How I Built This with Guy Raz - Advice Line with Chet Pipkin of Belkin International

Episode Date: November 13, 2025

Chet Pipkin, former CEO and founder of the electronic goods company Belkin International, joins Guy on the Advice Line to answer questions from three early-stage entrepreneurs. Plus, Chet and Guy drill into why solving problems for consumers is the key to success.First, we hear from Daniel in Toronto, who’s wondering how to educate customers about his company’s plastic-free, dissolvable shampoo and conditioner tablets. Then Meredith in Long Island asks how to manage inventory for her booming backpack organizer business that keeps selling out to female athletes. And Ryan in San Diego asks for strategies to grow the B2B side of his therapeutic massage tool company.Thank you to the founders of EarthSuds, Sideline Bags and Rolflex for being a part of our show.If you’d like to be featured on a future Advice Line episode, leave us a one-minute message that tells us about your business and a specific question you’d like answered. Send a voice memo to [e-mail] or call 1-800-433-1298.And be sure to listen to Belkin International’s founding story as told by Chet on the show in 2019.This episode was produced by Katherine Sypher with music by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Andrea Bruce. Our audio engineer was Cena Loffredo.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.ca. Hello and welcome to the advice line on how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz. This is the place where we help try to solve your business challenges. Each week, I'm joined by a legendary founder, a former guest on this show who will help me try to help you.

And if you're building something and you need advice, give us a call and you just might be the next guest on the show. Our number is 1-800-433-1298. Leave us a one-minute message that tells us about your business and the issues or questions that you like help with. All right, let's get to it. Joining me this week is Chet Pipkin. He's the founder of Belkin International. It's a name synonymous with computer cables, power banks, adapters, you name it. Chet, it's great to have you back on the show.

Guy, it is so much fun to be here. Looking forward to all this time together. So I think about you all the time. I mean, like even the back of my phone. I've got the Belkin magnet that I can connect to my laptop and use the back as a camera. I mean, it's unbelievable. All the things that Belkin makes, you were, of course, first on the show back in 2019. And as always, we will put a link to that in the show notes.

So check it out in that episode. We talked about how you first got started in the early 80s. You would hang out in like mom and pop computer. shops and you realize that computers could not talk to each other. There was, it was really hard actually. It's just so crazy we'd take it for granted. You couldn't easily connect a computer to a printer, for example, or to another computer. You just cables didn't exist.

And so you started to solder cables and then sell them to shops and to people who needed them. And eventually that turned into a business. You were 21. You dropped out of college. You started Belkin. And if I remember, you really started it because you didn't have the money. to start a PC company, which is kind of what you thought about doing, but you went on to

start this other business, which became a huge, incredible business. I've talked about this before. You were like Levi Strauss. You were selling jeans to the miners. You weren't golden gold mines, but you were selling the axes and the shovels and the tents and all those things. Yeah. At that moment, I thought that this couldn't be a real business, but it turns out that allowing people to connect and live the lives they want with tech is a real business and a really fun one. Amazing busy. Eventually, you grew, of course, into a huge brand, huge company.

In 2018, it was sold for reportedly more than $800 million. It's an amazing story. Since then, Chet, you have stepped down as CEO. Give us an update about what's been going on in your life more recently. Yeah. So still very active with Belkin and Foxx. who acquired Belkin, involved with a bunch of tech firms that are just getting going, and then doing a lot of work in the Lake Tahoe area, and then a lot of work in education also.

Am I right that you actually co-founded a hotel? Yeah, Desolation Hotel in South Lake Tahoe. And it all ties together because we're just into creating great experiences for folks, whether that's in tech or anything else. And so that's the common theme. You know, it's so crazy because Belkin is like it's, the products are just ubiquitous. And there's so many Belkin products, right, that I use all the time. And when you started it, as I mentioned, you really thought this was a side project that eventually maybe if you could find the cash, you'd build like a PC company.

