Learn Your Way Through (with Kipp Bodnar, CMO of Hubspot, and Tim Leatherman)

Todd Henry [00:00:00]:

In 1975, an engineer started an 8-year journey to put a pair of pliers inside a pocket knife. And today, one of the most influential marketers in the world is running the exact same playbook in a matter of days. The tools keep changing, but the people who win are always the ones who learn their way through. In the late summer of 1901, 2 brothers from Dayton, Ohio, just up the road from where I am right now, boarded a train home from the Outer Banks of North Carolina. And they were defeated. Wilbur and Orville Wright had spent weeks on the dunes at Kitty Hawk testing a glider on the best aerodynamic data in the world. The glider barely lifted. On that ride home, Wilbur told his brother that man would not fly for 50 years.

Todd Henry [00:00:42]:

But they didn't quit. They went back to their bicycle shop and they asked a better question. What if the data everyone trusts is wrong? So they built a wind tunnel out of a wooden box about 6 feet long, a fan and measuring balances cobbled together from bicycle spokes and a hacksaw blade. Over a couple months that fall, they tested roughly 200 miniature wing shapes. They discovered the published numbers were off, and they rebuilt their understanding of flight from the ground up. 2 years later, on December 17th, 1903, Orville flew. The Wrights didn't win because they had the most resources. Their best-known rival, Samuel Langley, had a $50,000 grant from the War Department.

Todd Henry [00:01:24]:

They won because they learned faster. They learned what they needed to know when they needed to know it, and they refused to let a hurdle become an exit ramp. That's what today's episode is all about. You're gonna hear from 2 people who faced the moment when the old way stopped working. Kip Bodnar is the author of a new book called Loop, and he's also the chief marketing officer at software giant HubSpot. Tim Leatherman is the creator of the tool that bears his name, the Leatherman multitool. Their worlds cannot be more different, but their answer is exactly the same.

Todd Henry [00:01:59]:

This is Daily Creative.

Todd Henry [00:01:59]:

Since 2005, we served up weekly tips to help you be brave, focused, and brilliant every day. My name is Todd Henry. Welcome to the show.

Kipp Bodnar [00:02:09]:

I sit at this very interesting vantage point of everything that's going on in marketing and in the creative world right now. And it turns out that the most relevant story is about corn and You know, Everett Rogers goes on to write one of the most seminal works in business history all around disruption theory. But the genesis of that disruption theory comes from being on a farm in Iowa and his father looking at his neighbor's corn and his neighbor's corn's growing and it's thriving in this drought, terrible summer, and their corn is Not. It's withered, it's barely growing. And, you know, that's their livelihood. And his father is sitting around because he didn't adopt this new hybrid seed corn technology that was out there, makes corn more drought resistant, more pest resistant. And so it's really just like you get more corn for the seed that you plant. Instead, he was doing it the old way.

Kipp Bodnar [00:03:11]:

And he looked around And he's kind of in the like, oh, let's wait and see mindset. And by the end of the summer, it was like, well, I've seen and I didn't get the result that I was hoping for. And now it's time to do something different. And I think that's where most marketers sit today.

Todd Henry [00:03:26]:

I think that you're exactly right. And the strange thing for me is that often it's people who are, these are people who have trafficked in the world of innovation, creativity. They've been helping their clients, their customers, take things to market for years and figure out how do we innovatively tell these stories. And yet when it comes to their own business, sometimes it's kind of like the, the cobbler's son has no shoes, right? They haven't really thought about how is this going to impact my business? Not just how we're gonna be helping others, our clients or our customers or our own organization, but how's this gonna affect us?

Tim Leatherman [00:03:59]:

Yes.

Todd Henry [00:04:00]:

Um, and you start chapter 3 of the book with a pretty startling confession. You talk about how HubSpot lost 80% of it, of its organic blog traffic, uh, which is something you, I mean, Anybody would know, like, that's been a core part of your marketing strategy for years and years.

Kipp Bodnar [00:04:13]:

Huge part of our journey. Yeah.

Todd Henry [00:04:14]:

So explain to, explain to us what happened when that happened and what the net result was on the other side.

