College Dropout Turned Entrepreneur: How Inventr.io Makes Coding Fun for Everyone MTM Austin Eckman

In this episode of Meet the Makers, we sit down with Austin Eckman, founder of inventr.io, to discuss his journey from a 12-year-old programming enthusiast to creating a business that empowers people of all ages to learn coding and circuits through story-based DIY kits (most popularly, 30 days lost in space.) Austin shares insights on his educational background, the challenges of starting a business with minimal resources, his philosophy on AI, and the evolution of  inventr.io. He also talks about the importance of community feedback, the impact of social media advertising, and future plans for the company. Tune in to learn more about his inspiring journey and the principles that have guided his success.
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Check out inventr.io
Website: https://inventr.io/
Get 30 days lost in space: https://inventr.io/products/adventure-kit-30-days-lost-in-space
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/inventrkits
https://www.facebook.com/inventrdotio/

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Come be a guest on meet the makers: https://forms.gle/wTqzxqGpsu9hZ39F6
Follow misfit printing on Tiktok:  https://www.tiktok.com/@misfit_printing

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Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Austin Eckman and inventr.io
00:30 Austin's Early Journey into Coding
02:10 From College to E-commerce
02:34 The Birth of STEM Kits
03:33 Challenges and Failures in Business
05:47 The Power of Storytelling
09:35 Scaling the Business with Video Ads
10:37 Dedication and Hard Work
15:23 The Role of AI in Business
17:10 Thoughts on College and Career Paths
21:15 Future Plans and Conclusion

Transcript

Welcome back to Meet the Makers. Today I am here with Austin Eckman, founder of Inventor. io, where they help everyone from kids to students to retirees learn the basics of coding and circuits through story based DIY kits. Today we'll talk the kits, we'll talk principles of starting and scaling a business without a ton of resources in the And probably even the future of coding.
But before we get there let's just back up a little bit. I'm curious to hear about how you got into coding how you became a maker, and how the whole journey started for you in general. Perfect. That was a great intro. when I was 12 years old, I got into programming.
My dad was in IT, so we had computers around the house and I had access to things he had extra ones that I was just playing around with.\I discovered you could go on YouTube and look up Java tutorials on how to program. I didn't really learn a ton, but I'd copy them and then I'd be like.
Build a calculator. I was like, this is so cool. it was that dopamine hit and that transformation inside of myself that really kickstarted it all. So as I continued our, the high school, I [00:01:00] went to Pinkney high school. It's a little small farm town in Michigan. They had a really good robotics program.
Like really good. we had fan X, we had Allen Bradley PLCs. We had all this crazy tech and they just let us run wild with it and gave us an amazing teacher. I did a bunch of national competitions through their programs that they had available. So I was just extremely blessed to grow up in that environment.
\ it's so interesting hearing a lot of especially the tech space founders stories. You hear a lot of times it was just the right place, the right time being put into that school, in that environment where they had a really good computer program or a robotics program in your case, Would you say having that strong background in the school that you went to \ is that how you got into thinking about the path of working on Kids for Kids, or how did that come about and that whole idea come together?
It did translate into the business but years later. I went to college, and I had 3D 

printers at home, was always making stuff, and it just felt so cool to be able to say I can make anything. It was just like this, I have an idea, I know I can execute on it with enough hard work and I've got the tools. 
school was a huge bonus. Like [00:02:00] the program they had give us mass amount of flexibility to go and build the work cells. they taught you how to use it, but also how to learn on your own as well. that was a huge component that I honestly didn't even find in college.
So all that being said, I went to college and ended up dropping out after two years. It just wasn't for me. I more so failed them than they failed me. But yeah, I discovered e-commerce and that you could sell stuff online and make money , some of my friends were doing it, selling hats.
So I thought it was super cool and spent quite a while learning that without actually building a business. But then eventually it came around to like, all right, I gotta execute on this. So we did STEM kits 'cause it was just what I was extremely familiar with. I had confidence in that space and I realized that there was good stuff. Like Arduino was around, Raspberry Pi was around at the time. So there were great brands, but none of them really onboarded people super well, they just handed you the tech and said, go run with it. Which was great. There was a massive community around it too, that would teach you all that stuff online.
So yeah, that, that's how it translated to that and years of failures [00:03:00] and a lot of ups and downs before it eventually worked we got it up and running and the first kits we sold are embarrassingly bad looking back on them now. It's just like PDF guides we had with it, but I had 2000 to my name.
It was completely bootstrapped. No funding, still no funding. You just had to do what you had to do to get by it's interesting hearing you say that. for people who are familiar with your brand, it's definitely grown quite substantially from where I'm imagining it started for you, a lot of people, especially if they haven't dabbled in business before, see successful companies and think you've got to be a trust fund kid, or have some kind of venture capital backing you to get things started.
I think it's really helpful for people to hear that you can start with a couple thousand dollars and build from there One of the things you mentioned is the failures along the way I think a lot of business people have a lot of failed businesses before their business takes off.

