Working Towards Our Purpose

Gino Cordone [00:00:05]:

Welcome to Working Towards Our Purpose, a podcast that offers a different perspective on what a job can be. For everyone out there that's heard that voice in the back of their head asking for something more, it's time to listen to it. I'm your host, Geno, and join me as I interview people who have decided to work in their own purpose. Together we will learn, become inspired, and hopefully find our own path towards working in our purpose. Joining me today on the podcast is Kendall Egan, who has worked in many different businesses and startups doing business development, sales, and marketing. She ran her own marketing consulting agency and is now the co founder of Box, a startup that creates prefab work from home pods. Kendall. Welcome to working towards our purpose. How are you doing today?

Kendall Egan [00:00:52]:

I'm good, thank you for having me. It's going to be fun.

Gino Cordone [00:00:55]:

Yeah, I'm glad you're here. So why don't we start by just you telling us in your own words a little bit about yourself and what you do and maybe even where you went to school and that sort of thing.

Kendall Egan [00:01:06]:

Sure. So I grew up in California, went to school in Boston, met a New Yorker, and ended up in New York. So that's the condensed version. And I started off as a liberal arts major, not really knowing what I wanted to do and had a couple of great internships. But again, it was a different sort of era. And as a liberal arts major, you didn't really go through the corporate recruiting as much as the business school did. So I ended up starting off in sales, spot sales and for CBS and really in an assistant role and then worked into a junior role. And then it was just going to be really too hard to stay in spot sales. As much as I liked advertising sales, as much as I liked sales, it was just a little bit unpleasant. And I moved into fashion, same thing doing sales and marketing. Started off in corporate marketing, moved into sales, then had a baby and stepped off. The math was different back in the day with childcare, you kind of looked at what your salary was versus what childcare costs and it was like, well, this doesn't make any sort of sense. I'm not investing in my future by staying in the workforce. I stepping off because childcare is so expensive and it doesn't make any sense. So took that hiatus and then really started back in in that freelancing type of role. Did a great research project, finished my MBA, and then went to work for my first startup and that was Gluten Free Living Magazine. Gluten Free Publishing was the overarching company and it was a really great experience because at the time I went back into sales again, back into advertising sales and it was such a hot topic. Like all things gluten free was just a really hot topic in the print publishing was still a big thing. So we were building this great book of advertising I was building this great book of advertising business and all of these exciting social media platforms were also starting at that time. So Facebook came along and Instagram and Pinterest and Twitter and we just learned to use all of these things and harness all of these things. And so while these digital things were on the rise, print publishing was not thriving as much and we were acquired kind of at the exact right time. All of a sudden this big book of business that I had built, they were also doing social media and they were looking at using Facebook and Pinterest and Instagram and Tumblr and all these other things and writing blogs. So they were kind of able to do their own thing. So that was just a very lucky we sold it the right time. The topic continued to be huge. I stayed on with the company for a year and then went and started doing my own marketing. My first client actually was Mattebormedia who had purchased Gluten Free Living and we did a conference together so did that for three years and then went back into brand marketing which was a small boutique agency up in Norwalk and that was an awful lot of fun. It was a really different it wasn't the digital stuff as much, it was more birthing a company from an idea to launch and again that was a really great experience. Stepped off again for caregiving this time on the other end taking care of my parents. And then since then it's been a series of startups, some more successful than others and kind of have stayed. I feel like I've pigeonholed myself into a startup role just going forward, but it is an awful lot of fun. So there's the short version.

Gino Cordone [00:05:24]:

Well, thank you for sharing. Is the startup culture kind of different? Because I don't have any experience with startups or anything like that. I do have very traditional corporate experience. Do you have any opinion on what the differences are and maybe pros and cons of startup culture?

