Product Genius, the Podcast for Inventors, Entrepreneurs, and Startups

Noah McNeely

You can't afford perfect product development, which is why you can't afford to miss this episode of Product Genius.

Steven Julian

Do you want to be a successful inventor entrepreneur?

Noah McNeely

Struggling to get your product from idea to market? Well, you've come to the right place. Welcome to Product Genius, the down-to-earth podcast that explores important topics about inventing and launching new products. Noah McNeely is your trusted guide. With more than 20 years of product launch experience, he's here to help you on your journey to become a product genius. Let's get started. Here's your slightly annoying co-host, Steven Julian. Greetings and salutations, everybody. I am Steven Julian. I am your slightly annoying host. Welcome to another fantastic edition of Product Genius. With me now, as always, is Noah McNeely of Product Quick Start.

Noah, welcome to your own table.

Steven Julian

Well, thank you. I should clarify that we are not always together, just on the show.

Noah McNeely

We are now on this show, hopefully for a while, going to always be together.

Steven Julian

Yeah, but I'm not riding home with you.

Noah McNeely

No, negative. That is a negatory. You are going to go home to your wonderful family, I to mine, Jody to his. Yeah, but for now, at this table for Product Genius, you're not coming on every once in a while. Now you're on every show.

Steven Julian

That's right.

Noah McNeely

So Product Genius brought to you by Opu Probiotics and Product Quick Start. You can catch all of our episodes on productgeniuspod.com. We welcome your questions. More about that at the end of the show. But to start the show, Noah, what's on your mind? What are we talking about today?

Steven Julian

So, you know, I run into a lot of inventors and they, you know, they have limited resources. You know, it's sort of the classic, what I call the classic hero story, or at least that's what I wrote in my notes here. You're kind of, you're the little guy. You're against all odds. You're in a world where there are massive giants out there. You know, the big companies of the world, the Coca-Colas, the Procter & Gamble's, the on and on and on. So how do you get your... Product out there on the market and make some sales and have a business.

And I think that's what we want to talk about today. But how do you do that without? the resources of a big company?

Noah McNeely

And because of those giant companies probably being able, no one can do perfect product development, but they can throw a lot more resources at it than you can. You also had some other thoughts and ideas about, we're really kind of talking about. Guerrilla tactics for inventors and entrepreneurs and you.

Steven Julian

Yeah, not really talking about silverback gorillas or King Kong and really talking more about, you know, revolutionaries.

Noah McNeely

Ah, upstart. I believe your phrase you told me was upstart underdog revolutionary. And then you put another disclaimer on that.

Steven Julian

Which sounds like a great garage band name.

Noah McNeely

Oh, the upstart underdog revolutionaries. Yes. You better trademark that. Grab that domain site so that we can sell it for seven bucks later.

Steven Julian

And I think we should note here that we are not advocating the overthrow of any governments or governmental agencies.

Noah McNeely

We're talking David and Goliath. We're talking, you know, the great American story. And you called it the classic hero story. I think it's become part of the American mythos of the inventor in their garage, not doing a garage band, but kind of coming up with something and then... Taking. over the world. The famous story of Bill Gates starting in his garage. And, you know, there are others that people will tell us what we forgot to say. And as romanticized as that is and as wonderful as that is, what's the reality?

Steven Julian

Well, the reality is that... You know, you have limited resources when you're that garage person. And I think we ought to say that it's not just inventors. I think we're very focused on inventors because that's sort of my whole thing. But I think these ideas apply to all entrepreneurs, really, because you're trying to start something new. You're generally entering a market where... There are a lot of big players. There are a lot of things that are in your way. There are a lot of reasons just to sit down and say, oh, that's too much trouble.

I don't want to do it. I don't have the funds to do it. So what I was kind of planning to talk about today is some of the tools and some of the ways to go about doing it without spending quite as much money as you might have had to a few years ago.

Noah McNeely

I got a great way to kick off the interview, I think. Now, you can tell me I'm wrong because it's your show. I'm just the slightly annoying host.

Steven Julian

Is this the part where you ask me a question I can't answer?

Noah McNeely

No, no, no, no, no. That would be more than slightly annoying. That would be irritating and worthy of being kicked off the show, and I do not want that. So if we're talking about limited resources or almost no resources and, you know, how do we do things? frugally or on the cheap? Can you give me, let's start with the main one. If everybody's listening and we hope they listen to the entire show, but if they have to leave early or they, God forbid, lose interest, then I really am not doing my job.

