Interview: Noah Dentzel of Nomad Goods
Noah Dentzel is Co-Founder and CEO of Nomad. Nomad launched in 2012 on Kickstarter with their first product, ChargeCard, a USB cable the size and shape of a credit card designed to keep your phone charged on the go, a "jumper cable" for your phone.
Key Takeaways:
Nomad dreams up and builds out award-winning modern, minimalist accessories for smartphones and smartwatches. They've successfully crowdfunded on Kickstarter (2012), Indiegogo (2013) and CircleUp (2014) and sell direct to consumer on their Shopify-powered site as well as through select retail and distribution partners in the US and globally.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
9-8-2020
Kurt Elster: Today, on The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, we’re talking about iPhone cases! Okay, wait. No, we’re talking about AirPods cases. Wait, no, no, actually we’re talking about Nomad Goods, a Shopify merchant that has achieved unbelievable success over a long journey, and so they started eight years ago on Kickstarter. They raised 160 grand. And today, in 2019 rather I should say, they did $20 million in revenue. Oh my gosh. And they’ve got just this beautiful website, an incredible product catalog in which I own… I’ve got their phone cases, I got their AirPods case. I love their stuff. It is inspirational and fantastic.
And joining me to talk through it is Mr. Noah Dentzel, co-founder and CEO of Nomad, and they describe it as Nomad dreams up and builds out award-winning modern, minimalist accessories for smartphones and smart watches. And they have successfully crowdfunded on Kickstarter, Indiegogo and CircleUp. I don’t even know what CircleUp is. And they sell direct on their Shopify-powered site as well as through a few retail and distribution partners, like REI. How cool is that? Noah, thank you for joining us.
Noah Dentzel: Kurt, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Kurt Elster: So, I love Nomad Goods. I’m a Nomad fanboy. I think the Nomad aesthetic is great. I love the lifestyle travel photos throughout the site. I appreciate that someone over there is a Land Rover fan. I’ve seen some Land Rover photos on that site.
Noah Dentzel: Yep.
Kurt Elster: And we worked on this project for KeySmart and you’re friends with Michael from KeySmart, and when we were talking early on in that project, I was like, “What’s the inspiration here? What do you wish your site was more like?” And they’re like, “We wish our site was cool, like Nomad.” Like, wow! They’re cool. And I think we did a good job, but the Nomad site, it’s so cool, and the products are so cool, and there’s quite the story here. So, that’s what I want to hear today. I want to hear how you went from 160 grand on Kickstarter to $20 million in revenue. It’s just tremendous.
But let’s start with Nomad. What the heck is Nomad? What do you sell? What do you do?
Noah Dentzel: Well, first, thanks to Mike for the kind words on our site, and I’ve gotta give a lot of credit to Brian, my co-founder, as well as our badass web and design team and everyone that chimes in, because we are definitely a sort of a team where everyone can play a part in something. So, there’s people who have their primary responsibilities, but everyone gets to add a little touch of themselves to what we’re doing, and I think that’s how we get a cool perspective on things and keep things sharp and fresh.
But back to your question, Nomad, so Nomad is about… Well, sometimes I say we build tools for the modern nomad, and over the years, that toolkit has expanded, but that sort of… That concept, that ethos holds true in what we do. And when you think about the modern nomad, well, you can think of the traditional nomad. A traditional nomad, maybe a nomadic person in the Asian Steppe, right? They owned very few things and what they do own needs to be incredibly well made and incredibly useful. They’re not gonna have one yurt filled with toys and another one filled with tools, right?
In fact, anything that they own needs to be of the highest quality. It needs to be useful. It needs to be practical. It needs to add value to their life. And frankly, if they come across a better bow and arrow, they’re maybe gonna upgrade from the one that they have, because the things that they have, they need to really be able to rely on them. So, those are some of the sort of product ethos principles that go into what we build, and we kind of look at the iPhone as the tool of the modern nomad. You know, it’s the sword of the 21st century. But it’s so much more than a sword. It’s crazy how much stuff you can do on a phone. If you were naming this device today, you wouldn’t call it a phone, because usually the last thing you do on it is make a phone call these days.
