Joshua Richards - Product Design and Entrepreneurship
Founder's Voyage ·
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Transcript
could be successful but maybe it's not the success that I want to find. Our guest today is a good friend, an avid fly fisher and brilliant product designer. He is the solo founder of Rippelbox, a company to develop and produce a fly fishing product of his own design. He has worked on products in the medical industry, pure industrial design, startup technology and art fabrication. He has started ventures in scrap metal and consumer products.
It is our pleasure to talk with Joshua Richards today. Going right back to the start, it was growing up in Shropshire, a small town called Colbradale. My parents were academics. A lot of my friends parents were either academics or admin so there was very much a culture or a note growing up that work was just what people did between weekends. I don't think thinking back, I knew anyone who had a company or aspirations to run a company. So it was sort of expected that you'd end up working for someone. Then I think I struggled at school. I'd never been diagnosed but I'm pretty sure I'm dyslexic the way I deal with numbers. So design was the first time I ever got like really positive feedback from a teacher. It was often before that I was sort of distracted or flitty or not really engaged but in design I was described as sort of creative and able to look at bring a different perspective and that was a lovely feeling. So I think that sort of tied me into a path of design quite early and then I had a really good technical college I went to and the teachers there were enthusiastic about product design. He'd done a furniture design course and it had a really well-tooled up workshop and it sort of gave me a love of making and they had a lot of autonomy. We could just sort of get in and use the tools. They had sort of welding and metal fabrication and some early sort of CNC stuff and a lot of hand tools and shape it. So there was a good grounding in that and that sort of set me on a path and went through to Coventry University to study industrial product design. I think it's the same experience for many people who've done a design course at uni. You start to get sort of an introduction maybe to what the tools are and how to use them in sort of design but also becoming more competitive and starting to practice those ideas of pitching and having influence in a group and starting to understand how you can communicate about design but still at that level. It was very much like oh I'd love to work for IDEO or Conrad. It wasn't an idea about enterprise or how design could become a business. I think if you think of it as a triangle, I think you come out of university sort of thinking that design is most of the triangle then that the business is the bit at the bottom and it's almost this echo chamber that if you have a great idea like people will recognise it and notice it and the art of having the idea was the big picture of design and yeah from my experience is not true so a difficult point to frame an idea of thinking to have and then as part of my university course I got to go to Melbourne for a year to do an industrial placement and that was the first time you sort of have that view really challenged in the idea that actually you don't know everything and just working for someone maybe isn't enough and I worked for a really small company called Mari's production services and they did a lot of sort of fees cash for services sort of engineering support or fa analysis or all these different bits but they also sold a number of small products and it was the first time I'd ever really seen like a passive income stream that wasn't someone who had a second house to rent or they invested in something ages ago but the idea of they could actually do something you'd then meet the rewards for later and I it felt a long way away but it was also that first sort of earworm that actually that's that's a really interesting way of working. Were there experiences maybe you know at Mari's production services or maybe even earlier than that that you feel like really had like a strong influence on you that took you from you know getting credit for that design project to really making that a passion in your life? Yeah the first one that jumps was we'd gone it was secondary school like the first day of secondary school so we'd been I don't even know how old but it was like a badge making class and a teacher had said that you can make a badge for every idea like if you gave you a sheet of circles and every one that was unique you could make a badge for and like I remember other people sitting down and maybe drawing out three or four and then scratching their heads and I was just just reeling off sheets of them just just one after the other just it was it was the first time that it was like and it was I remember looking around and other people it was like oh maybe it was the first time I thought that maybe I my head worked a little bit differently or I'm able to see see things differently and that was that was the first time I think that the group I hung around with at school were we're all very academic and very talented in sort of the site like the classical education stuff so I was sort of pulled along in their wake but very much not the smart one and that was the first time that I'd really excelled in like a school environment and that was made me super passionate I suppose that actually this is something that I could lean into. Thank you so much Josh I really obviously as someone you work with I've seen you you know actually in the office and all of the sort of focus you put on the human centered centered approach to your work and clearly you've just given us and I've again seen a million times the way that you can come up with curious and interesting and different and great ideas this might seem like a convoluted question but how do you both come up with ideas that inspire you whilst keeping the user in mind because I feel like those are in some ways combative against each other? One of the things my wife says I do is I become hyper fixated so I'll recently it's been spearfishing and I'll just go on a super wormhole into the who are the heroes and the villains and what's the the technology and how's it progressed and what's and I'll understand the intricacies and the