Founder's Story - Jaron Lodge: Over $1 Million Backyard Game with SCORE NN’ | S2: E48

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers. Their MAGNESIUM BREAKTHROUGH product has helped me sleep better, stay focused, and feel all-around healthier. Check out their products at BiOptimizers and use promo code FOUNDERS for 10% off any order. Make sure to check us out on the iHeart Radio App or iHeart online.In this episode, Daniel Robbins interviews Jaron Lodge, the founder and visionary behind Scorenn. Jaron's journey into creating a seven-figure solo founder company began with the idea of a backyard game, which has now evolved into a successful business. Starting with fish food skipping stones, Jaron pivoted to developing a unique and interactive game that combines multiple game modes into one affordable product for backyard owners.Jaron shares his insights on leveraging other people's expertise, the importance of creating engaging content for marketing, and his approach to managing the business as a solo founder. He emphasizes the value of the gig economy and using freelancers to scale his business efficiently. Jaron's innovative approach and determination have positioned Scorenn as a leading player in the backyard game industry.Key Points Discussed:Jaron's background and the initial idea of fish food skipping stones.Pivoting to develop Scorenn, a multi-mode backyard game.Importance of leveraging other people's expertise and mentorship.Successful Kickstarter campaigns and lessons learned.Challenges in marketing and the value of high-quality content.Managing a business as a solo founder with the help of freelancers.The potential and future growth of Scorenn in the backyard game industry.Expansion plans and potential for investment.The gig economy and its impact on business operations.How to learn more about Scorenn and connect with Jaron Lodge.Relevant Links:ScorennOur Sponsors:* Check out PrizePicks and use my code FOUNDERS for a great deal: www.prizepicks.com* Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: www.rosettastone.comAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Hey everyone, welcome back to Founders Story. Recently we were talking about how can you make a tiny business in terms of employees, but big profits. I was reading about how with the use of AI and different tools and technology that now people are going to make a billion dollar company with maybe less than five employees. I mean, this is amazing. And this really opens up for the ability for so many more people to create the company of their dreams. That's why today we have Jaron Lodge from Storen. Jaron was just featured in Forbes. I love the article, by the way, Jaron. But you're the visionary behind this seven figure solo founder company

organization with this backyard game. I mean, when you made it, when you told people about this, were they like, wait a minute, you're going to make scoring hole this big? Yeah. I mean, it started with like fish fruit, skipping stones and clay skipping stones. So when I first told people about that original idea you know they were kind of like oh this is you know this is a cute idea i kind of like this i'll uh i'll help you um i'll mentor you and stuff um but yeah i mean it started with the clay and fish food skipping stones and we did like an asu pop-up marketplace thing and we were trying to sell our fish food skipping stones and we figured out like

why not create some interactive way to sell these skipping stones so I worked at Ashley Furniture Home Store so I decided to build like a 24 foot long pool lane that I bought materials from Home Depot and stuff and we built this pool I went to Big Five I got like a target system and put the target at the end of um the pool which was like a cornhole board with like three different holes in it and i 3d printed some skipping stones that i went to i flew to pennsylvania to meet the guinness world record holder of skipping stones with 88 skips we actually came up with this design here um and that's the design that i 3d printed for um for the event and people

were way more interested in the stone skipping game than the fish food skipping stones so i was like all right why not we like why don't we pivot to this this game instead and now it's evolved to like an all-in-one backyard game where you know you not only play it in the swimming pool you can play it on land and we have all these other game modes that are combined into one to make it really affordable for backyard owners to purchase you know an affordable game but they can add all these different game modes so they don't have to buy like 10 different games they buy one game and they're pretty much done you know they got all the game modes they need for the most part you know it keeps it fun to have all those game modes we will return to our show shortly but first let's talk about today's sponsor magnesium breakthrough by

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And make sure you use the code founders, F-O-U-N-D-E-R-S, founders, and you get your 10% off. So check out biooptimizers.com to learn more. And back to the show. So what made you, I mean, that's genius. Telling yourself like, okay, I need to go find the Guinness World Holder because this person is going to help me give me the ideas, information needed to create this perfect skipping stone. What made you even think that you should even go do that? Well, yeah, I mean, I had a background in sales, so I listened to like a lot of audio books on how to like perfect sales and all these other jobs that I'd done previously.

