Doug Stienstra just successfully raised funds for the final production of FlashPals using Kickstarter. They’re now available on FlashPals.com with more designs coming soon. He also just launched a program to offer FlashPals for school fundraisers and is working on other promotional options. Anyone can vote for new designs straight from the website, so give him your suggestion!
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Resource Mentioned:
- Your Big Idea: Successful Entrepreneurs have One Big Idea. Follow JLD’s FREE training & you’ll discover Your Big Idea in less than an hour!
Success Quote
- “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” – English Proverb
- “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” – Theodore Roosevelt
Business Failure
- We have heard this cautionary tale so many times. Partners can be great, but buyer beware!
Entrepreneurial AHA Moment
- Really!? There is no cute, cuddly, fuzzy flash drive cover on the market? Get out! Okay, pass the super glue…
Current Business
- Doug has a great kick-starter campaign rolling. He needs funding for more animals!
Lightning Round
- Find out why the more narrow your niche, the better off you are, 10 times out of 10.
Best Business Book
- The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris
Interview Links
Killer Resources!
1) The Common Path to Uncommon Success: JLD’s 1st traditionally published book! Over 3000 interviews with the world’s most successful Entrepreneurs compiled into a 17-step roadmap to financial freedom and fulfillment!
2) Free Podcast Course: Learn from JLD how to create and launch your podcast!
3) Podcasters’ Paradise: The #1 podcasting community in the world!
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Full Transcript
John Lee Dumas: Hire Fire Nation and thank you for joining me for another episode of EntrepreneurOnFire.com, your daily dose of inspiration. If you enjoy this free podcast, please show your support by leaving a rating and review here at iTunes. I will make sure to give you a shout out on an upcoming showing to thank you!
John Lee Dumas: Okay. Let’s get started. I am simply overjoyed to introduce my guest today, Doug Stienstra. Doug, are you prepared to ignite?
Doug Stienstra: Yes, John. I am prepared to ignite.
John Lee Dumas: Nice! Doug is the CEO and founder of FlashPals, which all started when Doug’s girlfriend wanted a cute flash drive for her birthday. Entrepreneur Magazine featured this product in July and only added to this interesting ride that Doug is currently on.
Doug, I’ve given a little overview of your business. Why don’t you tell us a little more about who you are and what you do?
Doug Stienstra: Oh yes. Sure. I grew up actually in Iowa, in small town Iowa, and I always kind of wanted to get out, see the world and go to different places and have always had this urge to create something because I wanted to leave something tangible behind in some way. I guess I eventually came up with this after a while and created the FlashPals line, and that’s kind of my first big project I’m really working on. I’ve been pretty passionate about it and I try to incorporate it with other interests I have as well, such as on the big animal [Unintelligible]. Since I was a little kid, I wanted to be the crocodile hunter and go around chasing snakes in my backyard and collecting them. So this has been just a fun journey. A great opportunity for me to incorporate that passion into my business. Yes, it’s been fun.
John Lee Dumas: It does seem like it was quite a journey and I really look forward to getting into that later in this interview. Before that, let’s transition into our first topic, which is the success quote. At EntrepreneurOnFire, we always start our shows off with our guest’s favorite success quote. It’s our way of getting the motivational ball rolling and getting people pumped up and excited for the rest of the content. So Doug, what do you have for us today?
Doug Stienstra: Sure. Yes. It is kind of two combined that I’ve really, really lived by. It’s so simple, possibly cliché, but I’ve always lived by “if there is a will, there is a way.” Then the other is do what you can with what you have where you are. That’s simply just taking whatever few resources you have and doing something with them because everybody has resources to produce extraordinary output.
We live in this country where we have almost unlimited and overwhelming amount of resources. With the combined resources and knowledge of people that I know, I’m convinced that I can literally do just about anything. If you don’t know it, you can learn it. There’s always a way. So that’s what I kind of live by.
