Hear how David Barnett, the founder of PopSockets, evolved from philosophy professor to entrepreneur, and quickly grew his smartphone accessory company to 40 million units sold in his fourth year. Listen as he describes how employing “the power of reason” became a key to his success. Learn how his early product assumptions changed based on customer feedback — thereby leading to crucial new product and marketing strategies. Additionally, hear how he overcame early manufacturing challenges to finally achieve massive success.

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Top Takeaways from this Episode:

(1)  Don’t defer to the norm. Don’t defer to what most companies do. Don’t defer to general rules of thumb about how to start a business. Think through every problem on your own. Weigh the pros and cons and reason through it. It will bring you success.

(2)   We have an amazing opportunity here in the United States that most people in the rest of the world just don’t have — opportunities to start our own business.

(3)   Do not quit your job or quit school to become an entrepreneur, unless you have good reason to think your idea will be successful.

Transcript:

John Benzick: You know, one of the great things about my role interviewing entrepreneurs is that I get to hear so many diverse perspectives and advice on how to best launch a business; and as a result you’ll learn that there’s just not one or two or even three ways to succeed as an entrepreneur. There are many ways, many different ways to succeed. But the challenging part is that the advice I hear from one entrepreneur for example, can very often conflict with another entrepreneur’s point of view on a particular topic. And so it’s interesting to hear in this interview with David Barnett, the founder of Pop Sockets, how he uses the power of reason to sort through the noise and advice that he gets when he needs to make effective, crucial decisions. As a new entrepreneur who’s struggling to find his way.

David Barnett: They’ve actually learned that the power of clear thinking, I just have more and more confidence that people should not be deferring to the norm. Don’t defer to what most companies do. Don’t defer to what, what’s normal out there in business. Don’t defer to general rules of thumb about how to start a business. Think through every problem on your own, you know, weigh the pros and cons, really reason through it. It will bring you success. So it’s helped a lot that I paid no attention to someone’s background or when somebody says I’m an authority on this. To me, I didn’t even hear that until they give an actual reason for making a decision one way or another, it’s not going to have any impact on me. So the power of reason, I guess, is quite powerful and in business.

John Benzick: Today I’m interviewing David Barnett. He’s the founder and CEO of pop sockets. If you don’t know about Pop Sockets, the offer very clever smartphone accessories. My family has been using them for an a of years now and I’ve had my own custom made venture superfly branded Pop Socket as well, which is super cool. David officially started pop sockets in 2014 and now in 2018 he has sold over 40 million pop sockets worldwide. 40 million. This will be a terrific interview to learn about David’s journey as a new entrepreneur, especially since his previous career, at least on paper, was drastically unrelated to his new trajectory as a business owner. To learn more about his company, visit pop sockets.com David, thanks for being here and welcome to the Product Launch Rebel podcast.

David Barnett: Thanks John. It’s super cool to be here.

John Benzick: Oh, I’m super excited. So David, there are three segments in this podcast. The first is called, give me the basics, which helps set the context about your company for our listeners. The second part is called let’s get personal or we get into some of the more personal topics about what it’s like to start a business. And the final part is what I call tell me how well we get to the heart of the matter on issues that aspiring entrepreneurs want to know now to help them move forward. David, what do you think? Are you ready for some questions?

David Barnett: I’m ready. Hit me.

John Benzick: All right, fantastic. Here we go. David, tell us the story. How did you originally come up with the idea to start Pop Sockets?

David Barnett: Sure, in 2010 when I was a philosophy professor at the University of Colorado, I was tired of pulling my headset out of my pocket and having it be tangled. So my ear buds that I would use every time I made a phone call on my iPhone three back then, they were always tangled and out of frustration one day when I pulled them out, tangle that just hopped in my car and drove down to the nearest Joann Fabric in Boulder to look for a solution. So I walked around the aisles and eventually settled on a couple of really small buttons and a couple of really big buttons about one and a half inch diameter, the big ones. So the small ones separated the big ones from the backside of my phone. And then I used those two giant buttons to wrap my, my earbuds around the backside of my phone to keep them from tangling.

John Benzick: That’s really cool. Were these just regular apparel clothing buttons?

David Barnett: Yes, they were giant apparel clothing buttons. So if you can imagine the iPhone three is, was just tiny compared to today’s phones. So these, these buttons cover the entire backside of the phone, the two buttons together. And I like how you said, that’s very cool. You’re the only one who would say that, everybody around me thought it was ridiculous. So, so from there, actually that’s the transition into Pop Sockets. So from there, I just build the solution for myself. I had no intentions of commercializing it until enough friends and family made fun of me to the point where I decided to try to improve, improve this and make it have more functionality and look less ridiculous. So I went through a bunch of different mechanisms and settled on the accordion mechanism, which is the patented magic of the, the Pop Sockets. And I spent well over a year miniaturizing the, the accordions that you see in kitchen stores, like the giant funnels and bowls that collapse through that accordion mechanism. Right. Took me a long time to, to scale that down to the size of a popsocket. You can’t just shrink it. So a lot of work and then launched the business in 2014.

John Benzick: Yeah, that’s amazing. How many retailer doors do you sell to now and what channels do you sell through?

David Barnett: We’re in about 40,000 doors worldwide. As far as channels we are in the wireless carrier channel, so At&T, Verizon, Sprint, and other carriers. We are in a big box with Best Buy, Target and Walmart, then we’re in quite a few mid tier chains. Geez, I can’t, I can’t name them all, but for example, it’d be Tillys or Michael’s and then we’re in thousands and thousands of independent stores. So boutiques this is just domestically and we try our best to give a unique offering to each of those channels so they’re not all selling the same, the same Pop Sockets. And overseas we’re in about 45 countries in roughly similar channels.

John Benzick: That is astonishing growth in such a short amount of time, especially from a guy that’s never launched a business before. David, most entrepreneurs go into business with a set of assumptions and many of those assumptions prove to be different from what they expected there by making them scramble to make changes in order to survive. Regarding pop sockets, uniqueness, did your original assumption about that uniqueness prove motivating to consumers or did you have to change your selling proposition to sort of match what they were looking for?

David Barnett: So yeah, my original assumptions were false. I was lucky enough to learn early on, which is some key assumptions that were false because I was, I was still teaching at the University of Colorado, so I was able to get some early cases into their hands. The first Pop Socket product was an iPhone four case actually. Then it turned, it turned out by the fine. By the time I got to production, I think it was an iPhone five case, it had two Pop Sockets that collapsed flush with the backside of the case and it was, it was designed to make the headset, headset wrap, just perfect at the cost of a perfect grip or a perfect stand. And I noticed pretty quickly that while all my students said they’d love to wrap their headset around these every day when I put them in their hands, that’s not what they were doing.

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