And, you know, I guess it was just more intuition from reading those audio books and knowing how to be successful as a salesperson and you know I just knew I had to find the best person the best people to help me out in order to make you know the best designs and so I recruited you know I tried to recruit the best people to help me out and give me advice and that just kind of kind of worked out well I think I messaged him on like YouTube something, and he happened to respond. So I really tried. I think the sales jobs definitely helped, too, with the resilience and reaching out to these people.

Yeah, that's amazing. It's great how you can really access people like never before. There's so many platforms. I always tell people that it's amazing how you can go to LinkedIn and message somebody, and they will respond. It's so many platforms. I always tell people that like, it's amazing how you can go to LinkedIn and message somebody and they will respond. It's crazy. And many times people are obviously very helpful. So you've told people, hey, I got this idea. This is what we're doing. People probably looked at you and like, there's no way that this will become as big as it is. And then you made it. You started getting traction and you started to figure out like this is something i'm gonna double down i'm going all in on this game i'm going all in on

these things what were some of the next steps that you did yeah i mean and it wasn't like that obvious too like i doubled down before i was supposed to double down like i doubled down on the fish fruit skipping stones and i was trying to like scale up that manufacturing process and stuff and you know I spent like the twenty thousand dollars that I had saved up for my business and I'd spent it on like a majority on that I bought like a mixer that ended up not even working and it was like five thousand dollars or something stupid so like I made a lot of you know big big mistakes in the beginning but yeah once once once, once it was clear, um, once I had made those previous mistakes, I, you know, waited for the right signals to scale. And I think the Kickstarter campaign that we did once that was successful and I did, uh, two other Kickstarter campaigns before

that. So my two other ones before that failed and they were like the fish food skipping stone ones and the clay skipping stone ones. And then my third one, you know, I recruited some guy that, um, happened to run a Kickstarter campaign and he sold like $2 million worth of his product. So he knew what he was talking about. He gave me homework assignments on how to run the best Kickstarter campaign possible. I did everything he told me to do so that he wouldn't even meet up with me until I did all his homework assignments, basically, so I could speak his language. And the Kickstarter campaign was really successful. And that was the first indicator, you know, to start scaling this thing. And I had some companies reach out to me, want to do licensing deals.

Some tried to scare me into, you know, deals with them. But I didn't take them. And, you know, I was just like, you know, I can do this myself. But I'm always looking for other opportunities to, you know, collaborate with people. So there's something that I've noticed just in the few minutes of talking to you is you really leverage other people's expertise. Like that sounds like that. I mean, if, if you do two campaigns and they're not successful, why would you just continue

to do a third? You would find someone that can help you. That is the expert. And then your third is very successful. It sounds like from what I'm gathering and look, I've had like eight unsuccessful businesses. Almost every business ever started failed miserably. And so I'm with you. I love that approach to find someone who's successful, figure out what they're doing, have them help you, and then you will be successful. So from a marketing perspective, I think a lot of companies fail either the sales or their marketing, right? They don't have enough clients. They don't have enough leads. What are you finding in terms of maybe one thing right now that you're like super

enthusiastic, like from a marketing perspective that you see is working. Hey, everyone, I'm not sure if you've heard, but our show Founders Story is now available on the iHeartRadio app. So check that out. iHeartRadio online or you grab the app. It's super easy. You can listen to all of our episodes wherever you enjoy your podcast, whether that's iHeartRadio, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and many more. But check it out. Yeah. I mean, that's actually maybe one of our weak points. I mean, I think that's something where we can improve maybe the most on because that's like our highest cost right now is

marketing. So that's always something that I'm trying to improve. I mean, our margins are good where they're at right now, but we always have to always have to try to improve and, um, try to be better. Um, but yeah, I mean, for the Kickstarter campaign, uh, the Kickstarter guy that, uh, was mentoring me, he had a digital marketing guy that kind of specialized a little bit in doing Kickstarter campaigns. Um, so just like finding people like that to then know how to target these different avenues and stuff is really important in terms of marketing. Whether you're starting or scaling your company's security program, demonstrating top more, saving you time and money while helping you build customer trust. Plus, you can streamline security reviews by automating questionnaires and demonstrating your security posture with a customer-facing trust center all powered by Vanta AI. Over 8,000 global companies like Atlassian, Flow Health, and Quora use Vanta to manage risk and prove security in real time.-A dot com slash founders for $1,000 off.

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And with Monday.com, work is just easier. Monday.com, for whatever you run. Go to Monday.com to learn more. I really don't think we're that. I think we can be a lot better at marketing in general um but uh but yeah i mean facebook ads instagram ads is like a solid top of funnel for us and then those you know that marketing trickles down to retail sales it trickles down to amazon sales to website sales but the key is to try to make those as profitable as possible and for my business

content is extremely valuable because the better content we have the more marketing costs are going to go down so i guess the key really in terms of marketing for my particular business and industry is getting the best content possible and really creating a feedback loop of, okay, who creates the content and then who makes the videos and then who posts the videos and how can we have the customers make us more videos and how can we make an endless cycle that creates a bunch of content for us to lower our costs. So I think that's essential for a backyard game or backyard game industry, but I think that's essential for most businesses. But my my product luckily it's in the hundred dollar range so we have a little bit more to spend on marketing so that's why facebook and instagram works well for us

but people that have like lower price point items i would say tiktok tiktok shop um are the best places for them i think but i mean we haven't had too much traction with tick tock but it's different for every product yeah totally i mean i i've sold so many products and like sometimes amazon worked the best sometimes amazon worked the worst so i'm with you on that i'm curious because you're a solo founder which means all of the responsibility the weight it really falls on you. So how do you deal with that? Because I think a lot of people, when they come into entrepreneurship, it's kind of like the book, The E-Myth. You come into it. I don't know if you ever read that book, old one, but you come into it because you want to bake, but then you realize you have to do

50,000 different things that you hate doing, and then they fall out and I think they you know most businesses fail so how do you deal with everything really falling onto you yeah and that's been a huge learning curve like I bounced around a lot like I started with freelancers and then I bounced around I didn't I had an agency helped me out last year but you know that was really expensive and I didn't have enough control to like really manage the situation and maximize how much you know work they were putting in um so I bounced right back to you know freelancers and that seems to be working out right now but it can get really expensive if you don't watch things so I'm kind of building like a team of freelancers to help me out and that's one of the ways I'm able to be, you know,

a solo founder is because, you know, in this day and age, you know, you don't really need, you know, a bunch of employees. And I think, honestly, as a startup or small business and maybe an e-commerce brand, it might be best to just have a team of freelancers than to hire a bunch of people on salary, even if you have the money for it. Like, um, you can track their hours really efficiently on some freelancing websites. You can see if they're working and take screenshots for you. Um, and then, you know, you just, I'm basically what I'm finding out is I'm a huge bottleneck with a bunch of processes. Like I'm holding so many things back. Like I have so many ideas and so many things that need to be done,

but I'm holding a lot of things back because I can only do one thing at a time. So I'm basically, whenever I find myself not having the time to do something, I figure out a way for a freelancer to do that basically for me. And so until I'm basically just managing the freelancers

