Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, John in Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio, and how the tech are you here? In the United States? It is currently Memorial Day, which means that we're not in the office today, So I was going to play a rerun, but I thought maybe we'd try something a little different. Uh. Some of you may know that a couple of years ago, I used to host a show with Ariel Casting called Business on the Brink, and we covered businesses that had kind of a pivotal moment where either they made some choices that got them out of severe trouble or they descended into chaos. And it was a fun series to do. We did it for a couple of years, and I thought it would be great to play one of those episodes today. So what you're about to hear is a Business on the Brink episode which originally published on July two thousand nineteen. It is called Chilling Out with the Coolest Cooler and I hope you enjoy. Ryan Grepper was sure he knew how to beat the heat with an innovative approach to the old beach stand by the drinks cooler. He added some bells and whistles, updating the frosty concept with some techy bonus features. To get things moving, he launched a crowdfunding campaign that was incredibly successful and earned a lot of ice, but soon found out that manufacturing a new product isn't easy and the whole process ended up leaving a lot of early supporters out in the cold. This is the coolest cooler on the brink, Hey, guys on Jonathan and I'm Ariel Casting, and thank you Bill Jeffers for giving us this awesome suggestion. Yeah, yeah, this is a one that I have covered on my show Text Stuff a little bit. I did an episode about some of crowdfunding's biggest successes and failures, and spoiler alert, coolest cooler falls into the latter category. Yeah, sadly. Sadly because I think the concept is really cool. Yeah, we're going to be saying cool a lot and not meaning it in a punny way. But if you want to interpret it as a pun, feel free. Yes, but no, I if I were not so thrifty, I was about to say cheap, but I'm going to say thrifty. I would have wanted to back this. A lot of people did. Lots of people backed this product so much so that not to skip ahead too much, but it would become one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns in history. We'll get to that. But as it turns out, as as we alluded to in the introduction, things did not go smoothly, and it was largely a thing due to innocent naivete. There was a lot of of of underestimating exactly how hard it is to mass produce a brand new product. I'd have to agree with you, Jonathan. So let's get into a little bit of how this product came about. This coolest cooler. It was launched in two thousand thirteen by Ryan Grepper from Portland, Oregon. He used to be a medical sales rep uh and he was a self described inventor since two thousand six, which is I believe around the time that this products started taking form. He's also um He's still listed as a member of the CNBC Tech Crowd Council, which is made up of people who have done a successful crowdfunding campaigns. Yes, his campaign was successful. Yes for the crowd funding part. It's kind of surprised to see him still on there. But spoiler alert, guys, coolest Cooler is still around, but Ryan Grepper's reputation has taken an enormous beating in the process. And so so his idea initially started off as a pair of ideas before it merged into transformer, like what the coolest cooler would be? Right? Yeah, he tried to make a portable blender from a weed whacker, and then he made a cooler with the car stereo in it. Uh. And then after he made these these initial prototypes, he was like, well, I need to make them smaller so I can bring them places. And he got the inspiration that if he made it smaller, he could sell it. And his idea was for the cooler to be a place where people gather, to have all the things that make a space somewhere you'd want to hang out. And according to c NBC, his early experiments to compile all these things together didn't work. So well, yeah, I just have this in my imagined y. Now, I know this isn't what it actually looked like, but in my imagination, you have like an iglue uh style cooler with a car stereo duct taped onto it. Like that's how I imagine these early versions being that's how I'd do it, just just say it. But the whole idea was, you know, you've been to plenty of parties, you've hosted parties. You note as well as I do, that often a central gathering point for a party ends up being the kitchen. It's it's kind of it's where the food is, be is where the drinks are. People tend to hover there and then sooner or later a party kind of just it's centered there. It might spin off in other places. So this was kind of the same concept was that if you have all of these elements in a cooler and your outdoors, the cooler becomes kind of the central focal point for the party. Yeah, and he had an initial setup for the cooler, but by the end of his Kickstarter campaigns plural uh his cooler. His coolest cooler would include a USB charging station, a blender for crushing ice, a waterproof bluetooth speaker, watch aproof bluetooth speaker and l e ed light for the lid, dinner wear and storage for it, a cutting board, a bottle opener, and all terrain wheels like a bungee cord thingy and a little hidy spot for your keys and phone. Yeah. Also it was cooler. Yeah, it would be kind of ridiculous if he made this cooler with all these bells and whistles that didn't actually keep your beverages. It reminds me of the trend it was before even smart watches, but the trend where watches were including more and more features, and the standard joke was what's the time and then the person time exactly? That was? That was that was That's a longstanding joke in technology of seen it in like you know, comic strips and things like that, same sort of thing, like if you had ended up with the coolest cooler that couldn't actually keep food cold, that would be ridiculous. So he initially launched a crowdfunding campaign in November two thousand thirteen, and