mechanisms and the material processes and how things are made and that's often happening on a sideline and then when I get a project that comes up it's suddenly got this this wealth of interest and often though like the challenges for for one area or one niche is similar to another but it's you've just got this actually if I could take a mechanism from from this that's been known and developed for hundreds of years and employ it over here and I think that's having lots of these interest areas lots of hobbies and lots of things that I read up on and and I understand I have this wealth of those idea seeds that I can then count into a project in terms of trying to find user in it it's I guess it's empathy I I don't think of myself as a particularly talented engineer at the moment I'm working more of an engineering role I'm I just try and think of how I'd want to use it and if I was in somebody else's shoes I suppose it's just about trying to stop and question like is this is this useful I don't know if that's an answer to the question sorry Spencer that was a ramble I think that was a great answer but there's definitely not a wrong answer to any of these questions so please know that and and I like that you know you're always trying to think like the user in the back of your mind I guess this is probably my inexperience in the industry but do you get to have any sort of direct contact with test groups at any point or is that something you've experienced in another role and and do you find that that's helpful or is is that just kind of a little bit much I think I think it's often that people know the solution and the designer is just trying to get the right people in the room to have that idea a lot of my work so one of the places I worked was PDD and that was the first time it's a consultancy Pankhurst Design Development based in Hammersmith in London and connected to the Loomer Institute and it's all about human centered and that was the first time I heard the expression and sort of I suppose was introduced to the craft of it and a big part of that is is going out and having a group of users to first maybe just go and understand it's say we're going to look at music we want to do a new project about music and it's about okay what what are people passionate about like what are the opportunities that they're missing currently like other things that get them really like what's the the thing if you could just you could have one feature if that if of their current audio system if you could strip everything back what's the one thing that they'd hang on to I don't think you get that from engineering something new you have to go and talk to people and understand what what the passion is I think if you can you can pin that down then it becomes really easy to go away and and try and bring innovation to a market yeah so um I think talking to people is really important the other thing that I've done a lot of is the co-collaboration so once you've spoken to people and maybe you've given them a bunch of existing products and they can test it and they can sort of I re-log it and build an experience with it and then you talk to them about that and it's actually bringing them back in once you've got your first round of concepts and saying like this is what I've interpreted as your pain points and this is what I've interpreted as a possible solution and I did a lovely project at PDD on it was on a mop and we were talking about it was a lot of parents who had done the study they were talking about um how actually they didn't use mops very often um they'd use them once a week in like the deep clean of the house they weren't using them to react to spills they'd use baby wipes or a tea towel just because it was something you could grab and um it'd just be a packet you could put you can have lots of these packets everywhere and just grab what you needed we sort of went away and we made this mop that was tiny with this like a telescoping like fold-out handle and again it was at the time my obsession was sort of ultra light camping gear it's a mechanism we'd um appropriated from um some walking poles we had this mop to represent to them and you'd flung it out and it just popped up almost like magic to respond to a spill and and people just hated it it was well it sort of fit the brief to how that what their behavior we'd observed and seen and it it felt to them it was too flimsy or it was something that would break or something it was just it didn't it didn't match the user's interpretation of their need actually working backwards from that but the idea of transformable mop was was was really really interesting to them but it was a real barrier the number of sections that were involved in this pole we ended up making it so it just folded in half and and that was enough like it was was the sweet spot like what people wanted was a mop was too big to store so you didn't use it to react just folding in half was was like a sensitive enough to capture the fact that maybe i can store it one of these five places now rather than before i had to store it here and i think that's the beauty of talking to users is is trying to find that what's the it's the ultimate value and what's the the right way to deliver that it's it's understanding where the threshold is often sort of use case does this if you don't get all the way over that next level it's it's sort of not much better than being a bit further back and in that case just folding in half was the just at the start of that next level of value to people absolutely and i think getting that input from people early on it can be so valuable you can really see sort of the pitholes coming in front of you or you know maybe a diamond in the rough that you you wouldn't have seen otherwise when people say actually i really like this thing or really hate that thing so i really appreciate you going into that in depth for us now obviously you've gone on to uh to ripple box on the side um how did you really take that from something that you were just really interested in into a business and were there particular inspiration points that you had if i if i can i suppose maybe jump back into the history a bit more there's there's a few lessons i learned along the way that sort of allowed that thank you yes so so after i finished uni um i left thinking i knew enough and i didn't want to work in london was something