#069 - David Hewlett | From Acquisition to Innovation: Key Lessons in Scaling Tech Businesses

David Hewlett is an Entrepreneur, CEO of SmartLabels, and has an extensive background in Silicon Valley working in tech marketing for both Google and Youtube. On the episode, expect to learn about the utility of the SmartLabels product, purchasing businesses and how to improve them, how entrepreneurs find businesses for sale, vegan beef jerky, “hackathons” and other challenges entrepreneurs give themselves to produce a product as quickly and as cheap as possible, what changes were made to SmartLabels once it was purchased and how it improved, advertising with keywords, how SmartLabels can be used in an educational setting, how sometimes your products can be used in unexpected ways (like snake feeding schedules), past businesses he owned which had failed and what he learned, the process of having an idea and how to get it to market, navigating a learning disability through his younger years, red flags with suppliers, calculating risk, how to raise capital to begin a business venture, making sure your customer will buy your product before you build it, and, much more! Thank you for tuning in and hope you enjoy the show.

Shop for SmartLabels here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/SmartLabels/Homepage/page/D2BA86DA-42AE-48F3-92B6-2A1D67A48142

Download the Luxy App here: https://www.onluxy.com/?srsltid=AfmBOorQE6gOpRh5iTLYhBH2zLFzKX0WGhAc_oLC3EETPegghQkvcVUg

Thoughts shared on the podcast are purely our own and do not represent the views of the Anglophone South School District or the relevant jurisdictions associated with my guests.

Transcript

Lucas Clarke (00:00.595)
All right, David Hewlett, thank you so much for coming on today,

David Hewlett (00:04.952)
Thanks so much Lucas, I really appreciate you having me on.

Lucas Clarke (00:07.721)
Wow, it's an absolute pleasure. So you are currently the CEO of Smart Labels. It's like an organization company. I guess tell me a little bit about kind of how you got into this organization, into this company and kind of what the main features of it are.

David Hewlett (00:23.566)
Yeah, I actually bought this company so I can't take complete ownership for the idea. But I kind bought it in its infancy from an engineer and I saw a lot of potential for using smart labels as an organization tool. Not just for all kinds of people, but for myself. We had moved into our place in 2020 and...

Lucas Clarke (00:30.058)
Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (00:45.087)
Mm-hmm.

David Hewlett (00:50.67)
had two years and we still had boxes that were unpacked and we didn't know where things were. I was looking for a wifi router and I spent 45 minutes unsuccessfully looking for the wifi router which I eventually found another day. I know.

Lucas Clarke (01:01.863)
It's always the most obscure things too. Like the most obscure thing, you're like, where's that one spatula we had three years ago?

David Hewlett (01:07.854)
You know the one with Yoda on it. Yeah, so you know I saw a lot of potential for it and and so many more things that I could do with the app and applications. You know the app is targeted towards consumers. Which is great because it means that we make the app very easy to use. We have people that are over 75 years old. Using the app without having to reach out for help. It's it's that that easy to use.

And so it's just, it's been very fun to have it for more consumers, but also be able to get it out to businesses, get it out to teachers, which we may talk about today, and administration, and all sorts of people that are using it in fun ways.

Lucas Clarke (01:51.909)
Yep.

Lucas Clarke (01:59.221)
So walk me through, how are you finding companies you can potentially purchase? What is the process for reaching out? I wouldn't even know where to start with the questioning on that, but so I guess what can you kind of tell us about that process?

David Hewlett (02:13.302)
Yeah, it's well first it's fascinating as a learning experience in general. I'm an entrepreneur at heart, so I love talking to other entrepreneurs and finding out like their journey and what they what they've done. I actually started looking for companies in 2015 and got close with a couple and they were all across the board. One was a yoga mat company. One was a gourmet sauce company.

Lucas Clarke (02:16.309)
Mm-hmm.

David Hewlett (02:42.734)
and the other one was still in food. That was, it was a, a vegan beef, jerky company of all things, right. But like all across the board, right. I looked for opportunity and exciting products over something specific tech, you know, usually I do like to have a little technology involved in it too. So the second time, I, after those three companies, I looked at, I didn't acquire any of them, any of them for.

different reasons and one there was a lawsuit that was hadn't been disclosed second one there was I made an offer and The company accepted a different offer and the third one sort of fell apart but so then I went back to work and realized I didn't like the tech marketing world anymore. And so Which is why I've been looking to buy a business in the first place

And so I went and went after it again and there's a website called micro acquired.com which is now just acquired.com. But essentially what they offer is businesses between the value of zero in revenue per year to 10 million revenue per year and no brokers. So you're just having a conversation with the CEO and again about finding their journey.

Lucas Clarke (04:03.701)
shooting them an email.

David Hewlett (04:05.568)
Yeah, and it's so cool. mean, one thing that's great about that site because those businesses are so small, they usually have very niche focuses, right? So I actually ended up putting a bid in on a company that did scheduling and invoicing for ice skating rinks. It was actually a Canadian company. Surprise,

Lucas Clarke (04:28.775)
Okay, yeah, No shorter device up here.

