In today's episode, we explore how Sandy Stinson, President of GoodWag, turned a common pet owner's frustration into a thriving business. Every dog owner knows the hassle of waste cleanup, but Sandy's innovative solution, PooPail, has revolutionized this undesirable task, leading to a successful Kickstarter campaign and a growing product line.
Sandy joins us to share her journey from a failed first crowdfunding attempt to raising over $500,000 and surpassing her targets. Her story demonstrates how the right marketing strategy, customer feedback, and continuous product improvement can transform a simple solution into a market success.
Tune in to discover priceless marketing and business insights that have shaped her product development and company growth, leading to an expanded product line and recent rebranding.
In today’s episode of the Harvest Growth Podcast, we’ll cover:
Why most crowdfunding campaigns fail and how to succeed
How to use customer feedback to drive product improvements
Strategic approaches to expanding from one product to a full line
The importance of choosing the right marketing partners
The role of environmental consciousness in product development
And so much more!
You can listen to the full interview on your desktop or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Or, click to watch the full video interview here!
Tired of wasting precious time cleaning up after your pets? Visit www.goodwag.com to discover their innovative solutions that make pet waste cleanup quick and effortless. Shop now and join countless happy pet owners who’ve transformed their cleanup routine!
To be a guest on our next podcast, contact us today!
Do you have a brand that you’d like to launch or grow? Do you want help from a partner that has successfully launched hundreds of brands that now total over $2 billion in revenues? Set up a free consultation with us today!
Prefer reading instead of listening? Read the full transcript here!
Jon LaClare [00:00:00]:
Today's guest raised half a million dollars with a crowdfunding campaign and then took her learnings to significantly grow her sales in the years since her initial test launch. It's a great product that is needed by hundreds of millions of consumers, but a good product isn't enough anymore. You also need effective marketing. She shares what has worked for her in a way that you can apply to your business as well.
Jon LaClare [00:00:42]:
Welcome back to the show. I'm excited to have Sandy Stinson on the show with us today to do an interview about her product and her business. Her product's called PooPail and her business is called GoodWag. You can find more information about them at GoodWag w a g.com it's a pet product. We're going to dive into exactly what it is and some of the story behind how this has become so successful over the last couple of years. First of all, though, I want to welcome to the show. Sandy, thanks for taking the time today.
Sandy Stinson [00:01:08]:
Thanks so much for having me.
Jon LaClare [00:01:11]:
So can you tell our audience for if they haven't heard of the poo pail or of your business, GoodWag, what is the poop ale and how'd you come up with the idea?
Sandy Stinson [00:01:18]:
I have. I've always been a dog lover and I had two dogs and I worked long hours. I was in an industry that was very, very time consuming and I always had a docky door for my dogs to go in and out and relieve themselves during the day while I was at work during the winter, you know, when the days are shorter, I'd leave for work when it was dark and I'd come home from work when it was dark and I would go out on Saturdays and I'd spend half my day picking up all the dog poo from the week. So, you know, it just took forever. There was a lot of single use items. There was, there just wasn't anything that was convenient. And I went to a bunch of different pet stores in my area and I said, do you have anything like a pail with a scoop or some way to collect all of this at once? Said, no, there's nothing like that. And so I went about to kind of create one.
Sandy Stinson [00:02:12]:
I started with an Office trash can and a kitty litter scoop. And that was fine until it rained and it filled with water, and it was disgusting. And so it's like, okay, it needs to be a covered pail and a scoop. And I just kept thinking, if I want something like this, perhaps other people do too. So I started working with some engineers, and it took a few engineers, a few tries before somebody got my idea. You know, I. I knew what I wanted it to do. I didn't know the mechanics of it.
Sandy Stinson [00:02:43]:
I'm not an engineer, but I knew what I wanted it to do. And so I found one engineer, and we. We kind of, you know, went through and hashed it out, and he'd come up with an idea, and I'd say, absolutely. You know, like, why don't we just put the scoop inside the pail? It's like, I'm not reaching into a pail of dog poop to pull out the scoop. It's gotta be, you know, out to the side and kept clean. I want everything that you touch to be clean. And so we kind of worked out the first idea. I ordered molds.
Sandy Stinson [00:03:13]:
I was gonna have a crowdfunding campaign, which I then launched. And my first crowdfunding campaign was. I thought the crowdfunding, the platform, which was Indiegogo. I thought they promoted it, but they do nothing. You know, they provide a platform. And so my first campaign with no marketing at all, I think I sold $1,000 worth. So then I started searching frantically for marketing companies to, you know, that handle crowdfunding campaigns. I've.