What is one or two of the main things people can do to develop their products with limited resources?

Steven Julian

See, that is a question I can't really answer. There's not one main thing. This is sort of a lot of little things you can do.

Noah McNeely

You really don't like the seven ways to, you know, do this because last show you. said 367 or whatever it was.

Steven Julian

Well, it would be nice if the world were that something.

Noah McNeely

You're almost like a lawyer. The answer to everything is it depends.

Steven Julian

Of course, it depends. And, you know, it's confidential because I'm your lawyer.

Noah McNeely

I can see why you and Brock are such good friends. Yes.

Steven Julian

Yes. Brock's a good guy. So one thing.

Noah McNeely

Do I need to change the question?

Steven Julian

Well, actually, the one thing, don't spend money, you don't have to. And that's, so that leads in.

Noah McNeely

That is one good answer.

Steven Julian

It's a blanket. It's also a lawyer type answer because it's a blanket. It doesn't say anything. It covers everything.

Noah McNeely

But I can ask a great follow-up to that question. In your experience, and you've got a lot of it, what are some of the main things that people spend way too much money on that they don't have to? We got there. We got there.

Steven Julian

So a lot of times I'll see. Early, early entrepreneurs, they go and spend a ton of money on a logo design or a marketing, branding, whatever, or, you know, this is a whole other show, but patenting the wrong thing. And, you know, that's, we'll bring Brock in for that one, but that's, I see people throw massive amounts of money at that. But really, kind of today, I want to talk about tools you can use for some of these early things, tools slash services slash just different approaches. It's what I think of it as in the last 10 years, we've had this democratization, big word, democratization of professional services.

Noah McNeely

I'm going to give away my age. So all the electric company fans out there, democratization. Duh, duh. Anyway, sorry, I'm going to stop. So what do you mean by democratization?

Steven Julian

So you have, as an entrepreneur, much greater access to Internet professionals and unfortunately also non-professionals that like to think they're professionals. So there's some good, bad, and ugly out there, you know, through the Internet. But you have access to that in a way you wouldn't have had years ago. You know, back before the Internet, you'd have to go to the Yellow Pages or whatever. Local.

Noah McNeely

You'd have to stay. You'd have to hope somebody locally could help you.

Steven Julian

For those of you who are younger. We used to have these books called phone books and. everybody's phone number, every business will be in that. And the yellow pages is where they get the business listening. So anyway, you'd have to go to that book and you have to look down, okay, graphic design, graphic design, graphic design. Okay. And then you call one of those companies and they'd say, you know, and then they would quote you that. And it's probably company. 10, 20, 30, a hundred people work there. So you're going to get a pretty big quote.

But you're like, I just want a simple logo. I can't afford $5,000 to develop my logo yet. Now we'll talk about what down the road later, but you just need to get started. You don't need, let's say you've only got $20,000 or $10,000 to get your thing on the market. You don't need to spend a quarter of that on your logo. So there are, there are ways to do that now that are different. And even back in the early internet stages, it was sort of the same thing. It was just sort of, you would find a website of a company.

You look for graphic design, you find a graphic design company, but it was just sort of the yellow pages in a digital format. And over the last several years, it's, it's changed.

Noah McNeely

Well, I'm going to, I'm going to. Challenge you with something because the tag of the show is you can't afford perfect product development. So you talked about misspending on things like logo and marketing and branding. Maybe you were talking about before they've even got the prototype or the product ready to go to market. But let's talk a little bit about what you do when you are helping someone develop their product. That is an area where they can. They dramatically overspend based on who they work with and what they ask to be done.

Where someone's trying to develop a product and what specifically should they be paying for in getting that product developed? Is it paying for a prototype? Is it paying for the engineering? Is it kind of give us, this is one of those chances for people that have followed the show. You've talked about this at various times. I'm going to stop you and say, let's do the 60-second to five-minute conversation and break down exactly what you do with people. when it comes to developing their product.