David Hewlett (04:32.736)
Right. But you know, I talked to the guys and they were like, Yeah, well, you know, you know, we saw these ice skating rinks for our hockey team, they were using Excel. And we thought, you know, why don't we just give them something that they can use. And so it wasn't a complex product. wasn't anything crazy, but but a fit of market need. And so it's really neat as an entrepreneur to go talk to other entrepreneurs about how they found, you know, product market fits.

So it was a great learning journey. And of course, the learning doesn't stop once you buy the company because then you're learning all about that industry.

Lucas Clarke (05:09.973)
Well, yeah, because it's going into education, kind of go like I always kind of say it's a completely different world from anything kind of like business related because you grow up in school, you go in school, you study in school, then you start teaching in school. So you're kind of in a weird way, like in this like micro kind of shell kind of going into education. So you're not really exposed to a lot of the like

supply chain management. like, okay, I kind of know what that is, but like, not really when you're teaching social studies, you don't really think about that when you're teaching what the cold war. But I guess that could be an interesting thing to get into. But so I guess you have a pretty large background in tech in general, and like in promotion and marketing. So once you successfully acquire this business, like, what's the first step once you've actually acquired it?

David Hewlett (05:59.054)
Well, open the mouth and start the fire hose, I guess. You know, you get in and you find out there's, this is wrong. Uh-oh, OK, like we got to fix that. But you know, I saw a lot of opportunity in promoting this business. The person who started the business, basically gave himself a hackathon. For those of you who may not know what a hackathon is, you just, it's like a

Lucas Clarke (06:02.719)
Yeah.

David Hewlett (06:27.884)
You go for 24 hours usually or 48 hours. You get maybe $2,000 and you have to create a company or a product and then pitch it afterwards. And so his goal against himself was he gave himself $3,000 to create a company that he thought could be better than what was out there. And so anyway, so he built this thing and he got it done and he was once he was done with it, he was done with it. So it really was a minimum viable product.

So it worked, you know, So minimum viable product is what is the absolute minimum you can do to create a product that people will buy that functions correctly, right? So what the product did when I bought it was you could put a label on a storage tote or bin or tub, scan it, and you could add a name and description of what was in there.

Lucas Clarke (06:58.569)
What do mean by that?

David Hewlett (07:25.006)
as well as a picture and and with that they also He also had items you could add items underneath each label and that was with with names descriptions and pictures so that was the minimum viable product and he basically was just like Targeting it on he just sold it on Amazon And he had a few keywords he promoted it with and that was kind of like where he started So when I when I took it over especially being a marketer

Lucas Clarke (07:53.843)
Mm-hmm.

David Hewlett (07:54.058)
I said, my gosh, there's so much opportunity in marketing just on Amazon alone where, he had 15 keywords he was using to advertise on. those included words like smart labels, which were obvious ones to have. Right. But, you know, maybe he didn't have inventory management tool or something like that, or things that people would be searching for on Amazon that this, this tool would, would help. And so

Lucas Clarke (08:18.325)
It sounds like when you don't know what you're looking for, you'll just type in like an overall idea and hopefully it'll bring you to that. Okay, I see what you're saying. Yeah.

David Hewlett (08:23.848)
Yeah, or like, if you're like, organize, you know, storage bins for organization, right? If that's like, if you're looking for that, and then it's like, well, I didn't know I didn't even know about the product. Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (08:33.919)
But people also buyed, sorry people also buyed and they'll have like the little thing there, yeah.

David Hewlett (08:39.264)
And so, and there's a great way to take advantage of people while they're in the mindset of, I'm thinking about organization and storage and here's something I don't know about. I'm going to go just like, I'm going to go take a look. and then they're like, Whoa, this is pretty cool. Yeah. It takes a certain person, I think, to, to, to, to, to use the product because you have to want to be organized and have the motivation to be organized, which are two things that can be hard to have sometimes. but, but for the people that.

Lucas Clarke (08:50.773)
it.

Lucas Clarke (09:02.517)
Yeah.

David Hewlett (09:07.394)
that like to be organized and like to be able to find their stuff. It's just fantastic.

Lucas Clarke (09:12.865)
And for even like what you've seen so far with education, like if anything kind of targeting the workplaces that have to be very organized all the time and everything, the amount of, that's word I'm looking for, the amount of like filing cabinets that we have everywhere and you have no idea what's in them. Cause even just put them on a filing cabinet, not even as a storage tote, like putting it on everything can definitely help. But like what are, from your experience so far, kind of the review.

the reviews that you've had, what are teachers and administrators in the school districts using this for outside of maybe even just the filing cabinet or the storage tote area.

