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here 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 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 and 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 [Music] so Adam Robinson you've made it to the startup ideas podcast yes 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 n 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 uh were evolved to do that you know um 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 uh maybe later maybe when my kids are older and then you never do it so I 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 you decide to text me we're now here and and I'm ecstatic because you're the real deal you've built I mean you've built businesses from zero to 20 million ARR completely bootstrap 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 you know exactly exactly so um let's just let's just get into it you know what's on your mind right now and and what could you share with with people so look I um 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 we not physically evolved to be in then 150 years ago the Industrial Revolution 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 a comedian for instance and actually listen otherwise we'd just be on our phones you know getting our monkey mind whipped around by like whatever uh alert or text message that doesn't matter from someone uh that we receive 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 idiot proof this like put it in a place where I can't touch it is like a massive market for the future and it's very and it's infancy you know H how many schools have a Yonder patch set 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 pouch 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 foam patch only works in one way right which I think is the the TR 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 could 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 uh 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 to the point where everybody had smartphones when they were young who are having kids now so uh 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 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 and in a lot of other environments too 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 if you have a 2,000 person High School the practicality of that is not really great I think there's like kind of like what Elon did 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 wallets in there or you know it uh like uh the the the principal 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 shh 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 built hundred million plus businesses I've compiled them into one 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 flowing business is waiting for you I I am F if I were not doing what I was doing I would be like digging around I don't I would be digging a rabbit hole on this device keep my phone away from me market 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 um that costs about $25 to $30 USD per student um another interesting thing is I just checked um Google Trends and I use this tool called Glimpse that adds 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 Y inv in Yonder is y publicly traded which is a really good signal that uh people believe in the company so if you were going to create you know Yonder 2. 0 or Yonder for XYZ Niche how would you actually go about doing so I would probably take the Elon 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 a Yonder and show it to them and then I would be like what if this could do X Y and Z right you know and then I'd work on what the x y and z was after l i mean hundreds of conversations I would not build anything until I could say XYZ and I would get like 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 because 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 Uh 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 rb2 and we built a tangential feature first we built an ICP filter an 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 if you filter down by ICP in LinkedIn you're filtering a an 800 million contact database yep so a restrictive ICP filter makes sense a lot of our customers we resolve 10 contacts a day if they put a restrictive ICP filter which is like and instead of or it's going to give them zero to one contacts like per month you know what I mean so so but we defaulted to the end right so I asked and we didn't realize this to like I asked the people who are trying to beta test this other feature to set it up and then we're like oh my God like 10 out of 10 people the way we built this are doing something that like we would want to nudge them the other way and the first reaction is like oh it's fine like you know support can explain it or whatever but it's like no if it's 98% of people that we want to nudge one way like we want support to explain to the 2% why anyway so um you know I just keep learning that lesson over and over again uh 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 uh you know renting these summer camps in the fall in the Northeast and like you know having family experiences or like you know people in their 20s can like you know bring 30 people there or whatever like I'm just so interested in getting people away from their phones and I think that like more and more every day people acknowledge how terrible this ongoing you know onslaught of of uh you know our lives now right like you and I are we're in it dude like we're you know we we're the worst victims and perpetrators of this uh of problem how do you know I wasn't just checking Twitter right now how do you know I was on Twitter this whole conversation yeah it's like uh I talked to these guys one time in in in uh LA 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 pl platform less addictive right you know so they'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 both sides they're like Grey Goose but they're also Alcoholics Anonymous yeah totally that but I guess if you understand the problem that well you can you can help both sides totally totally so I'm on the under website and I see something I like seeing which is if you go to the under it they have a bunch of different categories so it says uh first of all their tagline of phone free spaces like perfect really really well said so elegant so elant by the way 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 if you can get it to three words God