Mountain Cog

089 – If you’re buying a bike light based on lumens alone… you’re wrong! (Outbound Lighting, Tom Place)

Mountain Cog - Joshua Anderson & Dane "Guru" Higgins Episode 89

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Outbound Lighting is a premier bicycle light manufacturer in Chicago, IL.  In this episode, the boys sat down to chat with Tom Place (Co-Owner, Engineer, Testing, & Customer Service) from Outbound Lighting to go deep on all things related to mountain bike lights.

And as the title of this podcast would suggest, we learned that there’s a lot more to a great mountain bike light than just the number of lumens.  Those things include; beam pattern, light requirement, runtime, battery management, thermodynamics and heat, mounting systems, durability, charge time, size, weight, price, and the user interface. 

After this episode Josh was so intrigued that he went ahead and ordered two Outbound Lighting Trail Evos (their flagship light) for his wife and him to test out (at full price).  Will advise on their experience in a future episode, but we are optimistic that they will love them.    

Outbound Lighting
Web: https://www.outboundlighting.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/outboundlighting/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OutboundLighting/

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Josh:

so, uh, I went on a bike ride earlier today, okay and uh, on the back of my bike I had my friend ruth, okay, and it was an epic ride. Unfortunately, about halfway through the ride, she fell off.

Dane:

You know what I did I don't know, you had to go pick up your baby ruth.

Josh:

No, I did that's a good one.

Dane:

We got another I'm trying, I'm trying so hard to figure yeah no, um no, I just left her.

Josh:

You know why why? Because I'm ruthless oh, jesus christ tom's not even laughing. These are so bad. Why did I agree to this podcast?

Dane:

They're always bad. Why do we do that to ourselves?

Josh:

I don't know, but we are here today, tuesday night, with Tom Dangerplace, who's co-owner engineer testing customer service.

Dane:

Wait, Danger's your middle name.

Tom "Danger" Place:

Danger is his middle name, or at least his nickname, at least not legally, but people remember it, so it's easier.

Josh:

Tom danger place uh from outbound lighting. Um alpine lending is a chicago-based uh manufacturing company for lights and they are making next generation bike lights. I do have a couple questions, and you touched on one already before we kind of get into it, tom. Where the hell does danger come from?

Tom "Danger" Place:

yeah, yeah, uh, that is uh. So basically nobody in the us calls me danger anymore, aside from a couple random old high school friends. Okay, came from uh watching a leslie nielsen movie. I think it was naked gun 33 and a third oh god, I love that movie love it.

Tom "Danger" Place:

I spent a lot of time in the emergency room growing up and so I was very accident prone. And at some point he says but Frank, you might end up dead. Might end up dead is my middle name. That just went in this other discussion and so that's where the name came from. And then it only really became common when I was working crew for bc bike race and, uh, when I was managing the bag team. There are four other toms, four toms total, on crew. On staff so radios?

Tom "Danger" Place:

yeah, I had to go by nicknames and so at that point a lot of people only knew me as danger.

Josh:

Nice with that second canadian family well, I think we should try to bring it back so to our listeners. If you run into Tom somewhere in the world, please call him Danger Well and a funny thing is I worked with a guy, bruce.

Dane:

He had a son and his son's middle name was Danger Danger. Yeah, he did that on purpose and it was legit. It was a joke, but it was also legit.

Josh:

I mean, you know we were going to name Maddie Hazard. Yeah, yeah, Hazard, we didn't see through it, Okay. Second question On the website. So I work in a? I've got to give you some context here. I work at a company with 30,000 engineers right, Huge company, a lot of engineers. On your website it says you are a socially dependent engineer.

Tom "Danger" Place:

Can you double click on that a little bit? What does that mean to me? Yeah, a lot of um outgoing family people, and so I kind of grew up with these two weird influences and I'm just this kind of uh strange engineer who I like to talk to people uh really that and, uh, to the extent that I actually need it almost all the time, there's very rarely a time where I need like alone time to just sit and quietly reflect.

Tom "Danger" Place:

I can't sit still. Um, I have severe add and I just need to be around people all the time. So, um, when I say socially dependent, it's not like it's different from extroverted. I don't need to be the center of attention, I just need to be around people right now, as often as possible that's cool, that's awesome.

Josh:

So out of the 30 engineers, I think I've met about three. Oh, that match that description so that's you're a rare breed from my experience, tom did you ever watch um office space?

Dane:

oh yeah so that guy who was like I talked to the engineers and then I talked to the customer, wait was that office?

Josh:

space that was office space I am a people person and he's, you know the jump to conclusions, the swing line scaper guy I had that job, that was my job, and and it was to talk to engineers yeah and then talk to the customers and I had to translate and, and that's a legit thing, I mean, isn't that pretty much what you do today between your mechanics and the customers at the bike?

Dane:

mechanics. I just keep them from stabbing people that's all so it's a very, very critical job.

Josh:

All right. So you guys have been on lots of podcasts and I'll urge our listeners to go out and just search on Outbound Lighting and you will see a whole bunch of podcasts. I think the most recent one was in January of this year with Bikes and Big Ideas, nice.

Dane:

Is that the one that I heard? So there's a reason that I wanted to get a hold of you, and it may have been that one. Okay so there's a reason that I want to get ahold of you, and it may have been that one, so I I can't remember if that was that one, or biker bar One or the other.

Josh:

I also have a bone to pick with you, Tom. We've met before, oh.

Tom "Danger" Place:

Oh, oh.

Dane:

Oh.

Josh:

So I was actually at Seattle this year and I really wanted to talk with you to kind of line this up, and I stood outside your booth for like 20 minutes and you looked at me and just sat there and talked to someone else and put me on the pain on my list. I'm like I'm never talking to that guy ever again.

Dane:

I'm going to tell you right now I did that four times stay in the shop, but I did make like, like sexy eyes at the people I was ignoring just so that they know that. I know they're there, but I, tom, didn't make sexy eyes at me.

Josh:

No, see, we got to work on the sexy.

Tom "Danger" Place:

I'm just messing with you. It sounds like you're describing a scenario in which we did not meet all right.

Josh:

So, um, lots of content out there on outbound. We don't want to um repeat all that stuff, but we do want to get, you know, spend a little bit of time up front here to just kind of learn about the company, the products we want to. As a, you know, guy from an engineering, an engineer, and a guy from an engineering company, we want to talk about your design, trades and then your go-to-market strategy. So, if you're cool with it, maybe we could just start with, like you know, tell us about outbound lighting a little bit history. What are you guys about? How'd you guys get started?

Tom "Danger" Place:

sure, um, I'll try to run through this with hitting the highlights. Uh, so my business partner, matt, founded the company in st louis. He did a kickstarter and got over the kick curse, managed to stay in business for a year and not have tons of debt and had a customer base that was stoked and he was doing something novel and interesting. I'll skip a lot of my backstory leading to that point, but basically I was looking to get into bike lights myself after leaving Cree, a career job where I was comfortable and making money and happy and had no reason to leave To go to the bike industry.

Dane:

To make more money. How's that look in the rearview mirror?

Tom "Danger" Place:

It's interesting we could talk about that too. It's a double edged sword, for sure it's more fun, less money. That too, uh, it's a double-edged sword. For sure it's more, more fun, less money, yeah. And uh, honestly, it's just a lot harder personally, because I I actually give a shit, yeah, about the end consumer, like all of my friends and family are riding with my product it I I carry a lot more weight with this than I ever did at a job where I was in a 24-7 manufacturing environment with gigantic contracts on the line, because it just you were punching a clock.