You never did because you didn't have the capital to do it. If you were thinking about, you know, if you are an entrepreneur right now and you feel limited by cash, right? I mean, what do you recommend somebody do? I mean, do you recommend that they sort of do what you did, which is look for a way in through sort of the side door? Yeah, so I think one of the best ways to kill a startup is to overfund it. So not having enough cash isn't always a bad thing. It makes us really, really get to the essence of what it is we need to do. So the first thing I would encourage people to think about is identify a true.

problem that is a real issue for folks. And if you can come up with a simple, elegant way to solve that problem, you'll get the rest of it figured out. If it's a solution in search of a problem that doesn't really exist, I don't care how much money you have. I don't know you're ever going to get there. Yeah. Chet, I'm curious to get your take on something. It's, it just occurred to me, you know, because you dropped out of college to start Belkin. And when you, you, you're you did that, that was a little bit more unusual. I mean, to go to college, certainly at the time that you went and, you know, it was a bigger deal. Now we're seeing a lot of young people graduate and more and more anecdotal information that with AI, you know, it could create more

and more unemployment for traditional sort of college graduates. I wonder whether you think that there's still value in going to college versus trying to start a business. Yeah, when I was in high school, there was no doubt I was going to go to university and I was going to finish. There was just no doubt about that. There was also no doubt that I was going to start a business. And as the business got going, the level of passion that I had for that versus the level of passion that I had for school, the former dwarfed the second, I didn't have a choice. there was no way that I could do anything in my life except pursue that business. It's just where I was.

I didn't expect that to happen. It just did. And so I think if people have good intentions, good motives, are in touch with their values, following your passion in that moment is probably not a bad way to go. And I do think of myself as a lifelong learner. So that's never, ever gone away. So education's critical. We don't want to minimize that in any way.

But it doesn't necessarily have to immediately follow high school in a formal fashion. There's all kinds of ways for us to do our lifelong learning. Yeah, for sure. Chet, what do you say? Should we bring in our first caller? I think we're ready, Guy. All right, let's go. Hello, caller.

Welcome to the advice line. You're on with Chappapipkin, founder Belkin. Please tell us your name, where you're calling from, and just a quick line about your business, please. Hey, Chet and Guy. Thanks for having me. My name is Daniel Mall. I'm calling from Toronto, Canada. I'm the founder of Earthsuds, where we've created the world's first dissolvable tablets of shampoo,

conditioner, body wash, and hand soap. They're more sustainable and more convenient for travel. Awesome. Daniel, welcome the show, calling from Toronto. So Earth sud, so these are like, it's not great now, as you're like laundry detergent tablets, but for shampoo and conditioner and soap. Yeah, tell me how it works. Yeah, exactly.

It's a little shampoo cube. You just add water, rub between your hands, and then it'll suds up like a traditional liquid product, and you can just apply it to your hair or to your body. Awesome. Tell me the story. How did you start this business? I mean, it started a while ago while on a family vacation. I wandered off onto a local beach and just saw it littered with all these plastic shampoo bottles.

And I was shocked because all the narrative at the time was reducing plastic straws, plastic grocery bags, and no one was talking about the plastic toiletry bottles that end up in our landfills every year. And so I got back to, I was in college at the time, got back to school and just started tinkering in my kitchen, trying different formulations. We first made shampoo strips. So if you know, like listerine mouthwash strips, we made shampoo in that form, but they would dissolve too quickly. tried a bunch of different iterations, thousands of experiments later invented shampoo tablets. It's such a great idea. I mean, it's zero waste, basically. I mean, you've got the tin, but the tin presumably can be reused or recycled pretty easily. Exactly. And on top of the waste

portion, your liquid shampoo is like 90% water. So we're emitting huge amounts of carbon emissions just to ship around a product that is mostly water that you use in a shower where water is president. It makes no sense. So we thought we could create a better version. looking at your website you've got four basically four products you've got shampoo conditioner body wash hand soap and and i'm just kind of describing the cubes they look like candy actually they're little cubes and it comes in a tin and you don't eat them use one and you just bring in the shower you rub in your hands and then you soap down or you shampoo your hair a conditioner tell me a little bit about where it's where are you are you sold only direct to consumer through your

website yeah we're mostly online today we're also on amazon and then we're getting into some retail stores and we're also carried by a few hotels and Airbnb's as well. Got it. And tell me a little bit about your sales. How are you guys doing? Yeah, we're on track to do over 100K this year. So I'm excited for that continued growth. We've sold over 200,000 tablets today to customers all over the world and just hoping to continue that traction. One big piece of recognition was that we were named by National Geographic for reducing ocean plastic waste. And so that was a nice marker recognition and has inspired us to keep moving forward with this mission. That's cool. What are your ingredients? I'm assuming, given that it's environmentally

friendly, you probably are, like, I hate this term, clean ingredients, but I'm sure they're environmentally friendly ingredients. What do you put in the soap? I mean, it's a mix of clean ingredients that are surfactants. We have butters, oils, natural preservatives, essential oils to scented products. No parabens, no sulfates, no silicones. So we really try to make a clean in product, like you say. Is this your full-time job? This is my full-time job. That's awesome.

