Hello. You’re listening to K12 tech podcasts, bringing you insights from the world of education technology. Stay tuned as we discuss the past, the present, and most importantly, the future of technology in our schools. Hello and thank you for joining us today and our K-12 tech podcast.
My name is Sean. We also joined with Mike from K-12 Tech and then we are with Leo and Oliver from NutKase Accessories. Very excited to have them on today. Both are very good in the business world of education technology. We’re going to hear a little bit about their backstory, how they got to where they are today, where they started from, and if anyone out there has ideas on how to make those ideas turn into reality. So I’m going to give it over to Oliver and Leo here for a minute and they’re going to introduce themselves. Give us a little background and we’ll go from there.
Thanks so much for having us, Sean and Mike, and it’s great to be here. I think I must confess my name’s Leo Shortland from Australian on the R here at my place accessories managing our European distribution sales channel as well as our worldwide logistics and contract manufacturing. And I’m really excited about EdTech. We’ve been taking on tech from day one. We really like talking about products and bringing product ideas to life. So I look forward to this conversation. My name is Oliver Page and I’m one of the founders here at place as well. And right now we’re in the hat as VP of Sales and I’m excited to be on the podcast. I appreciate being invited and invited.
Well, I know we’re excited to have you guys now. If I heard correctly, Oliver, this kind of all started back when you were in high school at the age of 17.
That’s correct. I grew up in Italy. I was lucky enough to have great parents who immigrated to Italy from the United States. So I grew up going to American schools in Rome. And when I was 17, I was a huge Apple nerd, a huge Apple fan, and I had one came out. I wanted to get one of these quickly as possible. They weren’t for sale globally at the time. And so we had a friendship one from the States, but they forgot to send the case with my dad. And so I was using like a neoprene somewhere in the school that was protecting it.
But I couldn’t have a kickstand, it didn’t have a utility, was clunky, slippery. And that kind of got me thinking about designing a prototype for a case that had a hand strap. And yeah, when I was 17 I design and found a factory in China but a prototype made and ultimately had the support of my parents to buy 500 units, which I started selling to friends and family. So I made a small little e-commerce store which didn’t really go anywhere. But then the education component to the business really came in really in the early days because my elementary school tried 100 iPads and needed 100 cases, and they were our first big K-12 customer, our only customer, really. And that’s how we got started with K-12. And we’re just like, You know what the case is designed by? By students. It’s for students that has a nice ring to it. Let’s start selling to schools. And that’s something. That’s right.
Yeah, that’s awesome. I mean, so as far as that goes, I mean, even there were their issues with you being, you know, under 18 and trying to start all that like, you know, necessarily you’re not technically an adult yet, or was it difficult finding a factory that produces things like that since you kind of I mean from it sounds like if that was with the first generation of iPads, this was kind of a new product on the market, you know, especially over there where they weren’t even available yet. Were there hurdles that you encountered as far as just getting the cases made themselves?
Absolutely. Making anything in China, big or small, is always tough, especially when you’re 17, especially when you have no experience in funding and you never went to China in Chinese. And, you know, you’re just communicating with random factories on Alibaba, subpar messaging. So, yeah, a lot of hurdles, no doubt. But at the same time, you know, you speak to any successful entrepreneur, no one ever gets it right the first time round. So we definitely made a lot of mistakes and there were a lot of situations where we thought we were going to have to throw the towel in, but ultimately we were able to find a reliable factory, which was a miracle. I mean, it was just lucky and we just got lucky, and that’s the reality. But, you know, the harder you work. You can get right.
And that’s also part of the equation, too. So, yeah, in the early days, you made a lot of mistakes, made a lot of bad products, a lot of stuff, a lot of bad prototypes. But we kind of we control only what happened with the quality control on one of those early iterations. Right. That brings up another horror story where ultimately we ended up buying about 500 of our first generation case. We thought they were all going to be made out of quite a high quality and probably carbon synthetic fabric, but they all turned out to be made out of recycled Chinese toothpaste boxes, which was a shocker, to say the least. So, yeah, we’ve come a long way since the tiny toothpaste box. That was our first mission.