David Hewlett (09:50.806)
Yeah, you know well, so the ones you mentioned are definitely definitely true, right? And you can't even have to go in the. You can go. I mean you can go down to the file level, right? You could put a label on each file and know what's in each one of those, which is great. And again, the storage totes for knowing where the toys are or where the materials are for this project or you know for dissecting this frog or whatever you're to do and whichever kind of class you're doing right. But like we had we had a school that was that loaned out.

Lucas Clarke (09:55.2)
That's the bread and butter for sure.

Lucas Clarke (10:09.075)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah.

David Hewlett (10:20.686)
Chromebooks to their students for students who didn't have access to those things. And so they put a smart label on the Chromebook and that was their way of knowing which student had which Chromebook as their loaner. And so we have those kind of things. We have them using it like an office manager might where they've got all the stuff that's in the admin building that they want to be able to track like the chairs and the

Lucas Clarke (10:35.989)
Hmm.

David Hewlett (10:49.49)
And the desks and all those things right so they have a QR code on them to know like how many of these do we have? When one of them's gone let's take it out of inventory and know that when we go back to look and when we're thinking about purchasing stuff for next year What do we have what do we not have? And so it's a great way to track All the materials that you're using that you may be thinking about that I don't know how often they buy them if it's annually or

quarterly or whatever, but it can be real help there.

Lucas Clarke (11:19.923)
Well, even just knowing what your inventories are, because I know even sometimes people will forget to go onto the sheet, but you've kind of always got your phone on you, so you can always kind of pull out that phone, take the quick scan, you'll always be able to see it. you don't really have to go to someone else to say, what is actually in this thing? It's kind of just a more convenient, you're removing a barrier, essentially. This is kind of what I'm hearing, which is, yeah.

David Hewlett (11:39.607)
Yeah.

So I think, you know, I didn't quite understand the true value of the product until I used it myself. And the true value isn't necessarily that, you know, you have, you've done your stuff and you have it organized. The true value is not having to remember where everything is, right? So like, it's kind of crazy how much head space people take up with

Remembering where one thing is they use once a year, right? That's a space in your brain that is like full of something that can't is not full of something else and so once we did our garage and got all those boxes done and we labeled everything our garage is it looks amazing now and I literally like I you know, I do my Like I do the lights around the household and so I know which light I'll take a picture of it and I know

that that light bulb, the replacement light bulb for it is in this bin. And I can go in and find the light bulb and I've taken a picture of what it looks like too. So when I go in the bin, I'm like, here we go. Right. I don't have to think about where did I store the light bulbs? Okay. Now which one is the right light bulb for the thing? I just, it's, right there. And now I have this freed up space to think about whatever is more important, like other parts of my business or my family or whatever it might be. And I think with teachers, like,

Lucas Clarke (13:03.561)
Yeah. Well, because you're also.

David Hewlett (13:08.248)
There's so many things you guys have to keep in your heads. There's pressure. There's how the kids doing, how they doing emotionally. Are they all getting along? How are they gonna do on the test at end of the year or month or whatever it may be? I don't want you guys to have to have that up there too of like, know exactly where this thing and this thing, you can just let that go. And so I think it's huge.

Lucas Clarke (13:31.411)
Yeah, because I'll be completely honest when, like, let's just say I'm in this new semester and last semester's final exams from the same course or somewhere, I'm like, I have no idea where I put those. And like, I'll find a cabinet and I'm honestly, think I, my old classroom, I probably had about eight or 10 cabinets kind of across the room on the side. And the amount of times that students probably saw me like open every single one of them and just go, which is probably just

It's probably just my own lack of organization in general, but like, the students finish a test, you mark it, and you kind of just plop it somewhere. Like, again, that would also require the effort of kind of going in and actually organizing it to begin with. But definitely if you have that to help you as a barrier remover from the very beginning, definitely something that's definitely of value. And so, yeah, go ahead.

David Hewlett (14:04.61)
Yeah.

David Hewlett (14:22.19)
I was gonna say, and the other nice thing for educators is that because this is a consumer park targeted tools, it's not very expensive, right? So you can get a label pack for $16 and then, and you can use 12 labels for free for life. But if you want more, it's 14.95 per year. And that's not a huge, that's not a huge weight on your budget, right? I mean, like that's something that's easy to do that can, that,

teachers and administrations have access to. And that's one of the things that I'm happy about with the product, that it is so accessible.

Lucas Clarke (15:00.846)
And at the very beginning, like I guess, how did you target the kind of education? I mean, obviously we've kind of come together here in the education realm, but like, how are you kind of finding your target audience for this product?

David Hewlett (15:15.432)
well, I try to think through the best use cases for the product. Right. And so typically, right. Like our bread and butter is people who are organizing their garage. people who have a self storage unit, and small and micro businesses, those are kind of like the three main areas. And so I do a lot to focus on that, of course, just because there's so many people within those, those categories. but

I actually did. I probably discover a new category of ways that people are using smart labels every every week, maybe maybe every two weeks. I'll say that the craziest one was a snake breeder who, yeah, a snake breeder who was putting the labels on the on the snake. Cases are not cages in there, whatever they're in the cases and.