John Lee Dumas: It is so true and it’s so incredible how as the years go on, that the Internet continues to develop that it’s not even just America that has access to all of these different informational products and ideas, but it’s the world because anybody now that can get on Google can, for all intents and purposes, answer any question they may have. That is just a really exciting time and it’s really leveling the playing field, which is going to make things very interesting.
Doug Stienstra: Exactly. I was going to say the same thing. It’s really leveled the playing field, giving just about anybody the resources to try doing a little entrepreneurial project where it wasn’t always like that in the past.
John Lee Dumas: So Doug, can we attribute those two quotes to anybody in particular?
Doug Stienstra: Honestly, I do not know where they came from initially.
John Lee Dumas: That is not a problem because using the power of Google, in the show notes, I will have links to who actually is at least credited with saying those words.
Doug Stienstra: Yes. The perfect example, yes.
John Lee Dumas: Perfect example. Now, let’s break down that first quote. Not too much, but let’s get into it real quick in how do you apply that first quote to your everyday life.
Doug Stienstra: “If there’s a will, there’s a way.” Well, just about in every single realm of my life from what I want to learn in the university, where I want to go and what I want to produce. So I’ve always been very passionate about learning and just had this insatiable desire to know the world and just understand everything around me. So that’s the first thing. If I want to know something, I find a book and I figure it out. That’s pretty simple. You go to the library or go to Google. There are lots of options for that.
If I want to go somewhere, I try to make sure there’s a way to make it happen. You don’t need a huge budget to travel the world, like a lot of people might think. I’m not sure if you’ve heard of couch surfing or there’s this great online community for basically you can stay for free in different people’s houses around the world. So even if you don’t have the resource to pay for a nice hotel somewhere abroad, you can meet great locals and just stay on their couch.
So that’s been a huge way for me. I’m a huge, huge traveler. I love going to new places. So yes, I think those are some of the biggest ways that I’ve incorporated it into my life. I went to Brazil. I studied abroad there for two years. Brazil is a country just full of bureaucracy and so much red tape to cut through. You had to get a visa and then get into their schooling system, and I did that all on my own instead of going through an established program because it would give me much more freedom.
It took a lot of research to figure out what are all of those steps that need to be crossed, but I figured it out. If there’s a will, there’s a way, and that’s kind of what I live by.
John Lee Dumas: Good tie-in. Now, let’s go over to the second quote.
Doug Stienstra: “Do what you can with what you have, where you are.” That’s almost saying the exact same. That’s why I put the two together. They both kind of communicate that same idea of if there’s a will, there’s a way. This is telling you how to do it. Do what you can with what you have, where you are. You have something. Do something with that. So I’m thinking instead of complaining about not having the money or the resources to accomplish something, just look around at what you do have. Start there, and then figure out how you can connect that with whatever goals you have.
John Lee Dumas: So let’s transition now into our next topic, and that’s failure. As an entrepreneur, there’s one thing that is absolutely relevant in all of our journeys. That’s failure because we’ve experienced it in some way, shape or form. It can either be as an obstacle, a challenge, or just an outright failure that we’ve encountered along the way. Those of us that are able to not let that failure define us, but allow it to teach us and move us in different directions are the entrepreneurs who are really successful.
Doug, have you had a failure or an obstacle or a challenge that you’ve encountered at some point in your journey? If so, how did you react to that?
Doug Stienstra: Yes, John. I have actually faced failure throughout this journey, like just about every entrepreneur I can imagine. For me, it was mostly involved with people I’ve dealt with. When I get into making a project and executing on that, and then collaborating with somebody, it makes me very excited. I’m just a very optimistic person, as you can tell. Even with my quotes, I always assume everything is going to work out. Which can lead to certain moments where I assume everything is going to work out with a certain person who we’re going to establish either a partnership or a contract to deal with whatever it is, and then it doesn’t work out or the person was trying to take advantage of me.