Steven Julian

So I have a habit of answering your questions with negative responses about. you asked what to do. I'm going to say what not to do. So what should you not spend money on? I would say you should not, as an inventor or entrepreneur, spend money on the same things, at least at the same scale, that a more established company does. And, you know, those of you who know me or listen before, you know, that's why I built Product. Weekstart is very focused on, you know, smaller clients, you know, inventors, entrepreneurs, small companies, et cetera.

Our business model is a little bit different. Yeah, we do some of the same things. We do really all the same things. We just do them at a scale. That is more appropriate for someone on a very limited budget because, you know, if you're a Fortune 500 company, like some of the companies I worked for earlier in my career, you can afford to hire a team of designers and pay them tens of thousands, maybe more, to go off and learn every possible thing there is to possibly ever know about. every toaster that's ever been built.

Assuming you're designing a toaster, obviously, it wouldn't make sense to learn about toasters if you weren't. But then come back to you with everything about toasters from the history of the beginning of time. And, oh, and here's 300 toaster designs we'd like to present to you. Well, you know, that's great. And if you're, you know, Acme Super Toaster Company, you can afford that. But if you are an entrepreneur, you can't. You need someone that's going to cut through a lot of that and say, you know, 99% of that we don't need to do.

We don't need to do. We don't need to know the science behind a toaster. We know toasters work. We know the heating elements work. Here's four different kinds. We can start there, and we know the new feature you're adding to a toaster is this. Let's focus on that, and here's four really good designs and four really good approaches to making that toaster. Now, I've just taken what could have been a $30,000 design program, and now it's, what, a couple thousand dollars of time and effort to get you there. And now we. can move into the next phase and do the same kind of technique of, yeah, is it the perfect toaster?

No. But maybe it's the perfect toaster to get you to the market with your funds and your resources. And then we can work on Gen 2 down the road after you already have some cash flow.

Noah McNeely

So what you just described is more about what you don't do than what you actually do.

Steven Julian

I'm a contrarian.

Noah McNeely

Okay. Boy, that's a challenging of how to ask a question. I believe one of the other things, and so let me circle back to the democratization. to an extent, I believe you were prepared and wanted to kind of focus on some very specific either companies or tools that people now have access to that they didn't have before in terms of developing their product, again, not perfectly, but in a guerrilla and in a classic hero story, limited resources way. Shall I throw out the name Fiverr and kind of let you riff a little on why you wanted to bring up actual company names other than your own?

Steven Julian

Right. And we're not talking about the rabbit character from the book. Watership Down. It was named Fiverr. I know that's a deep cut. That's one of my favorites.

Noah McNeely

I was going to go with High Fiverr, but I like yours better.

Steven Julian

Yeah. So, yeah, it's a deep cut. It's a good book. If you have kids, read it. But, yeah, so the Internet. People have found ways to use the internet increasingly creatively in the last several years. I think that I'm going to caveat all this with the good, bad, ugly comp. On the internet, and this is kind of where the hero story comes in, you've got the good, you've got the bad, you've got the ugly, and you have to be able to discern those and figure out what you're going to use.

So Fiverr is an example of, it's essentially a service website. It connects. People that do all sorts of things with you, if you want them to. You can go to Fiverr, you can type just about, I want someone to draw me a picture of a skateboard. Okay, you'll find someone that'll pay them $20, they'll draw you a picture of a skateboard. If I ever started with little, little tasks a long time. ago, as I recall, everything kind of did cost $5. It's a little bit different, it's evolved now, so there are different tasks that, you know, people kind of put their own price on that.

You're not going to get someone to proofread a four-chapter book for $5, you know, but you can. You know, you can go and you see what they would charge. You can reach out to them. You can go back and forth. So I've had clients that have used this to find graphic designers to do their logos and they would end up spending, you know, maybe $50 for a good enough logo to get started. Now, let's talk about the bad and the ugly. So the bad is they might get something that's like, oh man, this logo sucks.

Now I really don't like this person. Okay, well, you're $50 in, go hire another person. You may be, you know, for... Maybe you hire five people, you spend a couple hundred dollars doing that. That's still cheaper than going to a traditional brand graphic design firm, which are great, by the way, and spending $5,000 to do that. Again, we're just talking about getting. you started. So the bad is you may get stuff that sucks. The ugly is, and this is where you have to be a little bit careful, and I've seen this happen, you may get a logo back and say, that's great, but they actually just copied that from someone else's logo.