i don't i didn't have any reason why but my parents didn't like london much so i sort of never came down here and just thought it was something i wanted to avoid so i ended up starting a company at home uh called 636636C design it was like a tedious pantone sky blue which i thought was really clever at the time i ended up i got some really nice projects we did some museum exhibits for a local place and it was just spinning and interactions and cages and we designed a retrofit of a shop and some sort of merchandise for places i just i got i just didn't pay myself anything and just sort of completely anything that i earn i just spent and like the first lessons were okay if i'm going to run a company i need to be able to be myself and i did a company that was called focus on fishing it was an educational company and this time it was set up with a couple of people and we were getting a few grants we were going into schools and teaching stem so science technology engineering and maths we were running on these educational grants which was quite interesting at the time but it wasn't something i was super passionate about i was i'd started a business that i didn't really want to do the day-to-day on so i that became a lesson as well that actually okay i need to i need to pay myself but i also need to be interested enough in doing it then various ways i found myself at um pdd contracting as i said at uni there was never any idea about what the business of design was so freelancing i remember was a whole new idea to me i got this role freelancing and it was uh they were just week-long contracts and i did them for six months so every friday i'd take all of my bags into the office and they'd tell me if they needed me on monday or not and it sort of gave me this really um those like high risk way of living i just got super comfortable um without having very much or without knowing very much and being able to just keep on um people i met at pdd were brilliant it was the first time i'd felt like actually i'm a small fish in quite a big pond and i no pun intended yeah yeah yeah that's it i managed to become this just really focused on core skills and really focusing on actually i could get good at design it was the sometime actually there's all this like pd they had a fantastic model shop and i didn't know enough about that and i wanted to be a brilliant model maker then they had like really good engineers and i wanted to to know enough about that and then they had yeah like a really good um pitching the ideas onto clients and and selling in schemes of work and actually i was getting more and more skilled up with this but understanding where that was going uh hadn't really formulated itself but i met a chap there called graham davis who was he had he was doing licensing for a company called joseph joseph who makes sort of like the the poppy colored kitchenware and he used to work four days a week and do licensing one day a week it was like this like light bulb moment like i'd seen that's what re's production services were doing and he ended up um giving me an opportunity to work with him um he'd had it ended he had a kid and didn't have enough time to commit to it so i did a lot of the the grunt work the actual design and the cad and we'd come up with ideas together and we'd sort of license those off to joseph joseph that gave me one day a week uh it funded me off so i was then doing a four day contract and one day a week for myself generate these ideas i think uh going back to your point spencer that was the or your question that's what allowed me to get into ripple box it was about chasing interests um but by making time and sort of investing that one day a week into stuff i was interested in i was able to explore different ideas um and one of them was was ripple box and so ripple box is a um i'm into fly fishing and you have these like little they're almost like um jewelry it's like a hook it's uh whipped with thread and fur and made to imitate a insect or a um sort of an invertebrate that lives in the water that would come like a large part of the trout's diet and they is a heritage in history that goes back to the victorians of lovely story about the feather thief of some guy who broke into tring museum there's a whole black market for antique feathers so you can tie the the perfect sort of salmon fly but mine was much more sort of pragmatic than that but these flies they're quite hard to manage and the boxes are fiddly and your hands can be sort of wet and cold and because i was working quite a lot i wasn't getting to fish a lot all my problems were coming from this one piece of equipment and i just thought actually this is something i could could design out i've i've seen how pdd approach identifying an opportunity and this looks like one and i know the audience of which to talk to i'm plugged into that so i could have these conversations and i've got this um i might i've put aside to to actually start to think in this area um one of the other things i was noticing was because i was always contracting as the people who were i'd maybe be working with at pdd who at my age were getting these other access to skills they were doing project management and more budgeting i was very aware that if i if i didn't have a route to do that as well i'd be lagging behind so i ended up employing a friend to do some some freelance design and i wanted to practice my brief writing sort of budgeting and then sort of managing somebody else doing the design work that i i was interested in and um i got a friend james to do it and he he went away and he came up with this silicon ripple idea in which to hold the flies and it was like this like whoa i i probably wouldn't have thought of that like that that was so far beyond was interesting but the the technical challenges of how to go from a prototype that worked really well to a a scalable industry like how could we make this was was really challenging and james was a furniture designer still is so he that wasn't a skill that i could continue to get him to do so actually i jumped on it um i did a lot of the technical design myself in this sort of allotted free time i'd made the the challenges was spent was scaling it was it was understanding i i didn't have a background to to be able to understand how can i access market forecasting or yeah sure but it sounds like you you really took the