How to Create As Seen on TV Products with Bill McAlister

President at Top Dog Direct – Bill McAlister

Bill is a heavy hitter for As Seen On TV Products (he was asked to be on Shark Tank!) and he goes through step by step what makes a good product. AND he offers a chance to pitch him! Don’t miss this one!

Check out TopDogDirect.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript:

Jaime: Have you ever wondered what makes "as seen on TV" products work or not work? You're in luck - today on the show I have Bill McAlister and, in fact, he was one of the people asked to be one of the investors on Shark Tank and he ended up saying "No". He's really good friends with Kevin Harrington. He's been doing this for 27 years and really knows his stuff. We go in-depth into what makes a product work. At the very end he tells you how to submit your idea to him. Stay tuned!

Announcer: Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast - with your host, Jaime Tardy. Real talk and real advice from real millionaires, with a sharp focus on you - the Eventual Millionaire.

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy and I'm excited today to have Bill McAlister on the show. He owns a company called Top Dog Direct but what he's been doing for years and years and years is "as seen on TV" stuff, otherwise known as direct response television. I'm super excited to get into it today because he has so much knowledge in this industry and we usually don't know what goes on with it. So thank you so much for coming on the show today, Bill.

Bill: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Jaime: So, number one, how did you get started in TV and how long ago?

Bill: It's a great story, actually. I was importing products for CVS drug stores up in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, and a person called me out of West Chester, Pennsylvania and they had a small company with three employees and wanted to start importing products, so I flew down and that company was a little, teeny company called QVC.

Jaime: You know, that little, teeny company.

Bill: I was the very first person to ever import a product and then I took the products that I imported and I went on television with them. I was one of the first guest hosts as well. So I would take the products and I would go on QVC with them and that's how I learned what sold on TV - because a lot of the time, in the beginning, a lot of things didn't sell. So you kept throwing things against the wall. Plus I was sourcing it and I was selling it on TV, so I learned the television business. I did it for five years and then started this company.

Jaime: So you took it from the very, very beginning, doing their marketing and figuring out what worked and what didn't work?

Bill: Correct.

Jaime: You must have so much information on this. I'm so excited you're on the show.

Bill: I did it so many times I figured out how to do it right.

Jaime: Sweet! Alright, give us all your knowledge! There was one specific product that you were talking about right before we hopped online together. What's the evolution of a product? I know everybody listening has probably had a $1 million idea - "I should have this product; this would be great," but don't really know what to do with it at this point, so tell me a little bit about what that process looks like.

Bill: I can show you a new product that we're actually getting ready to do. Somebody brought an idea, a concept, and this sounds silly, but this will actually core a banana.

Jaime: A banana?

Bill: A banana. So you have the banana and you core it in the middle and you can fill it full of chocolate, ice cream, caramel, peanut butter. Right now the number one product sold in the United States are bananas - there's 10 billion bananas sold in the United States every year. It's the number one product sold in the United States.

Jaime: Really? Considering that I buy 30 bananas at a time, I agree with you. So what is coring a banana?

Bill: This will actually core a banana. You put the banana in here.

Jaime: Show it to the camera, because I can't really see it.

Bill: You put the banana in here. Then you take this little thing and it will core the banana. You core it, pull the core out, and you have the banana and it's peeled and you can put it in whatever you want. It comes with an applicator so you can put in chocolate, peanut butter, ice cream, whatever you want put in there. If you have little kids, I don't know if you have kids, I have four.

Jaime: I do.

Bill: And little kids love bananas. They love peanut butter and bananas, they love ice cream and bananas - the big thing now is freezing the bananas. This tool costs around $25,000, so we tooled it up and we produced a commercial, that cost about $100,000 altogether, we'll buy the inventory and then we'll put it on TV, channel 8, 20-30 major cable stations, and test it, and if it works, the person who brought me this idea is going to probably make a little over $1 million.

Jaime: So how did the person who had this idea go "Hey, Bill, I've got this idea, I think it's really cool." Is that how it happened?

