SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How GoSun Sold 50,000 Units, $4m Revenue, 250k Community, Software Next?
25 Dec 2020
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
It didn't take a ton of capital to keep GoSun alive and well. It took the better part of 200 grand to keep us alive during those first three years of startup doldrum. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka. Now, if you're hearing this, it means you're not currently on our subscriber feed. To subscribe, go to getlatka.com. When you subscribe, you won't hear ads like this one.
You'll get the full interviews. Right now, you're only hearing partial interviews. And you'll get interviews three weeks earlier from founders, thinkers, and people I find interesting. Like Eric Wan, 18 months before he took Zoom public. We've got to grow faster. Minimum is 100% over the past several years. Or bootstrap founders like Vivek of QuestionPro.
When I started the company, it was not cool to raise. Or Looker CEO Frank Behan before Google acquired his company for $2.6 billion. We want to see a real pervasive data culture, and then the rest flows behind that. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
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He's worked with solar for over 20 years and maintains a diverse background in design, social enterprise, and manufacturing. Volunteering in developing countries has inspired Patrick to create solar solutions that meet essential needs like cooking, cooling, and sanitation. That is what he is doing with his new company, GoSun.co. Patrick, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, buddy.
Let's do it. All right. So is this a pure hardware play? Is that how you're making money here? Largely, yeah. We design, manufacture, market, and move product. That's right. Very interesting. Okay, tell me what year did you launch your first product and what was the product?
It was about seven years ago, 2013, launched it on Kickstarter, and it was a solar oven that kind of blew away all other fuel-free devices. Cooked a meal in 20 minutes for two people, basically vacuum insulated so you can use it in the winter, freezing cold, clouds. It's a survival tool, great for recreation, boats, RVs, camping, and the like.
And we just keep running with that same market base and same kind of needs of meeting people where they're outdoors and sort of off-grid. What was it called? Sorry, the what? The GoSun Sport was our first product launch. GoSun Sport, interesting. Okay, so that was in Kickstarter in what year, 2016? No, 2013. Okay, wow, 2013. And how did it do on Kickstarter? It did well.
I had about a thousand emails from people that I had gathered, colleagues I'd been in the solar space for a long time, but on a very different, kind of doing integration, installation work. And those people responded super well. And then, of course, it took off organically on its own because there was very little like it. And with that, GoSun was born.
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Chapter 2: How did GoSun start and what was the first product launched?
Well, the key to Kickstarter is that you want to provide a 40% discount off of your intended MSRP. For us, since the first products that we launched were so unique and different, we put a pretty healthy margin. So we would say, for example, have a 70% profit gross margin. And then for the Kickstarter, it might be like 60 or 55. So people are getting a much better deal
And, you know, pricing and packaging is definitely a big part of the, you kind of have to, you kind of have to look into the future, grab the crystal ball. I can't really explain it. Across online product launches, how many customers have you driven? We have about, we have about 50,000 customers and our emails are a couple, about a quarter million.
Our sort of social following is about a quarter million. So 250,000 on your email list now. How did you build that? Obviously, I imagine Kickstarter gives you the emails of your backers, but how are you getting the rest of these opt-ins? We did a lot of that. And then early on, we were going to events like crazy and way too much.
I'm actually kind of happy that we're in the COVID world where I don't have to go to trade shows. It was exhausting. I mean, we went to like two trade shows a month there for a while. And we always focused on, hey, please give us your email. You'd have an iPad or something to sign up, drop your business card in, whatever. We got, you know, we must have got 100,000 emails that way. Wow.
One of so many events. Wow, that's incredible. Okay, so that many on the list, that basically means any future product you launch, you can raise money for it because you send one email blast and you hit your fundraising, go on Kickstarter, and then supply and demand takes over, right? It helps so much. And I know that you're real savvy on all of this. So you're right.
I mean, your product has to resonate. But I think a big part of it is that we have brand loyalty. People can trust that we'll make something that works and fits their needs. And we price things value-oriented too. We're not just gouging. You know, we're real honest folk. So I think you're right. It's pretty fun.
We recently launched a tiny house, which is literally, you know, an entire home on wheels, 22 foot long. And it generated a huge amount of interest. And we're getting into manufacturing tiny houses now. Super interesting. Okay, well, hold on. So let's stick with the other products pre-tiny houses. So nine launches, 50,000 customers. How much total top line revenue?
I think the number's like around 4 million on all of our crowdfunds. And then we've done two equity crowdfund raises as well. And those have brought in about 1.5 million in capital. Why did you do those? Why give up equity when you can raise via pre-selling? Well, it's still really hard to build a business and you're going to need, you know, you need money to meet your payroll or development.
And largely it's development for us. You know, what's on the next horizon? What tools do we need? What are we going to do with international partners and, you know, far away expensive places? So, you know, growth. And the reason we went to the crowd is because we're already so accepted in the crowd. You know, we went we were a crowdfunded company and now we're an equity crowdfunded company.
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Chapter 3: What strategies did GoSun use to raise funds on Kickstarter?
I think, I think what I don't include in my cost of goods sold is the logistics and the shipping, uh, you know, customer support returns, things like that, that you don't have to deal with in a, in a software play. Interesting. Okay.
So, so you launched these nine products, you do 4 million in sales, you're, you know, you're making a healthy salary, but more importantly, you're sort of doing what you love, right? Why get into tiny houses? It's just to grow. I've been interested in green building my whole life. Solar has been a gateway for all these things.
How to make great compost and gardens and manage water and waste and efficiency, heating and cooling. It was natural for us. My two lead designers are both very into building science. And we were watching the tiny house trend just continue to ratchet up, but nobody was really addressing it from an efficiency standpoint. uh, the houses are, are cute, but they're not very green.
