Launching a Product with Crazy Competition and a Drug Problem With Mike Lindell

Inventor, Manufacturer, and CEO of MyPillow, Inc. – Mike Lindell

Mike is the inventor of My Pillow a revolutionary new pillow. He spent years working on it, in the face of extreme adversity. For years he traveled to festivals just barely making enough to get by. Not only that he had a severe drug problem. Plus he was in an industry with a TON of competition. How did he get past all of that? Listen in now!

Go to MyPillow.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript:

Jaime: If you love down-and-out entrepreneurial stories coming into big successes you don?t want to miss this. Today on the show we have Mike Lindell. It?s crazy - he was a drug addict beforehand, he had no money, he was pushing through with his product called My Pillow - he went up against huge companies with a pillow. So make sure you stay tuned and hear his incredible success story.

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. My name is Jaime Tardy and today I have Mike Lindell on the show. He is CEO of My Pillow, a company that grew to over $102 million, but not only that, he had to battle addiction and a whole bunch of other things along the way. I'm really excited to hear his story today. Thanks so much for coming on the show today, Mike.

Mike: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Jaime: So first let's start off with My Pillow - what is it and why do I care about having a My Pillow?

Mike: Well it's my own patented pillow. There's nothing like it in the world - you can move it, and wherever you move it to, the inside filling takes 6lbs of pressure to hold it in that position. Your head weighs 12lbs so you basically make the pillow fit you instead of you trying to fit the pillow.

Jaime: Okay.

Mike: It's got a 10 year warranty so you can wash and dry it. I wanted it to be where you walk along the streets of America and anybody you asked, about what they would like to see in a pillow, my pillow would have it.

Jaime: Hence "My Pillow". How did you become the pillow guy, though? Were you always interested in that sort of thing?

Mike: When I was a teenager, I think back, and I would lie on department store floors and make sure nobody was watching and try out different pillows and I actually spent my whole pay check, when I was 16 years old, it was, I don't know, $69 was my whole check back then, back in the '70s, to buy a pillow. Who does that, as a teenager? And it did not work. Then, years later, I had all the problems everyone else has with sleeping, pillows going flat, your arm asleep, your neck sore, migraines, all of these things and then I started to develop this pillow. It took years.

Jaime: Okay, so number one - no teenagers care about spending a ton of money on a pillow. And then you were burnedbecause it didn't even work! So you probably had this since you were little. What was your job and stuff like that before you decided to become a pillow guy?

Mike: I've only had one job where I worked for someone in my life, apart from a couple when I was a teenager, but I didn't like it. I always had my own ideas and I would get comments like "Well if you don't like it, go and start your own business." I started out with a carpet cleaning business and then I had lunch wagons that were food trucks that would pull up and then I had bars and restaurants. I had up to five of them.

Jaime: Oh, wow. So you were pretty much successful before you started My Pillow.

Mike: Yeah, well successful, then broke, successful, broke. I've had a lot of challenges in my life. I sold my last bar and it took two years to develop My Pillow so by the time it was developed I was dead broke, I didn't even have $10.

Jaime: Why did it take two years todevelop the pillow? Did you find experts to develop it or did you develop it?

Mike: I did everything myself. Everything. From getting the trademark to everything. If I had to do it over again I probably would go out and get some mentors, some people that know what they're doing, but I knew what I wanted. I tried over 94 different kinds of foam and none of it worked and then I had to get the machine that made the pieces that I wanted. It was just one thing after another and it was probably a year and a half to develop but then another half a year trying to figure out a way to sell it.

Jaime: How did you get through that, for that long? A lot of people, when they start a business, will go for three months and then go "Screw this! This is taking forever!" But you went for that long - how did you do that?

Mike: I had money from the bars that I had sold and I had a contract for a mortgage for the bars that I'd sold, so I sold that to a friend of mine, I took a big discount but at least I had money because I had four kids and a wife and I was very worried - I think it was the only time I was worried in my life, because if I had to go out in the real world, what would I do? Bartend? But you're right, if I didn't have that backup, money-wise, I would have been selling part of the company right away, just developing it.

Jaime: You must have gotten a lot of flak, though - there are so many pillows out. Why is someone in his house going to make a better pillow than some huge company?

