Les Cookson
Inventor of Lucy Drawing Tool
Today's guest on the podcast is Les Cookson, inventor of the LUCY Drawing Tool. Since 2018, LUCY has been sold to thousands of artists, made millions, attracted an investment on Shark Tank, and gotten featured on mainstream media outlets.
But Les started LUCY with nothing - he spent four years building the product in his garage - and struggled to make $200,000 in annual revenues for many years after launch. So what changed? In today's episode, Les reveals how passion, grit, determination, and a hands-on approach to online marketing turned LUCY's fortunes around.
In today’s episode of the Harvest Growth Podcast, we’ll cover:
● Why failure is important in a bootstrapper's journey.
● How content marketing can improve engagement and drive sales.
● Why videos are crucial for marketing and sales success.
● Doing your own marketing when you have no experience or expertise.
● And so much more!
Visit www.drawlucy.com to learn more. Use "harvestgrowth" at checkout for a 15% discount on purchases.
Do you have a brand that you’d like to launch or grow? Do you want help from a partner that has successfully launched hundreds of brands that now total over $2 billion in revenues? Visit HarvestGrowth.com and set up a free consultation with us today!
Les Cookson
Inventor of Lucy Drawing Tool
Today's guest on the podcast is Les Cookson, inventor of the LUCY Drawing Tool. Since 2018, LUCY has been sold to thousands of artists, made millions, attracted an investment on Shark Tank, and gotten featured on mainstream media outlets.
But Les started LUCY with nothing - he spent four years building the product in his garage - and struggled to make $200,000 in annual revenues for many years after launch. So what changed? In today's episode, Les reveals how passion, grit, determination, and a hands-on approach to online marketing turned LUCY's fortunes around.
In today’s episode of the Harvest Growth Podcast, we’ll cover:
● Why failure is important in a bootstrapper's journey.
● How content marketing can improve engagement and drive sales.
● Why videos are crucial for marketing and sales success.
● Doing your own marketing when you have no experience or expertise.
● And so much more!
Visit www.drawlucy.com to learn more. Use "harvestgrowth" at checkout for a 15% discount on purchases.
Do you have a brand that you’d like to launch or grow? Do you want help from a partner that has successfully launched hundreds of brands that now total over $2 billion in revenues? Visit HarvestGrowth.com and set up a free consultation with us today!
Jon: Today's guest shares exactly how he used a simple YouTube video to drive over $8 million in revenues after almost 9 years of annual sales below $200,000 before that. Great products don't always lead to successful businesses. You also need good marketing to drive awareness and conversions. In this 30-minute interview, you'll learn a few specific marketing tactics that can help propel the growth of your company.
Presenter: Are you looking for new ways to make your sales grow? You've tried other podcasts but they don't seem to know. Harvest the growth potential of your product or service as we share stories and strategies that will make your competitors nervous. Now, here's the host of our Harvest Growth Podcast, Jon LaClare.
Jon: Welcome back to the show today. I'm really excited to be speaking with Les Cookson. He's the inventor of the Lucy Drawing Tool. If you haven't seen this product, you've got to check it out. You can actually find it at drawlucy.com. It's a drawing tool, so, drawlucy.com.
Of course, we'll put it in the show notes, go check it out after the show. If you're watching the video, you'll get to know Les today. Either way, you'll get to hear his interview for sure. It's, again, really cool product. I'm going to let you, Les, explain exactly what the Lucy Drawing Tool is, and what it does.
Les: Thank you, Jon. Thank you for having me on the show. The Lucy Drawing Tool is based on technology that's been around for hundreds of years. Without electricity, people before there were cameras and projectors and things, they came up with all kinds of ways to get an image onto the canvas to be able to just trace over and make their job easier. It's based on the historical camera, Lucetta, and it's an improved version of that.
Basically, imagine you're looking at a pane of glass, and you can see a reflection of yourself, and you can see the outside world as well, and you can see them both at the same time. It uses mirrors to create a similar kind of hologram effect while looking through it. You just look through the view hole, then you just see whatever's in front of you, whether it's your friend in front of you, it's a landscape, it's a bowl of fruit. You'll see a translucent hologram of it, and you can just draw right over the image.