It’s cameras, it’s notes, it’s an internet device. There’s an app for identifying birds if you’re a bird spotter. You can track your hikes, track your activities. It just does so many incredible things. So, keeping it charged is incredibly important, and that was sort of the insight in the beginning of this all, was like, “Okay, how can we frickin keep our phones better charged?” And I remember looking on Alibaba a really long time ago and literally trying to find a little USB cable that I could kind of like attach to the back of my BlackBerry, because we all had BlackBerrys at that time, and BlackBerrys were nice because you could swap the batteries out, but even so they were always dying.
And the thing didn’t exist, and so I was thinking, “Man, there’s gotta be a better way.” And I was really lucky to come across someone who ultimately became my kind of co-founder and so much more in this big mission, who was pretty much fully on board with… We were just on the same page. And so, with this germ of an idea of the USB cable, the first one was a USB cable the size and shape of a credit card with Kickstarter-
Kurt Elster: And that’s called… That’s the Charge Card, right?
Noah Dentzel: That was called Charge Card. We don’t make it anymore. It’s not certified. It’s not what’s called MFi.
Kurt Elster: Right.
Noah Dentzel: So, it doesn’t-
Kurt Elster: And that’s like Apple says, “Look, we promise this accessory doesn’t suck. It’s not gonna make your phone explode.”
Noah Dentzel: It’s a good program. It forces people to make things that are gonna work well. But you know, there are some design parameters. It couldn’t be as thin as we wanted it to be, so our first stuff was homegrown. We manufactured, and to be clear, we did not have manufacturing experience. We are kind of like bulldozers, and we constantly go into territory that is unfamiliar to us, or rather I like to call it like explorers. We’re out there exploring, and we get to one destination, and one island, and one peak, and from that peak, we see the next one that we couldn’t even see before. So, you just gotta keep on getting forward so you can see the next one.
And then if it makes a lot of sense, maybe you stay there, maybe you set something up, maybe you understand that more, learn about it. With manufacturing, we started in the U.S. in 2012, and we knew very, very little. In fact, we knew so little that we had… It gave us almost enough confidence to go into it. It’s like, “Yeah, this can’t be that hard. We can figure this out.” We ended up camping out at our factory quite a bit. We went to school-
Kurt Elster: Was this before or after you started this? The manufacturing school?
Noah Dentzel: This was all kind of like during, while the Kickstarter was raising funds, and lining up a manufacturer, and then mostly kind of like… The project started, we hit the funding threshold I think on the third day, so we knew pretty early on that this was gonna be happening. Now, at the time, Kickstarters often become something now where people go in often with such certainty. I see a lot of successful businesses that launch things on there and they use it as a launch platform. We really used it as a Kickstarter. We needed to hit our goal. We needed to hit over our goal. Things wouldn’t have moved forward in that capacity had we not.
So, raising those funds was an important part of having the sort of funds and much more than the funds themselves, having the backers, and the excitement, and the energy, and sort of the force to move forward. So, that was really important to us.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. A lot of people talk about their journey and they don’t include nearly as much mindset, and how your mindset evolves. It sounds like something you think about a lot, or at least maybe you’re not aware of it, but you are very aware of your own mindset throughout this journey. Clearly it’s important, but the softball question is like how important or why is mindset so important for entrepreneurs?
Noah Dentzel: I think they’re incredibly, incredibly, incredibly important. I always say to… I sometimes say I think it was at Thanksgiving, we were all going around and saying something that we liked, and I said, “You know, if you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right either way.” That mindset is I think so powerful, but the second part of that is expanding what you think you can. So, having the perspective to see more things and see more possibilities.
It just blows my mind how many times I’ve been in situations where if you push harder, if you keep on trying, if you try different things, if you try different angles, you can move forward somehow. Maybe it’s lateral or in a different way than you were even expecting, but you can move forward, and you can bulldoze through the problem, you can climb over it, you can go around it, you can dig under, and-
Kurt Elster: I love it. You’ve got… Your entrepreneurial mindset and personality is that of a honey badger. I refer to the strategy, and I say that in the most positive way possible. I refer to that as brute forcing it. I’m like, “Look, I know we can get to… Here’s our problem. We need to get from one side of this glacier to the other. We’ve got this glacier. I know we can do it. I don’t know necessarily how we’re gonna do it, but we can get from one side to the other. We know what our outcome is. We know what we want.”