Were there any specific failed businesses that you had leading up to this that kind of played into your skill set to get there? Totally. Like failure as far as like profit to myself. Yes, but I didn't fail as Cause at first I was just designing [00:04:00] Shopify stores for 500 bucks a store because I knew it's like, all right, I can pay my rent and also learn this new skill set along the way. 
And 500 bucks, like I can't mess it up that bad. And worst case I'll just refund them. So I went with that at first it wasn't huge revenue driver whatsoever. But. It definitely, it got me thinking on a lot of time spent studying, buying books on sales and branding and doing a ton of studying to get my clients good results, which translated to me being able to launch a brand for myself and have a shortcut in a way, because I knew a formula.
Yeah, no, it makes sense. And I think sometimes, too, with those do it for you services it can be, a good intermediary you're still in a way working for somebody but you're building business skills along the way So I think that's it's a really good option for people just looking to get their feet wet with it something I think that was important you said there is like It sounded like there was a gap in the market at the time of a lot of these companies They were just providing parts, but they weren't necessarily Providing a lot of education around what people had to do.
For you when you were looking to [00:05:00] get things off the ground Was there any specific experience that made you feel like this is a gap in the market that I need to address? Or how did you like dial in on that being the piece you were going to serve in the market?
So it took a bit of time. It was about a year until we were like really looking into the courses we were, PDFs we were offering at the time and we were like, nobody's going through these, like they're just buying the tech because it's a good offer, a good price we had a good relationship with supplier.
So it was drop shipping model at the time. And it made sense from that, but nobody was going through it. And we were lucky enough to decide to build a community. We have Facebook groups now we have two, and that's just been a massive help to us because we were just talking to the users that would join us there.
And we're like, Hey, what do you guys want? What would get you more engaged? What would be exciting for everyone. spending a ton of time talking with users was really the transformation we got to do storytelling. We need to 

give people a reason why and why they need to go through the training or why they need to do the next day in the training 
And why they're doing the projects as well. [00:06:00] Cause lot of people give real world examples, which are fun and all like the traffic lights and stuff like that for learning or like the dice and those are cool and all, but it really struggles with a why, like, why am I doing this? I don't think I'm going to go and program traffic lights in the real world.
So yeah, we gave it a fun twist and we were just playing around with storytelling and that's where 30 days lost in space came up you crash your spaceship and have 30 days to repair it or you run out of oxygen. So yeah, it's just, Starts with spaceship repair and you get the led turned on.
That's like turning on your cabin lights. I got 30 days out of, it was a recommendation. A lot of people had been recommending it to me. I was into 3d printing, obviously. And I was looking into just dabbling more with projects thatincorporated leds and things like that.
So a lot of people recommended it and we're really excited about it. And. Going into it I've taken a stupid amount of courses on everything that you could imagine in the world. what I think is unique about 30 Days Lost in Space and your products in general is the storytelling aspect to it.
And I have to imagine, I don't know if it's you or somebody else on your team but somebody there is clearly passionate about storytelling [00:07:00] and maybe cinematography It's a really cool way that you guys put it together and filmed it 
It keeps you engaged throughout the day. How was that something that, you were like, we need to make this more engaging and develop that more? Was it somebody else from your team who pulled that piece together? What did that look like? Because you guys did a really good job with it.
In my studies of internet marketing there was a big thing going on at the time that was, seven day challenges to get some result. So I took the challenge format and I was also learning a lot about storytelling through some of the marketers of the hero's journey.
So I wanted to incorporate those two and send people on their own personal 

