1692 – The Ultimate Platform for Creating New Consumer Products with Gembah’s Henrik Johansson

0:28Hey there, thoughtful listener. million in revenue. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. You can even chat with me live and I'll see and reply to your messages. Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We'd love to have you.

0:58with us right now is the co-founder and ceo of gemba it is henrik johansson henrik thank you so much for joining us thanks for having me pleasure's all mine yes and and i am excited to have you um we've had the opportunity to kind of work together over the past number of months and so i'm so excited to celebrate you uh to our audience would you mind giving us an overview of what Gemba is. By the way, for our friend that's listening to our conversation, Gemba is G-E-M-B-A-H.com. Please click follow along. Some of this stuff is a little visual, so it's going to be helpful if you kind of see what it is that we're talking about.

1:39But Henrik, I'll let you kind of explain Gemba's impact in the world today. Yeah, I'm sure you and all the listeners are familiar with, the e-commerce is taking over the world, right? And how marketplaces and software like Shopify have changed that landscape and made it basically possible for anyone to start an e-commerce business. So it's super easy to start a business, but it's still, nobody's made it easy to make the products that you actually sell in that business, right? You could argue that Alibaba have made it easy to go find products that already exist, but nobody has made it easy to create new products.

2:17So that was Gemba. Gemba's purpose and reason for being is that we realized that there are so many great ideas out there and people that want to create products, but it's difficult to create new products. So Gemba is a marketplace and a platform for new consumer product creation. So if you have a great idea and you want to turn into a product, Gemba is the place to go to. And so how exactly does that engagement look? Because again, I think you solve some pretty big problems and create great opportunities yes yes so we leverage technology so we're using data-driven insights and ai to to simplify the process and we built a proprietary software platform that basically knows how to create any product so if you come to us with an id of a new product let's say you have an idea of a set of headphones with solar cells on top so you never have to charge them right we will plug that into our engine it will spit out a project plan of you know however many tasks.

3:15There are a hundred tasks. And then we have a network of talent, industrial designers, electric engineers, mechanical engineers, and factories that are experts in different types of products. And then we connect, we put together the perfect team on our platform. And then that team works with our customer to develop that product. Have you ever counted up the number of hours that this could potentially take somebody, like, especially if they're a little newer to this world. I mean, we're talking about ideation. We're talking about intellectual property. We're talking about research, research, research.

3:49I mean, because again, I want to get into, first, I want to talk about the potential time savings. Next, I'll ask you about what I definitely want to talk about is like how this de-risks this whole process for But let's not talk about that next. Let's just talk about time savings right now, potential time savings, which is enormous. Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. And I think you can't talk about the time savings without talking about the risk, too. I mean, part of why we started this business was I experienced and saw firsthand how many companies, particularly small, mid-sized businesses, that fail in a product development journey, right?

4:31And for SMB, that failure can be fatal. No, you don't. And a small business does not have a bunch of extra funds to that they can spend on a design that doesn't lead anywhere. I've seen many times how how an SMB orders containers full of product. They arrive and they're not working properly. And that is probably the end of that business. So, you know, we're never you never write about them in Inc magazine. But, you know, I've seen stats that 80, 90 percent of product journeys fail. So it's a very small percentage to actually go through. Right. And just imagine the almost immeasurable heartache, wasted money, wasted opportunity that has come from that.

5:14So that's really why we started Gamma, because we saw that there's this, on one hand, immense potential. We talk about how we unlock entrepreneurial equity, because there are people everywhere with great ideas, right? But they don't have access. They don't know how to turn those ideas into reality. so that's that's what we have to do and that's that's why we exist uh but to your point time savings is everything too i mean particularly in this today's landscape everything is moving so fast right if you have an idea about a new cool product you've got to bring that to market as quickly as you can because odds are there are dozens or hundreds of other people that are seeing the same things listening the same podcasts you know having the same influences so if you have an idea you've got to act upon it and you've got to try to bring that product to market as fast as you can before anybody else can.