Kendall Egan [00:05:39]:

Sure. So one thing in corporate America is that you get hired for a job, you're either in sales or you're in marketing and you have a set of whether you call them tasks or deliverables or things that you do every single day. And an awful lot of corporate America jobs have cycles. So it's wash, rinse, repeat, you kind of do the same thing over and over again and you get really good at something, you master something and you rise up the ladder. You learn new skills of course. But for sales for example, one of the things that you end up as you progress is management. And management and sales are very different jobs. And I'm not as fond of the management piece as I am the sales piece. And so I didn't want that trajectory as much and in marketing as things got digital, people really thought that, especially in digital, that someone significantly younger was the digital native. And so even though I had used and harnessed and learned and done campaigns and done all this from the inception of these products, these services, this medium, I was never going to be able to get into digital marketing because I wasn't in my twenty s or thirty s. No one really believed that I had those skill sets. And I always ended up with social media and always ended up even with every startup. So again, it's just very the trajectory and the daily tasks are very different in corporate America. Some of it is repetitive, some of it is for me, sales and marketing, we're very separate and distinct in corporate America, whereas with a startup, very different. In a startup, you wear a lot of different hats, you have a lot of different responsibilities. Your job evolves as needs evolve. So for example, the last one I was in, I was hired to do vendor development, so business development, create that book of business, bring in new companies. But along the way, there was a portal that was developed. So I'm teaching vendors how to use it, and I'm doing UIUX on the portal. I'm like, no, this doesn't work. Let's send it back to development. And that's something in an established company, your portal is working, your stuff is working. You're not liaising with the developers to fix it. You're not saying, I think we should do it this way instead, because it's an established thing. It's not this new evolving, iterating brand new product. So again, it can be overwhelming in the sense that you have to learn to say, I can't do this, my plate is full. And sometimes that's not acceptable in a startup, you don't have that ability to say, I really can't do one more thing. But it is that excitement, and that it's a thrill of just building something from the ground up and knowing that your fingerprints are all over whatever the technology is, and whether it's the marketing strategy and the social media campaigns and writing the instruction manual, doing the beta test on something, it's just all very gosh. It's really exciting, for lack of a better word. You really get to dive in and play with every facet of the company.

Gino Cordone [00:09:23]:

Yeah, that sounds to me from my own personality and stuff like that. It sounds like that would be something that would interest me, because you can kind of do something different every day and figure out new problems and maybe similar to working for maybe a smaller company where you don't just have one task, but you do your task, and then you kind of help out here and you kind of can help put your own self into the company, I think, which is interesting, right? But talking a little bit more about marketing, I did want to ask you about marketing itself and marketing as a whole, because you did mention, like, in corporate, they maybe break up marketing into different categories, but to you, maybe they're very different categories. And I think even just to myself, marketing is like such a vague term, and I don't even really know a lot about it. And being kind of a solo business owner, having to do all of it is very overwhelming. What parts of marketing have you done specifically? You said social media and stuff like that, but what other parts of marketing are there that are important for a business?

Kendall Egan [00:10:23]:

Well, there's a part of marketing that is directly linked to sales. So that's customer acquisition. A sales team needs collateral. They need a good, strong website that's working. Whether the sales team is developing it themselves or whether they're working hand in hand with a marketing team, they need to know their customer. They have to have email pitches and scripts written. They need to be able to have teaching documents if it's a platform or a service. So there's a whole lot of marketing that goes into supporting sales. That's one tranche, and it's very important. Obviously, the better your messaging is, the better your website is, the better the collateral on your product is, the more successful your sales team is. Anything that you can do in support of that, there's customer acquisition. There's knowing your customer, understanding the personas. That's more in brand marketing. Brand marketing is the look, the feel, the personality traits, the reasons to believe in a company, all of the emotional benefits, what you look like, what are your colors, what are your fonts, what's your logo, what's your tagline, what's your message? Again, getting into the words, the core things, and then getting into personas and understanding who are you targeting, what's the value proposition of that? So it's that whole building your brand is one segment of marketing. Then there's all the digital, there's advertising, there's SEO, Se, M. There's keyword planning, and how are people going to find your website, and how have you studied your website with all of those words in your tagging and in your content and having it be authentic and good content, but still harnessing those keywords for search results. There is social, there's developing those audiences. I mean, when everything was first launched, building a core following was so easy. It was easy. It was great because there was no gates. Now there's gates on everything. You have to pay to play. And then there's a whole advertising segment in there. You don't just launch a Facebook page and all of a sudden, just through really great content, get an audience, because you're not getting seen by anybody unless you pay to play. So that's why all these evolutions. When TikTok comes along and something else comes along, in the initial stages, it's kind of much easier to get a following until they put the gates on. There there's influencer marketing, having somebody rep your brand, paying someone to wear your clothes or put the lipstick on and talk about it, and whether you're using an Instagram or TikTok, that's a whole nother segment of marketing. And not every product needs to utilize everything. Every product, every service should start with the brand and do all of that foundational stuff and then move into I think a website definitely provides that credibility. It gives your customers a place to search you. If you use YouTube, that's a huge search engine. That's number two search engine. If you have products on Amazon, that's a search engine. That's a way people research and find you. It's about getting found and it's about customer acquisition. It's about supporting sales. So another aspect of it is earned media. PR is not marketing. PR is separate and distinct. But in a small company, sometimes you have to oversee that. Podcasting is another. We had an agency in my past company that procured speaking engagements for the founder and CEO. So under that marketing umbrella, I ran that, I vetted the podcast. I'm like, no, we don't want to be on that one, we want to be on this one. So again, there's a lot of stuff that can go under that umbrella, but every company doesn't have to embrace every single strategy.