Lucas Clarke (16:02.705)
Yeah

David Hewlett (16:13.326)
Because snakes feed on very irregular schedules. Snakes feed on very irregular schedules, right? Smaller snakes eat more often, bigger snakes maybe less often, but you've got all these snakes that were born at different times that need to be fed at different times. And so they would put the smart label on there and then we have an expiration date feature and they were using that as a countdown for when the next time they had to feed the snake was. And so they would just get reminder on their phone. hey, you need to feed these snakes today. And so I was like,

Lucas Clarke (16:14.635)
There's a reason I don't know.

David Hewlett (16:43.663)
Okay, I would never have thought Snake Breeder was the target audience here. And I don't know that there are one that's worth going after. But, but hey, there was one that was just like, okay, I did not think that was going to be something and the so it's really fun because you get to see these really creative ways that people are thinking about organization and thinking about using the technology.

Lucas Clarke (16:45.727)
Hahaha

Lucas Clarke (16:55.871)
Hahaha

Lucas Clarke (17:07.605)
Yeah, because you're kind of just like, you know what, I'm going to put this out in the universe and wherever it goes, it's going to go. that's, yeah. And so I guess for kind of putting together a team, because when you kind of acquired the product, is it just you? Are you with a group that's acquiring this or like, what does that kind of look like for who are the people that you're going into business with? And like, how do you kind of characterize?

David Hewlett (17:28.33)
Yes, I acquired this one and I was open to having the founder work with me, but he really wanted to work on some other stuff. so I just said, okay, well then it's just going to be me. And I did get some of his time as part of the deal, but I had to go out there and find more resources. As an entrepreneur, especially if you don't necessarily know which direction your product is going to go in.

You have to, it's nice to create flexibility. So I mostly use vendors at this point to facilitate the work I need to do. I have a developer in Canada. I have an artist in Australia. I have a printer in Colorado. And so I spread the workout across these different teams. those are, those essentially are the extensions of my team until I get

going in a business well enough that I know, this thing is gonna be here, this is a bread and butter thing, and I can start hiring to backfill for that. But it gives me a lot of flexibility to shift directions when I'm working with vendors as opposed to hiring somebody for something specific that may or may not be there six months down the road.

Lucas Clarke (18:51.283)
Interesting. when you're, like, have you ever started multiple businesses that have failed?

David Hewlett (18:59.586)
have, yes.

Lucas Clarke (19:00.915)
And so what has kind of made this one work out? Do you think I know we've got to talk to him some reasons, but I guess the reason I ask is I haven't talked to many entrepreneurs on the show before and they're kind of talking about the, like, it's only three to 5 % of companies that actually lasts or actually make it more than a year or two. Like what are some of the kind of, to me, it's almost the simplicity of the smart label. It's like, it's just something that's so,

Like, it can be used by anyone and for like the most mundane task that can be actually made so much better. But I guess, what did you kind of learn from businesses that potentially didn't work out?

David Hewlett (19:42.552)
Well, I learned a lot about those businesses, about building businesses, and about myself. I had three companies that I started before I went on the buying a small business search. The first one was a tool for small businesses to help them with their advertising on Google. Again, it seemed like such a simple thing. And it did work, and it did help businesses advertise.

One, I learned that the advertising dollars they were spending on Google, these small businesses, was not their biggest problem. And two, that in order to get to a price point that worked for them to acquire them, that would be too much money. And so even though I had a great product that worked really well, I couldn't get people on the phone in a cost effective way, and I couldn't get people online to.

put the time towards it to get to start using the tool. So that was an interesting one. The next one I did was called Drink and Hunt. And it was a scavenger hunt bar crawl played on your mobile phone. And you would just get with teams and then you compete against each other in a city. And you'd follow clues to find bars. And it was super fun.

So this one was really successful on a product level. Had 6,000 people go through the game in the first year. People for the next five or six years were still texting me, hey, are you still doing this? I can't find the app out there anymore. We want to do another event with you. Right, but that one was I couldn't get, again, I couldn't get enough people into the game at the right price for it to make sense. And then the last one was a wine club.

Lucas Clarke (21:36.351)
Yeah.

David Hewlett (21:39.038)
an online only wine club that was focused on people who know what kind of grape they like to drink. Right. So was like if you like your Chardonnay drinker and you don't drink anything else. Right. There wasn't a wine club that was really like for that person. There was always like maybe one Chardonnay but then there's three other kinds of wines that they're never going to drink. Right. So this wine club was focused on finding more Chardonnays within

the Chardonnay category. And so that was the goal there. But what I realized was, one, you can have an idea that's great and it can seem like a no-brainer, but you have to be able to reach your audience. And sometimes your audience doesn't see it the way you do, Or sometimes it's price point. The problem with that Chardonnay business is,

the people were like, well, this is my go-to wine at the grocery store and that's what it costs. And you can't charge me any more than that or I won't try it. And they tend to drink the cheaper wine. So anyway, that made it difficult. And so again, but also what I learned about myself is that like I can build products, I can optimize businesses, can do all these things, but one, I'm not great at an initial sale, especially to a larger company and

Lucas Clarke (22:38.633)
Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (22:45.544)
Yeah.