knowledge that you did have like honestly this is like to me like i don't know maybe it's the way you tell it now but it sounds like like the perfect entrepreneurial story like i saw a problem in my life that no one else was tackling oh i just made another pun i'm sorry but uh you know and like you you you're like there's got to be a way i know some great people um and just bring them in as you needed them that that's really really great yeah but go ahead i wasn't trying to interrupt your story but i really appreciate what this is going oh no it's i appreciate it so it was it was really interesting we had this um product and because of the the time i'd spent at pdd and i i knew how to prototype things like i'd spent time in their model shop and i'd learned about um sort of silicon soft tooling and vacuum casting i was able to make these really high resolution models so they were um cast silicon ripple things and compressed into these um soft tool boxes and we made about i think we made 15 of them we sent them out to the um all of the like the top instagram anglers and the people who were sponsored by the big names and people who owned like um bigger states for fly fishing and sort of like these real heritage people and we said look we think this is this is really interesting like is this something you like and we had this sort of overwhelming or positive response that actually this like this is a great idea and also it was people liked it but there was there wasn't a lot of sense that people were looking for a better solution i think at the time i we saw that as something actually that would just work itself out but i think that that is one of the big challenges we're finding is that um there isn't a lot of innovation in the fly fishing market which i thought meant that it's it's ripe for for going in and providing all this innovation equally there's there's not a lot of people maybe looking for innovation so the lift on how much marketing we have to do make these products visible is is really difficult and that's that's not a skill i have so that that's been a real challenge and also um like costs like people want obviously great value and our boxes are i wanted to design it with my own ethics i a lot of the work i've done professionally you're having to save a penny here to so actually the the material selection isn't so good or the um we want to get the tooling cost for under this so we'll make it abroad and i knew that i wanted it to be 100% recyclable i knew i wanted to be out made out of as many recycled materials as possible i i wanted to not use any um material fillers that would make recycling harder there's a latch on there that needs to be quite stiff and other than just putting glass fill into the nylon we've made the wall thickness heavier so we get that stiffness but it's still a pure grade material i didn't want to use any adhesives and how it stuck together which has made the the assembly um a real challenge and when the only thing we could the only lever we could really pull to try and get cost out of it was to use cheaper manufacturing processes we ended up using extrusion extrusion to make the silicon at the time it felt like a really great um right we were going from a part that was costing i think it was about one pound seventy down to about 72 but we were saving a pound per box uh i didn't have the experience to know or think of at the time i suppose because we i was prototyping them i could make every one perfect i'd fettle and tweak i know spencer i talk a lot at work about how my my real skill in life is scratching stuff with a scalpel these these first 20 i'd made i'd made them as a model maker i hadn't stepped back and thought actually it can't be me fettling each one a mass scale so when it came to put the silicon into the box we've had real trouble um actually then it became this whole a lot of my time which was going to be reserved for marketing and trying to sell these things i've had to develop a whole raft of assembly tools and techniques and to get this silicon in the box and now got a bunch of uh gigs with vacuum clamps and levers and arbor presses and it's become this whole sort of convoluted thing where i've made myself this real bottleneck i've made it so specialized that actually i'm the only person who can who can make this box i think that's been the a real challenge of ripple box in terms of launching a business and leaning into the bit that i thought i was very good at is that you can suddenly make a company where if you're not part of the process it doesn't doesn't work and then and suddenly you can't scale anything because you you've got to be the person who's bringing that that special source as in sharpening the language to every single product and and that is the entrepreneur's dilemma too right you're wearing all these different hats um i i kind of want to ask you do you do you feel like this is the most difficult uh juncture um in in this startup so far um you know or in your opinion is there is there another part um you think was more difficult kind of looking back so this technically this has been very difficult and i found good solutions for this so um so i sort of leant into what i knew so the the business wasn't growing because i wasn't able to make the boxes fast enough we people come to us and they wanted like 2 000 units and i just knew that means that's me in the shed for two weeks i just i just couldn't do it um now we've what i could do i knew if i if i needed to get some revenue to be able to pay additional services to be able to find someone to do the marketing and find someone to do the fulfillment i approached another company in in the same space uh who i knew was interested to try and take ripple box as a wholesale product but the margins didn't quite work and say actually i could design you a whole new range of boxes had a a challenge where they were buying a sort of an oem plastic box branding it they there was somebody else who had an exclusivity to sell that same box in the states and for fishing that's the big market so seeing that again like the classic there's a problem identify it i can make you one of those and it also tied into the wave of we're seeing um faculty in fulfillment from um from china into these markets like you're making these boxes you're you're shipping a lot of air so i was able to go to them and say look you've