he was targeting a specific kind of of market. He was thinking about people who liked tailgating, and he was timing it to go along with the holiday Christmas shopping uh season. I mean you think that would be a smart move, right, yeah, But it turns out it didn't. It didn't quite pan out. He did not make his goal on that. Yeah, he was seeking a hundred twenty five thousand dollars, and he ultimately raised uh well, the campaign met a hundred two thousand from two backers. But the way kickstarter works is it's an all or nothing proposal. You either make your goal, or you get and you get whatever you make plus over, or you make not thing at all. So if you have a goal of fifty thou dollars and you only hit twenty thousand dollars, nobody gets charged, no money changes hands, and your campaign fails. If you make fifty, then everyone gets charged however much they pledged. You get your fifty dollars minus kickstarters cut, which I think is five percent of the actual money earned, and if it makes more than fifty thou dollars, then you get more than what you had set as your goal. Kickstarter obviously has a strong incentive to promote the the campaigns that are doing well. Like, if there's a lot of buzz, it makes a lot of sense for a kick started to kind of put those closer to the front thing they get exactly. Yeah, so if it's a really successful one, then kicks Started gets some bigger cut, because I mean it's still five percent, but it's five percent of a much larger number. And so that first one didn't work out so well. But the second Kickstarter campaign was a different story. Yeah, his second campaign launched on July eighth. He said a smaller goals, which just from the get go that seems problematic to me. If you need two dred and fifty dollars to create your coolers, don't set a lower goal so you meet your goal unless you're specifically thinking, I'm gonna start with a very small shipment, like if you if you still kept the price point for your cooler at the same level, but you thought I'll make a smaller batch, then that might work out. But as it turns out, that's not what happened. No, no, So first I want to say it shows you how small Ryan was thinking, because at his cheapest donation amount five dollars, you gotta thanks in the promise of having your name written on Ryan's personal cooler. Court cooler can only hold so many names unless you're like one of those grain of Rice writers. And even then, um and then the highest level, if you donated two thousand dollars or more, Ryan would come be your personal bartender for an event in your hometown and give you one of the first coolers. So and he would sign that one, and he didn't have any of space. Yeah, and so you look at this and you go obviously he was thinking he'd get a moderate amount of backers two hundred and eighty or so like his first campaign, maybe a little bit more because he can't travel to that many people's hometowns. And and he he had earned more than a hundred thousand dollars had the campaign succeeded in the previous example. So even if he got twice as many, you know, you're still thinking, all right, a hundred thousand, maybe two hundred thousand dollars, that's more or less on what he on par with what he was looking at for the first time through. So he was he was thinking, let's try this, and he he decided to launch it at a different time of year, yeah, because he was looking at the summer. He was launching it right around you know, just after the fourth of July weekend. You're talking about prime beach going outdoor grilling kind of of time frame here. It's when people are going outside and doing these activities where they need to have a big cooler or wanting a cooler they can crawl into and hide from the hot Georgia summer. Yeah, especially Yeah, once you get into the heat and humidity here, you're looking for any relief available. Yeah. He estimated that the final retail cost of the Coolest Cooler. This is from the Kickstarter page, which, by the way, is still it's still something you can visit. You can go and check out the Kickstarter page for this, uh this particular campaign. Kickstar keeps them all. It's no longer certain parts of the page you cannot access unless you have donated. Yes, there there are messages that go out just to backers, so if you are a backer, you have access to those, But the public facing page is still available. So he estimated that the final retail cost for the Coolest Cooler was going to be two uh So, three hundred dollars for a cool or seems like a hefty price tag, but as it turns out, it was also an underestimation of how much he would need to charge for that particular invention. I do want to say, I went online and I did a little bit of research. Some super high end, super large coolers do cost hundreds of dollars, so it's not a completely unreasonable price. It's more than I probably would want to pay for a cooler. Yeah, I mean, like, so there are products that cater to people who have way more money than you and I do and not very much idea of what to spend it on. I'll put it that way. That's not it's not to say that those those products are no good or that they're only marginally better than say, a decent cooler would run you. I don't know. There are some of them may be truly incredible and be much more efficient and managing you know, heat and all that kind of stuff. I don't know. But uh. He also on that campaign had an offer where if you were one of the first fifty people to pledge, you could pledge a hundred sixty five dollars and get a reserved coolest cooler of your own. Uh. Those fifty slots disappeared almost immediately, no surprise. Yeah, well, one cooler is a lot more palatable. Yeah. So, then, because they went so fast, and because the West coast had not even had an opportunity to look at it, because the campaign went live before most people on the West coast of the United States had even woken up, he decided to release another group, this time just twenty slots for more early bird coolers, and those went super fast to the next amount you could pledge. Let's say you missed