Tom "Danger" Place:

You did your job. This is more personal, but at any rate, I reached out to Matt, cold Call via email, basically wrote him a novel, said we should work together, and he wrote me a novel back. That was even longer, and so we started working on some design stuff. I was working part-time because I had a full-time job and we wanted to be careful about, you know, if this was right and good working relationship, if we had complimentary skill sets. And at, I think, a month 11, we were about to launch Hangover, our first product design together, and so I flew to Chicago to help them assemble the first production run right, and so I flew to chicago to help him assemble the first production run, and that was the first time we met in person or talked. Um, he's, uh, so matt's deaf, uh, so he doesn't talk on the phone.

Dane:

A whole lot no like like, like literally deaf, or yeah, he's deaf since he was a child.

Tom "Danger" Place:

Oh wow, crazy he's got hearing aids so he can hear and talk to you yeah, but if he turns off his hearing aids, he can't hear anything. Wow, crazy it's he. He loves it because he could just tune out the world literally yeah, sleeps very well.

Josh:

I wonder if I could get one just to tune them on my wife's, like the frequency of my wife's voice out, just like what do you call it selective?

Dane:

selective hearing my wife already says I have it, so let me ask you let me stop you real quick.

Josh:

Just did you get involved before or after the the Kickstarter campaign?

Tom "Danger" Place:

Well, after it was probably close to two years, okay, and he had been basically assembling lights in his living room until he relocated to Chicago and there he got about a thousand square feet of just general warehouse space that were just kind of cordoned off and he could work in this cold, dank warehouse in Chicago, right, but it was better than the living room, right. A lot better electrostatic discharge protection, for sure.

Josh:

ESD. I can see the ESD thing hooked to the couch right, the little cable hooked to the couch.

Tom "Danger" Place:

Oh yeah, it was playing fast and loose then, but we've tightened that up quite a bit. That's awesome. I got a story about Crocs later too. If we want to get into that, oh nice. Anyways, we started working together then, and shortly thereafter right at the beginning of COVID actually we decided to. I was going to quit my job and become partner with him full time, so I'm minority owner and so it's just the two of us. For a few years, we had Andy, who builds every single one of our lights. Still today, he's the only person who does that.

Josh:

We'll help out, occasionally Shout out toy.

Tom "Danger" Place:

Yep, thank you, andy. Yeah, uh, he was a part-time out of work actor, uh, and he became in building in the winter and then we brought him on full-time and now he's salaried with benefits and he kicks ass um do you guys write?

Josh:

do you guys use marker and write his name on his shoe?

Tom "Danger" Place:

what's that? What's?

Dane:

that cartoon toy story? Yeah, that reference is so old.

Tom "Danger" Place:

then we brought on uh lauren, uh matt's wife. She uh was a corporate hr manager for many years, was very good at relationship building. She does all of our packaging and shipping and then our supply chain, vendor management, any internal policies and documentation she kind of does. Like all of us, we have several different jobs. Andy's the only person who has one job Right. And then we added Greg, who's a, an engineer, whose entire job is just to make automated assembly equipment for Andy to assemble lights faster and more accurately.

Tom "Danger" Place:

And then I hired Jason back in March of this year just to do customer service. So he's just answering emails. I say just, we spend a lot of time on customer support and that doesn't mean like warranties and repairs. Obviously we cover that stuff too, but any random question we get from a customer we we dive into in detail, because our goal is to spend a lot of time upfront to make sure I'm sure somebody gets exactly what they need for their use case, so their happiest long-term, rather than letting them flail around, try to figure it out on their own and then maybe just be dissatisfied and not convey that to us.

Josh:

So there's just six, six of you guys right now, six total six total. Wow, and if you can't answer these questions, no, no problem, just tell me that and we can cut stuff out of this podcast. If there's things that I'll send you a copy before we publish it and you can cut out anything like me talking right now. But, with six people, like if you're, if you're willing to share, like how many units do you guys sell a year?

Tom "Danger" Place:

Um so this year, uh, it's tens of thousands per year. Wow, yeah, six, wow.

Dane:

It makes me even prouder to have them in the shop, because to me that is, that is like homegrown, you know what I mean that is, that's got more of a story than a lot of the other brands out there.

Dane:

And there are stories in a lot of light companies in the bike industry. They've got good stories actually in a fair amount of them, but that's a pretty solid story and when you're talking to somebody they have a lot of choices. You want to give them a little nugget like that so that they understand that they're supporting six families, you know they're helping six people out, and these there's real people. There's not a bunch of robots in some foreign country making stuff you know.

Tom "Danger" Place:

So we have a bunch of robots in the us making those are american robots, god damn it andy is controlling those robots, but we're actually quite big on robots. We just want them here yeah yeah, and I appreciate that honestly.

Tom "Danger" Place:

Like I feel like all not maybe not all, but most of the bike light companies I mean, like night rider light and motion, have kind of similar stories from 20 years ago or so. Yeah, we're just a lot newer and they've grown a bunch and kind of been saturated in the market and so they're they're in a very different spot. Yep, in their um, their progression and um, I think we're taking a different I'd and I think we're taking a different I'd like to think we're taking a different approach philosophically to the whole company, to from our design approach to the way we support customers, and that'll kind of be our, our story going forward. The only there's really not many companies that I just fundamentally do not like in the industry. I know the guys at Exposure and the guys at glowworm all really good people, good humans. The only ones I really don't respect are magic shine, because it's just deceitful I knew man, I knew, I knew I liked you tom.

Dane:

I, I knew it, I was like, I like this guy.

Dane:

Oh, that's yeah I don't I don't need to sit here and trash the competition though yeah, no, but as a retailer, uh, one of the things you know, like if, as we talk about the topics that we want to talk about as a retailer and a bike shop, you know there's a big shift to direct to consumer, you guys do that and one of the podcasts that I heard you talking about is moving. You know you're, it didn't seem like that's your end goal. It seems like that was just your startup strategy to move more towards a retail, more in the shops and less DTC.

Josh:

Yeah, what's your go-to-market strategy?

Tom "Danger" Place:

Yeah, so I think the end goal is probably 50-50. And I say that because we don't really view the local bike shop market as a competing market to direct consumer. Yeah, the type of customer that comes into their local shop looking for stuff is not the same guy who researches things on the internet and finds exactly what they need or hunts for deals or whatever. And there's some overlap, for sure. But there's. There's a lot of customers that want to be able to shop local first of all. They want their shops of customers that want to be able to shop local First of all, um, they want their shops to exist. They want to support those people, um, but also a lot of people that just trust their shops and what they recommend. So if our shops, you know, like our product and use it and can speak articulately to it, then their customers will buy that from them and then everybody wins.

Tom "Danger" Place:

Um, the main reason that, uh, there's's, there's always going to be a direct consumer component, component, thank you, because this is the age of the Internet. We just we can't get away from it. First of all, there is a type of customer that doesn't care about their local bike shop. They're going to go find whatever they need on the Internet and have it delivered to their door and that's the end of it. The main reason that we want to have a split there and why we start heavy direct to consumer is because that's where the margins are, and to survive as a fledgling company, we really need margin to reinvest in the company and to be able to grow.

Tom "Danger" Place:

If we're just slicing margins thin, so the shop gets their cut and distributor gets their cut, um, it's really hard to grow as a company. You don't have a lot of money to reinvest, which means scaling is done in a very haphazard and kind of reckless way and we're taking the approach of uh, we want to kind of stack up that money and we don't really stack it up cause we ended up spending it almost immediately. But the reason we have robots right now is because we have a heavy E2C component and we're taking money and just immediately reinvesting it in growth. So we're going to hire a couple more people, a couple engineers, full time so we can accelerate getting products out, because we still have a lot of different segments within the industry to cover and ultimately, I think that as we grow our dealer network slowly, we'll eventually reach some balance point where we have both direct consumer and local bike shops, kind of living happily together.

Dane:

Yeah, I'm finding that's a really like the way of the world, like you're talking about. This is the new way things are going forward and it's that symbiotic relationship. It's not a parasitic, you know, and that's when that's been tough for the past.