Bill: A lot of times they'll write their product ideas on a napkin or it's just in their head. Most of the time they don't bring a product down. This is a product that's on the air right now - it's night views, if you have problems at night when you're driving, the glare from lights, especially when it snows, this eliminates the glare at night.

Jaime: How?

Bill: I don't know if you can see it, but there's a UV block that blocks the blue light, which is the light from the lights. It will block that blue light so you won't get any glare from oncoming headlights or anything else. This person brought us this product just in his mind and we came up with a way that it would actually work, conceptually, and it took about a year to get it done but now it's on the air and we'll sell 3-4 million of these this year.

Jaime: That's really interesting. Normally I tell people, when they're starting a business, to validate their business idea. Because there are a lot of ideas and some of them are not very good so trying to figure out what's a good idea versus a bad idea is kind of what you do, but can you give us some tips on what you see as a good idea versus a bad idea in this industry?

Bill: Especially in my business - anything on television has to be demonstrable. Something like this, you can demonstrate. It's working and you can see it happening. Generally it's a problem/solution and that's what this is - you have a problem driving at night, this is the solution for that. It has to be something that's not out there already, and that's the biggest mistake people make is that they don't do their homework. If you don't do your homework, you can go bankrupt - instead of making $1 million you could lose $1 million because a lot of the time these things are already patented so you have to do a little bit of due diligence before you go out there. But if it's demonstrable, it solves a problem and it sells for $10-20 then it will most likely work on television. It sounds easy but it's not.

Jaime: I was going to say it sounds a little too easy. Can you tell me about some flops that you thought would do well and why they didn't work out too well?

Bill: We just tested a product for women. It was an earlobe product. A lot of women wear heavy earrings and they get that stretchy thing with their earlobe. This thing was called Lobe Magic and we just tested it and it completely and totally bombed.

Jaime: Really?

Bill: It bombed.

Jaime: Okay, tell me more. So it passed all the tests that you had?

Bill: It passed the tests, we did the commercial, a lot of women said it was a problem, younger women and girls said they don't wear the heavy earrings because they don't like the fact that they pull - well this eliminates the pull. It just didn't work.

Jaime: Why didn't it work? Do you know? Did you do any research afterwards to find out?

Bill: Probably because it wasn't a big enough problem. We're just coming out of a recession so it's a question of what people want to spend their money on and this wasn't a big enough problem. Yes, it's a problem for a lot of women but it's obviously not a big enough problem.

Jaime: But you go through testing so it's not as though you went full blown, let's try this, and lost a ton of money. I mean you probably did lose quite a bit of money but you didn't lose a ton of money because you did testing and that sort of told you whether or not it was going to take off or not.

Bill: I tested it first with about $20,000 worth of media, it was a complete flop so we moved on, went to the next one.

Jaime: What does a complete flop look like? Did you actually make money on it?

Bill: No, no, no. It cost us about $100,000.

Jaime: Man. That's really good to know. So someone listening probably likes that you had to go through that and not them

Bill: Nobody comes to us and spends any money. The onus is on us. I'm right two times out of three. Every once in a while I'm wrong but I'm right more than I'm wrong but I'm right more than I'm wrong.

Jaime: Because you failed so many times at the beginning you learned a whole bunch of stuff.

Bill: You'd better be right more than you're wrong or you're going to be out of business.

Jaime: Totally.

Bill: That's what's exciting about my business - every day, every hour, every minute, nothing's the same, it's always different. It's always changing. It's an exciting business.

Jaime: What's something that you can give to people, especially if they haven't started their business yet or they've got ideas. What do you suggest to them to a) have more ideas and maybe get more creative with them and b) you should they should do their due diligence to find out if these ideas are already happening - can you help us with that?