It's for people who are artists, who want to work faster, people who wish they could draw better. People have never drawn, who just want to be able to experience what it's like to be talented. It's going to actually help you learn and grow strong. It's a great tool.
Jon: Yes, it's a super cool product, for sure. It sounds expensive when you describe exactly how it works and as you look at it. What it does could be priced much higher, but it's not. It's a value product, I would call. What are the price points for the different products you have in the line?
Les: Yes. It's interesting, because the historical ones from forever ago, going back a few hundred years, they could range up to $1,500. It'd be really expensive devices, but we have them from $59 to $97 to $200, and about $250. It depends on how big an image you need, and what accessories you want. There's a few different options.
We try to make it as inexpensive as possible. As part of the re-designing of the old tool, it works a lot better. The image is larger, the image is adjustable, so you can adjust the brightness of the image, and it's expensive. Because today we have so many electrical devices, it's a fairly simple device.
The optics in it do cost money. It's not like a cheap toy, but we try to keep the price as low as possible because we want people to be able to use this again, revive this tool that used to be the only game in town then computers displaced it, so we're trying to bring it back.
Jon: Yes. Love it. How did you originally come up with the idea?
Les: I've always been interested in inventing. As a little kid, I always wanted to be an inventor. As I got older, I realized you can't just be an inventor, that's silly. Until I became one. I was taking an art class and my teacher brought in a camera, Lucetta, he had made it out of wood. He demonstrated it to the class. He'd had set it up.
The lens is little the older kind that didn't work as well, so we had to turn all the lights off. With the Lucy, you don't have to turn the lights off. That's one of the improvements. You don't have to have the lights off just as a spotlight. You can use it in regular lighting outside, inside.
We're all going through and looking through the image. I didn't even know what was going on. I wasn't paying attention, really, to what he was talking about. I wasn't following it until I looked through it. Then we had these gourds set up in front of us, and I looked through it, and I saw the hologram, a full-colored hologram of the gourds right over the drawing paper. I didn't really understand how this simple little box was doing this. I stepped this aside.
As it sunk in, I just got to chill of excitement up my spine that this tool is so simple, it's something that I can understand, something that I can build. Then as my teacher talked about the problems, that the images was always too small, and too dim, and no one really used it anymore, I immediately started figuring out ways to make it work better and to rebuild it.
I started building it in my garage, spent four years building different designs, all different types, from big, giant ones, to small ones, all out of wood, until I perfected the design and partnered up with a manufacturer that we started making them out of metal first. Now we make them out of metal and injection-molded polycarbonate. It's really something that grew out of my garage, and then became something a little bigger.
Jon: I remember some of these. It must be probably in elementary school back in the day that stemmed the idea. They were huge back then, but now the Lucy Drawing Tool is relatively small. What are the dimensions of the standard Lucy Drawing Tool?
Les: The optical head is about a four-inch cube. It's not quite cubed. It's got a bit of an angle on it, but then the rod is a couple of feet long, then you have a clamp. It's really small. You can roll it up and put it into a bag and take it with you anywhere you go.
There's no electricity either. There's a lot of devices. These old ones, some of them, like the Camera Obscura goes back a little further and is similar. Purposely, it's a play-off of each other, the different names, Camera Lucetta, Camera Obscura. Those can be the size of an entire room. You walk into them.
This is much smaller. Then there was other kinds of these reflection and projection devices that were huge and cumbersome. This is meant to be something that actually takes this technology from forever ago, makes it work better, and make something you can actually take around and use.
Jon: Yes. I love how you talk about it's small enough you can take it anywhere. Again, those watching video, you're on your backyard with a gorgeous little view there, you could do this there, you could do it at the office, you could do it as you travel. You could really take it with you. It's a game-changer versus the old products.
Les: Yes.
Jon: Let's jump in and talk about the marketing and how this business has grown. This has been a great success over the past several years, growing to several million dollars per year in sales. Obviously, that doesn't happen on day one, and it's not always easy to get there.
Part of the story is you had some early success on YouTube from a video that you created, and you really got behind that, and helped you to push sales. I'd love to hear and share with our audience more of the story behind that. Can you talk about what the video was like, your original video that started to drive the success of your business?