Kipp Bodnar [00:04:20]:

Look, um, one of the unfair advantages of life is when you have something happen to you that's so extreme that you have to take action. And there are probably a lot of people listening who haven't had that happen to them yet. We had that happen. You know, you just talked about it. For a period of 12 months, we lost 140 million visits, which is a lot of people who no longer are discovering you, reading about you, maybe signing up for your content, your products, those types of things. And to us, that was the clearest signal ever that the world had changed. And we sat back and we said, It's not possible to keep doing what we're doing. You know, like there's no way out of that.

Kipp Bodnar [00:05:06]:

If we just keep following the old playbook, we might get, you know, 5% of those visits back. We're not going to get 75% of those visits back. So we fundamentally looked around and said, there has to be a new way of approaching marketing and getting to our customers and having them adopt our products. that hasn't been disrupted by this AI thing that has provided the world with democratized access to information and intelligence in a way it's never been able to, to previously access. And so that's, you know, this was the genesis of the, the whole Loop book and the, the Loop framework was fundamentally born out of necessity. We were our first customer.

Todd Henry [00:05:47]:

I wanna talk about what you, what you learned and the, yeah, really the strategy you articulate in Loop, which is that sort of the traditional marketing funnel as we've thought of it, um, is no longer really a funnel. It's kind of changed. It's morphed a little bit. Um, can you, can you describe what you learned that led you to that realization and how you are adapting your organization to meet these, these new and changing times?

Kipp Bodnar [00:06:13]:

Yeah. So, so there's a couple things here. First is like, how has the funnel changed? For the last 20 years, we lived in a pretty linear funnel where the biggest leverage I don't care if you're a B2B company or B2C company, the biggest leverage was, can I get more visits to my website? And if I can get more visits to my website, my conversion rate of those visits into like leads and customers is kind of consistent. I can make them a little bit better, but I can't transform. And so, so getting those visits is where all the opportunity lies. And that's just no longer true. It's much harder to get visits and visits are far less correlated With customers and revenue. And so we look at it as we went from this very linear funnel to an hourglass-looking funnel, because what's changed is getting awareness and getting people just to know who you are through AI search engines, through creators and influencers, through the just kind of explosion of advertising channels.

Kipp Bodnar [00:07:12]:

You know, we have way more high-scale advertising channels today than we did 5 years ago. And so that has really opened up the top of funnel. It's been, it's much harder to get those people to your website. You know, people read the answers in those AI search engines and they don't necessarily need to come back to your website. They see your video or your ad on TikTok or an influencer talk about you. They don't necessarily need to come back to your website, or if they do, it's just to take like the last 10% of that journey to become a customer, right? You don't get all of the research and understanding and behavior That you used to over the last 10 to 15 years. What has changed though, is those people who do come, AI enables you to personalize an experience for them at scale that is remarkable. And we were able to increase conversion rate on our website, across our email marketing, across our ads, not like 5, 10%, but 80, 100, 200%.

Kipp Bodnar [00:08:10]:

And that is, one of the biggest shifts that is happening in the marketing world today.

Todd Henry [00:08:15]:

Walk us through how that is happening in a practical way when people come to you, because I experience the same thing, by the way. I mean, it used to be, for example, in the podcast world, since we're more on the podcast right now, you know, if, if, um, if I had 100,000 people, say, following the show or listening to the show, like pretty reliably, like 80,000 people were going to listen to any given episode or whatever, right? That's about how the numbers worked out. Now I can have multiples of that subscribe, but a much smaller percentage of those people are actually engaged with the material. But once they do engage with the material, the backend of that, it's become so much easier for us to customize an experience for people who are connected to the brand, right? And so to your point about awareness, like it's been easier to get awareness and to get like low low friction involvement with the brand, but to get deeper, high friction involvement with the brand has been more difficult. But once we do, people tend to be much more involved, much more attached to what we're doing.

Kipp Bodnar [00:09:18]:

Yeah, I think one of the things people don't talk enough about is that the, in the AI era, everything has become easier and cheaper to do, which means you have a lot more competition and competition for attention, competition for Your phone time, your clicks, everything. And if you're a marketer, you have to make the most of the attention that you win, because it's harder to win that attention, which you're just talking about. And so you asked for a really practical example. The practical example I'll give you, we have a chapter all around personalized messaging and how you engage with people at scale. And so one of the very first tests we ran in this whole transition to Loop was, could we basically take people who were, who, who did come to our website, were interacting with us, gave us an email address. Could we enrich that, those folks with all of the data that we could possibly know about them? What their business is, what their role at that business is, their biggest problems. We would infer some of that. We, we would have a very rich record on every person.

