Kickstarter, Copycats, and Comebacks: RiutBag’s Rise

Tom Constable (00:00)

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Hello and welcome to it’s only a prototype podcast. I am Tom Constable and with me is Phil Staunton, the managing director of D2M product design agency. How’s it going? is episode six of the series. You’re now basically a veteran.

Phil Staunton (00:18)

Hi Tom.

Yeah, and I’m absolutely loving it. It has to be said Is it getting easier? I think so and I’m also learning to relax a bit more in it Which hopefully means that actually it’s a better episode for everyone. Yeah

Tom Constable (00:28)

Is it any easier?

Well, this one is, you know, yet another great one. mean, our guest today is fantastic. Her story is phenomenal. The lessons we can pull out of it is second to none. But as a teaser, I’ll leave that there. Phil, would you mind just giving us a bit of an overview of the podcast? Why someone could listen to it, what they might get from it, what are the benefits for it and why you’ve chosen to launch your own podcast.

Phil Staunton (00:58)

Yeah, absolutely. So only slightly touched on it in terms of what you just said, but effectively we’re having conversations with people, leaders in new product development, founders, people who’ve taken a product right the way through and manufactured and sold it successfully. And we’re trying to glean from them the lessons that we can all learn to improve our own product development journeys to make what we’re doing more efficient and more effective because it’s hardware development and that is fundamentally really hard. So if there’s

stuff we can take from other people’s journeys, then it is only for the benefit and for better speed and lower investments in terms of launching new products. So the podcast series is for anyone really in that boat who wants to learn the lessons and move forward in terms of their knowledge of taking new products to market. And yeah, as Tom says, this is episode six. So we’re well into it by now and really excited to talk to today’s guest.

Tom Constable (01:52)

Well,

how do we introduce today’s guests? The topics we cover are solopreneurship, so running your own business with no support, just yourself, which is, I think a daunting process for lots of people. We cover things like, I mean, there’s so many military acronyms and analogies and stories that I managed to inject into this conversation. And you know, the importance of designing for customers, not for yourself, utilisation of crowdfunding platforms, utilising

New and emerging social media platforms. Today’s got it all.

Phil Staunton (02:23)

hasn’t it? has indeed and this guest has been through it all and like all of our founders on the series really I guess there’s been some massive ups and downs and that’s just fascinating to hear really. Yeah so today we are interviewing Sarah Giblin who is behind the Riot Bag company and she’s been going for about 10 years now and you’ll hear in the episode quite how many she’s sold, quite how successful she’s been and as Tom says she’s done it

Tom Constable (02:34)

Would you to introduce who it is?

Phil Staunton (02:50)

all on her own and as a result has a huge amount to teach all of us I think even if we’re working as part of a bigger team actually the way she’s done it is just so tight in terms of kind of budget and time scales and everything else that there’s loads of efficiency lessons I think that we can all glean from her story. Sounds good.

Tom Constable (03:07)

Let’s get into it.

Sarah, welcome to it’s only a prototype podcast.

Sarah Giblin (03:16)

Thanks very much for having me, that’s great.

Tom Constable (03:18)

You have the dubious honor of being our first remote recording. So thank you very much for dealing with the technical challenges of setting up this beautiful 4K camera at your home office for the chat with us today.

Sarah Giblin (03:31)

camera and microphone arrived in the post separately and we’ve got it all working and that’s all that matters.

Tom Constable (03:37)

no expense spares. for those that may not obviously have come across you and your products, would you mind giving us a view of you and your background and the product that you’ve amazingly developed?

Sarah Giblin (03:48)

So I am Sarah Giblin, I am the creator of the Riot Bag, which is a secure backwards backpack. On most backpacks, the person behind you could open it on the outside, but I took all the zips off the back and stuck them against your back so that when you put it on, it’s automatically secure every single time. So you actually like the people who are standing next to you in the city as opposed to potentially thinking that anything could happen. So that’s what I’ve been making for the last 11 years.

Tom Constable (04:13)

And your background? Did you just wake up one day and you were going to be a backpack designer?

Sarah Giblin (04:18)

I definitely never thought I would be a backpack designer. And I think a lot of people along the way thought Sarah’s never going to do anything like this. I think they expected me to have a really swanky suit, mobile phone, lots of laptops and be like jet setting around the world doing important consultant things. And instead you will mostly find me in high vis in a warehouse somewhere or in a factory in China to many people’s great disappointment. However, it is the greatest adventure of my life to design and manufacture.

product again and again and again. And actually next month, no this month, I am going back to the factory for my 22nd production. So it goes and goes and goes. And I’ve done a new design every single production. So it’s always changing.

Tom Constable (05:00)

Did you qualify as a product designer or did you, what’s your kind of, not academic, what’s your training, what’s your experience before you’ve gone on this journey to launch the company?

Sarah Giblin (05:10)

So definitely it was an idea. I was traveling a lot for my job. I was working in financial services and on a flight every week between London and Berlin. And it was just through traveling that it became clear that every single person who has got lots of value in their backpack, and I do think a backpack is a very sensible design, that the person behind them is the person who it’s basically made for to open. So my background is…

in classical music my entire life. And then I went to university and studied political philosophy and economics. And I went and worked as a journalist for a little while. Then I went into financial services. I studied in law. I just did lots of different things. And one day I just could not. I had this idea that had completely taken over my mind and I started saving up like I never had in my life and started the company. But I do not have a background in

product design and that’s why I ended up going to Phil at D2M so that I could go right here are my sketches, my very basic sketches that looked basically like that and said, does this work? I don’t even know. I will give you my money. I will give you my life savings to see whether it’s possible to make this thing. And if it works, I’ll go and do it.

Phil Staunton (06:22)

Yeah, no pressure at that point for us, obviously.

Sarah Giblin (06:25)

But that’s what you do every single day, right? So,

Phil Staunton (06:28)

Yeah, absolutely. It’s just, I think for you, it was so deeply kind of personal and it was, you know, had saved up for it and you had a very limited budget. And so it was like, okay, we’ve got to kind of get to a point where we know whether this is going to work or not within quite a fixed amount of time, fixed amount of money, which is a bit of a challenge when you’re developing, well, we actually developed a textile as well as developing the actual bag. But yeah, no, was the type of challenge that the team, my team really love. And yeah, it was fantastic working with you on it and great to…

to chatting 10 years later, almost to the day since she came to us. that right?

Sarah Giblin (07:02)

So

it is actually 11 years and two months ago. And it’s 10 years this year that the first riot bag that was actually manufactured came out because I left my job in it on the final day of February, 2014, started work with you on the 1st of March, went through those months, made three different prototypes. And the first one I could already see I was like,

it actually works, even if this isn’t finished, it actually works, so we continue. And then I did my Kickstarter campaign in September 2014. thousand people backed it and funded it. And with that money, I went to, went to found the factory that I still work with that you helped me find in China, in Fujian province, and started working with them in the December 2014. Just, I think it was 11 months after I left my job, the first

actual riot bag users were using their fully manufactured riot bags. But it was a wild year.

Tom Constable (08:01)

I mean that is amazing and one of the main efforts for today’s conversation is to talk about the concept of solo printout and we could touch on that in a second. I’m wondering if you could give us a few top level figures around the success of the Riot bag to date.