Les: Yes. Let me step back a little further to give some context as well. After I invented this, and now we had a perfected design, even partnering with a manufacturer, I thought I was all set, but it was difficult. Finding the right people was very difficult.
As we started trying to sell it, we were mostly just depending on people just finding it by accident just because that seemed to be enough at first selling on eBay originally. Then we started advertising in art magazines and sending out email blasts through the art magazines list, but that would only grow sales where we get sales of-- our best year between like 2009 and 2017 would be maybe 200,000 in a year.
I had always had videos. Video was always an important part of it. My first videos were very rudimentary and horrible videos. I learned how to produce better videos as I went on. That went hand in hand with the marketing because then-- we would try Facebook advertising for example, every once in a while, and I had the wrong mindset.
I would think, "Okay, let's drop $200 on it. If we can't get a single sell, what's the point of trying to learn the platform if 20 bucks gives me nothing? I'm losing money." That is such the wrong mindset. At the end of 2017, I made a resolution, and said, "Okay, I'm going to actually learn the platform first, then do a proper test," because I was seeing some results with something else I was doing. I'm like, "I think there might be something here I need to concentrate." I spent hours watching just YouTube videos, trying to learn how to do it.
From 2018, we started to really take off because actually we're advertising, not just randomly boosting posts. It went to a million dollars that year from our best being just a couple of hundred thousand.
About halfway through that year as well, we started going on YouTube. I would create an ad. It would go good, then it would really just tank again. Apparently, doing that a few times over and over again got Google's attention, and I got a call from Google. It's interesting because when Google calls you, you know that it's actually Google because they already have all your information.
They called me, were telling me all about my business. I was like, "Okay, this is actually Google calling me." I could see that they know everything about me. They invited me to their brand acceleration program, which is an invite-only program where they give you a team to help run your ads for you.
They got our whole AdWords, Google, and YouTube site built-out for us and really started taking off, so that in 2019, we did 1.9 million. Then in 2020, we did 3.7 million. We were able to grow as we got better with our marketing and better with our videos. The current video we have now on our website, which I made in-house was, we launched that just right before Black Friday. The day before Thanksgiving, 2019.
I made that one. I wrote it myself. I liked writing. I enjoyed the process of writing, and that's part of my creative side with making these videos. I enjoy making a script and making it funny. I wrote it in a way where I could sort of optimizing for manufacturing, you think of, in like a product where you optimize the way you design it for the manufacturing capabilities that you have.
I was low budget and have good sound. I didn't have good actors. I was having my friends come help me out. I designed the whole script with a narration. I could go onto Fiverr and pay someone to do a narration with their sound equipment, then have the actors not have to know how to act because they weren't saying anything, and be able to put a video by filming it in my home office and make it look professional enough.
We've sold off that video. I don't even know what it's up to now, but probably 8, 10 million off of that, just that video. That's an important thing because our product is so visual. We've tried retail stores. and we're still in a few retail locations, but it's such a visual thing. It doesn't grab your imagination sitting on a shelf. You have to see the video and see the way it works. Because once you get it, that's the same effect. That's the chill I got down my spine when I first saw it. That's what we're trying to have people see when they watch the video, that they can imagine, see what this is and what it does.
Jon: Yes. Video is such a powerful tool, especially like your product. Anything that's truly new and innovative, people aren't searching for it. They don't know what it is. If they see it on a Walmart shelf, like you said or anywhere, they're not going to grab it. They're not going to be attracted to it, again, unless they know the story behind it. That's where video can come in and complete that story.
I love that story. That's a great way to do it, of producing the video on your own, at least to get started. We call that a voiceover video as opposed to live action or live to camera where you record the voiceover separately. It makes it a little bit easier, and like you said, on Fiverr or other voiceover platforms, you can grab them fairly inexpensively.
It's a great way to get started. You had a great video, told the story. What'd you do with it? Was it just YouTube? Pre-roll ads? What's worked well for you in using that video?
Les: The video is a longer-format video, which was interesting. That's what I find, the marketing method seems to work best is that you have a video that's engaging, a video where in the comments people say, "That's the funniest commercial I've ever watched. I actually watched the whole thing." You keep selling as you go.