and giving them the information that they need to complete the projects and stuff, but also giving them that expertise and admit to that so they continue doing the things that they're not good at that they don't understand and they just continue being a bottleneck uh i mean the future really seems to be like gig economy if you ask most young people they don't even want to work like a full-time job 40 hours a week right like they want to work in that structure of a freelancer plus now we can have access to so much talent all around the world. I mean, the fact that all these things have opened us up to the 8 billion people around the planet that can now help us on different aspects. So I'm totally with

you on that, on that structure. Thank you for, for, uh, for sharing that even being vulnerable, you know, to admit to those things can be tough. So where do you see the future of the company, of your organization, of the games? Where do you see this going? I mean, I think it could really, you know, take over the entire backyard game industry because it's, you know, provides so many different game modes that a lot of games can't provide. And then on the top of that, it's at a very low price point. So like, you know, if you look at current, you know, backyard games, you know, there's one or two game modes that you may be able to play with them. With my particular design, you know, it really hits all the pain points that our customers are having with backyard games.

And so I interviewed hundreds or at least 100 people, door to door. And got a lot of feedback on, you know, what pains them with current backyard games or what pains them just in general with their backyard. So I got unbiased feedback and I, you know, tallied all those things up and made sure to hit all those points with my game. And then, you know, just keep growing it and adding more to it and creating value. You know, with technology, it's great because you can provide updates and you can continue to increase the value with technology

and certain products that people might have. You know, if you think about Tesla cars, you can overnight, their car could be better, you know, just by a software update. And that's what I'm trying to do with like physical products, I guess, you know, providing more updates or game modes to it i mean yeah they would have to pay a little bit more for you know the next game mode but they're not having to buy a whole new game set so i think that's really key for for scoring hole and i think we're going to continue to to see a lot of growth and maybe even reach heights of, you know,

surpassing spike ball, which is currently the highest, you know, highest volume, highest monetary, you know, backyard game out there. So I think we can, you know, we can compete at that level. I think we could reach those heights and, you know, maybe looking at investors right now might take on some investment, but it may not be necessary, you know, if we are strategic about it. So, but, you know, it's good to have those partners in place that can help you out and grow, grow a little faster. If you beat Spikeball, man, you got to come back and tell us like, I can tell with like your perseverance, what you want to do, your strategy. This could be huge down the line. Something maybe even way bigger than what you could even have dreamt it to be at one point.

Now that you're really digging in, really implementing a lot of strategy, all the things that you're doing, coming up to this point, possibly getting investors. It's a great place to be when you have these options, I think, than the minute that you're starting out and the excitement that you're doing. So hats off to you. Amazing story, by the way. I think it gives hope and inspiration to a lot of people knowing that they don't have to go do a business with 100 employees. They don't have to go do a business with 100 employees they don't have to raise 50 million dollars like the fact that you did it with kickstarter i mean the fact that i

didn't even know kickstarter was still like a viable option just because i haven't i haven't really been in it in so long but in the beginning i used to invest like in like so many different things and the fact that it's still like you can still do these avenues of crowdfunding and crowdsourcing i mean that's that's amazing to know but one thing today i really took away is if you don't know something find someone who does know and don't create a bottleneck for yourself so thank you you for sharing today, Jaren. Super inspired. So people want to find out more information. They want to know more either about you and the game.

How can they do so? Yeah, so they can, you know, you can go to scoring.com. Oops, on this side, scoring.com or Amazon. And we're also in Shields stores nationwide. So if you have a Shields near you and you have a cool party coming up, you can pick it up there at their store as well but yeah amazon prime day is coming up so look for

or look you know look forward to some deals i love that so check it out i'm sure they can reach out to you also on linkedin or any social media if they maybe want to invest or find out more information about you personally but jaron thanks again for being here on Founders Story. And man, keep inspiring. I love it. The solo founder beating out the biggest game in Backyard one day. Please make that happen so you could be in the Guinness Book of World Records. But I really appreciate your time today. All right. Yes, I appreciate your time, too. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you for tuning in to Founders Story. Keep exploring, keep dreaming, and join us next time for more inspiring entrepreneurial journeys.