I Started a New Business. It Didn't Go Well...

when you do something or launch a product and it doesn't work, why does the productivity guy mess around with keyboards and get negative reviews and stuff? This is probably really affordable and really cheap and wait, you're kidding, right? I have never seen it. This before they glued metal weights to the top of the box, bringing more attention to those negative reviews, it's generally considered a bad thing by the people I spoke to about this, how was the reception to the video? I tried the YouTube G keyboard $160 plus negative. than I expected, honestly, towards you, which I felt bad about, but yeah, I hope my reviews were helpful and not too scathing.

The reason I'm making this video is because I've been documenting the journey for the last 7 years to grow this. YouTube channel and growing this

business

and I think it's good to share the victories but also the failures and the lessons and learnings along the way. Yes, the goal of this video is to share what are the lessons that my team and I have learned. since launching a product that was pretty negative, a pretty negative reception, to say the least, so let's talk about what went wrong, let's talk about the few things that went right and the lessons that I'm personally taking away from this, which I hope that happen.

It will also be somewhat applicable to other people watching this who are in similar positions, so in November 2023, my team and I launched a new brand we call light mode. You can check it at light mode.com and the first product. What we launched at this brand was a nice looking mechanical keyboard, but a few weeks ago my worst fears about this keyboard came true and a guy who specializes in reviewing mechanical keyboards on the internet made a video about the keyboard and ripped it to shreds. I really hope that YouTuber does more for you than a half-assed tech product, so the first thing I want to say to Hippo is thank you for making that video in this whole vibe like the entrepreneur Vibe, there's this whole idea of ​​haters where the People say, oh, how do you deal with haters and stuff like that?

I've always felt weird about the word hater, because haters imply like that, any type of negative criticism is just the result of the psychopathy of the person who likes to make the criticism by watching this video, yes, it made me feel really bad, but also thank you for doing it, thank you for reviewing this keyboard in a pretty fair way, obviously, there were parts of the video where I was like, yeah, it's fair that you did that. For the effect, you did it for entertainment, I understand that, but generally speaking, it was a very high integrity and a very reasonable review of the keyboard and secondly, that kind of watching that video and confronting the thoughts, feelings and things that accompany it.

In fact, they have taught me and my team a lot of things and those are the things that we are going to go over in this video, so yes, in November 2023 we launched the product, we sold a few copies and we are currently losing a lot. of money on this because we invested about $300,000 or pounds. I don't even remember what currency it is in stocks because when you buy a keyboard, when you design a keyboard and stuff, you have to place bulk orders, etc., etc. So far we've recovered I think 40K of them 40 50k something like that so we're still £250,000 in the red on this keyboard yeah imagine that and then imagine the keyboard like if you know someone who specializes in mechanics review . keyboards saying this, the keyboard is horrible, it's also an interesting place to be, yeah, I'm just going to talk about Hippo's reviews, comments and questions about the keyboard and then through the video I'll share some of the learnings we're taking away from this experience, what

business

does a guy make $1,000 courses by building a custom keyboard?

Is this all just a scam or cash grab? The first thing to say is that you know that a cash grab is a product. designed solely to make money or primarily to make money primarily to make a profit, for example, if these physical products are not a good thing if you're trying to do a cash grab, like for the record, um, but yeah, why do you do it? did? we do why we made a keyboard the main reason there were a few reasons for it, but basically the main reason is because I thought it would be really cool.

I've been interested in technology for the last while, like basically, my whole life. I'm always looking for the perfect productivity, keyboard, productivity, desktop, productivity configurator, this and that and the other, and I see a lot of reviews of these types of products and at one point I thought: you know what? Wouldn't it be really cool if we could make our own productivity products, like a keyboard and a backpack, and desk accessories and the kind of things that I use every day, that was the main reason why it would be cool. The second reason is more of a commercial reason, which is. that the problem with my current business is that everything is tied to me as an individual, if I decide to retire from making YouTube videos at some point the business will eventually die because since everything is Downstream with this YouTube channel, I am the one in the YouTube Channel I'm the one who teaches all of our courses and so in many ways it's not really a business, it's just a very

well

-paid job.