My full-time gig, I was working in consulting in San Francisco for a company called Bain prior to this. I did that for three years and then decided this would be the time to give it a full-time shot. So I left it. Wow. That's awesome. I'm on it full-time now. Lots of people have left Bain to start businesses. So you were doing consulting. Now you're doing this.

That's awesome. Okay. Before we dive in further, tell us your question. Yeah. So my question today is, how can we get consumers to adopt an unfamiliar format like shampoo tablets. So it becomes part of their everyday routine beyond just travel use. All right. Cool. Good question. I want to bring in Chip Hipkin, Chet. Cool product, right? I mean, this is kind of awesome. It is super cool. The thing that I love the most about it is what we

were talking about before. Is it solving an issue that people have? And a problem that I have is the one that you bring up. I'm on the road a lot. There's products I want to use. And I can't bring them with me. And with this way, I can. I also like it on the hospitality side because this will produce a lot less waste. I'm going to be curious to hear a little bit more what the user experiences like with it. Yeah, tell us a little bit about who's, what are you hearing back from your customers and who's using it, who's buying it? Right now, it's a lot of travelers. So it's folks that are taking it on a trip overseas or on a safari. They're going camping. So it's a lot of that portability use case. In terms of user experience, the first time you use it,

it is a little different, right? It's unfamiliar. And so it takes a little bit of getting used to that first shower, suds hitting it up. But once you get the hang of it that first time, it's pretty self-explanatory after that. It's not rocket science. And are you, you mentioned hotels and how are those partnerships going? Actually, how many hotels are you partnering with right now? Yeah, we're in about a handful right now. They're mostly eco-adventure lodges, mountain lodges. We've pitched to dozens of hotels across Canada and the U.S., and they are a little bit slow to adopt something new like this. The thing that's working in our favor is that there is some incoming legislation that is

banning many bottles in hotels. So they've already been banned in California back in 2023, this year in New York, in Washington by 2027. So state-level bans, which are a bit of a tailwind for us, but there's still a hurdle to be able to get them to adopt a different type of form factor. Yeah, Chad, you know, I'm curious because you mentioned something. I think we both agree on this. This does solve a problem that a lot of people have, whether they're environmentally conscious and they want to be better stewards of the planet, or they just don't want to travel through TSA with a bunch of stuff, right? But I will say they are loyal to their brands of shampoo.

So what do you, how would you start to get people to think about something? like this, which is not a known brand, to try and adopt it. Yeah, so I'd love to dig a little bit deeper into what the user experience is like. Are you measuring what the user feels about her or his experience with it? Are you using anything like a net promoter score or anything like that? Yeah, we capture reviews on our site. So we have over 500 reviews, about 4.7 stars average. And then we also conduct user interviews. So we've done over 150 customer interviews to date to try to dig into the deeper qualitative insights and gather more feedback on how to improve the formulation, the packaging, the go to market, et cetera. Most of the research I've seen

seems to say that people clamor to be able to use an environmentally friendly replacement if it doesn't cost them anymore and it doesn't inconvenience them in any way. As soon as it does cost more or the inconveniences there, the resistance can go up at a quite high rate. So depending upon what the compromise or the sacrifice is that is being made in the mind of the user when the product is used, that would be an area of sensitivity that I would want to explore more. I love the fact that you're seeding this in hospitality because it gives people an opportunity to use it firsthand. I think for me, I would keep leaning into that really, really heavy.

That makes a lot of sense. A couple questions for you, Daniel. First of all, one of the things, one of the ways you're pitching this is it's convenient, right? You know, I'm looking at your website and says Hair and Body tablets for Life's Adventures, but you could do something like, you know, your shampoo now in the same convenient format as a laundry tablet. But again, I'm not convinced that convenience

is why people are going to pick this. I travel a lot, you know, and I'm perfectly happy to use the shampoo in the hotels, especially in a nice hotel, just to try it. But here's what I think that you may want to think first of all, being consistent with your story and your message is going to be virality any day. This is not having a viral hit going to an influencer.

That could be fun if it works, but being consistent, telling the story, speaking about this as much as you can. I'm looking at your website. It seems like you have given some speeches. I think you should keep doing that. But I keep looking at this and I keep going back to three products. Tesla, Method Soap and Sunbum, Suntan lotion. Why did Method soap work? Of course, it's in a plastic bottle, but it's because they took an environmentally friendly product, which was the soap, and they made it, they elevated it. At the time, it was seventh generation, and those were the brands that they were competing against.