bless you so so with rbb real quick like y with with there 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 too I like that yeah like that beautiful right yeah that's really good that that's really good so on the on the Yonder website Pham free spaces you got homes all these categories home school music comedy events and weddings courts workpl uh Productions hospitality and other what that says to me whenever I see something like that I'm like okay how do I create Yonder for X yeah so totally totally I think going to your point like if you can uh like mock up some of these landing pages mock up the products for x and then just start talking those people that's a great approach the other thing I usually do also to 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 uh Yonder for uh you know you know Wellness people or or whatever just you know going down the list and uh 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 haven't had the 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 80% there for all of them it's not 100% for any of them it might be 100% for one of them which is where they started and then they realized it was 80% for the other 15 or whatever right so like the way I love thinking about it is like I saw this thing that a VC 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 yanders Craigslist go make right you know one and then like other slices of like either a smarter or a dumber or like a whatever you know whatever musicians need that like you know hospitals don't or whatever I just think there's huge opportunity and and and when my buddy who runs a charter school is literally saying what the top search volume is he's 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 America in 10 years like this this idea right like uh and I understand why they're I couldn't imagine something that is like interferes with learning more than a student having a smartphone on their desk that's right and 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 totally right I think there's also an opportunity when a market gets really big there's just an opportunity to be a me too and if you just uh innovate on like your $ Five Doll 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 were 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 dope cigar high-end Cigar Case I would totally buy that for $799 799 instead of1 149 or 249 which Yonder charges how would you go about actually growing the thing I would do what Ryan banzan at Jolie did and I would do a micro to medium influencer ugc strategy and I would start before I had the device it's manual so so by the way I'm not trying to like promo my stuff or whatever but like I had this guy and there's this app there's this bdb app called clay who's also massive ugc motion I had the two of them on my weekly live show a few weeks ago and it was unbelievable a lot of it was unintuitive and the the the they were saying the exact same thing that they did right to grow this B2B app with Legion agencies and to grow a showerhead business with micro influencers it was the exact there saying the same words guys don't overthink this it's literally just Outreach right like we you know we had a novel thing and like these people tried it and liked it and they made content about it right so I would um I would pick a few thousand influencers who kind of like had either either were talking about things related to health and mental health or you know they're they they have an audience like the subject matter are things that are like tangentially interest interesting to affluent people um and I would go after them and I would say I have this pouch if I send you one for free and you like it would you post about it if you don't like it throw it away but if you think it's dope post about it right and with interpace social media in the randomness of Tik Tok or whatever it's like if you get enough of that going uh you know one out of every couple hundred goes viral like basically what bin was saying he's like before we started this uh 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 it's a it's basically a cold calling thing so by the way those guys got this showerhead business Jolie to 50 million run rate in 36 months with three people they just hired their fourth full-time employee they have double digigit free cash generation off of this physical product business they send a $99 filter every year to people who buy the showerhead that does not get canceled has 93% gross churn 19 million ARR with like 95% margin of filters right it's like one of the most beautiful businesses I've ever heard of uh and 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 ugc 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 it's really as simple as just sending them the product and being like if you like it look here's the thing uh this is what I Ryan's a great entrepreneur he's a second timer he sold a shoe business to Steve Madden uh 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 his 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 um he he's basically like what you know it's a they're ugly it's a there's no Brand Story around showerheads so he he just saw saw the opportunity there and 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 1,000 things in the world that you can do to speed it up this ugc 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 rbb now we have an incredible ugc strategy because like the product is so good and so hot that these Legion 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 both of them said this it's like they did not incentivize these people with money at all not $1 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 who had a massive audience like Kardashian or whatever they're like they both had this view they're like those people are way overpaid they haven't really helped the brands at all and uh the wayed think about it is if you were going to pay rather than paying $500,000 for one post you should pay $500 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 Prototype I hand it 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 ugc Outreach and 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 will will you throw it away right like quick ad break let me tell you about a business I invested in it's called boring marketing 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 found on Google and the secret sauce is they've got a set of technology and AI that could 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.