That’s something that I’ve definitely become more aware of and had to deal with a couple of times. It hasn’t hurt me tremendously, and overall, I would say that being optimistic and assuming the best out of people has by far helped much more than harmed me in any way because it opens the door to so many opportunities, assuming that just about every person around me could add some potential benefit to my project in some way, but then you’re going to have those times where the person isn’t necessarily trying to help you.
John Lee Dumas: Well, let’s take that down to the ground level. Have you had a failure or a challenge in this area that you would like to share with us?
Doug Stienstra: Let’s see. I have, actually. I was working. I was starting to get into like a type of partnership with somebody, and it didn’t completely work out, and we had worked for a while together. I guess from the beginning, you need to talk numbers. From the beginning, you need to lay down all of basically the terms of whatever contract you’re going to establish between each other because if you keep saying, “Oh, we’ll figure it out. We’ll figure it out,” and working together in the meantime, eventually once it comes down to the thing that matters to most people is who’s getting what percent, that’s when it becomes a bit more complicated.
John Lee Dumas: What ended up happening in this scenario?
Doug Stienstra: In this scenario, I actually teamed up with somebody, and it sounded like the best thing in the world for me. It’s so nice having a partner or somebody to work with. As we continued moving forward, it continued to seem good, and we kept kind of putting off our equity agreement. There’s going to be some type of share.
In the end, we could not agree on the numbers. I had been working on this project for a few years now, and I wasn’t ready just to give away a bunch of my company, and I guess we just couldn’t see eye-to-eye there. So I had to walk away from it and kind of it put a lot on my shoulders because we were already to a point where he was doing some of the work and I was doing some of the work. That’s what I kind of had to deal with afterwards, is how to proceed from there.
John Lee Dumas: So in 30 seconds, how would you say you learned from this failure? What was a lesson that you really pulled from this experience?
Doug Stienstra: A lesson that I pulled from it, I would say just be straightforward, don’t beat around the bush, and just communicate the essentials from the beginning between somebody because if you assume that this other person you’re dealing with is seeing eye-to-eye with you, there’s a good chance they’re not. So just make sure everything is straightforward from the beginning, and then continue to deal with them.
John Lee Dumas: Great! So communication is key.
Doug Stienstra: Absolutely, absolutely.
John Lee Dumas: So let’s transition into our next topic now and let’s kind of get into a brighter side of being an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur, every day is a new day, and we have these little light bulbs that come on as we’re moving forward, and they help inspire us and move us forward and we just really see the door opening as we’re understanding more and more about our clients, about our own business, about our marketing, and we’re getting feedback and it’s a great circular motion.
Doug, have you had an aha moment where this light bulb came on and you just said, “Wow! This is something that is going to be awesome. This is what I want to do. This is going to resonate extremely well with potential clients”? What was that moment?
Doug Stienstra: Honestly, John, I’ve actually experienced a series of aha moments. It’s hard to pinpoint just one particular moment, but it at all started, as you said in the beginning, when my girlfriend asked me for a cute flash drive for her birthday.
My first aha moment was when I started looking for a cute flash drive, which if you look at the size of the market of who uses a flash drive, it’s huge. Just about everybody who owns a computer owns a flash drive. I’m looking around and I just did not understand why is there no personality put into flash drives. Why isn’t there anything cute and cuddly? There’s so much potential with this one device. After I purchased something for her and it did not live up to cute expectations by any standard, that’s when I decided to start making my own.
From there, it was just a series of more aha moments, that at that point, I just made a few for her, and her friends liked them too, and quite a few other people started to like it. That’s when the next aha moment came. It was when I noticed she was not the only one that really liked this product. Quite a few other people did as well.
That’s probably when I really started to look into this, and from there, it just continued to make more and more sense. I started to think of all of the possibilities with this. I was using plush animals for the product and I’m a huge animal lover. So again, it made sense, and it was something I could easily be passionate about.
I guess finally, I was working at an [Unintelligible] for school as a peer educator, and I realized that kids need flash drives for school. That was probably the biggest one, when I started to consider the back to school market and how many kids nationwide need a flash drive for school. At that point, there was no turning back. It was just way too obvious.
