May 30, 2022 • 52 mins
It's Memorial Day in the United States, and so we're on holiday. We're bringing to you an episode from Business on the Brink back in 2019, where Ariel and I chat about a famous Kickstarter Campaign that ultimately led to frustration and disappointment.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
John in Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio,
and how the tech are you here? In the United States?
It is currently Memorial Day, which means that we're not
(00:24):
in the office today, So I was going to play
a rerun, but I thought maybe we'd try something a
little different. Uh. Some of you may know that a
couple of years ago, I used to host a show
with Ariel Casting called Business on the Brink, and we
covered businesses that had kind of a pivotal moment where
(00:45):
either they made some choices that got them out of
severe trouble or they descended into chaos. And it was
a fun series to do. We did it for a
couple of years, and I thought it would be great
to play one of those episodes today. So what you're
about to hear is a Business on the Brink episode
(01:06):
which originally published on July two thousand nineteen. It is
called Chilling Out with the Coolest Cooler and I hope
you enjoy. Ryan Grepper was sure he knew how to
beat the heat with an innovative approach to the old
beach stand by the drinks cooler. He added some bells
(01:30):
and whistles, updating the frosty concept with some techy bonus features.
To get things moving, he launched a crowdfunding campaign that
was incredibly successful and earned a lot of ice, but
soon found out that manufacturing a new product isn't easy
and the whole process ended up leaving a lot of
early supporters out in the cold. This is the coolest
(01:50):
cooler on the brink, Hey, guys on Jonathan and I'm
Ariel Casting, and thank you Bill Jeffers for giving us
this awesome suggestion. Yeah, yeah, this is a one that
I have covered on my show Text Stuff a little bit.
(02:14):
I did an episode about some of crowdfunding's biggest successes
and failures, and spoiler alert, coolest cooler falls into the
latter category. Yeah, sadly. Sadly because I think the concept
is really cool. Yeah, we're going to be saying cool
a lot and not meaning it in a punny way.
(02:36):
But if you want to interpret it as a pun,
feel free. Yes, but no, I if I were not
so thrifty, I was about to say cheap, but I'm
going to say thrifty. I would have wanted to back this.
A lot of people did. Lots of people backed this
product so much so that not to skip ahead too much,
(02:56):
but it would become one of the most successful Kickstarter
campaigns in history. We'll get to that. But as it
turns out, as as we alluded to in the introduction,
things did not go smoothly, and it was largely a
thing due to innocent naivete. There was a lot of
of of underestimating exactly how hard it is to mass
(03:20):
produce a brand new product. I'd have to agree with you, Jonathan.
So let's get into a little bit of how this
product came about. This coolest cooler. It was launched in
two thousand thirteen by Ryan Grepper from Portland, Oregon. He
used to be a medical sales rep uh and he
was a self described inventor since two thousand six, which
is I believe around the time that this products started
(03:43):
taking form. He's also um He's still listed as a
member of the CNBC Tech Crowd Council, which is made
up of people who have done a successful crowdfunding campaigns. Yes,
his campaign was successful. Yes for the crowd funding part.
It's kind of surprised to see him still on there.
But spoiler alert, guys, coolest Cooler is still around, but
(04:07):
Ryan Grepper's reputation has taken an enormous beating in the process.
And so so his idea initially started off as a
pair of ideas before it merged into transformer, like what
the coolest cooler would be? Right? Yeah, he tried to
make a portable blender from a weed whacker, and then
he made a cooler with the car stereo in it. Uh.
(04:30):
And then after he made these these initial prototypes, he
was like, well, I need to make them smaller so
I can bring them places. And he got the inspiration
that if he made it smaller, he could sell it.
And his idea was for the cooler to be a
place where people gather, to have all the things that
make a space somewhere you'd want to hang out. And
according to c NBC, his early experiments to compile all
(04:55):
these things together didn't work. So well, yeah, I just
have this in my imagined y. Now, I know this
isn't what it actually looked like, but in my imagination,
you have like an iglue uh style cooler with a
car stereo duct taped onto it. Like that's how I
imagine these early versions being that's how I'd do it,
(05:16):
just just say it. But the whole idea was, you know,
you've been to plenty of parties, you've hosted parties. You
note as well as I do, that often a central
gathering point for a party ends up being the kitchen.
It's it's kind of it's where the food is, be
is where the drinks are. People tend to hover there
and then sooner or later a party kind of just
(05:39):
it's centered there. It might spin off in other places.
So this was kind of the same concept was that
if you have all of these elements in a cooler
and your outdoors, the cooler becomes kind of the central
focal point for the party. Yeah, and he had an
initial setup for the cooler, but by the end of
his Kickstarter campaigns plural uh his cooler. His coolest cooler
(06:01):
would include a USB charging station, a blender for crushing ice,
a waterproof bluetooth speaker, watch aproof bluetooth speaker and l
e ed light for the lid, dinner wear and storage
for it, a cutting board, a bottle opener, and all
terrain wheels like a bungee cord thingy and a little
(06:21):
hidy spot for your keys and phone. Yeah. Also it
was cooler. Yeah, it would be kind of ridiculous if
he made this cooler with all these bells and whistles
that didn't actually keep your beverages. It reminds me of
the trend it was before even smart watches, but the
trend where watches were including more and more features, and
(06:42):
the standard joke was what's the time and then the
person time exactly? That was? That was that was That's
a longstanding joke in technology of seen it in like
you know, comic strips and things like that, same sort
of thing, like if you had ended up with the
coolest cooler that couldn't actually keep food cold, that would
be ridiculous. So he initially launched a crowdfunding campaign in
(07:06):
November two thousand thirteen, and he was targeting a specific
kind of of market. He was thinking about people who
liked tailgating, and he was timing it to go along
with the holiday Christmas shopping uh season. I mean you
think that would be a smart move, right, yeah, But
(07:28):
it turns out it didn't. It didn't quite pan out.
He did not make his goal on that. Yeah, he
was seeking a hundred twenty five thousand dollars, and he
ultimately raised uh well, the campaign met a hundred two
thousand from two backers. But the way kickstarter works is
(07:50):
it's an all or nothing proposal. You either make your goal,
or you get and you get whatever you make plus over,
or you make not thing at all. So if you
have a goal of fifty thou dollars and you only
hit twenty thousand dollars, nobody gets charged, no money changes hands,
and your campaign fails. If you make fifty, then everyone
(08:13):
gets charged however much they pledged. You get your fifty
dollars minus kickstarters cut, which I think is five percent
of the actual money earned, and if it makes more
than fifty thou dollars, then you get more than what
you had set as your goal. Kickstarter obviously has a
strong incentive to promote the the campaigns that are doing well. Like,
(08:40):
if there's a lot of buzz, it makes a lot
of sense for a kick started to kind of put
those closer to the front thing they get exactly. Yeah,
so if it's a really successful one, then kicks Started
gets some bigger cut, because I mean it's still five percent,
but it's five percent of a much larger number. And
so that first one didn't work out so well. But
the second Kickstarter campaign was a different story. Yeah, his
(09:03):
second campaign launched on July eighth. He said a smaller goals,
which just from the get go that seems problematic to me.
If you need two dred and fifty dollars to create
your coolers, don't set a lower goal so you meet
your goal unless you're specifically thinking, I'm gonna start with
a very small shipment, like if you if you still
(09:27):
kept the price point for your cooler at the same level,
but you thought I'll make a smaller batch, then that
might work out. But as it turns out, that's not
what happened. No, no, So first I want to say
it shows you how small Ryan was thinking, because at
his cheapest donation amount five dollars, you gotta thanks in
(09:47):
the promise of having your name written on Ryan's personal cooler.
Court cooler can only hold so many names unless you're
like one of those grain of Rice writers. And even then,
um and then the highest level, if you donated two
thousand dollars or more, Ryan would come be your personal
bartender for an event in your hometown and give you
(10:10):
one of the first coolers. So and he would sign
that one, and he didn't have any of space. Yeah,
and so you look at this and you go obviously
he was thinking he'd get a moderate amount of backers
two hundred and eighty or so like his first campaign,
maybe a little bit more because he can't travel to
that many people's hometowns. And and he he had earned
more than a hundred thousand dollars had the campaign succeeded
(10:33):
in the previous example. So even if he got twice
as many, you know, you're still thinking, all right, a
hundred thousand, maybe two hundred thousand dollars, that's more or
less on what he on par with what he was
looking at for the first time through. So he was
he was thinking, let's try this, and he he decided
to launch it at a different time of year, yeah,
(10:53):
because he was looking at the summer. He was launching
it right around you know, just after the fourth of
July weekend. You're talking about prime beach going outdoor grilling
kind of of time frame here. It's when people are
going outside and doing these activities where they need to
have a big cooler or wanting a cooler they can
(11:13):
crawl into and hide from the hot Georgia summer. Yeah,
especially Yeah, once you get into the heat and humidity here,
you're looking for any relief available. Yeah. He estimated that
the final retail cost of the Coolest Cooler. This is
from the Kickstarter page, which, by the way, is still
it's still something you can visit. You can go and
check out the Kickstarter page for this, uh this particular campaign.
(11:36):
Kickstar keeps them all. It's no longer certain parts of
the page you cannot access unless you have donated. Yes,
there there are messages that go out just to backers,
so if you are a backer, you have access to those,
But the public facing page is still available. So he
estimated that the final retail cost for the Coolest Cooler
was going to be two uh So, three hundred dollars
(11:59):
for a cool or seems like a hefty price tag,
but as it turns out, it was also an underestimation
of how much he would need to charge for that
particular invention. I do want to say, I went online
and I did a little bit of research. Some super
high end, super large coolers do cost hundreds of dollars,
(12:20):
so it's not a completely unreasonable price. It's more than
I probably would want to pay for a cooler. Yeah,
I mean, like, so there are products that cater to
people who have way more money than you and I
do and not very much idea of what to spend
it on. I'll put it that way. That's not it's
(12:40):
not to say that those those products are no good
or that they're only marginally better than say, a decent
cooler would run you. I don't know. There are some
of them may be truly incredible and be much more
efficient and managing you know, heat and all that kind
of stuff. I don't know. But uh. He also on
(13:01):
that campaign had an offer where if you were one
of the first fifty people to pledge, you could pledge
a hundred sixty five dollars and get a reserved coolest
cooler of your own. Uh. Those fifty slots disappeared almost immediately,
no surprise. Yeah, well, one cooler is a lot more palatable. Yeah. So, then,
(13:23):
because they went so fast, and because the West coast
had not even had an opportunity to look at it,
because the campaign went live before most people on the
West coast of the United States had even woken up,
he decided to release another group, this time just twenty
slots for more early bird coolers, and those went super
fast to the next amount you could pledge. Let's say
(13:46):
you missed out on those seventy, which wouldn't be a
big surprise. I mean, they did go super fast. Your
next option would be to pledge at a level of
a hundred eighty five dollars or more, and that would
put you on the reservation list for your own coolist cooler.