Kipp Bodnar [00:10:19]:

We'd take that and kind of the message we were trying to land, we would feed it to a, a large language model. And I think in our case, back in the day, it was was the OpenAI models, and it would write a bespoke email just for each individual person. So before it was, you had this templated email and you had a few personalization tokens in that email, and that email and those personalization tokens exist to be like, I'm not an idiot. I kind of know some stuff about you. You know, trust us. Now it's like, we will write these emails and it feels like a human has researched your business. For 2 hours and is telling you exactly what you want to know. And we can do that in an automated way.

Kipp Bodnar [00:11:01]:

And it turns out that when we did that, you know, we saw conversion rates go up 80, 100%, as you would expect, because people are like, wow, this is just so much more relevant to me than anything else I am seeing right now.

Todd Henry [00:11:15]:

So I think that raises an interesting question for, especially for the creative folks listening right now, which is You know, in the world where AI can generate hundreds of variations of emails or thousands in seconds, right?

Kipp Bodnar [00:11:29]:

Yeah.

Todd Henry [00:11:29]:

Um, what is the role of taste? What is the role of human intuition, human empathy, human communication in that, that world?

Kipp Bodnar [00:11:38]:

We talk a lot about this in the book, um, that taste has never been more important. And in fact, AI doesn't make the hard part of marketing actually That much easier. The hard part of marketing is knowing your customers deeply, understanding their problems, understanding your mission, why you exist. What are the thought leadership stories you want to tell in the world? What, what is the real reason your product exists? What is the core narrative or narratives around your products? That's what great creatives have been paid to help companies figure out for generations. What AI can do is give you access to a lot of customer customer insights in terms of call recordings, customer emails, and allow you to go through those in bulk much faster to get those insights. But you still have to put that, those insights together and have your own taste about how you want to communicate and tell the stories around them. I think the best way to think about this is we have this concept called a taste profile, and it's everything about your customer and everything about your brand In one document that you can then use with AI to scale anything you want to do. And I have used the taste profile a ton in the development of the book, and I will normally do a version with and without it.

Kipp Bodnar [00:12:52]:

And I always build an independent grader. So like I might be building something in HubSpot's Breeze Assistant, but I'll build a grader over in Claude to like, hey, this is what I'm trying to achieve, grade it on a, you know, A to F scale. And almost always without a taste profile, my great is like a C. And then as soon as I get the taste profile, I'm like B+, A, because you need that taste and context and it shows you exactly how important taste is.

Todd Henry [00:13:16]:

Yeah.

Todd Henry [00:13:16]:

I mean, in many ways, like those of us who have creative directed, right? You know, we're sort of used to sort of giving feedback, asking questions, shaping the work. It's just that the entity doing the work now is often AI, right? In some way, or the entity that, and we're sort of creative directing in some ways the AI in doing this work.

Todd Henry [00:13:40]:

It is.

Kipp Bodnar [00:13:40]:

And it's also like the scale of that creative direction, right? I always think of it as like, I'm an optimist. And so there might be some, some skeptics listening and some pessimists listening here. But my belief is there's been so many campaigns that I've run, Todd, where it's like, oh, I can make 5 really great video spots. You know, for that campaign and I will get them out there. Now I could make 300, right? And it's not that I don't need to have an amazing creative process. It doesn't mean that I don't have a clear vision. It means that I can actually create really hyper-relevant versions of that vision for a lot of different parts of my audience. And to me, that is insanely exciting.

Kipp Bodnar [00:14:22]:

And if I'm a creative person, like that would make me pumped about the future, because I'm kind of stuck in that generic, broad mass market segment. And I can focus more on like, oh, I know this particular cohort of my customers really love these things. And I can make a campaign just for them. That feels like a million-dollar campaign that cost me thousands of dollars.

Todd Henry [00:14:44]:

Yeah. Well, one of the examples you give in the book, and an interesting way to think about this, I'd never really considered before, you talk about Andrea Del Verrocchio's Florence workshop.

Todd Henry [00:14:55]:

Yes.

Todd Henry [00:14:55]:

Um, and, and how that is an interesting corollary to what we're experiencing with AI. Could you, could you tell that story or talk about that and how that reframes the way maybe many people might be thinking about AI?