And maybe we change the parameters on that a little bit, but all right, once we’ve got our glacier, how do we break that into ice cubes, and how do we make that into individual little problems that we solve or work around? What do we do there? And it sounds like that has been your mindset and your strategy, and clearly tremendously successful for you over the years. This is not a question I necessarily ask often, but personally, how has this been for you? Because it’s gotta be quite the change. You went from you said, “Hey, we had to manufacture this thing. We didn’t know how we’d do it. We didn’t know if we’d be successful.” It sounds like you lost an original business partner in the process. I did, as well, in my business, so I know that has its ups and downs. And then you went from Kickstarter, this successful Kickstarter while couch surfing, to $20 million a year in revenue. That’s quite the lifestyle change.
Personally, what has this journey been like for you?
Noah Dentzel: That’s a really good question. I think that when people look at something from the outside, in year eight doing $20 or close to $20 million in revenue, it kind of looks like we’ve made it. I’ll tell you, when you’re in my seat, it still feels like we’re definitely in the engine room. Obviously, it’s become a nicer engine room now, and the engine’s less likely to break down, and we know more what we’re doing in there, but it is… The journey continues. And it was maybe two years ago or so that we started taking weekends off and not just working all weekend. And it was like, “What do we do with this time?” It’s like, “I need to get a hobby.” It was this funny thing that I feel like people almost go through when they retire.
Now mind you, this was like what to do on a Sunday afternoon. And so, the journey has been a challenge. I think we put a lot of ourselves into this. So much of ourselves that we didn’t even know how much we were putting in, because we were putting in everything we had. It was all day, all evening, late into the night, staying up, drinking wine, trying to come up with a new product. We would do that often. And just the process of a business is not always like, “Oh, you start a business, and you have a marketing plan, and you do this, and you do that.” A lot of it was bushwhacking, or hitting these challenges and trying to figure out, like I’ll add to your honey badger, I’ll add a little bit of I guess raccoon, because raccoons are so-
Kurt Elster: Please, the preferred nomenclature on this show is trash panda.
Noah Dentzel: Yeah. Trash panda. They use tools. They’re not afraid to get their hands dirty. They’re smart. They have opposable thumbs. And we are not afraid to get our hands dirty. But it’s been personally, I think, and I’m speaking for Brian, my co-founder, as well. We dove so deep into this… We didn’t even know. We went so deep. And it’s been amazing, because it’s taken so much. It takes so much to I think make something happen. Maybe especially so if it’s your first big go at this. I’ve met these entrepreneur people who are like, “I have six businesses. I have six kids. I have six houses. I have six of everything and I’m gonna do a big two-hour lunch today.”
And I’m like, “I don’t have kids. I don’t have houses. But I’m putting a lot into this.” And I think that when you’re first getting off the ground, you don’t have that safety net, you don’t have extra reserve capital, you don’t necessarily have a house you can mortgage when you need to get through a tough patch, so what we had was our energy, and we had our minds, and we had our creativity, and we had our wherewithal and our unrelenting kind of just energy moving forward. So, personally, it’s been tough. It’s been a challenge.
I think that one of the most exciting and rewarding things for me in the history of the company wasn’t breaking $10 million in revenue. It was when we added company healthcare, you know? And because we didn’t have healthcare for years, and then we had these super low salaries, so we were on Medicaid, which wasn’t super great, so we needed to even up it a little bit, so we were over the minimum threshold, and it was just like this journey of being a bit scared. I don’t mean that in a bad way, but in a way that’s I guess motivating. But something like even thinking, “Wait a second. We can go to the doctor or we can go to the dentist.” I hadn’t been to the dentist in like 10 years.
Kurt Elster: Oh, geez.
Noah Dentzel: I know it’s my fault. I could have probably saved up and done that. But the point is my focus wasn’t on me. It wasn’t on my health. It was on the business. And I’m really just coming out of that still, and over the past two years I’ve been sailing, and I went to the dentist a year ago for the first time. I had 13 cavities.
Kurt Elster: Oh, geez.