Sarah Giblin (08:15)

I think that first month where I went on Kickstarter, you know, the bag had made no money. And the first Kickstarter campaign was 1,092 people who backed it to the sum of £63,000 in a month. So it was when I put a lot of effort into a sprint like that, it could suddenly generate income. And that was before the product even really existed. the

People were sort of willing to listen in that space on Kickstarter and that was absolutely amazing. I got the first Riot Bags made, the first production made, got them out to the first thousand users and then was terrified that they wouldn’t actually like what they had randomly given out money for to a stranger online. And so I sent them all a feedback survey. I was like, just tell me, tell me what’s bad, tell me what’s good and I will fix it, I promise.

They did, and I just sort of sucked up all of this information, made it into two new designs, because I could sort of see two designs coming out of the data, ran back to the factory, was like, let’s just start making these now, actually slightly before I started the Kickstarter campaign. So I didn’t really know whether I was going to be able to pay for that production, but I did, did a new Kickstarter and the second Kickstarter made 158,028 days. that was the following year.

And I know where that came from. That came from people seeing me have an idea, but then going, not too sure about whether she’ll actually be able to do it or whether it’s any good in reality. And then me coming back and showing them I did it and I’ve made it better. And this time they’re black and not gray. And that kind of made people go, okay, fine. We’ll back it. And I think that there were lots of little websites that were sort of supporting Kickstarter at the time, like KickTracker and stuff. And it was like the fastest funded project on Kickstarter.

Kickstarter at the time on that particular month or something like that. the beginning, which is such an important thing for all little companies, was just a kind of year and a half made up of different sprints and that really gave it a start. So that second Kickstarter is, I think, what started the company. And then finally, it all just sort of like, you know, went along. I was learning how to run this little business, find people online who liked it, but then randomly out of nowhere.

The Daily Mail wrote about the riot bag and I had just like grabbed myself a coffee. I was just going to check on an order the day before and I was like, why am I scrolling through so many orders? What is going on here? Why is everything sold out on my website? And I, there were times in my, like, like when I worked in an office job where I made like 27 grand a year. And on that day, my little Squarespace website that costs 14 pounds a month made 27 grand on that day. And I was like, hmm.

This is just like everything that I used to know is just in such different proportions. So it hasn’t been like this linear success. It’s just been these little sprints of these little moments where it’s kind of gone and gone and gone and happened. And yeah, so that’s sort of the start of the riot bag, I think.

Tom Constable (11:13)

And just fast forwarding to the end of the journey, like how many bags and units have you sold to date?

Sarah Giblin (11:18)

So there’s a new production coming, but I’ve lowered the sums that I make on each production. I think the largest production I’ve made was about 4,000, and that was way too many. And these days I will make a production of about 1,500. So actually, those first few years, I made a whole load of riot bags.

and try to sell them. And these days, because actually financially the riot bag has sort of looked after me, I can sort of lower everything. So I think there’s about 35,000 riot bags out there in the world. And, you know, it’s me, it’s my designs, it’s my little supply chain that I’ve made. And then I basically go on social media and say, hello people, I think you probably don’t know about this design, or maybe you do know about it. And maybe the next time you buy a backpack, this is going to make sense for you. But that is how you

You have to, if you make 35,000 riot bags or products, you’ve got to sell them as well. So that’s how you do it.

Phil Staunton (12:11)

And is that how you generally sell product now these days is through your social media channels.

Sarah Giblin (12:15)

Yeah, sometimes if I’m doing other stuff in my life, I just leave my website to get on with it. And sometimes people are, people just find it by our SEO, but SEO tends not to be so powerful these days. Like people are sitting on social media and if something appeals to them, they will go and buy it with almost no questions. It’s the most incredible change in like online selling that I’ve seen. Like for the last few years, lots of like personal crises were going on in my life and I couldn’t really like focus on the riot bag as much.

But this year, I feel like I’ve got lots more energy. So I’m like on TikTok, I’m on like whatever I put on TikTok, I put on Instagram as well. And people are buying my Riot bags again, which I’m really pleased about and in much higher numbers than they were last year, because I wasn’t really doing very much.

Phil Staunton (12:58)

And have you found that then as a solopreneur that actually the business you’ve built really does enable you to have a lifestyle that suits you and you can kind of do that ebb and flow thing where if other stuff’s going on, you do less and sometimes you have a real sprint and do more.

Sarah Giblin (13:12)

The word lifestyle sometimes kind of makes my defenses go up because people are like, you’re lifestyle business. And my dad used to say, Sarah, you’ve got a great lifestyle, but is this actually working financially? And I actually really love it that he always gave me a hard time about the money stuff because it made me so terrified that I had chosen this strange path in my life, but that actually it wouldn’t work out financially.

I always have to make sure there’s a balance between Riot making sense for me and making sense for my customers. And I’m always trying to think about that balance because there’s no point in me sort of destroying my own life to the benefit of the product. It has to be a balance between me and it. It made way more money than I needed to in the first few years, but it also took so much from me that I think what people call a burnout is definitely something I experienced after about three years. And when I

I didn’t think I would come back from it. I’d sort of kind of gone, I’m actually not going to design these bizarre backpacks anymore. Like, why am I doing this to myself? But then once I got better, I found myself actually designing this, the Riot Bag X35. And it is my, like, it was sort of, I don’t know, it was my way back into the design to kind of keep exploring it. And it turns like,

It’s still a secure backpack, but it has three different modes, like three different sizes. And I love shifting between the different modes. And it answered the impossible question. Can you make a backpack that like, that gets bigger when you need it to be and smaller when you don’t need it to be so big. And it was just a real joy to make. And when I came back to designing after my burnout, I was like, Sarah, you do not need to try and compete with these like huge backpack companies. Like I am one person.

I need to look after my life now financially and in the future. And I actually don’t need to do a vast amount in order to make sure that those two things are covered. But that’s partly because I am a wildly frugal person and most people would probably not want to live like I do. But I had a 10 year plan at the beginning of Riot. I was like, I’m going to really make sure I’m looking after my pension, make sure I’m looking after like if I’m going to buy any properties that I’m going to do.

that, sort it out. And then after those 10 years, I will start doing other stuff as well. So I’m just coming into the phase where I’m allowed to buy something for myself as well now. But yes, being wildly frugal has been part of how this has all worked.

Tom Constable (15:39)

Just going back to the concept of being a solopreneur, and you just talked about burnout, and you’ve intentionally chosen the path of a solopreneur. So I’d love to dig into why you want to be, and I’ve chosen to remain a solopreneur. And then I’d like to explore the fact you had burnout, and do you think that’s because you’re trying to everything yourself and how that happened?

Sarah Giblin (16:01)

So I had the idea and I was working in an office job. I’d had the idea for the riot bag and I sketched it out. And I don’t think I ever thought I should probably put a team together in order to do this. It never even crossed my mind. I just thought maybe I can find a prototyping company. Maybe I can fund this on Kickstarter. And then I sort of assumed once we’ve had a working prototype and you Phil were able to put me in touch with the…

with a factory. Like there was never any question from anyone like where are the rest of your people? And I suppose somewhere in the back of my head must have been, well, I’m the one who’s taking the risk. I wouldn’t want to put anyone else in this position. It didn’t have an income for a year and a half right at the beginning of Riot. So that felt like something I was doing to myself because I believed in this idea. But the notion of making someone else do that at the same time in my life that I happened to want to do that felt like a,

That never came into my mind. And there was a question from the factory when we first contacted them, which is basically, can she actually pay for this? Like, you’re not Samsonite, you’re not like, how can we know that you’re going to pay for this? So I ended up having to pay higher down payments in my factory contracts because I was such a risk. So like, that was a bit of a problem, but

Then I had the money from the Kickstarter so I could pay the entire production. And for me, I was just so in it. just like every single problem I just had to try and solve somehow. So there was no bigger picture. And I had no idea how other people put companies together. And somehow it was just possible to keep going on that basis.