Mike: My friends laughed at me. A big pillow company in Minnesota, where I'm from, they told me I was nuts, "You're trying to invent something that's been around forever," much less get a patent on it. But I just felt there was a need for something that wasn't out there. All of these big companies are selling pillows just to make money, not to solve the problems associated with sleep.

Jaime: So that's what drove you the whole time? In my brain I'm thinking of your mindset - how do you just push forward? When everybody tells you that can't do it, when your money starts to run out, you start to get scared and worried, how do you keep pushing forward, going "No, no, this pillow is it. I'm sure it's going to be huge."?

Mike: In my mind I had this idea, this concept, and it was just perseverance and once I got too far into it, it was the point of no return. You would do one piece and that would work so you'd get hope. I just kept the faith. I didn't want the pillow to just be comfortable, I wanted it to give you good sleep, I wanted it to help with snoring problems, I wanted to be able to wash and dry it, I wanted it to last 10 years - that's what I was told by other companies, "This isn't going to last 10 years. No pillows last that long. The only way to do it would be if you could wash and dry it." So I could have launched an inferior product a lot sooner but I waited because I wanted it to have everything and I just believed that the need was so great out there that once I had what was in my mind I would be able to live or at least survive.

Jaime: How did you know what was in your mind was possible in reality, though? Because we can make up whatever we want - I want to be able to fly!

Mike: That was the tough part. We tore different foams by hand, my kids and I, on our deck, for months, trying different kinds, and when I finally had the right one, I told this company what I wanted and they made it for me, I finally had the right ingredients but I didn't have a machine that would make the pieces, because they've got to be these certain sized pieces. That took a long time but at least I knew that if there was sucha machine out there, but there wasn't, so I had to invent that. I got a lot of breaks along the way - there was this farmer guy that a friend of mine knew that had developed other patents and was kind of a genius and he helped me - I told him my idea and he went to make a prototype somewhere. You get little victories. Little victories kept me going. You go "Wow, I got this part. Now I want the pillow to stay cool. What can I do?" So little victories along the way and I believe that if you stop, as an entrepreneur, especially in the inventing part of it, you can't stop, you've just got to keep going. "I've got this part done," yes, well you've got to get the next part done.

Jaime: How did you know it was good? So you thought it was good, but maybe it's only good for you, how do you know whether it's good for everyone?

Mike: It wasn't good. I made some big mistakes. The measurements of the pillows, I made them too wide. I went to a Bed Bath & Beyond and actually measured the pillow, or I read it off the label, 20x30. Well, it turns out they're only 18 so none of my pillows would fit in any American-made pillow cases when I first started out so I had to make my own pillow cases and call them a different name, like Minnesota Clean I think I called them. I did make mistakes at first. I probably made three changes from my original design and it was all in the first year but I haven't made one change since that day in nine years.

Jaime: Wow, that's a long time. How can you say that they last ten years, though, when you first launch it? A lot of entrepreneurs have that issue - they say "This is amazing, it will last this long," and they don't really know, it's never lasted that long before.

Mike: You mean the pillow, with the warranty? I was scared. I theorized that with the company that I got the foam from. It was kind of a theory because I had no way of testing it. If anyone's seen the movie "The Jerk" where he had this invention and he had to give all the money back to the people with these glasses he invited - I had that nightmare. This was in my second year. Well now I'm just coming up to the tenth year and I've never had a warranty come back yet.

Jaime: Not one?

Mike: I think they will last 15 years but I cut off five years just to be safe.

Jaime: That's awesome. You haven't had one; that's really inspiring. So then you have the actual pillow and you're like "Whoo hoo! This is the best thing ever!" But having a great product in your house is very different to getting it out to a mass market, so tell me about that.

Mike: That was the next big hurdle and that takes me back to where I just had to tell my story last night when I got that award on QVC. I had the pillow done, I actually went to a Bed Bath & Beyond in Minnesota and said "I have the best pillow ever made, it's going to change the world," and they said "You know what, we have one buyer for the whole country and you're not going to be able to see him." I have since talked to that buyer.

Jaime: Really? And you're like "Ha, ha, ha!"