So did they send you paper cases or were they still plastic of some sort?
They were made like the interior was made out of like toothpaste boxes. And like one day I was like peering through one of the seams, and I saw, like, a shiny tooth and like, a single product. And, like, I saw it open, and there was just, like, toothbrushes and teeth everywhere, and it was just. Yeah. So I believe it started with a hard, a hard plastic lining with a leather overstretch and ended up to be the hard plastic was just flat to spot to take those boxes that were flat and glued together to make sort of like a mega.
Yeah. I mean.
And, you know.
It’s so important, you know, everywhere. And when you’re new to something to that’s that may not be something that’s just on the front of your mind when you’re, you know, you’re excited about getting your product in. You just made something new and then it turns out someone else didn’t care as much as you did, and then that’s got to hurt. So, Leo, how did you get involved with Oliver then?
So I had an easy advantage that all of us, my cousin and is far more entrepreneurial-minded than I am, showed that while he was doing this, I was working in several schools around Asia, in Europe, teaching English and teaching a few other subjects as well. Mid-to-late 2016, when sort of NutKase was starting to get bigger, K-12 tech deployments really increased in Europe as well. And we had some sort of preliminary conversations about how we could scale. And in that case. At the time, I was working with a separate business, which was one of the world’s worst business ideas of all time.
But I loved wine and I loved natural wines, which is the style of winemaking. And I was working in Australia at the time and we noticed that there was a big gap in the market, that there wasn’t enough supply of natural lights. And so I had the idea with a buddy of mine that the country of Georgia near Russia has been making natural wines for about 7000 years, and we had some contacts there. We found a great winery and we made a business plan that we were going to import wines from Georgia into Australia to sell them some wine distributors. We made a great business plan. The wine cost about a dollar 50 a bottle. It would probably cost us a dollar to ship and we sold for 10 to $12 each. The problem we had is logistically it’s not easy to transport something that has to be temperature controlled from the caucuses to Australia and all the shipping.
The wine came in at $33 a bottle, not the $1 that we projected in our aggressive business plan. The other thing that was a complication is that there’s only so many import licenses for Wine Australia gives out every year and there was a three year delay when we tried to apply in January. SA That idea kind of came and fell very quickly and then we eventually ended up with a pile of the wine months and months and sometimes late on, but I’d always been into sales and into education. And so we were talking to all over that about the potential demand to bring that case. And so early 2017, I came board moved to Italy to run our sort of European sales and distribution, and we raised some money from the investor and we really got focused on Chinatown’s sort of all of the small student start up idea into a big business and to see how far we could run with it.
We thought we had a good product at that time to price box freight. And so yeah, I got involved in that capacity and thankfully not much has grown ever since then and rapidly. We had a much bigger team than we do now and it’s been a heck of a journey, a really fun ride so far with plenty of other problems over the years, unfortunately, but nothing quite. Toothpaste profit.
So what are those? I guess smaller than toothpaste box problems that you guys have encountered since the company has grown? Because I know now you have way more than one product for different. Devices. So I’m sure branching out and growing the company is going to have its own growing pains. But what are some of those pains that you guys encountered?
Firstly, we diversified. We originally were really focused on high-end cases. iPad education was very, very dominant in Europe for a long time, especially among its actual schools. And so really, really needed one product to meet that demand. From then, especially rolled out into the US market in 2017, Chromebooks and laptop form factor devices were far more popular and so we had to design devices that would fit within our schools. Budgets be drop proof, be resilient enough to support a ten-year warranty which we offer.