Bill: Any business that you're trying to start right now, and I've started six businesses and four have worked and two haven't worked. At the end of the day, you have to have a passion for what you do - that's number one. You've got to go into it knowing that you're not going to make any money for two years and you've got to be financially ready to not make any money for two years. That's the biggest thing I see with failed small businesses - they're not financially prepared to go for two years. And that's if you have a good idea. That's the first thing - be ready, you'd better have that fire in your belly because it's going to be a tough two years. It's got to be something that you love - if you don't love it, that fire's not going to be there and it's going to fail. So be financially ready and you'd better have that fire in your belly, it better be something that you have a passion for.

Jaime: Awesome. Tell me a little bit more about this - because a lot of time people know it's not an overnight success, at least the people that listen to me know that a lot goes into it, but two years is a long time for a product or service that's going to work, so why two years? Why do you think it's two years before you see success?

Bill: It's anything from 12 months to 24 months with something that's going to work. It is what it is. It's going to take you that long to get anything set up, to get your first sale, for example, or whatever your service is, whatever your product is. Then, once you do that, you're going to have to pay for whatever - let's say, in six months, you're finally lucky enough to get a sale in whatever that service is, then you've got to pay for whatever your last six months has been and then you've got to get ready for your next six months. So it takes two years and that's in a good business. It takes two years.

Jaime: I appreciate you saying that, because a lot of the time people don't assume that it still takes a lot of blood, sweat and tears even when it's a really good idea.

Bill: That's when you see the most failed businesses. I'm on a business panel here in Philadelphia and most of the time they just weren't financially prepared for that two year haul.

Jaime: What do you suggest they have, both financially and mindset wise, in order to get through those two years?

Bill: You have to be able to pay your bills, so whatever your bills are - whatever your mortgage is, unless you're lucky enough to not have a mortgage. Whatever your monthly outlay is, you have to be able to cover it. So if you're married and your wife is working, she has to be able to cover it and you have to be able to cut back and be able to pay for two years. That's what it comes down to.

Jaime: Do you recommend people quitting their day job in order to move forward?

Bill: No, never. Never ever. It's something you can do - like people who bring me products continue doing what they're doing. They don't need to start a business to bring products to other people, or services to other people, for that matter. Then you should always try to start a business with income coming in. when I started my first business I had a job and I was doing my first business at night so I kept the money coming in. in that first business I was lucky, it worked. I kept the money coming in and then, after about seven or eight months when it came to a point where it was taking up more time than I had, I had to get rid of my job.

Jaime: That's awesome. So you quit your day job, you did what you wanted to do - was that scary?

Bill: It was scary. We didn't have any kids at the time but we had just bought a house and, yeah, it was scary. She had to go to work full time and without her working I wouldn't have been able to make it.

Jaime: Thankfully we have wonderful spouses that can help us out and are supportive. Awesome. So you've started six businesses, so not only do you help other people with their inventions and all of that fun stuff, you yourself have started a bunch of different businesses too. Can you tell me a little bit about one of those businesses and how you saw the need that was there and can move forward on that?

Bill: The first business I started was an importing company which was the company I went to QVC with. The need was quite simple - I was in another job and I was selling CVS drugs where they wanted these little giveaways - have you ever been to CVS and they'll give you a coffee mug with CVS printed on it? They wanted to do that and they didn't have anyone to do it. So I saw the need and I started that business while I had my other job. I was importing products on the side for CVS and there was a huge need, I think my first order was a million and a half pieces, and then CVS grew as well, they were very small in the beginning and then they grew and within five years I was doing 3-4 million pieces of giveaways - magnetic pen sets and all kinds of different things. Can openers with "CVS Drugs" on them. It was fun, a lot of fun, but it took a lot of time - it took 6-8 months just because I had worked on it for 6-8 months while I had a job, but after about 6-8 months more, when I left my job, the money started to come in.

Jaime: I love this. I love that you're in something and that's where you see the pain points. Like the banana thing, putting peanut butter on a banana, which I've done before and it gets all over the place and it's kind of crazy. So you're in your life and then you see these needs come up that could potentially be a business. So you just evaluated it - how did you know that you were the guy who was going to go ahead and do it?