Method really broke the mold by making it cool and luxurious. Tesla did the same thing with electric cars. They didn't invent electric cars. They just made them so awesome for people that people went to them. Sunbomb with suntan lotion was looking at, you know, Neutrogena, and banana boat and Hawaiian Tropic and said, hey, we can make a beautiful bottle and really design the hell out of this. And I feel like this is a product that could benefit from a redesign.

That could really, you really want to, I would suggest you want to think about how do you make this into a product that is really desirable, not just for people who want to do right by the environment, but for people who want something elevated and luxurious and they get the benefit that it's good for the environment. Yeah, I think those are all great points, and we will definitely look more into that,

so I appreciate the advice. Trent, is your eco-lodge that you have in Tahoe? Is it kind of an upscale place? Yes. It's a small boutique hotel. I think that places like ours would have a level of being curious about things like this. I would love to be able to give what it is, sell a go and see what kind of an experience that I have with it.

Look at that. I think you should take Chetup on that offer. We would love to send you some samples. Appreciate that offer. That'll be fun. Daniel, it's an awesome product. Congratulations. The brand's called Earthsuds.

Daniel Moll, thanks for calling in. Good luck. Guy Chet, thanks so much. Really appreciate it. Yeah, I mean, I think it's really cool. I think it could really, as I say, benefit from just a few tweaks in the design to make it look really sleek. You know, you think about, and it's possible you guys even have this brand at your lodges, ESOP, ESOP soaps, even the name. You think of ESOP's fables. The design is so beautiful. They're botanicals. I'm not even sure if they're good for the environment or not, you know, but it's it just has this feeling and this aura around it that when you use it. And I think a lot of people listening would agree. It feels luxurious. I mean, it's expensive too, but it has that feeling. And I think there's something to that.

Yeah, I don't know for sure, but I suspect that Earth suds will likely live or die on what that experience is like. I am curious to get my hands on a couple of them and see. If it's a good experience, I think he's on to something. If it's not a good experience, he's got a big hill to climb. Stay with us because after the break, we'll talk to another founder working to take their business to the next level. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to the advice line right here on how I built this lab. Welcome back to the device line on how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz.

And my guest today is Chet Pipkin, founder of Belkin International, and we are taking your calls. Hello, let's bring in our next caller. Hello, caller. Hi, Chet. Hi, Guy. I'm so excited to be here. Hi. My name is Meredith Hudson, and I'm calling in from Long Island, New York.

And I am the founder of sideline bags, which are the number one backpack organization. organizer specifically designed for female athletes. And I designed them to go inside your sports backpack to hold things like a hairbrush, hair elastics, sunscreen, kind of all the stuff that's typically rattling around at the bottom of a female athlete's sports backpack. And sideline bags, keep them all safe and secure. Cool. Welcome to the show, Mara. So designed for women athletes who you know, need to take off their earrings or their jewelry or hair elastic. And instead of it rattling around in a pocket and a backpack. It's, this bag is designed for those accessories.

Exactly. Got it. Okay, tell me how you started this company. So we are about one year old. I am a mom of two, very active teenage daughters, who at one point we're playing three or four sports at the same time. So you're leaving the house with a few different backpacks. And inevitably, we'd be pulling out of the driveway or pulling into practice.

And someone would ask for a hairbrush. Someone would need a bandaid and someone wouldn't be able to find their sunscreen. And so I thought, and being a former female athlete myself, I knew how important it was just to have those things so that you were organized, so that when you got to the field, you could just really give it your all and, you know, crush it when you're there and not being worried about, you know, do I have a hair elastic or a hairbrush? So I thought to myself, you know, there has to be a better way for them to stay organized because I'm giving them all these items, but they're kind of disappearing. So I started creating sideline bags just for my own two daughters. and it was going so well and they liked having them. And I thought, actually, this could be a thing. So that led to my first prototype.

What sport did you play? I played ice hockey, field hockey, and lacrosse growing up. And then I played field hockey in college. Wow, that's awesome. Okay, so, and tell me how you designed this and then you found like a manufacturer overseas to start making them for you? Yeah, yeah, exactly. I have no background in manufacturing or retail. I literally drew on a piece of graph paper what I wanted it to look like.

And I had a very good friend who owns her own company and she's in manufacturing. And I said, what do I do with this drawing? I want to make this bag. How do I go about this? And then just from YouTube and her advice and talking to some other people, I kind of went down the route of turning that into CAD drawing and then finding a manufacturer to make my first prototype. But I'm self-taught in this world. That's awesome.