Noah Dentzel: I got like 7 filled in one day. It was great. But it’s been this process of growing up into a new phase of being… I think what is success, and I think it’s just so important to realize, and I’ve slowly realized this, that it’s not a number. It’s not $10 million in revenue. It’s not $20 million. It’s not $50 million or whatever it is. It’s getting comfortable with what you’re doing, learning how to do it better, and leading a healthy and productive lifestyle, and working with good people, and building great products.
Kurt Elster: Given that you had tremendous success on Kickstarter in 2012, and the Kickstarter listing is still up and out there, which I love that they do this, so I’ll link to it in the show notes. But you got press from everybody, so I’d love to hear, what do you think is critical to the success of a Kickstarter, at least in 2012, and Kickstarter’s so different now. Would you use it today?
Noah Dentzel: I do see over the years, I’ve seen more and more companies, and I hear people say it to me. They’re like, “Yeah, maybe we’ll do a quick little Kickstarter, and then kick up the PR, and then do a press tour,” or whatever it may be. And I’m thinking like, “Whoa, what do you mean you just do a little Kickstarter? That is a whole special process.” So, I think that over the years it’s become a mechanism and a tool for some companies and some projects, and at the same time, there are companies that got their start on Kickstarter, and they love that, and it’s who they are, and it’s in their DNA, and even though they’ve become successful over time, they still use it because those are their backers. That’s their DNA. That’s where they got started.
Now, inevitably, it’s different for them now, because they’ve kind of like made it, so to speak. But it’s nonetheless their DNA. So, I think that it has evolved, and that people use it in different ways, and that that’s totally cool and acceptable, and I think it’s up to the backer to understand what they’re backing. Are they backing a first-time entrepreneur or artist? Are they backing a successful company that’s launching their 10th product? And even sometimes a company that might be launching its third or fourth Kickstarter and raising millions of dollars, there can still be a lot of risk and uncertainty involved, and I think we’ve all seen large companies that we loved that got their start on Kickstarter who didn’t make it over the long haul.
And so, I’m for it, and I’m for the different kind of incantations of it and so forth, and I think that if we were to do it again, we could. We’ve certainly considered it and people suggest it to us all the time. We’ve got a good thing going on Shopify. We love our platform that we’re on. We love our current model. It is a lot of work, and that’s one thing I say to people, is don’t think that you, when you do Kickstarter, you’re not… It’s not like you’re lighting a match in a wild brush that’s about to just light on fire.
Kurt Elster: I was gonna go… I’m like, light a match in… a gas station? No, that’s not a good image.
Noah Dentzel: You’re not. No, so you’re sort of trying to start this fire, this energy, to get this project going, but I think of it like imagine you’re trying to start a fire in a kind of a wet rainforest or something. You gotta get the kindling, get it going, you gotta keep on, you gotta blow on it, you gotta do a lot of work to get that fire going. It’s gonna take time. It’s gonna take energy. Everyone sees the company that starts off and they just go straight up into outer space and everyone thinks that, “Oh, that’s easy and fun. I want to do that.”
We didn’t do that. We worked hard. We printed out 5,000 marketing cards that we were gonna hand out in person to like 125 people a day. We had this thing down where we will raise $50,000.
Kurt Elster: Like just on the street?
Noah Dentzel: No matter what. Yeah, we printed these things out, and we went up to people, we went door to door, we went into bars. At the same time, we were reaching out to press, and online press, and I think we realized on day two or three we had already hit our $50,000 goal, and probably less than 100 of that came from the in-person efforts. But nonetheless, it was that energy of like, “We are gonna-“
Kurt Elster: It’s that hustle.
Noah Dentzel: We are gonna hit 50K no matter what. I don’t care if we don’t get any press online, we have to build Charge Card. We are building this product. This is something we’re doing and we’re gonna hit the 50K. It’s somehow humanly possible that we could do this.
Kurt Elster: And then-
Noah Dentzel: It didn’t-
Kurt Elster: I love that. I love that, like that grassroots approach. I had to do the same thing to start my own business. I was slipping letters under people’s doors. And it worked. It doesn’t scale particularly well, but it worked.
Noah Dentzel: Not at all. And press is more of… The grassroots approach-
Kurt Elster: The press.
