Hi there, everyone im j. J. Ramberg and welcome to your your business. The show dedicated to giving you advice to help your business grow and succeed. His team calls him the worlds least important ceo. But do not let that label fool you. Ben kauffman is disrupting not only how the world invents new products but also the way you cultivate an innovative culture that fits the companys name, quirky. Its thursday night in new york city. And ben kauffman the dynamic 28yearold founder and ceo of quirky, has invited me to be a panelist judging new product ideas as part of the companys weekly ritual. Youre working quirky product evaluation. Special guest panelist tonight is j. J. Ramberg. You remember j. J. Ramberg . Quirky describes itself as a company that makes invention acceptable. Every week the employees sift through thousands of product ideas submitted by the companys community. They then select the best ones to bring to eval to see if a new concept has merit. If it makes it to eval the idea goes to the quirky community for a healthy debate and a vote. The evening, fuelled by pizza and beer is fun, fast and more than a little irreverent. J. J. What do you say . It comes down to price. I think theres a market for having cakes that look like this right . All these people who read Martha Stewart and are into crafting but cannot get it themselves. They would buy this but at the right price. Once a product is given the green light at eval, quirkys industrial designers figure out the viability of making the product, create a prototype, and then bring the concept back to the community who help finetune the idea. Youll notice on every quirky product the photo of the inventor and the number of people that help that inventor is on the back of the box. What do you mean number of people that helped them . People who helped figure the colors, how much weight it would need to hold. From your community . Yeah all these different people are making different contributions which make the product better. When one unit of this is a different target bed, bath and beyond and home depot, when one unit of this sells, all in this case 559 people get paid. Based upon the impact they had on the successful product. Wow. Share the royalty with the community. Kauffman may make it sound easy but believe me its not. The culture at quirky is intense. Focused and competitive. Starting with kauffman himself, who, at the time of our chat hadnt slept in three days. Are you demanding of your employees . Yes. In what way . Probably all of them. I mean i expect that stuff happens quickly. Speed is a big part of quirky. We say that quirky time is our weapon. We are faster than any company in the world. In order to do that, you need to work hard, and break down barriers every day. The breakneck pace has ideas being brought to market with unbelievably short turnaround times. Their record just 29 days from Idea Submission to store shelves. For a product called plop. What does a week look like with your employees . Everyone goes at a different pace. And then its the pace that works for them. You know its a Creative Business and creative people get turned out typically, and we want to prevent that. There is no doubt that ben expects his staff to work hard. But he doesnt want them to burn out. And so he figured out a way to avoid it with something he calls blackouts. So we actually shut down the business basically the philosophy is that when you take a vacation youre always worried about whats going on back in the office. And so to eliminate that we said how about if everyone in the office takes off time at the exact same moment. I went sky diving. I adopted a mini german shepherd. We shut down the business three weeks a year and tell people to go and relax and learn something new or see their family or whatever it might be. Rachel has been told she practices radical h. R. As the chief people officer at quirky her specialty is Building Companies with an entrepreneurial mindset. We have a very work hard play hard eitheros here at quirky and i think the blackout period is a way for people to recover from our sprint. So its a unique practice. I dont know that many other companies do it. And not Many Companies have annetteos like quirky where they hire fire and live by six values. Getting things done impatience embracing conflict agility, being elfless and looking to the future. The dynamic of the core values is for every yin theres a yank. With impatience you have future. They kind of balance you out. We want you to move now and move quick but we always want you to be thinking about longterm. You have embraced conflict. We want you to fight with everyone at the company but not fight for yourself. And what drives this culture is the fact that everyone is measured by this yardstick. Every day. Not just when review time rolls around. Whats really interesting about quirkys culture is the blueprint was set early and bens been very very clear about whats important here. It really vibrates through the Company Every day. People who are successful here embody those values. Getting things done and being agile. These things are alive here and if people are out of step with those values they dont succeed here. Kauffman preaches a culture of setting the bar high and always hitting it. Its always underpromise, overdeliver, right . We definitely dont do that here so we try to overpromise and overdeliver. The very structure of our business is is tell the world what youre going to do and very quickly after that do it. Most companies its the other way around. Do it and then telle world about it. Were on the hook. When we tell the world were going to ship this by this date. Guess what has to happen . Has to ship by that date. And its that sort of attitude that wrought this nimble, entrepreneurial and Disruptive Company to the attention of ge. A corporate behemoth who needed to reinvigorate their consumer products. We literally built a light bulb for ge in 100 days. Theyve been making light bulbs for close to 100 years. You would think theyre better at it than anyone