Editing The Pen Addict 116/transcript (section)

== Tactile Turn ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' Mm-hmm. Yep. That's awesome. So another, another Kickstarter on the positive front, and it's one that we're all familiar with. It's the tactile turn. Um, Will Hodges came out with, um, a bunch of new materials. Um, I call them the rare materials. It's titanium, brass, and copper, um, and the mover and the shaker pins that he sold before that I was such a big fan of. Um, and he just sent me, you'll see, you've seen a bunch of reviews from my friends online about all of these, the new materials pins and Will sent some to me and I just haven't gotten to it yet. He knew I was on vacation. So I'm still got a post in the works on these, but I wanted to make everyone aware if they were a fan of the original tactile turn and want an upgraded body. Um, one thing different in these pins aside from the materials is Will's gotten some new machinery that turns the pins and the barrels are actually smoother than the aluminum barrels were before. Not that they were rough and the, the, what this has done, it's made the seam to where the pin unscrews in the middle, completely invisible. Like I'll sit there and stare at it right in front of my eyes and you can't see the line where the pin screws apart. It's really fascinating. He's done an excellent job of this. Um, so I wanted to, to point that out and let everyone know that these new materials are out and they, uh, they look really good. Will's done a good job, um, with these pins and it's already met its goal. And it'll have a few days left. Um, you can, you can get it on that and I'll, I'll have a, my post will be up, uh, shortly.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I like the look of the clip on these.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, it's real good. It's integrated, um, kind of into the barrel and it's a real tight, real, real firm clip and, uh, it looks good.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So I just want to take a moment, Brad, to thank our final sponsor for this week's episode. Um, they are a good friend of ours, a returning sponsor and it's the fine folks over at Squarespace, which is a company that we both love and have used for a long time. Squarespace are the all-in-one platform to make it fast and easy to create your own professional website portfolio and online store. For a free trial and 10% off, visit squarespace.com and enter the offer code INC at checkout. A better web starts with your website. So if you want to be like Brad and have your very own pen blog, well, you can do that. With Squarespace, you don't have to worry about all the tricky parts. You just go to squarespace.com and you get started with one of their fantastic, beautiful templates. You can very easily build your own pages with their fantastic drag and drop page building system. It's all within your web browser and you can see all of the changes that you're making to the design all in real time. You can say, I want this font. I want this color. I want the width to be like this. I want to drag and drop things around like this. You're doing all live in the web browser so you can see exactly how it's going to look before you click save and publish it to the world. Squarespace takes care of everything for you. They take care of web hosting, image hosting, and if you want, even podcast hosting. And what if you want to run a store like Nock? Well, you can also be like Brad because that's exactly what these guys do. Nock, Nock Co, that we all love so much, is run on Squarespace and their commerce platform. So the whole site and the store is all run on Squarespace. Every single Squarespace website features Squarespace commerce. Now this enables you to set up your own store to start selling physical or digital goods immediately. They integrate with Stripe for payments and loads of awesome services like ShipStation to help you run a fantastic business. Squarespace takes care, take away, sorry, all of the pain from building your own personal or business website. They have awesome templates you can choose from that look good on all devices. They have awesome apps to manage your site and stats on the go. They have 24-7 award-winning customer support over live chat and email with teams located in New York City, Dublin, and Portland. And this all starts at just $8 a month. And this also includes a free domain name if you sign up for a year. So I want you to go to squarespace.com right now and sign up for a free trial. There's no credit card required to do this and you can start booting your website today. When you decide to sign up, make sure that you use the offer code INC. Not only is that going to show your support for the Pen Addict podcast and RelayFM, it's going to get you 10% off your first purchase. So I want to thank Squarespace for their continued support and renewed support in the Pen Addict and what we're doing with RelayFM. That's Squarespace, where a better web starts with your website.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' That's awesome. You did a good job on the read and you alluded to one thing. The one thing that I always comment about Squarespace and it should be their tagline is they make it easy. I mean, it's really, really easy to create a site and it's even more easy to, you know, manipulate that site after the fact and make design changes that you want. Or like in the case of knock, add products and item descriptions and keep track of inventory. It's just easy. I mean, it's for people like me who don't want to deal with back-end servers and, you know, WordPress installs, not to call them out. WordPress is totally fine. But other, you know, self-hosted, self-install, you know, platforms and Squarespace handles all that. And I'm real happy with them and always have been. So thank you, Squarespace, for joining us once again today.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' You ready for me? Oh, I'm ready. So we've titled this next, um, this next segment on the Pen Addict podcast, that damn scribble. Am I allowed to say that on relay?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, sure.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' All right. So a couple months ago, Myke and I talked about this pen that did a big PR push to all the gadget gear tech sites called Scribble. And what it purported to be was a pen that could color match a color in the wild, in real life, you know, whatever, you know, you have a wall that's painted blue, you stick the pen color in the pen, you know, you have a pen, you have a pen, you have a pen, you have a pen. So great idea. Lots of questions surrounding the implementation and will it work? So at that time at the, when they had their big PR push, I emailed them with some very specific questions. I got very unspecific answers that I was disappointed in. I replied back saying, basically, you didn't answer my questions. Here's what I want to know. Can you narrow this down? And I never heard back. So fine. I really don't care that much.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I really like, I love when you're in this mood because it's like these people, I mean, look, you are, I mean, I think it's safe to say that whether you would say it or not, you're one of the most important people in this industry. You have an extremely well-read blog. Everybody who is in the pen world that circulates online knows the pen addict, right? You have the right, if that's the right thing to say, or the ability or the clout to come at these situations like this. But these people don't know what they're getting themselves in for. They're like, this is some guy sending them an email. He says he's a pen addict. He sounds like a peculiar gentleman. And you're just like, give me the answers. And then they ignore you and like, right, I'm going to slam you.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So here's what I believe in as a person.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I have the right to information. If you're not providing me with accurate information, I have the right to ask you a question about it. And if I don't get clarity, then it's on.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I'm all down with that, buddy. Yeah. But because it's as a business.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' You have to be able to answer your customers questions in a clear manner, in a consistent manner. If someone has a question about your product and you're diverting them and you're circling around and you're, you know, going off on a tangent that's unrelated, you're begging for more questions. And then that pile of questions gets to be this huge volcanic pile that's eventually going to erupt back in your face. So if you're not ready for that, then you're doing something wrong. And that's the vibe from when their PR push came out two months ago. So there's so many questions that are unanswered about this project. And we kept, you know, it was just, it wasn't a, it wasn't a product yet. Right. They weren't doing anything for sale. They didn't have a Kickstarter launch. So, you know, there's no need in pushing it. You know, maybe that's going to, that's going to be phase two. All right. So maybe they would come out with, okay, here's the real working prototype. So last week they come out out of the blue with the Kickstarter launch for the scribble pen.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And then my Twitter feed fills back up. Hey, scribble launch, scribble launch. It's on Kickstarter. So I went, okay, great. Number one, I went over there and it's already like 250 K on the first day. Out of a hundred, $100,000 goal. And it's at 250 K. And we're going to, we're going to come back to that.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Um, so I start reading through and I watched the video in full, read everything about the page. And then went for my second pass where I really started. Okay. Now I'm going to take notes and see what's wrong. So the first red flag, I started posting some red flags on Twitter. The first red flag is when a company feels that their own press release that was regurgitated by gear, gadget, and tech sites is quotable validation for their project. So what they did was they sent out a press release. All these sites reprinted their press release. And now they have gone back and linked to, hey, Gizmodo said this. Gizmodo said what you sent out in the press release.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Gizmodo says scribble ink lets users draw with colors that they find around them. As if Gizmodo has seen it and is claiming it as fact.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right. Right. So all these links say, pen lets you draw any color in the world. The pen lets you draw any color in the world. This pen can draw every single color in the world. This pen lets you draw every single color in the world. Are you kidding me?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' That's a monstrous red flag.

