Lessons from a failure – Part 1

Back in 2009, a school friend of mine and I were sitting in a pub when we had an idea. This was at a time when the GoPro was a relatively new fad (other video capture devices are and were available) and the iPhone 3GS hadn’t long been launched – you know…the one that was shaped like a bar of soap?

Anyway, this friend was a keen downhill mountain bike nutter and often wanted to capture his exploits on a GoPro or similar. He noted that the camera used to capture video in an iPhone 3GS was now the same resolution as a GoPro and wouldn’t it be great if you could strap your iPhone to your bike helmet and capture the video that way. It would save all the hassle of additional kit and having to download the footage from the GoPro.

So we decided to try and design, develop, manufacture and sell a case that an iPhone 3GS would sit in, which would allow for continued use within the case but provide both shock protection and full waterproofing. You should still be able to plug in your earphones (this was back when Bluetooth earbuds were not yet a thing, and you needed a wire and a 3.5mm phono jack) and remove the iPhone easily if you needed to.

We did it.

We designed, developed, manufactured and sold what came to be called The NUT (feel free to Google it…there’s enough internet residue of it hanging around). A protective iPhone case that did everything we set out to. I am incredibly proud of what we achieved despite it never succeeding, for reasons I will elaborate on shortly (or at least some of them). We manufactured it in the UK. We did everything ourselves, bar the manufacturing itself.

It was bloody hard. Harder than I ever thought it would be.

I could easily write a book on the journey we took, and may yet shed some light on that in another article, but for now, I thought it might be an interesting thing to focus on the failures.

The things we got wrong.

The things that mean we had to admit defeat and fold the business.

Harsh lessons which I vowed to take with me as I redoubled my efforts at Square Banana to make it successful, and help others who have an idea and think they can take on the world.

So here goes…as always, in no particular order, other than the order in which they fell out of my head.

Note: I’d intended to write this as a single article but after writing the first 6 points, it was clearly going to be far too long, so I’ve split it into 2. I’ll post the second one in due course…

1. Ensure your idea can withstand ‘time slip’.

When you have an idea, test it to see if it isn’t reliant on a specific moment in time to succeed, as it is entirely likely that whatever deadline you set yourself will slip (see point 4).

In our case (no pun intended), we designed the product to suit a very specific iPhone shape (the aforementioned soap bar…which it turns out is incredibly hard to surface accurately in 3D CAD!). Whilst this was fine when we started, when we neared the time when we needed to place the order for injection mould tooling, we heard rumours of an upcoming Apple ‘event’ where it was mooted that a new iPhone model was going to be launched. We discussed this risk with the distributors we had got onboard and they suggested we should crack on with what we had as they had heard that Apple were simply going to update their current iPhone model and the form should remain the same. We (stupidly) did as they suggested (see point 3) and it was possibly the biggest mistake we ever made, as the next iPhone was the iPhone 4…a complete departure from the 3S in form and proportion. It went from a soap bar to a clinical slab of geometry which killed us stone dead, and is my biggest regret with the project.

If ever you decide to develop a new idea, unless you have countless resources and bottomless pots of money (by which measure you are unlikely to need to develop a new product), just make sure it will withstand the passage of time and the changing nature of technology, buying habits, taste and unforeseen circumstances. Our product proposition was fine, we just designed it too closely to the form of the product to optimise overall size, and it was our demise. In hindsight, if I were to design such a product again, I would make sure we built in adaptability to ensure we could accommodate changes we may not yet know about.

Even with a design to suit the older phone model, we still thought we stood a chance of getting enough products shipped and sold to fund the next iteration to satisfy the iPhone 4, but because we were a small business and were at the mercy of our manufacturing partners, our timelines slipped and slipped and our window of opportunity narrowed and narrowed to such a point where we were clutching at straws.

Test your idea right at the start. Before you’ve done anything else. Imagine circumstances that may sound preposterous at the time. Design to at least ensure you give yourself a fighting chance of adapting rather than watch as your idea drowns in front of your eyes.

It’s horrible to watch.

Even better, focus your efforts on things that can withstand time slip. I can vouch for the fact that mobile phone accessories were probably the worst thing we could have chosen.

People always need to get their hair cut. That sort of thing….

2. Don’t manufacture in the UK.

I hate myself for saying this, as I had such high hopes for what it represented.

However, bar some rare exceptions when it came to packaging, we were let down at every turn by UK manufacturing. Maybe it was because we were a small business working on a shoestring budget? Maybe we were trying something a bit too different? Maybe we were expecting too much of our manufacturing partners?