And that was definitely a challenging sort of design concept. And we’ve gone through multiple, multiple, multiple iterations to get to the product line that we’re very comfortable with now. But definitely, it was a heck of a learning lesson because we went from iPod cases that were mostly injection molded, which required not much manual labor to make to our range of cases at the moment, but are all stitched inside. So the fabric part, it’s sewn, double-checked handles, zippers, all sorts of extra quality control, breakpoints that you have to be aware of and be ready for. And yeah, you know, unfortunately, all of us are going to expression places like places in Kenya overnight success because it’s taken us a long time to get where we are. And we’ve had a lot of bad products and things that we’ve had to kind of improve along the way.
Notwithstanding everything in the past two years with regards to supply chain delays, shipping delays, total complications, school budgets going super wonky out of nowhere. And also I think the edtech business is quite a challenging business to be in already because you have a very seasonal business with really one quarter being the vast majority of your sales. And so you have to be pretty tight on the business and so the finance side to be able to plan projects and be ready for peak seasons. Yeah. Yeah.
I think the other I guess well what I guess I would assume to be a pretty large hurdle for that too is, you know, right now we have schools that are requesting models of devices that we physically haven’t even seen yet. So in order to prepare for, let’s say, the newest model of device that’s coming out, I mean, do they send you guys prototypes? Do you have to find the designs online and kind of hope that, you know, your initial prototype fits?
I mean, how how do you prepare for that? Because it changes every year, right? There’s always a new model. So how do you kind of get ready for that model to come out?
We don’t have a good solution. Apple, unfortunately, doesn’t share designs with us. I don’t think as many people they do share designs with. So typically we have to wait until release date. We buy the iPod and then we make a case for it just like that. Some big competitors in our space have been totally burned in the past for following predictions, and there’s always rumors going around about this one’s going to be 12 inches. This one’s going to be ten inches. All right. My name is pretty prominent.
Company took a really big position before Apple released an iPhone model and they came out to get the size totally wrong. But everyone thought Apple was going to change the size of the iPhone, so they loaded up with 20,000 cases to be ready. And it turned out none of the cases fit. And it’s a strike time unless we’re lucky. But we have a pretty quick turnaround time. We work closely on the batteries so they’ll get an iPod, and will make a mold from about 30 days. They can have product available within two months of the product launch. But it’s tough because also Apple doesn’t give us a heads up, nor do anyone really give us a heads up about when they’re releasing the product.
So when Apple had the iPad Air two, we had thousands and thousands and thousands of these cases in stock ready to go. And the iMac style surprised Apple announcement. We’ve changed the size. It’s now a 10.2-inch sides. I’m still trying to sell some ID, so getting dragged if anyone’s listening. But it’s definitely challenging.
Yeah, I can imagine. And I mean even this so not even size change. Right. But like there’s devices that one year they have rounded edges and the next year now they have right angle edges. And clearly, those cases aren’t going to fit even though they’re exact same size computers. So I mean, it has to be difficult just to projector prepare.
For and change the ports as well. I mean it’s they changed the volume switch once flopping around and what was OP is now off and all sorts of stuff I think mostly just the small, humble case manufacture. It’s nice, to be honest, but I’m sure there’s another reason for it.
Oh, yeah, absolutely. So I know you mentioned, Leo, that you were looking to get into a different space before joining Oliver Nut nutcase Oliver. Do you have other ventures happening right now or in the past that you tried and had issues after?
Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, I would consider myself to be somewhat of a serial entrepreneur in the sense that case turned out to be my most successful venture greatly, I believe, in part due to having Leo on the team and just got a really awesome team because that was all. It was not so hard to project, but I went through several iterations of my aunt’s on my entrepreneurial journey ranging from starting over a mobility transportation startup in Italy called Renault, which was essentially like uber motorcycles. No chance to get picked up on a motorcycle somewhere, which as you can imagine for the American listening, that’s probably not exactly the first choice of transport, especially in a busy city like Rome. But for the Italian population and for Romans, getting around on scooters and vespers is like hopping in your car in America. So we had a pretty ambitious vision for building a transportation mobility startup.