Sandy Stinson [00:03:49]:
I learned a little bit. You know, I bought email lists. I tried all of this stuff, and everybody's happy to take your money. And. But it took me a while. I finally reached out to another entrepreneur who had a successful crowdfunding campaign with a pet product. And it took me, like, a few months to get hold of him, but I asked him, who, you know, what marketing company did you use? He told me. And it took a while.
Sandy Stinson [00:04:18]:
But then I was about a year later when I had another campaign, this time on Kickstarter. It started on Kickstarter, and this time we raised over $500,000 in 30 days.
Jon LaClare [00:04:34]:
That's phenomenal. And it's a. It's a story that I've heard many times with crowdfunding specifically. It's such a unique way of marketing a product, and it's. It's different today than it was. I don't even know when they started 15, 20 years ago when these websites first came out and you could just put A product online and it would sort of sell itself in the very early days. But now there's so many products on any one of these platforms like Kickstarter at any given time. It's like, it's like going on Amazon and not advertising.
Jon LaClare [00:05:02]:
Right. It's like if it's a new product that people aren't searching for, they're never going to find it. So marketing becomes very important and it's a very specific way of marketing that is different from marketing on Facebook, TikTok, et cetera, when you're, when you're sending traffic to your website or maybe to or within Amazon as well. So what were some of the learnings? I guess as you now had this very successful campaign launch on Kickstarter. What were some of the strategies or techniques that worked well for you?
Sandy Stinson [00:05:30]:
The first thing is you've got to get a good company, a good marketing company. There's a, like I said, there's a lot of people, a lot of companies out there who are very happy to take your money. I actually had paid $5,000 to one company and they did some testing. They came back to me three days later, said, oh, it will never sell. And they kept the $5,000, you know, like I said. So you need to get references. And it doesn't hurt to do your own research, especially in whatever kind of area that you want to launch. Look for other companies that have had successful campaigns.
Sandy Stinson [00:06:08]:
Crowdfunding campaign marketing companies are very specific. It's a different type of marketing. The thing that they did is they, they did what they called at the time jungle proof testing. They test marketed the product, they checked the price, they, you know, wanted to see if people thought that it would be a good idea. I mean, there's a lot of bad ideas. People out, you know, that people come up with that, you know, they're going to become the next billionaire, but you know, it's not going to happen. And my product is brand new. It's kind of very different from anything out there on the market to pick up dog dog poo.
Sandy Stinson [00:06:47]:
And so they, they test marketed it. Was this a broad enough market where they could, you know, capture a good share. And then they did a pre launch for about two months. And a pre launch is expect, is extremely important. I can't stress how important it is. And during that time they're collecting names, collecting email addresses and I think they even collected a dollar or two dollars as a reservation amount. That way they had the credit card, they had the email, they had everything. And then, and they Stayed in touch with them until we had the launch.
Sandy Stinson [00:07:26]:
And that way, the moment that it launched, you know, when we finally rolled it out, the moment that it launched, we were, we, we met our goal like within hours. And the thing is, I set my goal low. I set my goal at $5,000 because I wanted to, to be successful. The algorithms with the Kickstarter campaign or with any campaign really, it's like the more successful you are, the faster you get to your goal, the more they're going to help promote you. And the first time I did this, it's like I, I, I knew that I needed roughly $100,000 for molds and that's what I put in there. And you know, getting $1,000, although it was good, was not anywhere near where I needed to be. So that way, once we actually, you know, had all the names and had email addresses, soon as they launched and they send out emails, we're launching, you know, they were great with all the follow up. They, you know, it was instantly successful.
Sandy Stinson [00:08:28]:
They continued to market, they had created ads. I had worked with their marketing company and they came, came up with a, a great ad with cartoon, with cartoon characters, two little flies. And it was, it was a riot because my product, you know, it's not, it's, it's not going to save the world. It's just makes life a little bit more convenient if you've got a dog. I wanted a lot of, a lot of comedy, a lot of tongue in cheek, a lot of, a lot of humor with it because know it's dog poo.
Jon LaClare [00:08:59]:
True. When it's such a great product idea, you know, it's anybody who has a dog or has been around them, you know, I, I think of my son, we, we sort of farmed him out as a service. Somebody who needed help cleaning out their yard. They hadn't picked up dog poop. They just had a new baby and just hadn't had the time to do it. And it was, I don't know, a long time, weeks probably of stuff back there and for him to do it manually. This is before you and I met and before we had the, the poop pail to be able to use. Such a pain to use.