Bill: I knew I could do it because I was already importing products, doing it for CVS, for another company. But the problem is that it's very detailed when you're writing a letter of credit, I'm not going to get too detailed into the letter of credit business, but it's very detailed and there are not a lot of people who know how to do it. I know how to do it because I was doing it. It's very tedious, especially when you're buying something like a mug. So I saw the need and I went to them and said "What if I started doing this?" and they said "Yeah, sure."

Jaime: Did you always know you were going to be an entrepreneur? Like when you were younger?

Bill: Yeah, I don't have the personality where I could work for anybody. When I was 11 I started a lawn mowing business. I cut about 6-7 lawns in my neighborhood and when I was 12 I also started a ploughing business. So I was doing it at 11, 12, and then I started a painting company when I was in high school and then I started a big painting company in college and put myself through college painting. So I've never, ever worked for anybody, other than that one company, importing. That was it.

Jaime: Why did you end up getting a job at that point, then?

Bill: I had no choice. I graduated college. I played minor league baseball for the Cincinnati Reds and I had gotten cut so I needed money.

Jaime: So the entrepreneur had to go get a job but was always looking for something that was better.

Bill: Yeah.

Jaime: Awesome. Let's go back to the direct response piece because I think people are interested. They walk through Target and they see all of these things that are "as seen on TV". Everyone has ideas all of the time and we write them off. They could be million dollar ideas but we write them off because the process to figure this stuff out seems daunting and we don't necessarily know what it is and there's a lot of scammy stuff online - you look it up and they're like "We'll pay you for your ideas!" and that seems kind of scammy because we don't know who to trust.

Bill: Most of that is scammy. This process is pretty simple. Now, with the internet, all you have to do, when you have an idea, is just type that idea, first off, this sounds really stupid, but put it down in writing, what your idea is, and go to a notary and notarize it. The reason that's important is because now you have your idea and you have a date to your idea. There's a big thing called prior art - you need to have a date for your idea. Then type that idea right into the internet, whatever it is. Let's say a banana corer - everything that's out there that's a banana corer or related to a banana corer will come up. The internet makes it a lot easier now for entrepreneurs and people who have ideas. You can actually do trademark searches, you can do product searches, so the internet is a great tool for people starting their own business now. That process, 30 years ago, probably cost me $6000. That process I just told you, that now I can do in two minutes. So the internet is a great tool - use it, it's simple, and if you have a great idea, a lot of the time, most of these great ideas that you have are already out there. But you never know.

Jaime: How do we know? So you look up "banana corer" before your product came out and maybe there was something that was kind of similar but it's not patented. It's always more vague than it sounds.

Bill: You can do a patent search as well, right online, and that can be very detailed. The number one problem is that a lot of people don't do their due diligence, as I said before. You have to do your due diligence - so if you come up with an idea you have to do a background on that idea. The simple thing is to use the internet to begin with and if nothing comes up then you're going to have to spend a little bit of money and go to a patent and trademark attorney and they'll do a search for probably $250-300 and that will tell you whether or not your product idea is already out there or not.

Jaime: Do you have any recommendations for patent attorneys to do the search for you?

Bill: They're pretty much all the same. I've met a number of them and they're all pretty good at it. You can go to the internet, again, and just search for patent lawyers. There's not a lot of them - I think in Pennsylvania there's just seven. There's not a lot.

Jaime: I actually went through this process way back before Eventual Millionaire, because I had an idea, and I found out that locally, in Maine, you can get free patent research and it's free to actually write your patent. It turned out that there were some things that were similar and I would have had to pay $30-40,000 to go to court to make sure that my patent was better. So that was kind of a pain but it's really interesting to go through a whole process.

Bill: It is a process, yeah.

Jaime: It's a long process too. So let's say they have an idea, they Google it, it doesn't seem like too much is there online about it. Should they be doing non-disclosure agreements before they tell anyone? People get really squirrely and scared about what to say, even when calling a company like you and going "Hey, Bill, I've got this idea but I don't want to tell you yet because it's not patented", and all of that fun stuff.