A business is a vehicle that solves a problem for people and charges money for that problem. If that's tied to an individual, you have what's called key man risk and the key man risk for this business is absolutely huge in the sense that my business with my team of 20 people and all this kind of stuff almost no one I would like to buy that business. because it depends a lot on me and so a question that a lot of creators are asking in the creator economy these days is how can creators create businesses that don't depend on them, so I

started

thinking: what if we launched a hardware brand? that could make cool products like keyboards, backpacks and so on, and what if we could name it something that

didn

't necessarily correlate with me and I was the one driving things and building them initially and then maybe for the next 5 years? 10 years, if the products are really good and the brand works, then people would have an association with the brand that is not related to me and that, in a dream world, the things that the light mode does, like the keyboard of the light mode and light mode. bag and the light mode Des desk accessories could we become like UGM monk or like grovemade or like these other very high quality brands that you don't know like Logitech or LG, which is just a big company, but like a small brand where when you look at a set of desktop videos you say oh, this is a clear mode product, it's the keyboard.

This is a clear mode product, it is the desktop organizer. That would be really cool and then that's a potentially navigable asset, it's not a business. You probably want to sell, but it's a business that I would then have the option to sell later if I decided I

didn

't want to do it anymore and that seems to be the next level of business, so why are we launching your keyboard? mainly because it's cool or I thought it would be anyway and secondly because it seemed like a good idea in terms of building a business that doesn't rely on my personal brand and then I got to figure out what the vision of the product and/or line is of products and basically it wasn't that sophisticated, but basically it was like you know I like productivity.

Technology. I tried many keyboards. I haven't tried hundreds of keyboards, but I've tried a few dozen, probably like I've had about 20-30 keyboards in my life and I wanted to build my favorite mechanical keyboard and in fact this is my favorite mechanical keyboard, it's the keyboard I use every day. and that I have been using since we first got the samples. It's been over six months and I think it's a really good keyboard. It's almost certainly not the best keyboard on the market. It is not the cheapest keyboard on the market. There are probably keyboards you could find if you tried a ton of keyboards that would be better.

I guess this for me, but I tried it somewhere between 20130 and more or less through all the rounds of sampling and all the testing and so on. My North Star was: is this a keyboard I actually use? and it's a keyboard I actually use. the goal is not to create a keyboard brand, the goal is to have a pretty basic mechanical keyboard for people who don't have one and who aren't mechanical keyboard enthusiasts if it's their first mechanical keyboard and they like the aesthetics and they like the like it sounds in the videos, then great, you can buy the keyboard.

We are not trying to compete with Kyron. We are not trying to compete with IQ Unix. These brands specialize in manufacturing mechanical keyboards. We are trying to be a reasonable all-rounder. mark at least that was the idea below how long did it actually take to make this? I also found other interesting things on his Tik Tok and Instagram. I wanted to tell you today about the launch of a new tech brand I've been building. in the last 12 months, didn't you literally say you spent 18 months building this brand? Let's go back to the last 18 months. Okay, let me play this real quick.

During the last 12 months, what happened to the 6 months? Ali. Okay, 12. 12 versus 18 months, it just depends on when you start counting. Do you start counting from the day we first drew the design sketch, which would be 18 months, or do you start counting from when we got the first sample and

started

? physical evidence, which was 12 months when I was filming the videos. I got confused in my own mind about what we were saying. This is if it feels strange to address some of these criticisms because it's on my mind. I'm like this. It sounds like he's making excuses, like he's not trying to make excuses.

I'm just trying to explain literally what was on my mind while these things were happening and what are the lessons we're learning along the way. What was on my mind while this was happening was that I had 4 hours at an Airbnb in Los Angeles where Harry, one of the guys we were working with, had flown in so we could film these videos in between a ton of book promotion he was doing. and I had something like this one day in Los Angeles and this 4 hour window between these two podcasts where I could film things with this keyboard.

I got confused because I hadn't heard anything about this keyboard for the last few months because the factory process to get samples and stuff takes literally months, so you give feedback and then 3 months later you get a prototype that says, oh, what? What were the comments I gave 3 months ago? I don't even remember, but let me. Try it, that's what ran through my mind. This is not intentional. I'm trying to fool the audience by saying this took 12 months and it actually took 18 months, it just depends on when you stop counting and yes, I had it. the conversation I didn't have the talking points clear in my mind lesson learned from filming marketing materials I need to be very clear in my mind what I'm really trying to say and what the feeling is I'm trying to convey I think a lot about what I say in YouTube videos, but in general when it comes to filming commercials for our course or random ad hoc filming that I have to do okay, Al, we need you to do it.