As long as they stay, they'll keep getting sold on the product, and at any point, they could break off and go buy it if they're sold. On YouTube, running that through audiences and different interest groups, or also crossing those two, having people who are lookalike, who then also are interested in drawing or painting, has been a good way.
We try to remarket with little clips of it. We break it up, the same, one into the different little clips, or if they only make it halfway through, start them up halfway through. Also, try to do some more informal videos. Something we're trying to make some more of just my camera, phone and just showing just, "Here it is.
I show you a quick look, look down in here," because it's that simple. There's no editing or anything in these videos. When I make the video, all I do is I actually put my camera phone into the Lucy because the camera's small enough to fit in there well. I hot glue a phone case onto the head then snap it and hit record on it because that's all you have to do. There's no movie magic to it.
We like to show people sometimes with a less refined video that it really is that simple. Then, on YouTube, we have people coming on there looking for tutorials on how to paint and how to draw. We try to target those or target people who are interested in drawing and painting.
If you're looking up a video of trying how to figure out how to be better at drawing or better at painting, that's our audience, is the people who want to improve and want to learn. We try to show them the video before then. Hopefully, it's engaging enough they actually end up watching that rather than what they were searching for.
Jon: That's right.
Les: It's not the thing where people are like, "I'm going to go search for a really cool drawing tool based on ancient technology that's going to make me a better artist."
Jon: That's right.
Les: Everyone wants that. No one knows that it exists. You've got to find the people, then show them the thing. Then search ads are more-- there's a little bit of volume of people looking for the historical device or looking for an art projector, like an electric one, and then finding out there's something cooler out there. A lot of search stuff is remarketing.
They've already been engaged with one of our videos or something, or been to our website, because it really is the kind of thing where there's not really any competition. There's other ways you can draw, obviously, but we just try to find people who might be interested, show it to them, and enough of them are where we keep the business going.
Jon: Yes. We've seen that. I think this is similar to what you're saying, but if your story is different, please let us know where, a lot of times, some of your initial traffic may come on pre-roll. Where they're searching for something else. They're not searching for your tool yet and you show at least a portion of your video in the upfront.
Many of those people may click to the site, but that's not why they started their search in the first place so they may not buy right away, but then now you have their contact information at least through Google. You can now remarket to them, send these shorter clips, or they come back and search directly for you.
The journey may start when they're searching for something else and end once they've been convinced and spent more time with you on your site, seeing more of your videos. Is that kind of an okay summary of the way it's worked for you?
Les: Yes. Obviously, some people will just see it, get so excited, buy it immediately. That happens but the remarketing is very important to be able to, once you get them of your top of marketing funnel, to keep remarketing to them and we'll show them different content, try not to hit them over the head with the same thing again and again.
Some reviews. It's a very visual product, and we have a lot of reviews on the website where people will submit artwork that they've done with it, along with a little review or testimonial about it. I love seeing those come in because it's like-- I got one just yesterday, the person talking about, hey, I was drawing this cat for somebody for a job. This may got me so excited, I'm going to start painting again.
That's just the one just from yesterday. There's been so many people who have come through and have said "This has got me back into art again." That's really important to me. What was the original question?
[laughter]
Jon: Yes. I think you answered it.
Les: I think I answered already.
Jon: You did, yes. Going through the process of cold traffic, getting their interest, no matter they come from, they come back and re-marketing to finish the-
Les: I wanted to touch on email marketing, though. That's become more important after iOS 14, which made remarketing more difficult in a lot of cases. There's a careful balance, I think, just in society in general between privacy, and then that ads at a relative.
People are really worried with their privacy. They don't want big tech companies having their data. The thing is, what the big tech companies are doing with it, which is not always the most benevolent things, but there's a lot of small businesses who depend on being able to have targeted ads to be able to show people things that they may actually be interested in. Hopefully, we can find a good balance there.
We've moved a lot more to email marketing. Whereas before, my mindset with email marketing was, they already bought it, it lasts their entire life, we have nothing else to sell them. I have their emails. I'm not really doing much with them.