Noah Dentzel: Was reflective of our mentality of, “Oh, okay, that didn’t work, but that was the same hustle that we immediately poured into our press outreach, and sending samples to people, and getting samples to people’s doors.” I remember we spent the last couple thousand dollars we had in this Kickstarter era. We went down to FedEx and we made these mailers by hand.
Kurt Elster: There’s this trend, we call it direct to consumer, of these brands who just… They manufacture something like you, something innovative, solves a problem, and they sell it direct to consumer, and they’re proud of like it is exclusively online. And you are proudly omnichannel, which is the other way to go, and so you’ve got… You’re selling online, offline, internationally. Talk to me about that. Why do that? What’s the advantage? Actually, you’re so great at answering these questions, the topic is retail. Go.
Noah Dentzel: So, we got started on Kickstarter as we’ve discussed. The day Kickstarter ended, I wish we had thought more about this before, but we realized, “Wait, we need a website. Duh.” The day Kickstarter ends, you’re-
Kurt Elster: Oh, really? You hadn’t thought about it?
Noah Dentzel: Yeah. I mean, we had a basic one, but there were just so many… We were moving so fast, it was always like, “Okay, wow. We need to keep on getting the preorders going.” Well, sometimes at Kickstarter they raise their money, and then they like… Especially back in this day, it wasn’t like, “Oh, then you immediately spool up to Shopify.” Shopify was one of the smaller players in 2012.
It was just so solid, and easy to use, and what we loved so much about it, and still true to this day, is that it was constantly evolving. Like, “Oh, new tool. New update. New feature.” Because this space is so evolving, and so that was nice. And it’s evolved so much over the past eight years, it’s been crazy, so it’s been such an awesome journey and it’s been really fun. Of this all, we don’t have a specific roadmap of we have to be here, or we’re only online, or we’re only offline, or we’re only gonna be gas stations, or we’re only… The only retailer we’ll do is REI.
We want to be where our customers are. We want to reach our customers. Online is and always has been for us an incredible avenue for meeting them. We can hit Nomad customers, people who like our products, who like what we’re doing, who like what we’re about, in Norway, in South Africa, all around the world. Truly, we’ve had orders and shipped to I think well over 100 countries, and so reaching those customers, if those customers are at REI, we want to be there.
Kurt Elster: You know what’s fascinating about that? If I just took these products, all your products, and I just put them in a pile, and I didn’t know anything about the brand, I said, “What kind of company is this?” People would say, “It’s tech accessories.” And you are flatly, plainly being like, “This is a lifestyle company.” And I think that is part of the brilliance of Nomad. It would so easy for this category of company just to be cool, and successful, but not like it is. Not like the way you have it run. And I think it is because you have that great branding, but positioning it as a lifestyle brand and listening to your customers, and making it about how they are living their lives.
Also, I just love this damn AirPods case. If you’ve got AirPods Pro, get this, the Nomad Horween Leather AirPods case. Shout out to my boys in Chicago at Horween. I love this thing.
Noah Dentzel: They have some incredible leather. And they have, gosh, building great products, one of the coolest things is when you can really use great materials, and they make incredible leather. And you just… You don’t have to know a lot about leather to sort of touch it, smell it, feel it, and just… There’s that visceral thing that we have, and we just know that it’s good. The same sense, you might not need to know a ton about wine, but if you drink a nice glass of wine and then a shitty one, you wouldn’t have to be an expert to probably taste that one’s a little bit better. Great materials is key. And feedback is so important, and back to the question on retail, we’ve had so much amazing feedback from different people.
Whether it’s our direct-to-consumer customers, or whether it’s the buyers from an APR, the Apple Premium Reseller in Norway, or Austria, it’s worth listening to a few bad ideas in order to get one good one, than to not listen and miss out on something that could have been good and useful. I had a conversation one time with a security guard in Germany, and the point of the conversation was just how you can learn something from anyone, and he was just sharing tips with me about how to be a security guard and the tips that he’s learned over the years, for 20 years.
And it was just an interesting thing about how you could just pass someone up or something up because it’s just a security guard, it’s just an Uber driver.
