Joe Lemay (Rocketbook) | Microwaving Notebooks to $50M

[00:00:00] Joe Lemay: Our video just shows it working, right? And we, we put some risks in there, but we didn't even really know what trouble we were getting ourselves into.

Welcome to eating glass. It's a podcast where at each episode we ask startup founders the questions no one else will. Our goal to reveal what it's actually like to start.

Scale and exit a company. I'm Joe LeMay, and I bootstrapped my reusable notebook company, Rocketbook, to a 50 million exit. And I am Will Nitze,

[00:00:25] Will Nitze: founder and CEO at IQ Bar, a nutrition company I took from zero to 40 plus million in annual revenue. For better or worse, we are your hosts. Eating Glass is sponsored by IQ Bar, which is my company, so be nice to it.

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So, magnesium or lion's mane to name a few. They are all [00:01:00] delicious. Most functional foods and drinks taste like crap. Ours taste good, and taste matters. That is despite them being super low in sugar and super clean label. There's no weird stuff on our labels. And by the way, they're affordable. Functional stuff is usually price gougy, and we are not.

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Why is Gorgias so much better? And he said, number one, [00:03:00] apps and integrations are just better. We have a customer based on Shopify, Amazon. We want to be able to take phone calls. Like all of that filters into one dashboard and it makes his life easier. His user experience is easier. There's less clicking, less typing.

Because of all the automations inherent to the Gorgias platform, he just has to do less, click less, have less tabs open. And the final thing is, it's really good for consumer brands. So returns, refunds, things that are centric to a business like mine are made really, really easy via the Gorgias platform.

Go to gorgias. com. Again, that's G O R G I A S. Request a free trial. Mention us, Eating Glass. You will get preferential treatment, and you'll be up and running in 15 days. Boom! Joe LeMay. Welcome to your own podcast.

[00:03:48] Joe Lemay: It's awesome to be here as a guest on this prestigious podcast.

[00:03:53] Will Nitze: I already know who you are, obviously. Although I do feel that there's a lot of stuff we have yet to dig deep on. [00:04:00] So, I think this could be a good exercise for that. I think a good space to start is just, who are you?

What's your background? How did you get to Rocketbook? I think we'll focus mostly on Rocketbook. But You know, what was the education and life experiences that got you to that point and and then why did you start that company?

[00:04:20] Joe Lemay: entrepreneurship is a young man's game, but I wasn't really listening. I graduated college with a computer science degree in 1999 and, uh, was always interested in starting my own company. I just joined tech companies and of medium, a large or small size, and had a run through, uh, engineering roles and sales and business development roles.

And it wasn't until I was like 36 when it just kind of occurred to me like, man, you're, if you just keep on this path, you're never really going to start a company. And I, I just started to thrive really hard to think [00:05:00] of ideas in a way that. With renewed urgency. and I had three young kids at the time and I just figured, you know, if I wait till they're older kids, I'm not going to be able to justify it to my wife at the time,

I came up with a few ideas, but one of was the precursor to Rocketbook, which I, you know, later sold for 50 million to Bic. but the first idea was a whiteboard related idea that I called Rocketboard. And when I was an engineer, when I was a salesperson in technology, I was using whiteboards a lot.

By myself, writing to do lists, in teams. You know, brainstorming, even with customers when I was in sales, selling, you know, million dollar software packages for salesforce. com to business customers, whiteboards came up a lot.

I remember waking up like in the middle of a, an airplane flight. And being like whiteboards, we could definitely do something with [00:06:00] whiteboards. And so I had a few ideas, but what I landed on was there should be an app. I'm going to call it RocketBoard, uh, that you take out your device, start up the app.

You sit it down, you point it at a whiteboard that a person is using with just plain old Expo markers, and it sees the whiteboard. It cuts it out. Colors are popped. White is white. The person who's in the way, half of the time is removed. And then anyone can at least follow along with that whiteboard using just a link.

Right? So it's just one direction. Very simple. I can be on a phone call with you and say, Hey, follow along to this link. I'm writing something on a whiteboard and you're just following along. And that was my first idea. And I was employed at the time at salesforce. com and I just started playing with it and seeing if I could.

Build anything like that.

[00:06:50] Will Nitze: I would use whiteboards all the time in my first job out of college, and we, you would just take a picture of the whiteboard. So the meeting would end, everyone would be like, all right, they'd whip their camera out, [00:07:00] and they'd take a picture of the whiteboard.