John Lee Dumas: I totally remember the flash drives and what their uses were. I was a big user of one. I personally am 32 years old and very active online and with computers, and I just don’t really have what I see as a need for a flash drive for what I do with what I guess is a lot of cloud computing and a lot of storage in the, again, “cloud.” Obviously, you were getting a lot of this kind of feedback from people when you were moving forward with flash drives, but you kept your head down, you saw that there was a community out there that wanted this and you moved forward, and you made a product that obviously a lot of people want and a lot of people use.
So what was your response when people came to you and said, “Doug, don’t you see where the future is going? It’s all going into the cloud. Why is somebody going to want to carry a flash drive around when obviously they could just go into the cloud and pull everything out from a Dropbox or from Amazon S3?” What was your response to that?
Doug Stienstra: Sure. That’s a great question, actually, and I have been asked that. A lot more people are using the cloud. However, while people continue to use the cloud more, the flash drive market is not diminishing at all. It is continuing to increase.
Like you said, you don’t use a flash drive much at this point. You use the cloud for the most part. Do you have a flash drive?
John Lee Dumas: I do not currently own one. I definitely used one. Probably recently is seven or eight years ago, but I really haven’t had the need since then. But again, to fully more state my situation, I’m normally in front of one computer all day. I’m not particularly moving from one location to another, as I can see students doing from home to school, and back again.
Doug Stienstra: Right. Actually, it’s kind of funny you answered that way because almost everybody I asked says yes. So John, that was the wrong answer. You’re supposed to have a flash drive at least. Almost everybody that I talk to, whether they use the cloud or don’t use the cloud, they still need a flash drive for some certain scenarios.
So yes, people continue to buy flash drives. They continue to sell. Especially this younger demographic. It’s more of as computer use has expanded, more unexpected users are more commonly using the computer. So you have lots of mom bloggers now and you have the kids who are using computers and becoming more tech savvy.
My target demographic is less this super tech savvy computer user who is trying to get rid of these extra components and just threw everything in the cloud. It’s more the mainstream computer users who still relies on this technology, and quite a few people simply do not trust the cloud. They don’t like the idea of having their files floating around somewhere. Even the name “cloud” just implies something that could just fade away, and I’ve talked to so many people who see that as a real concern.
For my own uses, I feel much more comfortable plugging in a flash. It’s so much quicker and easier for me to plug it in, toss the files on there, and I can bring it to the print shop or wherever I need to go, and it’s just super convenient for me. There’s something about holding them in your hands. Yes. I think that it’s going to continue to expand.
John Lee Dumas: Well, what I love about what you did is that you didn’t listen to the critics that were coming at you and saying, “Hey, this is where the energy is moving. Why are you trying to hang on to a “dinosaur”? You definitely targeted your niche. You really got your unique selling point down.
Again, even myself at 32 and a male, if I was going to get a flash drive, would I really get one that’s all cute and fuzzy anyway? Probably not. So I’m just not your target, and that’s a great thing to know because why would you waste time, effort and money going after somebody like myself who is tech savvy, who uses the cloud, who even if they were going to go with a flash drive, would not go with a Flash Pal.
Doug Stienstra: Exactly.
John Lee Dumas: Right. What I’m consistently telling our listeners and our audience and just future entrepreneurs is that one of the key things you need to do early on is identify your niche, identify your unique selling point, and then sell to that, because if you’re trying to please everybody, you’re going to please nobody. That’s a very famous Bill Cosby quote, was “I don’t know what the secret to success is, but I know the secret to failure is trying to please everybody.”
Doug Stienstra: That’s a very good point, and that’s something from the beginning that’s just been a journey of trying to narrow down that demographic more and more. When I first started, I thought everybody was my demographic, which made it very difficult to market.
John Lee Dumas: That’s how everybody starts, Doug [Laughs].