We raised about $1,000,000 in funding. It was a really exciting and challenging experience, but ultimately that case came out ahead. That was where I decided to double down and do this later with like a. Yeah. Cobain was definitely kind of the final nail in the coffin for Severino because no one was getting on the back of a motorcycle. Australians are in. But I heard a definition. I heard I heard a friend of mine that we were chatting with this morning gave us a really interesting definition of success, which was staying alive long enough to get lucky. And I think that really does speak a lot to entrepreneurial success. And I think all success in general because and I believe firmly in the harder you work, the lucky you get, but you also just have to be in the game long enough.
Then mature and grow and experiencing, battling and building businesses for you to get your brain. You know, rarely an entrepreneur gets their break on their first go around. And unlike like we’re talking about earlier with the manufacturing mishaps that we had. But yeah, I mean, I know Leo and I are committed to the long run together as partners and cousins and entrepreneurs and just know it is a numbers game. You’ve got to put in the reps long enough and try and obviously be smart and make calculated recipes on the can. But yeah, it’s been an exciting year during supplements.
So speaking of numbers, you did say that you guys were able to raise a good amount of money for that Scooter Renault business. I’ve always been curious, but I’ve never asked how. I mean, obviously, now there’s crowd-sourced funding and things you can do online. But how like, how do you go about raising money to be able to invest into a new business or a new product? And then on the flip side of that, if that product fails, I mean, do you have to pay that money back?
I mean, how does all that work? I’ve never understood that part of starting a business.
Raising money. There is one of the hardest things you can do about that. My fair share of experience being how old you are then so you can get any easier. But yeah, I mean, I think a lot of story short is the kind of ability raise money from different types of structures. You know, people who put money in at the very early stages of the next will be called angel investors. And these are people who no good angel investor is investing in a lot of different projects. And I’m kind of working under the assumption most of them unfortunately are going to fail, but hopefully one of them will do really well. And if they do really well, it’ll pay off for all the bosses and the other project. And that’s kind of how the venture capital model works in a kind of a weird way. It is a bit odd, but you look at some of the numbers on venture capital, it’s like 1% of the investments in their portfolio, which are in our top 100 X on their investment, which makes up for all the other bad investments they made. So yeah, there’s some kind of like a different direction that we’re going in as far as investors are concerned, as all types of shapes and sizes are real.
Do you have any comments on the investment landscape in terms of like getting money back and things like that? I think typically as all of a sudden it’s obviously structured and so it depends on the potential return. My sense is that you know, if we approach a bank for financing from that place, taking on more collateral, which basically gives them security if things don’t work out and we do have projects chance to get their money back. The trade-off is instead of getting a share of the business or something, we become a hundred times bigger than just going to get a rate of interest on the actual money.
Whereas if we say, Hey, we’ve got a great idea for a business, you know, we value with it $50,000. And if somebody makes a $10,000 investment, I’m going to get 20% of the business. And so when the business becomes more valuable, I stand to make a really great exponential return. However, obviously, in exchange for having such high potential upsides, they have no security, typically in the event that the business doesn’t blow up our concern as far as actually how to reach people, it’s been a great learning lesson that we’ve seen a lot of trends over the past ten years from what investors are looking for and investors of all sorts of different risk tolerance. I think ten years ago when all of us started especially trying to raise money, people were really bullish and really excited that high growth startups and especially looking at arena, you know, companies like Uber and all these companies, nobody really cared about profitability.
I just want to see how quickly businesses can grow and get massive and then trying to figure it out later. Now, in this economy we’re in right now, they’re talking to investors. They’re far more interested in bottom line and profitability, the recurring revenue, and anything like that. And it’s just a matter of friends and family reaching out to different people within the space and using a network to put a proposal and a business plan and a slide deck in front of them. That kind of sign them on the vision, making them believe in people process products behind the business.
You know, this sounds a lot like gambling to me.