got a product you can't sell in this market and you're spending a huge amount to ship it from there to here and back again why not make your own range of things from a supplier you've got control of in the in the uk and they went for it and that's again it was a a license agreement so leveraging the the skills that i learned at pvd and had done with joseph and joseph sort of bringing that in and that's that's given the company a bit of um space to breathe it's again it's taking time away from the main focus which should be the element of ripple box it's now earning enough to sort of keep itself ticking over so that's been a it's been tough but it's also now i've got this platform where actually they're sort of self-sustaining and we can start to think about okay which skills do we need to bring in to grow it so though that the technical side of it's been challenging it's all been been quite fun problems to solve but um early on in the sort of the ripple box story james who had designed this the initial idea of this silicon ripple told flies he said that we'd sort of maybe we'll do this as a project together we were going to be co-founders in it i think um the thing that was really challenging was we tried to do a kickstarter together and um we priced it for sort of expensive like 100 000 shot steel tooling meant that the tooling cost was really high actually we could have done aluminium tooling and just accepted that the the margins were worse which with hindsight is exactly what we should have done but we were so focused on getting the best deal almost that we inflated the costs and ended up the kickstarter was unsuccessful then we had offer of private investment and relationship between myself and james was it just wasn't very conducive in terms of what we both thought was the best path forward for the business and that was was really challenging because we'd started off as friends and i felt like i had a right to make the choices because or i i put a lot of the cash for the development and i it was it was my company who owned the ip because i paid james as a freelancer for it but james felt very invested because he'd had the idea initially it was this real tension between who was pulling the reins and and what was the best route for for bringing this to market and um i think anyone who's a solo founder it's it's really difficult you're sort of out in the wilds by yourself and but if you're founding with someone that maybe you've started in a really you felt like you're on the same page then realize you're not the it's it was really difficult to try and dissect what success looked like for both of us and the and the company at the time and absolutely josh i think that thank you so much for sharing that with us i know that can be a difficult time and as i think we've talked about a couple of times before like the relationships within a company are like the within the founders is so important and sometimes um like like i've heard people say you should it you should treat it kind of like a marriage like that's how real it is in that sense and i think that's such an important topic that people don't talk about enough but one thing i do want to get into a little bit because i know you have leo um you have ripple box you have a number of other things on the horizon both family and business how do you balance your work your family life and the things you're passionate about like your own personal time yes it's a good question um i think at the moment it's uh it's been a struggle and i think um yeah it's a really good question how do i balance everything i think you've got to work out you're often firefighting which is never a great way to go or you're trying to sort of do the most important parts for all of it and i'm i'm now trying to to make more stuff that's my my new goal is stuff don't i have to do i've got a lot more help in the admin of running in the accounts and things i've paid more to have uh more hands off on that and my wife is now involved doing that and i've got um friends who do a lot of social media stuff and i'll push stuff over to them i think with family it's just trying to take um go out and get excited about making stuff i suppose that's been the been some of it it's trying to um a lot of the ideas and small bits and the thinking can sort of be done at quite a low level so if i if i needed to make a model it was something for a project recently where it was mechanism i was working on i knew i could sort of work it out in popsicle sticks and pins and i just sat the kitchen table covered with stuff and while i was making it cleo was making it her own sort of mess i think yeah there's yeah there's i think that will be my my new coping strategy is to try and um i'm trying to bring the family into it a bit more maybe and if that's a good good option or not yet but i'll learn but the other the big one spence is just um investing in yourself in time so i still work four days a week um is my my main sort of butter pay the mortgage role and accepting that 20 hit on earnings gives me one day a week to try and be super productive i think because i i'm very aware of what that one day is costing me i'm able to try and really treat it like when i wake up i'm i'm on it and i can make a list of what i need to do and those things what the most important and what can i push to what can i do from a train while i'm commuting can i do of an evening when i'm doing this and trying to work out all the things i've got to do like what have i got to do the one day i can be productive and yeah the other thing is saying no i suppose which i'm not very good at it would be a yeah many of us are not unfortunately it's hard to find balance and and i think especially you know as um as someone running your own company um and i'm honestly curious and you can answer this however you want to i know on linkedin it says you know you're taking a break um and i think a lot of us have trouble trying to find that point where is it safe or acceptable for me to you know leave this nine to five linkedin job and go work on you know this other thing that i'm truly passionate about and you have a family like you said you have a mortgage how did you make that choice and also i feel like the way you messaged it on linkedin you could just jump back in and have an explanation about you know some big life event you're going through too so how