else. And they are. But sort of the Corporate Structure doesnt allow products to move quickly. We were able to do this whole thing in 100 days and build a light bulb that would have taken them a year. Its a great partnership. When Eileen Fisher started her clothing line in 1948 she had zero sewing experience and four samples in her hand. Now with stores all over the world, her designs are a favorite with people who gravitate towards her simple style and comfortable fabric. We sat down with her during a visit to the companys headquarters in new york city and she talked about the importance of capturing your brands essence online and why you need to diversify. Im a really shy person and sort of by default i became a listener rather than a speaker. Then listening becomes a huge advantage for me. In that i realized that by listening, other people helped me to even see my idea more clearly, or add to the idea. I wait to kind of express my own thoughts until ive heard from most other people. And then i filter what ive heard through my own kind of inner sort of sensibility, and then, then i give my opinion. Whats important about an Internet Business is just that you try to capture the essence of the brand. For us it was so much about feelings. We want to be able to feel the clothes. I think for us its having great photos that you can really see it up close. And, you know, all around. One of my first battles was french terry. Textured cotton knit. When everyone loved it and i became sort of known as the french terry lady. But what happened is i got a delivery of the fabric and the supplier had substituted a yarn. It performed differently. I had to stop the production. So i was getting clothes back from customers, and i really thought i was going to lose the business. I had to diversify. So i started developing the styles in all different fabrics. My whole line just exploded. And then i was seen as not just the french terry lady but somebody who you know did these simple clothes in all kinds of beautiful fabrics. You know to just stop and take a few minutes, and however we do it, i journal, and sit in my purpose chair. And stop and think whats important every day. Its so easy to be distracted. And so just if we stop before the day begins and you know sit down and just take stock of ourselves, and what we care about, and what matters, then were more likely to stay on track. Getting feedback from your target audience is an important step when launching a new product or service. If youre looking for an affordable way to survey opinion panels, check out our website of the week. A Market Research tool that allows you to conduct 30minute online video interviews with the members of its consumer panel. The company has more than 3. 5 Million People in its pool so you can target people based on criteria and age and income. Whether you are just Getting Started or you are already a seasoned tweeter you should be focused on building an engaged audience. Here now are five ways you could tap into your followers behavioral pattern to determine what resonates with them on twitter, courtesy of entrepreneur. Com. One get inspired by influencers. Use a Media Monitoring tool like mention to identify people who are leaders in your industry and see what content is getting the most shares. Two be personal while being professional. Sharing your personal hobbies and interests will attract likeminded followers. Your switer biois a great place to test this out. Three, track unfollows. Use fools like unfollowstat. Com. Four, find topics that engage the most. Monitor the effectiveness of your tweets so you can make sure your twitter activity is as productive as possible. Five, Pay Attention to your audiences activities. What, when and where theyre saying things is extremely important to discovering what hashtags and other key terms your potential community is using and who is leading these conversations. We talked about crowd funding a whole bunch on this show and it is important to remember that there are different kinds of crowd funding. There are Companies Like indy go go and kick starter which allow you to donate to somebodys venture and then in return you get some kind of prize. And that should not be confused with equity crowd funding. Thats where investors receive equity for their investment in your company. Vincent bradley is here to talk about how this works and who can invest. Hes a serial entrepreneur with a diverse background in business and product development, and he is the ceo and cofounder of splash funders a no cost Equity Funding platform open for Small Businesses and tech entrepreneurs. So great to see you, vincent. Thank you for having me. I think this is interesting because theres been so much focus on equity crowd funding because of the jobs act. Which said that eventually anyone can invest in a company for equity. Were not there yet. Yeah were not there yet. Congress actually excuse me the s. E. C. Just came a little bit further on that. Right now flash funders and everyone else in the Equity Funding space is allowing credited investors to purchase direct equity or equity through ftds which is a complex method. Must be a credited investor now to invest. Lets say im starting this amazing company, right, and i have some people who are interested, but im also looking for other funders. How does that work . How do i work with an equity crowd funding platform . So edits core flash funders is a Technology Company that partnered with a broker dealer and Securities Law firm. We provide entrepreneurs the tools to raise capital efficiently. Ar they have their own money, their own investors, their own family and friends that want to invest in a company we will allow them to do it at no cost very efficiently and because of our marketplace that we built around our utility platform investors from around the world can come in and access deals, as well. Weve already had investment coming in from montana, from wyoming, from israel from constituent, from switzerland, from australia. You know but its interesting though because, because