I have 2 hours and we need you to film these 15 things. I think it's less about ensuring that the message feels authentic, meaningful, and legitimate to everyone and more that it starts to feel right. I just need to get through. the list of things they want me to film isn't ideal, obviously, when something like this is released it can really impact my personal brand that I've been working hard to build for the last seven damn years hustling with the marketing of shooting. the materials just aren't useful um yeah the next price is the price i think the price for this is like $150 or something like that we change the price from time to time on the shopify store and it will be slightly different on amazon but order In that kind of ballpark, we wanted to position this as a very reasonable, affordable mid-range brand.

By doing so, you have also unintentionally opposed any other budget offer, because if the budget offer provides a better experience for potentially half the price of you. I have a big problem, yes, I think the phrase very affordable mid-range brand was worded wrong because very affordable imp implies budget and mid-range implies non-budget. I was speaking from the heart and generally when I speak from the heart I'm not that precise with my words, yeah a reasonably affordable mid range brand to me is like a $150 price tag, a high end brand in what As far as the keyboard goes for me it would be over 300, a budget brand would be like less than $100, so that's my conception of the mechanical keyboard market, but as far as why the prices are $159, basically, it's actually It's pretty difficult to build a keyboard like this, we don't just take an existing design and slap a logo on it which is in To be fair, Hipu thought what we were doing initially and then tried to do research to see what wasn't the kind of brand he wanted to build,where we just grab something off the shelf, slap it on the face, put a white label on it, and say, “Hey, we just built.” a keyboard, it was actually an annoying and complicated back and forth process and yeah, Hipp, you ask why it's taking so long, because like we're not Factory's top priority, this is nowhere near our top priority, which is another point of focus.

That's going to come further down the line. We're actually ordering relatively small quantities of units, like I think maybe 3000 units in total, that's nothing compared to the volumes that these factories in China deal with, so when We ask for feedback and get a sample, it takes months. for the sample to arrive, there are delays in shipping, things from Ukraine cause some delays on this. I think Chinese New Year delays absolutely everything since it takes me an awful lot of time to make this kind of thing happen, so why is the price $150 instead of $100? Are we trying to compete against these budget keyboard brands?

No, we can't compete against these cheap keyboard brands because they have economies of scale, they have volume discounts, they can negotiate better terms with the fact that in China they deal with a lot of actually these are based in China instead. from, for example, the UK and then they outsource the manufacturing to China, so they just have a much greater understanding of what's going on and so, yeah, we just can't, we can't compete against the budget brands, We're not trying to compete against budget brands, but probably the way I put it in the video was reasonably affordable.

Maybe for some people it means budget and therefore technically better than the Keyron keyboard, probably not. But what does better mean in the context of mechanical keyboards? I've tried all the Keyron keyboards and I personally prefer this one because I like the aesthetics and I like the way it feels. Is it worth $50 extra compared to a Keyron keyboard? You answer yes, because

well

, $50 extra for a keyboard that I use all the time, like 8 hours, plus every day, seems like it's worth it. Other people aren't going to have the same conclusion, so again, it's hard to really know, also, in case anyone is interested, this is the unit economics of the product, so we're selling the product for $149 and we charge by sending.

I hate charging for shipping, but shipping is annoyingly expensive, so we charged $15.90 for shipping, that was the shipping cost, the product itself is $734. Freight including duties is $8.23, fulfillment is $367 and payment processing is $577, then we have all the operating costs associated with this business, which are for example the agency fee called gen flow. that we were working with for this, the cost of warehousing, supply chain and warehousing costs the CR M all this type of stuff is not exact, it is not completely accurate because operating costs never are, but it is about the 40% of the cost of the product is operating expenses and that means if we were to sell these keyboards for $120 it would be a breakeven point and we wouldn't make any money on them, obviously we need to make money on them because this needs to be a viable business and we need to recoup the initial investment that we've made and being able to use that money to not fill my pockets like this, it's not going to fill my pockets like an extra $30 here and there, it's not going to make a difference, but we reinvest. get back into business to then buy the next round of keyboards or to then be able to pay for more factory samples, like the bags we're working on, which are delayed an absolute mile because at the same time we've been working on bags, but even the last 18 months of 12 18 months, depending on where you start counting, it's still not at the level that I personally would like it to be at in terms of quality and everything. it reinvests in that this whole thing is like a very long-term game of trying to figure out if we can make a business like this work.

