00:55  We'll have the intro after we're done, so this will just kind of be a brief lead in and then I'll kick on the intro later. Okay, here we go. Hey, welcome back to the show. I am so excited today because we've got a two-time founder, currently operating two businesses that are both right up my alley. I love to talk about this stuff. Kevin, will you please help us know who you are and what do do?

01:11 Great. Thanks, Todd. Glad to be able to spread the word. Appreciate the opportunity, and hopefully this will be helpful to at least one person listening. I am a repeat founder, more importantly, a very happy husband. My wife, Jen, and I have two great kids, Jack and Laura Marie, we call her Lala. And they are about to be six and eight, so that's priority number one. And in terms of professional background, I started a clothing company in 2012 called Mizzen in Maine with the crazy idea to make a performance fabric dress shirt. We've changed an industry and we've done a couple hundred million dollars in revenue since I started it, had some great, great stories to share there. And I am currently building a company called Harbor with a great co-founder, Charlie Hill. Ultimately, we're building a company to help parents and kids get more sleep. We have built a substantially better baby monitor. Given the leading product on the market, Nanit failed our family. We wanted to build something that parents could rely on and help get actually more sleep. And then we've built a really cool new product called a Remote Night Nanny, where for as low as $20 a night, you can have our professionally trained night nurses turn the volume on your monitor up or down for you, whether or not you should go in. So that means you get more sleep and you have a professional guiding every decision you make all night long. And,

02:29 You're kidding.

02:30 Yeah, it's been a life-changing we've done. We've worked with a couple dozen families so far and the results have been life-changing for those families. we're excited to, we're in the early innings. We just started shipping products in Q3 this year and we're very excited to hopefully change tens and then hundreds of thousands of lives.

02:47 I love it. mean, as a father of seven kids, I can't imagine, well, first of all, let me just give my wife the credit because she is the one that got up at night almost all the time. I'm a deep sleeper and I discovered that she could be changing diapers right next to me in bed and I am still, it's gone. 

03:15 It puts you in rare air. That's very rare air, but I'm happy for you.

03:16 Yes, I'm in a rare echelon of mankind and I apologize to her today given that was years ago. But what an awesome solution you're coming up with. Both solutions, to be honest. No one loves to be wearing shirt and tie or dress up clothes that they can't be themselves in. Very constrictive, very restrictive. So I love that game. Let's talk about that in a minute. But talk to me about this monitoring and the sleep help. Like, what are you talking about? Because there's a lot of parents out there struggling with sleep. How are you solving the problem?

03:45 Yeah, so we start with just a much better baby monitor. The leading product in the market when my son was born is a Wi-Fi camera with an app on your phone. And I woke up one morning to discover the app on my phone where you just run background audio, you have to sleep next to your phone, which isn't really a good idea for a whole host of levels. But the app had just crashed. And I then realized apps on phones are not baby monitors. Apps are nice to have, but it's not a baby monitor. And we went out and bought an old school Motorola camera, the little, you know, teeny five inch LCD screen, and you can't really see that well. You can't access it outside the house, but you have a dedicated device that alerts you if you've lost connection. So, what we've done is we've built a camera and a 10 inch monitor that connect directly to each other without internet. And both devices also connect to the internet. So you have a dedicated device that will alert you if it loses connection and does not require the internet to work, but we also enable cloud connectivity. So you have an app, you have remote access, you can record, you can rewind, and both of the devices together are really geared towards how do we help parents and kids get more sleep. So you don't have to worry if you're connected because there's all sorts of feel safe alerts and all of that. And then importantly, we have created smart audio where you as a parent can set the threshold by which you want to be alerted. And the best way I can describe that is until your child is eight, nine, 10, 12 months old, you should hear everything. But once they are in a kind of safe sleeping environment and old enough, you really don't need to hear if your two year old coughs in the middle of the night. And you don't need to hear when they wake up and start talking to their stuffed animal. And so as a parent, you can decide what you want to hear. And so you can set a threshold to say unless the sound lasts longer than call it five seconds or is above a certain threshold in terms of noise then you can choose to hear nothing and it will break through if it's a loud cry or if it lasts for a long period of time. And so for your one, two, three, four year old, you can actually not be alerted unless it actually matters. So Harbor helps you sort through the signal through the noise.

