Tackling the World's Biggest Problems, Such as Cleaning the Worlds Air with Michael Feldstein

0:01Light that, Sparkfire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. Brought to you by the HubSpot. podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Science of Scaling. Today, we'll be tackling the world's biggest problems, such as cleaning the world's air. To drop these value bombs, I brought Michael Feldstein into EO Fire Studios. Mike is the founder of Jasper and draws from extensive hands-on experience in cleaning toxic disaster sites to develop innovative, high-performance, and stylish air purifiers for the direct-to-consumer markets. And today, Fire Nation, we'll talk about going deep into a niche.

0:37We'll talk about unique marketing strategies, and we'll talk about challenging the norms and so much more, Fire Nation. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Michael and our sponsors. Marketing Made Simple, hosted by my friend, Dr. JJ Peterson, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Marketing Made Simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy and, more importantly, make it work. A recent episode on whether vulnerability is a superpower and business is a must listen. Listen to Marketing Made Simple wherever you get your podcasts.

1:10Ever thought about giving a TEDx talk? It's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world. And four-time TEDx speaker Taylor Conroy from Thought Leader can help you get there. Visit thought-leader.com slash fire to join Taylor's free training where he teaches you how to land a TEDx talk and spread your message to millions. Mike say what's up to fire nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with first of all what up fire nation and what up john thanks for having me man i believe that somebody should really just do the thing that excites them the most and when you are young like if you can use the ages of 18 to even 15 to 25 to like try to hit home runs, the players that hit the most home runs also strike out the most.

2:03So when you have the least to lose, swing as big as you possibly can. Whereas the contrarian belief is like, whether it's get the university degree or get the stable income going to start the career, you can do all that stuff later. But I think earlier in an entrepreneurial career, venture journey, whatever you may call it, swing big and do something that's very exciting and very scary because you've got nothing to lose. See, I love that Fire Nation because so many people that are listening right now have a very short distance to fall. You're just going to fall down a couple steps. And guess what?

2:37That doesn't really hurt. But there are people that are listening that may have like 40 stories to fall. And then, yeah, I get it. You can be a little more risk averse. But for a lot of people starting out, hey, swing for those fences. You have very little to lose if you fail. And in fact, you have a lot to gain and learn because that's where we learn most of our life lessons is from failure. And we're tackling the world's biggest problems today, Fire Nation, such as cleaning the world's air. So I talk often, Mike, about going deep into a niche. I mean, the riches are in the niches. And you personally decided to jump into the niche of air purification.

3:14Tell us the story of why and how. So it didn't start from some environmental passion or desire to, like I did, if you told me 12 years ago I was going to become the air guy, I would have been shocked. I would have thought it's just as likely I would become an astronaut. It started like opportunistic. You know, I was always kind of an entrepreneur kid, whether that was importing clothing from China in high school or fixing people's cell phones. There was always an entrepreneurial side hustle in me. And when I dropped out of school after my first year of university, I started an online marketing business.

3:53And I only ran it for a year. It was pretty good. Got up to about 50K MRR pretty quickly with no profit. But that basically was my university experience. And I heard the term mold is gold. Honestly, I heard the term mold is gold. And I had friends that were working for mold restoration companies. And I decided instead of doing marketing for other people's companies, let me, I'm like, they're making all the money. Let me just use my marketing skills to start my own home services businesses. So it started with everything roofing and mold and plumbing and electrical. I was generating leads and taking a little piece.

4:37And then I realized that all the money was the number one place to earn the money was by actually selling. The guy who gets the job gets the biggest check, not the one who does the job. So I went from marketing to mold. And then there was a huge flood in Calgary, the biggest flood in Canadian history. And we went for it. I basically saw that this huge flood, I heard on the news insurance companies were prepared to spend$2 billion cleaning up this flood and kind of just flew out there, went for it, figured it out, deeply immersed myself in the flood business. But really, that flood kind of led to fire because the same companies that clean up mold, flood fire.

