An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Things are going to take at least twice as long as you expect. No matter how much planning you do, things are going to take twice as long as you expect, because there are other people and processes involved. There might be a freeze on cargo ships, blackouts in the country you are doing manufacturing in, errors in the final product, etc. and you can’t rationally expect all these things, but you can build in buffer time.
As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. JJ Richardson.
Dr. Richardson hails from the sunshine state of Florida, but spent most of his adult life in Melbourne, Australia. He has a PhD in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and is a world expert in nanomaterials for biotechnology applications. His research has allowed him to live in 7 countries and visit and present in many more, which provides a more global context for solving problems and translating research. He is one of the most cited scientists under the age of 35, has won pitch competitions, founded numerous companies, and launched his most recent venture, SWIFF — deodorant for your clothes, with his wife.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?
I had a fairly idyllic upbringing in Florida, enjoying the sunshine and playing sports, but was always drawn to complex scientific questions. This led me to pursue a degree in philosophy, the foundation of all knowledge, and then expand towards practical studies in various engineering disciplines. I met a beautiful Australian, moved to Melbourne, Australia to be with her, and that has led to any number of adventures ranging from teaching breakdancing in East Timor to seeing ancient rock formation in the Outback. I always wanted to have a positive impact on society, and luckily science offers many routes to contribute, and so for the last 10 years I have been a scientist working in the field of nanotechnology for biotech applications.
More recently, my family and I moved to Japan to wait out the COVID pandemic, which gave me time to conduct some great research on antimicrobial materials and spin out a company with my wife, SWIFF. SWIFF is pretty incredible, but a completely new class of product, so we just call it “deodorant for clothing” as it means you don’t need to spread chemicals all over your armpits to still smell fresh at the end of the day. Its cutting-edge nanotech research, but put into a minimalist product so it has the smallest environmental impact possible, uses natural and organic ingredients (we actually only use 2 ingredients) that are sustainable and renewable, and is incredibly accessible to users. Being able to offer safer alternatives to consumers has partially fulfilled my childhood dream of contributing to society, but we still have a long way to go before we have touched the lives of everyone.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
I have two favorite life lesson quotes that come from some of the most capable people I know. The first is from my mother-in-law. She migrated to Australia around the age of 30 and has worked any number of jobs, and she once told me “You pay peanuts, you get monkeys. You pay bananas and you get King Kong!” It’s a strange quote out of context but was used to convey the importance of valuing your time and your skills, and if you’re the King Kong of your field, don’t settle for peanuts. And if you’re an employer trying to pay people peanuts to do a job, expect to get monkeys.
The other quote was by an uncle that did everything from missile design, to medicine, to creating one of the most useful medical software systems out there. He had lots of great advice, but the key one that always stuck with me was “don’t quit your day job”. Of course, this assumes you have a day job and are getting fairly compensated (as per the quote above), but to me this quote reinforces that the grass may seem greener in a new venture, but until you can support your family with that venture, collect your pay check and build your venture on the side. Once its big enough that it can hire you, then you should quit your day job. And if your company can run independently, guess what, you get 2 paychecks, even better!
Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
I love reading, and probably one of the most influential books for me is Dune, and the related books in that universe. What resonated most with me was the intergenerational focus on cause and effect and how humanity still tends to think in years rather than centuries. As a scientist, the system currently incentivizes small incremental work and hype, but I believe we need to take a longer-term view of the work we are doing. I have used this generational viewpoint to stop myself from pursuing projects that lack real meaning. Foundation is another book (and series) that really tries to tease apart how humanity can shift over millennia and I recommend these two books to people interested in thinking about how life might be 100, 1000, or 10,000 years from now.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. There is no shortage of good ideas out there. Many people have good ideas all the time. But people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. Can you share a few ideas from your experience about how to overcome this challenge?
The first step of any idea is to articulate exactly what the idea is and check of the 5 W’s. Write your idea down, then ask some questions about it. Let’s say you want to invent a flying car? Great, articulate the specifics: what will the car actually do, how will it fly, where will it go, who will use it, why will they use it instead of other transport options, how many passengers should it take, etc. After this stage, you should be able to hold a 5 min conversation with a non-expert on the values of your idea and answer some basic questions that they might ask about it.
You should then be able to use the 5 W’s to build various hypotheses and test them with internet searches, market research, or the good old-fashioned “sniff test”. Does your belief on who will use them pan out to being realistic? From there you can check the economics, will those people have the money and desire to buy your flying car? If not, is there someone else interested? Do the current laws of physics and state of materials science allow for your car to actually be energy efficient? If not, how do you redesign or what breakthroughs are needed? Maybe there is a better niche product you can target that will later enable your full-fledged dream of flying cars. Musk does this with rockets and slowly getting to Mars. He’s not going straight for it, but rather building useful technologies that can eventually grow to him visiting Mars (maybe).