05:59 Bringing you to a safe harbor. I love it. No, this is fantastic. No that that okay. I'm digging that My wife would have loved that because she wakes up to like a pin drop when we had babies around

06:10 Yeah. And the second piece to what we've built is, and there's never been anything before like our camera and our monitor product. That's a real leap forward from everything else, but we've created something new called a remote night nanny. And the vision there is to democratize access to sleep expertise. Night nannies are wildly unaffordable for almost everyone. And even if you can afford one, you may not be able to find one. They could all be booked up. You could be in a smaller town. And so you can grant my or harbors professionally trained night nurses access to your camera feed and then they can control the volume on your monitor and only wake you up when it's time for you to go in. So if they fuss or cry for a minute or two and the nurse will look in, make sure everything's okay, okay, everything's all right, then we're not gonna wake you up until that five, 10, 15 minute threshold, depending on age and stage is crossed. And what that means is you're getting good deep sleep in a way that's not possible. Kids wake up off and on all night long, that's very normal, but you are gonna not get actually good quality sleep. Even if you don't go in for four hours, you might not actually accrue any quality sleep and that matters a lot.

08:59 And you don't even need to have your mother-in-law living in the house.

09:03 There you go. We're helping marriages, we're helping families, all of the above.

09:09 You're helping marriages. That is such a blessing. Wow. That is really awesome. know, after our seventh child stopped wearing diapers, we calculated we had 19 straight years of diaper changing in the Western household. And that's a lot of years of diaper changing. Sleepless nights, I would say, you know, literally we're on a family trip right now and I had a 10-year-old climb into my bed last night and I was like, man. 

09:42 What happens, that happens.

09:43 So what I'm saying is this is amazing. Really smart solution, really smart target audience. And I love that you're offering not only the remote capabilities for the standalone parents, but having a monitored system like what you're talking about is just awesome. And it's awesome for you, it's awesome for the parents. It's a great business model because everyone loves the month of recurring. And I think it's awesome. Way to go. Smart idea.

10:07 Thank you. Yeah, thank you. And hopefully I can share some lessons learned having built one business in the DTC space with a physical product and now doing it again.

10:16 Yes, yes, and second time founders do have a bit of an advantage over those that are doing their first business. A lot of our listeners are first time founders, not all of them, but everybody's always curious. When you look at what you did with your clothing line and what you're doing right now, as you look back at your first growth experience, was there a couple decisions that you made that kind of had the biggest impact on your ability to grow, because a lot of people kind of get stuck. They beat their head against a wall for a while and they're like, my gosh, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm missing. And then they finally like something clicks. What are one or two of those things for you that kind of clicked and all of a sudden you were like, okay, boom, let's move past that.

11:03 So I think the biggest, we'll use that term, the things that clicked. In the early days of building Mizun and Main, it was kind of a grind for every sale. I was out there doing everything I could for every single sale. And then things started to move a little bit a little bit quicker, but we had in 2014, 15, there were a couple of things and I'll sort of bundle those up into one that really enabled us to not fight for every sale. And that was we penetrated a very valuable target market that opened up a lot of awareness and opportunity, which was professional athletes. And then we found a breakthrough marketing push that at the time, really wasn't sure it was going to work in any way, or form, and that was sponsoring Tim Ferriss' podcast. Today, podcast advertising, every third podcast you listen to is sponsored by AG1. But at the time, it really was a nascent advertising market. was a green field with a lot of opportunity and a lot of wasted money because you just weren't connecting with the right audience. so on the professional athlete front, I had a friend from high school that we didn't know each other that well, but his wife's mother bought him one for Christmas, a Miz and a Maine dress shirt. And he invited me to come to a trunk show in the nationals, the Nats in DC in their locker room. And that really just exploded, again, a very rich target environment for us in terms of guys that would love our product. But then that opened up, we did a partnership deal with JJ Watt, we started to do a bunch of photo shoots, we had a lot of really good things and it created significant leverage in terms of our reach. And the second piece that again created that leverage would be sponsoring Tim's podcast. It was a huge debt for us at the time, but it really, it doubled our daily sales overnight. mean, for the five days after each episode aired, we had this massive spike, but then when things sort of settled back down, we had doubled our daily sales average and never, never went backwards. Very cool experience. I very loosely stayed in touch with Tim over the years, because if you read anything that Tim writes, he's very cautious and careful in how he manages his communications and everything. So I never really pushed for much from him. I would just sort of loosely keep in touch. And when I launched Harbor, I just said, hey, I'm reaching out to every person I know. I just wanted to let you know I've launched this. I don't know that I would be able to do this had we not worked together on Miz and Amain. Thank you and hope all is well. We ended up connecting and he ended up investing in Harbor, which was an unbelievable win for us as a company. He's a great investor and just an incredible human. all that to say those two things, when I think about a click or a pop, it was how do you create leverage that is many times over what you can buy, what you can pay for on a pay per click basis, any of that kind of stuff. That would be the number one. And that's not a repeatable formula, right? Not everyone's gonna be able to sell. 