David Hewlett (23:02.318)
and and to like I focus on the product a lot and What you really want to focus on is like your product market fit actually are people actually gonna buy this thing before you kind of put the time in and so What I what I what I wanted to leapfrog was the product market fit problem Which was you know, I was starting these businesses which were fun great ideas But what I needed to find was a business that had already done that and then I can

optimize it and work on the product to build it out. And so that's why this company was a good fit. that's an incredibly long-winded answer to your question, but that's kind of how the process kind of worked for me for finding this.

Lucas Clarke (23:41.128)
No, I love it. Yeah, that's great.

Lucas Clarke (23:48.853)
Cool, because I've always kind of wondered even for, like, OK, you have this idea in your head, but what are the steps and how do you kind of go through those steps to actually getting a product to market? what are some of the barriers that, OK, I have this idea for a smart label if you were the founder of it? how do you know where to look for for printing? I guess, how does that kind of work for you?

David Hewlett (24:15.628)
Well, when I bought the company, the engineer I bought it from his his mom was actually printing the labels for him. I was like, this is is this is you can't write this stuff. Right? Like, and so, you know, I drove to his mom's house and I picked up the printer because I was like, I need to have the same printer. When I bought the company and I got to be his mom, she was very nice. And then I was

Lucas Clarke (24:28.307)
This needs to change.

Lucas Clarke (24:37.065)
Ha

Lucas Clarke (24:43.571)
You

David Hewlett (24:44.206)
I was printing the labels here in this office where I'm sitting right now. And as I was able to start growing the business, I was like, my gosh, I am spending so much of my week printing. And each one of our labels is unique. So like you can buy lots of packs of them and they won't overlap. And so, but that makes the printing process a little more complicated because you can't just put the same one in the same pack. Every pack has to have the different stuff and has to be printed that way.

Lucas Clarke (25:07.091)
Yeah.

David Hewlett (25:14.254)
The printing process was was more complex than a normal printing job. And so as that grew to a point, I was just like, I need to find somebody I need to find a company that can do this for me. And that took a little bit of work to, you know, I worked with more than one printer and there were clear hurdles of like them understanding. Hey, each of these things be unique. They need to, you know, the labels need to stick on things. And, you know, it was

Lucas Clarke (25:25.877)
Mm-hmm.

David Hewlett (25:43.694)
Worked with a printer that didn't work out and I finally found one that did and was like wanted to get creative with the process and how they printed it and So we kind of optimized it over time which allowed the business to grow even bigger because you know now I can get the print jobs done there and Yeah, but I think you know, maybe it's just an entrepreneur's mind, but

I grew up, I grew up with a learning disability and and it took me a while before I found the tools that that helped me succeed in life and be able to do school and go to college and get an MBA. What that teaches you is that no brick wall is is the end, right? Like you can't stop when you hit the brick wall. You just have to.

Find the way around it. Try an effort approach. Go under, go over whatever it is. That is one of the things, one of the gifts that I learned is really taught me. was like there is no wall you can't get around it. So as an entrepreneur, when I when I hit the wall, right, it's not a give up point. It's a alright problem solving time. Let's go. Let's just figure it out. There's gotta be a way to do it. And you know, most of the time there really is. There's something if you just keep banging your head.

and banging forward. that's the way my brain works. That's the way that I think it, that's what it takes, I think, to be an entrepreneur and to turn an idea into something that's out in the world.

Lucas Clarke (27:06.709)
You

Lucas Clarke (27:23.221)
I it. I only asked that question because one of my students that I had before, they actually started a t-shirt company while they were still in high school. And so I asked questions and he's like, yeah, I was dealing with this one t-shirt creator in Turkey that they made shirts at like $4 a shirt. Then they kind of effed him over for like $500. It was a crazy thing. guess my question is, there's so much that goes into, I guess,

David Hewlett (27:43.971)
Mm-hmm.

Lucas Clarke (27:51.189)
for allowing you to just work on the idea of it where the other parts kind of take care of themselves while you're kind of innovating it. And I guess it's like, what do you look for even as the printers, for an example, of how to know that you're building a trustworthy business relationship? Like what are some of the red flags that you see from some of the places that you start to look and start to contact?

David Hewlett (28:13.794)
I guess some of that you pick up just by talking to people. You're talking to people and you're saying things that just sound too good to be true. Usually if it's too good to be true, then it is too good to be true.

Lucas Clarke (28:31.573)
So is there anything that you can share of like that was a too good to be true without like singling anyone out?