Tom Constable (17:42)

Again, sorry to kind of pick at old wounds for lack of a better term. You spoke of burnout. There’ll be other people that listening to this really inspired by your journey. So it’d be useful for them to learn about not only your successes, but also kind of maybe where it didn’t go quite right. What could they learn from that episode?

Sarah Giblin (17:58)

I mean, I think it’s difficult to learn from other people’s burnouts. I suppose you might see some parallels in it. So about three years into the riot bag, that’s when other companies started copying it. And there was specifically a company that was around looking at successful products on Kickstarter and then copying them. And they would do it on a massive scale with huge distribution, which I didn’t even know how to do that sort of thing. So they were like perfectly placed to do that. it

really got to me emotionally in a way that I wasn’t aware was going to happen. And it was something to do with three years of sprinting basically, plus stuff from the outside that I knew was going to happen and I couldn’t deal with it. So I made the incredibly incorrect decision to try and out-compete this company by ordering way too many of the next production. And it

very nearly ended my company financially. The way it worked financially is with every production, you make a down payment to start the production. So you’ve got that money, but then you need to find the rest of the money so that in four or five months, you can pay the rest of that production. And you’ve either got it or you haven’t. And if you haven’t, there’s a massive problem, but that is like four or five months away. So I sort of saw the financial car crash, like

happening very slowly and only realized a few months in that actually my sales were not going up at the rate that they had in the previous year. And I think something to do with totally sprinting three years, not dealing emotionally very well with competitors copying the product and then making this massive

potentially financial error. I think when it came to it, there was 42 pence left in my bank account. I don’t ever go into debt, but that is how close it came to the bottom. And I was like, okay, and that production cost like 110 grand or something. I was like, just like just managed it. And on a good day, I would be like, amazing, I managed it. But on that particular day, I was like, I’m completely checking out. And I stayed in bed for about a year and a half and completely did not want to have engaged with anyone.

And I think the only person who really knows about this is my partner. And it was terrifying for him as well, because I’m usually a very active, very alive kind of person who does stuff all the time. So he tried to help, but that didn’t really help. I definitely wasn’t helping myself. And one day it was actually my warehouse manager, an amazing guy called Barry Salmon, who is so wonderful. And he basically slightly illegally got my phone number from somewhere and

Tom Constable (20:14)

can’t that.

Sarah Giblin (20:31)

called me directly and it’s very strange that I would even have picked up the phone at this stage. But I did and he called me because he was saying, you know, I wasn’t paying my invoices and it was absolutely true. So he called me on that basis and we spoke. But then he said, Sarah, do know, my wife has got depression too. And this too pierced me like nothing else. And I was like, my God, maybe I am.

massively depressed right now. Maybe I’m not just being bad at what I’m doing. Maybe I am actually in something. And that was sort of the turning point for me where I was like, maybe I can do something about this. And he helped me by checking in occasionally. And so for me, was like, maybe I needed someone from the outside to kind of come in to like the strangeness that was going on within. And from that point onwards, I started looking for solutions. Anyone I talked to, was like, I

need something like, I don’t know, halfway between meditation and sport and people would give me ideas and someone once said to me, Sarah, why don’t you try Aikido? It’s a martial art and I found a local Aikido dojo and I went there and I realised my head was so loud with never-ending criticism at this point that I could barely tell what was going on and when I arrived there, I would watch what you had to do, which is you kneel down,

your two teachers stand up, do some insane moves, and then you have to stand up and do it as well. And it was so physically demanding and it required my brain in order to understand these three dimensional shapes that were going on in these two people and how they would like fight that I couldn’t continue anymore with the like insane sort of depressive screaming in my head. And I would walk out of the Aikido sessions like three hours later.

feeling much lighter, much warmer, and much quieter in my head. And so that’s what I started doing. I kept going. I would go twice, three times a week until I was kind of fixed. But it took me knowing that there was a problem first to even get out of it.

Tom Constable (22:39)

Well, I mean, that is a journey and a half. I think he’s just really telling, like you say, a year and a half is a long time. And for you to not realize you’re in a rut, I think that’s the thing that’s kind got my brain thinking. Because if you don’t realize you’re there, then you can’t do anything about it. So where do we go from there? And I just think that I’m hoping that journey is a hard one to go on.

How is that now? You’ve now come back to the business and you’re hitting it with vengeance. What, what do you on social media? I just, I am in awe of your ability to create engaging content that actually adds value as opposed to all the other dross that you come across. So it’s, wonderful to see, but I’m wondering how, how has that event changed your perspective and what success looks like for you and your business?

Sarah Giblin (23:23)

think I had an idea of what I thought success was at the beginning of this apart from it approximately functioning. And what I realized after that is without me, the business doesn’t exist. So I’m going to have to find a way that I’m okay and the business is okay. And what I have found in my private life, in my business life is every single crisis has helped me understand myself better and understand the world better. So I’m actually

I don’t mind really that I went through that at all. I feel quite neutrally about it. And what it allowed me to do was go, okay, Sarah, do you need to make 4,000 riot bags at a time and try and sell them? No, you don’t. And there was another, I also realized at the time, because I had so much stock, I was paying Facebook at the time loads for ads. And I was like, do you know what? I’m actually not going to do that anymore. No more ads. I’m just going to make enough stock that I physically can sell.

financially, even though I destroyed myself, I did benefit greatly in those first few years. So now I’m going to bring it all into balance and just do this at a level that I don’t die every three years. So for me, it allowed me to find some balance. But I still, when I think back to the beginning of Riot, I still think you kind of have to go as hard as you can, because if you didn’t go hard enough, maybe it wouldn’t have been a success. It wouldn’t have got to the point of some sort of success. And I think success is

know, there’s that really lovely image of what starting a company is like. And it’s like jumping off a cliff and on the way down, you have to find, pull out of nowhere pieces together so that you can build a little aeroplane. And just before you crash onto the rocks, you have to learn how to fly it. And I really love that image because it feels exactly right. But once you’re flying it, that’s a totally different skill set. This means you need to be able to refuel in the air. You just need to keep this

things steady and hopefully like not going down too much, not up too much. Totally different skill set. And I am the person who can start something and make something out of nothing. But I’m not really the person who like flies a steady plane after that. It’s just, you know, I can do it, but it’s not what I want to be doing. Anyway, so what I have learned since the burnout thing is that actually you have to just take every problem as it comes because actually,

19 is when I came back to Riot and I was like, yep, I’m like, I’m fixed. I’m totally fine. Everything’s great. Let’s go, go, go, go, go new design. And then COVID came. And when COVID came, I was like, wait a second, this is another crisis, Sarah. We do not need to do that whole thing again. So what we’re going to do is like, are you okay? You’re Is the business okay? No, it’s not. Those are two separate things. Just cause my business is having a bad time doesn’t mean I need to have a bad time.