out on those seventy, which wouldn't be a big surprise. I mean, they did go super fast. Your next option would be to pledge at a level of a hundred eighty five dollars or more, and that would put you on the reservation list for your own coolist cooler. So again you're you're still looking at a hundred fifteen dollars off the projected a retail price. You would then also have to kick in fifteen dollars for shipping, which would you could argue push the the price tag for the coolest cooler to two hundred dollars. And that's how most websites refer to it, like it was a two cooler. Yeah still not still not horrible, Still a pretty big discount. Um. I think it was so popular because he took lessons that he learned from his first Kickstarter and and really marketed the second one well. He reached out to previous backers and enthusiasts through email, he hit up social media, and he did live events all prior to actually launching this campaign, So anybody who was already excited about it would then be excited at their friends about it. Yeah, they would tell people, Oh, you know, I tried to back this last time. It didn't work out. You guys should get done on this, because think how incredible this is gonna be. And then it worked because some news outlets, mostly local ones, were starting to pick get up, and this would increase as the campaign would launch, and in fact it would turn into a frenzy when the campaign was starting to get truly successful. So it became a a self perpetuating cycle, right because the campaign started picking up steam, it was getting a lot of backers that in turn was notable enough to get the attention of the media that hadn't already covered this, which brought even more people to back it. So it started to kind of become a spinning boulder down the hill situation. Well, and it became a spinning baller quickly. It beat its school in four days. Within four days, that had made three point two million dollars. Yeah, that's a lot more than a whole lot, And by the end of the two month campaign it had raised million, two hundred two hundred and twenty six dollars from over sixty thousand backers, and once it beat out Pebbles Watch as the most successful kickstarter of all time at that time, it got a ton more press coverage. Time magazine even named it one of the best inventions of two thousand fourteen. Yeah, they did this in two thousand fourteen. Um is before before this had really even had a chance to prove itself. And so then they began to work on finalizing the actual design of the products. And now they got the money to go into the process of making the thing. Yeah, and they worked with a studio, Fathom to get their prototype out, which had fifty five parts in it. Um And this is so that Time Magazine could photograph it for the article. Yeah. It's hard to take pictures of a thing that's largely theoretical. Yeah, I mean they had pictures of the original design of the cooler, but this was redesigned. So um and and through all this, so he has this successful campaign. Ryan thought he had planned appropriately for supply and logistics ahead of time. He thought he had sourcing partners in place based on the money that he made, and he was so optimistic that he figured unlike of crowdfunding campaigns that face delays, he would be able to avoid them. Yeah he was wrong, and yeah he was wrong. He had planned on starting to deliver coolers by February two fifteen. But if you know anything about this story, you know that was far too optimistic. And if you don't know anything about this story, we'll tell you about it. But first we're going to take a quick break. Al right. So Grebber has this crowdfunding campaign. It is monumentally successful and as an enormous following lots of enthusiastic backers who just can't wait to get their hands on this cooler that can do everything, uh that you can imagine and be prepared to live their best beach clad lives. The cooler cannot do everything you could imagine. I don't think it could walk a puppy for you, nor could it actually transport you to the beach, but just about everything else, everything, Yeah, you're so, what happened? Well, he immediately started to encounter issues in manufacturing. And this is a good time to remember that manufacturing has got a lot of moving pieces, right, You've got your whole supply chain. Now, it's one thing if you're making a relatively simple product, where the supply chain is is pretty linear, where you know you've you've got You get the raw materials from one place, it goes into a manufacturing facility and then goes into the shipping department of that facility, and then it goes out to customers. That's really simple. But the coolest cooler had a lot of different parts to it. It had these speakers, it had the USB charging outlets, it had a motor for the blender. Yeah, it's got all these different parts and they were coming from different places, which means if there's a delay and any part of that supply chain, it delays the overall product. And there was so the manufacturing facility in China that made the blender motor, which there was one place that he sourced for this one place, only he had no backups because his specifications for this blender motor were so high he wanted to be really good production. Um, they went on strike and so it stopped his entire his entire line of assembly, which also took a really long time because they had fifty five parts, a lot of which had to be hand assembled. Now, if you've ever looked at the Coolest Cooler online, like if you've gone to Amazon, where you can still see coolest coolers listed, although if you want one of the classic ones, typically you're looking at buying it from a reseller. But if you look at it, you'll see that there are a couple of different configurations. There's one version of the Coolest Cooler that has a regular top, doesn't have the blender part, and it's significantly cheaper than the one that comes with the blender. Well, the one that was on the Kickstarter page, the one that the backers backed specifically mentioned that the blender was part