So there are other tools, you know, you have to use the backside of the internet too. That's not the right way to say it, but you have to use the internet in other ways as well. And so you can take that logo they designed, you can drop it into the Google image search and it'll search and say, hey, it'll find similar images. And if you find that exact one, then you're like, you probably don't want to use that logo because that's a copyright violation.

Noah McNeely

Thank you for reminding everybody that as great as we try to make this show and as much as we want people to learn, there is the sophomoric side of us. Say the backside of the internet. I caught it. You caught it. I don't know if the audience caught it, but now everybody has because I brought it up. So that was my opportunity. That's doing what I do. Slightly annoying. So we are, for those of you just joining us, where have you been? Why'd you come halfway to the podcast? Product Genius with Noah McNeely.

And we're talking today about the classic hero story. You can't afford to do perfect product development. Which is why we're kind of talking about guerrilla tactics and we're talking about, and I'm not going to say cutting, I think some people would go, oh, you're talking about cutting corners. No, we're not talking about cutting corners. We're talking about doing effective product development without the budget of the Fortune 500 companies. It can be done and it can still be done well. It just might take a little creativity. It might take a little.

Elbow grease and research on your part to find the way to do it. So I mentioned Fiverr. You kind of talked about that. Given where we're recording this now, one of the huge topics in the news right now is AI. How does AI interact with the product development process and the democratization?

Steven Julian

Well, before we jump off Fiverr entirely.

Noah McNeely

Oh, okay. Hold on. There's more. to talk about with Fiverr.

Steven Julian

Well, I did want to say, so Fiverr, that's a really low-cost way to do it. If you're like, my task is a little more complicated, you can go up a level there. There's a site called Upwork. That's going to connect you more with people that will quote your job specifically and you have more interaction. and maybe that's for a bigger, more complicated thing again.

Noah McNeely

So that's almost like...

Steven Julian

It's finding freelancers.

Noah McNeely

Yeah. So Fiverr is like the garage sale level. That's probably too cheap. There's overlap.

Steven Julian

There's overlap because there are great people doing work on Fiverr. Yeah. Upwork is more of a, it's just really more of a way to connect with freelancers in various types of industries. Again, copywriting or drawing or whatever it is.

Noah McNeely

I am so obsessed with finding the right reference. It's the Dennis Miller in me. I apologize. So Fiverr is more broad. Fiverr welcomes, I guess there's more of. The bad and the ugly as well as the good in Fiverr? Is that fair to say? Or it's just broader?

Steven Julian

I think that's a fair aside.

Noah McNeely

Okay, okay. So Upwork is going to be more. restrictive of who can get in and more specific in exactly what they're quoting that they're going to do rather than just, hey, let me find somebody to do a logo for $10 or $20.

Steven Julian

Yeah, you can still get crap on Upwork.

Noah McNeely

Absolutely. You get crap anywhere.

Steven Julian

And so on Upwork, it's more you think about your kind of interviewing freelancers a little bit more directly and more specifically about your job. Fiverr, a lot of times the people you work with on Fiverr are offshore, you know, sometimes on Upwork as well, which neither good nor bad. It's just what it is. You may not be able to communicate as effectively with everyone in that case, and you may have to give them smaller chunks of tasks.

Noah McNeely

And you might be able to get more of a specific quote. Or even more of a bigger quote on Upwork. So, okay, so we've kind of differentiated and we've gone back and forth and you've satisfied my urge to try to do my reference. Thank you for that. GarageShare was absolutely the wrong one. I apologize to Fiverr. They're a great organization. They are actually a publicly traded company. And. in my separate line of work, which I can't talk about because of compliance, I've actually interacted with them to some extent.

Steven Julian

What's the CIA got to do with that?

Noah McNeely

None of that. That's not what it is. That's not what it is at all. It's being a product tester for Little Caesars.

Steven Julian

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Noah McNeely

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Steven Julian

Try today at GetOpu.com.

Noah McNeely

That's GetOpu.com. So now can we talk about AI? Have we satisfied that enough?

Steven Julian

We can.

Noah McNeely

So how does AI work in this idea of product development, especially when I'm the little guy trying to take on the big companies?