5:23It's all sort of the same restoration, hazardous cleanup stuff. So I kind of went from marketing to restoration. And then where it all happened was 2016, the biggest fire in Canadian history, Fort McMurray wildfire. And we cleaned up. So went from cleaning up smoke damaged homes. And then I realized these big, large industrial air cleaning machines that looked like subwoofers or photocopiers is what we were using. And I looked at Best Buy and Home Depot and these machines were like, the analogy I like to use is little air purifiers were kind of like trying to heat a bathtub with a kettle. And I kind of saw that there was like, you know, almost like golf carts and pickup trucks and there was no SUV in the market.

6:06And I saw how bad the air was, how sick people were getting from it. And I decided to try to do something more proactive proactive than reactive, which was cleaning the air as opposed to fixing these smoke-damaged homes. So it was very unexpected. Basically, marketing to disaster repairs to cleaning air. One thing that I'm really curious about is that everybody seems to focus on the quality of food and then the quality of water. And I get it because those things are important. I mean, especially water because 80 % of our body is made up of water. But I mean, we can go 40 days without food. We can go three days easily.

6:45I won't say easily, but we can go three days without water, but we really can't even go three minutes without air. But air quality is often overlooked. Why is this and what are you doing about it? So my hypothesis here is that the first thing we do when we're born is take a breath. The last thing we do before we die is take a breath. And I kind of feel like what water is to fish, air is to humans. Like we live in air and the human body is so good at adapting to uncomfortable situations that I believe like, you know, if you're hungry, you go get food. If you're thirsty, you go get water. But literally, hopefully you get your eight hours a night and at night, the only thing keeping you alive is air.

7:31You can be in a coma and still breathe. So I feel like it's so core to our survival and our existence that our body does it without our conscious that it just made us really take it for granted and not even appreciate it. So that's where I think the lack of awareness came in. And then because of that, like if you go into someone's house, you smell the wet dog, you smell the cooking. Within 10 minutes, you don't smell it anymore. So I think it really stems from a lack of awareness. I mean, nobody was talking about water quality 20 years ago. We would just drink whatever, tap water. It's fine. And then, you know, we're learning, we're getting more aware, the health impacts are getting more understood.

8:08So I think the lack of awareness, because it's something that our body does for us, which is pretty amazing, is why we don't pay any attention to it. Fire Nation, a lot to think about here. And again, be thinking about your niche, your passion, like what excites you or, you know, what are you moving towards? Again, this wasn't like this was a passion from Michael the day that he was born, but look at what he's created now. And we have a lot to talk about around these topics when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Starting your year off strong and accomplishing goals like increasing revenue and faster growth starts with the right selling tools.

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9:56Thought Leader is not affiliated with TED or TEDx, but they're able to get these results because their founder, Taylor Conroy, is a four-time TEDx speaker himself and past EO Fire guest. You might be thinking a TEDx Talk sounds great, but where do you start? Taylor has put together a free training that's going to teach you how to land a TEDx Talk in as little as 90 days. Join Taylor to learn exactly what TEDx organizers are looking for in their speakers, how to write a talk that goes viral once it goes online and more, visit thought-leader.com slash fire. Join Taylor for this free training and get your message out of your head, out of your heart, and out into the world where it belongs.

10:35That's thought-leader.com slash fire. Now, Michael, most people's marketing strategies, they just blend in with everybody else. It's like everybody's doing the exact same thing and nobody really stands out. But you have some unique marketing strategies that have worked. Tell us more. Sometimes it's a right place, right time situation, right? Like, so I started to create Jasper and to respond to wildfire smoke, which is the most harmful, toxic air quality problem you can find, especially when you're not just talking about trees burning down. But when there's a wildfire, often thousands of homes and cars are burning down too.

11:13So it's not, It's really a toxic soup. So it's like some of the worst air possible is from these big wildfires that destroy cities. So I developed Jasper to handle that level of smoke and that level of pollutants and toxins. And I realized because I went to a customer's house back when I was doing fire restoration and they unplugged their air cleaning unit. Their air was toxic. The house was filled with smoke and they unplugged it because it was loud and ugly. And I'm like, oh man, people care about their health, but not that much. The noise pollution can also be a big problem for people. So I wanted to create something that was pretty like a Dyson, quiet like a Tesla, but powerful like those industrial scrubbers that we were using for mold remediation.