Kurt Elster: You’re 100% right. Like we’re hanging out with friends or family, you meet someone new, and I encounter somebody, you always ask, “Hey, what do you do?” And when they tell you, if I think that person is at all a specialist or expert in their field, I will always try to ask them a question along the lines of like tell me something that would surprise me about that industry or that field.” And when you encounter someone who just knows a thousand times more about a thing that you never thought about before, like crowd control, or commercial security, and to ask them how they see it, it just completely changes your perception of that thing in minutes. So, yeah, you’re right, I think there’s tremendous value in that.
And then often those teachings can be applied in unexpected ways. Naturally, I can’t think of a great example right now, but-
Noah Dentzel: I love this diverse feedback that we get from so many different people and so many different sources. And I think that’s been interesting in terms of where we sell, and exhibit, and interact with our customers and this and that. And I guess that’s on the sort of the product-retail space feedback. What categories should we go into? And all these things. So, I think being open minded to opportunities, to be clear, that work. We’ve had offline retail experiences that don’t work, that aren’t profitable, that are too complicated, or the margin’s not there, so knowing when to say no, but I think that that just comes down to don’t do anything at any cost. Do things that work for you, but at the same time, you don’t need… You can be open to different ideas, or trying different things, being open minded, trying to learn and grow, doing more of things that do work, doing less of things that don’t, but always being comfortable to experiment a little.
Because at the end of the day, you gotta know that you don’t fully know, and so you need to keep on turning over stones and seeing what’s there, and I hear that and see that in so many different places, and I just think that that’s really true, and one of the things that’s gonna make you successful is not are you… Do you have this clairvoyant product marketing vision from day one? And maybe you got a little special sauce, that’s good, use it. But do you have the wherewithal to push forward, hit the wall, turn right, hit the wall, turn left, and then all of a sudden you’re gonna make it through.
Kurt Elster: Two takeaways there. The core personality trait at all of this advice you have given is humility. Despite your tremendous success all along this journey, you have always been willing to talk to whoever and hear out whoever about whatever ideas and explore ideas, and markets, and products. And the value in that has been tremendous diversification that has reduced your risk. So, really just that core humility and your natural curiosity and honey badgerness has paid all kinds of other dividends in the business and your life.
Noah Dentzel: Yeah. And hunger. I think that was the thing you were capturing there with that honey badger, is the relentless, relentless hunger. You know?
Kurt Elster: Yes. Just keep plugging away at it.
Noah Dentzel: Keep plugging away at it.
Kurt Elster: All right, last question. I want to know. You have a travel lifestyle brand during a pandemic. Clearly, 2020 has just been a dumpster fire of a year. Just a crazy, crazy time. How has Nomad fared through 2020 so far and what’s next? How has this changed you?
Noah Dentzel: We’ve been doing fine. We’ve been pushing through. We’ve been getting by. It’s been totally wild and totally Nomad fashion. We tried new stuff. We ended up going to the medical goods business. We’ve shipped I think well over 10 million masks, the 3-ply surgical masks, KN95s. We have shipped hand sanitizer, hand sanitizing wipes, all sorts of things. And to be clear, when we did this in March, it was a different scenario than it was today. It was a lot less obvious. It seemed a lot weirder. The demand was absolutely insane. We had to limit those orders only to the medical community at first, because the demand was so off the charts. And we were charging the base bare minimum price we could, because we were just trying to move these.
But all of a sudden we found ourselves getting into the medical goods game, so those are kind of our values of trying things, being comfortable with things that we’re less familiar with, and just that realization of like if you think you can, you can. We’ve got the supply chain, we have distribution channels, we know a heck of a lot about shipping. We know way too much about shipping. It’s ridiculous. So, let’s put this all to work.
And so, through this crazy time of COVID, it’s been one of the busiest times in the company’s history, and actually it reminds me so much of the really early days of the company, where we were doing so much by the seat of our pants. It is nice to mature a little bit, so we have a little bit more systems and things, but it’s been so cool for everyone that works at Nomad to get that experience of just that entrepreneurial experience of whipping up a new webpage overnight, receiving a shipment of hand sanitizer on a Tuesday, getting the website launched, and shipping and selling the product on Wednesday. And that’s a real thing that happened, and it’s just been totally nuts.
Kurt Elster: There’s that excitement.