Steven Julian

Yeah, I don't know. We don't know when you'll actually be listening to this podcast. It could be some far-flung future date in which AI will have evolved even more than it is today. But in 2022 and 2023, AI is really becoming very mainstream in a way that everyone can. use it. And these are internet AI tools. Big companies have been using AI for all sorts of stuff for a long time. I'm sure the Pentagon has been using it for a long time for things we can only imagine and probably don't want to know about.

But now AI has gotten to the point where you can just go to the internet, you can use it, some of the tools are free or cheap, and they're not that hard to learn how to use. These are things that some of my clients use to do certain tasks as well. Again, not to get perfect results, but to get really quite good results to get themselves going. And then down the road, they can go out and hire the really expensive branding firm or whatever when you have the money to do that.

So one of those tools is called ChatGPT. There have been all sorts of articles about it. It's a tool where you can go to their website. And right now, at this time of this recording, it's still in sort of a beta test. You can use it for free. Sometimes their server does get overwhelmed. So you go there and it's going to say, oh, we're busy. Come back. They have a little funnier way of saying that. But you go there and you type in whatever you want and it'll give you pretty decent writing back.

But you can do really fun, silly stuff. Like you can say, hey, write me a haiku about Legos. 12 seconds later, you're going to have a decent haiku about Legos.

Noah McNeely

Something tells me you've actually done it. I have. Yeah. That was a very specific example.

Steven Julian

It is a fantastic way to waste time. Ah. So that's one thing, but that's not what we're talking about here.

Noah McNeely

Something to take the crown away from YouTube.

Steven Julian

Yes. Write me a poem about the Smurfs meeting Garfield. Transformers.

Noah McNeely

Yeah, whatever.

Steven Julian

It could be anything. And then you'll get something back. It's kind of interesting. But more productive ways.

Noah McNeely

Yes, for product development. Let's talk about that.

Steven Julian

Yeah, well, not just product development, but for really your business development overall, you know, growing your business development. Let's say you're struggling coming up with a tagline for your product. It's like, you know, it's my product. It makes it easier to. clean your baby's face after a meal. Well, okay, well, that's a really not a great tagline. So you can go to ChatGPT and you can type, rewrite this, and you can say in a more dynamic voice, in a more compelling voice, whatever, put a colon there and then put what that is that you just typed and you'll get something back.

And the great thing about it, if you get something back, you can either take that and you can adjust it to your own needs, or if you don't like it at all, you just hit redo, redo, redo until you get something you love. That's a simple example. You can do much bigger things as well. You can do... I've done this when it's like late in the day, it's like seven o'clock and I'm like, I send this email, I explain all this stuff to this person. I don't have time or energy left to write this in a really good way.

So I'll just put my bullet points in chat GPT and say, write a nice email that covers this. And I just write out my bullet points and then I get back a. nice email that covers that. I may have to edit it a little bit, but then I can send it out and no one would know I was exhausted by the time I wrote that email.

Noah McNeely

That explains the email you sent me.

Steven Julian

Was it about Legos?

Noah McNeely

There was a haiku about Legos in there. Is there a cost to the chat GPT service?

Steven Julian

At the moment, no. I do suspect that at some point you may have a small subscription fee. I doubt it's going to be very much.

Noah McNeely

Who's behind it? Who started chat GPT?

Steven Julian

The giant robot that kills everybody at the end of Terminal.

Noah McNeely

Skynet. Got it.

Steven Julian

Use it for now until we're all slaves to the overall. Yes, exactly.

Noah McNeely

Until the GPT is telling us, here's what I need you to do.

Steven Julian

So I actually, what is the name of the company? The company developed ChatGPT. I can't remember the name offhand.

Noah McNeely

I've stumped Noah McNeely. Woo-hoo! You know, if we asked ChatGPT, it would tell us who was behind it.

Steven Julian

Now, yeah, so ChatGPT. GPT is fabulous. You can use it. Again, let's say you have written something and you're like, well, that's my. sales pitch. It doesn't, it's not very compelling. You can put that in there and say, write this in a more compelling way and it'll do it. It's a fantastic tool.

Noah McNeely

As we're currently recording this, so it's really, and the way it spits all this stuff back out is that it is, it's machine learning. It has all the data. Potentially at its fingertips of what it's, okay, I've got this bullet point and I'm looking at millions of examples of emails that have been written similarly and then I spit back out and then you take it and go from there.