Whatever the reason, we lost time, money and hair trying to simply get our UK manufacturing so-called ‘partners’ to just deliver agreed product on time and to specification. From injection moulding to ultrasonic welding, we had to battle, and we rarely won. We were just two guys who were trying to keep other jobs going whilst developing this idea. We didn’t have the resources to apply any pressure.

We simply received below par, poorly functioning goods, often late and with no apology. We ended up having to go back to our injection moulding toolmakers at least 20 times with simple requests to make the tool to the data that we had supplied. Hours and hours spent measuring mouldings only to find they’d buggered it up again and again. Pouring through boxes and boxes of ultrasonically welded components, throwing aside 50-60% of our assemblies because there was no regard to accuracy or quality – each time wasting costly mouldings which had proved difficult enough to secure in the first place. For all the ISO and Quality standards stated on a website, when you are a small client, you might as well piss your money down the drain for all the good that stuff does.

I say this as someone who supplied extensive tooling and component check drawings alongside solid 3D CAD data, visited multiple times to oversee tool sampling, as well as part checking recommendations and documentation. I wasn’t naive. I knew what I was doing. If it was down to the design being wrong then I would have held my hand up and admitted as such. It was simply a bunch of manufacturers not doing their job. Not doing what they agreed to do and what we paid them to do. They failed. Big time.

I’m not suggesting that overseas manufacturing is any easier, but it’s a darned sight cheaper, so you at least have the option to do more with less. The equation is stacked a little more in your favour. In truth, from my experience, overseas manufacturing is consistently more accurate, more timely, more polite, more cost effective (by a considerable margin) and typically of a higher quality than anything I’ve received from the UK. Even when you factor in shipping, customs and taxes, language barriers and all the other ‘inconveniences’ of overseas manufacturing, I’d still recommend it hand over fist.

Like I say… I hate to admit this but I’ve lived it first hand. Painfully.

3. Don’t trust anyone.

OK. So this might be a little harsh but the sentiment is relatively sound.

We believed too many people when they said things or made promises. We assumed when someone said something would happen that it would – in principle – happen. Now, neither of us were green. We’d both worked for around 12-13 years by that point so had dealt with enough people to understand an empty promise or a vacuous pleasantry. But nothing prepared us for the slimy worm-tongued retractability of the mobile phone industry…and particularly the mobile phone accessory industry. Maybe it was specifically the people we happened to be dealing with or the fact that we weren’t simply an OEM manufacturer banging out standard novelty phone cases from a factory in China, but every commitment we were made or intention to order was as substantial as the air used to utter it.

This extends to the manufacturing partners I mentioned earlier. We based our launch timelines on estimations put forward by these manufacturers (with necessary extra time added by us for tweaks, adjustments and reworks) but these were as useful as a fart in a thunderstorm. It didn’t matter what they said, it never transpired. No matter how many times they apologised or promised to improved, it never did.

So forgive me for being a little cynical, but my experience tells me it’s better to assume people won’t deliver on their promises. That way, you can plan for eventualities and be pleasantly surprised when things do arrive on time!

4. It will always take longer.

As guaranteed as every Grand Designs TV programme concluding interview talks about hideous over budget spend, so every single best laid plan will take longer than you think. I was fairly prepared for this and we factored a fair bit of time slip into our plans, but it still took considerably longer than we’d ever anticipated.

Much of this was down to sheer ineptitude of our initial injection moulding, so-called ‘partner’, who never delivered anything close to a finished set of parts. In fact, we had to almost threaten court action and spend what little money we had shipping the tools from our initial IM toolmakers/moulders to another firm who had agreed to pick up the remaining tool tweaks and start moulding parts for us. They basically held our tool to ransom and we had zero recourse, given our situation, the time pressures of needing to get the product to market for a ‘soon to be yesterday’s news’ iPhone model, and limited funds. It still makes me feel sick to my stomach now…just thinking about it.

Anyway, I digress. The point I’m making is that no matter how much you think you’ve considered all the eventualities and no matter how much time you’ve ‘bloated’ your plan with, it will take longer. I guarantee it. Unless of course you have a boot load of gold bullion to bribe people with, and even then it will still probably take longer than you thought.

And don’t believe anyone who provides ‘guaranteed’ timescales. It’s worthless. It’s just there to get you to sign on the dotted line. Once you’re halfway down that road you can’t turn back so you are at the mercy of others.

5. People will steal your ideas.

When we started this venture, we set up a Facebook page and tried to bring people along for the ride. We involved people in the branding decisions, positioning decisions, colour decisions….everything where we thought there was an opportunity to drive engagement and get some collaboration or interaction going, we did it.

One such post was following a long meeting we’d had in our local pub, where we’d had to decide on the colours for our initial launch. We deliberated long and hard and I’d sourced countless colour plaques from moulding companies to help facilitate this. We anguished over what they should be and ended up sharing 3 VERY specific green colour shades to our facebook group in an attempt to see what our (admittedly fairly small) audience thought.