That was the status quo. So that was like the problem you were solving,

[00:07:06] Joe Lemay: It was a problem I was solving, but I felt that taking a picture of the whiteboard wasn't enough for a lot of situations. If I'm whiteboarding and I'm talking and somebody is on the phone and they can't follow along, I want them to be able to follow along. So it was more of a, a live experience.

one of the first things I did was I created a really, cheap and shitty video that made it look like it worked, a demo video. And, that was good enough for me to like show developers what I was trying to make. And then I started working on it myself, but also hiring people off of Elance at the time. And I was just like, break down the problem and have them solve little parts of it. And then I would hire somebody, they wouldn't be able to do it.

I would fire them. I had to hire and fire a bunch of people until I finally found someone in Portugal who I could collaborate with. And he was really smart. and he was just [00:08:00] starting his consulting agency at the time. and we just got started working on it. I also was looking to improve the video and I wanted to like redo it and make it properly.

Maybe it's put on Kickstarter or something like that.

why Kickstarter? Or was that just a foregone conclusion?

Kickstarter was definitely having a moment. I was obsessed with it. I just love the idea of being able to bring money in the door based off of pre sales that other people would give you and in promise of a product that you would deliver later. I just thought the model was magical. Um, I couldn't believe that ordinary people would pull out their credit card and pay whatever for a product that doesn't yet exists with the promise that they would get it later, but it seemed to be working.

I put the video up there, my copy was probably pretty mediocre.

It was like our first launch. I, it didn't reach its goal, and it failed. But there were some backers who were very vocal about wanting to see [00:09:00] this exist in the world. So it was enough to make me want to continue working on it.

[00:09:06] Will Nitze: What was the goal and what did you do?

[00:09:08] Joe Lemay: the goal was somewhere around 50, 000 or 70, 000. I think we did somewhere between 10, of contributions.

and probably 5, 000 of that was my own credit card that I pulled out to make it look like there was, there was some volume on there to start, which you always want to do, on a Kickstarter.

I didn't necessarily think that launching it on Kickstarter was the best idea. But it was very much a why not type of thing. Right. And so with a little bit of like encouragement, also through that campaign, there was a consulting firm who got in touch with me and said, we want to give you 5, 000.

and we just want like a license for our company to use this thing.

[00:09:52] Will Nitze: they had just seen it on kickstarter

[00:09:54] Joe Lemay: they just like sent me 5, 000 and I said yes, I promise to give you a license for your consulting company, [00:10:00] right? So I kept going with that Kickstarter failed. I started to sort of get it to work in reality and then one day I put it up on product hunt Which people may know is a place where people discover products in those early days in ProductHunt 2.

and I also made a little hack where the landing page for RocketBoard showed the video, showed the first 10 minutes, first 10 seconds of the video. So you could kind of see what was going on, but then you could press play to see the whole video. But throughout that whole experience, there was just a box for your email address.

And if you put it in there, it said Great. Got it. You're on the waiting list, and if you want to cut to the head of the waiting list, share this link with five other people. So it was a little like hacky growth, hacky, type of gimmicky thing that I put in there.

And some people didn't like that I did that, but whatever, it worked. And when it went up on product hunt, that was just enough for this thing to start to feel like it was exploding. I was getting, you know, hundreds of email addresses a day. [00:11:00] sometimes maybe a thousand a day while I was, you know, developing this product and I was like, wow, if I could convert, you know, 10 percent of these people, I'll have a real going concern.

If I could do 10 bucks a month, you know, et cetera, like I've got a million dollar business on my hand. Then I started actually putting the app in users hands. Keep in mind, I'm doing the, the phone is doing picture taking, image enhancement, and a form of streaming. So when somebody could get this thing up and running, and if it worked well, the device would instantly become super hot and run out of batteries very fast.

So, I mean, I was just churning users a hundred percent. Meanwhile, I have this video, people like it. They like the idea of the app, but I'm running out of money and I had saved up maybe a few hundred grand, a couple hundred grand from, um, from my job before, I was spending on myself, you know, our living, I've got three [00:12:00] kids, I'm spending a little bit on some developers and I'm running out of money really fast and I'm just, I had to just put everything down.

And I woke up again from like a nap or something, and I was like, wait, a notebook. I can just make a scanning app for a notebook. Using all the technology you've already built. It'll be simpler than a real time scanning thing for a whiteboard. And, but I'll sell a notebook. And then I had to just think to myself, well, how am I going to justify a sales, a sale of a notebook?