Doug Stienstra: Exactly.
John Lee Dumas: I want to sell to everybody. There’s billions of people.
Doug Stienstra: Yes. That just seemed so obvious to me. Okay, the flash drive market is huge, and okay, I’ll just market towards everybody. But then as I got some of these concerns about the cloud, that made it so much easier actually, and it has by far helped more than anything.
John Lee Dumas: Absolutely. I’ve really enjoyed kind of war gaming this with you. I really hadn’t sat down and thought about your target demographic before this interview, but just hearing you talk of it, it’s just all of these issues and positives are just bubbling to the surface, and I’m really glad we’ve gotten the chance to kind of hash it over real time.
I think that this is very helpful to people who are listening and are potentially creating their USP right now that they can learn from you that listen, there is no reason that you need to try to sell to everybody. You need to figure out who your target demographic is, who your target market is, and then get that niche narrowed down and sell because there are still plenty of people within your target demographic. There’s no doubt about that.
Doug Stienstra: Exactly, exactly. A niche makes it much, much easier. Otherwise, you’re just going to be kind of fishing in the masses. You don’t know who’s going to bite or not. That’s much more difficult than finding that small group who you know will be interested in this, and it’s much easier for them to share that enthusiasm that you have for the project you’re working on.
John Lee Dumas: Here’s a quick random note, and I don’t really know obviously what your profit margins are with FlashPals and how much it costs for you to make one and how much you sell them for. I don’t know those exact numbers. So my question may not actually apply to you, but do you use Facebook advertising for any Flash Pals?
Doug Stienstra: I don’t formally use Facebook advertising, but I do use Facebook and other social media. Towards the beginning stages when I had just come up with the idea, I did use a little bit of Facebook advertising, but more for market testing purposes. I could see which keywords or interests that people had, which ones were most popular among people who liked FlashPals.
For the most part, I use Facebook for – I have a fan page, which you can go on it right now and like it if you’d like to check it out. There are some pretty cool things we do on there to try to keep everybody updated. I think that’s the best way to use Facebook, is to just try to build this audience and this fan base who, they really want to know what’s going on with your company like different developments, when a new product line comes out, promotional discounts and all that stuff, and then just some random fun and information too. Don’t keep it all promotional.
I put a lot of random, fun wild animal facts on there as well because I found a lot of my demographic happens to really like animals. So I’ve really kind of targeted that niche as well and it’s allowed me to not only just talk about FlashPals all the time, but it’s completely relevant to my business to share some interesting fact about tigers or any other animal in the wild.
John Lee Dumas: That makes a lot of sense. The reason why I brought up Facebook specifically is because we recently had Amy Porterfield on the show, and she’s considered the Facebook Queen by many. We were getting into Facebook ads and chatting about what was possible nowadays. What’s so beautiful about having such a targeted demographic and such an understanding of your avatar – and by avatar, I mean your perfect client for your product – is that you can just be so specific with Facebook about who you want, about where you’re at and showing up on whose pages your ad is actually appearing.
So for instance, if Doug, you know that a perfect demographic for you are mothers between the ages of 31 and 34 who have two daughters that both play soccer, you can literally get your Facebook ads to the narrowed down point where it’s only showing up on their pages so you’re not paying for clicks on people like myself, who are like, “Oh yes, I need a flash drive. Eww, whoa! I would never get one that looks like a tiger. I’m out of here,” and then you’re paying for that on Google. With Facebook, you’re not because you’re actually going to be having your ideal person seeing that ad, and your ideal person only.
Doug Stienstra: Yes. Exactly. That’s why it is really effective to use Facebook advertising, and I do intend on using it more for that purpose as I’m narrowing down this demographic more and more. It simply makes sense because it’s less of a waste of advertising to this giant crowd who most people aren’t going to pick up on it.