a lot of times when people hear crowd funding they think its this panacea, i put my company up there and its amazing all of these strangers are going to see what im doing and want to give me money. When in reality, what crowd funding, what these sites like yours do right now is they provide a tool to make it happen efficiently. You still have to go out and find your funders and pitch your business. Its an empowerment tool but the first thing i tell entrepreneurs is were not going to change the psychology of raising a check. You need to go out there and you need to hustle. I consider myself a hustler. Im in a position that im in today, i started several companies, because they hit the streets, i meet with people and i make relationships. Thats how you raise capital. You need to get out, you need to hustle. Youve seen with kick starter the people that are successful, the crowd funding sites, they put a ton of prep work before they launch their campaign. So raising equity capital, getting someone to write you a 25, 50 100,000 dollar check requires even more work. But what Companies Like your company and others in your space do is they make it easy right . So you can put i can put my whole pitch online so that people can easily access it and then the back end of the funding is easier yeah yeah absolutely. An investor can come on and he can discover a deal and he can diligence the company on the platform via his pitch, via the data room where we have all of the documents. You can reach out to the company, engage in the conversation, and what were seeing is those conversations will start on a platform and then theyll be taken offline. Right. And if he decides to invest he can invest in the company in under 15 minutes. That basically means hes going through banking compliance, hes going through accreditation, hes signing his documents on the platform. Hes linking a bank account. Transferring money. This is all stuff that used to be done by a Securities Lawyer and by a paralegal that would cost 250 an hour for a good paralegal, and 500 an hour for a Securities Lawyer and were doing it at pay fraction of the cost. Right. Youre making the whole process more efficient. I know if theres so much regulation around what you do and you had to spend a lot of money and a lot of time in order to launch your company, so congratulations. Yeah thank you. Yes. Its not a lot of fun sometimes, and its definitely very important to do it right. We consider flash funders creating a industry standard. Thanks so much for coming on and talking to us about it. Thank you for having me j. J. Its been awesome. Still to come the Small Business question people keep asking. How do you monetize social media . And we know bill murray likes them. But will our panel . Our elevator pitcher shows us his feathered bow ties. American express for travel and entertainment worldwide. Just show them this the American Express card. Dont leave home without it and someday, i may even use it on the moon. Its a marvelous thing oh haha so you can replace plane tickets, travelers cheques, a lost card. Really . That worked . American express timeless safety and security are now available on apple pay. The next evolution of membership is here. I redesigned my website recently and it is so hard to compete with all the big retailers and all the big online Beautiful Stores out there. So instead of hiring an incredibly expensive photographer, which i couldnt afford, and going and hiring a big studio which i also couldnt afford, my friend recommended that i go to the corner kiddie photo shop in the mall with my model and shoot all the photos for my redesign and i think it was a brilliant idea i saved a ton of money. The site looks amazing. This weeks your biz selfie comes to us from the owners at healing trail wellness in connecticut. Looks like a pretty good place for a massage. Now we would love to see your selfie so send us one of you and your business to your business msnbc. Com. Or tweet it to us msnbc your biz. Please do not forget to hashtag it yourbizselfie. Todays elevator pitcher has gotten the attention of some big hollywood stars. But does that mean that hes hit upon a fleeting trend or that hes developing a strong business . Lets see what our panel thinks . Tania yuki is the founder and ceo of social content analytics company, and jill sherman is cofounder of modalyst enables brands to get their products into e commerce and specialty shops. Hi my name is jeff plotner and im a cosigner of brackish. Were a high end mens accessory line specializing in bow ties hand crafted with natural feathers. The idea started eight years ago when my cofounder and good friend came up with the turkey ties for his wedding. Theyre a huge hit, and the two of us coming to the 5 1 2 years later in 2012 and forming brackish. Since then weve grown to have over 20 employees and have over 100 retailers all around the world. Since then weve gained significant press coverage and celebrities such as bill Murray Jack Nicholson and ringo starr have been seen with our ties. We also have a strong mix of sales combined with ecommerce retailers, and trade shows, and were seeking a retailers and trade shows. Were seeking a 300,000 investment in order to keep up with demand and fill orders we would like to upgrade our Production Facility and expand production. Jeff, i have to say, these products are beautiful. Congratulations on all of your success. Thank you. Two scores today. The first one on the lefthand side score the product from 1 to 10. The second one, score the pitch from 1 to 10. You guys have done some really amazing work. 20 employees so far. How many retailers . Over 100. Awesome. Thank you. I will start with you, jill. You have a lot of knowledge about the fashion world. Start with the product . The product a 10. The pitch 59. I would love to hear more about the market opportunity, how big it is. The red carpet weddings perhaps is where else youre hitting up. Tanya . Im giving the product an 8. It looks really cool. I see the appeal. Its not for me personally, but