What's special about this? So that's where I came up with the idea of a seven symbol system on the bottom page of the notebook so that I would mark a symbol. Like the rocket, or the diamond.

And based on that, when I scanned it in, it would instantly send the, that page to a specific destination. So I'm imagining a student writes in there, it's the end of math class. They mark the diamond, they scan it in. [00:13:00] That note instantly goes to their math subfolder inside of Google Docs for them without them having to press share, find Dropbox, find the document, find the folder, find the subfolder.

So it would like save time, right? And it would take the friction out of keeping your notes organized. That's what the value prop to the user was. But that the value prop to me was that now I had a justification for printing special pages and selling somebody a proprietary notebook that goes with this app, not a physical product that I could sell someone.

That was the magic that made this thing possible.

[00:13:40] Will Nitze: also that that kind of took it from b2b to b2c, right? Like with the first iteration was more b2b

[00:13:47] Joe Lemay: B2B or B2C, it totally changed what I think you're, you're hitting on is the distribution of this thing. So one thing that really made the difference for this company was designing a [00:14:00] product. With distribution in mind, meaning it's really hard to be successful. If you're the app store is your primary distribution mode, right?

So I've got this, this idea for a paper notebook that has a scanning app to scan and save your notes for you, right? So naturally, like while you're saving your pages on your phone and in the cloud, you could reuse the pages over and over.

So I was thinking maybe these should be wipeable pages. And that was like my first idea, what I was going to launch, like a whiteboard style book with an app, right? And I thought that that kind of made it both real world, analog, digital, but now you could use this thing over and over. And back then I was listening a lot to This Week in Startups, and Jason Calacanis is a big name these days, but he was running the launch festival and he had said, on Twitter, startups, please message me if you're a stealth startup, I'm looking for someone to launch [00:15:00] on our launch festival. So I was like, Hey, this is still pretty stealth. I just spent the weekend putting together a little demo video for Jason showing this little book. and he instantly, uh, after he looked at the video, just messaged me back. He's like, can you get out to San Francisco in two weeks? And I was like, yeah, I can do that. I had another co founder at the time who was short lived and I called him up and I was like, Hey, I want to go out to San Francisco. Do you want to go with me? And he, he had not yet quit his job. This was a side project for him that he was trying to help me out with and become my co founder on. And he's like, he was just like, no, like, I don't, I don't believe in the book part.

So I was like, all right, I'm on my own. I'll just go do it myself. I get there for rehearsals a couple of weeks earlier.

I'm And Jason just tells me, no, you cannot launch this on stage by yourself. You need somebody to be doing the demonstration while you're talking. It's just, it's the way it works. It's going to be a bad presentation. So then I just had to like call up friends and [00:16:00] ask somebody to like go out there and do it with me and be on stage.

And, uh, I got to Jake, who, you know, as everyone knows now is now my co founder,

and we went out there and we just like every day woke up and worked on our onstage presentation. We worked on the product and making it, you know, a little bit real and worked on a video for Rocketbook.

while I was rehearsing for this and showing Jason and his friends, um, a demo sort of in practice for this. said, Hey, what's up with the, with the product roadmap?

Like, where are you going? Okay. You got an app, you'll sell a bunch of books, but what's going to happen after that? I said, okay, well, reusability of notebooks is interesting.

I have one design where you can take the notebook, put it in the microwave for about a minute and it'll all erase. And then you'll be able to reuse it over and over. And Jason just said, stop, stop. That is literally the [00:17:00] only good thing you've ever said. Right? If you don't, announce that as your product, there's no way you're going to be on my stage.

You're kicked off. And so I'm like, okay, I went back to the Airbnb where Jake was, where we were staying, and I told him this. He's like, yeah, I bet we could do this. He was using we already, even though he wasn't officially my co founder, but we're like kind of in it. He's like, let's do it. Let's launch it.

It's right. It's true. It's a great gimmick. It sounds awesome. Just, we'll just give ourselves like six months to figure it out on crowdfunding. We'll announce that the date of delivery is six months and that'll give us plenty of time to figure this out. And so we launched this on stage, we announced it, the crowd loves our, our schticky presentation.

Uh, we were really funny during this presentation as well, uh, which ended up being part of our brand. And at the end I raised, I said to everybody in the crowd or a couple hundred people, I said, who here wants a rocket book? You know, some people raise their hand. I'm like, great. It's available now on Indiegogo.

that day, I [00:18:00] think we did like maybe 900 worth of, you know, pre sales on Indiegogo. The next day we did maybe a couple thousand and the next day about the same. And then Saturday we were still in San Francisco. And what's cool is Indiegogo sends you a little notification, ding, when you get a backer.

And we woke up Saturday and our phones were like, it was just, it was out of control. I thought my phone was broken, but Jake's was doing the same thing. And we got 99, 000 of pre sales in one day because Indiegogo put us in their newsletter and we just converted like crazy because the idea of a microwave to erase notebook, Captivated people.

And everyone was at least like, I get to try this. I'm going to see this. Right. So we ended up doing well over a million dollars worth of presales on Indiegogo,

[00:18:54] Will Nitze: that had nothing to do with the launch fest. That was just Indiegogo loved the [00:19:00] idea and they put it in their

newsletter.

[00:19:02] Joe Lemay: And probably what happened was we had enough fraction from the launch festival. Where Indiegogo looked at the data and said, Oh, this little project is doing kind of good, let's put it in our newsletter. Right. So one little thing turned into a snowball. now from there we were psyched, right? We've got almost a million bucks in the bank.

We're, we're feeling really good about ourselves.

[00:19:27] Will Nitze: such a different experience than when I ran a Kickstarter. So, I mean, we did ultimately get into a newsletter and it was awesome. It was huge. It was towards the end of our Kickstarter. But it was a dogfight to get all those dollars leading up to that. And so basically, I mean, obviously the awesome thing about this is it's free, right?

You didn't pay to acquire any of those customers, right?

[00:19:52] Joe Lemay: That's right.

[00:19:53] Will Nitze: you probably viewed crowdfunding in this initial stage quite differently than I did, which, you know, I knew this is [00:20:00] not going to spin off enough net profit for me to where I can then finance my business based on this. I'm using this to prove out some semblance of product market fit, get investors excited, and then raise some money on the back back half of this and get some early customers, but I was not like going to fund the business based on this whereas you correct me if i'm wrong, but you're like damn we can do the in you know inventory run and then start financing the business on it off of internal cash flows based off these crowdfunding campaigns from day one which which You Is unique.

Is that accurate?

[00:20:37] Joe Lemay: It's almost accurate. What, what my initial mindset was, keep in mind. was I'm going to launch this Rocketbook thing. It's going to raise 200k, maybe 300k. It's going to be easy to make. And I'm going to take the profits of that, and I'm going to reinvest it into Rocketboard. Because that is the software product that I had [00:21:00] still believed in. But clearly, after this took off, um, I was like, I guess Rocketbook is the product. I can't really deny it. And in fact, after the success, we came home from San Francisco with almost 400, 000 of pledges so far.

and, you know, over the course of the next nine months or so, it did generate over a million dollars of sales, pre sales that was just money in the bank, and we thought we were just in. In a great position, right? We've got, you know, even if, uh, it takes about half that money to, to develop the books, maybe we've got about a half a million dollars left over. Things are, are looking great. now, as it turns out, we didn't know what, how much trouble we were in. the software took a lot more time to develop and actually make good, right, on two platforms, Android and an iPhone.

So that took, you know, six figures of investment. but also we kept working on making this microwave to erase notebook. I'll try to quickly say how it works. We used these pens by [00:22:00] Pilot. Which turn clear on 140 degrees Fahrenheit, and that's included with the, with this book. So all you have to do is warm this book to about 140 degrees Fahrenheit, and all of the ink will turn clear.

So you can use it over and over.

[00:22:15] Will Nitze: Does it turn clear or does it like evaporate? Is there still You know the the ink on the page and it just changes color or does it

[00:22:24] Joe Lemay: It still turns, it turns clear. So I mean, that's an Achilles heel that you're talking about as well, is it wasn't infinitely reusable. Because you're, you're leaving, uh, a little film of pretty clear, almost clear stuff. Right. And it would just kind of build up. And after you use it, maybe 10 or 20 times, you'd be like, you know what?

I either need a new one or something different. Right. This whole microwave to erase notebook was not infinitely reusable. But that wasn't the big problem. The big problem was [00:23:00] that. When I made a prototype of a notebook, it would work great in my no in my microwave. It would erase, let's say, around one minute.

If I gave it to you to put in your microwave, in about a minute, it might not fully erase. And if I gave it to someone else to put in their microwave, in about a minute, it might erase. Burst into flames or char, because every microwave is so different, right? So we were trying really, literally every formulation of paper, cover material, uh, size, et cetera, and all of these different microwaves.

[00:23:37] Will Nitze: all of this is happening after people have already pre bought, right?

[00:23:41] Joe Lemay: And our, our video just shows it working, right. And we, we put some risks in there, but we didn't even really know what trouble we were getting ourselves into.

[00:23:50] Will Nitze: throughout this process, were you ever like, this might not work?

[00:23:54] Joe Lemay: Oh yeah.

And I'm running out of money and running out of options and slowly coming to the [00:24:00] realization I don't think I can ship a product here and I'm like running out of money. Even if I did have the idea for the product, I'm, I'm, you know, so long story short through some ingenuity, I give Jake a lot of credit for this.

Definitely too. We came up with something that basically worked. But it was janky. Two things were important. One was not only would you put this book in the microwave, you had to put a little mug of water on top of it as well. And what that did is if the microwave was a very powerful one, it slowed everything down so the book wouldn't catch on fire with a hotspot, right?

and then we wouldn't tell you, Hey, put it in for one minute or two minutes or three minutes. Instead, there was a little logo. That we had with, um, thermochromic ink. So when that logo turned clear, you'd have to put your face right up against the microwave and look at this logo and maybe be exposed to radiation.

Who knows? And then when that turns clear, [00:25:00] cool, flip it over, do it again for the other side of the logo, and then ding, you're done. You know, it wasn't the most elegant product in the world. And then if you did all of that, the ink wouldn't magically disappear and you wouldn't have a perfect book.

[00:25:15] Will Nitze: here's another thing that just like hit my brain as you were talking about all this. There is also always the alternative of just a regular notebook with those symbols at the your companion app and you know, you get through the notebook and You throw it out and you buy another Rocketbook notebook and you keep going and it's like all of the functionality minus the microwave ability is still there and arguably much of the value is still there and you avoid all of this.

Like did that ever possibility ever enter your brain?

[00:25:49] Joe Lemay: you're very logical about this, right? And it should have been version one of the book, right? It's the simpler version. Put that out there.

[00:25:58] Will Nitze: hadn't freaking [00:26:00] said gotten so excited

[00:26:01] Joe Lemay: he hadn't gotten so excited if he hadn't, like, prompted us to do this, we wouldn't have, we would have done it differently. But we also might not have succeeded doing that because Thales would have been tepid, man.

Like, nobody wants to write about. Press do not want to write

[00:26:17] Will Nitze: Yeah, there's no wow

factor.

[00:26:19] Joe Lemay: the microwave to erase notebook! Like, when we emailed reporters about this, reporters who were like, we're done covering Kickstarter, we don't cover Kickstarter, they're like, alright, we'll make an exception for this. This is zany enough, right?

So just having a gimmick right out of the gate got us customers, email addresses, etc. that, um, Really helped to propel us into having, um, some momentum.

[00:26:47] Will Nitze: Yeah, it also changes the product to the app versus the product being the notebook.

you're really focusing on the notebook. You disrupted the notebook, which is like who, no one's ever [00:27:00] disrupted the notebook

[00:27:00] Joe Lemay: there were other notebooks out there with a companion app, right? Like Evernote partnered with Moleskine to make a paper book that had a, had an app that worked. And, and so it was especially un novel to just have an app working with a book. But when you introduce the reusability with microwave to erase, that just was like, it just blew the socks off of the press and people covered this crowdfunding campaign quite a bit.

And we got a lot of like uncreate and business insider and all of this. And it would just, it just took off. Right. But then it also put our backs against the wall to deliver a safe and workable product that was really, really hard. Um, so we got that designed to work finally. And then we were like really running out of money.

Like really, like we, I needed another like three or $400,000 to like finish printing all of the books. After we did like half of them and we just didn't have it. Right. Because we had spent a lot of, of this, of this profits already. So [00:28:00] on the unit economics, things were fine, right? It was somewhere around 40%, 50%, gross margin.

But we had spent a lot of this money on, on like, just, you know, product development firms, et cetera.

Meanwhile, we're super late. We've announced delay after delay after delay. And, uh, And we're telling people that we're shipping books, but if you didn't get yours, all you know is like, maybe this is a scam. So people are writing in the comments that I'm a scammer.

things that are kind of like death threats. To me as well. And I'm like feeling like literally suicidal, right? And sometimes just to help myself sleep at night, I would go to other crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter and look how miserable they were doing. And I would console myself that I wasn't the only one.

[00:28:47] Will Nitze: Yeah, because there, there were many scams. I mean, this is one of the reasons why Kickstarter became less of a viable launch platform over a long period of time. There were just so, there were so many [00:29:00] scams.but, the other thing too is like, literally everyone delivers late. Everyone. Myself included.

We were, I want to say, four or five months, months late. And we, we got some angry people, um, you know the angriest people are the people who like, they, your project was the first thing they backed, and they don't get it.

[00:29:20] Joe Lemay: Did they ask for their money back?

[00:29:21] Will Nitze: similar to the stuff you're talking about but like more tepid, you know um, I don't think anyone threatened my life over a box of protein bars, but um, But no, they were not happy

[00:29:32] Joe Lemay: It was just really painful just dealing with people who are very upset with me.

but we had about 400k to figure out or right around there to figure out how to, like, get the money. So I, the one, one rule I broke is that, all right, we launched on, on Indiegogo I was like, maybe we've relaunched this on Kickstarter, but that's not allowed. Kickstarter is very clear.

You can only launch novel products that have never been launched [00:30:00] before on our platform. Um, or at least new projects, right? So here's my kind of clever workaround. I put it up on Kickstarter, launched it, but I said that what we were financing Was not another run of the books per se, but rather a Slack integration, a Trello integration, and like a Dropbox integration.

So it was a whole new project that we were launching. It just so happens that the rewards were the same, a Rocketbook wave, a microwave to erase notebook that works with our app. And when we relaunched, we launched on Kickstarter,

And we raised just enough to get out of bankruptcy. And to be able to deliver those products that were sold on Kickstarter and to deliver the products, that we were behind on from Indiegogo. And just by the skin of our teeth, we were viable and not bankrupt.

And we delivered to everybody. And there were still huge delivery delays because fulfillment [00:31:00] problems and, and, and things like that. But we were no longer, you know, fucked. We were, alive. but we still. Our main product was still the microwave to erase notebook. And when we put that up on, Amazon and such every once in a while, we would get like a one star review because, you know, people maybe didn't follow the instructions or even if they did, it didn't work out so, so great.

And sometimes people would burn their notebooks and, uh, it was, Not easy having a product that was sort of unreliable out there and kind of scary. Right. And we got invited to Shark Tank where we showed off this notebook and we're dressed up in orange astronaut outfits and showing a notebook that goes in the microwave.

And, the sharks just, valuation. We're asking for a 4 million valuation. And, uh, And they, they, but they [00:32:00] just, they just made fun of us the whole time. Basically. The only person who didn't make fun of us the whole time was Mark Cuban. He asked a series of logical questions that got to our user data and revealed a good reason to be out of the deal.

And he exited that way. And I very much respect how he got to his no. Everyone else was just plain mean, right?

But we were laughed off of the show with no deal in hand and we came homeand I was actually working on like relaunching RocketBoard at the time, but we put the brakes on that and, and said, we need to relaunch RocketBook, but in a new embodiment.

And while that whole thing had been going on with figuring out the microwave to erase notebook, we had tried all these types of synthetic pages too. And we found that with the same ink, they could wipe off perfectly with a little bit of water. It would stay on there nicely. It wouldn't wipe off with your hand, but a little bit of water, it would all come off of a plastic page very [00:33:00] nicely.

So after we had come back from, Shark Tank, we had, like nine months between the filming and having it go live. And in that time.

I was like, we need to launch another product to just show our friends, to show other people that we're just a machine we're innovating, even though the sharks laughed at us, we're continuing to be successful. So we launched what we called at the time, Everlast, the Rocketbook Everlast. It was a synthetic page that you could write on with the same type of pen, a little bit of water, and it would all come off and will, it came off perfectly. Right. There wasn't this problem with a film. There wasn't a problem with a microwave. Right, of it bursting into flames in the microwave. but I was, I was not anticipating it being that much of a success, because it didn't have the gimmickry of a microwave to erase notebook. So we put it up on Kickstarter.

It was a new, new project. Definitely a new project, a new product. Called it the Rocketbook Everlast. And to my [00:34:00] surprise, it knocked the socks off of our last crowdfunding campaign. It ended up doing well over 2 million in, um, crowdfunding contributions in about 60 days.

[00:34:10] Will Nitze: why do you think that what like was were there a lot of a lot of your backers backers of your prior notebook? Or what do you attribute to that? success

[00:34:19] Joe Lemay: We had tens of thousands of email addresses to work with. