Editing The Pen Addict 180/transcript (section)

== Notebook History ==


'''James:''' Wow. I mean – OK. So it goes way, way, way back. This actually goes back to the beginning of 2010, believe it or not. Yeah. So Joey and I, we met through kind of like strange circumstances. A friend was kind of organizing in New York and Manhattan, this kind of entrepreneur meetup, and I don't think I really knew what it meant, and I guess Joey didn't really know what it meant as well. But we got together every week and met up. People kind of – people talked about different projects they were working on. And Joey and I came from really different backgrounds. I was working in finance on Wall Street then, and Joey was a freshman in graphic design at SVA here in New York. And I don't know. Something about it, something about the way we worked together or our thoughts or just working compatibility was we had similar ideas. And Joey kind of had an observation about art school, and I'll let him explain.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. So I was in art school at the time, way back, and I noticed something really interesting. My fellow students and myself included, we all used two tools, right? One was a laptop and one was a notebook. And so the observation was that all of the laptops were the same. They were MacBooks, and all of the notebooks were different, different brands, different sizes, different paper types. It was just like everybody was carrying something different. And when I realized this, I looked back on myself and I looked at my own bookshelf, and I realized that I had been getting all different types of books myself, right? The bookshelf didn't have just one type of book. It's not like I was loyal for something. It was like I was looking for something, and that was a big observation and also an opportunity. So me and Adam met at this entrepreneur group, and we ended up doing three or four projects, like startup-style company things before Baron Fig. So we had some things going on, and it took how many years?

'''James:''' It took quite a while. So, I mean, you would think, all right, so we had this idea of making a notebook. I mean, I was always into paper. I've been tactile my entire life. I worked at OfficeMax for a while, selling office supplies. I don't know, just something that I've always been fascinated by paper. And when Joey had this observation, I was like, wow, this is great. So we started on it right away, right?

'''James:''' Nope. We had three years. Did nothing on it. So in the interim, yeah, we worked on a couple projects, and it was finally beginning of 2013, and ironically enough, the thing that really made us do it was my frustration. My frustration that Joey, it was kind of his senior year of art school, and he had like one class each semester, however it worked out. And so we started his own design studio. And so we had this little closet of a room in the middle of Manhattan, and it barely had a window, and it was about 80 square feet or so that we shared. And so we started sitting in there with the IKEA desk, and on day one of his own freelance design studio, I think he made like about $0. By the end of the week, he made about enough to buy maybe some ramen and a footlong sub or something. But week by week, month by month, all of a sudden it was four or five months later, and Joey had more business than he could possibly handle. It was like he literally was working 40 hours a week and paid quite well for good-name clients. And so he was looking at doing – he's like, oh, who's the broker who got us the studio? How do we expand? I need bigger space. I want to hire. And personally, I thought it was the worst idea ever. I was like, Joey, this is stupid. Like, don't get me wrong. It's cool what you're doing.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It's nice, but you're an idiot. Yeah, I was like, it's nice.

'''James:''' I was like, because you're just going to have to hire. You're going to have to hire more people, and then get bigger space. They need more clients. Then have more bills. And then you have more bills. You need more clients.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It's like a monster that you have to keep feeding.

'''James:''' So I was like, Joey, we talked about Notebook years ago. Let's do this thing. Let's make it happen.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. And so then we did. That was – when was that? That was like in February or something of that year?

'''James:''' Yeah, February, March 2013.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So I immediately quit every job that I was doing. And I went from, I don't know, like five or six freelance gigs to zero. I told everyone I was done. Recommended everyone off to designers that I knew. And started focusing exclusively on designing this notebook. And then it took like five months of research. We emailed people all over the world. We called them thinkers, right? We didn't want to call them like visual artists, like designers. Because other people, you know, like entrepreneurs, musicians, they all use notebooks. And it's certainly not visual, right? It's the ideas are on the page. But it's not necessarily beautiful. So we emailed all these people all over the world and we asked them one question. And the question is, what do you like in a sketchbook or notebook? So all in all, we emailed over 500 people. And we ended up with an 80 – over 80% response rate from cold emails, which was out of this world. We were expecting something like maybe 10%. And the people who emailed us were giving us these gigantic responses. We were having huge dialogues, right? It wasn't just like a few sentences. People were sending back paragraphs of like, this is what I'd like in a notebook. I can't find this anywhere. Thank you so much for doing this. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help. And we went from there and we distilled all this feedback into our first product, the Confidant. And we put that on Kickstarter.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It's about two years ago now.

'''James:''' Yeah, almost exactly two years ago. So yeah, it was a blast. That whole summer, recording videos, running around New York, doing all sorts of stuff to get the prototypes ready. I mean I think our first prototype was – Joey did quite a nice job. So we had a meeting on Tuesday night. Joey was like, I'm going to make a prototype. And I was like, OK.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' From scratch.