Mike: And he's like "Who was that guy?" But everywhere I went I got "Are you kidding me?" because it was patent pending, I got shut out everywhere I tried so I was at a dead end. Then someone told me to do a kiosk in a mall. At that time we were broke, we remortgaged our house and we used the money to buy Christmas presents and it was $11,000 to rent a kiosk for two months and we only sold 80 pillows so we lost $9000. That was in January and that was the scariest time but it was exciting that we had sold one but I didn't know where to go from there because I couldn't afford a kiosk and I was losing money. I got a call from a guy who had bought one of those 80 pillows and he said "Is this the guy from Minnesota who invented that pillow?" I said "Yes," and he goes "I run the Minneapolis Home and Garden Show," and he said "This pillow changed my life," and I'm going "What?" and he said "I'd like to have you at my show," and I said "I don't have any money left, but could I write you a check and you cash it on Monday?" and he said "Well, we don't normally do that," but he let me do that and he gave me a booth at this show. I just had handwritten signs so I borrowed some money to make a better sign and tweak my ideas and we sold out that show, everything we had, and got enough to live on for a week or two, but the Minnesota State Fair, people see me there, it's a big fair in my state, it's one of the biggest fairs in the country, and someone said "You apply and you'll get it." It's one of the hardest fairs to get into in the world but I did apply and I got in in the first year, but after I did that home and garden show I knew that I had a venue where I could sell my product so it was a big relief that I could at least sell enough to live on. Two months later I had a friend of mine drive me and I went shore to shore, around the country, for six years, doing shows. We'd always run into problems because we had to buy my fabric and other stuff in big lots, or what I considered big lots, now they'd be very small, but I would have to come up with $30,000 and I wouldn't have any money to do that because I'd used that money. It was very stretching, borrowing money to get through those times, but then you'd have some sparks, some really good shows, and then I had people that I'd given product to and they were supposed to give me the money but they took off, a lot of problems that way. And then the copycat came.

Jaime: I bet. There's a lot to dig into there. Let's go back for a second - if you had never gotten that phone call from the guy with the home show, do you think you would have quit?

Mike: No, I never would have quit. I would have sold them on a street corner, that's the kind of person I am. I had already sold 80 pillows, mind you, and the rent was high and plus I had the pillow price so cheap my costs were more than what I was getting for the pillow and a guy told me at the kiosk, because he wanted to trade products, I forget what it was but I said "These pillows are $24.95," he said "What? You need to have five times what your product costs," because I told him what it cost, "to even be here." So I thought I have to raise my price because I was always going to do my own manufacturing, I was never going to let anybody else. I'm so hands-on with all of my things. So I learned a little lesson there, raised the price, and thought if I can be in a setting where the rent is cheaper, I knew I had that concept but I didn't know there were shows out there like home shows and stuff like that, I hadn't been in that business, but I wouldn't have given up. It was very scary but I would have figured out a way, like I said, wherever there was people I probably would have been there - "Pillows! Get your pillows!"

Jaime: That's awesome. The fact that you had some guy call you, you probably would have eventually found it but it would have taken a lot longer.

Mike: It would have taken a lot longer and I probably would have had a lot of my ideas sold off. There were times where I sold part of my stock in the company just to keep going. I did a show about four months later in Minnesota, I was doing a lot of little local shows, craft shows and home shows, and this one show I did, I had my spiel down so good, telling people about what it had done for me and my passion, and people were coming up with this product because there was such a problem, I put the problems people had with sleep on the banner and every one of them could relate to every problem up there and I learned that being problem/solution was my key - I put the problems on the board, they can relate to the problems. They don't need to hear that the pillow is comfortable, they want to hear a problem and they can relate immediately to that. I have snoring, neck aches, anxieties, whatever it was, and then I told them why my pillow would help them and at that show there were more pillows going out the door than were people coming in. That was said by the show promoter, who got a call from these two guys that do big infomercials and they said "Are there any new products we should know about there?" and he told them, "There's only one - there are more pillows going out the door than there are people coming in," and these guys flew in and I met with them and they wanted all this money to do this infomercial and they wanted 80% of my company and I said "No, I'm not doing that," and they were amazed. I had been around a year and a half and they said "By the time we meet somebody like you, they've usually sold out 80% and all the rights to their invention," because of just what you said before, how do you keep going, putting in all the time and effort when you don't have any return coming in? So those were some scary times but there were different opportunities along the way and if I had taken them I wouldn't be here today. I didn't sell out, I didn't want anyone getting my dream.