Tom "Danger" Place:

I mean, you could speak to this too. Uh, perhaps more so with all the like fire sales and overstocking and understocking and just massive reactionary uh tactics at these companies. Everything's on sale all the time and you just can't trust anything. And as a bike shop, it's really tough to buy inventory and then see it go 40% off a week later and then deal with that. Um. So that's one of the things that I think has made this really possible for us.

Tom "Danger" Place:

Um, the way we've kind of built our brand is that we don't do discounts, we don't do promos, we just don't play those games. We don't want to be like limited time by now to just try drive up sales. Yeah, um. Also, my dad always said if you don't respect your time, no one else will either. So we feel like we're charging a reasonable amount for the engineering, the us manufacturing, for the support, for everything that goes into it. And it's not a luxury item, but it's also not chasing amazon products, yeah, and. But it's not a luxury item, but it's also not chasing Amazon products, yeah, and but it's not super expensive.

Josh:

I mean it's there's still affordable prices from my perspective.

Tom "Danger" Place:

It's affordable for a lot of people. There are plenty of people that cannot afford a $3,000 bike and the spending 10% of that on lights is a tall ask, um, and I'm I'm sympathetic to that. I also think that we can't do that. If we start with that product at the beginning, then we can't grow, we're not going to survive as a company, because the race to the bottom is already being won by Amazon and the magic shines the Chinas of the world. We are trying to do something different and create a really stable business, not just for our employees, but also for the shops. So if we as a brand do not have sales throughout the year, we have one sale per year around black friday just because we have to, and we can talk about stupid sale culture I just want to be your best buddy dude that's all there is to it like he talks all the time about how how sales devalue the products well, so I'm the consumer's mind.

Josh:

I got off I.

Dane:

I got a little squirrel um, a little rabbit hole here. I got off the phone with reynolds and I was talking to reynolds and talking to one of their national sales manager guys not the steel company, not the steel company.

Dane:

This is the carbon company so yeah and um, and we were talking about how, when you sell direct to consumer at a sale price, the consumer tends to, uh, basically hold on to that sale price as the actual value of the product. Um, but when you sell a sale or close out, like in my industry yeah you know, I'll get a hot sheet or something. This is way back like ancient days when we used to get faxes of hot sheets that's how old this is but we would get a hot sheet of items that they're getting rid of. There's three of these left. Do you want any of them? And the bike shop does not then value that product any lower. It values it even higher because we now have an opportunity to create value for people. But we don't devalue the brand. But when you do it with the end consumer, it devalues the brand and that's that race to the bottom.

Tom "Danger" Place:

So yeah, and that you're, you punch on something that's. That's very psychological, but it's real. If you buy something for $250 or 150, the $150 product, whether it's the same product or not, is going to feel like a less valuable thing in your brain. You're going to value it less. So if you paid your money, your hard-earned money, for something really nice, you're going to like it more, just generally speaking, unless you have problems or what have you. But you're going to be more inclined to like the product and that makes for a better user experience. Granted, that doesn't mean everything should cost more, but there's a balance right. And for us, I feel like a lot of our policies kind of stem from my frustration with internet discount sale marketing culture that is just systemically deceitful and awful, but also just driving the entire industry down. Where, yes, bikes are too expensive, prices can come down, but we're trying to find a spot that is reasonable, where we can sustain our business and provide a good product and support our shop and a good value to the customer as well.

Dane:

Yeah, if you have to over inflate cause you're going to count on putting it on sale. It's, it's a, it's a problem.

Josh:

You know because you're you're over inflating to just put it on sale like. So I think I think it'd be a good time. You best I can tell from your website you got four core products. Maybe you can tell us about it. Maybe I got that wrong, but I think you got four core products. Can you tell us about your products?

Tom "Danger" Place:

yeah, quick rundown, we have. We have four front lights. Right now we're adding more products, so we'll we'll fill in the tail lights, because somebody is going to ask about that. All that's under development and moving forward. Um, right now we have three primary mountain bike lights and one road light. Um, the road light uh is a very difficult educational task for the us market because we're 90 or 95 north america, yeah, um, uh, mostly us and canada and um, very little in europe. For a lot of reasons trade wars, uh, import fees, all that. The europe, european market is very used to this thing called stvzo uh, which is a, a testing standard for beam pattern for bike lights and it regulates cutoff in the beam so that you're not blinding oncoming traffic and you're not extending outside of your lane. It's very strict and kind of absurd, but it's good in that it forces bike light companies to have better design so it's not just Just full on blinding traffic, which is not safe.

Tom "Danger" Place:

So detour is our approach to that. Where it's it has a cut off beam like a car headlight, but with a much smoother, more even flood, so you still have foreground coverage. You don't just have some weird shaped spot down the road and people aren't used to that. So it's different, but we think it's a better approach to road riding, especially in heavy urban environments. So that's, that's what we're leading off with as our base product. And can I? Can I?

Dane:

do a little a quick translation, just for people listening that the cutoff beam, so basically the beam has. This is coming in modern cars too, where the beam doesn't emit light above a certain level. So if you're standing down the path where somebody's coming at a bike, uh, coming at you with this bike light on, if your head is at a certain height, you don't see the light, it doesn't glare, it doesn't blind you. And that is very, very different because, um, you know what Tom Tom is saying is a lot of lights can just pump out a ton of light, but I get brighted. So when I'm commuting with my, my lights, a car will bright me back, like my lights are so bright it's they see it as distracting, and so that's a very different technology. I don't see any other lights out there that have that.

Tom "Danger" Place:

Uh, they're predominant there's not a lot. There's really not much for us manufacturing that does that. There's not a lot of us brands that do that. Um, and what you're touching on is a quick, important aside, uh, is that it doesn't take a lot of light. Well, it doesn't take a lot of intensity in your eyes to be blinding. Yeah, your eyes are are very sensitive. They respond non-linearly to light input. Um, so a little bit of light can go a long way, which means that if you have just a round spot beam and some of that's going to somebody's eyes, it's, it's going to be blinding and glary, so it makes you squint, it causes your pupils to constrict, which lets less light in, which makes it harder to see everything. It's just generally not great, um, and so that's, that's our approach to roadblock.

Josh:

The price point for the detour, I think 185. Do I got that right 185?

Tom "Danger" Place:

retail.

Josh:

Yeah, awesome yeah all right, so let's talk about your, your mountain bike lights so mountain bike lights, uh kind of our bread and butter.

Tom "Danger" Place:

Uh, mainly because I mountain bike, I really don't road bike um, and god bless you you know, and, and there's just a lot more uh differentiation uh to be had in the mountain bike light market. Uh, there's a lot of lights that are just a bike light, not a handlebar light, not helmet light, not a trail light, not anything really specific, it's just a general light that can kind of go anywhere. And I kind of think of that approach as designing a Mazda 3, where it's kind of okay at everything but not really great at anything. So what we're trying to do is design products very specifically for both the type of riding and where it's going to be mounted. So handlebar lights have very different beam requirements from helmet lights and with that comes different power, battery, weight, size, requirements for ergonomics, and so we're trying to optimize it to keep the weight and size down on your head, on your neck, and then put the power and the width on the bars, where it both benefits you. In tight corners and anytime you're moving the bars around a lot, um, which is a lot, and uh, so you're not feeling bars around a lot, um, which is a lot, and uh, so you're not feeling the weight as much, and it just, it just kind of makes more sense, um, and so we're.

Tom "Danger" Place:

We're not only trying to optimize all those things but then also hit a sweet spot where we're providing as much light as possible without making the light so big and cumbersome to get the run times that are reasonable that you have to have a gigantic external battery pack or a huge honking mount.