Naturally. I think it really I mean, it’s like if you play roulette, right, you can bet on black and red and be 20, 50, 50 to win or lose your money. Or you can bet on one number. I’m not going to lose. If you win, you’re going to get whatever it is 35 times return. And I think different people have their own different. Restaurants, some investors, but most of them are in the stock market, and 5% are really speculative for all sorts of crazy ideas that are going to take over the world. They might and they might become the next Facebook and think I’m getting off on it. But last month, in summary, I mean, just depends on instruction. How much of this people want to take on. Yeah, I definitely do like that analogy there about comparing it to gambling.
So I guess the question I had, and this is kind of off the investment topic, this is more just again about being an entrepreneur. What would be probably the number one piece of advice that either of you have for anyone aspiring to start a business, especially in the EdTech world? I think that’s two lessons I’ve learned that have taken me far longer than I should have, and it’s not specific to edtech. One is focus. It’s so easy when you’re starting something to let other people dictate what you’re going to do and split yourself. And even in EdTech, you might start by saying, I’ve got a great idea for a new type of desk for students, and I’m going to sell it to schools in my town. And then someone from the next state over reaches out and says, Hey, can you do this for a little bit differently?
Oh, yeah, sure. Of course, I can. And they try to do that and they try and do that, and they try and do too many things at once and do nothing great. And instead, really, what took me a long time to learn is like the power of, like, 95% of the things. As an entrepreneur, you should be selling nature. Not immediately. Obviously, you should consider them, but focus. And it’s way better to crush one thing and be great at one thing than trying to do 50 different things. And we have this exact problem with my case. When people ask us all the time about How can you make a case for this device? Can you do this? Can you do this color? Can you change this thing? And too often it’s easy to say yes, because you want the sale again.
You end up bending over backwards to distract you from your core focus. And this weakens your overall. I think the other thing specific to EdTech, we didn’t do well for a long time that we’ve now learned is if you want to work in edtech, you have to be really switched on to school funding. Because business funding is one. Businesses can always make decisions when solving a business. There’ll be one person looking to the box office more often than not. Schools usually have to go a lot deeper to actually learn about budget time in budget cycle stakeholders. What an RFP is, how an RFP works. How can you best respond to these sort of things? Either know what point you might be going to our space, and this is stuff that we didn’t for a long time that really hurt us because we set ourselves up to sort of no success because we have products that maybe wouldn’t win in our fight, or we’d be trying to sell to schools the best possible case and not be aware that their budget only gave them a much lower budget and we wouldn’t have something to consider needs either.
But you know, definitely, I think especially on a budget, obviously, we’re in EdTech as well. And that’s something that as I’ve started doing this more, I’ve definitely picked up. You really do have to be mindful with our fees and just school budgeting in general. I mean, like you were saying, it’s not through one person, it’s through a school board and then the superintendent and then somebody else at the business office has to look at it. There’s so many different hands in the public schools and you really have to be mindful of. And another thing a lot of it, like you were saying, does come from government funding or state funding, however that works. But it also is taxpayer money. I mean, that’s something to be mindful of as well as a lot of schools are very cautious on their spend, their money. And it is coming directly usually from the parents of students like at school. So it’s always interesting when you’re negotiating price in the schools as well because on one hand it’s not the person when negotiating this money. So it’s not like negotiating with a small business owner where it’s literally money out of that five, $200, that’s $2 in their pocket. But at the same time, the accountability and the justification, the people in schools, they have to really show that they’ve done their due diligence. And so you have to give a much better value proposition for why your products the best at the price point.
It’s not enough just to have the best products. You have to have the best product at the best price point. And what I mean by that, even with prices, is if a schools budgets $20 a price, you need to have the best possible product up on a budget. If they’re budgets $25 a case, you need to have the best possible price at that budget. Which I think is a little different about other industries where in some industries, if you show that you do work in health care and you can show that your products are better and some are lost already using budgets almost secondary, because you can demonstrate that with this vast area that doesn’t necessarily happen in education with a laptop that’s twice as fast isn’t always going to be the choice of the school guys.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that that is perfect. And that’s why you and a lot of other case manufacturers and even the device manufacturers have different tiers or levels of products because the schools are incredibly budget oriented. To wear a case without a handle or a case with the handle that that with the handle may cost $2 more. It puts them over budget because they’re buying, you know, a thousand of them. And it’s something that the treasurers and the superintendents and everyone keeps that in mind when they’re looking to.