11:58So because the goal was to make something for fire, but that looks beautiful, we ended up launching in May of 2020 when a friend of mine named Jason said, Mike, you have to launch today. We were planning on launching summer 2020. He's like, no, no, no, you have to launch today. They just mandated that every single dentist in Ontario needs an air purifier in every room to open their doors. And if they don't have an air purifier, it's about two hours between patients. And the more powerful the air purifier, the cubic feet per minute, the less time between patients. So if they had like a little Dyson air purifier, it would be an hour between patients.

12:34If they had a Jasper, it would be eight minutes between patients. So we were actually not a health product to them. We were a business. We were a need, not a want. And it would pay for itself in two days for a dentist. So because we launched in COVID, we ended up being a$1 ,000 product and not an$800 or$900 product because our shipping and the costs were so high and all the medical competitors were like$2 ,000,$3 ,000,$4 ,000,$5 ,000. So we launched in a moment of chaos when our clients were dentists and doctors in schools and we were in need, not a want. and then what happened is after a few months like the dentist would rave about the jasper to their patients not because they cared about the jasper but because it showed that their investment in the hygiene and why it's safe to come back to the dentist so we became the star of the show to like show their patients and staff how healthy and clean their office was and this was a big deal especially for staff staff did not want to go back to work and so you have the hygienist raving about the Jasper to the patients and then the patient's like whoa like my kid has asthma or severe allergies like do they sell these things for the home so we went because we were kind of like born in COVID has this like medical need for businesses it kind of put us into a different category so our first thousand customers were doctors and dentists which it would be very difficult to enter the um it would be almost impossible to kind of like enter has a medical air purifier but being born and COVID kind of set us up in a different light.

14:09So we went from, yeah, designed for fires, were completely for medical, and then families kept buying it. And I'm like, when a dentist would buy it, if you would see a review would be like, our patients and staff feel safe. When you read it, then homeowners started to buy it. And you would read like, my kid went from having five asthma attacks a week to one, or my nose doesn't run anymore at night. So I did not think that we were creating an air purifier for like general well being in people's homes, which accidentally made us over-engineer the product. So we're kind of approaching it from a top-down, like this thing should have industrial power but look great, as opposed to being a small, cute, stylish thing that should also work.

14:48Coming from the wildfire restoration background made us accidentally engineer the perfect product for the modern family. Well, the next thing I want to talk about around this product is that a lot of people who sell products and even services too, they're just focused on cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. Like, can I position myself cheaper than the next product? And here's the problem, Fire Nation, with the race to the bottom. You just might win. And you don't want to win that race because you price yourself out, your profit's gone. You took the opposite approach and you set a high price point for Jasper.

15:21Tell us your thoughts and philosophy around that and how did it work out? That's a really great point. I remember you saying that with your blue blocker episode with handyman. You said that exact quote and that was the first time I heard it in that way and it really, really resonated with me. So I own 100 % of Jasper and I find that a high price, which wasn't originally the plan when we started at all, but the beautiful thing about a high price when you're launching a company, whether it's a service or a product, is it puts the guardrails on your growth. So it allows you to like your early adopters are always going to be willing to pay more than your mass market.

16:03So by having a higher price, it gives you margin. And people use, we talk about profit margin, but it's also margin for error. Like if you crash a golf, if you crash a Ferrari into a wall, you go up in flames. If you crash a golf cart into the wall, you back up and you keep driving. And it was very important to me. I'm like, we're going to be crashing. This is a startup. Let's crash a golf cart. So the high price allows you to attract the best, highest quality early clients. It also allows you to have margin for error, to make mistakes, whether it's shipping or defective units, whatever it is that allows you to surprise and delight and make things right.

16:42And I always used to think that when you buy a product, you're paying for the product, but you're not. Anybody can order stuff directly from China. Everybody knows that. But what you're paying for is that person to provide support for that product. And a higher price can mean incredibly talented service reps, sales reps, lifetime warranties. You can just really treat people amazing when you have a margin for it. But I find when people are starting, they start with a low price to get the early customers. But everybody's happy when you lower your price. It's harder to raise your price than to lower your price.

17:14So by starting high, it just gives you the ability to hire and make mistakes and not go too fast and learn at an organic pace. So I'm a big fan, just like what Tesla did. Start with the supercar, then the S, then the three. Starting with the high-tier offer and working your way down, I think, is just a really resilient way to start a company. And Fire Nation, sometimes there's just going to be people who say, give me the best. I want the best. And of course, a lot of people think rightfully and wrongfully. sometimes they're right, sometimes they're wrong, they think the highest price is the best.