In other words, start putting things into writing as soon as possible so you can start progressing your idea bit by bit. Get data and evidence for every claim you have, as our brains are great at fooling us into thinking we have a great idea because the details are hazy. Nut out those detail and if your idea survives, you can start getting excited.
DON’T rely on what other people tell you about your idea, do your own research and investigation.
Often when people think of a new idea, they dismiss it saying someone else must have thought of it before. How would you recommend that someone go about researching whether or not their idea has already been created?
First, I’d like to say that even if your idea already has been created, you can improve upon the currently existing product. Can you find issues it doesn’t fix? Is it too expensive? There are lots of questions you can start asking even if someone has already created your idea. In fact, being second to market can offer plenty of advantages, as seemingly the other people have already proven there is in fact a market worth targeting (but don’t forget to verify that hypothesis, too). They also probably have information on their website that can help you cultivate your idea.
But an easy way to see if your idea has been created is to do some internet searches for keywords. You can even call up Google Patents (which is free to use), and do some searches for existing patents. Just always remember that even if you find something similar to your idea, track down if it’s actually been commercialized and is on the market. If it isn’t on the market but a patent or news article exists about it, try to figure out why it failed by searching for the company that owned the patent or created the product. Maybe their patent has also lapsed, that means they probably couldn’t turn a profit. If it does exist, go back to step 1 and see how you can beat them out.
For the benefit of our readers, can you outline the steps one has to go through, from when they think of the idea, until it finally lands in a customer’s hands? In particular, we’d love to hear about how to file a patent, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer to distribute it.
These are the real questions every entrepreneur should ask when hashing out the details of their idea. In terms of a patent, don’t file a patent first, file a provisional place holder when you really need to. This will buy you 12 months of protection at a very affordable price, after which you can decide if you want to pay for the full patent application or not. You’ll also have 12 months to think about which countries you should file your patent in (every country has its own costs). Another tip regarding patents is that you don’t need to file them until you’re really ready to talk about your idea publicly. if you’re doing your own market research, hold off on filing any applications until you are ready to start marketing, manufacturing or pitching VCs.
Currently, manufacturing is easier than ever. You can use Alibaba to find a product related to yours and then start messaging suppliers of that tangential product. With a bit of digging, you’ll be able to find out who are the middlemen, and who are the manufacturers. My tip for plastic products is ask what colors they can manufacture in, if they don’t say “any color” and specify just black or white, then you’re talking to a middleman. Then collect samples from any manufacturers you’re interested in. Test the feel, durability, etc. as those things will likely translate into your product, too. If their samples feel or look cheap, your manufactured product will probably feel or look cheap. Also, do some math, often a small run of 100 units might cost the same or even more than a normal run of 10,000, figure out your costs, shipping, and storage, and get quotes dor way more and way less than you really need.
Retailers can be harder to find, and the advice I have heard recently is avoid retail until you are big enough that you can survive it. They will squeeze your margins unless you already have validated your target MSRP, and you can end up losing money even at a high volume of sales. Additionally, if you aren’t protected with patents and trademarks, they can just do an off-label production of your product and cut you out when your contract is up. Ecommerce is easier than ever, so first explore the interest of your product online and then make the retailers come to you.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)
1. Things are going to take at least twice as long as you expect.
No matter how much planning you do, things are going to take twice as long as you expect, because there are other people and processes involved. There might be a freeze on cargo ships, blackouts in the country you are doing manufacturing in, errors in the final product, etc. and you can’t rationally expect all these things, but you can build in buffer time.
I gave myself big buffers in our first SWIFF manufacturing run, but even so, I missed my self-imposed ship date. This happened because the international shipper we used to mail our empty bottles to the filling facility we use in the US, didn’t include the street address of the fillers, just the street name. So the bottles were delivered to a random address on the same huge street, and it took a lot of time and phone calls to figure out where they were and to get them to where they needed to be. Other people will make errors, get sick, have emergencies, and your project will only be priority number 1 for yourself. So double whatever timelines you have to be sure there is plenty of buffer for mistakes and world events.
2. A brand can be even more important than a product.
As a scientist, I tend to think the product and its functioning are the most important things for a company, however I’ve learned that the brand and the marketing are often as important, if not more so. So when designing a product, figure out a target market and think about how those customers should engage with your company, your product, and you, and that will help inform your brand strategy.