The hive mind duly responded and we selected a specific green that was suitably gender neutral but characterful enough not to simply merge with all other obvious green plastic products.

A few weeks later, we find out that a so called ‘entrepreneur’ over in Hong Kong, has blatantly been recreating our posts and using them to develop her own product which looked remarkably similar to ours. The ‘green’ colour choice post was almost identical (the green itself was an identical Pantone reference) and their positioning and wording was almost a clone of our own. But what could we do?

Nothing. Please see point 6.

What makes it all the more galling and bitter is that this aforementioned company essentially copied and benefitted from everything we did and eventually sold their product business to a larger accessories company – Garmin or Otterbox…I don’t recall which. Part of me resents them but part of me applauds them for having the audacity to ride on our coattails, knowing full well we could do nothing about it.

Ho hum.

6. Don’t bother protecting your idea.

Up to the point when we decided to design and develop our own product, I was a believer in protecting an idea. In truth, when we initially attempted to secure a single, early investor behind the idea, their line of questioning tended to include things about IP and patents, so it reinforced my thinking.

So when we came up with a name for the business, we decided to trademark it, and when we had a design developed and defined, we decided to patent it.

What a stupid bloody decision that was.

Effectively what we did was spend money we could have spent elsewhere on some drawn out, stupidly complex documentation that effectively just gave us the right to take somebody to court if we felt they had stepped on our IP toes. And only in the UK. I know there have been some marginal changes to the patent process in recent years, but it is a relatively pointless exercise in my book.

The one thing that did prove useful, and something I would suggest all budding entrepreneurs do, is do a ‘Freedom to operate’ search which effectively does a broad review of the IP landscape to see if you are likely to step on anyone else’s toes in developing your own idea. In essence…are you at risk of being sued by the holder of another patent if you do this? It doesn’t stop you or anyone else from doing anything, but it gives you a sense of risk and peace of mind. It’s also relatively inexpensive…hundreds of pounds rather than thousands.

Trademarking was also relatively useful, although we fell foul of a ridiculous detail. We initially named our business KOKOO – a derivative of a nickname for a snowboard stunt, and decided to trademark it under the category of ‘Mobile Phone Accessories’. However, we were prevented from doing so as there was a character in a kids TV cartoon programme (Chuggington…for those that are interested!) called KOKO whose originators had decided that – at some spurious point in the future – they ‘may’ wish to design a mobile phone case with a cartoon train character’s face on it. Go figure. Hence we changed our name to OKOQU…which ultimately led us to calling our product the NUT. I’ll leave you to figure that one out for yourself!

So we spent far too much money (thousands) on a document that takes at least 18 months to ‘review’ and then – from memory – about 3 years to fully come into force, which only gives you the right to take someone to court in the UK*, and then it is at the behest and judgement of the judge or jury to decide if they’ve contravened your patent. It is pretty much worthless to a small business hoping that it gives them any form of protection whatsoever.

It was a monumental waste of our time and – more importantly – our ever dwindling bank balance.

If you are ever in the position we were in, just get it out there and start selling. People will copy and you will have nothing to fight them with, so you might as well just try and sell more than them. Just move as quickly as you can.

If, once you’ve started making some serious money from an idea, then for sure explore the idea of patenting aspects of it that might secure your idea in your largest market, but remember, a patent simply protects ‘novelty’, not the whole product, so even after all that effort, it is likely that someone will be able to find a workaround to negate the patent wording and interpretation.

*Patenting an idea in multiple markets and countries is mind bendingly, eye wateringly expensive and is complex as each country has a different process and differing categories, rules, timescales and wording. That’s why patent attorneys drive very nice cars.

So…I’ve got 7 more points to make, but I’ll let you get your breath back after that tirade.

Apologies…this is a bit like therapy for me.

Overall, it was a simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying experience. We both look back on an opportunity that we saw slip through our fingers, despite our best efforts to try and do something new and interesting and in a way that we thought was honourable. Sometimes I regret it terribly. Other times, I think it made me a better designer and more honest and capable ‘advisor’ to my clients. Nothing focuses the mind more than seeing your own money (and that of close friends and family) disappear down the plughole through no real fault of your own.

Anyway. Comments welcomed. I appreciate that there may be people who vehemently disagree with some of the points above…most likely manufacturers in the UK and patent attorneys…but like I always say, these are my experiences and my opinions. Nothing more.

Ignore them if you want to.

Part 2 to follow in due course. Then I might do one on the things we got right…because it wasn’t all doom and gloom. We did some stuff brilliantly.