for capital to build huge teams to go distribute it you know
and also think bigger teams move slower that's kind of a counter counter intuitive thing anyway dude that's the pod there you go the pod mic drop yeah thanks for thanks for coming on where could people learn more about about you and I'm as big as you on Twitter someday I haven't actually had time to focus on it linked in where I'm at I make a lot of stuff almost every day I like have a very
and incredibly transparent you know journey sharing thing going on there I tell it the good in the bad and the ugly so Adam Robinson on LinkedIn if you want to email me adamant retention calm or respond yeah man RB to B dot com if you want to figure out who's on your website and get their LinkedIn profiles it's free that's that's one of
them up to these days and I like how you gave the email you know people your emails about the blow up sweet yeah that's cool and dude you should you totally create a system that takes your LinkedIn content just in a in a elegant way moves it to X but that's a story I got you know we got to talk about that yeah I'd love to talk anytime anytime I just am such a
believer so now that I have a large social media presence and I am in a position where I am respected in the startup ecosystem as someone who knows what they're doing I will never start a business without that you know I mean like I was talking to one of my co founders because we have this other business like sells to e-commerce and it's so hard because out
of getting so hard it's like what do we even do to like create awareness and generate leads and stuff now is like dude like now that I have this founder like I feel like starting a business that sells to anyone other than people in sass given this audience that I have would be like the Kardashians starting a lipstick and being like we're we are not using Instagram nope we're going to go do that we're
going to create a brand that doesn't involve us and we're going to pay a bunch for ads and we're going to start from zero it's like it's just it's just the biggest super power of all time to create content that people like so I would encourage anyone listening if this is still rolling to start today trying to find your voice because once you do it's going to open up doors you never knew
totally and going back to your yonder idea it's like if I was going to start that idea I start with a tick tock account and Instagram somewhere build build content around phone free spaces go you know review phone free spaces phone free like get at phone free experiences on Instagram or whatever it is yeah so it's a good place to start not just for personal but for as I always think about as my my
minimal viable product is my social account yeah so yeah Adam I'll catch you later and maybe on a mountain top somewhere all right man thanks for having me on Greg thank you