of it, So that was a big issue. With the the supply chain for the blender motor all all uh screwed up. It really put him behind. But even still he was estimating that by September. By September he could get everybody their coolers, and that did not happen either, not at all. Um everything was a lot more expensive then he anticipated. Yeah, so that final retail price turned out to be too low. That and in fact, he said this over and over again. So one of the biggest problems he had was that he had underestimated how expensive it would be to produce these coolers, and that it was an issue where if you did the math, there was no way around it. You were going to lose money on those Kickstarter orders like there was. This was beyond selling things at cost where you're just covering the expense of the materials and labor to put to the product together. Now you're actually taking a bath on those sales. And I mean, it does not take a business major to tell you that you can't stay in business that way. You you're bleeding money being in business. You cannot You can't make it up in volume. That's just gonna bleed you out faster. So this is where he had to start figuring out what do I do about this? Well, he had another idea that again kind of makes sense but also made a lot of people angry. He decided to sell his cooler on Amazon because that way he could sell it at a higher price than what he listed on Kickstarter and make up some profit on the coolers and then use that money on making and shipping these individual coolers to people to get all of the coolers for all the Kickstarter people to them. Yeah, because he didn't have the money to do it. Yeah. So essentially this was the reason this caused such a fuss is that the people who were backing it on Kickstarter. I can't speak for every body, but I notice in general that a lot of people act like Kickstarter is an early access store. That's not what Kickstarter is. You're an investor in an idea, yeah, and you sometimes investments don't pay off. I mean, we've done plenty of episodes of the Brink where that has turned out to be true. You've backed some some campaigns that didn't. Let's not go into my personal history and how many watches I have backed that never came out. But the campaigns are successful, Yes they were. I think there are three different watch campaigns I backed that did not ever ship. I think that just makes you an expert on the topic. But again, I didn't knowing that there was the possibility that somewhere down the line something like this could happen where I'm giving I'm pledging money to a business that I hope succeeds. But there are a lot of factors out there that don't have anything to do with the sincerity of the business owner that can sink a business. Right. You also have people out there who are disingenuous, who are snake oil salesman who they're selling an idea but they don't have any any intention of seeing it through. I never got the feeling that Grebber was one of those people. No, I really think he just lacked the business knowledge to set this up to be successful or as successful as it was. Maybe if he had the low numbers that he expected and the money that he he was originally estimating for, he would have done fine. Yeah, maybe he could have ramped up slowly and grown more organically. But the crazy success and the amazing amount of attention that was directed towards his campaign really was an albatross around his neck. And so the whole goal of any business oriented kickstarted campaign is to have usually at least to have a sustainable business on the other side of it, Right, So the whole goal of Coolest Cooler that campaign wasn't just to ship out coolers to backers. It was to create a viable business where he would be selling these coolers to other retailers and that the people who backed it, their reward for backing it would be getting a cooler at a discounted price. The problem was that unless he was selling them at this higher mark up at these retailers. He wouldn't have the money to cover sending out those those backer coolers to the backers. So the backers are upset because the thing that they've been waiting for is not coming to their to their house when they expected it. And somebody else who didn't back the campaign could, in theory, go out and order one and get one ahead of them. Yeah, in two weeks or or a couple of days. Uh, you have a note here. And I think it's true that a big part of the issue was communication. There are their notes and their comments about out, we haven't heard anything. And so they did do a live stream to say, look, you guys, we need fifteen million more dollars than we expected. We're trying to get it through selling coolers so that we can get you your rewards. They and they did, they send out some rewards early on, and it just it got too big for them. Well, and and that also ended up being an issue, like there was no good way for Creeper to get out of this because he owed something like sixty thousand people these coolers and he could only do them in batches. And so what would happen is you would send out you would have this company sending out coolers to backers in these smaller batches, but the media focus was on how many people were still waiting for a cooler. It wasn't saying, coolest cooler has made good on you know, ten thousand of the pledges and is working hard to get the other fifty thousand. It was instead it was fifty thousand people are still waiting for their coolers, which wasn't doing him or his company in favors. So again, like, yes, the mistake was his. We're not gonna lift all responsibility off of him and say like he was a victim in all of this. But at the same time, I think the way it unfolded, it was pretty much a worst case scenario for him to have to deal with on top of all just the production headaches he had. Well he does, he does. I don't know if it's victim blaming or a little bit of shaming, but he he has been noted to say that he thinks part of what hiss delayed him so long is that when he put the coolers on Amazon, all of these backers went on and