17:47And they're just going to go for that. I've done that with products and services before. So think about it. So Michael, let's end with a bang. Give us the lowdown about how you are challenging the norms of the air purification industry. You know, right now, if you look at us from the outside, you would see Jasper has a portable air purifier company. We're not. We're an HVAC company. So I wanted to kind of, I view this stage of the company has Basecamp One or the Dojo. So you're going to see us go from portable air purification to in the next five years developing entire HVAC systems. Because furnaces in about 30 years haven't been innovated.

18:30If you look at most HVAC companies, you'll see they're in the$6 to$150 billion range. and they kind of have a little, it's kind of an old boys club. And it's like, if none of us innovate, none of us have to innovate. And I could never just start a furnace company. It would be way too big of an undertaking. So I'm like, if you can get the trust of the, of the medical community and the biohackers and the health people, then kind of general homeowners. So I have a, I love, I love that quote. You can underestimate everybody overestimates what they can do in one year and underestimate what they do in 10.

19:05Since having daughters a couple of years ago, I started to think in decades more than years. So I'm trying to start a company that builds HVAC systems that doesn't just heat and cool your air, but handles your humidity and your air quality all like the, like your HVAC system is the lungs of your home. And it's often the most, it's the most expensive thing in your home that nobody even knows what brand they have. And it's completely neglected, even though it gives you the air that you breathe. So I thought starting with a single SKU, one color, one SKU, one product, simple business, block and tackle, and then we'll get fancier later on.

19:43But basically all we focused on is making the best possible product that actually changes people's lives so we could give incredible guarantees and big, bold offers. And that's what we're doing, one product at a time. In one sentence, Michael, what is the key takeaway that you want Fire Nation to get from our chat today? Air awareness. If you have high quality air, you're going to sleep better. You're going to breathe better. You can live better. Anything that you currently believe about high quality water, high quality food, or anything else like that, you breathe three liters of water. You eat two liters of water, typically, two pounds of food in a day, and you breathe 17 ,000 liters of air.

20:27and all the bad stuff that you can get from food and especially water, it's all in your air. So just generally like, you know, just take a moment to be grateful for the air that we have and don't take it for granted and know that your air is bad and there's something that you can do about it. And just, yeah, just generally raising air consciousness and being conscious of the water you drink, the air you breathe would be a key takeaway. And if Fire Nation wanted to connect with you, what is your call to action for our listeners? today. I'm going to create a code for your listeners that will be 40 % off for one week from the day of launch, just for your most loyal active listeners.

21:08We'll call it JLD. And that'll be our biggest code ever, 40 % off for the one week after launch only. And then the code will go away. But yeah, Jasper.co is our website at Jasper.co on Instagram, starting to do a lot more podcasts. I think it's really hard to talk about air in a cute little Instagram or a tweet. So I think long form is the only way to do it. And yeah, if you're interested in this topic, I'm doing a lot more health and wellness podcast. So that's where you'll see me diving much deeper into these issues. Well, Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

21:41You've been hanging out with MF and JLD today, so keep up the heat. And for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com. Type Michael into the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up. And Mike, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value, your 40 % JLD discount to Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Have a great day. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Michael for sponsoring today's episode. And Fire Nation, what can 4 ,000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs teach you? How about how to achieve financial freedom and fulfillment?

22:18My first traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success is a revolutionary 17-step roadmap that will lead you to the lifestyle you've been dreaming about. This book took me 10 years of accumulating the genius of the world's top entrepreneurs, and you can get it all in one place when you visit UncommonSuccessBook.com. I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Marketing Made Simple, hosted by my friend, Dr. JJ Peterson, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Marketing Made Simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy and, more importantly, make it work.

22:52A recent episode on whether vulnerability is a superpower in business is a must listen. Listen to Marketing Made Simple wherever you get your podcasts. Ever thought about giving a TEDx talk? It's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world. And four-time TEDx speaker Taylor Conroy from Thought Leader can help you get there. Visit thought-leader.com slash fire to join Taylor's free training where he teaches you how to land a TEDx talk and spread your message to millions.