What we're trying to do now is have a lead magnet on the website. The spin to win a coupon type of thing. Everyone spins and wins. About 10% of the people that spin it, 10, 20% of the people actually buy right then that everyone else is at least moderately interested enough to see what coupon they're going to get.
It allows us to be able to open up a relationship with them directly where we can keep telling them about the history of the device and give them some different drawing tricks and tips to hopefully help them be able to re-spark their interest in drawing and maybe come back and purchase the product. That's become increasingly important as we've focused on using our social media advertising to not just sell to people immediately, and not just to sell to them through remarketing through the different channels, but also to make a direct connection through email where we can help introduce ourselves a little bit more and teach a little bit more about drawing and why this tool is important.
That's been a huge improvement in our funnel, which is something we really had to work on just because it's become so much difficult to remarket because of different changes there have been with, particularly with iOS 14. That was the big one in 2021.
Jon: For the benefit of the audience, many of you, of course, are familiar with this, but when you've got a website that's working really well, you might convert 5% of the traffic. Sometimes it's 10, sometimes it's higher. 5% is considered a pretty high number, which means, in that case, you've got 95% of the people that are visiting your site that aren't buying.
Making sure you keep in touch with them in some way or another. Retargeting and re-marketing through Facebook, Instagram, Google, used to be easier for that, Les, as you're trying here, now that's harder. This email strategy, through doing some a lead magnet, really, for everybody listening, that should be on the top of your mind if you don't have it already on your website, to make sure you've got people that are somehow connected to your business.
Again, whether that's through Facebook or Google, it's harder, or getting their email address is gold right now. You can communicate with them forever. If you're providing valuable content, they'll stick with you and eventually buy. Some will take a while, some will be quick, but that's a great explanation of the whole process.
Les: Definitely.
Jon: Les, let's shift gears just a little bit. I'd love to talk about your story with Shark Tank too. It's a very interesting and unique story, having been on Shark Tank twice with quite a bit of time between the two airings for completely different products.
We don't need to spend a lot of time on the first one, but I think there's value in talking about maybe why it didn't work and how you learned to pivot towards eventually what became the Lucy Drawing Tool and obviously a massive success. We'd love to hear about the two experiences you had on Shark Tank, both in the very beginning not working out and moving, learning and going onto the product which has become a great success for you.
Les: Definitely. Being on Shark Tank was really cool, having been on Shark Tank, Shark Tank Alumni, that's really cool. Having been on twice, that puts me in like a very-- I think there's going to be five people who have been on somewhere-- let's say that's a handful of people that have been on twice.
Jon: Wow.
Les: There's been a couple that have been on with different products. Some have come on with the same product twice. They came back, "Hey, come back when you're bigger." They come back when they're bigger or they come back with something else, but this is the first time. The first two seasons in particular, maybe in the third season or just towards the beginning of Shark Tank in general, they had more goofy products. They had joke products.
It's like the way that it was like this product was not serious at all. It's just a joke. I'm the only one to ever come on with a joke product, at least in the eyes of the producers and the way they edited it, and then come back with a very serious product to the point where the biggest thing against me actually getting a lot of offers and a lot of sharks fighting over is like, they're all just going, what are we going to do better than you're already doing, which is fine. That's a good problem to have.
The first time, basically I had started with the Lucy before-- the carsick bib is the first one. It's a barf bib that a kid wears when they're too young to hold their own barf so they don't throw up all over themselves. We had kids that would throw up on themselves.
My father-in-law had a Subway store up on a windy up near where we live. When they'd go there, he'd pump them full of chocolate milk and cookies, and we'd drive them home and they would fall asleep and throw up all over themselves. That was actually the thing that got my wife's like, "Hey, you've got to find something." I'm like, "I'm sure there's something already."
I Googled it and there wasn't, so I started making it. That was part of one of my lessons. I had to learn to learn how to-- because I'm an inventor. That's what I love is, inventing and creating things. Then if you want to make money off your inventions, you've either got to license it, which means you've got to find someone else who wants to do the work, or you have to learn how to be an entrepreneur. That was something I had to grow into.