So COVID, I let riot kind of die a little bit and I was like, but I’m okay. And in the meantime, I came up with a different company. I did some other stuff. I like had a kind of okay COVID, not financially, but I didn’t totally go under. And when the next massive crisis came, which for me was my father dying, I was like, okay, do like, how are you? Okay, you’re kind of okay. Now you’ve got to do all the stuff you’ve got to do because basically when a crisis comes,

If you go under as well, then that’s, it’s doubly difficult to solve. But actually what has, especially whether you’re running a company or you’re like, I don’t know, dealing with the death of someone close to you and your family. Actually at that point, you kind of have to save the day. So you need to be okay enough to just work your way through the process. And actually my massive like depression thing sort of helped me realize that.

Tom Constable (27:04)

In the military, you a saying, it’s very old saying, it’s old school, and even I’m not around to understand it fully, but it’s called a condor moment. So when things are going wrong, you’re in middle of a battle or life and death. As a commander, it’s very, very important to go, apparently condors were a cigar or cigarette or something, and you go back and you have your cigarette and you think about, okay, there’s a thing happening.

I’m in charge, how am going to solve this problem and move further forward? But you always need that slight rational decision to be, and that pause in the battle to allow you to come up with the right battle plan to go forward.

Sarah Giblin (27:37)

Absolutely. You are the person who is going to fix this in whatever way you can. So you need to be okay. if, I mean, if you are physically not able to deal with it in that situation, you know, you yourself have been damaged and your leg has come off or whatever, you’re probably not the person who’s going to be like sorting this out. But I think the psychological bit is so interesting because

If you had asked me at the beginning of my burnout, are you okay? I probably wouldn’t have understood that physically I’m okay. Actually, I’m okay. and probably I could have gone, right. It’s got a problem. I have not got a problem. So let’s try and solve this now. I ended up solving it a year and a half later. It’s a long lesson to learn, but I have also realized like I’m now 40. So I started riot when I was 29, learnt a lot in my thies. And I’ve now realized that

Basically though, there are learning phases have got quite, ⁓ they’re longer than I thought. I thought if you had a bad time, maybe it would be like a few months and not a few years. And like after my father’s death, it’s really been a three year kind of cycle to kind of get back into life again. So sometimes these cycles are much longer than you think they’re going to be. And when you start a business, you need to know things that there’s going to be some really serious stuff that happens.

will come from outside, it will come from within, it’ll come from your own errors, it’ll come from other people’s errors and you’re the one who’s going to have to solve it all. So just check, are you physically okay? Because if you are, it’s time to start solving the problem basically. I like the, did you say condor? Yeah. Condor moment. Yeah, for sure.

Phil Staunton (29:13)

Could we pull it back a little bit to the product? I mean, obviously it’s all kind of connected, but one of the things that really inspired me about how you developed your product was that you were so into your target market and so prepared to listen to your target market. Quite often the clients that we work with think they know best and we end up designing the product that they want despite often our best advice, but there we go. But what was kind of really obvious with you is as soon as we asked you a question about your design that you didn’t know, rather than kind of,

deciding what you wanted, you actually went out to a whole lot of other people who were your target audience. So can you talk us through that a little bit?

Sarah Giblin (29:49)

Yeah, I mean, it sounds like a great plan that I had. But actually, what was going on is I had been, I’d had these sketches in my hand for like two years. And I had, this is the whole joy of prototyping. I hadn’t actually thought through any of the very serious real issues. So you were like, so what size laptop are we making this secure laptop backpockets for? And I was like, never gave it any thought. I have a 13 inch laptop. I sort of forgot that other people in the world might not be exactly the same as me. And I was like,

this whole thing is going to fail on me knowing nothing about people out there. first of all, made the weird, I was still sort of in corporate employee mindset. So I was like, right, must find a report online and found like a global backpack report about every backpack that had been sold in the world and what color they were. And you could download it for like 35 grand. And I was like, this is not what I need. I don’t need this. I need, I need what, and this

report is from like two years ago. This is not what I need. I need to know what size laptop people have in their backpacks. So I just made a little free survey on SurveyMonkey and quickly put it on Facebook because Facebook was sort of the thing at the time and said, hello everyone, I can’t really tell you what I’m doing. I’ve sort of left my job and making a thing and I’m just going to ask you these two questions. Like what size is your laptop? Do you have a laptop that you carry in your bag? What size is it? And do you feel the need to carry a water bottle with you?

I mostly didn’t, but anyway. So I put this out and was like, please just share it and use it. And I needed the information then because we were prototyping it then and I was paying for this. like 50 people, 50 of my friends took the survey and we suddenly had 50 people standing in the prototyping room with us who could tell us something. I didn’t need to know what everyone in the world was doing with their laptops and their backpacks.

I actually, without realizing it, was asking the people who would eventually possibly buy the first Riot Bags. I was kind of making it for anyone who was interested, who knew about what I was doing. But I didn’t realize that at the time. At the moment I was like, amazing. Okay, well, like 40 % of the people had a 13 inch laptop, but there was like a good 20 % who had 15 inch laptops. And so that to me said, I don’t want to reject those people. Let’s make it for 15 inch.

I can’t be bothered to make it for a 17 inch laptop at this stage because that was like 3%. And that’s how it looked. So it’s like, brilliant, 15 inch, let’s go for it. And that just allowed us to move forward, but not with what I wanted. It was very clear to me. If I just wanted to make this for myself, I would have gone to, I could have in some weird way, I could have made a strange little version of it, but this is meant to be a business, which means you’re selling this to other people, making backpacks for other people. So I needed them to be involved.

The first survey 50 people took it, that was great. And then of course, and this is the wonder of working with a prototyping company, they had more questions for me. And I then would go, okay, I either do know the answer or I don’t know the answer. Because sometimes you do have to just make an informed decision for your customers and that’s totally fine. But sometimes I just didn’t know. So then we would go back to them. So the second survey, because people had kind of gone, is Sarah making something? Sarah, who we knew either in the financial services or as a singer until now.

Let’s help her. Like the survey takes four minutes. Second survey about 300 people took and that was starting to get people who are total strangers, who I didn’t know, who were like a lot of classical musicians and some people on LinkedIn who’ve been in financial services, like random people who like headed up HSB and stuff were helping me with my backpack designs. And then the final survey, a thousand people took it because they were just noticing that something was going on. And since the internet arrived, I can still see myself in my front room.

with like the internet for the first time on our computer. I used to hunt through chat rooms for email addresses. I found email addresses as a little sort of token. So fascinating. Like they said a lot, they worked in a certain way. And I would just write A4 sheets of three columns of never ending email addresses because I found them so fascinating. So whenever I put my little survey out, I would always make sure I’d like scoop up these little emails as well.

And emails are still really powerful, even though like in theory younger people don’t use them. They still have this incredible immediacy. So I then, when my Kickstarter campaign came, emailed a thousand people and said, I made a backpack that, well, I think all backpacks are the wrong way around. I’ve made one that I think makes more sense for the city. What do you think? Not all of those people backed it, but they did know that I was doing it. And a few of them backed it. Enough on the first day that it got a really good push.