Gino Cordone [00:14:51]:

Yeah. Wow. Just listening to you describe all those different areas makes me realize, oh, that's why it's so overwhelming for marketing, because there's so many different things you could do. But I think an important piece of what you just said is you don't necessarily need all of them. And I think that's maybe something that I've been trying to learn as of recent and pick the ones that are actually going to be working for me and then focus more so on those so I can do a better job at those. So as far as social media, from my perspective, I'm not a social media person. I don't like social media at all. But I know you hear people say all the time you need a huge following and that's what's going to drive your business and stuff like that. Do you have an opinion about social media? And is it important to have a social media following or are there some cases where maybe it's not even necessary to have social media? Because it certainly is a huge time commitment.

Kendall Egan [00:15:41]:

It's a time sucks.

Gino Cordone [00:15:43]:

Yeah, I was going to say that.

Kendall Egan [00:15:47]:

I think again, it all goes back to how are you going to be found and whether you have a service, you have a product, you have a podcast, how are people going to find you? How are people going to engage with your brand, your product? And that's really what you have to think about, using content to showcase your value proposition. Why are you different from other people? Why is your T shirt better than someone else's T shirt? Why is your insurance service better than other people's insurance service. Whatever it is, you have to think about methods to put your brand out there for people to find you. So, again, when I say you don't have to do everything, maybe a podcast doesn't have to be on Pinterest, but maybe it should be on Facebook and LinkedIn. Maybe those are the two ones that you think are the best ones for a clothing brand. Maybe TikTok is the right place. You also have to look at the age group that you're trying to are you a corporate brand? Are you a fun brand? Are you targeting Boomers? Are you targeting gen? Z? It's all about kind of figuring out and that's really the key thing to do, is figure out, well, who's my target audience? What's the voice I'm using to reach my target audience, and where is that best place to actually have my target audience find me? And that all goes into this whole overarching strategy for Box. What I'm seeing is that Pinterest is really important. If people are planning a she shed, they're all over Pinterest. I need to be all over Pinterest. If I want someone to take a prefab studio and turn it into a she shed, like, I got to play in that sandbox, because that's where Instagram is another one that's kind of important. If I want to target work from home people, which I do, I am employing a strategy of work from home thought leadership on LinkedIn, like sharing articles, sharing blogs, sharing work from home statistics, and talking about the mental health benefits of having a separate workspace that you can leave at the end of the day. That's stuff that targets that audience. So I may be playing in multiple areas and creating content for multiple areas, but I've got a voice for each one, and that's just about getting found. I want people to find me, and I want the right people to find me. Creating a yoga studio. I'm on Pinterest. I'm on Instagram. Creating a place for zoom calls without your kids barging in. I'm on Facebook. I'm on LinkedIn. So that's how you kind of decide where you're going to put your messaging out.

Gino Cordone [00:19:10]:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think that's also why it's so important to have your target market identified. And I think maybe as a small business, that's something that at least I've struggled with trying to not appeal to everybody and be like, well, let me be very specific in who I'm trying to target, because then it makes all that other stuff a lot easier. Because you can say no to these things because it doesn't make sense for this specific target.