14:21 Yeah, no, you hit the right place right time.

14:22 Yeah, and I tried a lot of other things too. But then the other thing that I would say is nailing distribution. From the very beginning with Mizzen and Main, we started selling through wholesale channels. It was very slow going for a very long time. But Damon John gave me some very good advice before I started Mizzen and Main, which was everyone's saying that wholesale is dead. It's not.It's changing, but with your product, people have to be able to try it on. And these mom and pop boutiques run amazing businesses and have very loyal clients. And so go to them, create a win-win relationship, and they will promote your product because it's new, it's different, and they're always looking for something good that will actually create value for their customers. And so I bring up that because distribution is so critical and it's very easy to just say, we're direct to consumer. Everyone will find us online. It's very hard to be found online these days. It's both easier than ever and harder than ever to really take hold online. so nailing that distribution is another critical lesson that I would say really opened up lot of opportunity for us at Mizzen and Maine.

15:31 I love it. Talk to me about that journey though, because that is so scary. You're talking about every town has, you know, a hundred boutique stores that you want to get in. That's intimidating. Like that, I would imagine you came up with a really awesome system and strategy for making those approaches. Was it all boots on the ground? Was it phones? How did you even wrap your head around hitting boutiques like that.

16:02 So I would say it's a combination of bottom up and top down. And I know there can be a tendency to do sort of analysis paralysis or I've got to have the perfect strategy before I get out there. And ultimately it is a lot of just go, just start talking to people and seeing what happens. And when it comes to the early days of selling wholesale with Mizzen and Main, I didn't even know how people. What does the relationship look like? What does payables look like? And so just starting allowed us to iterate and continue to move. other piece, so just start, and then the other piece is along the lines of distribution, where should you go and where can you go to make real material progress? And so what I mean there is leverage connections, your hometown, the ability to get in the car and drive down the street, just go, start talking to somebody. And it's not, unlike enterprise sales, it's not you get one shot. You can just walk in and start talking to a boutique owner and what do they like and what do they buy? And they may tell you to get lost, which would tell you that it's probably not the right partner for you, or they may say, absolutely. They may say, look, why don't you come back tomorrow before 11? I start to get busy and I can't spend any time doing this. You could also just talk to someone who's working on the floor and get their perspective. They might say, Tony only ever buys at the trade shows or Sally really loves to get to know the vendors that she works with. so here's my say, you'll you'd be surprised what you'll learn in that capacity. And then the second piece would be, go. And the second piece of this is, what should you know about the industry? And I didn't know this and eventually learned there are trade shows where most of the business gets done. And so you got to go to the trade shows in some industries. In others, the trade shows are totally irrelevant. But we ended up going to one or two trade shows in the spring and one or two trade shows in the fall, because that's the buying season. In the first trade show that we went to, we were basically laughed out of the building. Everyone told us no one will ever buy this product. But absolutely. We were, we were a, I mean, were, people hated us in the menswear industry because we were selling something that broke all the traditions and in the menswear industry, it's very tradition oriented. But we got one account at our first trade show and then we got two accounts at the next one and that flywheel started to spin and we ended up learning there's a real benefit in the world of, you know, menswear and boutiques the store in Kansas City is not competitive with the store in New Orleans. And so they tend to also have friends in the industry and they'll trade notes. And so if you can become a value creator for the store in Kansas City, they're likely to mention you anyway. Hopefully you can find a way to incentivize those referrals. But if you're creating value for the store owner in Kansas City, they want you to grow and grow in a big way in other places because it elevates their business. And so that is not a repeatable lesson specifically across other industries, but the core there is where are they buying? What are they looking for? How can you create value? How can you create those network effects? Those things matter a lot.