And then I had to go out literally live, stop people in the street and like make them know about this thing. And by the end of it, I got my thousand people. So it ended up being this marketing tool, which was not my plan at all. It was genuine terror at having started a project that I didn’t know what the next step was. I was being asked important questions by the prototyping company and didn’t have an answer. So rather than making it up, I went out to actual people and those people ended up buying riot bags eventually.

Tom Constable (35:00)

I’ve just got one question on that. So you went out in the streets and stopped people. This is the point where you’re trying to drive this awareness. You literally stopped people and said, look, I’m doing this thing. Here’s the thing. Here’s the link you can go to to support it. Let me know if you’re going to support it. I mean, not many, I don’t know many people that would, know, very few people that would do that, think.

Sarah Giblin (35:17)

It

was during my Kickstarter campaign. Like for me, it was very clear those 30 days, that’s the time. It either works or it doesn’t. And I was going to do everything in my power to make it work. So I had like a series of events that I planned. I was basically going on tour, but because of the nature of the problem, like

as it that was trying to solve. Sometimes you just see someone with a backpack that’s open as you’re making your way from one event to the next. I couldn’t let that go. So there was a guy I remember, this was on the second Kickstarter campaign. I was like quite tired at the end of the day. I’ve been talking to lots of people. I’ve been to a couple of events and then on the way home, I just saw this guy crossing the road at Checkpoint Pachali in Berlin and his backpacker was open. I was like, God, just leave it. And I was like, no, don’t leave it. Go and talk to that guy. And he was, I was like, excuse me.

your backpack is open.” And he was like, yeah, thanks. And I was like, I have created something that means that that could never happen again for you. And he was like, okay. And by chance, he was a Turkish rock star called Bora Yita, who had just had a bad day, had been left by the group that he was with. And he totally wanted to sit down, talk to me about this idea and

share it with like his hundred thousand followers on Facebook in like five different languages. and we have, he became a riot bag user. He like, he backed it on Kickstarter and like, we still see each other now. So I am a great believer in doing the kind of, you know, building a system that works, but then having a personal touch whenever is humanly possible. Like if there’s someone who writes to us and says, you know, that bit that you don’t really sell.

but like the bags come in this particular cover in the post or whatever. Like I’ve lost mine and I use it every day. Please, can I have it? Or please, can you make them available online? We didn’t really have any. So I was like, don’t worry, Claire, who’s my customer services person, my virtual assistant. I think I’ve got someone, I’ve got one at home. So I like packed it and put it in the post for him with a little postcard drawing of it. Like if I can do that, I would love to do that for everyone, but I can’t. Doing it occasionally is not meaningless. Like it has something. So I will still…

try to be as physically involved in something as much as I can.

Phil Staunton (37:28)

And just thinking about your overall journey and the challenges on your journey, you’ve been kind enough to share quite a lot of those. What happened with Brexit? How did that affect Riot?

Sarah Giblin (37:38)

Hmm,

actually, Brexit, think came into the whole burnout situation. It was like three years. So I started riot in 2014. So it was all around that kind of 2014, 15, no, 15, 16 was when that was happening. And my life is spread over two countries, Germany and the UK. My mom’s German, my partner is German. my whole

Part of the reason I started Riot was because I didn’t want to sit in an office job in London and have to just visit my partner at the weekend. So was like, maybe this weird idea that I’ve had will actually allow me to live the way that I need to in order to have some balance in my life. And for me, that means living in the UK and Germany. And I didn’t even have a German passport at this point. So Riot got really affected by it. I got really affected by it. And I think that kind of added to the whole…

like becoming majorly depressed about what the whole future was going to bring. I should have had a condor moment and just gone, do you know what, Sarah, just wait for them to make a decision, sort out what is going on with your business, sort out what’s going on with you and you’ll be fine. I didn’t, instead that led to, you know, the stuff we’ve already discussed. But only recently, literally last year,

Enough people, enough little companies have been making really good software that will attach to your website so that you can kind of go back to a pre-Brexit scenario. So let’s say someone from Germany orders a Riot bag. They pay their tax at the point that they order the bag like they used to.

It’s my job to then take that tax, make sure it goes back to the EU and then they will send it on to Germany. It takes a little bit of extra software just to make sure that that all works properly. I do have to pay like monthly VAT returns for the EU, but thankfully there’s this like ecosystem of companies that have come to solve problems around the issue of Brexit and I can rely on that. So now Brexit is no longer an issue. I’m really glad to open up my shipping to the EU again.

But for a few years, a third of my market suddenly disappeared. So that wasn’t much fun either. But Brexit was just another problem. And that’s what I’ve come to realize that basically, let’s say every year there are going to be two really big problems and about 20 small ones. And it’s just a case of which ones they’re going to be. So when they like make themselves aware, like they kind of go, I am the problem. I’m like, right, you’re the problem I’m going to have this year. How am I going to deal with it? And as long as I’m in an okay mindset.

then I can deal with probably hopefully anything that comes up. And I’m really pleased that we are currently not impacted by all the Trump tariffs. And I’m really interested because that was our Brexit was sort of what’s going on with Trump in a way, like there’s parallels with it. I’ll be interested to go to the factory in China next, like later this month and ask them how they’re impacted by it.

Phil Staunton (40:26)

When you see a riot bag out in the wild, do you still get excited about it? Do you go up and talk to the person?

Sarah Giblin (40:31)

If I’m feeling good and I think the person would not totally hate it, I will occasionally go up and say, you’ve got a riot bag and they mostly don’t know the name of it. They just think it’s a backpack and then, or they know it. And then I go, oh, I designed that. And sometimes I think they think I was the person at the company who happened to work on the design and I’m not going to be like, it’s my company. I did it all on my own.

That is like, sometimes they know who I am, mostly they don’t. And sometimes, like everyone’s response is different. But for me, I love seeing a riot bag in the street. Like literally two weeks ago, I was in Manchester and I had some visitors and we all came out in the street just organizing ourselves and a riot bag walked past in my street, in front of my house. Like it was amazing. ⁓

There are riot bag spottings out in the wild and I love to see them. And what I really like to see is, like, I’m amazed at how well people look after their backpacks. Some people are like, have them in pristine, have even quite old riot bags and they look quite pristine. And often people will say to me, oh, sorry, I know I’ve got a 2015 like version. I’m sorry, I haven’t bought a new one since. And I’m like, I don’t mind if they’re indestructible. That’s totally fine.

I’ve even seen like first edition riot bags out on the street. It’s amazing. So I love it.

Phil Staunton (41:54)

So Sarah, what I’d like to know is, when did you realise how hard this journey was going to be? And that, you know, maybe there was quite a lot to learn that you weren’t necessarily expecting.

Sarah Giblin (42:06)

You’ve got to understand that 29 year old Sarah thought she could do absolutely anything. And I have learned that that is actually not true. And especially like, you know, people will say, but you weren’t a product designer. How on earth did you do this? And there was a moment on the first production, like I’d worked with you in order to kind of complete these three prototypes. But on the first production, I didn’t really know what it was going to mean to work with a manufacturer. Cause when you’re a consumer.