Jaime: So you really held on tight to it, which is hard when you're faced with fear. What advice do you have for somebody who might be going through that right now?

Mike: You've got to believe in it. If you don't have the passion, stop. You've either got to have the passion to override the fear or I think you're not going to make it through that fear, because you're going to take the easy path, "Just set it on the shelf over here and when times get better in my life then I'll come back to it,"' that day doesn't come for a lot of people.

Jaime: Do you think that's innate with you? Is that something you were born with or is it just because you were passionate about the problem?

Mike: I'm passionate about a lot of things but with the pillows I'm over the top. I started getting feedback from shows, people coming up and saying "This isn't just a great pillow, this changed my life," because sleep is so important to people's livelihood, people's living, everything about them, and just hearing that was so rewarding for me. Back when you said would I have given up when I sold just those 80 pillows, no, because the people I was hearing from, and I don't even know how the pillow helped them, but they said things like "My husband stopped snoring, you saved my marriage," those were those first 80 who came back into the mall to tell me how amazing the product was. I knew I had found something that could change a lot of people's lives and that was so rewarding to me and it just kept coming. At one point I was getting a testimonial for every three people I had sold a pillow to. A written testimonial or when I did fairs they would come in just to tell me stories - "I have never been able to sleep well but now I sleep through the night with no interruptions," so that kept the passion going. If I didn't have that, I think the fear, especially for people out there who have a family to support, it's very hard to put everything asides and just work on that. It's tough to balance working and putting everything over here. It would be tough, I think. It's tough with that fear not to just say "You know what? It's a good idea but I'm just going to set it here until I get this much money." You've got to be really careful because your ideas get stolen, too.

Jaime: I definitely want to talk about where you are now, but we didn't hit on the addiction and the stuff you went through at the very beginning. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Mike: That was another thing. I came out of the bar business, I was a cocaine addict when I was in the bar business for 13 years and then I got into crack cocaine and there's no worse drug in the world, that's why our foundation is all about helping people get through that terrible addiction. So I did this while I was on those two drugs and how I got through that, I don't know. You had money being spent on that too and, sure, you'd have times when you were up all night, working, but then you'd have the three days you couldn't work because you're coming down. It's a miracle that I got through it. My faith got me through that. I always knew, one day, that I would quit everything but after being an addict for that long I had to have this, I had to be working hard. There used to be a commercial - "I get my work done, I stay up late," it was a cocaine commercial and the guy's just running around in a circle doing nothing. I would use excuses but I knew that one day I would quit and I quit everything overnight. Everything - cigarettes, alcohol, drugs. January 16th of 2009, the day before I said "Tomorrow's the last day." People ask me "Well why did you quit that day?" I quit that day because I had waited one more day there would have been nothing left - there was no company left, I was behind on orders, I couldn't buy fabric, it was the worst time because I had all of these things going on and I had just pushed it to the limit. I wanted to show people in that book I have coming out that even this person, this far down, with my faith in God can make the best comeback ever and to give people hope. You go back to 2008, how the housing crashed, for a lot of people everything was fine and all of a sudden they were thrown into something. People who have addictions, they're survivors, so to speak, so they're used to that. A lot of those people weren't, so they need to see something worse, to give them hope. It's like David and Goliath, the comeback.

Jaime: So you knew, way back when, that you'd be telling your story and inspiring other people. Is that what got you through that?

Mike: Well that's not why. I knew the day I quit that it couldn't get any worse, that's why I quit that day, I knew it would be passed the point of no return. I would have quit for nothing other than that. People have been telling me to write a book for as long as I can remember but I wanted it to have a good ending.

Jaime: That's always good! That's amazing, so you were building this company while you were wrestling with addiction for most of it. What happened to the company once you got that addiction figured out? Where was it before and where was it after you killed the addiction?