how did you decide how you were going to do that yeah so so i need to update that i have jumped back in so i took the first three months of this year off um some of it was um those mental health it was it was feeling like it was juggling too much it was stuff that um one day a week you can get quite good at keeping something ticking over but it's very hard to build something and ripple box needed to go from this this point of where i was a bottleneck to if um we've redesigned the silicon put some costs back in um but it will enable the um higher quality production of the silicon part so now the assembly it'll be much cheaper and quicker so we can outsource that and and by doing that we then need to change the box that it fits in and then there's an opportunity to change the packaging i could see all of that and it just i knew that it was it was more than i could do today i need a week to week i needed to just have a focus sprint on it i think um i spent 10 years freelancing this idea of like a stable job is it hasn't been something that i'm in intimidated to lose i suppose i feel like i could still step back and a day-to-day practitioner if i needed to be and when i was contracting i got quite good at um have a number in my head of what i wanted to earn that year and when i got there i sort of for that year i suppose i'd i'd often take off two or three months every year to focus on other projects or uh a woodworking thing i want to do or something else i wanted to learn or something else i wanted to make so it's always been sort of part of my process take that time i think that for people it seems i hear a lot of people say like oh i you've taken three months like i wish i could do that i i think i've just been lucky in the sense that um i got into a habit of doing it early maybe so although i do it now it feels like something i know how valuable it can be maybe that's a good answer absolutely and i think that what you said about freelancing and being comfortable with sort of not having that certainty i think is almost a superpower as a founder right like it makes you able to take risks and able to sort of push yourself into extreme scenarios like i know i don't work i i work a lot but i know i don't work nearly as much as i did when i worked at my previous company bio carbon engineering and i know if i need to i can put the pedal to the metal and do that right and i think that sort of understanding of yourself as well as willingness to be comfortable with risk is so powerful and i wanted to get from you in your personal opinion are there other characteristics that you think are very powerful for a founder to have especially in the solopreneur scenario that you're in i think you've got to be annually interested in what you're doing maybe like i know some people who are it's maybe that the financial reward at the end of it that's the interest the idea that i could run a company that earns this i'm i'm very very excited about the ideas like it's the i thought of having an idea that maybe nobody's had before is what i find very compelling and i think that's the bit that's is never going to get old and never going to get tired and actually i will keep if i do trip and stumble or fail or meet a problem i've got something that's not maybe related to the success of the company i'm still going to be very passionate about and maybe maybe that's really important actually even if everything goes badly i'm still super enthusiastic about it i think there's there's some power in in just being being along for the ride almost in a way i think that makes a lot of sense um there's another question i kind of wanted to ask you because you had expressed um well i think kind of in your words uh your interest in better understanding how sustainability technology and consumerism can find the perfect balance and that sounds lovely to me um so i was kind of wondering if you could use your you know your talents your abilities and kind of this passion you have to find this balance to solve a problem that you have not had a chance to focus your energy on is there something you would want to tackle and that's another good fishing pun i do i do like that we've got a lot of them today sorry yeah no it's i'm not going to get into it there's there's lots but um i think one of the things always struggled with is is the idea of as a designer you're you're making things like every every day you're you're trying to produce something new and prototyping isn't very i make a lot of a space that's it's just going to end up in landfill and it might be a resin casting or 3d printing supports or sort of the odd bits of this like products i've hacked up this idea of just always wanting to produce something new i think is there's something in me that's don't find it very satisfying and i often thought that maybe the solution is to try and like design heirlooms what what could i do that people buy once and have forever and a ripple box has very much been elloped on that sense like it's it's almost bomb proof and in terms of fishing it's i think it's the best thing like will last forever in in fused formally and i think that's that's one way but that's that's not really a solve you're you're still producing stuff but maybe just less of it the thing that gets me really excited i'd like to work on is is that the challenges in the thought process and the amount of energy you have to invest in a a new product as an engineer i suppose and a designer like what if i could take those skills apply it to a whole new industry and the the one i'd like to do would be conservation i see that conservation i've got a friend who's a wildlife ranger and i'll say that oh we've got this problem and i could buy this product and it would solve part of it and i could buy this product and it would solve part of it but they don't work together and they there isn't design solution to them where they can say well i'll take this of a and this of b and we'll build c actually being able to do what i think could be real ecological or growth or progress or something i could be super proud of that i could solve with a a product or a service that i designed that that would be my um that could be a pinnacle that could be something i i'd like to do that's a great answer josh thank you i am i i know we've previously talked a bit about conservation and things like that um that that you're