So again you're you're still looking at a hundred fifteen
dollars off the projected a retail price. You would then
(14:09):
also have to kick in fifteen dollars for shipping, which
would you could argue push the the price tag for
the coolest cooler to two hundred dollars. And that's how
most websites refer to it, like it was a two cooler.
Yeah still not still not horrible, Still a pretty big discount. Um.
I think it was so popular because he took lessons
that he learned from his first Kickstarter and and really
(14:31):
marketed the second one well. He reached out to previous
backers and enthusiasts through email, he hit up social media,
and he did live events all prior to actually launching
this campaign, So anybody who was already excited about it
would then be excited at their friends about it. Yeah,
they would tell people, Oh, you know, I tried to
back this last time. It didn't work out. You guys
(14:51):
should get done on this, because think how incredible this
is gonna be. And then it worked because some news outlets,
mostly local ones, were starting to pick get up, and
this would increase as the campaign would launch, and in
fact it would turn into a frenzy when the campaign
was starting to get truly successful. So it became a
a self perpetuating cycle, right because the campaign started picking
(15:15):
up steam, it was getting a lot of backers that
in turn was notable enough to get the attention of
the media that hadn't already covered this, which brought even
more people to back it. So it started to kind
of become a spinning boulder down the hill situation. Well,
and it became a spinning baller quickly. It beat its
school in four days. Within four days, that had made
three point two million dollars. Yeah, that's a lot more
(15:38):
than a whole lot, And by the end of the
two month campaign it had raised million, two hundred two
hundred and twenty six dollars from over sixty thousand backers,
and once it beat out Pebbles Watch as the most
successful kickstarter of all time at that time, it got
a ton more press coverage. Time magazine even named it
(16:01):
one of the best inventions of two thousand fourteen. Yeah,
they did this in two thousand fourteen. Um is before
before this had really even had a chance to prove itself.
And so then they began to work on finalizing the
actual design of the products. And now they got the
money to go into the process of making the thing. Yeah,
(16:24):
and they worked with a studio, Fathom to get their
prototype out, which had fifty five parts in it. Um
And this is so that Time Magazine could photograph it
for the article. Yeah. It's hard to take pictures of
a thing that's largely theoretical. Yeah, I mean they had
pictures of the original design of the cooler, but this
was redesigned. So um and and through all this, so
(16:45):
he has this successful campaign. Ryan thought he had planned
appropriately for supply and logistics ahead of time. He thought
he had sourcing partners in place based on the money
that he made, and he was so optimistic that he
figured unlike of crowdfunding campaigns that face delays, he would
be able to avoid them. Yeah he was wrong, and
(17:06):
yeah he was wrong. He had planned on starting to
deliver coolers by February two fifteen. But if you know
anything about this story, you know that was far too optimistic.
And if you don't know anything about this story, we'll
tell you about it. But first we're going to take
a quick break. Al right. So Grebber has this crowdfunding campaign.
(17:31):
It is monumentally successful and as an enormous following lots
of enthusiastic backers who just can't wait to get their
hands on this cooler that can do everything, uh that
you can imagine and be prepared to live their best
beach clad lives. The cooler cannot do everything you could imagine.
(17:52):
I don't think it could walk a puppy for you,
nor could it actually transport you to the beach, but
just about everything else, everything, Yeah, you're so, what happened? Well,
he immediately started to encounter issues in manufacturing. And this
is a good time to remember that manufacturing has got
a lot of moving pieces, right, You've got your whole
(18:14):
supply chain. Now, it's one thing if you're making a
relatively simple product, where the supply chain is is pretty linear,
where you know you've you've got You get the raw
materials from one place, it goes into a manufacturing facility
and then goes into the shipping department of that facility,
and then it goes out to customers. That's really simple.
(18:35):
But the coolest cooler had a lot of different parts
to it. It had these speakers, it had the USB
charging outlets, it had a motor for the blender. Yeah,
it's got all these different parts and they were coming
from different places, which means if there's a delay and
any part of that supply chain, it delays the overall product.
And there was so the manufacturing facility in China that
(18:57):
made the blender motor, which there was one place that
he sourced for this one place, only he had no
backups because his specifications for this blender motor were so
high he wanted to be really good production. Um, they
went on strike and so it stopped his entire his
entire line of assembly, which also took a really long
(19:17):
time because they had fifty five parts, a lot of
which had to be hand assembled. Now, if you've ever
looked at the Coolest Cooler online, like if you've gone
to Amazon, where you can still see coolest coolers listed,
although if you want one of the classic ones, typically
you're looking at buying it from a reseller. But if
you look at it, you'll see that there are a
couple of different configurations. There's one version of the Coolest
(19:38):
Cooler that has a regular top, doesn't have the blender part,
and it's significantly cheaper than the one that comes with
the blender. Well, the one that was on the Kickstarter page,
the one that the backers backed specifically mentioned that the
blender was part of it, So that was a big issue.
With the the supply chain for the blender motor all
(19:59):
all uh screwed up. It really put him behind. But
even still he was estimating that by September. By September
he could get everybody their coolers, and that did not
happen either, not at all. Um everything was a lot
more expensive then he anticipated. Yeah, so that final retail
(20:20):
price turned out to be too low. That and in fact,
he said this over and over again. So one of
the biggest problems he had was that he had underestimated
how expensive it would be to produce these coolers, and
that it was an issue where if you did the math,
there was no way around it. You were going to
lose money on those Kickstarter orders like there was. This
(20:44):
was beyond selling things at cost where you're just covering
the expense of the materials and labor to put to
the product together. Now you're actually taking a bath on
those sales. And I mean, it does not take a
business major to tell you that you can't stay in
(21:05):
business that way. You you're bleeding money being in business.
You cannot You can't make it up in volume. That's
just gonna bleed you out faster. So this is where
he had to start figuring out what do I do
about this? Well, he had another idea that again kind
of makes sense but also made a lot of people angry.
(21:26):
He decided to sell his cooler on Amazon because that
way he could sell it at a higher price than
what he listed on Kickstarter and make up some profit
on the coolers and then use that money on making
and shipping these individual coolers to people to get all
of the coolers for all the Kickstarter people to them. Yeah,
(21:47):
because he didn't have the money to do it. Yeah.
So essentially this was the reason this caused such a
fuss is that the people who were backing it on Kickstarter.
I can't speak for every body, but I notice in
general that a lot of people act like Kickstarter is
an early access store. That's not what Kickstarter is. You're
(22:09):
an investor in an idea, yeah, and you sometimes investments
don't pay off. I mean, we've done plenty of episodes
of the Brink where that has turned out to be true.
You've backed some some campaigns that didn't. Let's not go
into my personal history and how many watches I have
backed that never came out. But the campaigns are successful,
(22:30):
Yes they were. I think there are three different watch
campaigns I backed that did not ever ship. I think
that just makes you an expert on the topic. But again,
I didn't knowing that there was the possibility that somewhere
down the line something like this could happen where I'm
giving I'm pledging money to a business that I hope succeeds.
(22:52):
But there are a lot of factors out there that
don't have anything to do with the sincerity of the
business owner that can sink a business. Right. You also
have people out there who are disingenuous, who are snake
oil salesman who they're selling an idea but they don't
have any any intention of seeing it through. I never
(23:15):
got the feeling that Grebber was one of those people. No,
I really think he just lacked the business knowledge to
set this up to be successful or as successful as
it was. Maybe if he had the low numbers that
he expected and the money that he he was originally
estimating for, he would have done fine. Yeah, maybe he
could have ramped up slowly and grown more organically. But
(23:38):
the crazy success and the amazing amount of attention that
was directed towards his campaign really was an albatross around
his neck. And so the whole goal of any business
oriented kickstarted campaign is to have usually at least to
have a sustainable business on the other side of it, Right,
(23:59):
So the whole goal of Coolest Cooler that campaign wasn't
just to ship out coolers to backers. It was to
create a viable business where he would be selling these
coolers to other retailers and that the people who backed it,
their reward for backing it would be getting a cooler
at a discounted price. The problem was that unless he
(24:21):
was selling them at this higher mark up at these retailers.
He wouldn't have the money to cover sending out those
those backer coolers to the backers. So the backers are
upset because the thing that they've been waiting for is
not coming to their to their house when they expected it.
(24:41):
And somebody else who didn't back the campaign could, in theory,
go out and order one and get one ahead of them. Yeah,
in two weeks or or a couple of days. Uh,
you have a note here. And I think it's true
that a big part of the issue was communication. There
are their notes and their comments about out, we haven't
heard anything. And so they did do a live stream
(25:03):
to say, look, you guys, we need fifteen million more
dollars than we expected. We're trying to get it through
selling coolers so that we can get you your rewards.
They and they did, they send out some rewards early on,
and it just it got too big for them. Well,
and and that also ended up being an issue, like
there was no good way for Creeper to get out
of this because he owed something like sixty thousand people
(25:27):
these coolers and he could only do them in batches.
And so what would happen is you would send out
you would have this company sending out coolers to backers
in these smaller batches, but the media focus was on
how many people were still waiting for a cooler. It
wasn't saying, coolest cooler has made good on you know,
(25:48):
ten thousand of the pledges and is working hard to
get the other fifty thousand. It was instead it was
fifty thousand people are still waiting for their coolers, which
wasn't doing him or his company in favors. So again, like, yes,
the mistake was his. We're not gonna lift all responsibility
off of him and say like he was a victim
in all of this. But at the same time, I
(26:11):
think the way it unfolded, it was pretty much a
worst case scenario for him to have to deal with
on top of all just the production headaches he had.