Kipp Bodnar [00:15:05]:

Yeah. So I, you know, Todd, I was at Cannes Lions, um, in June and I was hung, hung out with a bunch of creatives and a bunch of CMOs. And the, the sentiment on artificial intelligence was, I think, pretty negative. And there was, you know, I heard people being like, oh, I was able to do this without AI. My team didn't use AI to do this. And it was very proud. And I think what's happening is we have 2 ways of thinking about this AI revolution. There are a lot of people who see it as the Industrial Revolution.

Kipp Bodnar [00:15:36]:

Like, oh gosh, they're going to commoditize and processitize my work and take me out of it.

Tim Leatherman [00:15:42]:

Right?

Kipp Bodnar [00:15:42]:

And that's, I think, how I, at least I viewed the Industrial Revolution. And then there are people like myself, we argue in chapter 2 of the book, That AI is leading to a renaissance of marketing. And in the Renaissance, it was a very interesting time. You had this small city in Florence, Italy that becomes the center of art and culture in the world. Not Paris, not London, not Hong Kong, not, not, not any other place. And why is that? And one, it's a density of really smart and passionate people, but two, it's a density of technology and tools. You had a new system of tools, new engineering methods, new paint colors, painting techniques, all of these things. And that led to bridges that would never have been before built, domes that people previously thought were impossible to construct, and this proliferation of creativity and art that the world had really never seen.

Kipp Bodnar [00:16:39]:

And I believe from a marketing perspective, The revolution that we're in right now is much more like the Renaissance than it is the Industrial Revolution.

Todd Henry [00:16:47]:

Interesting.

Todd Henry [00:16:48]:

That perspective, that, that the way of thinking about it, right, of AI is your lab assistant, AI is your editorial assistant, your research assistant. Andy Crouch, who we've had on the show, talks about, uh, distinguishing between tools, instruments, and devices. And I think so many people want to use AI as a device to replace their work as opposed to thinking about it like an instrument. So if I'm Yes. If I'm a talented violinist, I can imagine all the sounds I want, but I can't make those sounds without my violin. And in many ways, AI is allowing us at scale, to your point, to create sounds or to create work that we can imagine, but we never could do before because it just wasn't cost effective. And now we're able to do this because of the leverage we have. The, I call it the infinite lever of AI, right?

Tim Leatherman [00:17:37]:

Totally.

Todd Henry [00:17:38]:

The fact that we have We have an infinite lever at our disposal now to help us achieve these things we couldn't achieve before.

Kipp Bodnar [00:17:45]:

I recently interviewed, uh, David Epstein. He wrote this amazing book, Inside the Box. Uh, and he, I wish I would have thought of this, but he has the most simple articulation of what you just said. It's like the people who fail using AI are tool first, brain second. You know, they're just outsourcing all the thinking to the tool. The people who really succeed are brain first, tool second, which is very similar to the instrument analogy that you just shared. You need to use AI to help you do things that were previously impossible and to scale the knowledge and taste that you have in new and creative ways. And I think the people that we see that are doing that are being really successful.

Kipp Bodnar [00:18:20]:

You know, PJ Ace and all of his AI-generated creative and ads is really remarkable because he does it in a really short timeline and he does it a lot cheaper. And those change What you can tell stories around when you can tell it in days versus needing, you know, a couple month production schedule.

Todd Henry [00:18:37]:

That is the beauty of it is you can iterate so much faster.

Kipp Bodnar [00:18:39]:

Yes.

Todd Henry [00:18:40]:

And you can experiment so much faster and failures cost you less.

Tim Leatherman [00:18:43]:

Right.

Todd Henry [00:18:44]:

And I think in the past, especially in creative work, cuz process, research process, all of that is a big chunk of the, the cost of doing creative work. And I mean cost, not physical, not necessarily like financial cost, but just the cost of time and energy and resources.

Tim Leatherman [00:18:59]:

Yeah.

Kipp Bodnar [00:18:59]:

100%.

Todd Henry [00:19:00]:

And you could do all of that, you know, you could do it a day now, maybe it would take you a month before or even longer. And you can fail fast and learn and adapt and then scale on the other side of it in a way that we never could before. Kip, the book is fantastic and I really hope everybody checks it out.

Todd Henry [00:19:18]:

Thank you.