David Hewlett (28:36.748)
Well, yeah, the first printer that I used, he like, I went and met him and he showed me the paper and I was kind of like, okay, he's like, yeah, we're gonna get this for super cheap and like, we're gonna be able to print this no problem. And I had printed these things at home. So I knew that it was complex, right? And so I kept trying to explain it to him and he's like, yeah, it's not a problem. We print stuff all the time. And so, I probably should have got it at that point. Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (28:52.965)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (29:02.773)
Like when they don't really get what you're saying? When they're kind of dismissing what you're saying? Okay, yeah.

David Hewlett (29:06.742)
Like like yeah, like you're a salesperson. You're not. You know you're you're you just want me to spend money with you, so I'll print with you like you're not as worried you want the sale to get done so you get your commission. You're not worried about what happened at the back end. You know they'll probably be able to do it, but it may be more complex and so you know it was that one almost I wasn't able to almost ran out of stock and wasn't able to deliver and then the second time around they they they raised the prices on me significantly, probably because they didn't realize how.

how complex the printing job was. Yeah, exactly what I told him at the beginning. Right, and so you can kind of pick those people out a little bit. I find that the more nerdy the person I'm talking to, the more likely it's gonna be a good relationship, partially because I'm a nerd at heart, but also because a nerd will try to understand better, right? They'll be like, that's interesting.

Lucas Clarke (29:37.333)
How complicated that actually was when you told them.

Lucas Clarke (29:59.615)
feel it.

David Hewlett (30:06.254)
Do you like to do it this way? Like what happens if you do this? And you know that person is hearing you and is excited about it. you know, that is a good, if somebody can meet your nerd level, that's probably a good partner to work with. And most of my current partners.

Lucas Clarke (30:19.007)
Yeah.

Well, it's the difference of, I'm sorry, it's the difference of like, I'm gonna listen to you but let it go with the other ear versus actually going back and forth with you and actually trying to further a dialogue, like maybe before they're even involved of how to improve the product or how to do et cetera, but yeah.

David Hewlett (30:38.252)
Yeah, and usually if they're asking questions is also a really good thing, right? I mean, you don't want them just listening. You want them really digging in to figure out what your real needs are, right? Because there's times where I worked with a second printer who's great. And I would say, here's what I want to do. here's how I think you should do it. And they would say, well, what are you actually trying to achieve? And I'm like, OK, well, this is what I'm trying to achieve. They're like, well,

Lucas Clarke (30:43.252)
Mm-hmm.

David Hewlett (31:06.892)
we might go about it this way, which would actually be a lot faster. And we could change the way that you think about printing to speed it up as a process as a whole. And so letting them explain what you need, but letting them ask the question, and then having them take it and say, well, maybe let's try this. So it's, yeah, again, long-winded answer to your question.

Lucas Clarke (31:16.521)
Mm-hmm.

Lucas Clarke (31:25.556)
Mm-hmm.

Lucas Clarke (31:29.351)
And so how do you know and how do you assess the risk of a company? I hear that word thrown around a lot and like I know from my perspective, I hear the word risk and like intuitively everyone knows what that means. But how does that apply in the business sense? I know obviously it's you're risking losing money, but like are you looking at is that 15 % risk? I guess like what is your thoughts on that? Like when you're looking into that.

David Hewlett (31:56.718)
That's a great question.

I'm not risk averse. Obviously as an entrepreneur, we take a lot of risks. You have to be calculated about it, but I tend to look at it. I try to do my homework, right? And I will do research before working with the company. I'll do research on their reviews. I tend to try to get a recommendation from somebody outside that saying, this is a good company to work with.

Lucas Clarke (32:08.617)
Well, you have to,

David Hewlett (32:31.639)
or something like that. And then, you know, again, I interview all the companies I work with before I start working with them and I try to assess, you know, again, does their nerd level meet mine? And like, do they seem to know what they're talking about? Do they have a different approach to a problem? And even then, it can go bad, right? I I worked with, I was working with the developer in Canada.

Lucas Clarke (32:42.537)
yeah.

David Hewlett (32:59.63)
fantastic mind to see is the name. If you ever have anybody who needs development done on an app that they're fantastic. But they were more expensive than other developers. And I was like, you know what, I pay them by the hour. So if I could get one that was doing 75 % as good as them, but it was half the price, I would get a lot more done and be able to build out my app.

Lucas Clarke (33:03.443)
Mm-hmm.

David Hewlett (33:29.196)
more for my customers each month. And so that was my impetus for looking elsewhere to find another developer. I got a recommendation. They had good reviews. They had a really interesting process for selecting developers in other countries. Because I'd had problems selecting developers in other countries before outside of the US and Canada. And so,

So all the pieces fit, when we got into it and actually got into the development, it just didn't work. I didn't interview any of their developers, and so I only got to talk to the sales staff, that's something that usually you don't get to interview the developers. But it ended up not working out, and I went right back to Mynsee, and I'm sticking with them because I know they work, and my app is...