Tom "Danger" Place:

We're trying to hit that sweet spot in there and, as a result, you're not going to see like a 10,000 lumen light from us unless we're just screwing around for fun. We're not going to productize that because it doesn't really provide the value you think it does, because your eyes respond non-linear non-linearly to light. So it takes four times as much light to feel twice as bright. And that sounds very wishy-washy but it's. It's a. Your, your rods, your cones are chemical receptors in your eye and they they will saturate. Your pupil is an aperture. It opens and closes to protect those rods and cones. So if you get a high intensity of light in your field of view, your pupils close, which lets less light in, so everything feels dimmer, it's harder to see doesn't mean that more light is bad, just means there's a, there's a balance to everything where too much can make it a worse product in other ways.

Dane:

So just buying the most lumens isn't always the right way to go.

Tom "Danger" Place:

That's what we think. We think that if people try it with the properly engineered product, they'll see that as well.

Josh:

So your mountain bike products right. So you've got the Trail Evo, the Portal and the Hangover.

Tom "Danger" Place:

Yep products right. So you've got the trail, evo, the portal and hangover. Yep, yeah, evo and hangover have been kind of our, our, our core products for a couple years now. Um, both are very current because we do a lot of rolling updates. We're also not a the kind of company that does like a new rev every year that you have to buy because it's 10 brighter or anything like like that. It's not worth it to buy a whole new light because it's 10% brighter. All else equal.

Tom "Danger" Place:

So we try to update things as we go, like we improve the USB doors, we improve the structure of the light, we improve the water ceiling, whatever. But we just kind of roll those into the product. So the current hangover, versus what we launched almost five years ago, every single part of that has changed, except for the top shell okay, the optic, the battery, the led driver, the charging circuit, the leds themselves, the usb port, the lower shell uh, everything. Um, and it's not a v2, which may not be a good business strategy, but that's the way we're doing, that's what you've done.

Josh:

So the uh from a price point perspective, the, the trail evo's like 245, the portable, the portal, which I think is your brand new longer lasting. That's. That's the newest uh helmet mounted light right yes, um.

Tom "Danger" Place:

So hangover is the helmet light, portrayal evo's the handlebar light. That's the core set. That covers, honestly, the majority of customer bases for pretty average trail riding. Honestly, even pretty ripping trail riding, it's plenty. And then the portal fills a gap in between for a couple of different use cases. So we got a lot of feedback from customers and so we try to design a product that kind of fit around that feedback. What were the use cases that drove the portal? The primary use cases would be more aggressive, faster, higher speed, gnarlier, steeper trail riding. We want to see deeper. Like you know, I live in Bellingham now.

Dane:

Nice Lucky.

Tom "Danger" Place:

A lot of really steep chutes there.

Dane:

Yeah.

Tom "Danger" Place:

Everything is steep. It's not like the Phoenix Valley. Phoenix Valley you can go real fast over really rough terrain where a handlebar light is incredibly useful so you can actually read the terrain properly.

Tom "Danger" Place:

It looks three-dimensional. Yeah, In Bellingham it's not that everything is smooth, but it's not nearly as rough, it's just way steeper. So, for example, if you're creeping up to a steep chute or you're about to drop into that chute and look for a catch at the bottom, you need to see deep down into that chute before your butt drop in and before your handlebar points down.

Tom "Danger" Place:

So there's a lot of opportunity for, or a lot of people who are kind of looking for hangover with more power. So that was one. And then there's a lot of people that just want matching runtime hangover. Just to make it as light as possible, we use an 18650 cell. On the portal it has a 21700, so it's 40% more battery capacity so we can match Evo runtime in adaptive medium and low output. And then we also have customers that want something that's more versatile and a lower cost of entry option for bar mounting.

Tom "Danger" Place:

So with Evo you can kind of think of that as a horizontal, flat, wide beam. Hangover you can think of it as a spot, but more of a vertical like. It kind of has a tail below the spot, so it's more of a vertical coverage beam. And then Portal is a little bit more T-shaped. So the idea is that it gives you more punch down the trail for use as a high power helmet light and still gives you that vertical tail. But then it also has significantly more width than hangover. So if it's being used on the bars as, say, a gravel light or cross-country light, um, it'll still give you the width you need. So you still have peripheral coverage. You're not just seeing the trail, you're seeing the sides as well oh, that's cool.

Dane:

So I was going to bring up that um, when, um, you know, I've been selling lights for years. I remember going out with the night rider guys with, uh, the trail rat, uh, which was a lead, you know, acid battery like, super, like. I mean I've been Knight Riding, because in Arizona when I get to ride is usually in the summer and you want to avoid the sun yeah.

Dane:

And I, you know, we always had this philosophy you put the biggest light on your helmet because you have to look into corners and, um, if you had one on your bar it was just kind of an accessory, like the bar light was. If you were going to have one, we said, put it on your helmet. When we started carrying outbound, it was almost the opposite, and it took me a while to get used to that, because when I, uh, and we do 24 hour races we do racing at night when you come up to a corner and you have it on your bar, you're often need to look into that corner before the light gets there because you haven't turned yet. And so I kind of kicked and screamed without bound when we brought it in, because Because it broke your bias.

Dane:

It broke. It broke the the mold that we've been living with, and I didn't understand how he's laughing Like he's heard this before. Oh, I'm sure he has, I'm sure he has heard it a million times and he's probably over, you know.

Tom "Danger" Place:

Explain this over and over Jesus Christ, keep going.

Dane:

But it's important because there are a lot of guys like me out there that may have friends or may work in a shop and they, they don't understand.

Dane:

And and what it took was, um, I was on a ride and I swapped bikes with a buddy who had an outbound light and I didn't, you know, I had a uh lights in motion and I'm like, ooh, you have a light. You know, you have an outbound, I can try this and I want to check it out. I could not believe it was just on the bar, he only had the hangover and I could not believe that I could see in the corners. I didn't slow down at all, I went just as fast as I did with my helmet light, but I only had a handlebar light. And then you add the fact that it's showing the steepness of the terrain that you're hitting, showing the steepness of the train that you're hitting. It's showing the shadows and the contours so you can pick lines and prepare for, prepare, prepare for hits, you know. And uh, it was pretty. It's very different. It's very, very different, and when people experience it, it's kind of groundbreaking for them.

Josh:

I feel like you should be a marketing guy for outbound right now.

Dane:

Well, I, you know, I mean to be perfectly honest, um yeah, our, our manager our manager, ben, brought the outbounds in and I, you know, I didn't really know much about them, hadn't seen much, um, I think, uh, the homegrown, um, tara and al had uh, and art had uh, a kind of mentioned stuff and I had a little bit of awareness. And then Ben's like, well, I think we should bring these in. And I said, you know what, if it sells, bring it in, I don't care, you know. And then it started selling, which was great. But then I started paying attention to it. And it wasn't just another night writer. Lights in motion, magic shine. Whoever you want to slot in there.

Dane:

It wasn't just another brand or another. Look, you know of a light. It was there. It wasn't just another brand or another. Look you know of a light. It was a truly different product and a very different product from what's out there, which, uh, which is really cool. And in some of the podcasts I've listened to with you and just you know our conversations tonight so far, it's been really nice to see that you guys are actually just doing something different, but not just for the sake of different. It actually works, which is really cool.

Tom "Danger" Place:

So yeah, I, I am um, you know we talked earlier about I was like. So it becomes very personal to me because it's not just a job, it's the two things I care most about in the world. It's bikes and lights lighting my career before this and so I really, very passionately want to make something that actually adds value. I don't want to make a me too product. I don't want to make something that I think somebody else does better because somebody asked to. Some people are going to ask me why is this a better product for whatever use case, and if I can't tell them honestly what it is, then that sucks Like. No, I don't. I don't want to live my life that way. So we're not always the best product for everything, but we really try to think through every detail, and that's that's ultimately how we decided upon having more power and more width on the bars and less power and a narrower beam on the helmet. Is it not only made more sense from, uh, from a shadows and depth perspective, which we'll talk about a second, but because you're needing more power on the bars, you end up with a bigger battery there instead of on your head. Yeah, so you can get away with self-contained lights, not requiring big packs or wires and not having a bunch of neck strain, and they're just doing two different purposes from what you're you're used to Now. The helmet light is intended to point down the trail and see at speed out in front of you and then around tight corners, and that's kind of where I want the you know the spot with the vertical tail underneath it, so that when you stare into that corner you're not just looking at where the spot is, you're looking at the trail leading up to that spot as well. So it fills in a lot more than you think. And then on the bars it's super, super wide and even so that as your bars move around back and forth, you're not getting this single dancing spot moving back and forth. So it's a lot harder to lose your line because you're just spreading this whole area and the benefit of that is the depth. So having a bar light below your eyeline projects shadows out that you're now looking down into.