Todd Henry [00:19:18]:

If people wanna learn more about the book and they wanna learn more about you, obviously they could, I'm sure that they could learn about HubSpot's journey by visiting HubSpot. But if they wanna learn more about the book specifically and about The Loop, principles, where would you send them?

Kipp Bodnar [00:19:31]:

Yes, if you want to dive into the book and, and where to get it and what it's all about, go to loopmarketing.com and you'll have all of the information you need right there.

Todd Henry [00:19:40]:

Kip's team lost 140 million visits in 12 months, and their response wasn't to wait and see. It was to learn faster than the disruption. Now I want you to hear what that same principle looks like when the loop isn't measured in days, but in years. In 1983, Tim Leatherman and his partner mailed a photo of his prototype to more than 100 catalog companies. They got zero replies. The one company that did agree to see it told him to rip out half of what he had built. So he did. He went back to the garage, rebuilt it, and tried again.

Todd Henry [00:20:12]:

That's a loop, just like Kip was talking about. It just ran on a slower clock. Tim didn't have AI. He had a brother-in-law with a machine shop and a refusal to give himself And out. So here's my conversation with Tim Leatherman.

Tim Leatherman [00:20:26]:

There were a couple of things. The first was that I had, I set a goal at the very beginning, and the goal had 2 parts. The first part was to create a prototype that I liked, and the second part was to commercialize my invention somehow. I mentioned in the book that previously I'd set a goal to become a really good table tennis player. And in that case, I had given myself an out as to when I could stop pursuing my goal. And that was that I knew I was starting late, and if somebody started later than me and leapfrogged and became better than me, then I figured my chances were diminished and it was okay. But in the case of the add pliers to a pocket knife, I forgot to give myself an out. So I continued and continued and continued.

Tim Leatherman [00:21:18]:

And then I think there was a second factor, and I think that's just a positive attitude, that there were lots of hurdles along the way, lots of moments to be discouraged, but I would wake up the next morning and say, today's a new day, let's go for it.

Todd Henry [00:21:33]:

Well, tell us about your first prototype. I thought this is a fascinating story because I think a lot of times people think, oh, well, I don't have resources, or I don't have all the tools I need, or I don't have all the materials I need. And so, well, this is impossible for me. But tell us a little bit about how the very first prototype of the Leatherman tool came about.

Tim Leatherman [00:21:51]:

There's definitely a lesson there that you, that you don't need super good resources to create a product, but you do need to realize that it's probably going to take a lot more time than you would have thought otherwise. But as far as my personal Mm-hmm. Creation. It was started with a concept that I had in my head that I have to admit was pretty crude. It was a pair of pliers that had fixed handles and a few blades coming out of the back. But as it turned out, that was too— the handles were too short to get enough leverage. And if you did cut a piece of wire, you'd get a— you'd pinch the skin of your palms of your hands. 2 good things that are not, not, not, don't make a tool very marketable.

Todd Henry [00:22:39]:

Perfect.

Tim Leatherman [00:22:41]:

I can envision a certain distance out, and when I get there, if I'm not there yet, I can, I then look a little further. And somehow I came up with the concept that if the handles would fold, then I could have a tool in my pocket that was no longer than a pocket knife, but it would open up to, could open up to a full-size, full-strength pair of pliers. But just getting to that was also a journey. And the key lesson to that was to learn what you need to know as you go along, because there were many, many times when I came to a hurdle and I couldn't go beyond until I stopped to educate myself how to overcome that hurdle.

Todd Henry [00:23:21]:

Can you give us an example of a hurdle that you encountered early in the process? That you maybe, maybe for a lot of people would, they would think, okay, this is when I give up, right? But you didn't. You learned and you moved on. What was an example of that?

Tim Leatherman [00:23:34]:

Well, I do have a background in engineering. I have a degree in mechanical engineering, but the materials I was starting to use were, turned out to be the wrong materials. So I had to switch to that. I had to learn about them, learn what to buy and where to find them. Another hurdle would be Just acquiring the skills to be able to make a prototype. And I got very fortunate that I had a brother-in-law that had a— that was a skilled machinist and did have machine tools in his garage and allowed me to use his machine tools. But I needed him to teach me, and he was willing to do that, not to be a skilled machinist, but to learn enough to do what I needed to do.

Todd Henry [00:24:18]:

You know, it's interesting that I think a lot of people, when they hit a hurdle, That's their excuse. That's their off-ramp. You were persistent enough that you were looking for resources in your environment. Like you said, your brother-in-law, is that right, was a machinist?