Well he does, he does. I don't know if it's
victim blaming or a little bit of shaming, but he
he has been noted to say that he thinks part
of what hiss delayed him so long is that when
he put the coolers on Amazon, all of these backers
(26:33):
went on and made these horrible reviews because they said
they didn't have their coolers and he's like, guys, you're
shooting yourself in the foot here. Yeah, it's it's just
delaying when I can get enough money to make good
on the promise I've made you. But then again, if
I were said, hey, if you pay nine dollars, will
get you your cooler quicker than you're paying the quote
unquote retail price for the cooler at which point, yeah,
(26:55):
so that was something else that came up with that.
He said. One solution to the problem they had was
that if you were a backer and you wanted your
cooler faster, you could get it by giving an extra
nineties seven dollars to the company. That would make up
enough of the difference for him to be able to
put those people on a priority list and they would
(27:17):
get their coolers faster. But you didn't have to do that. Again,
the way a lot of news outlets reported this, it
sounded like if you don't cough up the nineties seven dollars,
you're never going to get your cooler. That wasn't the case.
It was if you want your cooler now, you have
to pay almost an extra hundred dollars. If you are patient,
you can wait and it may take a while. But
(27:40):
at least in theory, you will eventually get it. I
wonder if some of those news outlets reporting it where
the reporters maybe had backed it and we're feeling a
little sore. I mean, probably not. It was, it was
It's very easy to get the the idea that the
company was eating backers dry. But again, the more I
(28:03):
look into it, the less I feel like that's the case,
and the more I feel like there was no good
pathway out of this this whole Okay, So, after all this,
they started shipping in July of two more coolers. They
had enough money to restart shipping, and they hoped they'd
be done by October of two thousand fifteen. Uh, how
(28:24):
did that turn out? It didn't. Yeah, there's so, I mean,
there are still lots of people waiting for their coolers.
I'll give a kind of figure in a second. But
they began to sell the model of the cooler that
was covered by the kick starry campaign for four hundred
(28:44):
eighty five dollars on their site, which if you look
at the if you look at the initial projected retail
price of I'm pretty sure is more than that. Yeah,
I'm an English major. It that's a lot for a cooler. Yeah,
just shy a five hundred bucks. But it also shows
(29:08):
that this cooler and all the parts that were necessary
in order to put it together and to have it
do all the things that was supposed to do, that
it was way more expensive to produce than what he
had anticipated. And it's about again we'll get into lessons
at the end of the episode, but one thing this
immediately tells you is that whenever you are thinking about
(29:28):
really any business endeavor, but particularly if you're making something physical,
you should grossly overestimate how much it's going to cost
you to make it, because it will prepare you better
to when you encounter those problems to manage them well.
And then if you do have if you do have
a surplus at the end of it, if everything goes
(29:49):
as you expected and not as you planned for, and
then you can either give it back to your supporters
or you can invest it in your company to be
more successful. Um, make sure you talk to other people
who know are doing instead of just like your own
research is good, but also talk to industry experts. But
you know, I'd have to imagine that there were there
(30:09):
was fallout beyond just angry consumers from all of this
failure to deliver product. Oh yeah, you had. You even
had people who were ordering it and uh and you
know they're actually purchasing it online and getting it ahead
of time, who were reviewing it and saying the cooler
is fine, like it's there's nothing wrong with it, but
(30:32):
it might not be cool enough to justify the cost.
So again that ends up hurting sales, which makes it
even take even longer to to make good on these
these kickstarter backers. So it's a domino effect, right, or
ripple effect if you prefer. It's a ripple effect. If
something goes wrong at ripples out and it effects and
(30:54):
ultimately the people that it is affecting the most, at
least in the eyes of the backer, are the backers. Yeah,
which led to some legal troubles, but we're going to
tell you about that right after this break. Okay, So
when we started talking about Grepper and his ideas, we
(31:17):
mentioned that he is from Portland, Oregon. That's where he
was operating out of. And Oregon has been the home
not just of Grepper but of some of Grepper's biggest woes. Yes,
he got a whole bunch of consumer complaints to the
Oregon Department of Justice. Three hundred fifteen incidents of complaints
(31:38):
were filed with that d o J in Oregon. Yeah,
because if you've got an issue with the company, you've
got to file it where that company is. Yeah. So
from people outside of Oregon complaining to Oregon, UH, and
the complaints stated that the Coolest Cooler was being negligent
in delivering their product. So that was enough to to
(31:58):
inspire the d O JAY and Oregon to launch an
investigation in twos s. So UH kickstart, by the way,
their policy states that any successful campaign is supposed to
either deliver the awards to backers that were promised or
offer refunds to backers. And so part of the problem
(32:21):
here was that Coolest Cooler, at least according to these complaints,
was refusing to refund money to backers who were discontented.
I mean they didn't have it. Yeah. But the problem
that is kickstarters own policy is that if you successfully
fund your project, you either have to make good on
(32:44):
these rewards or offer up the refund to your backers.
So it's what gave a foothold for the d o
J to really kind of look into what was going on. Yeah. Now,
in two tho um, Coolest Cooler did try to a
piece people again. They added a tracking tool to their
website for backers to track where the progress of their
(33:05):
delivery was, like it hasn't even been made yet. Yeah,
you could see your place in line basically. But then
they also weren't going in chronological order of who backed
and shipping these things. They were going by address, which
makes sense from a bulk shipping standpoint. Yeah, but not
great if you happen to be like if you had
prided yourself on being one of the first, like let's
(33:25):
say that you were one of those first seventy, like
you were an early bird backer, but because of your address,
you were not at the top of that list. You
might think, what the heck, I'm the reason. I'm part
of the reason why this campaign was so successful. Yeah. Um.
They also tried to put on that tool on their
website where all of the money raised had gone, to
(33:47):
give some transparency to people. I'm guessing that didn't really
help much because there are employees of Coolest Cooler that
we're getting docs and Ryan's family even got some threats
from some angry consumers. Yeah, people man, when they don't
get what they expect, they can turn real ugly, real fast.
And I mean I get the frustration. Trust me, I
(34:08):
get the frustration of backing a campaign and not getting
what you were promised when the campaign funds. I also,
in at least one of those instances, did not get
a refund, nor did I get my reward. Uh. The
I cannot have any recourse for that because the company
that was supposed to make the thing I backed no
(34:29):
longer exists, So there's no one for me to get
money from at this point. It's just it's the risk
of investment. Yeah, you got to know going in that's
again you have to remember it's not a store, right.
So but there are people who they have that expectation
and they're like, well, I bought this product and you
(34:49):
won't give it to me, so therefore I it's fair game.
I'm allowed to do whatever I want to strike out
at you because you have taken my money, which you know,
so these people who filed with the organ Department of
Justice took a much Yeah, I'm more responsible and less
like psycho U unsympathetic approach. Yeah yeah, so how did
(35:15):
that turn out? Um? Well, you know, at least turned
out well for some of the backers. The Oregon Department
of Justice did find that Coolest Cooler was or at
least was approaching the point of saying that the Coolest
Cooler was negligent, but Grepper was able to settle the case.
But the settlement, of course, came with some pretty strong
(35:38):
agreements that he had to abide by. One of those
was that uh he was going to have to ship
Coolest Coolers to Oregonians who had backed the campaign that
included eight hundred seventy three backers in the state of Oregon.
He also agreed that if backers in general did not
receive their coolers by the middle of twenty twenty, so
(35:59):
we still have some time to go. Yeah, although, like
while we're researching this episode, there are people actively posting
on the Coolest Cooler kickstarter page, I haven't gotten my cooler. Yeah, yeah,
well there's thousands of them alert. But that anyway, if
he does not get the coolers to the backers by
mid twenty twenty, for every backer who has not received
(36:22):
his or her cooler, they will receive twenty dollars from
Grebber and no matter if the company goes into bankruptcy
or if it's still solvent, he will owe that money.
If the company goes into bankruptcy will not protect him
from that that obligation. He will still have to pay
the twenty bucks per person. Well, and I know people
(36:43):
were not happy about this. I mean, obviously they hope
to get their cool Some of them don't even anymore,
like I don't care about this cooler anymore, And twenty
is a small amount of their investment back, but it's something. Well,
and you know, the idea would be that assuming company
was still solvent, that even with the twenty dollars being sent,
(37:04):
it would still the cooler would still be on its
way at some point. Um, so it's not like here's
twenty dollars now you don't get your cooler. Yeah, assuming
that the company is still around. Of course, if it
were bankrupt, then it's just coming out of Grabber's personal funds.
I assume. After this settlement, Grabber actually wrote a letter
to people and he put it on the Kickstarter as
(37:25):
an update to all the backers, and he explained their
plan and he explained their strategies for going forward to
get this done, things like going international and things like
that more investors and stuff, but he was really salty
about it. He's like, I feel vindicated that this is
how the Oregan Department of Justice ruled that we aren't shysters.
(37:46):
We generally want to get you your product, but we
just we can't, and you're hurting our progress, right right, Yeah,
like like the you know, we're trying to do good
on the agreement we had, but the more you guys
put up a fuss, the harder it is for us
to do that. Yeah, it's kind of like, uh, like
you've promised a toddler that you're gonna go to the
(38:09):
water park in the afternoon, but it's still in the
morning and you need to do some errands, and the
toddler starts having a melt down. You're like, you know,
I want to go to the water parks. Says yes,
we're going to the water park, but first we have
to run errands. But I want to go to the
water park. I mean, mind you if I had been
promised to go to the water park in two thousand
fourteen and I hit two thousands sixteen, it's a very
(38:29):
long afternoon. Areal very long afternoon when you're a toddler
time stretches before you like an infinity. Yeah, that's true. Anyhow,
in two thousand seventeen, there was actually a petition filed
on change dot org to get them to stop selling
their coolers until the backers got their's again, which makes
no sense. It's it's hurting the process to get you
(38:50):
your cooler. Yeah, that is kind of crazy, like the
idea that hey, stop stop doing this thing you're doing
that is helping fund actually getting coolers to backers, and
get coolers to backers without any funds. That's not the
way the world works. No, no, but Grepper, you know,
obviously didn't listen to that. The petition didn't well, I
(39:12):
mean it's a petition. It's a petition, doesn't doesn't have
any holding value over anything other than letting you know.