19:42 Well, I think you'd be surprised. mean, what you're talking about, boutique stores are a lot like a dentist office or a barber shop. There's not likely to be one guy with 100 locations, right? I mean, more often than not, they're individual operators looking for ways to improve the way they do business. So I think that what you've done is amazing because you took, you kind of cracked the nut in this boutique world, which is a hard nut to crack, I think, I don't know, I've never tried it. a lot of hard work, a lot of manpower, but I think to your point, the loyalty effect and their willingness to share with other people saying, my gosh, we're selling this product. They support us, they make it easy to buy the product. They take returns, they do all the things that check the boxes that we need to be a good boutique operator, right?20:40 Yeah, absolutely. And then you obviously have to follow through and create that value for them, be a good partner. And as you go through that, you're going to have partners that end up candidly screwing you over. They don't pay their invoices. They will tell you, hey, we won't bring in any competitive product. And then you find out that they do and that they lied to you. And sometimes you got to roll with it. And sometimes you got to go, well, then we're just not going to do business together anymore. No shortage of surprises, just like kind of any interaction that you have with people normally, right?

21:12 Right, so I would say biggest lesson learned, and correct me if I'm wrong here, biggest lesson learned is really understanding your buyer, your avatar. This is a huge problem in every business. I think that as you're learning your parent products and your nanny products and stuff like that, you're probably looking back on this lesson of understanding who your avatar is, understand their pain points, understanding what's gonna make them happier to buy from you is now ingrained, it's a part of Kevin. And any business you do moving forward, you're probably always gonna be thinking, probably overthinking about your avatar and what their needs and pain points are. Am I wrong?

21:56 Absolutely. No, absolutely. And I think it's important to understand when it comes to your distribution channels. So the person who buys your product from your website is likely very different than the person you're selling the product to through a store. Now, the store is also looking to sell to that person. So we have a user persona for Harbor and also for Mizun and Maine. And we craft a lot of our messaging around that Jessica for Harbor is someone that we want to target online. And then we also are thinking through, just started shipping product to customers. So we're beginning that wholesale business on the Harbor side. We are going into the conversations with wholesale partners around how are they targeting Jessica and how do they think about Jessica differently? And the conversations we have with the buyers, it's rarely Jessica at the store on the buying side, but we need to know that they understand who Jessica is and how they market. they may also, you may have a conversation with them and say, you know what, I don't think our customer's coming into this store. And even though it's a great store, great team, all of those things, they're going after this type of buyer or that type of buyer that's going into their store. understanding that is really important, including defending the integrity of your brand and how you want to show up as a business.

23:16 Love it. valuable lesson. For those of you listening, I hope you're paying attention. And I would highly recommend looking into Kevin's companies and understanding how he's manipulated his ability to target these people the right way because not every, just because it looks like the store you want to be in does not mean that is the store you want to be in. Who's coming into it? And I think that understanding that avatar, understanding who your actual buyer is, understanding that you're your buyers oftentimes have their own set of buyers that you need to appeal to. And if you don't, don't waste your time. I mean, how many times, Kevin, did you walk into a store and out of a relationship with someone and say, I'm glad I'm done with that one. Let's move to the next one.

24:02 Plenty. Let's just leave it at plenty.

24:06 Fair enough, fair enough. I love it. Well, moving forward, mean, as Kevin, as you're building Harbor and you're identifying these parents and even parent types and probably even cultural parent types, you probably have different demands that are coming from each different avatar that you're looking at there. How do you recommend someone in say a sub one million or sub three million dollar revenue company should look at their avatar. And how do they really understand which group is going to get them to the 10, 20, 30, 40 million dollar revenue?

24:46 So when we started down the road of building Harbor, we, ended up doing a ton of customer interviews, well, prospective customer interviews. And it started just with, just with friends. Hey, would you be open to talking for 25 minutes? And I had a list of questions that I wanted to ask. And then I put out the feelers through LinkedIn and Twitter. Hey, I'm looking to talk to people and understand some basic characteristics and demographics. And so I did dozens of interviews and took the notes from all of them and basically created a composite. And you got to make some calls. You got to just sort of say like, hey, this is the composite of what I think I'm looking to build. If you are already operating, well, gosh, you've got customers who are buying your product and you should interview them and you should understand.

25:41 Yeah, definitely.