Kipp Bodnar [00:24:35]:

Yes.

Todd Henry [00:24:35]:

Many people may not have even thought to pursue that because, you know, they were looking for the excuse. And yet you didn't. You persisted. You eventually developed a prototype. And It wasn't exactly a cakewalk from there because everyone you pitched turned the idea down, right? The knife company said it was too, too much of a tool, and the tool company said it was too much of a knife. Um, tell us about what the experience was like trying to go to market with this when you had your, your prototype to show people.

Tim Leatherman [00:25:05]:

I think every inventor, uh, values their invention at exactly $1 million, and they think all they have to do is take their, uh, patent application And their prototype to a company that could manufacture it. And they'll get paid $1 million and sit back and live happily ever after. That was not my experience. The knife company said it was a tool. The tool company said it was a gadget. Gadgets don't sell. So I have to admit that at that point, I had about given up. And my wife and I had a little chat.

Tim Leatherman [00:25:42]:

And we thought maybe it's better if I continue to pursue this as a second job while I have a day job that's helping to pay the bills. And at that point, I'm quite sure I could have gone back to one of the companies to whom I'd pitched the prototype, and I'm positive I could have gone back and got a job with them as a mechanical engineer. But I still had this dream to get this tool on the market. And I knew that by now it looked like I was going to have to start my own business in order to be able to do it. And I knew I didn't have a lot of the skills that I would need to start a business. And especially if I wasn't able to make the tool, I didn't have the skills to be able to sell the tool. I didn't have selling skills. So I searched the want ads in the newspaper and there was an ad for a wanted salesman welding products.

Tim Leatherman [00:26:34]:

And I applied for that job. And it was a national company with a headquarters back east. And I got a job with a sales territory in my local area. And that was, that was a real educational experience for me as well, to learn that when I approach a person to sell, it's not to convince them to buy what I have, it's to ask them what they need. And to match the products I have with the need they have.

Todd Henry [00:27:06]:

Interesting.

Todd Henry [00:27:07]:

So, um, had you initially had success maybe selling the tool to a company, uh, instead of going out, getting a job to support your ability to try to build the company, and, and like you said, learning some of these new, uh, skills maybe that you did, you hadn't previously acquired, but now that you had to develop those skills, you learned skills that were helping you in fact build the company that you wanted to build. Who knows what might've happened? And yet that, again, that hurdle became an opportunity, even though it probably didn't feel great at the time, right? Um, to be hitting all of those roadblocks and all the nos. Um, and yet you persisted through that and you learned, uh, you know, some, some new skills maybe that you had to acquire in order to make the company eventually a success. So at what point did you realize, okay, I think, I think now is the time I can actually jump back into doing this full-time? without a secondary income.

Tim Leatherman [00:28:01]:

I was getting discouraged and about to give up after about 7 years into the 8 years. And when a friend of mine from university days named Steve Berliner stepped in and said, there's still a few things you haven't tried, let's be partners. And I agreed. We were very naive. We thought that if we could make and sell 4,000 tools in our first year, That we may be able to pay back our cash investment, but we were not so naive to realize that we would pay ourselves nothing for our time. So we took a picture of my, at that point, a fairly complex prototype, the one that I had patent coverage on, and wrote a cover letter and sent it out to over 100 catalogs asking them if you'd like to see my precious handmade prototype. Just reply and we'll be happy to send it to you and we'll take it from there. The number of answers we got to that mailing was zero.

Tim Leatherman [00:29:04]:

By this point, my wife and I had a small starter home with a single-car garage that no longer had a car. It had some equipment in it. And I, about 6 months later, I came out with a new prototype. And the prototype ended up looking remarkably like the tool that ended up coming onto the market. We took a picture of this tool, wrote a new cover letter, and sent it to the 100 catalogs. This time we got one reply. It came from, it came from Cabela's. And late May of 1983, we got a purchase order from Cabela's for $12,000 for 500 tools.

Kipp Bodnar [00:29:48]:

Wow.

Tim Leatherman [00:29:48]:

And you can't, you can't imagine how happy Steve and I were. We were climbing the walls and crawling across the ceiling. And when we finally settled down, we realized this is only 500 tools. It's not 2,000. Sure.