The app is the product. The labels are what gets you there. And so the app just has to work. I don't know if that answers your question, but.

Lucas Clarke (34:34.405)
Yeah, absolutely. Cause I'm even wondering too, like just saying that like you've been able to speak with the developers at the one that even though it's a bit more expensive, like you kind of have more of a rapport with their business overall. Yeah.

David Hewlett (34:45.922)
Yep. Yeah. And the process, right? I mean, like you start to know a company and you start to, you start to learn their process and how they go about doing business and what their culture is and stuff. Right. So like, I have a developer there that I work with closely. can, I can, we have Slack and I can, I can just ping him and be like, Hey, I've got a customer who's got a problem. He'll be there, you know, as long as it's during work hours, he responds, we get on it right away. We can usually fix a problem in like two or three hours. Like,

And customers love that right like you know what customer gets their tech problem solved like with a broken app not broken up but like you know something some bug in the app is broken and it would take like two weeks or more to get something fixed right and I can get it done in two hours get back to the customer and say hey we got it we got it done just update your app or we got it done in the background your yours is going to work now and we're going to fix it moving forward for any other customers that are like that and so. That's not a relationship that you get to have with lot of developers and so that's like something that's.

Lucas Clarke (35:23.402)
Yep.

David Hewlett (35:43.518)
of the culture of that development shop. And so that works out well. And the same thing with the printers. They're honest people. They're quick to get back to me. They try to come up with good solutions and understand timelines of when I need to get this print job done and all that stuff too. So yeah, it's a...

It's a bit of a, it's a bit of just figuring it out as you go. And that's kind of the entrepreneurial way. Sometimes like I try to, I try to put some process behind it, but, you can only, you can only do so much. And also if you're, if you're, if you're an entrepreneur and you're just you, right. Like you only have so much time that you can focus on, on that sort of like judgment part. and, know, maybe other entrepreneurs, they would do it differently, but that's my, that's where my process.

Lucas Clarke (36:16.437)
Mm-hmm.

Lucas Clarke (36:27.701)
Mm-hmm.

Lucas Clarke (36:35.071)
I love it. And I'm even wondering too, like let's just say you wake up tomorrow morning and you're like, I have this thought like for smart labels, just for example, like what would be your, like let's say you have $0 but you have the idea. I guess how would you get capital to help launch that product? Like what would be your pitch and who would you go to?

David Hewlett (36:57.742)
Yeah, that's a that's really tough. mean. Friends and family are the the best way to get started. You have to be a little careful with that, right? Because you don't want to ruin a friendship or or family relationship if things go wrong. So you just have to be very open with them about the possibility that that it won't work at the while at the same time being excited that it will. Right and and you know one of the things that.

Lucas Clarke (37:07.049)
Yep.

Lucas Clarke (37:20.586)
Yeah.

David Hewlett (37:25.782)
I've learned over time and I have a mentor from from my business school. He's one of my teachers there and and he is always about. Make sure your product make sure your customer will buy your product before you build it. If you can, if there's any way to do that right so he's all about like putting a website up that sells something and drives some traffic to it and if people are buying be like it's out of stock sorry but prove the.

the point that people will buy it and then go build it, right? Because it's expensive to build. It's time consuming to build. And I can't tell you how many entrepreneurs, including myself, that built a product before realizing if it would sell or not, right? And two of my businesses would have, I wouldn't have done if I'd applied that teaching to it.

But to your point of how do get the money right? It's a lot easier to get money if you can prove that your product is something that people want to buy. So if you, it's just, it's helpful in so many ways to try to think of building companies that way as opposed to I'm going to build a product and then I'm going to take it to market and then people are going to buy it because I don't know because, because I did it right? And like, I had such a great idea. And it's like, people don't care that you had a good idea. They want to buy what they want to buy, right? Like, and so

Lucas Clarke (38:38.483)
Yep, because I did it. Yeah. No, the market doesn't care.

David Hewlett (38:50.03)
so it's, it's, it's just like a common pitfall. I think, you know, to your, your sort of like statistic, you're talking about the beginning, which is like, you know, how many, startups actually make it. I think that's a big part of the problem. and, let me say that it's, it's like so much easier said than done. Like do it like figuring out if a person will buy your product is a hard thing to do, but it really makes a difference and you will be a much more successful entrepreneur if you can.

Lucas Clarke (39:19.797)
Looks as even like all the stories about Elon Musk and PayPal and he would work 21 hours a day and sleep for three and eat pizza in this room. And Bill Gates, it's always kind of that same narrative of it just takes forever, but eventually it pays off. But again, that's great story when you hear about someone who did it 20 years ago, but when you're actually looking to start something now, especially online when the online is just saturated with like information and

It's actually very difficult to put a product out there even though it is so much easier to put one out there now because you're kind of competing for so much attention all the time.