You just go into a shop and there are all these perfect little products and you just choose one. And I thought going to a manufacturer with my design and say, please make a thousand three hundred of this meant I would have a thousand three hundred perfect designs and that they would see exactly what was in the prototype. And, you know, that would, it would just all happen. But I remember when I went to do the quality check on the first production and I was using assumptions from financial services.

perspective where in the old days if a bank got lots of complaints, we would then check whether the complaints had been dealt with properly according to regulatory standards and they would do a 20 % check of those complaints because there were lots of them. So I was like, we need to check 20 % of the bags. That’s what we’ll do. And someone came in and they would check them according to a list that I gave them, but not according to anything else. And I

then started looking at these bags myself and I was like, well, there’s some weird stuff going on here. There’s a bottle holder that’s the wrong way up. There’s there’s, there’s, and then I was like, what is this? And the, the, the thread that was used along this scene. So on the inside seam along here on a gray and black backpack was light blue. And I was like, I wanted to, cause I used to be a very angry 20 year old. I wanted to go like, have you

But I realized again and again and again in my business, anything that goes wrong is something that I have not communicated or something that I have not had a conversation about. And I started to realize how many components are in a backpack of my design. You know, sometimes it’s like over 200 and I need to be specific about everything. And that’s where in my mindset, I was like, I need to, I’m not going to be in this like safe consumer world anymore. I’m now in the business world where

everything is on my shoulders. And I just became so much more detailed, so much more thoughtful as a person through this whole design process and realized like, I have to look further into the future if this is actually going to work. And one of the things that I did, which is minorly control freaky on the back of this was that I in the second production was like, hi factory, I’m going to be checking every single.

backpack and they were like, absolutely not. was like, if I’m buying these backpacks from you, I’m going to take a week, give me a table and I need to look at every single one. And they were so annoyed. But then when I sat down and actually started working on the bags, we got a person with a sewing machine with me on one side, Daisy, my production manager with me who could like translate. And they realized that I was working as part of the system. And I still to this day go and check every single riot bag, every seam, every zip. It gives us

a two-way communication system during the manufacturing process. gives me as a one-person business site of what the problems are going to be in this production, what problems my customers are going to have. And I can absolutely reduce the number of problems that end up on a ship going to the UK that I can do nothing about once they are in the UK. But when we’re at the factory, we’ve got the whole skillset there to be able to fix pretty much anything. So I can’t catch everything, but I will catch as much as I can. And that

has given us a much better relationship, like manufacturing relationship as well. So the learning of like getting into the product mind space also eventually turned into.

Tom Constable (45:56)

this as well. And I’ve got two more army terms there from what you just brought out, which I love. It’s one of the phrases. least two or three per recording, but it’s good to trust, but it’s better to check. that comes where if you trust your soldiers, that’s great. But actually you need to check because firstly, someone will mess something up. And secondly, when your soldiers know you’re going to check, guess what? They’re going to make sure they’ve got everything. So it’s actually a more efficient way to do it than.

Phil Staunton (46:01)

always has to get an army term in.

Tom Constable (46:23)

almost to close your eyes and ignore the problem.

Sarah Giblin (46:26)

sounds

like any army training would make you into a dramatically better business person. And there is a real connection between like business people and army and they often will go into business quite successfully afterwards. That is exactly, I really believe in that.

And I mean, the paranoid parts of my brain sometimes thinks maybe because they know that I’m going to be checking, they’re not going to care, but I don’t believe that at all actually in practice. And what it means is the most important thing that I think happened is by me being there, everyone knows me, they know I’m going to be there every production. And I have asked Daisy, my production manager, to always tell me when she sees that I’m doing something that doesn’t make sense from their perspective. And I would like to hear from the people who are

hand stitching the riot bags at sewing machines, which bits they hate making so that there is a chance that we don’t have to make it that way. We might be able to make the production process easier for them without impacting the function. And so we have a two way conversation. We also eat together at lunchtime. We all nap together at lunchtime. We just see each other and say hello in the mornings and I can just, like I can.

feel what it’s like at the factory. like I was just on TikTok doing, I did a video yesterday just to say like, I’m going to China soon and go to the factory. I’m going to be making videos anyway, but I would like to know what you want to know about so I can make videos specifically that make a bit more, that are a bit more relevant to what you’re interested in. everyone is always interested in how the workers are treated, how the staff at the factory are. And I can’t wait to talk about it because I know.

Tom Constable (47:59)

No, and that’s bringing me really nicely on, but I want to go back only because I said I’d give two military analogies. second one is the concept of extreme ownership. If something goes wrong and you’re in charge, then it’s very easy to blame the person that maybe did the thing wrong, but actually ultimately you’re responsible for it. So it should have been, instead of going private Smith, you did that wrong, you’re a numpty. It’s, oh my goodness, what did I do wrong in the training and the preparation that enabled this person to get things wrong? That’s the thing you can control.

Sarah Giblin (48:28)

so important because I know it is my intuition to, especially growing up like in my teens and my twenties, to sort of blame other people when something went wrong. And that has been one of my, greatest things that Riot has sort of like rubbed out from me, that this like taking responsibility, I mean, just makes you a calmer person because you realise

either told people about it and help them prepare or you didn’t and that’s what results. And it also reminds me of a learning that my dad had from working for British Rail for decades, that he would look at a railway crash and sometimes people would want to blame the driver, but you have to look at, even if the driver was tired, drunk,

Whatever the situation was, the system allowed that to happen somehow. And the system is so complex, you have to build these checks into it so that no one would ever be able to go to work in that way. And you have to basically see it as a senior management problem if there’s a railway crash, not.

as an individual one. And I think that’s really important. It is easier to live that way if I know this whole thing is my responsibility and my customers know I take responsibility for everything as well. That it isn’t like, there’s a problem. Well, someone must have done something wrong. It’s easier to live that way.

Tom Constable (49:43)

Now we are coming to the end of this conversation. It’s been brilliant. Your energy and charisma and attention to detail has come through at every stage. So in order to end on a high, let’s talk about TikTok. The thing that’s fascinated me about our pre-conversations is that how you sell your product. And one of the platforms that I’ve avoided, like the plague, frankly, is TikTok and that kind of platform. And for no particular reason, mainly probably because I’m getting to an age where I’m like, I don’t understand it. It scares me. I’m not going to touch it.

I know LinkedIn, I could do that. So I’d love to hear more about how you’re utilizing that and hopefully given in the lens of someone that’s looking for inspiration for their own product and how it could help them.

Sarah Giblin (50:22)

In the old days, you would make your videos and you would go and find your audiences. And I would do that on the street, literally stopping someone with a backpack or gathering email addresses from people who were interested online. But it took me having to find people. And the insane and wonderful thing with TikTok is that if I make, I focus entirely on what I’m doing, niche, niche, niche, niche, niche, like secure backpack designer who…

helps you carry your laptop top around so that you have a clear mind as you’re walking through the city. It’s very niche-y. I make my videos and if they look half decent, make any sense and have a nice structure and people would like the sound or the look of them, TikTok will throw it at the people that are online. And sometimes they get like 300 views. And for a long time they did get 300 views. But then I made one video where I knew it was going to be good because I actually put some effort into it.