There's a lot of people who are ticked off enough
to fill out a form. So, in addition to trying
to boost international sales, get more investors, reduced production costs,
all of which are great ideas, although hard to get
investors when you've got a bad reputation UM, Greber started
(39:34):
innovating more to try to get more money. So he
made peripherals like batteries, and solar panels and charging chords
for the coolers. He made a soft sided cooler, which
is expensive for a soft stadic cooler, but apparently is
like super magnetic. It's also less expensive than the full
coolest cooler is yes, and it has like a universal
attachment thing you said, you can put on your bike
(39:54):
or your backpacker. But the whole idea was that he
could use profits from that or revenue from the sales
of those products to help again make good on these backers.
I have a feeling that that should the day come
when Grebber is able to send off that final backer cooler,
it will be an enormous weight of his shoulders. So, Jonathan,
(40:15):
how many people would you suppose don't have their coolership? Well,
it's tough to say because there's not really an ongoing
tally that I could find anywhere. But in ten late eighteen,
there was an article that stated as many as twenty
thousand people were still waiting for their coolers. Yeah, that's
(40:35):
a lot of people. So it's about a third of
the backers who who pledged at a level that was
enough to get a cooler in the first place, So
two thirds got their coolers. A third are still waiting. Um,
so that's tough. And there was an article and so
the oregon Ian was the newspaper that published the report
(40:57):
that said twenty thod people were still waiting. A few
months later, they published a second article that stated that
during the most recent quarter, according to a statement from
Coolest Cooler, the company had shipped precisely zero coolers tobaccers
in that most recent quarter, meaning that they weren't able
(41:17):
to do any in that three month period. So obviously
every month that goes by is bringing them closer to
that mid twenty twenty deadline that they need to make.
And um, there have been a lot of other things
that have happened over the last couple of years that
have added complications. For example, you probably are familiar that
(41:38):
there have been some issues about tariffs and China, as
as the United States of America has enacted certain policies
that have instituted these tariffs that in turn ends up
impacting the supply chain and manufacturing plan for the Coolest Coolers,
So which that is not Grabbers fault. Now, there's nothing
(41:59):
he can do about it other than like trying desperately
to find a way to still stay within budget and
be able to continue production. It's not like it halts production,
but it makes production more expensive. And since that was
the problem in the first place, in addition to the
timing issues with things like the strike, uh, that does
not make his life any easier. Yeah. Um again. I
(42:21):
really think the lesson here is give yourself buffer, give
yourself a leg up, overestimate, like you said, how much
it's gonna call you talk to people. Give yourself a
longer deadline too. You know, if backers know that going in,
they might be okay with that. Yeah. It's it's when
you start changing things and people had. It's when you
(42:44):
set certain expectations and then you have to change those expectations.
That's always a problem, and I've seen it on multiple
Kickstarter campaigns, and it almost always happens with stuff that's
related to producing something physical. And it doesn't have to
be complicated either. I've backed Kickstarter campaigns that were producing
things like a deck of cards, but then there are
(43:04):
printer issues, their quality control issues, and these things slow
everything down and they increase the costs because you have
to pay for another production run because if it's not
going to meet the expectations, of your backers. Then you're
going to have problems that like you, you either ship
nothing and you tell your backers were sorry, but the
(43:24):
quality was not up to our standards, so we're going
to go back and try it again, or you end
up shipping something that is of substandard quality and your
backers get upset anyway because they're like, I backed this.
That was a waste of money and a really long wait.
And also you know the lesson for you, uh you
know you've listened to this episodes, so you know, but
(43:44):
realize that you're making an investment. It's almost like loaning
money to your family or friends where you shouldn't. You're
hoping to get something back, but you may not. Yeah,
you need to You need to ask yourself, like, can
I make this pledge if this campaign is successful? Is
it okay if this money never comes back to me?
Like if I if I make this pledge, and what
(44:05):
for whatever reason the actual endeavor fails despite the campaign
being successful. Am I okay with taking a loss of this?
If I'm not, then maybe I should just wait until
it's for public consumers. Yeah, exactly. So in this case
with Coolest Cooler, if you saw it and you thought, Wow,
(44:25):
that sounds really awesome and I would love to have
one of these, and it would be nice to get
it for a discounted price, but I'm also aware of
the potential pitfalls that can be in the way of production.
Then you might think, well, is it is it worth
potentially saving a hundred fifteen dollars off the projected retail
(44:47):
price or is it better for me to wait, because
it could be that instead of saving a D fifteen dollars,
I'm throwing away a D five. Yeah, policies are great,
but the truth of the matter is, no matter how
well intentioned the inventor or the founder of the kicks starter,
if they end up going bankrupt due to misfortune, not
(45:09):
even poor planning, but just misfortune and end up living
under a bridge, you they can't refund you. It's it's
just the way it is. Um It's It's also interesting
to point out that crowdfunding has largely changed over the
last couple of years, where we're seeing more and more
established companies using crowdfunding, and they're not using it to
(45:30):
raise the money needed to make whatever the thing is.
Often the thing has already made. They're using it to
kind of judge the reception of whatever that thing is
so that they know how much of it to make
or whether or not it's going to be a successful product.
And so it's it's changing where it was kind of
(45:52):
aimed at the individual creator originally, like this was an idea,
Like you have an idea for something, you launched this
crowdfunding and paign to get the money you need to
to actually bring that something into reality, and then you
ship off or you start selling or whatever. Now it's
companies are using it almost as a marketing tool, and
(46:12):
so it's it's dramatically changed how crowdfunding is working in
the like I said, in the last couple of years.
But we still have these issues and uh, and there
are no shortage of crowdfunding campaigns that do come across
as kind of scammy, so that's also good. Although to
be fair, both Kickstarter and indigo Go and others have
(46:34):
gotten a lot better at weeding those out. Although indiego go,
you can get your funding amount even if you don't
magic Yeah, if you don't. If you said you can,
you can choose if you set let's say you set
a ten thousand dollar goal, but you only raise five
thousand dollars, and it's on indiego Go, you can choose
to accept any amount raised even if you haven't met
(46:55):
your goal, but it's with a heftier fee taken out.
For indie go Go, they take a much larger percentage
of the money, so you get you get even less.
So if you ask for ten thousand dollars and you
end up getting five thousand dollars, you might only end
up with four thousand dollars. So it's it's one of
those things that it's kind of a slippery slope issue. Um,
(47:17):
we have a couple of fun facts and I just
read them and now I'm angry. I'm sorry, Jonathan. The
first is Ryan Grabber has backed his own kickstarters. Uh,
he backed the potato salad kickstarter. That's the one that
gets me mad. It is because Jonathan had a kickstarter
around the same time and his didn't get funded. But
this dark potato salad kickstarts choke. The potato salad was
(47:39):
a choke and then it got it got ridiculous. Not
just backing it was again like a crazy viral success
for a joke potato salad. I mean, the guy did
take all the funds and make a major party out
of it. All props, all props to that guy and
and his cooke and the fact that it brought joy
(48:02):
to people. But I am I am unapologetically envious because
I had a project. It was near and dear to
both of our hearts. It was that I was really
hoping I could get funded and uh. It also managed
to buck another trend. It funded about halfway to where
it needed to be. But it was on Kickstarter. It
(48:24):
was make or break. And the reason why I say
it broke some trends is that generally speaking, on Kickstarter,
if you reach a certain level, a certain percentage of funding,
and I want to say it's somewhere around that, of
campaigns that hit their gold during the campaign, we'll we'll
(48:44):
get all the way to funding by the end. Mine
was not one of those. Now I'm really sad about
that too. So we'll move on to our last fact
and then we'll wrap things up. The original version of
the Coolest Cooler had an attached grill, yeah, which turns
out probably not the best idea for a product that's
mostly made out of plast It was nixed for safe. Yeah.
You can't imagine a grill working too well. I mean,
(49:05):
you can maybe have like a stand alone little stand
and grill that you could put over a fire pit
or something, but even then you don't have to have
it cool down enough to be able to put it
against a plastic cooler. Um. So that wraps up our
discussion about coolest cooler. But before we go and wrap
everything up for the episode, we also wanted to give
(49:26):
an update about a previous topic that we've covered. We
did an episode about Toys r Us and we talked
about how at the end of that episode, we talked
about how UH there was an effort to kind of
bring these sort of pop up stores to life and
inside of targets and things like that, and the Toys
r Us name might not be totally gone. And now
we've gotten word for the heads up as of the
(49:49):
recording of this podcast, which is on June one, two
thousand nineteen, that there is a sincere effort to bring
back UH a larger version of Toys r Us, although
not at the full size of the older toy stores. Yeah,
there will be about the third of the size of
the old toy stores, with more experience points, play areas
(50:10):
and things like that, and also they're looking at bringing
back their e commerce site. They're hoping to be back
by the holiday season of two thousand nineteen, so we'll
have to see if that happens. Yeah, and if it does,
we'll do another update where we'll talk about maybe we'll
have to do an episode at some point. It's all
follow ups on I was thinking the same thing. Clearly,
Canadian would be another one. Thanks for the shout out, clearly,
(50:33):
we greatly appreciate it. Awesome. I still haven't received any
crates of drinks or anything. You don't listen to him.
I totally gave him a BlackBerry, clearly Canadian. That's not
a crate. That was one drink and it was from you,
not form. Clearly, not that we do this to get
stuff from companies. We're just joking. We don't expect nor
do we deserve anything from anybody. I hope you enjoyed
(50:55):
that episode of Business on the Brink that came out
back in two thousand nineteen. Yeah, that's is no longer
in production. You can still find all the episodes online,
so if you want to take a quick look and
see if there are any topics that interest you. We
did have a habit of getting a little playful with
the titles, so you might have to look at the
descriptions to see what the actual episode is about. I
(51:18):
apologize for that. We just made our own fun, but yeah,
take a listen to those episodes. Let me know if
there are any that you would like me to do
a tech Stuff episode on. Because we were mostly focused
on the business side, not as much on the tech side.
If you want me to cover some of these, let
me know, and you can do that by using the
I Heart Radio app. You can navigate to the tech
(51:38):
Stuff podcast and you can use the little microphone icon
to leave a voice message that can be up to
thirty seconds. You can also let me know whether or
not you would like me to use the audio in
an episode. I won't unless you tell me, or if
you prefer, you can reach out to me on Twitter.