Mike: Before, people that had worked for me had copied my patent and stolen my manufacturer, everything. When I woke up on January 16th I had nothing left, no money left in the world, I had sold any possession I had to make the last pillows I could make for these guys that were selling them for me and it turns out that they were crooks and never paid me for them and then they went out and started this other brand and took all my local shows. The pillow company, it was like the lights were out but like the old TVs where you see one little light in the middle of the TV, that's all that was left. So it was a completely new start from that day but things happened pretty fast from that day. i had a lot of tests of my faith. When I woke up on January 16th I needed to borrow $30,000 from somebody, from anybody, to buy fabric, because I was out of fabric. I had to have the money by Friday at two o'clock and this guy told me about these guys that had this business in Minnesota and said sometimes they take a chance lending money to someone, so I went in and there were six guys in suit coats, I gave them a presentation of the pillow and I was brutally honest, I said I was a crack addict, I said I'd quit and here's where I'm going with this coming, and this guy said "Well, how long ago did you quit?" and I said "Last week," and they all looked at each other, like "Is this guy nuts?" I said "I need $30,000, I'll pay you back $42,000 in three months," I told them my game plan and the guy says "Well, when do you need the money?" I said "I need it in two hours," he said "Do you have a backup plan?" I said "No, it's just you guys," and three of the six each put in $10,000. Now, I took that money and got the fabric and I had six of my friends going to do shows throughout the mid-west, so we were going to do seven shows to start cash flow. You pay fees to get into these shows, well a blizzard hit the whole mid-west and wiped out all seven shows, so I was just devastated but I just pulled up my pants and said "We're going to keep going!" and we paid those guys back and it just kept going from there. I added another person and another person and changed some things, some mistakes I had made. Even when I wasn't on drugs there were mistakes that I made so I learned from that and I was able to steer my way through, so to speak.

Jaime: So that was 2009. It's early 2014 right now and you have a $102 million company - that's huge! Tell me about that.

Mike: It stayed the same where I probably had five or six people working for me. I was still making the pillows myself with my kids, making them at night, I did my own sewing and my cell phone was the only phone used for the company so I had my website and people would call. One month I was on the phone for 18,000 minutes. That was incredible. But the big break came, I had the beeper on my phone so that whenever an order came in it would go "ding" and I told a friend of mine "Someday I'm going to have to turn this phone off because it's going to ding so much." Well, the Minneapolis Star Tribune did a human interest story on January 2nd 2011 in the business section. They had come out and interviewed me in early December and I did not know when it was going to come out. I was out of town and, all of a sudden, that morning my phone goes "ding, ding, ding." I took in $70,000 that day, which was like a whole half a year, just off that article and that was my big break. We had a little show going and people were wrapped around the upper level there to get pillows - we were doing 10,000 a day. so then I went "Wow, everyone does have this problem," because it was just an unknown pillow and we were the most hit site that day by the Better Business Bureau ever, my company was checked out and they had the most hits they've ever had. The BBB started in Minnesota and I had this relationship with them. What I did then was I took that idea and made it into a newspaper ad, just a story. I did that and I put that ad in the New York Times and I got calls from these New York PR companies saying "Did you write this yourself? This isn't going to work," but when it came out I made all kinds of money, double what my ad cost, and I said "Yeah, I did write that and I think it will work because it's just me talking from the heart," and it was the most successful ad. It's still running to this day - we've been in the Wall Street Journal over 100 times, the New York Times over 100 times, every paper in the country has probably seen that ad. The next big break came that spring, the spring of 2011. I wanted to make my dream, which was an infomercial, and I didn't have any money to do that, it would have cost a lot of money, so I had all of my friends and workers at the time and my family and everyone grabbed their life savings, I said "You guys are going to make a lot of money out of this," I couldn't borrow big from a bank, never could, so I said "We're going to finance this ourselves and you guys are all going to have a piece of this." So we did that and we had problems with the infomercial people, they wanted to do it without us but I said 'I want to do it myself. I want to be in it. I want a real audience. I want it to be real. I know it's going to work because I'm tired of watching cookie-cutter infomercials." By the time that launched four months later I was dead broke again, everybody's money had been used and the guy who did the infomercial, they threw away the teleprompter and we just did that. That was a real, live, ad-libbed infomercial and the guy who made it at Life Brands who believes in my company and works with me, Mark Jones, he believed in the product so they bought the infomercial time. At that time I had 20 employees - in a month and a half after that launched in October 2011, I believe it was the first week in January, we had the number one infomercial in the world. We went from 10 or 20 employees to 450 in one month.