made these horrible reviews because they said they didn't have their coolers and he's like, guys, you're shooting yourself in the foot here. Yeah, it's it's just delaying when I can get enough money to make good on the promise I've made you. But then again, if I were said, hey, if you pay nine dollars, will get you your cooler quicker than you're paying the quote unquote retail price for the cooler at which point, yeah, so that was something else that came up with that. He said. One solution to the problem they had was that if you were a backer and you wanted your cooler faster, you could get it by giving an extra nineties seven dollars to the company. That would make up enough of the difference for him to be able to put those people on a priority list and they would get their coolers faster. But you didn't have to do that. Again, the way a lot of news outlets reported this, it sounded like if you don't cough up the nineties seven dollars, you're never going to get your cooler. That wasn't the case. It was if you want your cooler now, you have to pay almost an extra hundred dollars. If you are patient, you can wait and it may take a while. But at least in theory, you will eventually get it. I wonder if some of those news outlets reporting it where the reporters maybe had backed it and we're feeling a little sore. I mean, probably not. It was, it was It's very easy to get the the idea that the company was eating backers dry. But again, the more I look into it, the less I feel like that's the case, and the more I feel like there was no good pathway out of this this whole Okay, So, after all this, they started shipping in July of two more coolers. They had enough money to restart shipping, and they hoped they'd be done by October of two thousand fifteen. Uh, how did that turn out? It didn't. Yeah, there's so, I mean, there are still lots of people waiting for their coolers. I'll give a kind of figure in a second. But they began to sell the model of the cooler that was covered by the kick starry campaign for four hundred eighty five dollars on their site, which if you look at the if you look at the initial projected retail price of I'm pretty sure is more than that. Yeah, I'm an English major. It that's a lot for a cooler. Yeah, just shy a five hundred bucks. But it also shows that this cooler and all the parts that were necessary in order to put it together and to have it do all the things that was supposed to do, that it was way more expensive to produce than what he had anticipated. And it's about again we'll get into lessons at the end of the episode, but one thing this immediately tells you is that whenever you are thinking about really any business endeavor, but particularly if you're making something physical, you should grossly overestimate how much it's going to cost you to make it, because it will prepare you better to when you encounter those problems to manage them well. And then if you do have if you do have a surplus at the end of it, if everything goes as you expected and not as you planned for, and then you can either give it back to your supporters or you can invest it in your company to be more successful. Um, make sure you talk to other people who know are doing instead of just like your own research is good, but also talk to industry experts. But you know, I'd have to imagine that there were there was fallout beyond just angry consumers from all of this failure to deliver product. Oh yeah, you had. You even had people who were ordering it and uh and you know they're actually purchasing it online and getting it ahead of time, who were reviewing it and saying the cooler is fine, like it's there's nothing wrong with it, but it might not be cool enough to justify the cost. So again that ends up hurting sales, which makes it even take even longer to to make good on these these kickstarter backers. So it's a domino effect, right, or ripple effect if you prefer. It's a ripple effect. If something goes wrong at ripples out and it effects and ultimately the people that it is affecting the most, at least in the eyes of the backer, are the backers. Yeah, which led to some legal troubles, but we're going to tell you about that right after this break. Okay, So when we started talking about Grepper and his ideas, we mentioned that he is from Portland, Oregon. That's where he was operating out of. And Oregon has been the home not just of Grepper but of some of Grepper's biggest woes. Yes, he got a whole bunch of consumer complaints to the Oregon Department of Justice. Three hundred fifteen incidents of complaints were filed with that d o J in Oregon. Yeah, because if you've got an issue with the company, you've got to file it where that company is. Yeah. So from people outside of Oregon complaining to Oregon, UH, and the complaints stated that the Coolest Cooler was being negligent in delivering their product. So that was enough to to inspire the d O JAY and Oregon to launch an investigation in twos s. So UH kickstart, by the way, their policy states that any successful campaign is supposed to either deliver the awards to backers that were promised or offer refunds to backers. And so part of the problem here was that Coolest Cooler, at least according to these complaints, was refusing to refund money to backers who were discontented. I mean they didn't have it. Yeah. But the problem that is kickstarters own policy is that if you successfully fund your project, you either have to make good on these rewards or offer up the refund to your backers. So it's what gave a foothold for the d o J to really kind of look into what was going on. Yeah. Now, in two tho um, Coolest Cooler did try to a piece people again. They added a tracking tool to their website for backers to track where the progress of their delivery was, like it hasn't even been made yet. Yeah, you could see your place in line basically. But then they also weren't going in chronological order of who backed and shipping these things. They were going by address, which makes sense from a bulk shipping standpoint. Yeah, but not great if