Steven Julian

Right. Even if you don't like anything specifically, it spits back out. I found that it will prompt me to have other ideas. So I didn't think about that. So now I can incorporate that into what I was going to say.

Noah McNeely

And as you're working on limited time and limited budget, potentially, whatever those limited resources are.

Steven Julian

Right.

Noah McNeely

A resource like AI, when used smartly or correctly, and sometimes entertainingly, is that a word, entertainingly, allows you to get those things done.

Steven Julian

So it's a resource that helps you save time.

Noah McNeely

I am now officially scared. that Product Genius is eventually going to be hosted by ChatGPT. So I will be doing everything in my power, and it makes me work harder so that you don't replace me with ChatGPT. I believe there were two. What's another AI tool?

Steven Julian

So the other group of tools is the image generation tools. And there's really three big ones that I know of. There are others. You've got stable diffusion. That may be the best known one. There's one called DAL-E, and I don't know if I pronounced that properly. And then there's one called Mid Journey. And I've actually used this in some of my workflow to generate ideas for some box designs and things like that. And I never quite got something that I could just use straight up, but it prompted ideas for me and that I didn't have to sit down and do a brainstorm with a bunch of people to get to that point, which I really didn't have time for and the client didn't have budget for.

So I was able to do this and get to something that was... That's really quite professional looking and it got the launch now down the. road. Again, they may go back and they may hire a high-powered brand firm for their second product, but they can't afford that right now.

Noah McNeely

So when you say image generation tool, I'm going to play the idiot. It's a picture. Now, what exactly are you talking about? Are there entrepreneurs and inventors listening to this and going, Steven, come on. Seriously, you don't know what an image generation tool is?

Steven Julian

I don't know what people are thinking about this.

Noah McNeely

Well, then why don't you explain it to me and then they won't feel as bad because I will play the court jester.

Steven Julian

So if chat GPT was a good way to waste time, these are fantastic ways to waste time. So you can literally go and type anything and say, I want to see a picture. of a monkey riding a rhinoceros through New York City. And you're going to get some options of pictures of a monkey riding a rhinoceros through New York City. You'll get different options. He'll show you four. One of them may be right spot on to what you want and you can take it. Or it may, you can say, if you don't. like any of them, you just hit redo and you'll get four new ones. and you hit redo and you get four new ones.

Noah McNeely

So I don't know how our listeners' minds work. I immediately thought, what oxymoron could I type in that would break the machine? The first thing that came to mind was type in, show me a picture of an honest politician.

Steven Julian

It'll produce something.

Noah McNeely

It'll produce something. I think that's a good one to try. Yeah, I've just given you something, you know, seven o'clock when you're tired, you're going to put in the next image generator. Okay.

Steven Julian

So on a top level of how it works, where it would get that image from is it's, you know, there's billions of images on the internet. They have descriptions and yeah, there's a lot more to it than this, but kind of think about that's all in a database now. And you type in. You know, monkey, rhino, New York City, it's going to look at pictures of monkeys and rhinos and it's going to sort of combine that together in clever ways. I don't understand that. I have no idea how the algorithm works.

You know, it's way above my computer science pay grade, but it's pretty cool.

Noah McNeely

And clearly in product development and in developing a prototype, things like that. So clearly the way you would use it or the way someone who's an inventor entrepreneur, hey, I'm trying to come up with a product that, you know, is a doorknob that... It helps people who have prosthetics, limbs, or whatever. And they type all that stuff in and it can help create an image.

Steven Julian

It's not going to necessarily, in that case, and I have used it in that sort of sphere a little bit. It's not going to design a product for you. It's not going to engineer a product for you. But it will show you some different shapes of things that you may not have thought of. And it's like, okay, I was thinking of these three shapes as possible, but that one's kind of different. Let me explore that out on my own in the CAD or in the whatever to see if I can develop that further if I like it.

Now, it's also going to show you some that are totally infeasible just because it doesn't know. All. it does is the words you typed in. It doesn't know that that doorknob shape is ergonomically impossible or inappropriate, but it's almost a numbers game. You do that, you roll that 10 times, you might get two or three out of that. It's like, oh, that's worth exploring.