interested in and where potentially that could go in the past but what i would like to get an understanding of now you're you're at this point you've got your success with ripple box but you can see the paths forward with it obviously you're working in shark ninja and impressing everyone as you do um what do you see the next five years being like for for you like for your your path forward i think it's um i think there's a pivot coming i feel that your question you asked earlier you sort of cut to the root of it it's like how do you juggle everything and it's i think honestly it's like it's only just is probably it's probably the answer i should have given actually um finding something to be really committed to is something i want in the next five years as to what what would be a big enough idea or opportunity that actually i could could step away from the other side things something that i could would pay the the mortgage in the thing but does let me have the autonomy and i have to be creative as well it's trying to bring it all under into one vehicle is the next challenge i think that's really great and if we could go back just a little bit too i did not wind up asking you this yet i don't think how did you get into fly fishing fishing because i feel like it's one of those things that like i picture a wise grandfather you know um gifting forward or something like that um when my when my brother got into it no one else in our family was doing any fishing and i mean it was a great experience for him to get to know like the whole community of people but i feel like someone else had to show him like yeah this is actually interesting so mine was the exact opposite i um no one in my family fishes like zero absolutely no one um i i grew up near the river seven i remember we used to ride our bikes down there and sometimes swim one day i we rode our bikes down and i i've gone up to the river where we normally jump off this rock and go in it was a huge i didn't know what it was at the time but it was a pike which is like a predatory freshwater fish it just sort of looked at me enrolled and then disappeared it was it just set something off that like there's there's monsters in there and like it was so exciting and then there was sort of you'd see these old boys fishing and i'd ask a question and they had all these like specialist tools like line nippers and knot tires and keepers and just that sort of um like the fixation on something i just it just locked in that there was all these little problems that they'd already solved i was really interested so i sort of into freshwater fishing but there was too much stuff and i was just trying to refine it and refine it until like i sort of find the essence and fly fishing for me is the simplest form it's like the ultimate um trick like there's there's no bait it's just a uh the weight is in the line so there's some elegance in the casting and it's it's quite meditative i find it um i don't meditate but in any other form but when i'm fishing i find myself really zen you're sort of facing a feeling almost other than a result which is quite rewarding then the rods and the reels that mechanically they're quite beautiful and the the sounds and it all sort of all sort of came together for me in something that was the essential um it put me out in nature gave me a a place to sort of focus and sort of find calm and it sort of introduced me to all these niches i suppose there was a um graham davis who i mentioned earlier who who was the person who sort of helped me get my first sort of passive income through a royalty uh the story of why why he took me on to do that was he was working at pdd at the time and he was working with another engineer and we're trying to make this it was a medical device that needs to have an o-ring assembled onto it had two engineers and a freelancer working on this problem i remember walking past the first day and seeing it and sort of sking like oh what what are you trying to do and he'd said oh we're trying to get this tiny o-ring around this thing it's really challenging for x y and z and i knew that from fishing you you could buy a tool that did that there was a whole assassination like this whole trend people fishing with um really small fish pellets so little cylindrical pellets which they'd attached to the hook with an o-ring it was the exact same challenge these competition fishermen were able to do like 10 a second like it was it was really quick and i just said oh you should just you should just buy this fishing thing they'd sort of dismissed it as this crazy idea then like a week later i asked them again they still hadn't managed to do it so i just brought this fishing thing in with me and just gave it to them graham saw it and it was just like its ability to sort of transfer ideas and be able to to understand it sufficiently in one category to understand how it could move over i think there's there's some magic in fishing for that for me actually it's this it's like this huge repository of of niche problems and actually being able to pull from them and apply it to my my day job has been relatively successful over the years i've i've taken a lot from it that's awesome i love that that's such a clear example of knowledge transference from like one discipline to another i think that's brilliant i really appreciate you telling us about that josh no no it's a pleasure the the founders voyage community is based on disciplined entrepreneurship which is like a framework for starting companies and things like that and one of the key things is about sort of having ideas and then killing them quickly right so one thing that i do like to hear from and you've been incredibly honest with us and i really really appreciate that um were there ever any major um pivots or deviations from your plan that you had to go through when you realized something wasn't working and looking back would you change anything about how you went about it uh yeah so there was as a company i've not talked about yet which was uh a well it was a startup i looked at doing with a friend called lead reckoning it started off as we we i had a friend who was into clay pigeon shooting i talk about it and i was just became aware that the shell casings were always wasted and i was just getting into this idea of like could design and sustainability be and it's that that first route of oh just