Kendall Egan [00:19:33]:

And I think that's something a small business and I saw this very much so when a small business goes from an idea to a working, functioning concept and a business, there's so much effort and energy put into the company name, the URL, maybe the logo and colors and all of that. But doing the whole entire brand project is so important. And you can't skip that step. And I think a lot of companies make the mistake of skipping that step. You've got to really identify your target audience. You've got to identify the voice you want to use to reach that target audience. You have to really understand why you're different, what's your value proposition, your points of differentiation. And then as you do that, you can really start honing your messaging to be very effective because you're going after your customer acquisition strategy starts with the knowledge of who you actually think your customer is. And that's really important. And it's a step that you just shouldn't skip in that whole brand identity process. And it is think about this. You're a solopreneur, you're super busy. You've got the accounting responsibilities and the procurement and ordering responsibilities and the setup and the calendaring and selling my business and all of that stuff is all your responsibility. And you're supposed to also take a step back and say, well, who is my customer and what is their persona so critical?

Gino Cordone [00:21:20]:

Yeah. And I think part of it too is that it seems like it's more almost like of an art thing, especially when it comes to copywriting and coming up with taglines or very short text under your logo on your website of three words or four words. I found that to be extremely challenging. And is that something that is more of an art sort of thing, or can it be driven by data?

Kendall Egan [00:21:45]:

So that's a really great question, and I would say that coming up with something witty and clever and all of that, there are folks out there who are tremendous at that. There are some tools out there that you can really also help. You can use chat GPT to feed it prompts and hone it in and come up with some things. If you're not the best writer or the most creative individual, there's helpful tools out there. And then there is a data component too. When I was developing email pitches and messaging, you test it like, let's test this subject line, let's test this subject line. Let's test this line underneath the subject line. When you use, like, MailChimp, for example, you have the ability to replicate a campaign and change your subject line, change the little line that goes underneath it. And really half the time that's all you're going to get from anybody's attention on an email. They're going to see those two things, the subject line and that. And you've got data, good data to see what works. You can see like, okay, this had an open rate. This particular combination of subject line and the underneath line had a much higher open rate. So let's go with that one. And then you can also test your messaging inside there, like what in your content of the body of your email what worked, what resonated, what got you a phone call? And again, that data. That's the secondary part. So you test things. No one hits a home run in their messaging, right, at their first event. You just have to keep testing and iterating and seeing different combinations and patterns of things that work. You may segment an audience for a campaign and think, I've got this, and then it's like, well, that wasn't that successful, and let's try a different audience. Let's try something else. And that's part of marketing is really testing, testing, testing, and using the data and all of the great analytic tools at your fingertips to see what sticks, what made a difference with your customer.

Gino Cordone [00:24:07]:

Yeah, I think that's great advice. I think that's partially why it seems like so much of a task for me, because I'm always thinking like, all right, what's the one thing I can do? And then be good with it forever? Instead of thinking of it like, well, maybe this is trial A and then we'll do a trial B and then compare them and then C and it's an iterative process. So I think maybe a lot of times it seems like you can't do that because that would be too time consuming or something. But in the end, if you spend less time doing the first iteration, you probably do have enough time to do two of them and look at the actual data, right? So, yeah, I think that's a really good advice.

Kendall Egan [00:24:44]:

And conversely, if you just go with something and you just go with it and you stick with it and you have no idea, could something be better? If it's not working at all, that's a pretty positive clue that you should probably try something else. But could something else be better? Could something else resonate more with someone? So just, again, just keep trying things and messages. Also, you need to be fresh. You need to keep things. You've got some probably the same eyeballs looking at stuff over and over again. So you want to keep it fresh and changing and new. Keep people coming back for more.

Gino Cordone [00:25:26]:

That's also a good point. I think that's maybe something you don't really think about either. Even if you do have a good message or good colors or branding or logo, you may want to refresh it in five years or so or however that looks like. How do you feel about Chat GBT in specific? And like, AI, is that going to be a tool that will help automate some of the marketing, or will it more so, just help people who are doing marketing?

Kendall Egan [00:25:51]:

So it's a tool that all of this degenerative AI is just to me, it's absolutely fascinating. I've used it to create art for blogs. I'm not really good at prompts yet for art. I definitely have to work on that. I'm like, no, that's not what I wanted at all. That's absolutely not what I wanted, but it really is great for I don't think it's going to totally replace copywriters or writers in general because from what I've seen so far, the writing is basic, it's very simplistic and I think people can string subject verb together a little bit more interestingly than the AI right now. But it is phenomenal for background. You know, like, hey, I need a listicle of like the top five reasons it's great to work from home or the top ten productivity tips, stuff like that. And you can just keep regenerating and regenerating and then you can pull it out and all of that background is kind of done for you. And then as a blog writer, I can make that background my own. So it saves me a ton of time. I use Chat GPT, for example, to create a bunch of background information or really search and find background information about the Sunday scaries. Are the Sunday scaries less if you work from home? I don't know. But I went in and I used it and found a bunch of different things that sounded really good to me. They sounded thoughtful and pulled it out and then I'm going to use that background to write something original and it's just extremely helpful in that regard and I think it is going to change a lot of certainly it's going to change a lot of marketing. I think. For example, one of the things Canva is doing, which is so great, is that they will generate text and then you feed the text back in and it will generate social media posts for you. Like you pick a template for like, let's say an Instagram post. You want to post tips on something, it'll generate the tips and then you feed the tips back in after you pick a template and it generates 25 social media posts. That's epic. That's huge. Some of this stuff, erasing, backgrounds, it's all in one platform they're using. It's almost a democratization of graphic design and things that you don't necessarily need a Photoshop for anymore or anyone can do it, basically. So it is very interesting to see the utilization of some of these generative AIS.

Gino Cordone [00:28:48]:

Yeah, definitely two things that I just thought of as you were speaking to Connect, like the Chat GBT because I've tried using it and it haven't really been helpful. But I think if you think of it in a different way and you're not thinking of it as like it's going to write my blog article, you're going to think of it as it's doing the research for my blog article because it's a really good research tool that works a lot faster than I do. So if you can use it almost as doing all the research for you, then you can start your blog post way further ahead and with way less time than you would have previously. So I think that's really interesting, for sure. Canva has also been like a hugely helpful tool for me, even just like when I'm working with clients and trying to make podcast cover art or something like that. I don't know how to use any Adobe software, but on Canva I can make a pretty good looking cover art and you can edit it and you can change it. It's made it a lot easier to be a graphic designer. Just one cool thing I've used on Canva in the past is the QR code generator.

Kendall Egan [00:29:47]:

Oh, absolutely.

Gino Cordone [00:29:48]:

Just put a link in and have a QR code. I didn't know how to do that before, but right, that's super helpful.

Kendall Egan [00:29:53]:

Well, you could actually do that in Google as well, but it is prettier. When you do it in Canva, it's a stylized QR code, which is really nice. Instead of having like I did one for box and it had like a little dinosaur in it, I used Google, but then when I did it in Canva, it was like a round one. It was pretty I could move it into different things and it was so easy, right? Like just so easy.

Gino Cordone [00:30:23]:

Yeah, it's crazy.

Kendall Egan [00:30:25]:

And that's something where, again, having moved into startups and really working with startups in the past four or five years, it is that mile wide set of experiences just for that foundational build. And then once you get that foundation, you really do need specialists. You need people who are very good at running campaigns and doing things for social media and someone else to handle content and development and have it hire a team for sales. There's things that you get to a point of, like, okay, I've done this foundational build, and now I got to hire people who are those corporate people who have that specialization and who like to be in something where they're in that cycle, and there are people who are very good at that. And like, I like sales, and I want to do sales, and I love this cycle, and I love knowing what tomorrow is going to look like. And I like doing wash, rinse, repeat, and that's great. There's people that you need everybody, right? You need everybody in there. People like myself who aren't so fond of doing the same thing over and over again. And then the people who really they just want to be in sales or they just want to do social media or they just want to do this. Those are the people that I need. Once a startup gets to a point of critical scale, like, I can't have my finger in every pot. Someone else has to handle this and just this.

Gino Cordone [00:32:04]:

Yeah, no, I think that's a really good point too, because I think a lot of times I'll look at corporate and just from my own experience, look at it really cynically and be like, oh, this is terrible place, I don't want to be here, nobody should be in there. But in some. Cases, there are people who excel in that environment and that's something that they do, like, so that's definitely something to be aware of. And then even, like you're saying, if you're scaling a business, you need certain people to do certain tasks and not want to stray or not want to go do other things and be distracted. Right.

Kendall Egan [00:32:35]:

They have 25 years experience in a particular area. They have done a lot of different roles and whatnot in like, a retail buyer, for example, they've done that particular job, they've moved up, they're very senior, but they've always done that and they may have done it for a couple of different companies. You need that person with that core expertise. Eventually, as you're starting, you really just need people who can get in there and grind and do a lot of different things and get the ball rolling.

