For most of my career, I attended trade shows as a visitor. I was developing and licensing my own product ideas, so I would walk up and down the halls of the show floors to connect with as many companies that work with inventors as possible. But when I started a...
We started selling Hot Picks in local music stores across the Central Valley and the Bay Area. The process was extremely slow-going, because there were only a couple of large chain retailers. Meaning, we had to call independent music stores one by one. Most of those...
People ask me all the time, why did I start a business selling guitar picks? That's a great question because I don't even play guitar. It was purely by accident, is the truth. A local gentleman in my hometown was selling tens of thousands of guitar picks that looked...
It doesn’t matter how you get started — only that you do. Here are a few images from my offices throughout the years. Before I began working at the toy startup Worlds of Wonder, I designed life-sized animals for the plush company Dakin in a little...
Tens of thousands of people try out for Shark Tank but only a couple hundred have actually pitched in front of the Sharks. The chances of making it on the show are very slim. According to one article, of 40,000 applications the show received in 2016, only 180...
I had a master licensing agreement with the company CCL for my rotating label, Spinformation. We shared the sub-licensing rights. Soon, a company in Dublin, Ireland called Kinelworth licensed our technology to provide to their customers. Before you know it, they had a...
I have not shared these before. When I first started trying to license my ideas, they were, well, let’s say…OK. I’ve learned over time that when you stick with an industry long enough, your ideas do get better. Check out my very first sell sheets below. I was in...
I’ve been collecting things all my life. Even as a young child, my room was filled with things I collected. Things that matter to me, and today is no different. On my mantle, a fake grenade. This was a joke played on me by my best friend’s son. It wasn’t so funny at...
This wasn't the first time I got rejected, and I remember this like it was just yesterday. A new inventing TV show was produced by Simon Cowell and was called American Inventor. I had received a call from one of the producers requesting I interview for a spot to be...
When I received a call from a vice-president at publisher McGraw-Hill’s San Francisco office, I was a little surprised that they wanted me to write a book. What did I know about writing a book? Absolutely nothing. But I had a very good friend who was once a student...
You can do anything. I’m living proof! I barely passed second grade. Reading and spelling are nearly impossible for me, because I have auditory dyslexia. Nonetheless, I’ve been publishing articles online since 2008 and have written five books. How? With a lot of...
Of all my ideas, my packaging innovation, Spinformation, was the most difficult to commercialize. A tremendous amount of effort was required, but it was well worth it. I made my first prototypes of the spin label out of paper, which allowed me to design many...