Jon LaClare [00:09:26]:
But it made me realize like there's, you know, there's picking up one as you're walking your dog in a park is one thing. Right. But being able to go out in your yard and get that quantity and have it readily available to either, you know, whether it's daily or weekly and an easy way to do it that your fingers aren't close to, that's not sort of gross and it's protected from rain, as you mentioned. It's such a great concept, but as you and I have talked about, product is part of it, right. There's a lot of fantastic ideas that never get off the ground or that, you know, become total flops. And I'll add to that there's a lot of products that we've come across. You know, we've launched hundreds of products over the years with our clients and, and a lot of we're in the industry, right. We see these Kickstarter campaigns that take off, sell like crazy and then when they get into, quote unquote, the real market afterwards, they flop sometimes.
Jon LaClare [00:10:13]:
Right. So having a great product and even having it in a proven way in crowdfunding is not always going to guarantee success. The next step is, okay, now how do I turn this into a marketing success to a continuous business, right, that's going to continue to do well and grow for years. So I know you've had great success afterwards, once you got manufacturing and everything figured out, to then launch on your own and market it directly to, you know, to your website as opposed to Kickstarter. Can you talk a little bit about what has been successful for you, what has helped your business to grow to work well even after Kickstarter?
Sandy Stinson [00:10:47]:
Sure. The old adage, build a better mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door is complete hogwash. Complete hogwash. I built what I thought was perfect, you know, poo pail. And one of the things that the marketing company did through the campaign is they sent out emails to all of the backers and said, what would you like to see? And they wanted an even taller version, they wanted wheels, they wanted more colors. And so that all took a little time and that's it. Kind of delayed delivering my original orders of PooPails. It was deliver, it was delayed by a lot, but it was during COVID and you know, shipping delays, you know, the supply chain issues, all of that.
Sandy Stinson [00:11:33]:
And, but I did deliver and then once I delivered all the 6,000 poo pails to the backers, I sent a follow up email and said, what do you like? What do you do? What do you not like? What is easy, what's not easy? What would you like to see different? And I got, you know, you don't look for the one who complains about everything, but you look for a theme. And they said the wheels were too thin, they weren't stable enough, the lid would fall open unless it was just seated. Right. I went through and redesigned the PooPail and, and this time I did most of the design myself. The first one, if you look online, it will seal the old products. It looks kind of like, you know, the old, the old Volvos. It's boxy but good. And this is more like a Ferrari.
Sandy Stinson [00:12:22]:
It's, it's more streamlined, it's, it's better balanced, the wheels are thicker. You know, it's, it's just a much better product. As a matter of fact, I just got an email today from somebody who was an original backer and he received a new poo pail and he goes, light years better. I, you know, I'm so proud of you and your success. And so I asked questions, I continue to ask questions because even though I think I've built a great product, you really have to find out what the customer wants. And you have to, you, you have to ask. You can't be afraid to ask. Don't love your idea so much that you are going to die for it.
Sandy Stinson [00:13:05]:
You know, you've got to be able to pivot.
Jon LaClare [00:13:09]:
Absolutely. And it's, I think it's a relatively inherent part of the process with crowdfunding because everything's new. You know, people ask questions. It's, you know, really, there's a delivery window to send out after the first order and it's kind of researchy. Right. If it's a way to say it. But the part that gets often missed that I think you've done well, is continuing to have those conversations after you, you know, post Kickstarter right now in the true launch of the website, but continuing to have conversations with your customers. You're going to learn and improve over time and, and really should not rest on your Laurels.
Jon LaClare [00:13:42]:
Right. Version 2, version 3, version 4 of any product is only going to get better and better. I do want to say to our audience, we're going to keep talking for a minute, but go to their website, GoodWag.com to see the designs. As Sandy said, they're, they're phenomenal. Designs work. They work really well and they're not clunky. Right. They work well, they look great.
Jon LaClare [00:14:00]:
And anybody who's watching the video as Sandy talks, you can see one of the poo pails behind her as well and see how it's a very well designed product, but also super functional too. So are there, is there anything else that kind of sticks out that you've heard recently as you've reached out to existing customers that maybe what's next for the product in your, in your development, whether it's an improvement to the poo pail or something, maybe developing a new product that you've heard from your audience.