The handle for the show is tech Stuff hs W
and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tex Stuff
(52:06):
is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from
I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
John in Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio,
and how the tech are you here? In the United States?
It is currently Memorial Day, which means that we're not
(00:24):
in the office today, So I was going to play
a rerun, but I thought maybe we'd try something a
little different. Uh. Some of you may know that a
couple of years ago, I used to host a show
with Ariel Casting called Business on the Brink, and we
covered businesses that had kind of a pivotal moment where
(00:45):
either they made some choices that got them out of
severe trouble or they descended into chaos. And it was
a fun series to do. We did it for a
couple of years, and I thought it would be great
to play one of those episodes today. So what you're
about to hear is a Business on the Brink episode
(01:06):
which originally published on July two thousand nineteen. It is
called Chilling Out with the Coolest Cooler and I hope
you enjoy. Ryan Grepper was sure he knew how to
beat the heat with an innovative approach to the old
beach stand by the drinks cooler. He added some bells
(01:30):
and whistles, updating the frosty concept with some techy bonus features.
To get things moving, he launched a crowdfunding campaign that
was incredibly successful and earned a lot of ice, but
soon found out that manufacturing a new product isn't easy
and the whole process ended up leaving a lot of
early supporters out in the cold. This is the coolest
(01:50):
cooler on the brink, Hey, guys on Jonathan and I'm
Ariel Casting, and thank you Bill Jeffers for giving us
this awesome suggestion. Yeah, yeah, this is a one that
I have covered on my show Text Stuff a little bit.
(02:14):
I did an episode about some of crowdfunding's biggest successes
and failures, and spoiler alert, coolest cooler falls into the
latter category. Yeah, sadly. Sadly because I think the concept
is really cool. Yeah, we're going to be saying cool
a lot and not meaning it in a punny way.
(02:36):
But if you want to interpret it as a pun,
feel free. Yes, but no, I if I were not
so thrifty, I was about to say cheap, but I'm
going to say thrifty. I would have wanted to back this.
A lot of people did. Lots of people backed this
product so much so that not to skip ahead too much,
(02:56):
but it would become one of the most successful Kickstarter
campaigns in history. We'll get to that. But as it
turns out, as as we alluded to in the introduction,
things did not go smoothly, and it was largely a
thing due to innocent naivete. There was a lot of
of of underestimating exactly how hard it is to mass
(03:20):
produce a brand new product. I'd have to agree with you, Jonathan.
So let's get into a little bit of how this
product came about. This coolest cooler. It was launched in
two thousand thirteen by Ryan Grepper from Portland, Oregon. He
used to be a medical sales rep uh and he
was a self described inventor since two thousand six, which
is I believe around the time that this products started
(03:43):
taking form. He's also um He's still listed as a
member of the CNBC Tech Crowd Council, which is made
up of people who have done a successful crowdfunding campaigns. Yes,
his campaign was successful. Yes for the crowd funding part.
It's kind of surprised to see him still on there.
But spoiler alert, guys, coolest Cooler is still around, but
(04:07):
Ryan Grepper's reputation has taken an enormous beating in the process.
And so so his idea initially started off as a
pair of ideas before it merged into transformer, like what
the coolest cooler would be? Right? Yeah, he tried to
make a portable blender from a weed whacker, and then
he made a cooler with the car stereo in it. Uh.
(04:30):
And then after he made these these initial prototypes, he
was like, well, I need to make them smaller so
I can bring them places. And he got the inspiration
that if he made it smaller, he could sell it.
And his idea was for the cooler to be a
place where people gather, to have all the things that
make a space somewhere you'd want to hang out. And
according to c NBC, his early experiments to compile all
(04:55):
these things together didn't work. So well, yeah, I just
have this in my imagined y. Now, I know this
isn't what it actually looked like, but in my imagination,
you have like an iglue uh style cooler with a
car stereo duct taped onto it. Like that's how I
imagine these early versions being that's how I'd do it,
(05:16):
just just say it. But the whole idea was, you know,
you've been to plenty of parties, you've hosted parties. You
note as well as I do, that often a central
gathering point for a party ends up being the kitchen.
It's it's kind of it's where the food is, be
is where the drinks are. People tend to hover there
and then sooner or later a party kind of just
(05:39):
it's centered there. It might spin off in other places.
So this was kind of the same concept was that
if you have all of these elements in a cooler
and your outdoors, the cooler becomes kind of the central
focal point for the party. Yeah, and he had an
initial setup for the cooler, but by the end of
his Kickstarter campaigns plural uh his cooler. His coolest cooler
(06:01):
would include a USB charging station, a blender for crushing ice,
a waterproof bluetooth speaker, watch aproof bluetooth speaker and l
e ed light for the lid, dinner wear and storage
for it, a cutting board, a bottle opener, and all
terrain wheels like a bungee cord thingy and a little
(06:21):
hidy spot for your keys and phone. Yeah. Also it
was cooler. Yeah, it would be kind of ridiculous if
he made this cooler with all these bells and whistles
that didn't actually keep your beverages. It reminds me of
the trend it was before even smart watches, but the
trend where watches were including more and more features, and
(06:42):
the standard joke was what's the time and then the
person time exactly? That was? That was that was That's
a longstanding joke in technology of seen it in like
you know, comic strips and things like that, same sort
of thing, like if you had ended up with the
coolest cooler that couldn't actually keep food cold, that would
be ridiculous. So he initially launched a crowdfunding campaign in
(07:06):
November two thousand thirteen, and he was targeting a specific
kind of of market. He was thinking about people who
liked tailgating, and he was timing it to go along
with the holiday Christmas shopping uh season. I mean you
think that would be a smart move, right, yeah, But
(07:28):
it turns out it didn't. It didn't quite pan out.
He did not make his goal on that. Yeah, he
was seeking a hundred twenty five thousand dollars, and he
ultimately raised uh well, the campaign met a hundred two
thousand from two backers. But the way kickstarter works is
(07:50):
it's an all or nothing proposal. You either make your goal,
or you get and you get whatever you make plus over,
or you make not thing at all. So if you
have a goal of fifty thou dollars and you only
hit twenty thousand dollars, nobody gets charged, no money changes hands,
and your campaign fails. If you make fifty, then everyone
(08:13):
gets charged however much they pledged. You get your fifty
dollars minus kickstarters cut, which I think is five percent
of the actual money earned, and if it makes more
than fifty thou dollars, then you get more than what
you had set as your goal. Kickstarter obviously has a
strong incentive to promote the the campaigns that are doing well. Like,
(08:40):
if there's a lot of buzz, it makes a lot
of sense for a kick started to kind of put
those closer to the front thing they get exactly. Yeah,
so if it's a really successful one, then kicks Started
gets some bigger cut, because I mean it's still five percent,
but it's five percent of a much larger number. And
so that first one didn't work out so well. But
the second Kickstarter campaign was a different story. Yeah, his
(09:03):
second campaign launched on July eighth. He said a smaller goals,
which just from the get go that seems problematic to me.
If you need two dred and fifty dollars to create
your coolers, don't set a lower goal so you meet
your goal unless you're specifically thinking, I'm gonna start with
a very small shipment, like if you if you still
(09:27):
kept the price point for your cooler at the same level,
but you thought I'll make a smaller batch, then that
might work out. But as it turns out, that's not
what happened. No, no, So first I want to say
it shows you how small Ryan was thinking, because at
his cheapest donation amount five dollars, you gotta thanks in
(09:47):
the promise of having your name written on Ryan's personal cooler.
Court cooler can only hold so many names unless you're
like one of those grain of Rice writers. And even then,
um and then the highest level, if you donated two
thousand dollars or more, Ryan would come be your personal
bartender for an event in your hometown and give you
(10:10):
one of the first coolers. So and he would sign
that one, and he didn't have any of space. Yeah,
and so you look at this and you go obviously
he was thinking he'd get a moderate amount of backers
two hundred and eighty or so like his first campaign,
maybe a little bit more because he can't travel to
that many people's hometowns. And and he he had earned
more than a hundred thousand dollars had the campaign succeeded
(10:33):
in the previous example. So even if he got twice
as many, you know, you're still thinking, all right, a
hundred thousand, maybe two hundred thousand dollars, that's more or
less on what he on par with what he was
looking at for the first time through. So he was
he was thinking, let's try this, and he he decided
to launch it at a different time of year, yeah,
(10:53):
because he was looking at the summer. He was launching
it right around you know, just after the fourth of
July weekend. You're talking about prime beach going outdoor grilling
kind of of time frame here. It's when people are
going outside and doing these activities where they need to
have a big cooler or wanting a cooler they can
(11:13):
crawl into and hide from the hot Georgia summer. Yeah,
especially Yeah, once you get into the heat and humidity here,
you're looking for any relief available. Yeah. He estimated that
the final retail cost of the Coolest Cooler. This is
from the Kickstarter page, which, by the way, is still
it's still something you can visit. You can go and
check out the Kickstarter page for this, uh this particular campaign.
(11:36):
Kickstar keeps them all. It's no longer certain parts of
the page you cannot access unless you have donated. Yes,
there there are messages that go out just to backers,
so if you are a backer, you have access to those,
But the public facing page is still available. So he
estimated that the final retail cost for the Coolest Cooler
was going to be two uh So, three hundred dollars
(11:59):
for a cool or seems like a hefty price tag,
but as it turns out, it was also an underestimation
of how much he would need to charge for that
particular invention. I do want to say, I went online
and I did a little bit of research. Some super
high end, super large coolers do cost hundreds of dollars,
(12:20):
so it's not a completely unreasonable price. It's more than
I probably would want to pay for a cooler. Yeah,
I mean, like, so there are products that cater to
people who have way more money than you and I
do and not very much idea of what to spend
it on. I'll put it that way. That's not it's
(12:40):
not to say that those those products are no good
or that they're only marginally better than say, a decent
cooler would run you. I don't know. There are some
of them may be truly incredible and be much more
efficient and managing you know, heat and all that kind
of stuff. I don't know. But uh. He also on
(13:01):
that campaign had an offer where if you were one
of the first fifty people to pledge, you could pledge
a hundred sixty five dollars and get a reserved coolest
cooler of your own. Uh. Those fifty slots disappeared almost immediately,
no surprise. Yeah, well, one cooler is a lot more palatable. Yeah. So, then,
(13:23):
because they went so fast, and because the West coast
had not even had an opportunity to look at it,
because the campaign went live before most people on the
West coast of the United States had even woken up,
he decided to release another group, this time just twenty
slots for more early bird coolers, and those went super
fast to the next amount you could pledge. Let's say
(13:46):
you missed out on those seventy, which wouldn't be a
big surprise. I mean, they did go super fast. Your
next option would be to pledge at a level of
a hundred eighty five dollars or more, and that would
put you on the reservation list for your own coolist cooler.