Tom "Danger" Place:

So in the Phoenix Valley, where there's nothing but gigantic, sharp rocks trying to kill you, very true, is this rock sticking out of the ground or is it flush with the dirt? Because that will tell you, do I need to lift my wheel over it? Do I need to be in a different body position or do I just cruise? And if you just have a helmet light, it doesn't matter what brand model, none of that. If it's above your eyes you get no shadows. So everything looks very two dimensional. You can still read the terrain, especially if you know the trail, but it is harder because the way it looks during the daytime, when you have shadows and depth, is different. So your brain is having to work harder to process the terrain if you just have a helmet light.

Tom "Danger" Place:

So we want the handlebar light doing the heavy lifting, giving you the majority of your field of view, and then the helmet light kind of fills in gaps. We don't want it to overpower all that depth you're getting, cause that kind of ruins the visual effects. It just makes it harder to see Um. But it's hard to convey that to people who are used to having a handlebar light as an accessory, because until you actually try it and see it, and even once you try it, it's new and different. So it might take some getting used to. Um, even if it's better, different makes people have to process it differently. You know, if you're, your brakes are better now. But if they grab tighter and you're not used to the way they engage, you're going to pull the brakes differently and it's going to be hard to get used to for a bit. So there's there's a lot that goes into it, but I'm glad you finally came around.

Dane:

I, you know, I, I I'm going to admit here and you're going to hate me for this I don't actually have a set yet.

Dane:

Uh, the outbounds, cause right before we opened the shop I bought two new lights, Um and so, but uh, my kids are getting into riding and so I'm going to kick them down, those two so that I'll be an outbound rider. But it did take, it, did? It? Did really help for me to ride them, because, as a guy who's been riding for a long, long time overcoming, you know, it almost sounds like smoke and mirrors when you say, oh no, do it the opposite way, Because you've had so many people for so many years tell you the other way around and you kind of have to experience it way around and you kind of have to experience it, which in fact, you know. Having a demo set in the shop is not a bad idea, because then you can, you know whether you rent them, you know, cause some shops will do rental lights, you know, to see if people want to try night riding, or you just take them out and just loan them to people.

Josh:

That would be a good, that'd be a good idea, I think, yeah, I think, to get people to see the difference.

Dane:

Yeah, think it's a a smart move for us. We do a lot of night riding and there's still a lot of people that are like what? You night? You ride your bike at night. That's crazy, you know, and uh, you have no idea. Like it is amazing and it just freshens up the trail yeah, we did a night ride last night, it was it was amazing.

Josh:

It's fun yeah it took that trail that I've written a hundred times and made it awesome.

Tom "Danger" Place:

Yeah, I got lost, so and there's points in there that that I want to touch on, um that it is definitely the best way to see it for yourself is to actually see it in person and not just pictures on the internet. Yep, we publish beam shots and we try to give the best comparative information we can. It just doesn't do the same thing as going out and using them yeah, and using them when it's on your agenda, where you're just going for a ride, you're not in a group of 30 people with a bunch of lights flashing everywhere and all this chaos and distraction is also good. So having like a single or a couple demo lights at a shop is is great, because then you can go out and do some experiments and see whether you like night riding at all and whether you like it with the right equipment. Because that's another thing that I get from a lot of customers is I don't want to buy really nice lights because I don't know if I'm going to like night riding, so I'm just going to buy this cheap stuff and see if it works and see if I like it before I invest. That's great. But see if it works and and see if I like it before I invest Like that's great.

Tom "Danger" Place:

But I bet if you bought a $300 bike from Walmart and tried mountain biking for the first time on South mountain, you probably would not enjoy it. You would not want to spend more money on it. But if you borrowed somebody's you know, uh uh, pivot switchblade, for example, you might actually really like it. Um, the problem for us is just figuring out how to manage that as a small company, because we've got a, you know, we've got probably 300 shops nationwide right now. Um, they carry our stuff and we've had this request from a few and we've we've kind of tried some pilot program things. But how to get demo lights and make sure that they're actually being used?

Dane:

so I was just going to touch on that. Have you in in your manufacturing process? Is there any way to change a color at all Color of the light itself, where somebody's like, oh, get a demo, and then the shop gets a demo and then they just sell it, you know, and it doesn't really get used and the manufacturer's taking a hit to get that out there so that it can work. Yeah, like the demo seats you used to be able to get, they were like really ugly colors or something yeah the WTB demos were all yellow and they said test saddle.

Dane:

So you couldn't just go sell them. You know, and I remember when they were done with those and I had to sell them and I'd tell people yeah, this is a test saddle, but it was pretty obvious, you know.

Tom "Danger" Place:

I don't know if that's an idea that you guys would work on, but, um, I, I wholeheartedly appreciate what you have to deal with because I've been doing this so long, you know, and there are you know, it's a great idea and it's just the scale, yeah, by which we need to do that for it to make sense, um, not only for the shops, but for for us.

Dane:

Anything that splits our manufacturing line, yeah, adds cost and complexity and just make andy come in on his day off and uh, you can just do it on the day sucks to be in you know you work literally all year round assembling lights, but could you, could you do more? Hey, you're not here on christmas. What are you doing on christmas?

Tom "Danger" Place:

right now we have uh, we do have some. We have some lights that we laser etch the outside of the shell, um to just say demo light.

Tom "Danger" Place:

Um, oh, that's for, yeah, our point of purchase display stuff for shops yeah because we want people to be able to see and, like, touch the lights and play with them, yeah, but we don't want people to steal them. So we have a seven-second timer programmed in so that if you get the light, it will automatically turn off after seven seconds. So you can check it and play with it, but you can't go ride with it, gotcha. So if somebody stole it, it's of no use to them. And if they tried to warranty it.

Josh:

I would get it back, you would know. All right, so we've talked about a lot of these things already, but I want to have you give me a grade. So I sat down like I was an engineer and said I'm going to design bike lights. What are the different trades? Design trades that I'd have to make?

Dane:

So I made a list of what I think the design trades are. Can you tell me, as somebody who's supposed to know this, what do you mean by design trade?

Josh:

So you're trading off different variables of the product. You know so if you want it to be like the battery life to be long, and then you're trading that with the weight of the product as an example so you're making those two trades, so it's kind of trade off, battery life trade offs, trade offs.

Josh:

Okay, yeah, design trades okay so, uh, I got size, weight, heat beam pattern, light output, battery life, price and durability and I kind of wrap like weather drop and like dust protection in the whole durability Maybe you have a different term for that or water. What did I miss?

Tom "Danger" Place:

I wish I had that list in front of me.

Josh:

to go back to Size weight, heat beam, heat beam pattern, light output, battery life, price and durability.

Tom "Danger" Place:

It's like eight variables um, those are all excellent. You definitely need to think about all of those. Um, ergonomics, another one, okay, yep, for both the controls and the mount interface.

Dane:

Damn it, I've missed that oh yeah, the's very unique on them, so very unique.