So, yeah, I would say that’s. The price point is probably the number one biggest thing when negotiating with a school district.
Yeah, this is talk of the line as well. You know, you can have a case that’s twice as protective as a cheaper product. And so over a three-year period, twice as protective cases will save the school more money because they’re going to lead to fewer broken devices. However, schools have annual budgets, and so they might not necessarily be able to split the budget over three years. That is going to look at year by year what the best option is. And it could be tough to sort of show that the potential ROI with the more expensive products could actually save the money in the long run.
Yeah, for sure. So. Okay. The other thing I wanted to ask about was from. Okay. So we got how it started, how you kind of sourced the funding to get it going where you had them made the first sale that happened with your old was it I think middle school or younger than that with with the cases. But how did you especially starting overseas how did the marketing and advertising and what did you guys have to go through to really spread? Now, I would say globally with the products and growing the business as you have.
The current shows, boots on the ground, all going to production lines, locking up resellers. And just putting in the hours and the rest. That’s how we did it. I landed in the States in 2018 as the only employee in the United States and just started going to conferences and my sister come with me to a bunch of conferences, just wrapping the products, introducing myself to partners, and that’s how we got started. I mean, every part, every relationship in the early days, every relationship that we made was mostly at conferences and great shows. And, you know, these events are really all there.
I think they really are great opportunities for new brands to get exposure and to kind of get that initial momentum. People are mostly when you go to a trade show, everyone’s open to chatting. That’s why you’re there. You know, you’re not there to ignore an email or somebody kind of walks up to you and it’s hard to do that. So yeah, for me it was just going to conferences and trade shows and then, you know, experimenting with different sorts of email marketing techniques. You know, we were doing quite a bit of that as well in the early days.
So do a lot of email marketing, but the trade shows really move the needle for us just because you got that human interaction, you know? Miracles. Yeah. We sell a physical product. People can put their hands on it in a way that they can’t do in a Facebook ads or picture in an email. Or you can put a device in and drop it in front of them. I’m sorry. That’s protective.
Yeah, I’d say. Yeah, I agree. And I was in education for a few years and now obviously I’m not anymore, but still involved. But I have been to a few of those shows and yeah, it is nice to be able to pick up that product and be able to look at it and you can feel the quality of the product versus taking the word of the website for it or you know, just to be able to actually touch it is absolutely beneficial. Now, do you guys like Facebook and Instagram, and LinkedIn?
I mean, are you are you heavily involved with the advertising and getting your name out that way? Or is it really just having the product and having the product essentially speak for itself?
We’re I’m we’ve raised as far as social media goes, it’s been virtually useless for us until pretty recently. We started putting more content out on LinkedIn. And I think what we started doing is trying to be more fun. You know, I think we went to we tried to copy what everybody else was doing and we realized that that didn’t really represent what our brand stood for. And we were trying to be, I think the brands like Nutcase for a reason.
And so, you know, we started doing a lot more funny drop test videos in the pool, drop test videos. We did a Happy Gilmore spin off where one of our sales persons was holding a case and we were launching baseballs at him and he was using the case to block. And just like Happy Gilmore, when, you know, we think batting practice is getting hit and doing that sort of stuff, which is actually resonated really well. I think some of a reputation sometimes of being a little stodgy and a little schools are still sending us by Fox and Stops. And so for us, being more fun and a little more out there has actually really resonated way more than we thought it would. Yeah, we were worried some people might be annoyed by it. I think people have been loving it.