You know, when we were selling our stationary products as the essential products, it was like a productivity planner. and it was like $30 or $25 something like that and I mentioned it once on YouTube and there were people in the comments absolutely outraged, oh my god, how can you charge $25 for a newspaper? I can go to Walmart and buy something similar. $7 is like yeah, you can, you don't realize that when you're trying to start a business from scratch you don't have volume discounts, you don't have economies of scale Walmart orders millions of units of their productivity planner and therefore they can charge small amounts of money, we order hundreds or thousands of units of our product and so we literally can't do that if we want to have any kind of margin, a 20% margin.

You know our online course business is about a 95% margin. This is a 20-18% net margin as it is annoying when building a physical products business or any type of business, when you are getting things going it is almost impossible to compete on price and generally advice that I give to people. What I have understood is that you shouldn't even try to compete on price as if that weren't the goal. Competing on price is the race to the bottom. Actually, the ideal is to target the type of people for whom $150 versus $100 for a keyboard, eh, doesn't make much of a difference, so I'm sticking with the price.

The next question is, actually, this is a good product. To be fair, I may be incredibly disappointed, but it's not exactly a bad keyboard. it has some board support and it's missing a lot of enthusiast features that you could get for less money, but it does what it says on the tin, it's a keyboard and it feels relatively good, but it does what it says on the tin and Honestly, it feels relatively well, the fact that Hippo said that to me was like thank goodness for that because that's what we were looking for, we were looking for a keyboard that does what it says on the tin, that looks relatively aesthetically pleasing subjectively and that feels relatively good. subjectively, so I'm glad that was the conclusion.

I'm glad that was one of the points Hippo makes in the video. The other thing we really wanted to do was make sure the packaging was pretty because it's just great. To have good packaging on a product, one thing I won't throw away is its packaging because it's surprisingly pretty with one of those nice slippery boxes, the manual makes a lot of sense and has all the macros you could ever need and there are some accessories. I guess one of the highlights is the braided cable. You know, I made fun of it. They braided the cable.

They braided the cable. But hey, it's good. One of the things you mention is the fact that we added weights. yes we added weights to make the product feel a little more premium because without the weights it felt very plasticky, we didn't want to go for an aluminum design which would actually add weight because aluminum again was more expensive and we didn't want this to be so expensive, so we added the weights and apparently, from the people I spoke to at the agency who specialize in building physical products, adding weights to a product is a pretty standard practice when it comes to building .

Technology and stuff just because the weights made a difference as it means it doesn't like to slide, it doesn't feel sticky, it just feels better to have the weights inside it without adding too much to the cost we decided to go for pretty high end keycaps high, uh, the Gator and yellow switches after testing loads and also, and he talks about the braided cable again, the cost of the braided cable, but it adds the sense of premiumness that I personally like. braided cables I thought braided cable was cool, so I thought, yeah, let's make a braided cable because why not, again the goal is to make something cool, so what was the hippo's biggest problem now?

You're probably wondering, hippo, why? I am very angry about this and honestly for me it is because of the fact that you are trying to appeal to an audience that knows nothing about keyboards but with a sense of authority as a productivity expert, you are essentially selling them a technology product that is worse than they could get. a little bit of research but because of his authority he's trying to get them to not do the research and to me that feels a little gross honestly it's hard to know how to respond how to respond to this um yeah we're aiming to an audience of people who don't know or care too much about mechanical keyboards who like the idea of ​​this being their first mechanical keyboard and to begin with, we're not saying it's the best on the market, we're not saying it's be the cheapest.

In the market, we're not actively trying to discourage people from doing their research, but we're also not like, come on, man, like we're trying to build a business here, we're not going to say, by the way, here's everyone. of the other competitors on the market, you absolutely need to do your research before deciding if this is the right one, it's like no company does it, if that's the bar for something not to feel gross, a company has to disclose that, for True, there are actually types. There are a ton of competitors that will make similar products, you should absolutely do your research and that seemed like a bit much, potentially a bit of a grandiose analogy, but since The Rock has his own brand of tequila on the website for that brand of tequila, he doesn't say that.