'''Myke Hurley:''' It's all the same.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' That they think that that's an important thing that they should include. It's fine that they did the PR push, right? But then to include that as if that's a validation for this product is a joke. That has no bearing on this project at all.

'''Myke Hurley:''' There's one thing I wanted to say as well. I'm sure you're going to talk about the video. Yeah. Why is it so weird?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So the video, all I could think of when I watched this video is that it's up until they got to the interview part, which was a little bit uncomfortable. Yeah, that was its own level of weird as well. I was uncomfortable doing our video, so I don't really want to comment on that. No, I will. Okay, you can comment on that. But the product video was an as seen on TV infomercial.

'''Myke Hurley:''' It was like more stock stuff. Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So you've all seen that brand. It's called As Seen on TV. It's the guy they had voicing it is probably related to Gilbert Gottfried in some way. And it's really commercially and late night 2 a.m. TV watching commercial. It's very poorly done.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Welcome to the scribble. Yeah. Let me tell you about all the great things that this product does. Yeah. It slices. It dices.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Shamwow. And then the interview with the creators is super weird. They're like weird close-ups on their face. They've clearly, I think, you can see at certain points, they've like overdubbed the audio, which is strange. Yep. It's weird. It's weird. And like smiles from the guys.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. I caught the overdubbing. The overdubbing was bad. I caught that for sure. And it was just uncomfortable to watch. There was no passion that they believed in this product.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah. They're like dead behind the eyes.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Like I'm watching the part now where they're talking about their product. If you've made this, you should be doing cartwheels in this video. Yeah. If you've actually made a product that you can scan a color in and reproduce that color in ink. Like the whole iPhone app bit is just like whatever. Like I'm not interested. Yeah. That is a product that people aren't buying and they spend way too much time demoing that part.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yes. So let's touch on that. Yeah. I mean that's a huge red flag. The majority, 90% of the video, if not more, not counting the interview of just the product stuff is on the stylus. Okay. And that's, okay, maybe that's a valid product. I could see that being a valid product and a valid Kickstarter. It's all digital and can do some digital color matching. And you have an app and you can use these different colors. Awesome. Great. Knock yourself out. Do your project on that. Then they show, they show a little girl doing the, with actually the ink pen part of it. She draws a single white line. And that's all you see. And I'm not even sure that's real output from that pen. Right.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I, I, I, I'm not convinced.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. It's.