Noah McNeely

Going back at, so the chat GPT generates wording. The image generator generates images, and I'm simplifying, I'm sure. But I'm sitting here thinking, again, going back to what you're bringing up here of how you do a product development with limited resources under the ChatGPT. One of the key things is, does this thing already exist? I can go to ChatGPT, start typing in some of my ideas and the things I'm thinking need to be developed. Then all of a sudden I go, It generates something or generates an image or it shows me something word wise.

And I go, oh, crap, they already have this. And then but I can also go, oh, but let me look into that. Oh, I would change it this way or I would do this to make it a little bit better or improve on it. So even and maybe market research. I mean, there's a lot of things that you could spend thousands of hours and thousands of dollars having other people do. And maybe at least on a. Surface basis, you can kind of get more ideas for your stuff or find out potential obstacles or pitfalls that you could avoid early in the process, which is something you've said on past shows.

Steven Julian

I think potentially you could use it that way to find those. You could ask ChatGPT, does a robot that cleans my baby's face exist? And it would respond in some way based on what it knows of all the writings on the internet. The problem with that, or you need to verify whatever you get from that in situations like that, because the problem is, it's what you would call a garbage in, garbage out problem. So the internet, again, there's good, bad, and ugly on the internet. And all of that's, you know, even though the moderators have tried to do their best to get rid of the ugly, some ugly, to get rid of a lot of the ugly, a lot of that's still in there.

So you may get... Something that's not a. real thing. And it's like, oh, so you can't just go by what that is. Because that may be from a fiction story. It may be from who knows what. But again, it might tell you, hey, you should go check this out. I mean, that, that, and then you check it out and say, oh, that's not really a real thing. And then you'd at least know that it was something you didn't know before.

Noah McNeely

So it took us a half hour, but we got to the fact that Noah McNeely has now admitted on the record on Product Genius, not everything on the internet is true.

Steven Julian

No, it's all true, but some of it's ugly.

Noah McNeely

Oh, okay. It is all true.

Steven Julian

It's all somebody's truth.

Noah McNeely

I thought I got an absolute statement from him. But no, when you're in product development, that was your way of being very nice in saying and disagreeing with me. I see that now. We talked about that in the previous episode.

Steven Julian

I told you I'm a contrarian. Oh, you didn't?

Noah McNeely

Yes, I did. I'm looking for a good argument. That's a deep cut right there. No, you came in here for an. argument anyway. So I think we've come to a really good point in the show. We've kind of talked about how to the classic hero story. I'll kind of circle back to that classic hero story. Sometimes to be the hero, you have to figure out a way to get things done, even if you don't have the resources to do it. Sometimes to be the hero, you have to recognize you head down a path and realize, I think I'm heading the wrong direction.

Or I saw something, you know, I was able to take that next step, even if I didn't have necessarily the time or the resources to get it done exactly the way somebody else with unlimited resources would get it done. How do people keep their hope in the midst of all this with limited resources? Give some advice to that person with the limited resources to keep them going, to help them take that next step when they might think, golly, now Noah's got me. Paying, finding somebody who's willing to give me a logo for five bucks and, I mean, paying a little pay and maybe hope's too strong a word, but give. some encouragement.

They're not alone, right? There are thousands of people utilizing these tools. And if nothing else, the one piece of hope is you're not wasting a ton of money just to get a big Brent and a fancy logo when you still don't have a product.

Steven Julian

Yeah, I think we should be clear, too, that big companies use these tools sometimes, too. You know, I think the encouragement there is. there's probably some way for you to move forward. But you need to make sure that you're moving forward at a pace and in a way that you can afford both with your time and your money and whatever other resources you brought to bear or you can bring to bear. You don't have, most entrepreneurs, I'm assuming that's who we're talking to, you don't have. You can't afford to chase perfection the way a Fortune 500 company can.

They can afford to do a $100,000 nationwide focus group. You can't afford that. You're going to have to find some other way to get that information. Yeah, maybe your information you get doesn't eliminate 99.999% of the false positives or negatives out there, but might eliminate 95% of. them. And that's probably good enough for you to get started with your company. And you've spent one one thousandth of what that Fortune 500 company did to get there.

Noah McNeely

We kind of started talking about democratization. I think the way I would ask something after talking to you here for a few minutes is to say that we live in an age of where instant gratification is now an understatement. Given the history of the last 50 years. And really, I mean, dating back to all the way back to the Industrial Revolution, it's just been this continuous getting more and more to instant gratification. And I think I talked to my. I have three boys. The oldest is 22. The youngest is 17.