So again you're you're still looking at a hundred fifteen
dollars off the projected a retail price. You would then
(14:09):
also have to kick in fifteen dollars for shipping, which
would you could argue push the the price tag for
the coolest cooler to two hundred dollars. And that's how
most websites refer to it, like it was a two cooler.
Yeah still not still not horrible, Still a pretty big discount. Um.
I think it was so popular because he took lessons
that he learned from his first Kickstarter and and really
(14:31):
marketed the second one well. He reached out to previous
backers and enthusiasts through email, he hit up social media,
and he did live events all prior to actually launching
this campaign, So anybody who was already excited about it
would then be excited at their friends about it. Yeah,
they would tell people, Oh, you know, I tried to
back this last time. It didn't work out. You guys
(14:51):
should get done on this, because think how incredible this
is gonna be. And then it worked because some news outlets,
mostly local ones, were starting to pick get up, and
this would increase as the campaign would launch, and in
fact it would turn into a frenzy when the campaign
was starting to get truly successful. So it became a
a self perpetuating cycle, right because the campaign started picking
(15:15):
up steam, it was getting a lot of backers that
in turn was notable enough to get the attention of
the media that hadn't already covered this, which brought even
more people to back it. So it started to kind
of become a spinning boulder down the hill situation. Well,
and it became a spinning baller quickly. It beat its
school in four days. Within four days, that had made
three point two million dollars. Yeah, that's a lot more
(15:38):
than a whole lot, And by the end of the
two month campaign it had raised million, two hundred two
hundred and twenty six dollars from over sixty thousand backers,
and once it beat out Pebbles Watch as the most
successful kickstarter of all time at that time, it got
a ton more press coverage. Time magazine even named it
(16:01):
one of the best inventions of two thousand fourteen. Yeah,
they did this in two thousand fourteen. Um is before
before this had really even had a chance to prove itself.
And so then they began to work on finalizing the
actual design of the products. And now they got the
money to go into the process of making the thing. Yeah,
(16:24):
and they worked with a studio, Fathom to get their
prototype out, which had fifty five parts in it. Um
And this is so that Time Magazine could photograph it
for the article. Yeah. It's hard to take pictures of
a thing that's largely theoretical. Yeah, I mean they had
pictures of the original design of the cooler, but this
was redesigned. So um and and through all this, so
(16:45):
he has this successful campaign. Ryan thought he had planned
appropriately for supply and logistics ahead of time. He thought
he had sourcing partners in place based on the money
that he made, and he was so optimistic that he
figured unlike of crowdfunding campaigns that face delays, he would
be able to avoid them. Yeah he was wrong, and
(17:06):
yeah he was wrong. He had planned on starting to
deliver coolers by February two fifteen. But if you know
anything about this story, you know that was far too optimistic.
And if you don't know anything about this story, we'll
tell you about it. But first we're going to take
a quick break. Al right. So Grebber has this crowdfunding campaign.
(17:31):
It is monumentally successful and as an enormous following lots
of enthusiastic backers who just can't wait to get their
hands on this cooler that can do everything, uh that
you can imagine and be prepared to live their best
beach clad lives. The cooler cannot do everything you could imagine.
(17:52):
I don't think it could walk a puppy for you,
nor could it actually transport you to the beach, but
just about everything else, everything, Yeah, you're so, what happened? Well,
he immediately started to encounter issues in manufacturing. And this
is a good time to remember that manufacturing has got
a lot of moving pieces, right, You've got your whole
(18:14):
supply chain. Now, it's one thing if you're making a
relatively simple product, where the supply chain is is pretty linear,
where you know you've you've got You get the raw
materials from one place, it goes into a manufacturing facility
and then goes into the shipping department of that facility,
and then it goes out to customers. That's really simple.
(18:35):
But the coolest cooler had a lot of different parts
to it. It had these speakers, it had the USB
charging outlets, it had a motor for the blender. Yeah,
it's got all these different parts and they were coming
from different places, which means if there's a delay and
any part of that supply chain, it delays the overall product.
And there was so the manufacturing facility in China that
(18:57):
made the blender motor, which there was one place that
he sourced for this one place, only he had no
backups because his specifications for this blender motor were so
high he wanted to be really good production. Um, they
went on strike and so it stopped his entire his
entire line of assembly, which also took a really long
(19:17):
time because they had fifty five parts, a lot of
which had to be hand assembled. Now, if you've ever
looked at the Coolest Cooler online, like if you've gone
to Amazon, where you can still see coolest coolers listed,
although if you want one of the classic ones, typically
you're looking at buying it from a reseller. But if
you look at it, you'll see that there are a
couple of different configurations. There's one version of the Coolest
(19:38):
Cooler that has a regular top, doesn't have the blender part,
and it's significantly cheaper than the one that comes with
the blender. Well, the one that was on the Kickstarter page,
the one that the backers backed specifically mentioned that the
blender was part of it, So that was a big issue.
With the the supply chain for the blender motor all
(19:59):
all uh screwed up. It really put him behind. But
even still he was estimating that by September. By September
he could get everybody their coolers, and that did not
happen either, not at all. Um everything was a lot
more expensive then he anticipated. Yeah, so that final retail
(20:20):
price turned out to be too low. That and in fact,
he said this over and over again. So one of
the biggest problems he had was that he had underestimated
how expensive it would be to produce these coolers, and
that it was an issue where if you did the math,
there was no way around it. You were going to
lose money on those Kickstarter orders like there was. This
(20:44):
was beyond selling things at cost where you're just covering
the expense of the materials and labor to put to
the product together. Now you're actually taking a bath on
those sales. And I mean, it does not take a
business major to tell you that you can't stay in
(21:05):
business that way. You you're bleeding money being in business.
You cannot You can't make it up in volume. That's
just gonna bleed you out faster. So this is where
he had to start figuring out what do I do
about this? Well, he had another idea that again kind
of makes sense but also made a lot of people angry.
(21:26):
He decided to sell his cooler on Amazon because that
way he could sell it at a higher price than
what he listed on Kickstarter and make up some profit
on the coolers and then use that money on making
and shipping these individual coolers to people to get all
of the coolers for all the Kickstarter people to them. Yeah,
(21:47):
because he didn't have the money to do it. Yeah.
So essentially this was the reason this caused such a
fuss is that the people who were backing it on Kickstarter.
I can't speak for every body, but I notice in
general that a lot of people act like Kickstarter is
an early access store. That's not what Kickstarter is. You're
(22:09):
an investor in an idea, yeah, and you sometimes investments
don't pay off. I mean, we've done plenty of episodes
of the Brink where that has turned out to be true.
You've backed some some campaigns that didn't. Let's not go
into my personal history and how many watches I have
backed that never came out. But the campaigns are successful,
(22:30):
Yes they were. I think there are three different watch
campaigns I backed that did not ever ship. I think
that just makes you an expert on the topic. But again,
I didn't knowing that there was the possibility that somewhere
down the line something like this could happen where I'm
giving I'm pledging money to a business that I hope succeeds.
(22:52):
But there are a lot of factors out there that
don't have anything to do with the sincerity of the
business owner that can sink a business. Right. You also
have people out there who are disingenuous, who are snake
oil salesman who they're selling an idea but they don't
have any any intention of seeing it through. I never
(23:15):
got the feeling that Grebber was one of those people. No,
I really think he just lacked the business knowledge to
set this up to be successful or as successful as
it was. Maybe if he had the low numbers that
he expected and the money that he he was originally
estimating for, he would have done fine. Yeah, maybe he
could have ramped up slowly and grown more organically. But
(23:38):
the crazy success and the amazing amount of attention that
was directed towards his campaign really was an albatross around
his neck. And so the whole goal of any business
oriented kickstarted campaign is to have usually at least to
have a sustainable business on the other side of it, Right,
(23:59):
So the whole goal of Coolest Cooler that campaign wasn't
just to ship out coolers to backers. It was to
create a viable business where he would be selling these
coolers to other retailers and that the people who backed it,
their reward for backing it would be getting a cooler
at a discounted price. The problem was that unless he
(24:21):
was selling them at this higher mark up at these retailers.
He wouldn't have the money to cover sending out those
those backer coolers to the backers. So the backers are
upset because the thing that they've been waiting for is
not coming to their to their house when they expected it.
(24:41):
And somebody else who didn't back the campaign could, in theory,
go out and order one and get one ahead of them. Yeah,
in two weeks or or a couple of days. Uh,
you have a note here. And I think it's true
that a big part of the issue was communication. There
are their notes and their comments about out, we haven't
heard anything. And so they did do a live stream
(25:03):
to say, look, you guys, we need fifteen million more
dollars than we expected. We're trying to get it through
selling coolers so that we can get you your rewards.
They and they did, they send out some rewards early on,
and it just it got too big for them. Well,
and and that also ended up being an issue, like
there was no good way for Creeper to get out
of this because he owed something like sixty thousand people
(25:27):
these coolers and he could only do them in batches.
And so what would happen is you would send out
you would have this company sending out coolers to backers
in these smaller batches, but the media focus was on
how many people were still waiting for a cooler. It
wasn't saying, coolest cooler has made good on you know,
(25:48):
ten thousand of the pledges and is working hard to
get the other fifty thousand. It was instead it was
fifty thousand people are still waiting for their coolers, which
wasn't doing him or his company in favors. So again, like, yes,
the mistake was his. We're not gonna lift all responsibility
off of him and say like he was a victim
in all of this. But at the same time, I
(26:11):
think the way it unfolded, it was pretty much a
worst case scenario for him to have to deal with
on top of all just the production headaches he had.