What were you, are, is this your full-time work now? It's not. I, um, I've been in advertising and media for about 20 years. I work in sales. So this is very much my five to nine in my weekend job right now. Uh-huh. Yeah. Which is great. What do you guys, uh, and you're selling through website, through the website right now only? Yep, I'm selling through my website. Um, I do a lot with TikTok shop, which is really exciting. And I'm also in a few retailers as well. And tell me about your sales, uh, what do you expect to? to do this year in sales? I think I'm going to do a little over 100K this year, which is about 10x from last year. Yeah. It's been such a whirlwind in the best way possible. Wow. All right,

before we dive in further, tell us your question. Yeah, so my question is about inventory planning. So I can't keep sideline bags in stock. The response has been incredibly overwhelming. I keep selling out. And so my question is, what is the best way for me to plan and buy inventory? when I'm bootstrapping the business and cash flow isn't totally unlimited. And also space isn't unlimited. I'm still in my house, in my garage, in my basement, in every corner of every bedroom, there are boxes of sideline bags. But the girls love the bags and we've been selling out really fast.

Awesome. I want to bring in Chet. Chet, again, I mean, cool product to solve it clearly solving a problem for lots of people. What thoughts about Meredith's question or questions from Meredith? Yeah, I really like this. I've got a granddaughter who is an avid volleyball player. I travel with her on all of her away volleyball tournaments. So I watch her and her teammates gear up first just for life, right? And then they re-gear up for the game and then they re-gear up again for life. So it's easy for me to envision. a much more organized way to do that. So really in touch with the problem that you're solving on that side. And I love the problem that you have with the business.

We had the same problem at Belkin, not enough cash, no working capital to invest in goods. So the way we solved that issue was we formed a very tight alliance with the person that was manufacturing our stuff. And we built a lot of trust with them. And so it wasn't like a viable financial model for them, but because of the trust we built with them, we were able to get them to build a lot of things for us and to keep them on their books.

And they allowed us to pull it off of them as we needed it. we could have never afforded to have had that, all of that stuff on our own books. So I don't know if you'll be able to build a relationship like that. But if you can, it could be a way to solve your issue. I have a question for you, Meredith. I mean, what are your biggest sellers? I'm looking at your website now. You've got a bunch of colors here.

Maybe nine different colors. They're nine colors. I'm assuming, I'm just going to take a leap here, that black and maybe Navy are your biggest sellers? So it's actually Navy Blue and the Carolina Blue are our two biggest hits. But here's the thing that's unpredictable is I do a lot of team sales, which is amazing. I'll have a, you know, Division I soccer team, coach reach out and say we'd love to get them for the entire team, which is great. But maybe they'll come in and buy, you know, 40 green bags. So green will sell really quickly. And then another team we're like, we would buy a hundred

purple bags from you because our school colors are purple. And I have to go. and get a certain color of purple manufactured. So when it comes to the specific colors that I'm making, it's really dependent on the demand that I'm getting from various teams. I mean, you don't have years of historical data, obviously, because you've just started this. So you're really going to be looking at sell-through rates for like 30 days, 60 days, 90 days. Are you selling out in a specific window?

Like, do you sell out in like three weeks or two weeks? Or do you have any data around that? Some of them I sell out when I put it up on pre-sale before I even get the entire shipment. Every time I do a reorder with my manufacturer, who's amazing and to your point, I think that's a very interesting area for me to explore is like working even more closely with them and kind of how they can help me out there. We've been able to shorten the production time a little bit, but I've been sometimes doubling my orders with the manufacturer as well, and I still can't seem to keep enough

in and in my house. stock. Chet, I guess, I mean, normally you wouldn't want to drown in in unsold inventory. That's not a good recipe. Inventory management's critical for building a successful business. It doesn't sound like Meredith has this problem. It sounds like it's going in the door and out in one door and out the other door. I don't know.

I'm just thinking like, why wouldn't she just order more than she thinks she needs? What do you think? I'm going to guess she doesn't order more because she doesn't have the cash. and I can definitely relate to that. And so how does she get more without having the cash? Is your inventory more like bananas or is your inventory more like wine? Is there a lot of risk in the inventory you have? I actually think there's zero risk.

I think if I got a lot and had it sitting there, I would eventually sell it over time. It's just, yeah. Okay. So it sounds like wine. It doesn't deagrade over. time. Yeah. So your sales are a hundred thousand bucks a year. Do you have 10,000 dollars in inventory at any given time? I'd probably like double that right now. Okay. Yeah. And what is the lead time? From the time you place an order until you have goods on hand, what is that period of time? It's about six weeks. If I do

air shipping, which is cutting into my margins, but I've been doing that sometimes because I had skinny margins, better than no margins. And it's more like nine weeks if I see ship it, which I would like to do more of, just have it planned out. So I'm just receiving shipments over time versus these like rush air shipped orders. Yeah.