Sandy Stinson [00:14:26]:
I am coming out with new products. As a matter of fact, I recently transitioned from Poo Pail, which was just one product name, to GoodWag. And the reason why is because I'm coming out with new products. You know, when we changed that on the algorithm, our, our ratings went down a little bit. It took a while to get them back up. So I suggest, you know, if you want to build a real company and not just a one off product, use the company name to begin with. And, and so I am now Poo Pail by GoodWag and, or, you know, the company name is now GoodWag. Everything is branded as GoodWag.
Sandy Stinson [00:15:05]:
And the reason why is because I'm coming out with Poopy Scoopy. There's a lot of, you know, kind of waste bin and broom kind of contraptions or rake contraptions to scoop up dog poop. Well, I'm going to come out with one of those too because it's going to be a lot less expensive. Kind of PooPail is the Cadillac and these are going to be like the Toyota Prius Prius, you know, just everywhere. And of course I've taken a look at everything that's on the market and I've redesigned it so that it's better. It's going to have both a rake and a scoop option kind of like this. And so people can use either the rake or the scoop. It depends on the, you know, the ground cover or.
Sandy Stinson [00:15:47]:
I, I've had more intimate conversations about dog poop. It depends on the consistency of the dog poop. So, you know, and it's going to be, be able to live outside. You don't have to bring it in during winter and things like that. I just kind of look at what it should do and design for that. So that's my next product coming out. I also have a jumbo poo pail coming out for households with multiple large dogs or commercial use. Kennels, rescues, that kind of thing.
Sandy Stinson [00:16:19]:
Doggy daycares. And I have one final product coming out, at least so far. It's going to be one final product which is Shtick SH Stick. You know what the SH stands for? The. And that's going to be kind of for, well, older, I hate to say older, but mobility challenged people. There's a lot of older people that have Pets and should be out exercising and walking their dogs. But because of back or balance issues, they can't pick, they can't bend down to pick up after their dog. So this is going to help older people and you know, others go out and walk their dog and it's going to be at one, you know, handheld, foldable, go down, get the poop, you know, kind of suck it up, put it in a bag all in one step and, and then they can kind of carry that around and then dispose of it when they get back, you know, to a trash can or whatever.
Sandy Stinson [00:17:16]:
So that's the next, that's, that's going to be a difficult, the difficult one to engineer. I've got some prototypes but, and probably I don't think it'll be the, the most sold. So I've kind of pushed it off to the end. But I, I, I want to have GoodWag cover all bases of pet waste. It's like this one problem that I want to take care of. You know, as I mentioned, I was out spending half my Saturdays picking up after my dog. It's like I kind of resented my, you know, that I had to spend half my day, you know, day off cleaning up after my dogs. I felt like, well, they should be cleaning up after me or something, you know, But I just wanted to make this one area of, of dog ownership a little bit easier so that, you know, just kind of free up your life and you wouldn't have to spend so much time.
Sandy Stinson [00:18:08]:
And I, I, you know, that's still what I want to do. I want GoodWag. I want to build the company so that it's the go to company when your dog goes number two. I don't want to get into pet treats or leashes or anything else, just dog poop.
Jon LaClare [00:18:24]:
Well, I have to be honest with you. I was, as we set up this interview, I wasn't sure how our discussion would go talking about dog poop for a while. But you know, it's a funny topic sometimes, but it's such an important topic for anybody who has a dog. It's something everybody needs. Exactly, exactly. And it's such a, you know, a great product you've developed and you know, great business stories along the way that, you know, you find something that is in need for any dog owner out there and then great idea, great product, better mousetrap, as you said, and then finding the right marketing approach that is really going to drive sales and help the business grow from there. Well, Sandy, is there anything I didn't ask that you think would be helpful for our audience?
Sandy Stinson [00:19:02]:
Well, I, I think that's kind of it. You know, sales have continued to grow. We're, you know, poop pail is still our best seller. We also offer smart poopy walking bags. And the thing that I didn't mention is the poop pail is designed to live outside. So will Poopy Scoopy, but the bags are biodegradable and compostable because I don't want to have to preserve dog poop and plastic forever. I'm a scuba diver. I want to keep the planet clean.
Sandy Stinson [00:19:31]:
And I picked up way too many plastic bags while scuba diving.
Jon LaClare [00:19:38]:
And I want to tell our audience, please go visit GoodWag.com where you can learn more about Sandy's current product and coming products that are coming out soon as well. And did you know you can meet with a member of my team absolutely free for a 30 minute strategy consultation. We've launched and grown hundreds of products since 2007 and learn some of our strategies while growing Oxiclean back in the Billy Mays days. We're here to help, so please go to harvestsgrowth.com and set up a call if you'd like to discuss further.
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