6:03So we see that we can reduce the time and the cost with as much as 50%, sometimes even 70 % through this process. And we recently launched what we call the future product marketplace. So not only can companies come to us with their ideas and we help them make those, they can also come to the Gemba marketplace and look for ideas that have been designed by other designers in our network. So our designers use data-driven insights. So they look at ratings and reviews for existing top-selling products. And we identify what the features are that people like and don't like. We look at five-star reviews, what do they have in common?

6:45One-star reviews, what do they have in common? And then turn it into a set of parameters that we then use our platform to develop new products. So now you can reduce the time to market even more. Let's say you have a pet brand and you don't really know what next products should be. Now you can go to Gemba and find the next top selling pet products and reserve them and become the exclusive seller of those. There's just so much to unpack here. If we're truly, and I know you are, empathic to the typical user journey or to someone who's toying around with an idea. And Henrik, one thing that I want to talk very specifically to, and I alluded to this before, and you started talking about this as well, is as humans, we are going to be wildly imperfect in trying to gauge great business opportunities, certainly execution.

7:42We're going to make a lot of mistakes by default. default. But I think the biggest one is that when we get excited, or say someone gets excited about an idea, we have had the opportunity to work with some, a lot of folks in kind of the intellectual property space and, and creators get excited about their thing. And that's normal. But how, maybe you could talk about that, you know, kind of balancing enthusiasm versus, you know, truly being able to be objective and why that's so critical that you surround yourself with people who can help you maintain that objectivity. Yeah, I think that that's a great observation and question.

8:26And that's why I think sometimes one, I often talk about the four, you know, cardinal mistakes that people make and that can be lethal for a small business. And research is the first one that people often skimp on the research. They don't do enough. And sometimes they don't do any research at all. And it's absolutely essential, like I said, particularly if you have an idea, at the very minimum, you got to look what's out there. What is the competitive landscape look like? And there are powerful tools. If you don't work with Gamba, there are other tools that you can use to see what's trending on Amazon.

9:00How much is this product like this selling? Who are the main competitors? Because the last thing you want to do is to launch a product. and then you realize after the fact, after you made investment that you're going up against Nike or Under Armour or somebody has exactly the same product or very similar, right? Because then odds are you're going to lose. So that's why it's essential to do that research up front to assess not only if consumers are going to want to buy it, if it's a trending product, but also what's the competitive landscape look like? Can you actually manufacture this product for low cost enough so you can make a profit and still sell product, right?

9:39And I think a lot of people miss that and you end up in the end with a container full of products and then you're just barely eking out a profit margin. And that's sad. Yeah. Talk about the part of what you do when it comes to matching with appropriate vendors or manufacturers for that. Because again, And that's an area, I mean, unless you really know what you're doing, wow, have I heard some horror stories on that side of things. Yeah, absolutely. And that's why we have over 600 experts on our platform. So that's not counting the factories. But these are industrial designers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, folks that you're probably not going to find on Upwork or Fiverr.

10:25Right. People don't hire mechanical engineer because often they don't know how to interact with them. Right. They don't know what's their job description. So that's part of what the Gemba platform does. It outlines what type of resources do you need? What tasks are they doing? In which order? What are the deliverables that they need to create in order to create a complete product design? And then we build detailed profiles on them. You know, all industrial designers are not equal. right just because let's say you see somebody oh they made footwear well it's a big difference if they made you know christian labutan high heels for for for ladies or they made rubber boots or you know for the bass pro shop so so there's design sensibilities in there too and that's why we build up very detailed profiles and understand these these experts what's their portfolio what kind of products have they worked with in the past because that's super valuable to an entrepreneur, right?

11:20Let's say you wanted to create the next sustainable running shoe. Well, imagine how valuable it would be for you to work with somebody who did that at Allbirds or Nike that created their sustainable running shoe. The learning curve just is dramatically reduced and you can get so much value out of that expert. I also want to point out that you, as of when we're recording this recently, or are in the process of launching your podcast It's called Innovator Insights from Idea to Impact. So to our friend that's listening to our conversation right now, go search your favorite podcast directory. Go search for this podcast.