Gino Cordone [00:33:10]:

Yeah, definitely. So, yeah, I do want to talk a little bit more about Box and how you got involved in Box and how you got started. So yeah, if you want to share.

Kendall Egan [00:33:18]:

Sure. So Trevor found me. So Trevor Hufford and I have been working together now since really since January. And I had just come off a startup. I was pretty burned out, I have to say. It'd been two years of two and a half years through the Pandemic, like, working all the time. And I was like, I got to step off. I'm just exhausted. And I'm like, my whole opinion was, gosh, I am super done with startups. I can't do this anymore, this is too exhausting. And he contacted me. He had found my profile on, I think it was like Angel Co at the time, and they are well found or something else now. And it kind of scoped me on LinkedIn. And he had a couple of partners who had helped him with the foundational build of Box. So he's got 20 plus years in construction, particularly with these structural insulated panels with a very specific precision type of construction and the whole work from home. During the Pandemic movement, a couple of people had asked him to build them studios in their backyard. So once you get asked more than once, you're like, wait, is there something here? Is there a business here? So we started working together in earnest in January, and I really am doing more of the I took over the whole marketing end of it and the customer acquisition strategy part of it, and really just trying to think about potential partnerships and how are we going to sell this and do we have the right models? There have been some changes and some things in development now that I think are going to be very fruitful. So we're at a stage right now where we're building one up in Massachusetts right now. It looks great. And a lot of learning comes from that. He had built a couple during the Pandemic, so the pricing was the pricing right? Is this sustainable? What are we going to change? Like, those discussions we will have after this, but just really currently working on? Let's figure out how we can get to a point where we're selling a couple of these a month and then get to a point where is the demand there to build a factory? He really wants to build a factory and it's just absolutely ground level right now, trying to see which model is going to be the most successful, which size, what's the price point. So we're kind of focusing on three different price points, three different models. We're adding a fourth model now in collaboration with another company. The ink is not quite dry yet on the deal, so I'll keep that under wraps. But in seeing if we can become a regional player in these small structures, these backyard structures, ADUs are big deal out west. This whole concept of backyard units is much bigger out west. So, you know, we're kind of introducing it to this northeast corridor. You know, this hasn't been as big a thing here. And we're building it in such a way that it's structurally sound and insulated. Like, a lot of the sheds out west are literally just converted sheds and there isn't insulation. There's no need for it. We were talking like, oh, you got to have French doors on a she shed. And on the west, the doors can open out. Trevor's like here the doors open in because of snow. We can't have those doors opening out. They open in on the east coast. So it's just like those type of things, figuring out our personas, figuring out our target market, figuring out, is it a work from home, is it a shed, is it an art studio? Like, what resonates the most? And we're just slowly but surely looking at each area of business reaching out to them. So he's design and build and I'm customer acquisition and marketing and partnership development. So we're working together. I'm building a movie, an imovie right now of the project going up. I'm like, take some more pictures, let's take some video. I know you're very busy, but please provide me the tools I need.

Gino Cordone [00:38:07]:

Right, you got to get that content.

Kendall Egan [00:38:09]:

Yeah. And I swore I was like, I'm not doing another startup. But he's a good guy and we do get along very well. And I am thinking that this has some legs, that there's going to be some interest. Everybody seems to be very interested in it and we just have to figure out the right size, price point and kind of the easiest way to put these together. And do we have endless design choices or do we more curate design choices and narrow it so it's all kind of like up in the air right now and iterating and discovering what works.

Gino Cordone [00:38:48]:

Like you said earlier, the testing and seeing what works. So are you also testing the end client too. Like you were saying that the different kinds of either art studio or the she shed or work from home. Are you testing those three and are there intentions to kind of pick one?