you happen to be like if you had prided yourself on being one of the first, like let's say that you were one of those first seventy, like you were an early bird backer, but because of your address, you were not at the top of that list. You might think, what the heck, I'm the reason. I'm part of the reason why this campaign was so successful. Yeah. Um. They also tried to put on that tool on their website where all of the money raised had gone, to give some transparency to people. I'm guessing that didn't really help much because there are employees of Coolest Cooler that we're getting docs and Ryan's family even got some threats from some angry consumers. Yeah, people man, when they don't get what they expect, they can turn real ugly, real fast. And I mean I get the frustration. Trust me, I get the frustration of backing a campaign and not getting what you were promised when the campaign funds. I also, in at least one of those instances, did not get a refund, nor did I get my reward. Uh. The I cannot have any recourse for that because the company that was supposed to make the thing I backed no longer exists, So there's no one for me to get money from at this point. It's just it's the risk of investment. Yeah, you got to know going in that's again you have to remember it's not a store, right. So but there are people who they have that expectation and they're like, well, I bought this product and you won't give it to me, so therefore I it's fair game. I'm allowed to do whatever I want to strike out at you because you have taken my money, which you know, so these people who filed with the organ Department of Justice took a much Yeah, I'm more responsible and less like psycho U unsympathetic approach. Yeah yeah, so how did that turn out? Um? Well, you know, at least turned out well for some of the backers. The Oregon Department of Justice did find that Coolest Cooler was or at least was approaching the point of saying that the Coolest Cooler was negligent, but Grepper was able to settle the case. But the settlement, of course, came with some pretty strong agreements that he had to abide by. One of those was that uh he was going to have to ship Coolest Coolers to Oregonians who had backed the campaign that included eight hundred seventy three backers in the state of Oregon. He also agreed that if backers in general did not receive their coolers by the middle of twenty twenty, so we still have some time to go. Yeah, although, like while we're researching this episode, there are people actively posting on the Coolest Cooler kickstarter page, I haven't gotten my cooler. Yeah, yeah, well there's thousands of them alert. But that anyway, if he does not get the coolers to the backers by mid twenty twenty, for every backer who has not received his or her cooler, they will receive twenty dollars from Grebber and no matter if the company goes into bankruptcy or if it's still solvent, he will owe that money. If the company goes into bankruptcy will not protect him from that that obligation. He will still have to pay the twenty bucks per person. Well, and I know people were not happy about this. I mean, obviously they hope to get their cool Some of them don't even anymore, like I don't care about this cooler anymore, And twenty is a small amount of their investment back, but it's something. Well, and you know, the idea would be that assuming company was still solvent, that even with the twenty dollars being sent, it would still the cooler would still be on its way at some point. Um, so it's not like here's twenty dollars now you don't get your cooler. Yeah, assuming that the company is still around. Of course, if it were bankrupt, then it's just coming out of Grabber's personal funds. I assume. After this settlement, Grabber actually wrote a letter to people and he put it on the Kickstarter as an update to all the backers, and he explained their plan and he explained their strategies for going forward to get this done, things like going international and things like that more investors and stuff, but he was really salty about it. He's like, I feel vindicated that this is how the Oregan Department of Justice ruled that we aren't shysters. We generally want to get you your product, but we just we can't, and you're hurting our progress, right right, Yeah, like like the you know, we're trying to do good on the agreement we had, but the more you guys put up a fuss, the harder it is for us to do that. Yeah, it's kind of like, uh, like you've promised a toddler that you're gonna go to the water park in the afternoon, but it's still in the morning and you need to do some errands, and the toddler starts having a melt down. You're like, you know, I want to go to the water parks. Says yes, we're going to the water park, but first we have to run errands. But I want to go to the water park. I mean, mind you if I had been promised to go to the water park in two thousand fourteen and I hit two thousands sixteen, it's a very long afternoon. Areal very long afternoon when you're a toddler time stretches before you like an infinity. Yeah, that's true. Anyhow, in two thousand seventeen, there was actually a petition filed on change dot org to get them to stop selling their coolers until the backers got their's again, which makes no sense. It's it's hurting the process to get you your cooler. Yeah, that is kind of crazy, like the idea that hey, stop stop doing this thing you're doing that is helping fund actually getting coolers to backers, and get coolers to backers without any funds. That's not the way the world works. No, no, but Grepper, you know, obviously didn't listen to that. The petition didn't well, I mean it's a petition. It's a petition, doesn't doesn't have any holding value over anything other than letting you know. There's a lot of people who are ticked off enough to fill out a form. So, in addition to trying to boost international sales, get more investors, reduced production costs, all of which are great ideas, although hard to get investors when you've got a bad reputation UM, Greber started innovating more to