In fact, there are 400 other tequila brands and you should research and try each tequila brand before trying this one. If a tequila specialist were to review the Rocks brand of tequila, he might say that there are cheaper tequilas on the market. They are the best tequilas on the market, etc., etc., but most people who buy the rock brand of tequila do not do so because they taste tested the other 400 brands on the market and decided that that is the best and That's not the point. While we were building this, I was afraid in the back of my mind to say that I know there will be some mechanical keyboard enthusiasts on the subreddit or on YouTube who will review this and probably say bad things about I care and the answer was: Yes, I care because I want this to stand firm, but I also like to acknowledge that this product is not designed for mechanical keyboard enthusiasts.

If anyone knows what the difference is between Gator, Yellow and Cherry MX. red or blue is like they're not really the kind of target for this particular keyboard and that's fine, but obviously yes, yes, but because of your authority, you're trying to get them to not investigate and to me that feels a little bit. Disgusting, you know, this was one of one of the aspects like, obviously, someone in authority with a large audience saying something that I've done feels gross, obviously, that doesn't feel good and this needed a lot. I was really thinking. about this it's very much like if it's disgusting it's disgusting to not encourage people to do their own research before purchasing a consumer technology product for that reason every tech company Under the Sun would be a disgusting technology company because no one encourages people to research other brands before buying from them, that to me is one of the things I disagree with in the video as I can see why he says it and I think and I can see why he has a feeling This guy is using his authority on something X to make people not investigate.

If I said this is categorically the best on the market, then yes, I would agree, but I'm not saying this is the best on the market. What I'm saying is that this is the keyboard that I personally like. I like productivity stuff. I am a productivity enthusiast. My editor literally calls me a productivity expert. I get hired to give talks at Google and Facebook and so on as a productivity expert. As someone who cares a lot about productivity, I try to design a keyboard that I vibrate with and this is the V1 of that sucks. Don't know.

Don't know. I'll let you decide. Whoever is watching this, let's talk about how much money we've made from this so far. We have made 23,123 to 43 pence in sales. We have had 206 total orders as of March 13 and our conversion rate is 0.32%, which is not the case. amazing yeah that's how much money we've made from this so far so we're currently at least 200k in the red so let's talk about the lessons. Learned lessons. One important area is focus. This keyboard is a process that we now begin as finished. 2 years ago and in that time, this light mode brand has always been at the bottom of our priority list as a business because it's not a Coe Focus, you know, what we do is continue and courses and then I had my book and blah, BLA bla. the keyboard and light mode branding was always a bit complicated, where every few months we would have a meeting with the gflow agency to see samples and get feedback on them and then we would ask for more feedback and then 3 months. later we'll have another round of samples and stuff.

Now I have learned this lesson so many times that when you try to do too many things things go wrong, this is something Cal Newport talks a lot about in his new book,slow productivity, which is a really good book, the number one principle of slow productivity is to do less things and the number three principle is to obsess over quality. Principle number two is to work at a natural pace, but that doesn't apply here, doing fewer things and obsessing about quality is here. context, we didn't obsess over quality, the quality bar was whether this was a keyboard that Ali would use and it is and do less things, it was like we were still trying to do too much in the business so if I had my time again . and I realized I could tell myself something from two years ago, when we started shooting this: Don't take on a new project unless you can devote a huge amount of attention to it and make something Half Baked. worse to do than not to do the thing at allThe product was not the focus of anyone on our team now we decided that after this hiccup video came out it was okay B on our team is now the team member who is officially in charge of this B is great, he's been with me for like three years and now he loves He loves technology, he loves bags, he loves keyboards, he loves productivity stuff almost as much as I do because he checks and sees more things than I do, so that B is running this project and now we have someone on our team who likes to take the brand forward I think a big lesson is about the marketing message if I really think about it the marketing message around this keyboard was too strong, it was too on the nose.

I had an instinct when I was filming the videos again in that like a 3 hour filming session. 2 our filming session is the time it lasted in Los Angeles, among other things. I think this marketing message is too strong and I don't feel comfortable saying it, but then I allowed the pressure of the situation. be like no, but this is the only time and we have to make these videos because otherwise the keyboard can't start and we've already spent all this money and like, uh, yeah, yeah, yeah, period, like all those costs sunk associated with that it made me feel rushed it made me feel good I guess I fuck it up like moving fast and breaking things like maybe I'm overthinking it like I'm being too much of a perfectionist like who really cares like you know, will the audience? actually the care of the marketing message is a little stronger than what I personally feel, basically I felt very rushed doing the marketing, filming the marketing videos and so on for this and that was bad, if you could give me advice on how to do the process again, it would be Take your time and have my own comfort with the message and my own brand Vibe and everything like I'm the true north star instead of doing whatever it takes to get this out there because it's already taken too long. . being a big factor in the decision and in fact one thing we're going to do is re-record the videos and the ads and all that and on the website so that this keyboard doesn't oversell what it is because I like it.