Tom "Danger" Place:

Yeah, and it's a little. It's different. There's a learning curve because it's not a normal like snap in where there's a click and a detent. Yeah, but we did that so that it doesn't have play over time, because if you have something that just snaps over an edge at some point it'll develop play and then, once it does, it'll just get worse and worse and worse as you ride. So we want the cam interface. There's not really a locking point, it just closes and holds the light. Yeah, and that's something difficult for some people to understand, like how much do I press on it? Why isn't there? Why isn't it going far enough? And it's like well, it only needs to go as far as it needs to go.

Dane:

Yeah, it just stops when it needs to, but two years from now it may stop a little farther. Is that the? Is that exactly?

Tom "Danger" Place:

yeah, as it wears, it can take up the slack by just closing a little bit further. Yeah, but then you know we want people to be able to reach down with one hand, pull the lever and pull the light out of the mount in two seconds, without tools, without having to look, without having to fiddle, for like a little tab or an arm or something. And then the button. You know we put a lot of time into the button. It's not perfect but as silly as that sounds, the most common issue with pretty much any other light from a warranty standpoint is customers thinking the light is bad because it's in lockout mode.

Dane:

Yeah, oh, my God, don't get me started.

Tom "Danger" Place:

Yeah, the reason why we have lockout modes is because they've got a single optic with a single high power LED where all the light goes into a tiny spot. So if it accidentally turns on in a bag of clothes, it will melt the clothes, yes, it will, for example, burn a hole in a vinyl seat in a Sprinter.

Josh:

You've got some pictures on your website of that actually website of that actually, and uh, the.

Tom "Danger" Place:

So you have to have a lockout mode for a lot of these switches to prevent accidental activation, because they want the switch to protrude enough so you could feel it through gloves and still be able to easily press it, which makes it really easy to accidentally press it. So we're trying to make our buttons uh, geometrically so that the outside edge of the button is solid and doesn't compress. Only the middle compresses. So if you press it up against the surface you can't accidentally press the button. It has to be a finger pressing down into the button. I got it Gotcha.

Tom "Danger" Place:

And then with how we're spreading out the optics, we're not having the same light intensity so that and we've tested this a lot, including in shipping boxes and that sort of thing we turn on the lights at high power and pack a bunch of black tissue paper around it and stick it in the box and just see what happens. You know we do that for safety, but then also that means that the worst possible scenario for accidentally turning on your light is it runs the battery down and we have thermal protections in there, so it doesn't damage anything. It's annoying at worst, but it's also really hard to do that. And so ergonomics of the button where, if you can't feel it through a glove, you know most night rides are in colder weather, except in the Phoenix where it's a thousand degrees all the time.

Tom "Danger" Place:

Yeah, it's so true, you can't feel it through the button, then it's annoying because then you have to, like, spend all this time hunting for it and that sucks, yeah. So I'd say that you covered, I think, the majority of the basics. The way we approach that from a design perspective is we, obviously we, we do competitive analysis. We take, we have a list of features, from the mount to the battery indicator, how it conveys that information to you while you're riding, to the ergonomics, the button to the beam shape, blah, blah, blah.

Tom "Danger" Place:

But we also ask people what do you not like about your current lights? What causes you to not want to use them? What frustrates you when you ride? Because oftentimes you'll, you'll. You know, one of the best compliments you can get on a product is I didn't even know it was there. I forgot it was there. Yeah, you know like the grips are great because my hands didn't hurt and I didn't even notice it. Yeah, uh, was there. You know, like the grips are great because my hands didn't hurt and I didn't even notice it. I feel like that's what we're kind of striving for. We want you to forget that you're riding at night, you forget about the product or just using it. And if you have something that sticks in your brain and annoys you, it pulls you out of that, and so if we can find these really easy pain points from other products and or even our own products and fix them, then we can make a better experience for the den customer.

Dane:

I I've got one for you. So my biggest pet peeve with my lights is forgetting to charge them. So if you could go ahead and fix that, that would be great.

Tom "Danger" Place:

Yes, we're going to start putting solar panels on all of our lights.

Dane:

Oh man.

Tom "Danger" Place:

That's a joke.

Josh:

Yeah, I was going to say you say that and we're going to get like three emails from engineers going you can't do it, there's not enough surface area.

Dane:

Yeah, and then we're going to get one from an engineer that has like a six-foot trailer that he pulls behind his bike to charge his car.

Josh:

Look it, I power my lights. All right, we like crazy stories, so interested in any crazy, unique or funny stories you have and I want to give you some scenarios so you know, in your time there, any crazy, funny, interesting stories that you experienced on a night ride yourself no-transcript.

Tom "Danger" Place:

Oh no, I got one for you. Um, actually on BCT.

Josh:

Okay, black Canyon trail.

Tom "Danger" Place:

Yeah, it was well before outbound, um, I was still, you know, working at Cree, so I was a lighting nerd, so I had, um, a flashlight in my pocket that had 27 different modes and multicolor and all these different things. Because I always carry that with me. Who wouldn't? Because I always carry that with me, who wouldn't? We started a ride on BCT we were going from Is it Bumblebee?

Dane:

Yes, thank you.

Tom "Danger" Place:

Down to the Pi place and it was going to be like, should be like a three-hour ride if we're moving and we weren't, and we did not look at time of day, sunset, this is in January, so what should have been a three-hour ride ended up taking us, uh, six hours. Oh jesus, about an hour into the ride my buddy davis says it's cool. I looked at the weather forecast it's clear skies and supposed to be a full moon tonight. Um, so we're like, okay.

Tom "Danger" Place:

I guess, we guess, we can ride on moonlight, and so we're riding and it gets real dark. We're all in, you know, t-shirts and shorts, and it drops like 40 degrees, so it's in the thirties by the end of the night. We're riding just by moonlight, which is fine, until you pass by a saguaro and there's a shadow from it.

Tom "Danger" Place:

And you don't know what's in that shadow, and it's usually loose rocks, um. So there's just a lot of us just all over the place eating shit because we couldn't see into those shadows. And at some point my buddy has a and I can't turn on my flashlight because I'm the only one with that light, which means that I'm going to turn that on and ruin everybody's dark adapted vision, making it possible for them to see in the moonlight. So I'm just leaving it off, except when we get to the big washes, where we can't see where the trail goes because it's all just dry and washed. So I'm turning on to look for the reflective sign on the other side of the trail.

Josh:

So you know, so you know where the trails at.

Tom "Danger" Place:

Yeah, yeah. And buddy Adam brought his dog and the dog at some point just started going nuts and it was just barking off the side of the trail and um, so I was the person in the back with the flashlight and so I come by and I I turn on the light to shine on the dog and there is probably a thousand pound long horn staring at this dog, yapping right in its face, you know, gigantic horn sticking, and it was like dog, we gotta, we gotta go, let's get the hell out of here and kind of grabbed it and ran and we sprinted from there and, uh, nearly died a couple of times in shadows, but, uh, we made it out and then I had to sit in the parking lot for an hour while they shuttled back to get the drop car yeah, yeah, that's I.

Dane:

I have a similar. We were coming down the trail called Salmon Yaga Ridge on Mount Lemon, which nobody rides. Very few people will even know about this trail because it's so bad, and there is a book that was published by Cosmic Ray. I don't know if you ever saw the Cosmic Ray book when you're up in Phoenix, but he's a guy who Trail book for trail book.

Dane:

And so he had this route on there and we're like, oh, that's awesome. And he had put on the star pass trail which is in Tucson, and he had said it was like three hours and we do it in like 45 minutes. So we're like this guy doesn't even know he's, he can't ride, he's super slow, he's doing star pass in three hours, we do it in 45 minutes. This Sam and Diego ride that we didn't know anything about, from the top of Mount lemon all the way down, he says is six hours, we can probably do it in three. And then we realized we have to drive all the way up there and we don't even start till three o'clock in the afternoon and it's this.

Josh:

It's about an hour drive to the top of the mountain.