John Lee Dumas: We’re at now the five minutes left in this interview mark, and it’s pretty disappointing because I could continue to rap about this for a while because I really love the theme that’s come to the surface through this interview, which is target demographic and your unique selling proposition. Those are two such key things in every entrepreneur’s business for them to identify as early as possible and to market to as early as possible. So I’m really glad that FlashPals is just a great example of why that’s so important to narrow down.
That being said, we’re going to move into the Lightning Round now. This is my favorite part of the show. This is where I’m going to ask you, Doug, a series of questions, and you’re going to come back with some answers that you think could really be relevant to our listeners. Does that sound like a plan?
Doug Stienstra: It sounds like a plan.
John Lee Dumas: What was the number one thing that was holding you back from becoming an entrepreneur?
Doug Stienstra: For me, it was definitely just kind of a mix between my perfectionism and being obsessive about everything. Once I start a project, I get completely taken away by it and need to have it completely perfect before I execute. That made it so easy for me to continue with that brainstorming process of making this idea bigger and bigger and bigger. Putting it off and procrastinating, instead of just start small. Something is better than nothing. Create, execute, and then if it’s not working, move on and try something else. It doesn’t need to be perfect from the beginning, at least for myself, or I’ll simply never do anything because I’ll just keep brainstorming.
John Lee Dumas: Well, that, too, and we never really know what our target demographic wants until we release something and start getting feedback. So the sooner you can get to the feedback stage, the sooner you’re going to get to a good product.
Doug Stienstra: Exactly, and I needed to get there. That was the big thing for me with this, is just execute. Make something happen. Build a simple website. It doesn’t need to be the best website ever with super expensive web designers. Just start.
John Lee Dumas: What is the best business advice you ever received?
Doug Stienstra: The best business advice I’ve ever received, I’ve heard it from a few different businessmen and professors, and it’s fail quickly. It ties in very well with the last piece that held me back, was failing very slowly, trying to figure out what’s wrong, and then tweak it, perfect it, and that just makes the process take way longer. Execute. If it’s not right, move past it quickly. Don’t wallow and try to spend a lot of time over that one issue. Just make the mistake and move on as fast as possible.
John Lee Dumas: Absolutely. The sooner you can fail, the sooner you can improve your product, and you really can’t fail until your product hits your client base. So get it out there.
Doug Stienstra: Exactly.
John Lee Dumas: On that note, what’s something that’s working for you or your business right now?
Doug Stienstra: For me, I’m just at a stage where I have so many opportunities because I have gotten some very nice publicity through the Entrepreneur article, and a few different blogs have picked up on it. That’s definitely made it very easy for me to consider my options because I don’t necessarily have to scope out the entire scene of different stores I should try to market this towards because the stores will just simply contact me, which will make it much easier to do, obviously.
So that’s worked out very well for me lately, is just being contacted by interested customers and even suppliers who might have that perfect little niche of part of my supply chain that I need. So it’s made it easy so that I don’t need to start that whole process from scratch and start scoping it out myself.
John Lee Dumas: So being featured in the premiere Entrepreneur Magazine is what’s working for you right now [Laughs].
Doug Stienstra: Absolutely. Yes. It’s helped out quite a bit, believe it or not.
John Lee Dumas: So what’s the best business book that you’ve read in the last six months?
Doug Stienstra: Oh, the best business book that I have read in the last six months? I’m not sure how much of a business book it’s considered or not, and I don’t even know if it’s respected too much in the business world, but Timothy Ferriss. I like his book “The 4-Hour Workweek” quite a bit. He nails it on some pretty nice principles about productivity, and it just applied to me really well.
It talks about like the 80/20 principle of how 80% of your output will come from 20% of your input. While I’m not sure how dead on he is with all the numbers, it’s more of the general concept that’s really made me aware of, okay, what is the meat of the work that I do that’s really making the biggest difference? Yes. I think it’s a great book that everybody should check out.
John Lee Dumas: Well, to alleviate your fears, it is extremely respected in at least the entrepreneur world and it’s considered the bible by most.
Doug Stienstra: Oh great! I think you got to distinguish that. It’s greatly respected by entrepreneurs, but not necessarily so much the traditional businessperson.
John Lee Dumas: Which is not a bad thing.
Doug Stienstra: Right. Exactly. We think somewhat differently, I think.
John Lee Dumas: So Doug, this is the last question. It’s my favorite, but it’s kind of a tricky one. So you can take your time, let it digest, and come back with an answer that you really feel is a good one for our listeners.
If you woke up tomorrow morning and you still had all the experience, knowledge and money that you currently have right now, but everything about your business had completely disappeared, leaving you essentially with a clean slate, which is exactly where our listeners find themselves to a large degree, what would you do in the next seven days?
Doug Stienstra: Alright. Well, that is kind of a tough question. You’re right [Laughs]. I think if I lost everything with this, but I still held on to the experience and everything that I’ve learned from it, first, I wouldn’t waste time on marketing to that massive market of the masses, like we had talked about, and I would contact and start building an audience within that niche immediately.
Then beyond that, not just know who that target demographic is, but start accumulating an audience, a fan base. Provide some type of content to them – even before the product line is out – that is valuable, so that when the product line does come out, I can simply send them all an email or a Facebook update or whatever it is, and I already have that audience ready to go. I think that is a huge, huge hurdle.
I’m doing a Kickstarter campaign right now to raise funds, and that’s the number one thing they say before launching a Kickstarter campaign, is have an established audience first. There’s not just a bunch of investors sitting around on Kickstarter so much that just wants to throw money at different projects.
Build an audience who will be interested in that project that you’re working on. Then you can give them updates as you move along, instead of first making out a progress, and then, “Oh shoot! I don’t have an audience. What do I do now?” You got to start with the audience.
John Lee Dumas: Great advice. Doug, you have throughout this entire interview, given us some great actionable advice, and we are all better for it. So listen, give Fire Nation one last piece of guidance, then give your Kickstarter campaign a plug, and then we’ll say goodbye.
Doug Stienstra: I feel like I pretty much just have been saying the same different advice in different ways with starting…
John Lee Dumas: It’s a good theme though. We love it.
Doug Stienstra: Sure. Yes. Basically, that’s just what’s hit home for me so much, is just trying to move forward with this and simply executing, even if it’s something small, and use the resources you have around you because you can do so much with so little. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Contact anybody and everybody who may have some valuable advice for you.
I think that’s one of the biggest ones that I might not have mentioned, is people and connections that you build along the way, with the combined knowledge of everybody around you, you can certainly find whatever missing piece of the puzzle is for that project you’re working on. Somebody knows the right person. Just start reaching out to people and moving forward. This whole thing has been a learning process. I had no idea how to start a business, how to run a business, anything, when I began all these, but simply through Google, books, asking people around, you kind of figure it out.
John Lee Dumas: Alright. Give us a plug for your Kickstarter campaign.
Doug Stienstra: Oh, absolutely. Yes. Right now, I am running a Kickstarter campaign to fund the production of the two Flash Pals that I have right now. They have been out of stock, and I need about $2,500.00 to produce Jack the Giraffe and Zena the Zebra. I also really, really would love to go above and beyond that goal so that I can bring more animals to market as well, because so many people have asked me for a tiger or a monkey, with a platypus. Some of the most random animals, and I want so badly to make more of them.
I’d love to continue teaming up with different wildlife organizations who will be helped through the sales of each of these animals and online donations, just promote these causes, and I need some money to make that happen. So please, please check out my Kickstarter campaign. Just search FlashPals on Kickstarter.com or google it – FlashPals Kickstarter. We only have until September 16th, and it is done. So we’ve still got ways to go, so check it out.
John Lee Dumas: Wonderful! Well, we will definitely link all that up in the show notes. Doug, thank you so much again for your time, and we’ll catch you on the flipside.
Doug Stienstra: Awesome! Thanks a lot, John. Good talking to you.