Again, the good thing, the goal is not this, this is not a cash grab, this will not generate any profit, we will be lucky to break even on this, the goal is to have this as a V1 as a testing ground for See what it's like to build a tech product, whether it's something we want to continue, and if so, how many resources we want to put into it for future products. The goal here is to learn rather than make money. The goal is to learn and not win and build a brand that actually has good products.

What I wish I had done is reached out to all the mechanical keyboard reviewers on YouTube and said, "I'd love to get feedback from you." I will be happy to pay you for your time, if your expert opinion reviews this offline so we can improve the product. I wish we had done that and we will if we ever release the keyboard again and number two, what I wish we had done is do more user testing for normal people. It would have been pretty easy to do an event in London, get 100 people there and say, Hey guys, I'm going to do a Q&A, but while the event is going on, could you go to the side room and just give some comments about this mechanical keyboard?

How do you feel? What do you like? What do not you like? What do you think of the packaging? I believe too. one really one really big one really important thing that I've learned a lot recently is that the mode of trading that got you here won't get you there in that I think historically I've been pretty good at trading on the fast top move and breaking things I have an idea for a YouTube channel. Screw that, let's film video number one while I'm in bed. Brilliant. I have an idea for a course. Great, let's do it, let's launch it.

I have an idea for a video, let's do it with this bias towards action and just have an idea and just do the thing and publish it and then let the market feed back and all that and fine-tune and iterate like-built Lean Startup type of approach . an MVP build a minimum viable product publish it get feedback and then iterate that's an approach that's really served me well so far in my career over the last 7 years, but one thing I've realized and we talk a lot about as a team with other things that we also do is that I don't really think that approach will continue to serve us because now we have an established brand, we have an audience that hopefully knows my tastes and trusts me as an individual. and branding as a team and all this kind of stuff and actually releasing a product that ends up being really bad because we rushed it and it does a lot more damage than the value we get, like moving fast and breaking things and so on.

What we're trying to do is go from moving fast and breaking things to going slow to going fast. There's also another lesson that I'm learning, which is that before you shell out the 200 300K, whatever was on this bill. When I went to the factory I had a strange feeling about this. I thought: ooh, this feeling feels a little bad and I didn't hear that feeling. I told myself I'm being irrational. I told myself I'm being too much of a perfectionist. I told myself the classic Sun cost fallacy, as if we'd already spent two years on this, as if the agency's generation stream had invested as much time and money into this as if they hadn't been paid anything because it's a profit split, so it's like I feel bad because they've put all this time and effort and investment into this and now I'm regretting it at the last minute because something doesn't feel right and I thought about this for like a week.

I basically talked myself out of it by saying I was being irrational and saying no, like you know, it's a bad move to renege on this agreement we made with this company that's helping us with these keyboards. and those things. be like no, I actually feel weird about that, what I would tell myself is like look, if you have a bad feeling about something, take it very seriously, but we haven't decided yet if we're going to continue with the next product because we were going to do it. to release a bag, we have tested about eight different versions of this bag, but currently this is my daily driver, the pico design 30L daily backpack, this is a really good bag, none of the factory samples we have until now.

They're better than this bag and for me that's the bar, the bar is like what do I really use on a daily basis? I actually use this daily because I think the keyboard is good, but I don't use any of our current samples for the bag and so on until we get to that point where I think this is a must-have and then I have to use it every day and then it's on to the next stage which is getting real people to review it and to use it send it to we know a group of bag experts B we know people at nomatic I'm sure we know we can find people at Peak design who look at my stuff , as people who specialize in bags but also as other YouTubers who specialize in bags I know a bunch of tech YouTubers who love this kind of stuff.

What we would do is in the next round, once you are happy with it, we would send it to you to see what your feedback is and then we would make normal user. doing tests with normal people and just having an event where we ask people to try the bag and see what they think about it, we make selections for them and all that, all that is like Cal Newort's principle three of slow productivity, Obsessed with quality, I think. The mistake we made with this was not obsessing over quality and setting the quality bar for this to be a keyboard that Ali uses, but actually, now that I think about it, that shouldn't be the quality bar for a product we launched . the product should not be Does Alie think it is good enough? actually the product should be do we as a team think this is good enough?