'''James:''' From scratch. So he shows up the next Tuesday with this pretty legit-looking prototype. I was like, wow. Where did you get this thing from?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, so it turned out I went all over the city and I got materials. New York is amazing and we can pretty much – we have access to pretty much everything here. Paper stores, fabric stores. So I went around, selected something to get started. And then I sat in my underwear on a Saturday morning in front of YouTube. And I learned how to bind a book. And actually the prototype that I brought to them, the covers, the inside of the covers are a Cheerio box that I had because I forgot to buy cardboard. I brought it to Adam and he got excited. I got excited. We sort of captured momentum by making the idea physical. And we kept going from there, refining and refining until the book you see today.

'''James:''' Yeah. I think it's kind of interesting in the process of making things. Everyone thinks they watch these movies and it's like in one step, some blast of inspiration. Oh my god. It's some great moment and then the final product comes out. I don't know. Maybe we're different than how it works for other people. But it's amazing how many little kind of like imperceptible steps things have to go through from a Cheerios box on a Saturday morning to a final product that people can buy on your website. It's like a thousand little steps in the middle.

'''Adam Kornfield:''' Yeah, no, I think that's completely the case and I've definitely experienced that. The one thing from you talking about this, the one thing that stood out to me the most was, well, not only that Joey was stupid enough to quit his job and start to make a notebook. But that when you reached out to all these people, and this is in 2013, you sent out 500 emails, got like 80% response rate. It's not like at that time in the marketplace there's no notebooks out there. But it's the people who care about these type of things were not satisfied with what's available. And that's what I find like the most shocking. And that's what we always talk about on the pen addict, finding the right tools for the right job. And just what's out there, you know, publicly available, you know, if you walk into a Barnes and Noble or something, the people that want to use these products, they're not satisfied by them. And I find that to be to be pretty telling when you get that kind of response from people who have a notebook sitting on their table while they're responding to you saying this thing sucks, basically. Right. Oh, totally.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah.

'''Adam Kornfield:''' Yeah. So so y'all moved into the Kickstarter. Yeah, it was September 3rd, 2013. And what did you expect when you when you when you press that button? Did you have any idea what to expect? No.

'''James:''' I mean, we knew our moms and grandmas would buy it. Right. So. Right.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So we had about five hundred dollars accounted for.

'''Adam Kornfield:''' So it could go two ways, right? It's going to go straight in the ditch and no one's going to ever hear about it again. Or it's going to go berserk, which I think this pretty much did. I think this classifies as berserk, at least at least in our realm. It you had for over forty two hundred backers, over one hundred and sixty eight thousand dollars raised. When you when you say that kind of stuff out loud, looking back on it, what do you think?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' A lot has changed in two years. Right. With Kickstarter. The numbers two years ago were a lot lower on Kickstarter than they are now. So it's hard. It's hard to put that into context today where it's like, oh, people are doing a million, two million, ten million on Kickstarter.

'''Adam Kornfield:''' Right.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right. And, you know, we did one hundred and sixty eight thousand, which was phenomenal then.

'''Adam Kornfield:''' And it's a notebook, for God's sakes, right?

'''James:''' I mean, I will I will take the opposite approach of Joey on that one. I think it's pretty amazing. I'm blown away when I think about it's like, wow, like here we were a company that just had a little tiny mailing list and a Web space, Squarespace page that with kind of Joey's half fake design on it at that point in time. And it's like here we were able to sell over eight thousand notebooks in a month. Like, I don't know. I thought it was amazing. I was pretty impressed. Like, I was really amazed that we were able to get some nice press mention press mentions throughout it. And really, it's fun. It's a ton of fun. Strike on dialogue with all people from around the world. And, you know, we're just looking at the countries today, actually, where people bought it from. I made a list like two years ago of chart and like, I don't know, 17, 18 percent of our sales are from overseas. So like all around the world.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Total 48 countries we ended up shipping to. It's pretty wild.

'''Adam Kornfield:''' Yeah, that is wild. And the thing about the amount raised, this is a on Kickstarter. It was a relatively small amount item. It's not like you're selling, you know, $150, $200 item. It's a $20 notebook. And at the time, it wasn't even named the confidant, right? I mean, you just this is the Baron Fig notebook, right?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, actually, I'm glad you brought that up. So there we had Baron Fig as the name. And I knew then that the name of the notebook was the confidant, right? Because the goal was if it succeeds, Baron Fig becomes the name of the company. But I also knew that to introduce too many names at once would be overly complex, right? So we kind of layered a couple surprises into the campaign if we succeeded. So two of them, one being the name, you'd get this thing and realize, wow, this thing's called the confidant. That's pretty cool. And two, that it came in a really well-designed, beautiful box that we did not show anywhere the entire time until it arrived at your door. Nice. Nice. Nice.

'''Adam Kornfield:''' Yeah, so I think that's great. And I want to explore kind of this when you launched the Kickstarter, what were the post-Kickstarter ideas you had in your head at the time. But I want to take a break real quick and talk about our first sponsor. It's our good friends at Pen Chalet.