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 foring marketing. com someone's going to listen to this and be like yeah but I can't write copy as well as you ad him and I think a really easy way to do it is if you find another product that has great sales copy like say Jolie like go and sign up buy a Jolie for example um just study their their copy map out their funnel and then just go to go to Claude or go to chat gbt and be like hey this is what I'm trying to write for this product I want it to be in the style of Jolie because I like it for the following reasons could you take a first stab at it yeah totally and um 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 uh 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 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 what came to my mind immediately is like I went to Bhutan on a trip in 2011 and they're drinking this like butter tea which was like so good and then a few years later I start seeing this Bulletproof Coffee and it's like the same idea it's like this dude was in Nepal drinking this butter tea and he's like oh if you put that in coffee it kind of does the same thing it has this like really makes your body feel really cool and I didn't even know that that was a back story until like a year ago and like that's literally what happened if every single person in Nepal and Bhutan 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 is so amazing and then like how could I just like adapt it to what I'm trying to do you know um and and I think that's what all the greats do right like it's like steal like an artist there's this great book called steal like an artist it's like if you take from one person you're plagiarist 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 man I've been been doing this a long time totally you know totally yeah I think uh what you can steal is not the individual recipe but like the D you know the break the the direction of the recipe so for example um you know one of my favorite websites is on. com Jason Fred's um 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 in like copy ones.

com but you can what you can copy is the recipe of like a Manifesto and and and you know a main character having uh encountering problems and stuff like that and apply it to whatever it is you know you're trying to do cuz CU recipes like that don't really change like human beings don't really change and it's really just about adapting that to whatever it is you're doing beautifully said thank you sir yeah these guys love being different you know um they love being different but like did they invent the manifesto probably not right yeah yeah yeah yeah I by the way like the the these guys were like one of the most influential you know I sort of read 4H hour work so I worked as a Trader at Leman Brothers for 10 years the day I arrived in Manhattan my roommate Jake lodwick was building Vimeo on a Dramweaver instance baby blue homepage big letters and he's like I think I'm going to make this thing that shares video with PE I was just like why would you do that you know like no we we didn't have smartphones like it was it was 2003 2005 no four anyway um so that made me want to be an entrepreneur I was a Trader for 10 years and when you're a tra when you're like it's really hard to describe the life how much of a grind it was like I was getting up at 445 in the morning because the gyms were I had to get to work at 6 gyms were not open until like 5:30 whatever I was running across the Brooklyn Bridge on the coldest day of the winter at 4:45 in the morning in Manhattan every single day because I wanted to work out uh and that you know putting a tie on like getting on the subway like it was just brutal um and then financial crisis happened I had a good year then a bad year and then I got fired because I lost a money a lot of money at once but I've saved some dough 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 4H hour work week after you've lived out life for 10 years and it's like he was writing to me he said that he was writing 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 you know 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 this is it you know like this is the direction that I want to go in and then my first startup basically ended up being a rework business it was like 3 million AR 50% profit I had two co-founders but it was like in email marketing business in the customer account was shrinking by a percent a month but like it's it's a 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 stably at 3 million AR 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 is like rework fundamentals but why combinator orientation towards W growth if you can think about product Market fit and growth from the Y combinator 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 yator 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 growing more the reason it's not growing is because the product's 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 uh in you know 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 the product that you sell like that's just the reality you know uh 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 uh you know religion about how you know well Jason freed was spoton the why combinators are spot on in many ways but like they missed the mark in 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 too yeah no I think we're really aligning the way we think about right cuz 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 if 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 takeoff and Landing helicopters like the you know one of my friends from New York right like you're going to need to raise hundreds of Milli 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 uh 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 um 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 I also think bigger teams move slower that's kind of a counter a counterintuitive thing anyway dude that's the Pod there you go that's literally the Pod mic drop yeah thanks for uh thanks for coming on uh where could uh people learn more about about you yeah I hope that I'm as big as you on Twitter someday I haven't actually had time to focus on it uh linkedin's where I'm at I make a lot of stuff almost every day I'm I I like have a very an incredibly transparent you know Journey sharing thing going on there uh I tell it the good and the Bad and the Ugly So Adam Robinson on LinkedIn if you want to email me Adam at retention. comom I'll respond um yeah man uh rbtb.