Wade Armstrong

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American Inventor: Episode 1 Recap

Posted Monday March 20, 2006 in Entrepreneurship

If you’re a geek like me, you probably tuned into American Inventor last week. What’s not to love about a show that takes normal people with great ideas and gives them the chance to succeed? Dreams, business, cleverness, all that good stuff — and it’s a moderately entertaining show. I’ll be recapping it every week, looking at the inventions (and inventors) through the lens of the tools and knowledge I’ve gained getting my MBA. The first two episodes are the “cattle call” shows, just as in American Idol, with a ton of applicants from all over; I’ll just call out a few details from those shows, but, once we start reviewing different inventions and pitches, I’ll come up with a way to save any invention that gets eliminated. That should add a little challenge for me and a little fun for you.

This episode began with some introductions of our judges. A good mix of four different people with four different specialties and four different sets of experiences, this group seems like just what any entrepreneur needs: a veteran board that can provide the advice that you need to take your product, service, or company to the next level. If the judges actually provide useful feedback to each round’s survivors, then the inventors are lucky to have this opportunity, win or not.

Now on to the inventions. I’m not going to go through all of the products that came up, just a few that really illustrate things I’ve learned at business school or through my own entrepreneurship.

The first inventor out the door brought on the Bladder Buddy, a product that was accurately described by one of the judges as “peeing in a suit bag.” Obviously, this inventor didn’t advance. The lesson here plugs into something I learned as a Web designer: model out your user as precisely as possible, so that you can describe their needs and the process that they use to fulfill those needs. Web designers often use personas, incredibly complete descriptions of typical target users that include names, hobbies, preferences, and even names. The goal of these personals is to give you a shorthand for certain kinds of customers: you can ask “would Gail use this?” and answer that question, because your Gail persona is described at a sufficient level of specificity that the whole team understands her preferences. Of course, you want to have enough separate personas that you can represent all of your major customer segments.

So what would a persona have done here? Imagine Jim, your “tourist who needs to pee” persona. Jim likes traveling to cities in the US, having a couple of beers with lunch, walking around town taking snapshots, sheepdogs, and golf on TV. We know that Jim has had a few beers, so he needs to pee. He’s in the middle of a large, unfamiliar city, so what does he do? Well, our inventor assumes that he takes a garment bag out of his backpack, zips it around himself, and pees there. But we can all put ourselves in Jim’s place, and realize that he actually finds the nearest Starbucks, because there’s one every four blocks in every major city in the country. Not only is it less likely that Jim would pee in a suit bag, but our inventor is actually competing with Starbucks, and nobody survives competing with Starbucks.

Then there was the solar-powered cooler. The product was a great idea — everyone wants their beverages to stay cold longer — but the weakness was the added plug. The customer could plug anything into the cooler, said the inventor — but that’s hardly good copy for the packaging. Going back to the concept of personas, what persona plugs in just anything? A real persona, a real market segment, will use specific types of equipment. Are you aiming at single executives on a quick getaway to the beach, who want to charge their blackberries? Families who want to charge the kids’ Power Wheels? College kids who want to charge their PSP? Describe the segment (or segments) that will be buying a solar-powered cooler, and then pitch the use of the plug as the way to charge the product that the persona describing that segment actually use. “Everything” is never the right answer to the use of a feature, just as “everyone” is never the right answer to your question “who is your customer?”

Shortly after the pee bag came an inventor with a shovel. It was a special shovel — it had an attachment that hooked up to a sandbag, so that, with one scoop, a laborer could fill that sandbag. The inventor’s pitch was good, bringing up things like Hurricane Katrina, and he was attentive to the judges, taking the opportunity to learn things from people who might have some knowledge to impart. I’ve spoken with a number of angel investors since I’ve been at Marshall, and all have told me that they invest in the person at least as much as the company. This guy’s demeanor and speech told me that he was a person I’d want to invest in, and the judges clearly agreed.

But this inventor also exemplified something that truly shocked me about many of the contestants: he spent a heck of a lot of money, even selling his house, to make his product. It’s a basic entrepreneurial concept to spend as little as possible to get off the ground. For instance, this man could probably have made a prototype out of a shovel and a length of stovepipe. The trick, then, is to take your prototype and make a pre-sale sale, before having to go into full production — do a demo, get a contract, get some money up front, then start producing. The trick, of course, is to find the right customer. In this case, I’d suggest FEMA, which needs tools, and loves — since it’s a government organization — minority vendors, like our Latino inventor. Finding the right first sale is key, and will be determined by the attributes of your organization, the scale you need to operate profitably, and the network to which you have access.

Another inventor brought out a bike that had a seat on the front, of the handlebars — you know, for kids. To ride on. It’s a good idea, not least because it takes something consumers are already doing and makes it better, monetizing an existing practice. It’s always easier to do that then to convince consumers to do something completely new, and, by the way, pay you for it. A good suggestion, however, came from the judges, who proposed the idea of selling a conversion kit for the bike, rather than an entire new bike. When making a new product that builds on an existing one, it’s always important to ask “can the people making the existing product make this product cheaper than I can?” A whole new bike, yes, the current manufacturer can make cheaper — and they can make bikes with other compelling features, features that kids may choose over our inventor’s front seat. But a kit can be put on any bike out there, and produced more inexpensively to boot. That’s a recipe for success.

A much worse take on the same approach was the punk rocker with the jack on his guitar relocated to the side. He clearly wanted to create a guitar company, but it’s certainly far easier for Fender to move the jacks on its broad line of guitars than it would be for our musician to create a full line of guitars to compete with Fender once the side jack stopped being the key differentiator. A better idea here would be to build a contraption that hooks to the front of the guitar and moves the jacks to the side — if musicians love the idea as much as our inventor suggested they would, then musicians will buy the add-on.

All in all, the line-up we saw was a good parallel to the successful “cattle call” line-ups on the early-season episode of American Idol — a bunch of real stinkers, a bunch of everymen, and a few stand-outs. It seems as if there were a number of people who had failed in previous business efforts, but that’s normal — the average entrepreneur fails more than twice before they succeed, and the first episode of American Inventor is a good reminder to stick with it!