Well he does, he does. I don't know if it's
victim blaming or a little bit of shaming, but he
he has been noted to say that he thinks part
of what hiss delayed him so long is that when
he put the coolers on Amazon, all of these backers
(26:33):
went on and made these horrible reviews because they said
they didn't have their coolers and he's like, guys, you're
shooting yourself in the foot here. Yeah, it's it's just
delaying when I can get enough money to make good
on the promise I've made you. But then again, if
I were said, hey, if you pay nine dollars, will
get you your cooler quicker than you're paying the quote
unquote retail price for the cooler at which point, yeah,
(26:55):
so that was something else that came up with that.
He said. One solution to the problem they had was
that if you were a backer and you wanted your
cooler faster, you could get it by giving an extra
nineties seven dollars to the company. That would make up
enough of the difference for him to be able to
put those people on a priority list and they would
(27:17):
get their coolers faster. But you didn't have to do that. Again,
the way a lot of news outlets reported this, it
sounded like if you don't cough up the nineties seven dollars,
you're never going to get your cooler. That wasn't the case.
It was if you want your cooler now, you have
to pay almost an extra hundred dollars. If you are patient,
you can wait and it may take a while. But
(27:40):
at least in theory, you will eventually get it. I
wonder if some of those news outlets reporting it where
the reporters maybe had backed it and we're feeling a
little sore. I mean, probably not. It was, it was
It's very easy to get the the idea that the
company was eating backers dry. But again, the more I
(28:03):
look into it, the less I feel like that's the case,
and the more I feel like there was no good
pathway out of this this whole Okay, So, after all this,
they started shipping in July of two more coolers. They
had enough money to restart shipping, and they hoped they'd
be done by October of two thousand fifteen. Uh, how
(28:24):
did that turn out? It didn't. Yeah, there's so, I mean,
there are still lots of people waiting for their coolers.
I'll give a kind of figure in a second. But
they began to sell the model of the cooler that
was covered by the kick starry campaign for four hundred
(28:44):
eighty five dollars on their site, which if you look
at the if you look at the initial projected retail
price of I'm pretty sure is more than that. Yeah,
I'm an English major. It that's a lot for a cooler. Yeah,
just shy a five hundred bucks. But it also shows
(29:08):
that this cooler and all the parts that were necessary
in order to put it together and to have it
do all the things that was supposed to do, that
it was way more expensive to produce than what he
had anticipated. And it's about again we'll get into lessons
at the end of the episode, but one thing this
immediately tells you is that whenever you are thinking about
(29:28):
really any business endeavor, but particularly if you're making something physical,
you should grossly overestimate how much it's going to cost
you to make it, because it will prepare you better
to when you encounter those problems to manage them well.
And then if you do have if you do have
a surplus at the end of it, if everything goes
(29:49):
as you expected and not as you planned for, and
then you can either give it back to your supporters
or you can invest it in your company to be
more successful. Um, make sure you talk to other people
who know are doing instead of just like your own
research is good, but also talk to industry experts. But
you know, I'd have to imagine that there were there
(30:09):
was fallout beyond just angry consumers from all of this
failure to deliver product. Oh yeah, you had. You even
had people who were ordering it and uh and you
know they're actually purchasing it online and getting it ahead
of time, who were reviewing it and saying the cooler
is fine, like it's there's nothing wrong with it, but
(30:32):
it might not be cool enough to justify the cost.
So again that ends up hurting sales, which makes it
even take even longer to to make good on these
these kickstarter backers. So it's a domino effect, right, or
ripple effect if you prefer. It's a ripple effect. If
something goes wrong at ripples out and it effects and
(30:54):
ultimately the people that it is affecting the most, at
least in the eyes of the backer, are the backers. Yeah,
which led to some legal troubles, but we're going to
tell you about that right after this break. Okay, So
when we started talking about Grepper and his ideas, we
(31:17):
mentioned that he is from Portland, Oregon. That's where he
was operating out of. And Oregon has been the home
not just of Grepper but of some of Grepper's biggest woes. Yes,
he got a whole bunch of consumer complaints to the
Oregon Department of Justice. Three hundred fifteen incidents of complaints
(31:38):
were filed with that d o J in Oregon. Yeah,
because if you've got an issue with the company, you've
got to file it where that company is. Yeah. So
from people outside of Oregon complaining to Oregon, UH, and
the complaints stated that the Coolest Cooler was being negligent
in delivering their product. So that was enough to to
(31:58):
inspire the d O JAY and Oregon to launch an
investigation in twos s. So UH kickstart, by the way,
their policy states that any successful campaign is supposed to
either deliver the awards to backers that were promised or
offer refunds to backers. And so part of the problem
(32:21):
here was that Coolest Cooler, at least according to these complaints,
was refusing to refund money to backers who were discontented.
I mean they didn't have it. Yeah. But the problem
that is kickstarters own policy is that if you successfully
fund your project, you either have to make good on
(32:44):
these rewards or offer up the refund to your backers.
So it's what gave a foothold for the d o
J to really kind of look into what was going on. Yeah. Now,
in two tho um, Coolest Cooler did try to a
piece people again. They added a tracking tool to their
website for backers to track where the progress of their
(33:05):
delivery was, like it hasn't even been made yet. Yeah,
you could see your place in line basically. But then
they also weren't going in chronological order of who backed
and shipping these things. They were going by address, which
makes sense from a bulk shipping standpoint. Yeah, but not
great if you happen to be like if you had
prided yourself on being one of the first, like let's
(33:25):
say that you were one of those first seventy, like
you were an early bird backer, but because of your address,
you were not at the top of that list. You
might think, what the heck, I'm the reason. I'm part
of the reason why this campaign was so successful. Yeah. Um.
They also tried to put on that tool on their
website where all of the money raised had gone, to
(33:47):
give some transparency to people. I'm guessing that didn't really
help much because there are employees of Coolest Cooler that
we're getting docs and Ryan's family even got some threats
from some angry consumers. Yeah, people man, when they don't
get what they expect, they can turn real ugly, real fast.
And I mean I get the frustration. Trust me, I
(34:08):
get the frustration of backing a campaign and not getting
what you were promised when the campaign funds. I also,
in at least one of those instances, did not get
a refund, nor did I get my reward. Uh. The
I cannot have any recourse for that because the company
that was supposed to make the thing I backed no
(34:29):
longer exists, So there's no one for me to get
money from at this point. It's just it's the risk
of investment. Yeah, you got to know going in that's
again you have to remember it's not a store, right.
So but there are people who they have that expectation
and they're like, well, I bought this product and you
(34:49):
won't give it to me, so therefore I it's fair game.
I'm allowed to do whatever I want to strike out
at you because you have taken my money, which you know,
so these people who filed with the organ Department of
Justice took a much Yeah, I'm more responsible and less
like psycho U unsympathetic approach. Yeah yeah, so how did
(35:15):
that turn out? Um? Well, you know, at least turned
out well for some of the backers. The Oregon Department
of Justice did find that Coolest Cooler was or at
least was approaching the point of saying that the Coolest
Cooler was negligent, but Grepper was able to settle the case.
But the settlement, of course, came with some pretty strong
(35:38):
agreements that he had to abide by. One of those
was that uh he was going to have to ship
Coolest Coolers to Oregonians who had backed the campaign that
included eight hundred seventy three backers in the state of Oregon.
He also agreed that if backers in general did not
receive their coolers by the middle of twenty twenty, so
(35:59):
we still have some time to go. Yeah, although, like
while we're researching this episode, there are people actively posting
on the Coolest Cooler kickstarter page, I haven't gotten my cooler. Yeah, yeah,
well there's thousands of them alert. But that anyway, if
he does not get the coolers to the backers by
mid twenty twenty, for every backer who has not received
(36:22):
his or her cooler, they will receive twenty dollars from
Grebber and no matter if the company goes into bankruptcy
or if it's still solvent, he will owe that money.
If the company goes into bankruptcy will not protect him
from that that obligation. He will still have to pay
the twenty bucks per person. Well, and I know people
(36:43):
were not happy about this. I mean, obviously they hope
to get their cool Some of them don't even anymore,
like I don't care about this cooler anymore, And twenty
is a small amount of their investment back, but it's something. Well,
and you know, the idea would be that assuming company
was still solvent, that even with the twenty dollars being sent,
(37:04):
it would still the cooler would still be on its
way at some point. Um, so it's not like here's
twenty dollars now you don't get your cooler. Yeah, assuming
that the company is still around. Of course, if it
were bankrupt, then it's just coming out of Grabber's personal funds.
I assume. After this settlement, Grabber actually wrote a letter
to people and he put it on the Kickstarter as
(37:25):
an update to all the backers, and he explained their
plan and he explained their strategies for going forward to
get this done, things like going international and things like
that more investors and stuff, but he was really salty
about it. He's like, I feel vindicated that this is
how the Oregan Department of Justice ruled that we aren't shysters.
(37:46):
We generally want to get you your product, but we
just we can't, and you're hurting our progress, right right, Yeah,
like like the you know, we're trying to do good
on the agreement we had, but the more you guys
put up a fuss, the harder it is for us
to do that. Yeah, it's kind of like, uh, like
you've promised a toddler that you're gonna go to the
(38:09):
water park in the afternoon, but it's still in the
morning and you need to do some errands, and the
toddler starts having a melt down. You're like, you know,
I want to go to the water parks. Says yes,
we're going to the water park, but first we have
to run errands. But I want to go to the
water park. I mean, mind you if I had been
promised to go to the water park in two thousand
fourteen and I hit two thousands sixteen, it's a very
(38:29):
long afternoon. Areal very long afternoon when you're a toddler
time stretches before you like an infinity. Yeah, that's true. Anyhow,
in two thousand seventeen, there was actually a petition filed
on change dot org to get them to stop selling
their coolers until the backers got their's again, which makes
no sense. It's it's hurting the process to get you
(38:50):
your cooler. Yeah, that is kind of crazy, like the
idea that hey, stop stop doing this thing you're doing
that is helping fund actually getting coolers to backers, and
get coolers to backers without any funds. That's not the
way the world works. No, no, but Grepper, you know,
obviously didn't listen to that. The petition didn't well, I
(39:12):
mean it's a petition. It's a petition, doesn't doesn't have
any holding value over anything other than letting you know.