Bill: I'll give you a typical example - one of my commercials was Strap Perfect, a clip that hid bra straps for women, and that was out there two or three years ago. I did the product search, I did everything that I should have done and put it on televisions. I sold 30 million of these things. Two years later, this person comes out of the woodwork - they own a patent from 1947 that they kept updating and we wound up having to pay them a certain amount of money. You can do all that sort of work but who knows? You can only do what you can do. We showed them all of the work that we had done, we didn't do it maliciously, so we came to a financial agreement. But it is a process, there's no question about it.

Jaime: So trying to figure out whether there's a patent or not is what they should probably do ahead of time, but having a notary is enough?

Bill: A notary is going to give you a date for what they call prior art. But you should always go to an attorney with your idea and have your attorney tell you whether it's a valid idea before you show anyone. Anybody - me or anyone else. You'll then have the attorney basically say "I got the idea, I saw it on this date," so if anyone takes it after that, that's call prior art and they're infringing on what you already have.

Jaime: What if they already have the idea? What if they have a product that's selling kind of well? Is that something that they can take to you or they should try to get direct response?

Bill: If it meets all those other criteria - it's demonstrable, it hits the price point and it fills a need, then yeah. The great thing about our company is that you send it to us and we'll tell you within 24 hours whether we think it's a product that we can do.

Jaime: Really?

Bill: We get hundreds of them a week. I can tell you very quickly, that's one thing from doing this for 25 years, whether it will sell or it won't sell, and I'm right more than I'm wrong. So anyone out there who has a direct response idea can just e-mail us and we'll let them know.

Jaime: So they can just e-mail you every week until they get a good idea?

Bill: People do. The one person that came up with this idea, it was his 30th idea, and this one stuck.

Jaime: Really? So you're not like-Stop e-mailing me, you don't h'ave any good ideas", after the 20th one?

Bill: You never know. As long as they're coming to me having done some due diligence, because due diligence, as you know, takes some time. So do your due diligence first and then go to me or whatever other industry you're looking at, because nothing's worse than just showing up and somebody pulling out the exact same object and they're already making it. I've had that happen to me, where somebody came in, they flew from Arizona, they had this great idea, they showed me over the internet, then flew in, and I just pulled out something that I'd made three years prior to that and it was exactly the same like.

Jaime: Like "It was a good idea - three years ago!"

Bill: Three years ago, exactly.

Jaime: In the case of the night vision thing, he didn't even have the solution. Don't people need to have the solution or just the idea?

Bill: He had done a lot of homework. No one had ever done night sunglasses before and he had a lot of background on it, on exactly what we needed to block the blue ray. I'm not an optical guy, I'm a marketer, so I just went to the best optical people and they told me, literally within seven minutes, that they could do it, they could block it out, "This is what you need to do," so we went ahead and did a joint venture with Bausch and Lomb. But he had done a lot of due diligence, I mean like 10 or 15 pages of documents that he had actually come up with. So he was ready to go, he knew the style, the aviator style, he knew it was the right style, what style wasn't going to work, whether I should do clip-ons for people who have prescription glasses - so a lot of due diligence done before he brought it to me.

Jaime: Okay, and patent searches and all of that fun stuff?

Bill: He did all of that before he brought it to me. But, yeah, you can e-mail me every five minutes with your ideas ? as long as you do your due diligence I will respond within 24 hours.

Jaime: And we will give out your e-mail address at the end so that everyone has that. What would you suggest for people to deal with their failures? Like you said, you've been through failures over and over again, and people who have these ideas, especially if a couple of them haven't worked, it can be disheartening. Do you have any advice for people who have gone through that?