So I agree with Guy. It sounds like the problem you have is the problem we're all dying to have, is that our sales are constrained by a lack of goods. Yeah. It's a much more fun problem to solve then I can't generate the sales. So I think you need to get creative

with the working capital constraint you have. And so you can do that with your supplier if they're willing to undo that and to keep it there for you. Maybe there's another way to solve it where an angel or someone else is willing to fund that supply, side for you, you'll need to give up some margin for that, either to the source of supply or the

person who is doing that for you. But the cost of doing it that way is probably going to be a lot less than the cost of shipping at air. Yeah, the other thought I had was if you're constrained financially is, as Chet said, you could potentially work with the manufacturer to see if you can explore different payment terms, you know, like 30% up front, 70% on delivery. There are also other options like taking out some kind of loan, like non-dilutive loans. Are you do have, are you on Shopify? Is this is your website using Shopify? Yes. My website. I'm not using Shopify. I'm not using Shopify for any specific reason. There's a lot of, I think, Squarespace, a lot of them do it. I'm not endorsing any of them, but they exist. These are places where you can actually

take out loans. Have you explored any of that? Shopify wants me to. It keeps prompting it, you know, right on the home screen when I log in there. Have you considered that? No, I definitely could. I think I could also consider just a regular small business loan as well, depending on what the interest rate is. I did actually renegotiate my terms with my manufacturer, just this last cycle of inventory. So that was a good first step. I'm glad that you guys agreed with that. Yeah, awesome. Cool. The brand is called Sideline Bags. Meredith Hudson. Thanks for calling and good luck. Thanks so much.

Chad, you could even put belkin peripherals and cables in these bags. That would probably be the best thing you could put in those bags. No, but it's really cool. I mean, you know, I'm not, I've got two boys who are athletes, and they just, you know, dump all their crap in a backpack, and then, you know, you find it with like an old candy bar wrapper. Yeah, watching my granddaughter and her teammates, they have a lot of accessories that, you know,

your boys may not have. And so the way to manage that and to be able to keep track of that, it's a good problem to solve. All right. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with another caller and another round of advice. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz. And you're listening to the advice line right here on how I built this lab. Welcome back to the device line on how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz. And today I'm taking your calls with Chet Pipkin, the founder of Belkin international. Chet, thanks for joining me. Are you ready to take the next call? I'm ready.

All right, let's bring in our next caller. Hello, you're on the advice line. Tell us your name. Where you're calling from and just a little bit about your business. Yeah, hey, Chet. Hey, hey guy. I'm Ryan Haldrigo, and I'm calling in from San Diego, California. I'm the CEO of Rollflex, a company that specializes in making therapeutic massage

tools. We are most known for creating the world's most effective arm recovery tools for things like tennis elbow, carpal tunnel, and overall arm soreness. All right, cool. Thanks for calling in. Ryan, appreciate it. Roll flex. So tell me, describe what this product is.

Like, because we're on, we're not, it's not a visual medium here. Tell me, yeah, build me a picture. The best way to visualize what the Rollflex is, is imagine a vice or a nutcracker, but for your arms and also for your legs. So instead of using. A vice. A vice or nutcracker. Okay, keep going.

Just imagine it's like a torture device, totally kidding, to help roll out the pain and tension in your arms and your legs. So it allows you to use that leverage to create all the pressure instead of gravity, which is what we use a foam roller or lacrosse ball for. Okay. And generally, what kinds of people, I mean, athletes, but is it for, I mean, is it, you just mentioned your arms, also your calves, like where? Yeah. It fits over what parts of your body? It's adjustable, so you can do both. It's most primarily used for tennis elbow and arm recovery.

You can use it for arms, legs, as the better way to recover. Got it. Okay, so it's like pressure, like you'd go to a masseuse, and they would use their fingers and apply pressure to, like, knots in your forearms and things like that. Okay, cool. And how did you come up with this idea? How did this start? Yeah, so Rollflex started back in 2016.