And it got 1.4 million views. I did not work for that. TikTok threw my video at people it thought would be interested. in, like, let’s say when, in 2014, when I started Riot, Kickstarter had a really similar feel. It was this place where people were kind of interested in stuff and they were willing to take a moment out of their day to listen to a new idea. And like, if they thought it was the kind of thing that was at the

all of interest to them, they might even support it. And I get the same feeling from TikTok because TikTok does all the work for you finding people who I think they do it more on a basis of who looks like me, who sounds like me. It is mostly like there are more women. It’s always been men who have followed Riot Bag and have like supported Riot Bag. Like Riot is built on men. Thank you all male people who have like taken Riot to this point. But

actually because of TikTok. TikTok, the algorithm thinks, ⁓ she looks like this, she sounds like this. Well, we might as well like throw stuff at people who look and sound like her. And it suddenly brought a bunch of women in who have bought riot bags in much higher numbers than it’s ever done. So to me, TikTok is for sure a place to like try posting for a month every couple of days. Try making your watching some videos.

It’s difficult with TikTok because you have to spend like a couple of hours going down the hole of TikTok and teaching the algorithm who you are. And you do kind of lose your life a little bit. It’s kind of scary. But if you’re willing to get through that, then you know how the platform works. You know what hooks work. You know how the, how people will feel when they see your video. And then you stop watching the videos. That’s totally crucial. Stop watching and start making videos. And then.

some will work, some won’t work and then finally some will. And like this morning, I just posted a video about Ryanair because I actually really love Ryanair, I find it very interesting company. I know their marketing tries to paint them as like the bad boys of the industry and that’s very successful because everyone thinks they’re awful. But I think they’re really consistent and fair company, low prices.

Strict rules makes total sense. And in fact, I’ve even made a backpack that will fit into their strict rules. That’s the box that is the size of the small bag on Ryanair. was prototype one. But I just noticed that someone said, are the stickers on the Ryanair size, are the new stickers on the Ryanair sizes, are they actually consistent? And I went back and measured them and they’re not at the moment. So I just put that video up this morning. I know that TikTok loves controversy.

to be as fair as I possibly can, which is to say, I actually defend Ryanair to the hills, but this is a little bit inconsistent and it’ll make their staff job harder and flyers jobs harder. And they won’t be doing what they want to do, which is getting as many people within the rules on their planes, like onto the flight as quickly as possible so that they can do as many flights in a day and keep fares low. Like that’s what they want to do. And through this inconsistency on their sizing, they’re going to slow themselves down. So that’s what the new video is.

Tom Constable (54:27)

doing a public service.

Sarah Giblin (54:29)

I want to include Martin Lewis if I can get him on this. Because I’d love it if I really support everything Ryanair does, but they have to be consistent and that’s where their power will come from. So yes, I happen to notice a minor inconsistency and actually I think that’s what all design is about, whether it’s information or whether it’s product design. It’s that something doesn’t quite work in the world, so try and do something about it. So maybe it’s the same brain space. But I am loving TikTok and apparently

Instagram and Meta has managed to copy the algorithm so effectively that basically the videos that do well on TikTok are the ones that do well on Instagram. All those at the same rate. It’s the strangest thing. And I don’t really engage with people on Instagram because I find it very hard to answer questions on more than one platform at a time. So I just focus on TikTok. I find it like I started in February this year being very serious about TikTok and it is like free marketing. It’s amazing.

And I refuse to spend money on advertising. So yes.

Tom Constable (55:29)

I mean, that is a we’re talking about doing a live webinar at some point and actually maybe there’s a product, you know, product designers use of TikTok idea webinar something in the future in the making.

Phil Staunton (55:39)

Sarah, thank you so much. It’s been an absolute privilege to talk to someone who I worked with, you know, 11 years and two months ago, and to see how you’re flying now with your product and how many sales and everything else is great. So thank you so much for sharing that and sharing so honestly about your journey.

Sarah Giblin (55:55)

I’m always happy to do that because it’s been the greatest adventure of my life so far and it’s had highs and lows and I’ve learned so much. But it did all start with us creating three prototypes together that are unfortunately not here, but maybe we’ll do another podcast and I can actually like bring in the prototype.

Phil Staunton (56:11)

date. We’ll always take a link in the

Tom Constable (56:13)

Aren’t they behind you Phil? was it the final product?

Phil Staunton (56:17)

their final products.

Sarah Giblin (56:18)

I that’s the first production and the third production. And in my opinion, you should put them the other way around so that the zips are showing because you can’t actually see the main design.

Tom Constable (56:30)

That’s attention,

Phil Staunton (56:31)

Yeah, absolutely. Anyway, just talking about show notes, Sarah, where should we direct people if they want to look more at right bags or buy one and that type of thing?

Sarah Giblin (56:42)

So

my website is riot.co.uk, R-I-U-T stands for revolution in user thinking. But if you see my name here, Sarah Giblin and Linktree, then you can find all of my links at the moment that are important, which surveys I’m doing at the moment, TikTok and all of that. So Sarah Giblin, Riot Bag, TikTok and wherever you want to find. they’re all there. Cool. Thank you so much. Love speaking to you. And I super love all the army stuff that comes in. I keep forgetting that…

They’re like, that’s going to be woven into the podcast. It’s brilliant.

Phil Staunton (57:13)

There was no choice on that, unfortunately, it just keeps coming.

Sarah Giblin (57:17)

Right.

Tom Constable (57:22)

think I need to sit down in a dark room after that. The amount of energy that she gave just in that discussion, let alone running her business, let alone everything else she does in her personal life and everything you can imagine. If she operates her life at that level of intensity and enthusiasm and drive and determination, no wonder she’s had to find the way of operating where she avoids that burnout. Because that’s not a sustainable thing 24-7-365.

Phil Staunton (57:49)

No, and it is quite incredible. And the fact that she self generates that it’s not like she’s surrounded by a team and she’s feeding off other people’s energy or anything else. But actually that’s entirely kind of coming out of her is just absolutely remarkable. And as you say, the fact that burnout is part of her journey is not vastly surprising at all.

Tom Constable (58:10)

Yeah. I mean, there’s so many takeaways that we could discuss. one that I really liked unsurprisingly because it was a military term, but it was the extreme ownership concept. The fact that she’s had to evolve to that next level of thought process without saying, you know, it’s really goes wrong. Not having to blame everybody and going, actually, you what could I, how could I have changed that in the future? Be really self-reflective. I think that’s the thing that everyone can take away in their day-to-day life. It’s understanding, you know,

You can’t control other people, but you can control what you do. And if you’re the leader, you’re in charge, the book stops with you. actually, you know, so that if your troops do something wrong, even if you’ve maybe told them not to do it the wrong way, then you’ve got to go, well, maybe I should have reinforced it three or four times or could I have taught it a different way? Or maybe I should have realized that that person wasn’t the right person to be doing that job in the first place. It always needs to come back to yourself.

Phil Staunton (58:57)

Yeah, I don’t know about you Tom, but certainly in my past, it always takes me a good few months to get to a point of extreme ownership that I will have to go through that process of kind of blaming everybody else. And then suddenly in a quiet moment, suddenly actually this is on me. Maybe Sarah just gets there an awful lot quicker and maybe because of your military training, you get there quicker as well.

Tom Constable (59:18)

Yeah. look, you know, yeah, I think maybe you’ve just lived a charmed life and you managed to get away with not having too many nuclear events. I know you’ve had a few, mate, and I know you have, but maybe you haven’t had too many to the point where your brain is scarred and has had to revert to extreme ownership in order to protect itself.