Bill: If I'm the one putting up the money they wouldn't have to worry about it. But it is what it is; it's a numbers game. The more you throw against the wall, the better chance you have of one working. You're not talking about a business, you're talking about a product - that's completely different. Products come and go - I do 8-9 a year, sometimes 10. Let's say 6-7 or them will work but 3-4 won't. It's just a numbers game; it is what it is, so you can't get disheartened. I relate it to baseball - if you're hitting 300 at the end of the day, you're in the Hall of Fame - and that's only 3 out of 10, by the way. That's what this is - it's a number game. You have to understand that most of them are not going to work. In the infomercial industry the average is 1 out of 40, which means 39 out of every 40 don't work. My batting average is 2 out of 3 I get to work but that's just because I've been doing it so long that I have a much better feel than other people. But you can't get discouraged, you have to keep on going to the next one and the next one.

Jaime: So if the night vision guy hadn't sent in his 30th idea you wouldn't have this success?

Bill: That's correct.

Jaime: I was talking to you earlier about Shark Tank. Most entrepreneurs or people who want to be entrepreneurs are really excited about watching this show. They get super excited about the way things go. Tell me your thoughts - say they have a product idea, and everybody just assumes Shark Tank is the way to go but you have this other option. Are there other things out there like this, that are like you?

Bill: There are four other companies like me and I'll tell you a funny story with Shark Tank - so Kevin Harrington was on it the first 3-4 years, very good friend of mine, and he's actually the one who got me started 25 years in this business after I was on QVC and he was on it for 3 years and he didn't find one product. A lot of what you're seeing is some cool products, but taking that product and actually making it and then selling it is not happening out there. This woman, Lori Greiner, who's on QVC, she's actually taking it and putting it on QVC but it's not going further; it's not going to retail. They're taking the most interesting people, not necessarily the most interesting products. I think out of every 20 people that subject they take one of them and out of those, one out of every 50 get to the show. So that's a process.

Jaime: It's a huge process. A friend of a friend of mine went on and actually got funded there but it's a huge, amazing, crazy process that you have to go through.

Bill: Did she take it any further than getting funded?

Jaime: Or you can e-mail Bill!

Bill: She got it funded but is she selling it at retail or anywhere else?

Jaime: It wasn't a product, it was a sushi restaurant that did on-demand sushi. They're doing pretty well with it now, but I just think, in general, it's one of those things where, if you want to go the fame route, I mean Shark Tank has horrible numbers in terms of what they actually give you for funding.

Bill: It's a one-way street with those guys.

Jaime: Unfortunately. But it's great TV and I absolutely love watching it.

Bill: Yeah, I watch it, I think it's great.

Jaime: Do you ever watch that show and think "That's a good one" or "That's not a good one" or do they ever fund one that you think is not good?

Bill: Yeah, especially when Kevin was on I watched it. They asked me to be on it, but you have to post a $1 million bond and you're actually filming for six straight weeks in LA, they don't pay for you to be there. You don't get paid - you actually pay to be on that show; they don't pay anything. I think it's an interesting show and I think more interesting is the fact that they never give the person a fair deal. To me, if you're an entrepreneur, why would you want to do that? They're going to take 80-90% of your business. There's really no need to do that. There isn't. Especially a product-driven thing. It's easy - if you've got a good product, and even if it's not direct response, you can do it a lot cheaper and a lot easier without giving up any money. If we think the product is really cool but it's just not us, we'll tell them how to get to Bed Bath & Beyond and we'll give them the Bed Bath & Beyond phone numbers, we'll give them the e-mails, because I want to help whoever I can - somebody helped me get to where I am and I'm a millionaire many, many, many times over and I want to help people. As long as I think it's a good product and I think it will sell I'll recommend it to Bed Bath & Beyond, I'll call the buyers and say "I think this is cool - take a look at it."

Jaime: That's awesome. I know a lot of the time we assume we have to have some prototype or something like that. Do you suggest people go ahead and put a little bit of their own money up to get a prototype?

Bill: You have to. If you come to us, we'll be able to tell you right away "Yes" or "No".Maybe it's just a mail order item. Many people bring us items and it might just be a mail order type of item. That's fine. There's a catalogue out there called Harriet Carter - have you seen it?

Jaime: Oh yeah, I used to look at it all the time when I was younger.