just recycling which is i think is the lowest order but at the time it was where like the most it was it was the important one but what if you could take the brass from a shotgun shell use it to make a product i got into that but actually the shells are is plated steel not brass and there's a lot of lead contamination and if you if you weigh out the mass of the shotgun shell the valuable piece is like a hdpe plug like a plastic plug and so again it's challenging to sell when you run the numbers it has this much plastic and this much steel the big volume of the shotgun shell was the lead people are shooting like 28 grams of lead every shot they might shoot 50 shots in a session that's one and a half kilograms of lead per person they might be doing it the same discipline the same 50 shots the same standing point in the same field for some of these clubs were running for 50 100 years all the lead was falling in the same place and tonnage weight of scrap lead is like it was floating from about 700 pounds a ton to 1200 pounds a ton and actually it became this whole if we could get that lead back we'd be doing an environmental service we'd be doing a land cleanup also be having this resource that we could sell or repurpose and we we ended up going out and doing loads of sampling we spent like this was one of my longest breaks from work i was like five months but going around all the ranges in the uk and digging up samples from various field locations and mapping out where the lead would land and some of the places 20 of the mass of the earth was lead you're getting really excited about when you run the numbers that this could have been millions of pounds of revenue and like this much environmental cleanup and we had this vision that we'd do three years and from that we'd have enough seed money to start this sort of environmental consultancy the bit we had to pivot on was was realizing that after five months didn't really want to be a foreman on a site digging up lead and that was i think yeah that was i probably i didn't kill that idea quick enough but that was a really hard one to kill it was it was realizing that actually could be successful but maybe it's it's not the success that i want to find i think that's been the hardest idea to drop so far to date excellently asked question um spencer and that was such a great answer i really appreciate that i don't know for some reason the image of the clay pigeons is like one that takes me to one that takes me back to like the nintendo duck hunter days and i don't know i had i had a good visual to go along with that so but thank you so much for for sharing that i think if it's all right um we've got one final uh question for you um and so we're not holding your feet to the fire on this at all we kind of end with this what words of wisdom do you want to leave us with today so this could be a favorite quote it could be some advice someone else gave you or it could just be you know any lesson or takeaway from your journey so far from my experience it's been we got so ripple boxes is small like it's it's i think there's opportunity for it to something but it's never going to be it's never going to be this huge thing actually it's taken so much time and passion and energy to get there i think there's my i suppose my my handover of my big learning from trying to be an entrepreneur is make sure that it's an idea that's enough to fit your aspirations i suppose it's going to take the same amount of work to ask someone for 50 grand as it is 500 like it's make sure you're starting a project that can go as big as you want it to be otherwise um you can start to feel start to feel trapped by it i think yeah it's big it's my advice thank you josh i think you've given us two excellent quotes um we always like to for the podcast we like to start with a quote from the speaker and it's going to be hard to fight between the one you just gave us and your one earlier of um i wrote it down uh it could be successful but not the kind of success i wanted to find and i think that's brilliant um and i think that's something that a lot of people would get too far down the road to realize that um and i think there's a million stories of that happening yeah now obviously thank you so much for coming on today i really really enjoyed talking with you and um thank you for everything you've you've shared with us and everything you've taught us today i have a pleasure thank you for making the time absolutely now nancy and i and the team behind founders voyage feel fortunate to be part of this community with you and everyone here and for the opportunity to bring this cooperative learning experience to you each week um this includes you josh but if anyone has any nominations they want to give for future saturday sessions please um let us know um we're obviously we're always looking for people who can bring value to and get value from the community um and thank you again everyone for joining and have an amazing day and evening ahead yeah thank you so much josh and thanks everybody for for joining us today and um there was a side conversation on the questions and discussion channel if you want to scroll back to that later on between uh trusting your friends in business so i i always appreciate where these conversations go in in both directions so thanks so much josh uh a pleasure all right have a great rest of your weekend i hope that i hope that your your kid free weekend allows you to to do some adult things that you haven't done in a while we're gonna go to the tip that's all we're finally gonna throw out all the plush toys in the cupboards that we've been hiding from the last oh wow okay yeah it's all right well a weekend of cleaning that's always a good thing too yeah yeah organizing we're trying to marry curia cells we're trying to declutter well done all right we'll take care we'll we'll talk to you soon thanks you've just finished another episode of founder's voyage the podcast for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs the team at founder's voyage wants to thank you from the bottom of our hearts we hope you enjoyed your time with us and if so please share this with someone else who might enjoy this podcast you can also support us by leaving a review on apple podcasts and spotify and by donating to our patreon outro music today is something for nothing by reverend paten's big damn band