try to get more money. So he made peripherals like batteries, and solar panels and charging chords for the coolers. He made a soft sided cooler, which is expensive for a soft stadic cooler, but apparently is like super magnetic. It's also less expensive than the full coolest cooler is yes, and it has like a universal attachment thing you said, you can put on your bike or your backpacker. But the whole idea was that he could use profits from that or revenue from the sales of those products to help again make good on these backers. I have a feeling that that should the day come when Grebber is able to send off that final backer cooler, it will be an enormous weight of his shoulders. So, Jonathan, how many people would you suppose don't have their coolership? Well, it's tough to say because there's not really an ongoing tally that I could find anywhere. But in ten late eighteen, there was an article that stated as many as twenty thousand people were still waiting for their coolers. Yeah, that's a lot of people. So it's about a third of the backers who who pledged at a level that was enough to get a cooler in the first place, So two thirds got their coolers. A third are still waiting. Um, so that's tough. And there was an article and so the oregon Ian was the newspaper that published the report that said twenty thod people were still waiting. A few months later, they published a second article that stated that during the most recent quarter, according to a statement from Coolest Cooler, the company had shipped precisely zero coolers tobaccers in that most recent quarter, meaning that they weren't able to do any in that three month period. So obviously every month that goes by is bringing them closer to that mid twenty twenty deadline that they need to make. And um, there have been a lot of other things that have happened over the last couple of years that have added complications. For example, you probably are familiar that there have been some issues about tariffs and China, as as the United States of America has enacted certain policies that have instituted these tariffs that in turn ends up impacting the supply chain and manufacturing plan for the Coolest Coolers, So which that is not Grabbers fault. Now, there's nothing he can do about it other than like trying desperately to find a way to still stay within budget and be able to continue production. It's not like it halts production, but it makes production more expensive. And since that was the problem in the first place, in addition to the timing issues with things like the strike, uh, that does not make his life any easier. Yeah. Um again. I really think the lesson here is give yourself buffer, give yourself a leg up, overestimate, like you said, how much it's gonna call you talk to people. Give yourself a longer deadline too. You know, if backers know that going in, they might be okay with that. Yeah. It's it's when you start changing things and people had. It's when you set certain expectations and then you have to change those expectations. That's always a problem, and I've seen it on multiple Kickstarter campaigns, and it almost always happens with stuff that's related to producing something physical. And it doesn't have to be complicated either. I've backed Kickstarter campaigns that were producing things like a deck of cards, but then there are printer issues, their quality control issues, and these things slow everything down and they increase the costs because you have to pay for another production run because if it's not going to meet the expectations, of your backers. Then you're going to have problems that like you, you either ship nothing and you tell your backers were sorry, but the quality was not up to our standards, so we're going to go back and try it again, or you end up shipping something that is of substandard quality and your backers get upset anyway because they're like, I backed this. That was a waste of money and a really long wait. And also you know the lesson for you, uh you know you've listened to this episodes, so you know, but realize that you're making an investment. It's almost like loaning money to your family or friends where you shouldn't. You're hoping to get something back, but you may not. Yeah, you need to You need to ask yourself, like, can I make this pledge if this campaign is successful? Is it okay if this money never comes back to me? Like if I if I make this pledge, and what for whatever reason the actual endeavor fails despite the campaign being successful. Am I okay with taking a loss of this? If I'm not, then maybe I should just wait until it's for public consumers. Yeah, exactly. So in this case with Coolest Cooler, if you saw it and you thought, Wow, that sounds really awesome and I would love to have one of these, and it would be nice to get it for a discounted price, but I'm also aware of the potential pitfalls that can be in the way of production. Then you might think, well, is it is it worth potentially saving a hundred fifteen dollars off the projected retail price or is it better for me to wait, because it could be that instead of saving a D fifteen dollars, I'm throwing away a D five. Yeah, policies are great, but the truth of the matter is, no matter how well intentioned the inventor or the founder of the kicks starter, if they end up going bankrupt due to misfortune, not even poor planning, but just misfortune and end up living under a bridge, you they can't refund you. It's it's just the way it is. Um It's It's also interesting to point out that crowdfunding has largely changed over the last couple of years, where we're seeing more and more established companies using crowdfunding, and they're not using it to raise the money needed to make whatever the thing is. Often the thing has already made. They're using it to kind of judge the reception of whatever that thing is so that they know how much of it to make or whether or not it's going to be a successful product. And so it's it's changing where it was kind of aimed at the individual creator originally, like this was an idea, Like