hero's journey. To get them results Like when I was 12 Oh, this is a change in the mindset, not necessarily like they have to remember every line of code, but it was Alex and I, my business partner, and we had a 500 camera, a green screen in my apartment for version one. 
we spent three weeks nonstop cranking it out. we were just extremely passionate about the product, the storytelling, the immersion of it. it worked. It took us years to keep iterating it. Every year there's a new version that keeps coming out and we [00:08:00] keep adding stuff to it.
So it definitely wasn't an all at once thing, but we keep improving it
when you guys were launching that first version, 
Was there any part of you that was like, I hope this works? I'm not sure. Did you guys know that this was going to be successful?
 So yeah, basically what we did, which is another interesting trick waswe were talking to our community the whole time, so we're getting them amped up about it, we opened pre orders right as soon as we started recording it.
we already had secured the manufacturing and production for the kits, so getting the product to them wasn't really a problem. So we weren't worried about that. But yeah, we were pretty selling the idea and we opened up pre orders like 60 day pre orders and we started getting sales in right away.
And that was the proof. this is, worthwhile our time. I really suggest a lot of people do the pre sale method. Cause like worst case, you just refund everybody and you just change your idea up and you keep going nobody really loses. That's the approach we took just doing pre orders and working really hard to that.
Yeah. I think pre orders is a cool thing that I don't feel like a lot of people take [00:09:00] advantage of doing that. And I don't know if maybe for some people, like if they're newer to business, it, I do think there's a level of intimidation of maybe taking people's money and not having the finished product ready yet.
But yeah, just for proving the concept, I think that can be a really great way to just the offer and seeing. Where the interest lies before you have to invest a 

ton of money, now for you guys, as things started to work there was interest with the product, clearly things were going in the right direction. Was there any point where you were like, okay, this is, the tipping point and we know that this is working. 
We know that we're going in the right direction. Any point where things really started to feel, outside of that startup phase and maybe feel a little more serious for you. Yeah. We had one of our, like a YouTuber posted a video and he only had 50 subscribers, but he posted a perfect video ad for our thing.
So I was like, let me buy the rights to it. And we ended up working with him a ton after that. Like an absolute ton on our videos. But yeah, once his video ad, we started running it and it really took off. So that's when we were able to scale super aggressively. And we like 10 X our business just from using that video [00:10:00] ad as the creative and that's when kind of everything changed of like, all right, we're hiring a bunch of agencies now we're running this more like a business 
It was always run like a business. We're always dedicating absurd amount of time to it, but we were at least getting more for our time. And that felt good. Yeah, I think that was the tipping point where everything started to take off gotcha. like you said it was always run as a business.
You always had set time dedicated to it. And I think people underestimate the amount of effort that has to go into a project to get it off the ground. In the early days of it, or I guess even in the more current days what, did it look like in terms of time that you were devoting to it?
Was this like a completely full time thing for you? Was it 24 hours a day? What was that looking like at that point? Yeah, I've completely sacrificed any social life, partying, dating, like everything. I've committed everything60 to 70 hour work weeks, and when I'm not working, I got a whole bookshelf over there of sales stuff and marketing stuff, and business leadership spending a ton of time studying, or meeting other people, so really all my life is just dedicated to this, interesting hearing you say, obviously you [00:11:00] like to read a lot of books, like to follow a lot of people.
Any books, courses or anything like that, that really stood out for you that maybe really lit a spark or took things to the next level for you there was a book called dot com secrets by Russell Brunson that was really changing for me. you don't have to buy his software, but that book for 12 bucks if you're 

trying to make, a business it's so great, and he's such a good writer. 
So that one definitely transformed all of my thinking, and then just watching videos on YouTube there's so much on YouTube, you don't need to pay mentors, you don't need expensive courses or masterminds and stuff like that, that can all come way later on, just YouTube videos the old Alex Becker videos or Sam Ovens videos, those were also so great to watch
now, a little bit back, you had mentioned, you had this creator and it wasn't like a huge creator necessarily, but how did you get the word out about the product?
Was it mostly word of mouth and was it mostly organic? Were you guys doing paid ads? How were you driving traffic to these offers? This whole time, most of our traffic is Facebook ads. So meta ads from the beginning, day one, since I was already, Learning that skill [00:12:00] set and then like 2019 when we started it was so cheap and so easy to run ads So that really gave us a nice boost at the beginning It's much tougher now, but I'm glad I've built that skill set over the last few years so I can still run on myself Facebook ads.
I've heard it's a treacherous skill to really get fully up to par with
I see a lot of agencies out there who offer services for running ads. I always think it's better if you can learn something like that yourself, but I do think there's a bit of an investment you have to do there of just testing. Any advice you'd give somebody getting started on that path today?
Just start running ads and really the big thing isn't necessarily how you run the ads or your creatives a little bit of it, but the most important thing is your offer. So you'll be able to test your offer way early on and see does the market want this or not? And that's just super important.
This year has been tough for meta ads, but next year is going to be great. It's just, election year. It's how it always goes. just go out and test it as far as agencies. I've hired a lot of agencies. Some that were expensive as like 20 grand a month. And I ended up just doing the [00:13:00] ads myself that month anyways.
So you can get burned on agencies pretty quickly. It's really not like Facebook's taken all the work out of running ads. if you're starting something, just, throw it 

