Building a Better Mouse Trap: How to Succeed as an Entrepreneur

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed I had the opportunity to speak with my good friend Louis Foreman. Louis is the Chief Executive Officer of Enventys, which is a full-service product launch company that handles all aspects of product development, crowdfunding and ecommerce marketing. In addition to Enventys, Louis is a prolific inventor himself, he is also an Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship at Wake Forest University, and as if that isn’t already enough, Louis was the creator of the Emmy award-winning PBS TV show Everyday Edison that so many people in the community remember.  I’ve counted Louis as a friend for close to 20 years, so it was good to sit down for a conversation, even if that conversation took place remotely.

You can listen to our full discussion wherever you get your podcasts (links here) or you can visit IPWatchdog Unleashed on IPWatchdog.com. You can also watch the video below, or on YouTube.

As our conversation unfolded it became clear pretty quickly that the focus would be on entrepreneurship, particularly the trials and tribulations of entrepreneurs looking to dive into the startup world with an innovative product.

“There is money to be made by being creative, by coming up with something that does something better,” Foreman explained. “We talk about building the better mousetrap, right? That’s a term that many of my students don’t really even know what a mouse trap is. But the point is that you can always improve the way something functions, the way something works, the way something’s manufactured, the way a consumer accesses that technology, that product.”

Of course, the road to building and monetizing a better mouse trap requires not only ingenuity and the identification of opportunity, but it requires funding. And one way that entrepreneurs often look for that funding is through crowdsourcing, but crowdfunding can be a double-edged sword because there are entities out there that watch for successful crowdfunding campaigns and then affirmatively try and beat that person are startup to market.

“Yeah, absolutely. It is truly a risk,” Foreman explained when discussing how easy it can be for a factory in another country to see a product gaining interest on a crowdfunding platform. Such a company “could be making that product in a couple days, couple weeks, whereas the entrepreneur is waiting 30 or 60 days to run their crowdfunding campaign, then they’ve got to collect the money from the campaign and then go find a factory to do it, so they’ve got a huge advantage. But this is where intellectual property plays a role, so if you are going to disclose your product, if you’re going to run a crowdfunding campaign, you’re going to want to have some IP protection. It could be a trademark on your brand, it could be a patent on the function of the product, it could be a design patent on the ornamental appearance of what the product looks like, which would help from a pure knockoff where someone just completely copies what the product is and what it looks like. But having some level of protection is important.”

Our conversation quickly pivoted to a generalized discussion about entrepreneurship, and not just inventor entrepreneurs.

“Well, obviously the number one reason a business fails is they run out of money,” Foreman explained. “They don’t take into consideration what you just mentioned, Gene, where things cost more, or it may take twice as long to get to profitability… I strongly encourage the students when they’re putting together their projections… not just to do a most likely scenario, but do a best case scenario, do a worst case scenario, right? What if everything costs more? What if it takes longer to generate meaningful sales? What if there’s a lot more competition? So, you don’t get the market penetration that you were really hoping for. How much capital do you need under the worst case scenario? And if you’ve got enough for that, then you’re going to be in much better shape than if you’re going based off of the rosiest projections that you put together.”

Our conversation went on to discuss juggling a single product versus developing a product line, the need to disrupt yourself or become stale and get passed by, the importance of intellectual property rights for investors, and how difficult it to create a new market for a groundbreaking innovation versus incrementally making products better within an already existing marketplace and with consumers who already know what the product does and why it is valuable. But before we ended, I asked Louis if there was a particular kernel of wisdom that he likes to pass on to would-be entrepreneurs.

“There’s three P’s that I like to share with all entrepreneurs and all inventors,” Foreman said. “The first P is passion. If you’re not passionate about what you’re doing, find something else… The second P is patience. Inventors and entrepreneurs don’t have a whole lot of it, but you need to because it’s going to take longer than you expect. You’re not going to become a billionaire overnight. It’s going to take longer than what you expect to just be ready for the long haul. And the third P is persistence because life is going to throw all sorts of obstacles in front of you. There’s going to be all these roadblocks or detours, and you’re going to question whether or not you should even go forward… But if you really believe in what you’re doing, you’ll eventually succeed.”

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