And and I remember my parents telling me stories of, you know, oh, I used to have to. we used to have to go to the movies to be entertained or whatever. I'm telling my sons. You know, I had to like sit in front of the TV at eight o'clock so that I could catch the show. And then when I was a teenager, maybe we could record it. Whereas now I go, hey guys, I watched this show or, and they just immediately look it up and go, oh, you mean this show that I can now watch the every episode that you slave to watch, you know, the everything at your fingertips, everything available.

And I say, what's interesting is that has created for the entrepreneur and inventor so many things at their fingertips. But there is still an element of we got to go one step at a time. Your advice that you just gave there is you've got to make another step forward. And at some point that step forward might be to go, okay, this project needs to be shifted or changed or we can't go any farther without wasting a ton of money. But there is the let's just keep moving forward.

Steven Julian

They can't afford to chase perfection. That relates to a money side, but it also relates to the time side. You can get stuck. Like, I want to rework the logo. I want to rework the logo. And you do that over and over and over again. I've seen this happen. And, okay, you just wasted three months reworking a logo. that was really pretty good. when you started. And, okay, now it's blue instead of red. Whoop-dee-doo. Nobody cares. You're the only one that cares about that. So I think some of these tools...

Can help you maybe get unstuck if you're like that. But that also takes some discipline. With you, you've got to have that discipline to say, okay, I can't make this perfect. Number one, it's never going to be perfect. And number two, I can't afford to spend that much more time or money on it because I'm going to miss my, you know, somebody else is going to get to the market with a better product before I do if I keep spending all this time on that.

Noah McNeely

And part of the ways that you help your clients or part of the ways that you help anybody listening to this program who engages with you about their own product development is you can help them maybe put them on the road to using one of these democratized tools. Hey, I can help you to this point and you know what you ought to do? Maybe you should go spend some time with this AI tool or go to Fiverr or. go, that's one of the, you're kind of bringing to this show some of the things you've told your clients in the last year, two years.

Steven Julian

Sure. I mean, you can hire me to, you know, I don't do a lot of it, but you know, I've developed logos in the past, but I'm not the right person. I can do it, but you don't want to pay me to do that. There's cheaper ways to get it done.

Noah McNeely

Absolutely. So. For those people who want to engage with you, they can go to productquickstart.com. There is a fantastic one-page contact form where they can give you kind of the things they're working on, their ideas, what they're doing, and they can set up a one-time consultation with you and see if there's other consultations to be had. If you can't help them, you'll point them in the right direction of where they can be helped, which, by the way, is what we just did on this show. So I have one final question for you.

You can't afford the perfect product development, which is why they needed to listen to this episode of Product Genius. Is there the perfect? screw that can be used for any particular situation?

Steven Julian

Well, they're getting close. You know, screw developers have been making a lot of strides lately. So they've got one now that'll go through metal, plastic, wood. Concrete everything.

Noah McNeely

I can't wait for that episode where we really unpack that topic.

Steven Julian

Yeah, it's going to be riveting.

Noah McNeely

Noah McNeely with Product Quick Start. Thank you very much. And great. You saved your last joke for the end. Well done. I appreciate that. Want to remind everybody that Product Genius is brought to you by Noah's company, productquickstart.com. We are also brought to you by Tiffany Kruman's company, Opu Probiotics. Go to opuprobiotics.com. And you can catch the wonderful flavors they have. It helps with gut health, which is very important to all of us. You just may not know it. Also want to let you know that all of our episodes are available through your favorite podcasting platform.

Also visit our website, productgeniuspod.com, productgeniuspod.com. There is a place on that screen where you can ask us, and by us, we really mean Noah. Maybe questions about podcasting. Jody Smith, our producer, would answer those. Maybe you've got questions about what I. do professionally. that I am allowed to say. I'm an independent financial advisor, but I can't say anything else other than that or compliance will throw me in the clink. But you can ask questions about that. But really, we want to get your product genius questions. We want to get your product development questions.

Noah will answer those. And if he can't, we will bring in a genius on the show to answer those questions. For Noah and for Jody, this is Steven, your Slightly Annoying host, saying we will catch you next time on Product Genius.