Bill: A lot of these items are just mail order but people can make millions of dollars just selling mail order, so it will help them get to Harriet Carter, for example. It's kind of a process but if I think it's good for mail order or Bed Bath & Beyond I'm going to recommend that. We know the owners of Harriet Carter - they ship our products out, actually.

Jaime: Nice. Can give me a couple of ideas that worked really, really well for you and a couple of ideas that were really, really bad, whether you went through with them or not? Just so that we can give people a general idea on what's working and what's not working?

Bill: I'll tell you what you would never think would work - a Japanese man by the name of Dr Watanabe brought me a pillow 11 years ago. It was a buckwheat hull pillow from Japan - and the Japanese people, 70% of the population today, only sleep on buckwheat hull pillows. You think that's crazy - it's like cornflakes in a pillow. I did my research and I put the pillow on television, on Home Shopping First, and we have sold 14.5 million pieces since then - and the pillow is incredible. It's absolutely the best pillow in the world, there's no question about it. The pillow went through the roof. On the other side, the product I thought was going to be incredibly good is called Scrub Balls. They're little balls that your put in your washing machine that eliminate the need for anything but a teaspoon of laundry detergent. That's it. So you would save $4-500 a year if you had a family of four, for example, just in laundry detergent. I put it on TV, I put a lot of money into it, Home Shopping put a lot of money into it - the thing sold three pieces. Three.

Jaime: Why?

Bill: I don't know. I don't know. We built this clear washing machine so you could see the balls in there. It actually worked better than anything else out there. We did testing and everything else and all you needed was a teaspoon. People just think more is better with certain things - cleaning, for example. They just didn't buy it. It fit all the needs that I have, it was perfect, I tooled it up, I spent $2-300,000 and we sold three pieces.

Jaime: Ouch. How do you come back from seeming like that?

Bill: You've just got to go on to the next one. It's all you can do. You've got to say "Okay, where did I go wrong?" Well I didn't go wrong, I did everything exactly the way I would have done for anything else, it fit all of the criteria and it just didn't work.

Jaime: Tell me what you think about gut versus logic - because when you start thinking of this pillow that doesn't sound very good whatsoever. Do you go with your gut or do you usually go with your research?

Bill: You have to do both. I looked at this pillow then I went back and said "Why are these people sleeping on it for 300 years?" and they live much longer lives than we do in Asia. The fact of the matter is, to take the pillow as an example, it did three things - it gave you support, it was adjustable and it actually got better as the pillow got older. Buckwheat hull gets stronger - they look like a contact lens but it's a hull. They grab it and make flour out of it, so this is a byproduct of buckwheat and they basically put it in a pillow. They get stronger as they absorb the moisture around your neck at night, because we all lose moisture at night, and it closes and gets stronger as the pillow gets older. People have these pillows for 100, 200 years some of them - they pass them down from generation to generation. So we did the research, I thought there's got to be something to it, and it was a huge hit.

Jaime: Can you patent that? I mean you must be able to.

Bill: No.

Jaime: No? Okay.

Bill: It's been around for 300 years so you can't. But it's the most enjoyable pillow because you wake up every day. The sumo wrestlers use them because they don't move and it gives you support all around your neck - you fall asleep and you wake up in the same position you fell asleep in. you don't toss or turn. It's amazing.

Jaime: Now I want to buy this pillow! My goodness!

Bill: It's called the Superkawa pillow. We've been selling it for 14 years now.

Jaime: We talked before about patenting and how important that is, but if you can't patent this do you just try to brand it as much as possible? Because anyone could come out with another pillow like this.

Bill: Right, and they did. Somebody knocked me off. I'll give you the perfect example - we came up with the X-Hose first and then somebody came up with that pocket hose that you see.

Jaime: There's a pocket hose? I haven't see this yet.

Bill: It's probably the best selling direct response product in the history of direct response. It's sold 40 million pieces - not me, the person who knocked us off. So you're going to get knocked off and you better be ready because for any good idea, people are going to knock it off. It's going to happen, so just be prepared and try to get to retail before they do.