And we did a drop test video about a year and a half ago where we were throwing a montage off a balcony and I was standing on the bottom and attaching these cars upon driving past and all sorts of stuff like that, just to make it a bit more interesting than. Hi, this is we are is our case. Call me now. You’re on a by type content. Yeah. I think I actually saw one of a recent video from you guys where you were doing like a HP device, dropped it off a balcony way too high.
Well, I couldn’t even watch it. I was going nuts about it. So I guess that’s a question I have since you mentioned that it’s named Nutcase for a reason. What was the inspiration behind the name? Inspiration? It was quite random, I think, ultimately. I mean, they have a funny name, but when I tell people that name, the bottom half of them definitely is. And we chose in the case of the case that was taken, not much more to it than that. But yeah, we see, you know, what names memorable people seem to have a lot of fun. That’s kind of what makes it stand out. And I think.
That aspect of having fun, even making videos just to post or, you know, having a fun name or something, I think actually goes a long way with people in really any industry just because especially now with the past two or so years that we’ve gone through. People want to laugh, right? They want to have that happy feeling back. And, you know, it is I watched I scrolled through Instagram all day watching stupid videos because they make me laugh.
Yeah. No, I mean, it’s a very good point. And I think we’ve also adjusted a bit of our sales team to sell products and really tried to push them to not feel that they have to be overly formal, that they can still be professional of course, but like small risks with things like that. We’ve definitely sent some email, email campaigns that were more mean, and focused, some of which worked really well, some of which were hated. But you know what? You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. So we definitely tried to put content out there that is that makes us smile and, you know, we think would work for us. Yeah, definitely. And in the same sense, kind of like you were saying. With entrepreneurship. It is anyone in general. You truly won’t get anywhere unless you make mistakes. I mean, that’s just how it is. So for anyone that’s interested in starting a business or anything like that, you ready to fail?
Because you’re probably going to, at least in some regard, you’re going to have a lot of hiccups along the way. And it’s very important to overcome those and, you know, persevere through. I feel like that’s something obviously you guys did with the two-faced story. That was a huge issue to start with. And obviously, you persevered through and nutcases pretty well know nowadays, I would say. Also being able to deal with rejection. I think people don’t talk enough about it’s very easy to read about the Zuckerbergs of the world and from 1 to 1000000000 and things like that.
So many people are going to say no. So many people aren’t going along with the selling. So many people aren’t going to want to help. And you have to be pretty resilient and confidence in yourself to be able to just like in sales, you know, you get, you know, entrepreneurship, investors, people are not going to like your product idea. They’re not going to like writing in general and being resilient enough to kind of push through that and stay confident and have a great mentality. I think it’s really important.
So speaking of resilience and moving forward and still going with everything. Leo Oliver What, what is next for nutcase or another venture or you know, what, what do you guys have going on in the, in the near future here?
You got a lot cookin. I don’t know how much I want to disclose just yet. So we have a little bit more and a little more. Baby got a lot of balls in the air. But yeah, I think, you know, a higher level. We’re exploring manufacturing options outside of China. We are building new product categories. And, you know, we’re really excited about continuing to build on the momentum that we’ve been working on our behinds off on our building. And what I think with the team that we have, we are really just still at the beginning of what really happened.
I think it’s still just in the early stages, still the growth that we need out of it. So yeah, a lot of exciting things in that you guys argue about. I think what’s cool as well is just, you know, our company’s got 16 people now. And so seeing it sort of goes from one person in the US in 2018 to 2 to four to 8 to 12 and sort of being a part of that growth and really seeing the team expand and finding other like-minded individuals that believe in the vision, believe in that company culture and kind of what we’re trying to do here is, yeah, we’re, we’re really excited for the growth we want. We want to be the best place company in K-12. And that’s kind of what drives us at the moment. And we think right now there’s no reason why we can’t.
It’s just a matter of time and execution and just continually getting things right at the time. And we’re successful from.
So we’re staying away from scooters and importing wine, or are we going to try to go back and hit those ventures again?