There's a lot of people who are ticked off enough
to fill out a form. So, in addition to trying
to boost international sales, get more investors, reduced production costs,
all of which are great ideas, although hard to get
investors when you've got a bad reputation UM, Greber started
(39:34):
innovating more to try to get more money. So he
made peripherals like batteries, and solar panels and charging chords
for the coolers. He made a soft sided cooler, which
is expensive for a soft stadic cooler, but apparently is
like super magnetic. It's also less expensive than the full
coolest cooler is yes, and it has like a universal
attachment thing you said, you can put on your bike
(39:54):
or your backpacker. But the whole idea was that he
could use profits from that or revenue from the sales
of those products to help again make good on these backers.
I have a feeling that that should the day come
when Grebber is able to send off that final backer cooler,
it will be an enormous weight of his shoulders. So, Jonathan,
(40:15):
how many people would you suppose don't have their coolership? Well,
it's tough to say because there's not really an ongoing
tally that I could find anywhere. But in ten late eighteen,
there was an article that stated as many as twenty
thousand people were still waiting for their coolers. Yeah, that's
(40:35):
a lot of people. So it's about a third of
the backers who who pledged at a level that was
enough to get a cooler in the first place, So
two thirds got their coolers. A third are still waiting. Um,
so that's tough. And there was an article and so
the oregon Ian was the newspaper that published the report
(40:57):
that said twenty thod people were still waiting. A few
months later, they published a second article that stated that
during the most recent quarter, according to a statement from
Coolest Cooler, the company had shipped precisely zero coolers tobaccers
in that most recent quarter, meaning that they weren't able
(41:17):
to do any in that three month period. So obviously
every month that goes by is bringing them closer to
that mid twenty twenty deadline that they need to make.
And um, there have been a lot of other things
that have happened over the last couple of years that
have added complications. For example, you probably are familiar that
(41:38):
there have been some issues about tariffs and China, as
as the United States of America has enacted certain policies
that have instituted these tariffs that in turn ends up
impacting the supply chain and manufacturing plan for the Coolest Coolers,
So which that is not Grabbers fault. Now, there's nothing
(41:59):
he can do about it other than like trying desperately
to find a way to still stay within budget and
be able to continue production. It's not like it halts production,
but it makes production more expensive. And since that was
the problem in the first place, in addition to the
timing issues with things like the strike, uh, that does
not make his life any easier. Yeah. Um again. I
(42:21):
really think the lesson here is give yourself buffer, give
yourself a leg up, overestimate, like you said, how much
it's gonna call you talk to people. Give yourself a
longer deadline too. You know, if backers know that going in,
they might be okay with that. Yeah. It's it's when
you start changing things and people had. It's when you
(42:44):
set certain expectations and then you have to change those expectations.
That's always a problem, and I've seen it on multiple
Kickstarter campaigns, and it almost always happens with stuff that's
related to producing something physical. And it doesn't have to
be complicated either. I've backed Kickstarter campaigns that were producing
things like a deck of cards, but then there are
(43:04):
printer issues, their quality control issues, and these things slow
everything down and they increase the costs because you have
to pay for another production run because if it's not
going to meet the expectations, of your backers. Then you're
going to have problems that like you, you either ship
nothing and you tell your backers were sorry, but the
(43:24):
quality was not up to our standards, so we're going
to go back and try it again, or you end
up shipping something that is of substandard quality and your
backers get upset anyway because they're like, I backed this.
That was a waste of money and a really long wait.
And also you know the lesson for you, uh you
know you've listened to this episodes, so you know, but
(43:44):
realize that you're making an investment. It's almost like loaning
money to your family or friends where you shouldn't. You're
hoping to get something back, but you may not. Yeah,
you need to You need to ask yourself, like, can
I make this pledge if this campaign is successful? Is
it okay if this money never comes back to me?
Like if I if I make this pledge, and what
(44:05):
for whatever reason the actual endeavor fails despite the campaign
being successful. Am I okay with taking a loss of this?
If I'm not, then maybe I should just wait until
it's for public consumers. Yeah, exactly. So in this case
with Coolest Cooler, if you saw it and you thought, Wow,
(44:25):
that sounds really awesome and I would love to have
one of these, and it would be nice to get
it for a discounted price, but I'm also aware of
the potential pitfalls that can be in the way of production.
Then you might think, well, is it is it worth
potentially saving a hundred fifteen dollars off the projected retail
(44:47):
price or is it better for me to wait, because
it could be that instead of saving a D fifteen dollars,
I'm throwing away a D five. Yeah, policies are great,
but the truth of the matter is, no matter how
well intentioned the inventor or the founder of the kicks starter,
if they end up going bankrupt due to misfortune, not
(45:09):
even poor planning, but just misfortune and end up living
under a bridge, you they can't refund you. It's it's
just the way it is. Um It's It's also interesting
to point out that crowdfunding has largely changed over the
last couple of years, where we're seeing more and more
established companies using crowdfunding, and they're not using it to
(45:30):
raise the money needed to make whatever the thing is.
Often the thing has already made. They're using it to
kind of judge the reception of whatever that thing is
so that they know how much of it to make
or whether or not it's going to be a successful product.
And so it's it's changing where it was kind of
(45:52):
aimed at the individual creator originally, like this was an idea,
Like you have an idea for something, you launched this
crowdfunding and paign to get the money you need to
to actually bring that something into reality, and then you
ship off or you start selling or whatever. Now it's
companies are using it almost as a marketing tool, and
(46:12):
so it's it's dramatically changed how crowdfunding is working in
the like I said, in the last couple of years.
But we still have these issues and uh, and there
are no shortage of crowdfunding campaigns that do come across
as kind of scammy, so that's also good. Although to
be fair, both Kickstarter and indigo Go and others have
(46:34):
gotten a lot better at weeding those out. Although indiego go,
you can get your funding amount even if you don't
magic Yeah, if you don't. If you said you can,
you can choose if you set let's say you set
a ten thousand dollar goal, but you only raise five
thousand dollars, and it's on indiego Go, you can choose
to accept any amount raised even if you haven't met
(46:55):
your goal, but it's with a heftier fee taken out.
For indie go Go, they take a much larger percentage
of the money, so you get you get even less.
So if you ask for ten thousand dollars and you
end up getting five thousand dollars, you might only end
up with four thousand dollars. So it's it's one of
those things that it's kind of a slippery slope issue. Um,
(47:17):
we have a couple of fun facts and I just
read them and now I'm angry. I'm sorry, Jonathan. The
first is Ryan Grabber has backed his own kickstarters. Uh,
he backed the potato salad kickstarter. That's the one that
gets me mad. It is because Jonathan had a kickstarter
around the same time and his didn't get funded. But
this dark potato salad kickstarts choke. The potato salad was
(47:39):
a choke and then it got it got ridiculous. Not
just backing it was again like a crazy viral success
for a joke potato salad. I mean, the guy did
take all the funds and make a major party out
of it. All props, all props to that guy and
and his cooke and the fact that it brought joy
(48:02):
to people. But I am I am unapologetically envious because
I had a project. It was near and dear to
both of our hearts. It was that I was really
hoping I could get funded and uh. It also managed
to buck another trend. It funded about halfway to where
it needed to be. But it was on Kickstarter. It
(48:24):
was make or break. And the reason why I say
it broke some trends is that generally speaking, on Kickstarter,
if you reach a certain level, a certain percentage of funding,
and I want to say it's somewhere around that, of
campaigns that hit their gold during the campaign, we'll we'll
(48:44):
get all the way to funding by the end. Mine
was not one of those. Now I'm really sad about
that too. So we'll move on to our last fact
and then we'll wrap things up. The original version of
the Coolest Cooler had an attached grill, yeah, which turns
out probably not the best idea for a product that's
mostly made out of plast It was nixed for safe. Yeah.
You can't imagine a grill working too well. I mean,
(49:05):
you can maybe have like a stand alone little stand
and grill that you could put over a fire pit
or something, but even then you don't have to have
it cool down enough to be able to put it
against a plastic cooler. Um. So that wraps up our
discussion about coolest cooler. But before we go and wrap
everything up for the episode, we also wanted to give
(49:26):
an update about a previous topic that we've covered. We
did an episode about Toys r Us and we talked
about how at the end of that episode, we talked
about how UH there was an effort to kind of
bring these sort of pop up stores to life and
inside of targets and things like that, and the Toys
r Us name might not be totally gone. And now
we've gotten word for the heads up as of the
(49:49):
recording of this podcast, which is on June one, two
thousand nineteen, that there is a sincere effort to bring
back UH a larger version of Toys r Us, although
not at the full size of the older toy stores. Yeah,
there will be about the third of the size of
the old toy stores, with more experience points, play areas
(50:10):
and things like that, and also they're looking at bringing
back their e commerce site. They're hoping to be back
by the holiday season of two thousand nineteen, so we'll
have to see if that happens. Yeah, and if it does,
we'll do another update where we'll talk about maybe we'll
have to do an episode at some point. It's all
follow ups on I was thinking the same thing. Clearly,
Canadian would be another one. Thanks for the shout out, clearly,
(50:33):
we greatly appreciate it. Awesome. I still haven't received any
crates of drinks or anything. You don't listen to him.
I totally gave him a BlackBerry, clearly Canadian. That's not
a crate. That was one drink and it was from you,
not form. Clearly, not that we do this to get
stuff from companies. We're just joking. We don't expect nor
do we deserve anything from anybody. I hope you enjoyed
(50:55):
that episode of Business on the Brink that came out
back in two thousand nineteen. Yeah, that's is no longer
in production. You can still find all the episodes online,
so if you want to take a quick look and
see if there are any topics that interest you. We
did have a habit of getting a little playful with
the titles, so you might have to look at the
descriptions to see what the actual episode is about. I
(51:18):
apologize for that. We just made our own fun, but yeah,
take a listen to those episodes. Let me know if
there are any that you would like me to do
a tech Stuff episode on. Because we were mostly focused
on the business side, not as much on the tech side.
If you want me to cover some of these, let
me know, and you can do that by using the
I Heart Radio app. You can navigate to the tech
(51:38):
Stuff podcast and you can use the little microphone icon
to leave a voice message that can be up to
thirty seconds. You can also let me know whether or
not you would like me to use the audio in
an episode. I won't unless you tell me, or if
you prefer, you can reach out to me on Twitter.
The handle for the show is tech Stuff hs W
and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tex Stuff
(52:06):
is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from
I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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