Phil Staunton (59:38)

Yeah, I guess there is a protection element in it, isn’t there? Is that actually you’re not then potentially so dependent on everyone else and all external circumstances because actually you just take a level of responsibility yourself and go, well, should have, you know, I guess it’s like the push chair project that we launched. You know, it’s easy to say, it failed because it launched at the wrong time with COVID and all the stores shut and, know, all the consumer shows we were planning on, you know, attending, they all closed down and everything else. that’s…

it makes sense, but it also isn’t going well. Maybe actually I should have at least had contingency plans should that kind of thing happen. But I think COVID is the one thing you look at and go, well, no one was ever expecting that, right?

Tom Constable (1:00:15)

Yeah, definitely. I’m not going to pick that apart. Maybe I could interview you on a podcast. That would be cool. We should think about that. But without jumping into that, that all makes sense. Is there any other points for you from your perspective you want to kind of draw out?

Phil Staunton (1:00:30)

I just loved really the combination with Sarah of that kind of energy and that drive to launch this amazing product that she had the idea of, whilst also going, actually, I’ve got no idea what it needs to be and I need to talk to my customers. And we find that so rarely. I mean, worked on 1,600 projects over the last kind of 15 years at D2M. And I worked on another kind of 400, 500 before that, my previous company.

And very, very few people actually listen to their customers. Even if they’ve been in business for years and everything else, you just don’t find it. And I think though that Sarah demonstrates how well that really works. If you do listen to your customers and you are prepared to be humble and go, well, actually I’ve got a great idea, but that doesn’t mean that I’ve got the right idea for all the details or for every element of it. And that really stood out for me.

Tom Constable (1:01:17)

Yeah. And I was definitely listening to that thinking, could I be like that? And it’s, and I don’t, I definitely don’t have a black or white answer to that one. It’s not easy. It’s not an easy thing. And you’ve got to have, in order to launch a product or a business, you’ve got to have a certain level of self-confidence that you’ve got a good idea and the thing you’re going to do is right. But then somehow you’ve then got to taper, temper that self-confidence with humility.

Phil Staunton (1:01:43)

And it’d really interesting to get Lisa from episode two and Sarah from episode six in a room, right? Because Lisa was completely self-belief. Me and my patent attorney thinks it’s a great idea. You know, I’m going to do this and throw loads of money at it and buy thousands in stock and everything else. So it’s not just talk at that point, it’s real action she put behind that self-belief versus Sarah who got just a few weeks in and went, I don’t know. And now I need it.

a thousand people in my research group so that I can ask their opinion instead. And both hugely successful with their product, but both approached it in a completely different way.

Tom Constable (1:02:19)

Yeah, would be interesting to be a fly on the wall for that one. think for me as well, the other takeaway is two more, suppose, but the being frugal, again, a skill that I’m not particularly good at. My mindset is very much like it’s either going to be successful or it’s not. Whether it’s another 30 quid reoccurring subscription or not, is it not relevant to the success of the product or the business? I would not say that’s a good idea. You know, I don’t think that’s necessarily, it’s just my mindset, but the fact she had to be so frugal and the fact that

or she choose to be or the way that she is a personality allowed her to survive, survive for those periods where either she just downed tools and stopped. And because there wasn’t these massive overheads, she could do that. And then at some point pick it up. I think that’s a, if someone is listening to this and is thinking about being a solopreneur, probably a huge takeaway there is that because I think there’s times when you’re going to want to go on holiday. There’s times when you’re going to want to down tools before unforeseen circumstances. And if you’ve, if you’ve got all those overheads, then you’re going to struggle.

Phil Staunton (1:03:14)

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s certainly one of the lessons that I would have drawn out of Sarah’s experience and my experience previously as well, is you want to give yourself as long a runway as possible for this to work. And actually in Sarah’s position with no overhead, her runway is almost forever. If she had to stop for a few years because

something happened that demand dropped or whatever else, or she couldn’t personally kind of tackle things because she wanted to do something else or whatever. She’s fine and she can do that and she can just pick it back up again wherever she wants. The problem is when you start kind of having logistics and staff and offices and all this kind of thing, all of a sudden that runway decreases massively to a point sometimes where you’re like, well, actually I’ve only got three months here and we’ve got to sell something in next month or we’re going to have a problem. But with new product development, things come up all the time and you can’t really look at it and go, well, I’ve

got to get to market next month, or I’ve got to increase my sales next month, whatever else, because there are just too many variables that you don’t have complete ultimate control over.

Tom Constable (1:04:08)

Maybe that kind of segues into my final point is the TikTok marketing and the ability. If you are under pressure, you’ve only got three months worth of runway, sometimes I guess you won’t be able to see the wood for the trees. You won’t be able to think strategically in long-term and you’ll be too busy trying to make the quick buck in the short term, as opposed to, know, I can go strategically attack TikTok. I’m going to create a bunch of videos and hey, know, first few.

get 300 views and who cares? I’m going to keep going because I’m not under pressure. Suddenly, you know, I’ve learned a bit more and I created a video that I thought was going to be good and 1.3 million views happened. And then guess what? Bet you started to tick over a few sales at that point. And if you’re under pressure and you’re struggling to see the wood for the trees, that’s not going to happen.

Phil Staunton (1:04:49)

No, absolutely. And even with some of our other marketing things like the PR and everything else, some of it just came out of the blue, right? And suddenly she gets an article in the Guardian and she sold out her whole product stock. But you got no guarantee that was going to happen. And so to give yourself as long as possible for that type of thing to work and those types of kind of organic marketing things to actually get the reach and for

a journalist to pick up on the story and all that kind of thing, you do need as long a runway as you can possibly get basically, because you just can’t determine it. I guess you can do a lot more and then you’re more likely for it to happen quicker, but you still can’t guarantee it. yeah, I’m glad you brought it up because otherwise I would have done. mean, the TikTok thing is remarkable. Looking at paid ads for Facebook and Instagram and everything else, everything seems to be…

pay to play. ⁓ One of the very few exceptions right now seems to be TikTok and actually if you do just get it right, you can get in front of a million people or more without actually paying anything. And that is incredible and what an opportunity for anyone who’s launching a new product.

Tom Constable (1:05:51)

Yeah, it still makes me feel a little bit queasy. The idea of downloading TikTok and spending time training it and then trying to work out how to game the algorithm. that’s more my

Phil Staunton (1:06:02)

You

and I could do some like dance video thing, you know?

Tom Constable (1:06:05)

mate, let’s do it. ⁓ Our wives would divorce us, our kids would leave home. But it would be also banter, so you know, maybe. Right mate, have we reflected enough?

Phil Staunton (1:06:19)

Yeah, I think so. I don’t think there’s anything else to draw out of that. But hopefully it’s been really helpful to the listeners, no matter what stage of their journey they’re at. I look forward to the next one.

Tom Constable (1:06:29)

I would just say thank you for Sarah for being hugely open and transparent and really sharing the realities of what she went through. I think it will help people. listener, if you’ve found this useful and you’re finding this series useful, so the first time I think we’ve asked you, but if you’ve got time at end of listening to this episode, it’s about to end in 30 seconds time, just stop what you’re doing, get yourself onto the app that you’re listening to this on and give me a very quick rate and review. It’ll just help us increase the reach, help other people if you find it useful.

and it’ll help inspire us to keep doing and make sure that this series continues to grow in the way that it’s Until next episode.

Phil Staunton (1:07:03)

Thank you