Luckily, my wife works for a branding agency (CourtneyKimStudios) and helped turn my science breakthrough on antimicrobial coatings into a modern and approachable gender-neutral brand focused on stopping odors. The before and after pictures of the website and product design astounded me and made me a true believer in building a brand. In my view, this added as much value to SWIFF as the incredible science I put into it. Of course, part of your brand is delivering the best product and customer experience imaginable, so you always need to have a great product!
3. Be across every aspect of your company, don’t rely on others till you know what you need to rely on them for.
Founders or inventors should try to learn as much about the various aspects of the business they are trying to build. Everyone you ask to do something for you will want equity or money (or both), so be sure you know what you want and need, before asking. Design creep, website optimization, ads, etc. can all eat up time and money, so try to hash out the details beforehand. Asking general questions to prospective hires or freelancers is a great way to fill in gaps in your knowledge before deciding on what to spend money on. I had plenty of offers from people willing to be distributors, or to help out with design aspects, or even offering themselves as potential hires, but I didn’t want to commit until I really knew what those things would entail. Once I knew what it entailed, my wife and I could decide if it added tangible value to SWIFF at that time.
For example, I found that I could not do design and branding myself, thankfully my wife and her colleagues could. I also determined that, while I could do an okay job at online marketing, it was going to be too much for me on top of everything else, and that an expert could add a lot of value in that specific space. So once we understood exactly what ad creation and monitoring would entail and how to judge an ads expert from an ads amateur, we went ahead and hired one.
4. Your friends and family might cheer you on, but they’re not your target consumer.
Regardless of how supportive your friends or family might be, they’re biased and probably don’t want to make you feel bad. They also probably don’t want to actually buy your product either. So when trying to find out if people will be willing to buy your product, sure give some to friends and family, but also find strangers on Discord or Reddit to try your product and give advice.
I ended up sending samples of SWIFF to some random strangers on the Reddit in the ‘natural beauty’ sub to get feedback. The testing went so well that we were confident that real customers would love our product, and that our current instructions were clear enough for strangers to use. In terms of friends and family, about 50% of the people we gave samples to sent us any feedback, while 100% of the strangers that were interested sent us incredible feedback.
5. Your biggest supporters might come from unlikely places.
This relates to the point above, but you never know who will become your biggest fan. And since you don’t know this, you should try to talk to different people and communities about what you are doing. I found an outpouring of support on Reddit and some Facebook groups, and it was rarely the people that I thought would be most interested. So find some passionate people that can help test and improve your product, and keep them in the loop, they’ll become your biggest cheerleaders.
Specifically, I first invented SWIFF as an antimicrobial coating for face masks, it was only later after talking to customers that regularly try cutting-edge masks that I realized there was no real market for this. People who cared about great masks already had the best ones, and people that didn’t care about great masks didn’t want to spend any extra money on anything mask related. That’s when I started exploring SWIFF for clothes and other materials and found that it protected against odors, and subsequently that this is a huge market (valued at well over $40 Billion USD annually. These new conversations made me realize that people want new safer, natural products for preventing odors and that traditional deodorants and so called “natural” deodorants were just not hitting the spot. That’s how SWIFF was really born.
Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?
Start writing things down and make a plan of what needs to be done to make it a physical reality. Then, create a more general plan on what the company that would sell this product will look like. Break the invention process down into specific categories so that you can try to design an MVP that is feasible, economical, and reproducibly does what it is supposed to do. Talk to people in any target consumer groups that might exist to see if there is a real pain point that your product solves, or if you just think it solves the problem. Handmake a prototype if you need, combine off-the-shelf components, and start testing it yourself as you mull over the design steps. Whatever frustrates you about your product design will be sure to frustrate costumers.
In other words, the first step should be to turn that idea into a reality, even if just on paper. Just attempting that will fill in lots of knowledge gaps and pave the way for deciding whether to pursue it or not. There are also incredibly free online resources for business plan templates, customer interviews, product/market fit, and use those until you understand why the templates exist and how to think about the whole translation process.
There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?
I strongly recommend striking out on your own, especially if this is your first invention. People will take your money and do what you ask, but if you don’t fully understand what needs to be done to make your invention a real product (not just a physical item, but something people will pay for), it’s just money down the drain. It’s easy to think you can just hire someone to make your idea a reality The other reason you should start by yourself, is that going through the creation process will give you lots of additional experience relevant to making a real product. This will let you understand the pain points of your customer even better and let you shape the product and company to fit what it needs to do.