Jaime: Wow, this is a really interesting, fast-paced market, which is really, really cool.

Bill: You have to hit and run. You can't sleep, you've got to keep on going.

Jaime: You can't sleep, even though we have a great pillow that you can sleep on.

Bill: You can have a solid six hours on that pillow.

Jaime: We have to start wrapping up - tell us, because everyone now wants to know, how do we get a hold of you and what are you looking to have us e-mail you in terms of having an idea?

Bill: You can e-mail in any form but do some research. MediaEnterprises.com is the name of my corporate company so just e-mail me at MediaEnterprises.com - you can go to Products and just submit your product. But do some research, do some background checking, before you do it because that's one - if you haven't done any background checking I'm going to give you an answer based on me not knowing the background of the product. But I'll give you an answer as quickly as 24 hours.

Jaime: You actually give an answer?

Bill: Yeah.

Jaime: You do?

Bill: Erica does, but I look at the products.

Jaime: Really?

Bill: Yeah, every product that comes in here I look at.

Jaime: How many hours a day do you spend doing that?

Bill: Probably two or three.

Jaime: That's amazing.

Bill: But most of them, 99% of them, I know right away.

Jaime: So you're like "No, no, no." That's really amazing, though. Awesome. So, everybody, make sure you're doing your due diligence beforehand. We don't want to waste Bill's time, anyone from Eventual Millionaire.

Bill: You're wasting your own time - it's not just my time, it's your time. If you do your due diligence, most of the time you're going to find that there's a product out there already.

Jaime: Awesome. Well, not awesome! So we've got to keep thinking, we've got to be really innovative and push the envelope.

Bill: Just understand that obviously there have been products around forever and ever, so the fact of the matter is that the idea may be good and maybe we could put a twist on it. A lot of the time people give me an idea and I say "It's out there, but what if we tried this, what if we tried that?" The mirror which we're doing now, which was a product that was already out there, is a mirror so that you can see the back of your head when you're blow-drying your hair, which I guess is a problem for women, not a problem for guys, and it was out there already but we switched it around a little bit and we're getting ready to market that. It's a problem, and there was someone out there who did it but we came up with a different solution. You never know.

Jaime: You never know. Awesome, so make sure, of course notarize your idea, go and do a Google search, see if you can do a patent search, and if that works out e-mail Bill and see what he has to say - and e-mail me because I want to know! I want to know what Bill said, number one, if you did send something, but I also want to know if you guys end up having a relationship with Bill. Let me know how it goes for sure. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, I really, really appreciate it. I ask the same last question every interview, and that is - what's one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of $1 million?

Bill: Understand that if you're out there, the number one thing is that you have to have a passion for whatever you're going to do. Whatever you're thinking of doing, make sure it's something you love. You have to love what you do. If you don't, whatever it is you're doing, I don't care what you're doing, it's not going to be a good ending. That's the number one thing - have passion for whatever it is you're getting ready to do. If you love what you're doing, money follows.

Jaime: Awesome. Thank you so much. Sometimes we need to hear that over and over again, especially for those people in day jobs that maybe hate it but definitely want to get out there. There's some hope for you to be able to move forward on your passion. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Bill. I really, really appreciate it.

Bill: Thank you.

Jaime: I hope you enjoyed that interview with Bill. Now, if you didn't catch what he said, go to EventualMIllionaire.com and find his interview under Millionaire Case Studies and you'll be able to get the e-mail address so you can e-mail him and also that link to submit your product idea. It's fun to know that, if you have a product idea, within a day or two, you can find out whether he thinks it's a good one. I really appreciate Bill being on the show. If you like these millionaire interviews, go to EventualMillionaire.com, you can sign up right on the homepage and every single week we come out with a brand new interview. I hope you enjoy it and I hope you have an amazing week. Take care.

Announcer: Thanks for listening. You can find out more great information like this on EventualMillionaire.com.

Tags: advertising, Bill McAlister, innovative marketing, millionaire interview, Physical Products, Pricing

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Millionaire Interviews

Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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