Actually, the carsick bib was a distraction where I was trying, "Oh, I'm going to change this for a while because I'm going to try to invent myself out of my sales problem," which doesn't work. Basically, I created a dummy that demoed the product that was a little barfing dummy. If you watch the current Shark Tank, you go to drawlucy.com, go to the Shark Tank tab, you can watch our whole pitch. It has a preview of the previous pitch. I like, "Hey, I'm back. Here's the first pitch if you don't remember me."
Then the only reason I got on, basically, is because I had a barfing dummy. It was just good TV. That's the only reason. There was no sales. There was no anything. I would not have bothered turning in an application if I wasn't already doing some market research on this idea to see if anyone else had the same problem else, anyone else thought it was a good idea.
I sent in the application to Shark Tank because I already had all this stuff together where I was sending out the friends and seeing if they thought this was a good idea. Totally forgot about it, so they called me back a few months later and I was like, "Okay, cool, yes. Let's do this. Let's go on Shark Tank."
I was hopeful that one of them might have a car-sick kid that they could connect with this idea. When it came down to it, they just weren't interested in being in the barf bag market, didn't think it was a big enough market. They weren't interested in that, which is fine. In retrospect, I wouldn't have done it either if I was one of them.
I kept trying afterward, and it was a good lesson for me, and I think hopefully other people can take the lesson as well. It's like, it's okay to give up on an idea. That doesn't mean giving up on yourself at all. Because after Shark Tank, I was determined, I'm going to continue with this. I went and I found a sanitation product with a multimillion-dollar company, a global company making sanitation products. Their number one product that they sold, a consumer product was a bag that you peed in. A bib that you barfed in seemed like a natural transition.
Jon: Sure. [chuckles]
Les: Exactly. I sat down with the CEO of the company. I got a meeting with him. He was this kid. He didn't even care about Shark Tank. He's like, "I don't care about Shark Tank." He just said, I like this design. I've imagined something similar. I like your design better. Come back with fully issued US and Chinese patents, and we'll put in a million dollars worth of infrastructure work to build up the machinery and make these things."
Then as I went and looked at it and was looking at the prior art, which means in patent law, that's the products that already exist around the same area, there wasn't an airtight patent to be found, really. It was possible I might be able to find something, but they wanted it airtight enough where no one else could make it. There was too many similar things. They didn't do the exact same thing, but would stop me from being able to find an airtight enough patent, and it would be like a $50,000 adventure to try to see if I can find something, then go back on his word to see if they would actually then want to follow up and do the product.
I didn't have enough money for that. I didn't have enough money to run my current business. I was like, all right, we'll just give up on that and then double down on what was actually selling. I had to keep thinking on Shark Tank, it's like they're always talking about, what's actually selling? What's actually making your money? When they were talking to entrepreneurs who just got the inventor itch where they keep going off on too many skews and creating too many products. What's actually making you money? I'm like, what's actually making me money? The Lucy Drawing Tool. That's what's making me money.
I'm not making very much, but I'm making some. I'm watching Shark Tank, and it's like they're all advertising on social media, and that's how they're making their money. I'm like, "Hey, how about I just try to be successful with this? Try to see if I can pour some fuel on what's actually working a little bit?" That made all the difference, was rather than trying to invent my way out of bad sales, try to fix the sales problem.
Then when I was came on Shark Tank the second time, I came on there, not coming back with the same product, but coming back having learned a lesson both from when I was on Shark Tank and the advice they gave me to take it behind the barn and shoot it. Just in general watching Shark Tank and seeing how are these businesses successful? What are they doing? Then try to emulate that.
The first time I was on Shark Tank, it felt like just basically on there just for entertainment value, the guy with the funny product. The second time, coming back with a real business, it was more than just another opportunity to promote my item and to go on there and try to make a deal. It was vindication.
It felt really good to be able to get up there and come with confidence and with real sales and to show that a person may have an idea that doesn't work out or even a bad idea, but it doesn't mean you can't learn from it and grow, and don't give up on yourself, but sometimes you got to give up on one particular idea so you can find success elsewhere.
Jon: That's such a great story. I think inspirational. Whether we're talking Shark Tank first time on versus second, or whether it's just you've got two ideas you're working on or frankly even your first one. Knowing when the right time is to stop on a certain product and pursue something else.