up, try it, watch a few YouTube videos. It's all on YouTube for free. There's so many people that post that stuff for free and it's pretty simple to get an ad account up and running. 
There's a lot of skill sets involved past that too, like the funnels, the copy. But the number one thing is if you have a good offer that really improves somebody's life and brings them a lot of value, it should be, a no brainer. You can have pretty bad copy.
And a lot of stuff you can do with AI now. A lot of my Copy, I have an AI bot trained on all of our writing styles and all the OG copywriters. So it takes a lot of work out I'm not the best writer myself. So from that perspective, AI has been a life changer in my life. But hearing you talk about the targeting side of things, I had watched previous interviews with you and something really interesting that had come up that you mentioned that was unexpected to me, is the audience for these I had, assumed that it would be.
Kids using them and even as an adult there was like a little bit of me that [00:14:00] kind of felt this like goofiness of should I be buying this product made for kids but you had mentioned that actually a lot of retirees were buying this product. I don't know if that's still true today but how did you guys even come to that realization?
I think it's a bit biased based on how we acquire customers through Metta, and I think that it skews more towards the retirees that are spending a lot of time there maybe. So I'm thinking that's why we ended up with. The crowd we have, but I love them anyways.
I love everybody. it's just been great. I definitely discovered it through talking to users in the group. I was like, there's no teens in here. There's no kids. There's no young adults that are in college. there are, but it was primarily retirees tinkering and having fun, keeping their brains active.
I know that's amazing. spending a lot of time with them now, does change the way we do offers. we have some other offers we're working on that are niching out of the tech space that I think would be A perfect fit for them. hopefully we'll launch that next year But also they're resistant to the AI stuff and we really want to push [00:15:00] that pretty hard Everybody's voting against us doing that.
So we have to push back sometimes and it can be tough, but we think it's going 

to be a better product overall. If we do that. It's interesting hearing you say that. I think, there's a degree of getting feedback and hearing what your customers want. 
But I think there's also a degree of sometimes knowing. What your customers would enjoy, but aren't asking for. it sounds like that's what you guys are maybe experiencing with AI. With AI in general, any time that, I talked to somebody who's either a coder or has a technical background like that, I'm always curious, like their stance on AI.
And you seem to have a very positive stance on it. How has that approach to this business andyour outlook on, coding and things like that in general. So we've been trying to use it for years now. Cause we, we jumped like a quarter million into the production of 30 days lost in space.
And I was like, wow, that's a lot of money. So we were always trying to find ways to make it faster too. it took a whole year to do that film production. That was so long. we've always been tinkering with it, but it was never enough. It never really did what we wanted to, but we've been playing around with it for years now, as of this [00:16:00] summer, something changed in it.
It started to really work for us. we learned how to train agents, so we use it to make the storytelling process much faster We can write stories a lot faster. We can write them how we want the dialogue. We've created new ways of teaching it, like dialogue between two characters in the story.
it helped us produce the product much faster on top of that. And like inside the business, you can do make automation. So we have an executive assistant that runs reports every day for us and reads all of our sales, P and L inventory, even D mark stuff for our sending IP for the email.
And it reads everything and tries to give us a report on what's good, what's bad, what we need to pay attention to. So we're really trying to stay super lean with our team. And use AI as much as possible. 
It's a lot of training that goes into it. uploading thousands and thousands of key metric points and data makes it super helpful for us. it seems like in the last six months it's grown leaps and bounds. And I'm super excited to see how it progresses.