Todd Henry [00:30:02]:

But, but this is now, this is now 8 years into this. This is 8 years after you first cobbled together a prototype to try to make this work. And you had to go get a job. You took on a partner. All of these things have happened in the course of this 8 years, and that had to at least feel like Validation of the idea, even though you believed in the idea, the fact that you were getting an order for 500 tools from this big retailer had to at least feel like validation for you.

Tim Leatherman [00:30:29]:

Yes, it felt fantastic, at least for a few hours.

Todd Henry [00:30:33]:

And then you realize, oh, we have to fulfill the order. We have to, yeah, right?

Tim Leatherman [00:30:37]:

3,500 tools seems like a lot of tools to have to be able to figure out how to sell.

Todd Henry [00:30:43]:

One of the things that I want to honor your time, I know that, that you've been very generous with your time and I want people to read the book in order to hear the rest of the story, because those are not the only hurdles, obviously, because, you know, getting orders is one thing, getting a product to market is one thing, but then figuring out how to scale all of those things, you have to cross several bridges in order to do that. One of the things I want to talk to you about are your principles. Um, you talk about principles as a competitive advantage. Could you share with us why you believe that to be true? For example, you make tools in Portland. Which is not the least expensive and most convenient way to do it, probably, if you want to scale. And yet you believe that's a principle that's important to you.

Tim Leatherman [00:31:25]:

What—

Todd Henry [00:31:25]:

tell us why principles are a competitive advantage.

Tim Leatherman [00:31:29]:

I believe they're competitive advantages because it's very, very important that a business know what its core business is and keep its focus on that business. Those principles are like guardrails on a highway. When you're driving down the highway, you could veer off and turn off and go in a different direction, but maybe accidentally, but those guardrails keep you centered and keep you on the highway. And that's really important. And as far as manufacturing the tool in Portland, Oregon, yes, it's a challenge, but there really are some advantages. And so our second principle is to Always manufacture our tools in our own factory in Portland, Oregon. One of the main advantages is that it allows us to monitor the quality. It's really hard to keep track of quality if your factory is 8,000 miles away.

Tim Leatherman [00:32:23]:

And, and another advantage for us, or reason that I want to want those jobs here in Portland, Oregon, and in this whole Leatherman journey, The thing I'm most proud of is that the jobs created, and I'm really proud, most proud that they're, that as it happened, that they fell into a whole new product category. So they're in addition to the world supply. They're not a cannibalization of knife manufacturers' jobs or hand tool companies' manufacturers' jobs.

Todd Henry [00:32:53]:

Tim, I can't pass up the opportunity to let you just encourage the people listening, the leaders who are listening, many of whom are leading large teams and Doing significant work in the world. People who are out there, maybe who have an idea, who want to take that idea to market, and they're hitting hurdle after hurdle. What words of encouragement would you have for those people listening right now?

Tim Leatherman [00:33:14]:

I would say, learn what you need to know as you go along. Sweat the details and make sure the product or service you're offering is Providing, improving the lives of others. I think that all sums up that you need to be all in or your chances of success are greatly diminished.

Todd Henry [00:33:42]:

Tim Leatherman's new book, The Leatherman Book, is available now wherever books are sold. So Kip said learning is the currency of the new world. Tim said learn what you need to know as One of them is building the future of marketing. The other is building a tool that's now in more than 90 million pockets, and they handed us very similar advice. Here's what strikes me. Neither of them waited until they had it figured out. HubSpot became its own first customer. Tim learned to sell by taking a job selling welding supplies.

Todd Henry [00:34:13]:

The hurdle wasn't the things standing between them and the work. The hurdle was the work. So here's my challenge to you this week. Name the hurdle that you've been treating as an exit ramp. Then ask the Wright brothers question, what if the thing I've been told simply isn't true? And what would I have to learn in order to find out? Remember, Wilbur Wright once said a man wouldn't fly for 50 years. He was off by 48. That's what learning does. Hey, thanks so much for listening.

Todd Henry [00:34:43]:

If you'd like all of our interviews in full, you can get them at dailycreativeplus.com. It's absolutely free. Just go to dailycreativeplus.com, enter your name and email address, address, we'll send you a private feed where you can listen to all of the interviews in full. My name is Todd Henry. If you want info about my books or my speaking events, you can find it at toddhenry.com. Until next time, may you be brave, focused, and brilliant.

Todd Henry [00:35:03]:

We'll see you then.