Kendall Egan [00:39:04]:

No, I don't think there's intentions to pick one. It really is more in the what's the decision maker on this? Right? The marketing research said X, but in the reality we've seen Y and we don't have enough data yet because again, these are long lead time sales. It's not something you just go on Amazon and buy. It's definitely a process of discussion and design and put a deposit down and then okay, we'll get these things done. And what do you think about these colorways? And there's renderings that have to be built and maybe that's too much customization. And maybe as we go through this we're going to say here are the four colorways that you can choose from. And we've already got the renderings for these. So again, it is very iterative at this point in time. But we are looking at, to your point testing, testing a different look. Right now our models and designs are very sleek and they're modern and we're looking at a different model. We're looking at something that's a little bit more in flavor of like Nantucket and that different sort of design. Maybe that's something that that's a she shed market. And this particular model is what we really push for an office. So again, it's still very nascent and no decisions have been made. And so because it is long lead time, the testing will be long lead time and we will continue to message to different segments to figure out, okay, where are we going to get the most traction to get to a point of real, not scale but like sustainable. That okay, we can invest the money now to go into a space to actually assemble these in a factory and then deliver them and install them versus right now we're assembling them as a kit and installing them on site because we don't have the volume yet to do it any other way. So you just got to keep kind of grinding and figuring it out.

Gino Cordone [00:41:26]:

Yeah. So we are getting kind of close to the end of our time here. But I did have one more question for you that I just kind of thought of as you were speaking. And that's as far as like when you're looking at the data of something versus maybe even having your own opinion or your own wants about something, how do you separate that? Because I think for myself, I've maybe seen the data but been like, well, this is the answer I like and then trying to make the data make sense for that answer. How do you separate that the gut feeling, right?

Kendall Egan [00:41:55]:

That's a really great question. I really don't think that you can't ignore the data. You also can't ignore your gut and I think that I lean very heavily on going into this. For example, we're going to target women, this household income, this particular type of neighborhood. And I looked at that and I said, well, that's interesting, but I'm not sure our designs fit that particular what what the marketing research found, you know, and so I said that's what sort of prompted me. Maybe we need a different roof line. Maybe we need to talk to these people because I'm not sure that what we're offering fits what the research said is our ground truth. So that did prompt a discussion that prompted an outreach to another company like, hey, can we potentially collaborate? Because I think you could help us come up with a design that would resonate with the marketing that we found. And then I'm going to work with somebody else and saying, this is my hypothesis. Right to your point. This is what I think. But I'm not sure. And we don't have enough data yet. The data that we have doesn't say this, but how can we test to see if my hypothesis is true? I think that we should be targeting men. I think that when you look at a car decision or you look at a $35,000 decision, like, should we be targeting the men and not the women? Like, I don't know. Or like, should it be a more joint target? And and so there's just things there's nuance that you kind of go in and you think about it and you don't ignore your gut, but then you kind of figure out a way to again, test it. Test it before you do anything. When you're messaging and you're doing a campaign, you can look at all your analytics. You can see if it's working or not pretty quickly. And so you pivot if it's like, okay, this is not right, you pivot away from it. And for us, it's like it's a design. We're not building something and then showing it based upon a hypothesis. We can design it and advertise it and market it and see what the reaction is. So again, it's very different. If you have to plunk down for inventory or invest money up front to build something, maybe you go more on data. But when you can use messaging and design and ad campaign and potential collaboration to test the hypothesis, it's just a little different.

Gino Cordone [00:45:02]:

Yeah, those are all really great points, I think, and certainly a balance between the gut and the data because I think the data is only going to show you so much and depending on where you're getting the data and how you're getting it and that sort of thing. So I think that's a really smart way of going about it is kind of balancing it and using both to help make the best decision.

Kendall Egan [00:45:22]:

Yeah.

Gino Cordone [00:45:24]:

So thank you so much. Unfortunately, we've run out to the end of our time here, but if people would like to connect with you or with Box. Where are the places that they can find you?

Kendall Egan [00:45:33]:

Absolutely. So the easiest place to find us is on our website, it's boxbox.org, and I can put my email in the show notes if you'll allow me to do that. But it's Kendall@box.org, and Trevor is Trevor@box.org, and we work closely together every day. So happy to have a conversation with somebody who wants some backyard space.

Gino Cordone [00:45:59]:

Definitely. I'll for sure link those in the show notes so people can get a hold of you guys and check out the product that you guys are creating. So thank you again for coming on and for all your wisdom.

Kendall Egan [00:46:09]:

Thank you, Gino. Thank you. This is a lot of fun. Appreciate it.

Gino Cordone [00:46:13]:

Thanks.

Kendall Egan [00:46:13]:

Okay, take care. Bye.

Gino Cordone [00:46:16]:

Thanks for tuning in and listening to Working towards our purpose. If you like this episode, please share it with a friend and don't forget to subscribe for more episodes.