David Hewlett (39:59.64)
Yeah, it's like I'm a songwriter also. And I lived in Nashville, Tennessee for nine years. And I think of it like songwriters. There are some fantastic songwriters out there. And I've been out to some bars in Nashville, and I've seen them play around. And I'm like, man, that is a hit, or that is just a wonderful song.

Lucas Clarke (40:04.629)
Cool.

Lucas Clarke (40:08.307)
Wow.

David Hewlett (40:29.374)
And that artist never makes it for one reason or another, right? Like, because they didn't get their song out there in the right way, or they didn't find the recording studio that was the right one, or the record company that wanted to promote them, right? And so...

Lucas Clarke (40:45.737)
Well, they needed that building investment, kind of like what you're saying. Like no one kind of took that in between step.

David Hewlett (40:48.939)
Yeah, and-

Yeah, and so there's there's there's a lot of great companies out there again that had a great idea that just isn't getting to market. Even if it's a product market fit like there, they don't get to market, so it's of it's sort of sad, but I just sort of think of the two. The two are similar that you gotta have. You gotta have a little bit of luck too. You know that's it helps.

Lucas Clarke (41:17.141)
You gotta have a little bit of luck to not ruin those family relationships for investments. that always seemed like a little, because even right now, obviously education is kind of moving toward like the ed tech kind of realm where there's all these different apps for literacy and math and all these games and all this stuff. And that's kind of becoming this like.

David Hewlett (41:20.812)
the

David Hewlett (41:29.518)
Mm-hmm.

Lucas Clarke (41:37.491)
kind of over saturation in and of itself, where it's very hard to actually kind of separate the wheat from the chaff because there is so much there. But anyway, I don't want to keep you too much longer here, Dave, but I do have one more question for you. It's kind of touches on like the commentary that you gave for your learning disability a little bit earlier. And again, thank you for sharing. It's one of the quotes I often discuss with people on here is don't let school get in the way of your education.

David Hewlett (41:51.267)
Sure.

Lucas Clarke (42:06.613)
Because again, we don't teach entrepreneurial spirit or how to be an entrepreneur in high school. So I guess, what are some of the things that you would say for someone who wants to maybe become an entrepreneur of some of the skills they need to learn and the things they need to focus in on?

David Hewlett (42:24.046)
Yeah, that's a really great question. You know, I think...

One is don't be afraid to ask for help. And actually practicing with your teachers is a really good way to start. there's so many times when I was growing up, I didn't go up and ask for help when I needed it. Again, that was partly driven by growing up with the learning disability and just sort of thinking that I was stupid.

And that it was just me who was the problem, right? But if you practice going up, getting help, it'll help you in talking to people that have more experience than you, in talking to people that think about the world in a little bit different way than you do. And how that helps you as an entrepreneur is you don't know what you don't know. And putting people around you that you can talk to and you can be open with.

and you can be vulnerable with. And practicing that skill is something that will really take you a long way. know, there and there's so many ways to do it, right? I like I had so much trouble reading and and and presenting. had trouble with friends presenting, but you know, that was and I couldn't write very well handwritten stuff. And so.

I had to find my tools to get around those things. And so, you know, as you're going through your learning journey, however you learn, you need to just recognize that there may be another way to get around that and that don't let things stop you. And the more that you can realize that there is another way to learn to do well in the classroom, that skill,

David Hewlett (44:24.81)
is going to be making great at business, whatever business you do, but especially in entrepreneurship where you're going to hit a lot of walls that are hard, where maybe you think, I'm just going to give up on this thing. finding ways to get around anything that's hard for you learning wise to get it done is going to be valuable in whatever you do, but especially in entrepreneurship.

Lucas Clarke (44:51.603)
I love that your initial lane into that was literacy and reading and presenting because I think those are, I literacy is not really a soft skill, but some of the most underrated things that students I find are kind of taking for granted. So I really appreciate you sharing. I wholeheartedly agree with everything you're saying. And I guess to kind of finish us off for smart labels or anything else that you want to share with the listeners about the product or anything where they can find it.

David Hewlett (45:19.382)
Yeah, you you can find it on the Amazon Walmart.com in the US Amazon in the US and Canada and UK. And or on the website QR smart labels.com. If you have any questions, my email is David at QR smart labels.com. Feel free to reach out if it's if there if you have a question about how you could use it in the classroom or in the administration building or.

district level or whichever level you are thinking about using it at. It's a really good product and I have and personally, I had some teachers that really helped me get past my learning problems and showed me that I wasn't stupid and that I could I can actually perform very well and and and so I am always open to helping a teacher with whatever and so I again reach out to me. I'm happy to help.

I will give you as much time as I can give you to help you be successful in your job, your career, and helping your students learn.

Lucas Clarke (46:26.399)
Beautiful. David Hewlett, thank you so much for coming on today,

David Hewlett (46:30.168)
Thank you, Lucas. I really appreciate your time.