In your case, you had two products one had more potential behind it. You put all your ammunition, all your effort, all your investment behind that one. Of course, the rest is history. It's become this massive success. Being able to make that hard decision. That's the hard thing about being an inventor, I think, is making those decisions of when to stop because you love the product. You developed it, you've put sweat, blood tears behind this. It's knowing when to cut the cord and move on to the next one. Everybody with one good idea can come up with another good idea eventually and find the right time to really get behind the best idea.
It's hard. It's an emotional connection, but I think the best advice I've heard and seen used by inventors is to get other people involved. Just find some objective measure, whether that's market research, whether that's talking to friends, family, consumers, but finding out as early as you can, the likelihood of success behind one product versus another, and knowing where to really put your resources.
Les: That's a really good idea. That's what I want to emphasize. That's very important. There's a lot of shady invent help places that will play on your emotions and make you ignore that advice of just dump money into something they don't care if it's a good idea. Market research is the first step. You've got to get outside heads in there who think this is good because too many emotions otherwise.
Jon: Yes. Like you talked about, you could spend so much money on patents and related expenses. We've talked to a lot of people over the years that have put well into six figures, 100,000, $200,000 in the process. Whether that's just a patent or samples, inventory, test inventory, prototyping et cetera.
At some point, you've got to decide when to start test marketing. Market research is a really cheap way to do it, relatively speaking, in the very early days, but also getting it to a market before spending too much time, just unsealing it up.
Patents are important, but making sure you make those decisions with your money. If you spend all your money on a patent, for example, and then you've got no ability to really grow beyond that, you're relying just on licensees to be able to take it over for you, and that can be a hard game sometimes.
Having some ability to spend and really get behind some marketing to prove your product's going to work, but like you said, before that, market research in the very beginning. Well, Les, are there any resources that you've found to be helpful in your entrepreneurship journey?
Les: Yes, there's been a few different things. I think as far as the nuts and bolts of marketing, The Invisible Sales Machine by Ryan Deiss has been a really good book. That's something that actually Daymon John's team recommended to us. They sent us that book.
Reading through that, that's something that's really helped focus more on our email marketing strategies to try to actually focus on building our email list through sales magnet, and then converting that through making a relationship with the people on that list. That's important.
If you're selling anything, Invisible Sales Machine by Ryan Deiss is going to help you organize and focus and increase yourselves. It was a really important book for our recent growth.
Jon: Yes, I'll second that. Ryan runs a conference called Traffic and Conversion that has some great content as well. That's one of his tools, Great book. Lots of others as well. Definitely second that, especially on the topic of email marketing, which we talked about in this interview. Les, is there anything else that we didn't talk about that you think could be helpful for our audience?
Les: Well, I think the only thing is, go to drawlucy.com, check out the Lucy Drawing Tool. One thing we're trying to do is that, even if you're not an artist, we launched a drawing course where it teaches you how to draw with the Lucy Drawing Tool.
We have a lot of people who are professional artists who just want to work faster. Hobbyists who just want to be able to move to the fun part of drawing quicker. We're trying to grow the part of people who aren't artists at all. Come check out the Lucy Drawing tool and the Lucy Drawing Course, and I think you might find that that's a way that connects with people who don't have any experience in drawing and can see how easy it can be to start to learn to draw when it's more hands-on.
It's more like-- rather than reading a book on how to ride a bike, it's training wheels. That connects with a lot of people to be able to learn through experience like that. I think we covered everything. I appreciate you having me on the show today.
Jon: Yes, likewise, Less. This has been a lot of fun. I will encourage everyone to check out the website draw lucy.com. Les has also been kind enough to provide a discount code for our listeners. You'll get a 15% off discount code if you use 'harvestgrowth'' as a promo code. One word, 'harvestgrowth.' Again 15% off. Check out the website.
Please support Les and what he's done. If nothing else, it's a super cool product. Watch the videos on his site from a learning experience and you'll be able to learn some things for your own business as well. Again, Les, really appreciate the time. Thanks so much.
Les: Hey, thank you, Jon. I appreciate it.
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