25:42 Why they bought your product, what drives them, and importantly, things like where do they learn about products from? That's easy. That's easy enough. And you should have the data on where you captured them. But like, where do they get information about the world? Where do they spend their time? You know, do they watch TV? Do they watch only streaming? What do they do for, call it fitness or hobbies or meals or do they grocery shop? Do they cook at home? All of those things can end up helping you understand. They may tell you that they bought the product for a certain pain point, but their actual driver may have been very different. so talking to real customers is really important. And then also not getting lost in the customer you want to have, but the customer that you actually have. And so that is something that it's very easy to fall prey to because you can say, this customer segment is really exciting and this is who I want to build my business around. But actually, you'll never grow above a certain level if that's who you target because either they only buy it once or twice or they move on to the next one. And that's maybe why they're so exciting because they're always willing to try something new, but they won't stick with you. There's a credible company called Levels, which is a continuous glucose monitor and overall general wellness company. And they've been very open about their journey in understanding their customer. They assumed that all of their growth and their business would be from, call it biohackers, people who are obsessed. They've got the whoop, they've got the eight sleep, they've got all that stuff. And that is a valuable customer segment for them. But they ended up finding that a lot of their growth factors were coming from other types of customers that were struggling to, it wasn't the growth hacker who was trying to lose three pounds. It was the person who was actually trying to lose like 50 pounds. And they weren't typically the person who would have been interested in biohacking, but their friends said, my gosh, I learned that like I was eating oatmeal every morning thinking it was a healthy meal, but actually it was spiking my glucose and changing the way that I felt throughout the day. And so that came from customer insights and customer interviews that allowed them to say, we still want to appeal to the growth hacker, the biohacker, but what we're really looking for is growing this business in a material way because they want to change the way that America thinks about food and health and nutrition. And that required a meaningful shift in their initial focus.28:20 And Kevin, is this something that you suggest to people they do internally? Is it something you hire an agency to do? Like, what's the best way to pull this off if you've never done something like this before?

28:33  I would just start, just talk to customers and come up with a list of 15 questions that you want to ask them. And then after you do a few, what are you learning and what questions are you now realizing that you're not asking? And I would encourage people just start. You can read 20 books on customer profiles and user personas, and you could craft the most amazing experience ever. And that will take you six months to build it. Or you can hire a firm or you can hire a firm and they'll charge you $100,000 to do the thing that you should be doing, which is going and talking to customers. And look, I get it. There's a reluctance that we have to impose on people and I don't know if I can pay it or pay them or make it worth their time. Some people are just very happy to share their perspective and insight because they're excited about what you're doing. if people aren't responding to you, maybe you need to sweeten the pot like, hey, I'll give you a $50 Amazon gift card or, you know, find a brand that you love and maybe know and say, Hey, would you be willing to give people a $25 off coupon to your website? And a lot of brands would go, you're talking to our target customer, interviewing them about their perceptions and their wants and their desires. We would be thrilled to give you a $25 gift card because that's a great customer acquisition channel. And that $25 gift card, they're spending more than that on customer acquisition all the time.

30:01 No doubt about it. No doubt about it. Kevin, I love the feedback. I love your growth journey in both fronts. And I'm a big fan of the mission of both your companies, both the products, and I encourage anyone out there, if you're interested in following a use case or following a fun case study of growth, follow Kevin and what he's building, buy his products. If you don't have kids, refer it to somebody that does because I promise you as a parent, this is something that every parent is likely wishing was out there in the marketplace. So Kevin, thank you so much for taking the time to view the audience and I really appreciate your time and your thoughts and your wisdom. For those listening, again, look them up, show notes, I've got all the details on Kevin and his companies. Kevin, thank you. Any last thoughts for our audience?

30:55 You know, in building Harbor, our focus is our mission is happier parents and healthier families one restful night at a time. And so at harbor.co, we have a ton of free resources. You don't need to be a customer. You don't need to buy anything. We hope those resources are helpful. Obviously we hope our products would be helpful, but you can go to our website and get a lot of great free resources that we have a 40 page infant sleep guide, a toddler sleep guide, interviews of experts, all with the goal of helping parents and kids get more sleep. And so I encourage people to go check it out and then you'll have my social handles on the show notes, send questions if I can be helpful in any way, happy to do so next time.

31:36 Love it. Kevin, thanks again, man. And for those listening, re-listen to this one. This is a good one. And we'll catch up with you on the next one. Thanks so much, Kevin.