Cause I know there's a lot of people out there who. talk about [00:17:00] it and it's like a pessimistic outlook that a lot of people have on it. But I don't know, maybe it's cause I like tech or maybe it's just cause I'm an optimist, but I think it's super exciting and I'm curious to see how it goes. 
For you, you mentioned early on, your path with college. You ended up dropping out of college. And I think college is always an interesting topic for me nowadays. Multiple times you've mentioned, all the great resources that are online for YouTube, all the great books, and there's so much media nowadays out there for learning.
You didn't necessarily go down the traditional path of going to school for coding and becoming a coder, but went more of the business path. But I do think there's still a lot of young people out there who, they're maybe interested in coding or interested in tech, and they are looking to go to school for that.
Do you have any thoughts on Young people going to school for that. And again, particularly like maybe as AI becomes more prevalent, like how that intersects with just like what jobs and things look like for coding in the future. Yeah. I did really bad at college. I don't really know what to say for them.
Cause I, I'm against college, like I'm talking to a lot of college teachers and they're so against AI they're like, Oh, people are just going to cheat with [00:18:00] this. I'm like, you just need to redo your curriculum. it's more about building something and inspiring people.
I guess just really ask yourself what you want in 10 years, 5 years, I know that's so hard to answer, it's pretty much impossible to get a correct answer for yourself, but think deeply about what you want in your future, and if that's gonna be a good ROI, and then go seek mentors as well go talk to a lot of people, there's so many people on LinkedIn that you can easily just message that are Thanks executive level or, high level at a bunch of brands.
And a lot of them didn't even do college either. it's really up to you, there's a lot of degrees that need it, like if you're going for nursing and all that stuff, definitely. I did meet my business partner at college. So that was a huge win that came from it.
So it's not all lost. Yeah, just really, you don't have to have it. I will say that firmly now, if you are willing to put in the work, and you're willing to create stuff and bring value to a lot of people, you can get, a good income without 

needing to go that route for you when you were initially going down that path, like for family, for friends, did you have people at that point in time? 
Were people supportive of that? Were people like, you're [00:19:00] making a big mistake? What did that look like? Yeah, when I dropped out, I got kicked out of home. I don't think I talked to my parents for two years. I was disowned from the family. They're like, this is the biggest mistake of your life.
My mom kicked me out, out of love. she's you gotta be around like minded people if you're going to do this, go move in. And my friend's Mason. I slept on his couch here in St. Pete and she definitely did it out of love. And it's exactly what I needed for my journey to be successful.
I needed to burn the ships. I needed to be all in on it. And I was like, I need to prove them wrong too. I can't, let them be right. So it was a combination of things, but yeah, I had very few supporters of that decision I think it's good for people to hear that.
I think, being young and 18 or however old you are at the time. You're not a full adult. You don't, I think like you look a lot for the people around you for validation at that time in your life. it's hard tomake that decision when everybody's telling you that you're making a mistake, not that I'm saying for everybody to drop out of school tomorrow, butnot everybody in your life is always going to be supportive. sometimes it takes going against the grain a little bit to. [00:20:00] Get to the next stage.
 Did talk to the Dean of my college before I did it. And I explained he was the only person I was gonna listen to because he was already like successful. He was working a big thing in business and stuff like that. He was the only one I was gonna listen to. And I sat down with him. I'm like, Hey, I think I'm going to drop out.
Like I got this business thing, like we did this amount of revenue. I really think I can make this work. And then, yeah, he just sat me down. I was like, I'll sign that you should do it. I think you should drop out and give it a try. worst case you come back and you learn a lot.
So it was really his advice and he was the only person I was gonna listen to. at least have somebody that you get advice from in the position you want to be in. Like somebody you really look up to and they've done the successful things you want to do. take their advice because they're going to give it to you 

authentically. 
If you sit down 1 on 1 and just give them the hard to hard talk. Yeah, I like that a lot. I think even if it's not going to be a relationship where you work with them, orhave an ongoing relationship with them, reaching out to, business owners or, Somebody in a position where you want to be 
I think that's something for me my parents are great and successful in their own right, but they had a path that was different than what I wanted [00:21:00] to. I think for me sometimes seeking advice from other people was helpful. it's one of those things they don't really teach you.
School to do or they don't really tell you, but it's I think if you're young and you're looking to start things out, definitely finding that person who is where you want to be for the next step is definitely great. What's next for you guys and where you're going with things.
 Anything new and exciting that we should be expecting from you guys in the near future? And what are just like your hopes going into the future with us? So I can't share too much, but a lot of next year is going to be really focused on AI and making super cool things that inspire people to teach them a lot and really teach them more about themselves as well.
Hopefully also niching out and getting into other stuff like watchmaking kits would be really cool. So we're hoping to do that along with a possible rebrand coming up soon. So a lot of stuff in the works, but I can't talk about too much. And then all of our adventure kits are continuously getting updated.
So we're going to go back and refresh a lot of those and keep empowering our community. It's been super [00:22:00] interesting hearing all about your journey, all the different things that you guys have going on. 
For people who haven't tried one of your kits or people who just want to follow along with what's next, where can they find everything online for you guys? if you go to inventor. io or you look up 30 days lost in space, that'll get you to our website. And the best place to start by far is 30 days lost in space.
We put An absurd amount of value into this and we're even updating it this week with new challenges. that is the best spot to start. Awesome. Austin, I appreciate it so much for you taking the time to do this. Super interesting 

talking to you. And with that said, that has been Meet the Makers.