Noah Dentzel: There’s that excitement. There’s that energy. There’s that entrepreneurial honey badger spirit of pushing forward-
Kurt Elster: It’s a little Bear Grylls, you know? And you’re like improvise, adapt, overcome.
Noah Dentzel: Yeah. Bear Grylls. It’s do what you can with what you have wherever you are. And sometimes I talk about our cables and it’s like, “Well, what is the best cable?” Well, the best cable is the one that you have on you, you know? If you’re phone’s dead, so we make the really minimalist cable the size and shape of a key, so it fits on your key chain, because at the end of the day, yeah, it’d be nice to have your three meter and be lounging your couch, charging with USB-C, but maybe you’re charging out of the back of a TV in a hotel with your key cable, because that’s the only one you have on you. So, back to that spirit of Bear Grylls, of MacGyver, like those are such Nomad qualities of being resourceful.
One of the biggest words that I would say is so important in this whole thing is being resourceful, because you’re never gonna have the right tool, and if you’re early on this, you’re never gonna have enough money. You’re never gonna have enough tools. You’re never gonna have the right contacts. You’re never gonna have the right… When we were reaching out to press in the early days, I would cold email and I would just make up the email of someone that was at CNET, and I emailed this one guy, I just… Okay, first name, last name, at this. First name at that. You know, and I sent four emails. I got three auto rejections. That fourth one, he agreed to do an exclusive on Charge Card for our Kickstarter launch, and then it was like, “Okay, wow. We’re just kind of making this up in terms of the process.”
We didn’t have a PR agency. We didn’t have a firm. We didn’t have a list. And so, every stage of the business has always been just let’s try. Let’s maintain a positive attitude. Let’s push. The same qualities of just persistence. I say persistence breaks resistance. Of just being persistent.
Kurt Elster: Persistence breaks resistance. That’s a good one.
Noah Dentzel: Being persistent, of trying new things, of keeping a positive attitude, of taking on challenges that are bigger than you, and bigger than you know and know how to do, but are within your grasp and reach. That that is how you’re gonna always move forward in a business, is every day is a challenge. And it’s a creative mindset to come up, whether it’s a new product, or you resolve a cashflow issue, whatever it might be. So, I think that having a positive mindset is gonna be key, because you gotta believe in yourself. You’ve got to believe in yourself. And that’s an important thing.
Kurt Elster: Absolutely. I love that advice. I love that sentiment. I think I want to end this podcast there, because it’s such universal and practical advice. But before we go, you have a free sticker offer. What? I love stickers. How do I get my free stickers?
Noah Dentzel: Oh my gosh. We have the coolest little sticker pack, and I’m actually… If you just Google I think Nomad stickers, it will come up. Our sticker pack. It should be the top result. It’s got some cool stuff in there. A little bit of the company story. And it’s free. So, that’s nice.
Kurt Elster: It’s such a clever thing. It’s like a beautiful envelope. It’s got multiple stickers in there. And then it’s got the brand story, and it really, it’s like an inexpensive thing, but you keep the stickers forever. It speaks to the brand. I got one. I don’t know… I ordered a few items, and this was in there, and I just thought it was so cool. And of course, the stickers ended up in my garage, where all stickers go. So, you’ve got this unending reminder. It’s like you and Tacticalories are both stuck up in my garage.
Well, so I’ve got all this stuff in the show notes. Where can people go to learn more about you?
Noah Dentzel: NomadGoods.com. Check out our Instagram. It’s @Nomad.
Kurt Elster: Oh, it’s so good. Your IG is so good.
Noah Dentzel: We have a lot of fun stuff on there, some cool interviews with people. We flash new products on there. We showcase some of the sort of landscapes, and peoplescapes, and cityscapes that get us excited about things. Yeah. NomadGoods.com and Instagram @Nomad, and yeah, just engage. Reach out. We really strive to make the best products we can with the best materials. We stay up late thinking about USB tips, and how we can improve this little thing, and all these nerdy little things. We nerd out on it.
Kurt Elster: I can confirm. I’ve got the Nomad Goods. They live up to the hype. They’re fabulous. Noah, this has been great. I thank you for your time and I hope this inspired some folks.
Noah Dentzel: It’s been great to be here, Kurt. Thank you.