Jaime: What?

Mike: I didn't even know what a HR department was. I didn't have a corporate lawyer. I had nothing. We were hiring people off the street, two people came in one day, I said "What are your names?" it was Mark and Luke. I said "Those are good names out of the Bible, you're hired!" It was whoever I could grab so that we did not miss one order. We were working through the night, we only had a couple of sewing machines so I sewed through the night. I made sure that every Christmas present pillow that we promised to get out on time that year got out on time. When we launched we had a call center and on the second day I called them up and said "What's in that pillow?" to test them, and they said "I don't know, Google it." So that was it, I fired the call center and I said to my friend, that was Mark Jones, "I want to make my own call center," we were in a little old school house and I said "I want my own call center and I want it in a week," and he goes "It's impossible." We got it made in five days with 40 people while the rest of us were taking calls through the night on our cell phones, we had them tied together, it was just controlled chaos.

Jaime: I'm glad you said it was controlled chaos. It wasn't total chaos, it was controlled chaos.

Mike: In 2012 we did $200 million.

Jaime: That's insane. I love this story. Especially as you had so many years of up and down, up and down, up and down.

Mike: I had companies where my manufactured promised me stuff and other companies that copied my patent or tried to copy the pillow. So many things happened to me, and then my own addictions. Besides me hurting myself, other people were hurting me one after another.

Jaime: You had everything against you and you were still "No, this pillow matters!" That's insane. I love your story. I wish we could chat a lot more but we have to start wrapping up. The last question I always ask is what's one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of $1 million?

Mike: If you're early on in inventions or even a business, the best advice I could give is to reach out for help from somebody who's in something who's learned so that you don't have to make mistakes. For a while there I was two steps forward, three steps back. If you can just get any knowledge, knowledge about where you're going, whether it's an invention, a business or whatever it is, even if you can't get a mentor, just go out there and learn what they've done wrong so that you don't have to make those same mistakes, you can save yourself. That would be the biggest thing I could say. Everything I did, I was going into the abyss, the unknown, for everything from my own call center to corporate America - I've never been in corporate America in my life. I don't run my company like corporate America but at least now I know what a CEO is.

Jaime: That's always good, considering you are one!

Mike: You want a title? Go ahead, you can have a title. Titles don't mean anything to me.

Jaime: I love this. We really appreciate you coming on to share your story because we can hear what you did wrong and probably nobody else is making pillows like you are but hopefully we can take some information from you and not make the same mistakes that you did, so we really, really appreciate it.

Mike: When I was in the bar business I asked the guy I bought a bar from and he said "Anything you do, ask the person you're getting it from about the mistakes they made," and he told me all the mistakes he'd made and I didn't make them in the bar business.

Jaime: You were smart in that one! I love that. Thank you so much. Where can we find your pillows? MyPillow.

Mike: You can go to MyPillow.com and you can even use the promo code, I don't know, pick a promo code and you can have a promo code. Pick a promo code right now, it can be a name.

Jaime: Perfect - make it Eventual Millionaire.

Mike: Okay, if you put in Eventual Millionaire, if you put that in there you'll save 25% off everything on the website. We'll do that.

Jaime: Perfect. Thank you so much, Mike. We really, really appreciate it. I hope you have an amazing day. Thanks.

Mike: Thank you.

Jaime: Did you like that incredible story from Mike? I hope you did. If you like stories like that and you haven't already picked up my new book, it's called "The Eventual Millionaire", there are tons of stories from rags to riches and people really pushing through and how they did it, how they got past their fears. Really interesting stuff, I find it interesting, I hope you do too. Check it out at TheEventualMillionaire.com. Have an amazing day and take care.

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

Tags: Health and Wellness, Mastermind, Mastermind Group, Mentor, Mentoring, Mike Lindell, millionaire interview, Personal Value, product launch, Self-Esteem

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Goals, Mentors and Mastermind, Millionaire Interviews

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