11:58It's, again, called Innovator Insights from Idea to Impact. Henry, can you maybe share a little bit about who you talk with and who should be subscribing and listening to that podcast? Yeah, I mean, I think it's valuable and exciting to anyone. And I think that the success of Shark Tank shows that there's a lot of people, even if they're not entrepreneurs, that are really interested in the entrepreneurial journey. But I think first and foremost, I'm interviewing other entrepreneurs that have been successful going through product development. And I'm talking about physical product, consumer products primarily, because there's a lot we can learn from folks like that.

12:38And I'd like to ask them to be very transparent and talk about the challenges, because I think we learn as much or more from other people's mistakes. So we don't have to make them ourselves. Right. So we always engage in conversation about how did they come up with the idea originally? How did they validate that idea? What was the journey they went through? And typically it's, you know, a lot of failure on the way to success or a lot of learnings. And I think that anybody else that's thinking about going, you know, becoming a product entrepreneur or is already a product entrepreneur can greatly benefit from that podcast, from Idea to Innovation or from Idea to Impact.

13:19You know, Henrik, we didn't talk about your marketplace. And I just, I don't know if folks understand what a cool opportunity that you've created. In other words, you've already, as I understand it, right, you've already come up with products. They've already been validated a little bit. it really just needs someone to drive it, right? So you get in the driver's seat, follow the system, follow the process. Do you mind just sharing just a bit more about this? Am I getting that correct? Absolutely. And it is. It's the first of its kind. It's the first in the world. You know, where if you ask 100 entrepreneurs, where do you go to find products overseas, existing products?

13:57You know, probably 99 will say Alibaba. If you ask the same 100 entrepreneurs, where do you go to create new things? probably get 99 different answers because until Gemba was launched, there wasn't a place to go. And you're absolutely right. So if you think of the four steps you go through in a typical product development journey, the research, design, sourcing, and then manufacturing, what we've done in the marketplace is they could take in the first three steps, the research, the design, and the sourcing and collapse them into one. So we leveraged those data insights to design the products and then find factories to price them out.

14:32So now suddenly you've collapsed something that may take 6, 9, 12 months and cost someone$25 ,000,$50 ,000. You can now find on the Gamba marketplace and go through that. You still have to order samples and place purchase orders, of course, but we've drastically compressed the first three steps and reduced the risk and the cost and the time it takes to go through those steps. Yeah, your website, Gemba.com, someone's been listening to our conversation. Maybe they've, you know, months down the road, they've kind of doing some research on Gemba and now they've heard our chat. Where do they go from here?

15:09If they'd love to take a look at the marketplace, if they'd love to learn next steps, maybe learn more about what, you know, engagement and working with you looks like. Yeah, I mean, there's a few different ways. Like you said, go to Gemba.com, G-E-M-B-A-H.com. And there are basically two ways to engage. One, you can go straight to the marketplace that we just discussed and see if you can, if you find a product that speaks to you that you would want to sell and you think it fits your brand, then you can just go ahead and reserve it. For a small fee of$500, you can reserve that product, become the exclusive seller, and we connect you directly with the factory and you can start working on it.

15:47That's crazy. If you can't find what you're looking for, or if you have like an idea that, you know, like a crazy new real innovation, right, that's not there, then you just fill out a form, a short form, explain what you're doing, and we'll connect you with an expert on the Gemba site to help figure out what that product journey could look like, right? And, you know, within 24 hours, you can get a quote, and then you can choose if you want to move forward with Gemba or not. Yeah. And by the way, to our listener, if I sound like I listen, I'm normally very supportive of our guest. If I sound like I've been fanboying a little bit, it's only because I do have a little bit more familiarity with what Gemba does.

16:26And I am a huge advocate and fan. And so Henrik Johansson, again, co-founder, CEO, your website, gemba.com, your new podcast, by the way, Innovator Insights from Idea to Impact. So to our friend who's already listening to this podcast, just go search for that right now. Henrik, it's been great having you. Thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure. Thanks, Josh. Always great talking to you. Have a great day.

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