Do we stand behind it and can we defend ourselves in court if someone said this product is actually okay? your opinion, but these are all things we did to make sure the quality was really high. We didn't do that with this product. If someone bought it. I hope you like it. If you don't like it, please email us. I'll give you a refund like with all the things we do um basically no questions asked money back guarantee uh if you don't like it for any reason and if you like it then great the last thing I really want to talk about Was there a comment on this video of this type? uh Ponzi Gaming Studios LOL it's one of those things that I feel like I can pay more for because of the research and the developer that went into it, however there was clearly a miniscule amount of research into the best of Ali ofal agreed and neither They don't even seem to have used an OEM, what the heck is an OEM OEM?

Well it looks like he found a keyboard that already existed, not like we really made a lot of changes to it and made his own keycaps for it, it probably would have been better to just make a set of keycaps. Honestly, you're probably right. Actually, it probably would have been better to make a set of keycaps because now that we're in the process of this, I realized. that a lot of the feel of a keyboard essentially comes from the keys and, like taking a keyron or a new keyboard that has a white base and just customizing the keys would have been a lot easier, would have caused a lot less pain, but we also want to want build our own keyboards we want this keyboard to be really good this is the V1 we would like the V2 to be even better we will do it if we decide when we decide to release a V2 we are going to make it do all the rounds of testing so this is me from the future now , a couple of days after filming this whole video, I contacted Hippo and he very kindly offered to join a Zoom call with me and so on.

I wanted to include some of the segments from this fantastic conversation I had with the man himself. I think a big part of our problem with this particular keyboard was that I think the marketing was too harsh. I agree with my hypothesis. It's just that we, TR, rebranded the light mode instead of trying to focus on optimization and efficiency, and this keyboard will help you type faster, which it actually doesn't. It's more like, we just like to make things that we think look good and are a pleasure to use and feel free to try it if you don't want to make any claims about this will make you more efficient or something, how does that work?

No, that fits perfectly with the way I look at keyboards and I saw what made it really interesting to me is that I saw that you had the twist of the product in mind, like there were elements like this, it feels great, this is amazing and It's perfect for keyboards because ultimately what keyboards are about is everyone having their own personalized experience. what they like the most and that ends up being what makes them more productive or to say that it makes them more productive is even an exaggeration because it's like I knew that before I had a really nice keyboard I didn't like to just sit down and type and then, a Once I got a really nice keyboard, I started to enjoy typing more to some extent, but yeah, I think the Vision aligns a lot more because it's ultimately more person-focused than product-focused. that I didn't actually agree with you and to get your take on it, there was a line where you said something like he's trying to convince his audience not to do their own research, which feels a little gross or something. like that and I was Like I was confused about that because no brand tells their audience.

By the way, guys, you should do your own research and every attempt to position yourself is like the only one on the market or whatever, and yeah, that was the part I thought about. Yeah, what was going through your mind with that kind of idea? Sure, yeah, for me, I guess my perspective is that of a YouTube guru, someone who is generally like you, a YouTuber, separate from you as a brand, like you're educating your audience. I guess it's best to approach things like best deals with productivity, best deals with getting things done, so generally when you position amark, you say this is the best.

You are using your authority as a productivity figure to then position yourself. As an authority on productivity technology, I guess that was my perspective, yeah, okay, that makes sense, so it's like I'm seen as a guru on this in one domain and I'm trying to transfer guru authority to another domain. which is kind of unrelated, yeah, nice, any final comments. I would love to include a little segment in the video that we're doing, uh, something like, yeah, just words, words from you to Chuck for the video, very broad, ultimately, just listen. for your audience listen to me as the keyboard player listen to everyone and I think you can make a really good keyboard yeah so if you watch to the end of this video I would love to hear a comment below.

What are you taking away from this? My goal for this is not to try to make an apology video or anything or defend myself like, oh my god, this guy was mean to my keyboard. I need to make things clear, there is no disc to sell, to make things clear, almost all of Hippo's comments were spot on, feel free to buy the keyboard if you want as well for what it's worth, thanks hippia for making the video and for causing this. introspection within myself and my team and helping us learn lessons for next time, so thank you all, have a great day, see you next time. bye