In terms of SWIFF, one unsolicited recommendation we received from those around us was to design a custom bottle shape, geometry, etc. rather than using an off-the-shelf design. However, designing new injection molds can be challenging and expensive, and there was sure to be things we would forget to do or features that were nice to have but not critical that we would try to squeeze in. So instead of sinking 5 figures into just the design stage of the product, we got some commercial bottles and tested those. Turns out we found one that was more than good enough, still gave us a unique feel, and greatly reduced our start-up costs. Had we used a design firm we probably would have had an over-engineered bottle that would have cost our whole budget and the additional features we would have added might not have improved the user experience, but were guaranteed to increase the cost.
All that being said, if your product is very technical, intricate, or needs to meet regulations, you need an expert. If you’re not the expert, ask yourself if you’re right to be starting this endeavor, and if you are the right person, find an expert to join, or if it’s cheaper, outsource to them to meet your aims.
What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?
This is the question for the ages and comes down to personal preference and depends on the type of product being developed. I lean towards bootstrapping, because if it is your own money, you tend to be more careful with it and make sure it adds real value to you project. VC money is widely available and at favorable terms currently, but it’s possible to get lazy when you have excess money you HAVE to spend. There are plenty of paper unicorns that are not profitable, but used investor money to pump up valuations because they had to, and that’s an easy trap to fall into. But if you have a product that needs a huge user base to be profitable (make sure it can actually be profitable though), or is highly regulated, such as medical devices, then you should strongly consider investor funding early on so you can grow rapidly. Investors will also have some knowledge for tricky subjects that can help, so try to make sure they are strategically placed to aid you the most. Also consider whether you
For SWIFF, we have avoided taking outside money, even though plenty has been offered, as my wife and I wanted full ownership. We also wanted to have the last say on how to run the business, what angles to go after, etc. and did not want to have pressure from investors if we decided to have a slow month while we travelled or moved countries. Finally, we wanted to learn valuable lessons along the way, and excess money can smooth out critical learning points that might come back to bite you. In the future, if we think that VC money will help, we will definitely consider it, and since we have sales we are in a much more valuable position to negotiate than the design stage.
In other words, the easiest way to decide whether you should bootstrap or go for VC funding is to ask the question, what is the minimum amount of money I need to reach the next milestone. If you have that money, and can risk it, then go for it because every additional user you get on your own boosts your valuation, so if you do need to get outside money later, it will be worth more to you and dilute your ownership less. You’ll also be in a better position to recognize which VCs will strategically benefit your company the most.
Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
I’m really lucky that my day job involves discovering new knowledge and training the next generation of fantastic researchers. So I am thankful that I am making the world a better place and have products on the market that are improving lives around the world. In terms of SWIFF, my wife and I took a lifestyle approach which has resulted in the first product anywhere, that protects clothes from odors and lasts through multiple washes. Having people thank us for allowing them to control their body odors in a safe way has been really rewarding. Smelling fresh might seem small in the grand scheme of things, but that confidence boost can go a long way in making the world a happier and healthier place. And helping people avoid contact with synthetic chemicals, aerosols, fragrances and the like, improves health, so I like to think we’re making the world a better place on a few fronts.
You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
I would want to inspire a movement that takes a longer-term approach to products in everyday life, because there are a lot of little things that damage our environment, our health, and even our offspring’s health through epigenetic changes. I’d like products to be a bit cleaner, with more oversight during the manufacturing process so we can avoid issues like the recent finding that many commercial deodorants have benzene in them. A return to nature, but with strong scientific underpinnings is my dream and something I’m working towards slowly with my research and with my company, SWIFF.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.
There are some awesome and inspirational people out there that I would love to meet and some I’m happy to just watch from afar (like Keanu Reeves). There are some comedians I’d love to meet face-to-face to hear about their life experiences and learn their approach to oration. But two people I’d really be interested in meeting and talking with are Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Mark Cuban.
Nassim, because I love his thoughts on black swan events, randomness, and philosophy and think there are some interesting parallels with how science progresses and major discoveries occur. And because my background in philosophy would let us talk about a broad range of topics, I feel like we could have a rewarding chat over lunch.
I’d also like to have lunch with Mark too, because he’s seen so much in business and life that I feel like a lunch with him would teach me as much as an MBA. In particular, his thoughts on consumer products, retail, and everything involved with that would be invaluable to me. I also like his thoughts on the value of a philosophy degree and definitely validate his idea that a degree in philosophy is worthwhile, and maybe I could teach him some tips for scientific feasibility when considering what biotechs to invest in.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
Making Something From Nothing: Dr JJ Richardson Of SWIFF On How To Go From Idea To Launch was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