One of my business partners, they're both physical therapists and massacists. therapist, they created this tool to help them alleviate their own tension. Imagine you're a PT or a masseuse working on people's arms and legs all day. You could imagine your arms after working on people would be really tense and really sore. My business partner, Nick, would go home to his sweet wife and go, honey, please help me roll out my arms. So they develop this tool to help do that to them themselves. Wow. And this is a patent, presumably a patented product and yeah and yeah and and where do you primarily where do you sell it we sell on amazon and our website primarily got it and so how and so since 2016 so you're close to hitting your 10 year mark

tell me a little bit about your sales what do you expect to do this year this year we'll do about five million dollars in sales last year we did three that's amazing yeah that's awesome and who are your primary customers so we always say if you have arms and legs we can help you if that yeah i mean that's pretty awesome five million okay so let's before we dive in further tell me what your question is for us. Yeah, so the question that keeps coming up over and over and over again for me is that we have large businesses, think like manufacturing logistics companies, military companies reaching out, to have the Rollflex, reduce worker comp claims. We have never successfully outbound reached out to somebody and got through to the right point of contact

to get the Rollflex to help more people. So my question is, what are some pathways when serving the B-to-B realm in those spaces, what would you imagine would be a great pathway to help serve more people in that space? Yeah. When I hear government contractors or military contractors, my blood pressure goes up

because it's so complex. The RFP process is just, it's so complicated and challenging. And, Chad, I'm sure Belkin has been through this many times. So before we tackle the question, any thoughts or any questions that you have? for Ryan? Yeah, so I think you're both making a great point. A frontal assault is expensive and ineffective. With this kind of sales and market development, the best way to do it is an inside job.

So if you can plant these experiences from people on the inside, and a firm that's done this in a brilliant fashion in the recent years is Slack. So what Slack does is gets people inside of the organization to use it. And then people inside of the org are the ones that are fighting and clamoring for the org to adopt it. So if you can get first some and then a critical mass of people inside the org that are using it and being an evangelist for it on the inside that, look, We're losing all this time to people being down because they're injured. We're incurring all of these costs. This is a lifesaver for me and for us.

Create that demand on the inside. And I think that things will be a lot more effective. Yeah, I think that's a great point. And Chet, truly, that is the only way that we have gotten to create contracts of these large companies for thousands of units for workers' comp because it all starts with that one UPS driver or that one health and safety officer. But that's a really hard to repeat process. Have you been able to connect with HR or procurement officers at any of these places that

have been interested in maybe partnering with you? Yeah, HR. And then we have conversations around like corporate wellness programs and we start moving the needle there and then what we've experienced in the past and we've done it for a limited amount of time is something happens the person's no longer working for the company and then it's starting from the ground up all over again right that happens normal how much it does one of these devices cost it costs $80 the cost of one massage so so have you been able to show right it's not just a nice to have perk but have you been able to show that this could potentially be a cost

reduction tool right because workers comp claims are high and it costs thousands of dollars right, per employee, if somebody puts a claim in. And I mean, if you can show with data, and I don't know if you've done this, that, you know, this can reduce repetitive strain injuries by, I don't know, 5, 10% even, you then turn the product into a cost reduction tool. Like, that to me would be the best argument. Have you been able to make that case and make that pitch? We have on the consumer standpoint through doing our own studies,

but we have not been able to publicly share the companies that we work with that are willing to share their data reviews with us. And that's part of most of them come from military contracting, that we haven't been able to re-leverage that. You can't anonymize it and just share data that doesn't mention, that doesn't reveal who you're talking about? Yeah, we could do that, yeah. Yeah, why wouldn't you do that? I feel like people always want, like, the name and... Yeah, you can say we have relationships that are private, but here's the data. We will show you the data from, you know, company, you know, Acme, whatever, Company X.

It's a well-known company. You will know it. You'll know their products. You know what they do. But, you know, we have a proprietary relationship with them so we don't talk about and we would protect you as well. Here's the data we have from them. They have 100 employees. They've reduced their workers' comp claims by 5%. It could save them. $100,000, they only spent, you know, say to a million dollars, they only spent $100,000 in this product, whatever it is, you know, you're going to say, that's what you want to do. I think that's a great point. And I should definitely lean into that more clearly, yes. But the D to C bit, what percentage of your sales are D to C? 99%. 99% direct to consumer. I mean, that's pretty damn great. I mean, the margins on that

product must be pretty good. Yeah, yeah. And it's, we've scaled through meta ads, influence, sensors, Google, TikTok. But we're definitely in this phase that we're looking to go to the next level, and it's going to require sales channel diversification. Chet, how important for Belkin were these big contracts versus, you know, just selling to consumers? Yes, our B-to-B business was often almost as big as the business on the consumer side. Wow. And even the delineation between the two is not that clear, right? I mean, I use my tech at home. I use it at work.