I still import little wine and the state is trying to resell it. I’m more in this sort of end to end ends when I get the wine guy a drink. But I think all of us still read the studio quite a bit. So the great thing about K12 right now is that despite all the all the terrible things that happened, it’s forced the industry to sort of speed up. Ten years in the past, students. And so there’s so much more potential.
There’s so much more budget going around. There’s so many more opportunities in the space. But I know we have tons of other ideas for supplementary products or extra things we can add to our portfolio. And the biggest challenge is just focused like we talked about earlier and knowing which is good to go for and which is, you know, Leo’s new take on the backpack three ignore or do we do or which you know which Pollan’s to change what new strategies what new materials but there’s so much room for growth in the space, that’s a really exciting time to be a tech.
Yeah, definitely. I mean, like you said, it’s really forced this industry and just forced schools in general to. I mean, we’ve talked on previous episodes of our podcast with tech directors. Our schools weren’t 1 to 1 before COVID, and then COVID kind of forced all of them to become one because they just couldn’t teach at home. Or do you any days without a Chromebook or an iPad? And so that’s really. Made this the education technology market just rapidly explode. And just watch out there because they actually did it as well. When we take the 70 districts, they had a six year technology plan and that was going to get them and that’s how much time they needed and kind of forced them to act. And a lot of them had great success. And I think a lot of tech companies as well might be surprised with what would have seemed impossible pre-COVID to actually manage to pull off what they did with relative amounts of success, borrowing, you know, problems and supplies.
Well, everyone we talk to now is 1 to 1, and that’s going to be going anyway.
Yeah. Very excited to see what the future holds. I mean, obviously, the technology’s not going to go back in time. It’s only going to continue evolving to be more complex and more user-friendly and more fragile, to be honest. But I do think it is an industry that is sort of on the on the brink of, I would say, like a technology revolutionary explosion to where because we’re never going back. Right. We mean, you just can’t go back and back to the way it used to be.
And which is fine. If I was a kid in school, I wouldn’t want to carry around 30 books anymore either. But, you know, having that essentially the world at your fingertips, protecting that world at your fingertips is definitely important. So, yeah, I mean, very exciting to see where things go. You know, time will tell. But, you know, I think you guys have done something great. You started with an idea back in high school and turned it into a global company, which is amazing. And I hope, you know if you have any last bit of advice for anyone out there that’s got the smallest idea, you know if you want to share it.
Don’t give up, write it. Try and let me try and I’m gonna try and find out, you know, that’s really what it is. I mean, I think that’s, you know, you know, you don’t have to be the smartest person. You don’t have to be you don’t have to have any real credentials or background or experience. It helps that background, experience, and some level of education and credentials necessary. And, you know, I really am just a believer in this meeting.
And you have that passion for a project and you have a burning desire to see it come to life with enough hours and put enough time and effort. It will happen one way or another. But on the flip side, you also have to be smart enough to kind of realize when it’s time to move on to the project. So that’s also a pretty important lesson that kind of comes with experience. But, you know. That’s really that’s what I’d like to know. Well, just a quick final note as well. We’re going to be at the trade show in a couple of weeks.
If anyone has any entrepreneurial ideas or wants to promote other bands, we’re happy to talk about what’s left for us and give advice here and there. I will be in place 2748. We’ll also be showing our places. It’s more fun to talk about entrepreneurial, crazy ideas.
Awesome, guys. Well, I wish you nothing but the best. Leo Oliver, I appreciate it. Continued success hopefully as well. And I’m sure we’ll see you guys at some shows coming down the road at some point.
Likewise. So thanks again.
Have a good one.
In Episode 33, Hope Davis, MA, CHC takes us on a journey from personal challenges to leading educational innovation at Teach Tech U. Discover how her experiences fueled a passion for transformative technology in education, shaping the future with Project LEAR. An inspiring conversation for anyone intrigued by the power of tech to change lives. […]
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With guest speaker Marsha Maxwell, PhD, CETL, join us for a reflective journey on the advancements of AI through the years, focusing on how we can further develop these technologies to bridge educational divides.
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