Dane:

Same exact scenario. We didn't have lights, nothing you know, and we got out about 10 o'clock that night and rode some of the hardest terrain, which is, uh, by the time you get down to a, a jeep road called charlotte gap, where it's rutted and you're trying to feel your way through. And we didn't have a full moon. We're basically blind, like trying to ride these ruts to go in line have a full moon. We're basically blind, like trying to ride these ruts to go in line. So I don't know if you've ever ridden like sandstone type ruts which, as you're riding, you're not just going through bumps, you're there. There are veins that you slip into and your front tire just washes out. I I think I counted about 30 crashes so, and we made it out alive, so very bruised after that, oh, extremely I wish we had a full moon.

Dane:

You guys are pansies. Because, uh because what's the? Uh, so in my day there was no moon, we didn't even wear shoes. Yeah, bike, we did this on skateboards wheelbarrows wheel.

Josh:

All right so next interesting story. Question uh, it most interesting customer return or warranty oh god, that sounds great oh my god, I don't know if I can say any of these.

Tom "Danger" Place:

There's um, I have a folder in my email called the wall. It's not the refrigerator, but those are the customers that go up on the wall. I get the full gamut. The overwhelming majority of people are just spectacular to deal with Yep. But there's what's the saying 5% of the people take 95% of your time, yep.

Josh:

I've had a few um, maybe just generally like what are some of the weird things that people have asked you to do without getting any specific person?

Tom "Danger" Place:

oh, I get custom requests all the time. I get uh custom mounts for uh scooters. Uh-huh. I think the weirdest custom mounts that I got were one for a snowblower and one for an electric unicycle. Oh my God.

Josh:

I didn't even know there were electric unicycles. I mean, I guess it's possible, but why would you want that?

Tom "Danger" Place:

They're spectacular. You should look up shibby time.

Josh:

Oh you're talking about the ones that go like 60 miles an hour.

Dane:

Is this the wheel I'm thinking of like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I was thinking of like, yeah, yeah, those are, those are I would. I was thinking just like a pedal unicycle, but I I know what you're talking about. Oh, those are the ones that have the, the wheel that's straight out in front you don't ride like in between your feet yeah, I see people doing like red bull jumps on those things, you know, yeah that's.

Tom "Danger" Place:

That's shibby. Oh god, really nuts. Yeah, the best way possible. Um, so the custom mounts is one I get custom like. People just have to have a certain color point of LED. We make 5,700 Kelvin, 80 CRI lights. They can't do with anything other than 4,000 Kelvin or 3,750 or Amber, or they want green, like.

Tom "Danger" Place:

I've gotten literally every request and every single one of them is like well, you should just offer the color I want and your color that you're currently producing. I was like yes, but every single customer who's ever asked for a different color point has asked for a unique, different color.

Josh:

Yeah, it's not like you're getting a bunch of the same color coming in Now.

Dane:

they use a film in theater that they put over the lights. It's gel something I can't remember what it is where you can just change the color just by putting it over.

Josh:

Just you're just giving them another design.

Dane:

No, I'm telling him, I'm telling him how to handle those people.

Tom "Danger" Place:

That was actually a fun one we got was a guy who is very crafty and wanted to tune the color himself on the Evo. He had a crash and it was a pretty gnarly one. It broke the top shell and so he got some stuff inside the light because the housing was compromised. And he sent me some pictures and the pictures were kind of blurry but it looked like, you know, through the front optic of the light it looked like a couple of the LEDs were like burnt and there's a phenomenon with chemical incompatibility where the leds will actually turn brown, um the phosphor will turn brown, um it'll oxidize and it kind of looked like that, like the leds smoked themselves. Somehow something really bad happened and I was like I need this back like immediately so I can figure out what's going on. This is like potential safety issue. And I get it back and, uh, he had cut out two pieces of Amber sticky film and put them over those those, just those two lenses, because he was trying to tune the color of the light and didn't feel the need to say that when I was talking about how it looks like the light had melted and caught fire. Uh, anyways, it was fine. That was a fun one.

Tom "Danger" Place:

Um, I had an interesting one just the other day that was actually really nice person to talk to, was not a jerk, was not a problem, it was just the strangest email because, uh, he was talking about how the he got the light and it just reeked like dirty garbage, like this putrid, nauseating smell, and I was like I cannot wait to find out what this is. So I said, look, we definitely don't want you dealing with that, uh, but I I don't want to just send you a new one and think that's going to fix the problem. Yeah, can you send it back to me? Here's a shipping label.

Josh:

I want to smell what you're smelling and figure out what's going on so that I can send you back something did you ever think, like working in owning a bike cup or a bike light company, that you'd be telling to a customer like I want to smell what you're?

Tom "Danger" Place:

smelling like that's not something you're ever going to think about yeah that quote goes up on the wall, yeah no doubt. But I I got the light back and everything's fine. It is totally normal, within the standard mean. There's no like weird plastic outgassing smell or anything like that. We're not using PFAS or any weird chemicals. There's not really anything to create such a smell. Yeah, and I was talking to a friend about it and she had mentioned this phenomenon called MCS. It's multiple chemical sensitivity.

Dane:

Oh, that's yeah, People smell different things.

Tom "Danger" Place:

Yeah, mcs, it's multiple chemical sensitivity. Oh, that's, yeah, people smell different things. Yeah, turns out some people are just ridiculously sensitive to certain materials chemicals, uh, whatever it is and something about the rubberized overmold or the seals or whatever in our products was just driving this guy crazy. Response yeah, like a like.

Dane:

A lame example is my daughter hates gas, the smell of gas so much that I can't have the door open on the car when I gas up. And I actually like the smell of gas, which I don't know why. It's because it gets you high pretty much. Yeah, it kills brain cells, right. But um like that um, but yeah, she killed your brain cells, but uh. But but seriously, my daughter gets like really really upset. I mean like more than just annoyed or it's just uh, there's something there there's something that's pushing her past that.

Dane:

So yeah it's crazy, so that that those are awesome. Hey, tom, who does your marketing? Like, do you have a marketing department, or do you hire a company, or who does your marketing?

Tom "Danger" Place:

Yeah, we have six people. So, yeah, we're kind of the marketing department, I suppose. Um, my, my partner, matt, is uh, he's, he's a very introverted, quiet guy but he is really fricking funny and he's got a bunch of super weird ideas. Yeah, and we like to incorporate andy, because andy is a is a classically trained actor. That's his career and he is hilarious. Um, he is really good and it just loves to ham it up. So we, we made a video a couple years ago of him, uh, basically talking to himself and it was just a silly, weird back and forth and, uh, we got so many comments that are just like not even recognizing that it's the same dude. It's like they're wearing the same shoes and everything.

Josh:

It's like do we say anything?

Tom "Danger" Place:

Yeah, so Matt does that and pretty much all that. It's just us internally coming up with ideas for things that we think are silly.

Dane:

One of the best. The reason I bring that up is one of the best advertisements I've ever seen from any company was their one-star review ad. I don't know if you've ever seen this I think I've seen one of them. I don't know if it's, yeah, it's it's basically uh, you gotta, you gotta tell you know which one I'm talking about, I'm sure, oh, yeah, yeah yeah, uh, the guy uh blinded himself and was pissed off because that is, and that is definitely a concept we 100 stole from snowbird.

Tom "Danger" Place:

Oh, okay, all right, there's another guy. I uh, uh, forgive me, I can't come up with his specific name off the top of my head, but uh, he came up with this ad campaign for snowbird. It's a ski resort that doesn't have a lot of green runs. Like it's all pretty steep terrain and it's like review for snowbird one star, no, green runs one star too steep. This is great advertisement for the right audience.

Dane:

And that's how this was one star. I opened the light up and nearly blind myself with how bright they are. You should put a warning on them. It's just like that's great.

Josh:

That's great.