Is that a B-to-B path or is that a consumer path? And with all due respect to that like frontal approach through HR and the people that write the POs for this, it's not the way I would do this one. Let's go. I would be much more, much more. on the guerrilla side of things. So go where these folks are. If you can get to them and you can allow them to experience this,

so like let's say it was on the sports side, you're going to go to a triathlete event. Somebody's going to be there, you know, selling bottle drinks and somebody else is going to be having some kind of power bar. You're there with a booth with these things, right? and say, hey, you feeling aches or pains, just give this a try. And you start solving that problem for people and they start talking about it inside of the organization. And HR is hearing from them and procurement's hearing from them.

That's where you're going to get your breakthroughs. The problem with you doing it, even with the data and everything, there's too many people trying to sell too much stuff. And everybody's got all these claims. They don't know who is credible and who is not. For me, you have to get the inside voice. Whatever it takes to get those inside voices, that's where I'd focus 99% of my effort. You're saying go grassroots.

I love this, Chad. I didn't know you were a guerrilla marketer. I love that. Yeah, I would explore ways to be able to reward or incentivize people that make things happen for you. So I immediately don't know exactly what that might look like. But something on a referral or if you're able to make like these things happen for us, that this is your reward, I think I'd spend some time thinking about that. But that's where I'd put 99% of my energy.

Awesome. Thank you. Yeah. And I agree. And I think that the given how robust your D to C sales are, that's really the core here. But one thing you could consider doing is trying to find a distributor that works with these corporate wellness programs. and obviously you'd have to cut them in, but that could be an interesting approach,

sort of outsource this outreach to wellness programs using your products. And that's what we've been advised is a really good next step, instead of trying to do it all yourself and establish all the relationships, why not work of somebody that has it? And then comes the conversation,

we are a fully bootstrap company around fulfilling these orders at that scale, that scope. Yeah. Yeah. And I think this is an inside job. And I wish you a lot of success with it. Yeah. Awesome. Ryan Helregal, co-founder of Rollflex, thanks for calling in, man. Good luck. Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Chet, I mean, it's been a while since you were grinding through some of these issues yourself. But, I mean, it kind of must take you back a little bit. It does. Thinking back grinding through this,

I don't think about it every day. But hearing these people with their own grind going on, it all comes back. I mean, it's like I'm reliving it, right? I'm here in this moment. And I just want to dive in to help them because these are solvable things. And I think most of those, maybe all of those, we've had to solve in multiple ways, and multiple times. Yeah, let's just go get it done.

That's awesome. Chad, if you could go back, right, knowing everything you know now, back to when you were 21, you were starting Belkin, you were trying to figure this out, and you could give yourself a piece of advice that you now know.

What do you think would have been helpful for you to know? So I think for me, the systems and the approaches that we invented were really appropriate and good for our business. And some of the biggest errors

we made was listening to so-called pros tell us at a future point in time that the right way to run a business is, you know, fill in the blank. And rather than just staying true to what it was that was working and our own systems and our own DNA, some of the times when we tried to make that shift to the pros, it was actually a huge step back. So I would just keep following the heart and keep following what works and not worry so much about what other people say are the right way to do things. That's Chet, Pipkin, founder of Belkin International Chet. Thanks so much for coming back on the show. Pleasure to be here.

Always great to see you. It's great to have you. And by the way, if you haven't heard Chet's original how I built this episode, please go back and check it out. We will put a link to it in the podcast description, the show notes. And here is one of my favorite moments from that interview. There were days when I thought nothing could stop us that this is going to work and this is going to be the most brilliant thing ever. And there were other days that were really, really dark. And I just would hold my head in my hands and say, wow, this is never going to work.

Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. And by the way, please make sure to check out my newsletter. You can sign up for it for free at gairoze.com. or on Substack. And of course, if you are working on a business and you'd like to be on this show, send us a one-minute message that tells us a little bit about your business

and the questions or issues that you're currently facing because we would love to try and help you solve them. You can send us a voice memo at hibt at ID.wondry.com or call us at 1-800-433-1298. Leave a message there and make sure to tell us how to reach you and we'll put all of this information in the podcast. podcast description as well. This episode was produced by Catherine Seifer with music composed by Rumtin Arableu.

It was edited by Andrea Bruce. Our audio engineer was Sina LaFredo. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, Carla Estevez, Casey Herman, Carrie Thompson, Chris Messini, Ramel Wood, Sam Paulson, Neva Grant, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.