Uh, they, they use a ton of propane or electricity to stay warm and cool depending on the season. So that was the main reason we saw this huge opportunity. And, um, since we have that loyal following, you know, we want to always be growing and, uh, and it's sort of like, we've got the cooking, cooling, cleaning, and now we have the shelter to go with it. How do you,
how do you let community members like get excited together? What opportunities you create for them to like hang out in one spot and like, get excited?
Because like, ultimately, when I look at what you're doing, right, you start off with a mousetrap, which is a launch in 2013 of a product that you really like, that's also really smart, looks pretty got a lot of pre sales, you grow your list, your hustle at trade shows, now you have 50,000 paid customers, you've got 250,000 on your list, you're launching a tiny home, I'm looking at a tiny home right now.
And It's basically, this is the new shopping center floor.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did GoSun face in its early years?
Instead of you paying to go sell products on an end cap at Walmart, your audience members or your community can pay to go stay at these tiny homes where they're going to experience and you're going to upsell all your other products to them, right, at scale, right? I mean, is that an intentional strategy? So how do you accelerate that? Oh, no, you're absolutely right.
And there are several models that are doing that, like an Airbnb. And you're reading my mind. Who else is doing this, though? Like besides Airbnb? There's a cool startup called Getaway. I don't remember their exact URL. But they don't have your products. I've used them. I've stayed at a Getaway before. But they don't have like cool solar products that they build into the experience at the Getaway.
Yeah. Well, you know, uh, they, we should talk. Um, we, we have a pretty robust audience on Facebook. Uh, we have this, you know, the ghost on solar community kitchen, I think it's called, and there's like 7,000 people in there and they share their experience. Um, we don't, we You know, I'm fairly out of Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat myself. I regret that I kind of missed that boat.
And so Facebook has been kind of where I interplay and, of course, YouTube and a bit on LinkedIn. But we're also not super communicative on Twitter or Reddit or, you know, we're most really represented on Facebook. You're listing the dream, you call it GoSun Dream. You're listing the dream, the solar off-grid tiny house for between $69,000 and $99,000.
And they can put down a $500 deposit, sort of like a Tesla put down a deposit model. Elon sells a billion dollars of down payments before the thing even exists. How many sales have you done? How many down payments of 500 bucks have you got? Yeah, we're well over 10. And we're definitely on our way to our first 10 units in production for 2021. Oh, wow.
So is this, I mean, is this going to be a margin thing? What can you produce this thing for? Yeah, you know, we'll make like I think you're nailing it in that a lot of this is just a point at the overall lifestyle. We're not going to have a great margin on the tiny home, you know, 10 or 15 percent on something that's 100 grand. That's 10 grand. Great.
But but it's really about, you know, getting people into using our products and relating to our products in these different ways, whether it's for family fun or for kind of preparedness purposes. And same with the experience with the home in general.
And like you said, sort of the opportunity to upsell or to help people, you know, absorb the different use case scenarios of cooking or cooling on our devices. So we think of it almost as a giant brand building marketing exercise as well. This just, to me, is fascinating. Because I talk to so many founders, it is crystal clear to me that you and Getaway Around should be the same company.
They've got software to allow bookings manually. I assume you could probably... Actually, it's probably easier to do what you've done.
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Chapter 5: What is GoSun's approach to product development and launches?
Sorry. You've built the harder part, which is the physical brick and mortar, like the atoms. They've sort of built the bits, right? It's easy for you to add bits. It's probably harder for them to add the hardware. So you're probably more valuable than them.
But I feel like you could do a model like what they're doing pretty darn easily if you raise some capital to build a bunch of these units and put five outside of every major city. Definitely. No, I love it. And I do have a developer tinge in my blood. So you're kind of reading my mind in our future growth opportunities.
We're doing a lot to communicate that vision in 2021 that you're going right after. You're a step ahead of it. You should keep me like, I mean, I don't know how, but I'd love to participate in that somehow, whether it's from a capital perspective or just even just brainstorming once everyone's like this. I really enjoy this. I think it's the future.
These curated sort of content houses, whether it's a tiny house in the middle of nowhere or a mansion in Beverly Hills where content creators are saying that all of the same thing. Yeah. I mean, and you can make these houses super smart.
You know, there's this opportunity where like, you know, you log, you pull in our app and you jump in the house and all of a sudden the app connects you to 20 smart devices and you're just like, whoa, this is so cool. I could do all these things now and be superhuman, you know. This is great. And you're still personally doing, I'm looking at the tiny house consultation. Your face is right there.
You're still doing all the onboarding, huh? Well, that's just how we set up the Calendly. You know, we have some, you know, I don't talk to everybody. We're not a big corp, you know, and I love interfacing, especially with somebody that wants to buy the dream. But I'm not a part of every interaction there. Yeah, very interesting. Yeah, I do try to be as connected to our customer as possible.
We do have a customer board and we're always pitching surveys and trying to get more feedback. It really has brought us a lot of incredible ideas and improvements. That's really cool. What else am I missing? What else should I have asked you about that I haven't asked about? Oh, you're good. I...
You know, there's a part of our business that's about social entrepreneurship, and we're trying to bring our technology to three billion people in the world that still cook with wood and charcoal every day.
And that's like sub-Saharan Africa, you know, Latin America, in areas where impoverished regions where people need to break a cycle of poverty because cooking is this huge burden, not to mention, you know, clean water and and, you know, refrigeration and things. So basically, we do have sort of a dual business. And our strategy is to really work towards benefit.
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