you have an idea for something, you launched this crowdfunding and paign to get the money you need to to actually bring that something into reality, and then you ship off or you start selling or whatever. Now it's companies are using it almost as a marketing tool, and so it's it's dramatically changed how crowdfunding is working in the like I said, in the last couple of years. But we still have these issues and uh, and there are no shortage of crowdfunding campaigns that do come across as kind of scammy, so that's also good. Although to be fair, both Kickstarter and indigo Go and others have gotten a lot better at weeding those out. Although indiego go, you can get your funding amount even if you don't magic Yeah, if you don't. If you said you can, you can choose if you set let's say you set a ten thousand dollar goal, but you only raise five thousand dollars, and it's on indiego Go, you can choose to accept any amount raised even if you haven't met your goal, but it's with a heftier fee taken out. For indie go Go, they take a much larger percentage of the money, so you get you get even less. So if you ask for ten thousand dollars and you end up getting five thousand dollars, you might only end up with four thousand dollars. So it's it's one of those things that it's kind of a slippery slope issue. Um, we have a couple of fun facts and I just read them and now I'm angry. I'm sorry, Jonathan. The first is Ryan Grabber has backed his own kickstarters. Uh, he backed the potato salad kickstarter. That's the one that gets me mad. It is because Jonathan had a kickstarter around the same time and his didn't get funded. But this dark potato salad kickstarts choke. The potato salad was a choke and then it got it got ridiculous. Not just backing it was again like a crazy viral success for a joke potato salad. I mean, the guy did take all the funds and make a major party out of it. All props, all props to that guy and and his cooke and the fact that it brought joy to people. But I am I am unapologetically envious because I had a project. It was near and dear to both of our hearts. It was that I was really hoping I could get funded and uh. It also managed to buck another trend. It funded about halfway to where it needed to be. But it was on Kickstarter. It was make or break. And the reason why I say it broke some trends is that generally speaking, on Kickstarter, if you reach a certain level, a certain percentage of funding, and I want to say it's somewhere around that, of campaigns that hit their gold during the campaign, we'll we'll get all the way to funding by the end. Mine was not one of those. Now I'm really sad about that too. So we'll move on to our last fact and then we'll wrap things up. The original version of the Coolest Cooler had an attached grill, yeah, which turns out probably not the best idea for a product that's mostly made out of plast It was nixed for safe. Yeah. You can't imagine a grill working too well. I mean, you can maybe have like a stand alone little stand and grill that you could put over a fire pit or something, but even then you don't have to have it cool down enough to be able to put it against a plastic cooler. Um. So that wraps up our discussion about coolest cooler. But before we go and wrap everything up for the episode, we also wanted to give an update about a previous topic that we've covered. We did an episode about Toys r Us and we talked about how at the end of that episode, we talked about how UH there was an effort to kind of bring these sort of pop up stores to life and inside of targets and things like that, and the Toys r Us name might not be totally gone. And now we've gotten word for the heads up as of the recording of this podcast, which is on June one, two thousand nineteen, that there is a sincere effort to bring back UH a larger version of Toys r Us, although not at the full size of the older toy stores. Yeah, there will be about the third of the size of the old toy stores, with more experience points, play areas and things like that, and also they're looking at bringing back their e commerce site. They're hoping to be back by the holiday season of two thousand nineteen, so we'll have to see if that happens. Yeah, and if it does, we'll do another update where we'll talk about maybe we'll have to do an episode at some point. It's all follow ups on I was thinking the same thing. Clearly, Canadian would be another one. Thanks for the shout out, clearly, we greatly appreciate it. Awesome. I still haven't received any crates of drinks or anything. You don't listen to him. I totally gave him a BlackBerry, clearly Canadian. That's not a crate. That was one drink and it was from you, not form. Clearly, not that we do this to get stuff from companies. We're just joking. We don't expect nor do we deserve anything from anybody. I hope you enjoyed that episode of Business on the Brink that came out back in two thousand nineteen. Yeah, that's is no longer in production. You can still find all the episodes online, so if you want to take a quick look and see if there are any topics that interest you. We did have a habit of getting a little playful with the titles, so you might have to look at the descriptions to see what the actual episode is about. I apologize for that. We just made our own fun, but yeah, take a listen to those episodes. Let me know if there are any that you would like me to do a tech Stuff episode on. Because we were mostly focused on the business side, not as much on the tech side. If you want me to cover some of these, let me know, and you can do that by using the I Heart Radio app. You can navigate to the tech Stuff podcast and you can use the little microphone icon to leave a voice message that can be up to thirty seconds. You can also let me know whether or not you would like me to use the audio in an episode. I won't unless you tell me, or if you prefer, you can reach out to me on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tex Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. 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