Tom "Danger" Place:

We get a lot of weird reviews. Yeah, yeah, thankfully mostly positive, but man, there's some gems in there.

Dane:

You know, no matter what in life, you could do everything right, there will always be that one person or a few people. Yeah, you can't make everybody happy, for sure, no, but having that humor really shows a good personality. It shows a story. Again, I like companies with stories, and your company has a lot more story than others, and that that's important, and you guys convey that really well. I was really impressed, so I appreciate that.

Tom "Danger" Place:

yeah, we're matt and I were actually just talking the other day when we were all bent out of shape, because we take what we do extremely seriously and we want to make sure we don't run out of stock and we don't have production issues or quality issues. And I get I'm known for having a lot of anxiety, workplace anxiety and Matt is cool as a cucumber almost all the time it's. It's actually very good for balance.

Josh:

But he just said we're just making bike lights at the end of the day, chill out, danger, chill out, it's going to be OK.

Tom "Danger" Place:

Take this very seriously. We we work really hard to make a really high performing, excellent quality product, but we're making bike lights Like let's have some fun with it and relax a little, and that's what our, that's where our marketing comes from.

Dane:

It's brilliant. I had a customer once. I was selling them a custom bike and it was a Trek and they had a program called project one where you could order a, you could pick out of a catalog these different color schemes and get your name put on it. And you know, I think he picked like the lightning bolts and stuff, and so they would custom paint these bikes and they had a range of time, you know, like six to eight weeks or something that it would take, and right around eight weeks the guy is just stressed out and calling me and just like where's this bike? You know why? Why isn't it here and and in the bike industry we're, we're not like that, you know, because six to eight weeks could mean 10, 10 weeks. It just happens.

Dane:

And I, uh, I I was working at a bike shop and we had a cafe and I literally took him over to the cafe, bought him a cup of coffee, sat him down and I said I told him this is the bike industry, it's not medical, it's. There's no life and death here, there's no rockets, there's nobody's dying. When this stuff happens, I go. Majority of the people working on your bike right now are high as hell.

Josh:

And I was. I was dead serious.

Dane:

I was dead serious because he was just he. He had that anxiety like, oh my God, where is it? You told me this, you told me this and I'm like dude, you're lucky these guys get off the couch to get your stuff done, like no joke.

Josh:

Like you know, I've had, just just for the record, 88 episodes. We've never had someone fire up a joint in the podcast.

Dane:

No no, I don't break the stereotype but this, this, this kind of idea of the bike industry it is. It is. There's a lot of people that are doing it for fun, they're doing it for passion, they're doing it because they love it and they're not necessarily worried that somebody's going to die if they don't get it done right away. And you gotta, you gotta kind of go with the flow sometimes so, tom, what are you excited about for the future of outbound?

Tom "Danger" Place:

just about everything. Um, I'm excited to have some more employees, um, for the first time ever. Normally, management and taking on more responsibility is quite stressful, but I like people and I like having the bandwidth to focus on the things that really I do best and can really add the most value to the company. So bringing in a couple engineers so we can really accelerate our product development and transition to production and our sustaining systems and just tighten everything up and grow, I'm excited for that. You know, bringing in more robots is going to be fun where we can make the process as efficient as possible. You know, like I think Andy started out, he was building you know 50 lights a day. Right now he has the capability of know 50 lights a day. Right now he has the capability of building 400 a day. He doesn't do that every day, but that's one person, and that's because we've had all these operational efficiency increases from machinery that we've either designed in-house for roboticizing you know, thermal grease application or spot welding, batteries or soldering terminals or pressing optics or what have you. So that's going to be really fun as we expand our facilities. I think, more than anything, I'm really excited to get some more products out, like different products. We've got a taillight coming. That again.

Tom "Danger" Place:

I don't really ride road bikes, but lots of people do, and taillights are basically a commodity market. It's a race to the bottom. People don't think they should value the beam pattern in taillights because they don't use it to see where they're going. They don't know what the beam is, they just know if it looks blinding from a distance or not. So there's plenty of opportunity for us to make something not only really impactful but something that looks really cool.

Tom "Danger" Place:

I'm actually super excited for that product because it'll look like a total departure and more like Porsche taillights than it will a bike light. So, getting some more products out and just um, kind of really just continuing what we're doing you know we're doing. You know we're we we are not the type of company that is trying to sell as many lights as possible, as quickly as possible. We're not trying to increase our valuation so we can sell off and live on a yacht. We just we just kind of like doing this and we want to keep doing this for a long time. So we're now in a spot where we can grow incrementally and take kind of a next kind of big step for us. So that's pretty cool.

Josh:

Well, that's awesome, tom, thank you. I want to thank you so much for your time tonight. Thanks for you know there's a subset of our listeners, I'm sure, that aren't familiar with Outbound, so we've now introduced them to your product, which is great.

Dane:

We've heard the story.

Josh:

We've heard the story.

Tom "Danger" Place:

We've heard the story into the story.

Josh:

Story hurts. We laughed a little bit, which is good. Tom, you got any final thoughts for our listeners?

Tom "Danger" Place:

well, let's talk about tariffs no we said we weren't going to talk about no, no, we definitely don't have to end on that. Um, I don't really have a whole lot of thoughts. I'm just, I'm happy to be here doing these things, uh, in the bike industry with um, with my friends that you know it's, it's just cool to take a, uh, a leisure activity. That is what we do for fun with the people we love, and be able to improve that and to be a part of that experience. So um probably won't die a millionaire. And to be a part of that experience, so um, probably won't die a millionaire, but it's pretty, pretty fun while we're here.

Josh:

So how can our customers find you? Obviously, one of the 300 LBS is that you, that you have your products in for sure. If they're in your LBS, go there. But how can they find you online? What are your socials? That kind of stuff.

Tom "Danger" Place:

Um, we're just outbound, lighting on Instagram and Facebook. Um, we don't do. Oh god, I think we still have a tiktok I would like a shirt.

Tom "Danger" Place:

Oh god, we still have a tiktok lauren had started one at some point and she thought we should be on tiktok and she basically just started posting really irreverent stuff that had nothing to do with bike lights, like it had to do with us and what we were doing, but it was like us at Halloween assembling lights and costume and stuff with no context and I don't know if that's still active.

Josh:

I should probably follow up on that. All right, don't look on TikTok.

Tom "Danger" Place:

Instagram and Facebook and just on our website We've got a dealer locator on there as well. Awesome.

Dane:

So if you want to look for a local shop, we have a map and if you want your local shop to have them, ask them. Yeah, you know, that's honestly that is important. If you want to support your local shop and you want to get those lights there, just ask. You know they will bring them in.

Tom "Danger" Place:

And we are not pushy salesmen. We do not have sales reps that go in knocking on shop doors because we we don't want shops to have our stuff unless they want to have it. Uh, and that's worked well so far. We're we're growing very quick. We're adding a lot of shops every week, um, which is great. But it helps the shop too, right Cause if the shop knows who we are and they've seen the product, they use it, they believe in it, then they can help express that to the customer and, again, everybody wins in that scenario so, yeah, you, you do.

Dane:

You do a great job of pushing people into the shop because, like you said, there's a lot of people that don't want to get it online. I I'm amazed on how there is still a lot of people and and some of them are converts where they've had a bad experience.

Josh:

They bought something and got crap. I mean, I only know three people that had magic shine lights catch on fire Only three.

Dane:

Man, you got way better, actually, that's not true.

Tom "Danger" Place:

We have had one catch on fire, but it was because somebody dropped it into a fire pit.

Dane:

I don't think that counts. So you're saying they are flammable. I don't think you're saying they are flammable.

Josh:

No, uh, shout out to rob and arrowhead for that one um, yeah, hey, tom, thank you so much for your time tonight. It's been great to get to know you a little bit and hear more about outbound really appreciate you, man, absolutely great, yeah, thank you for having me you.

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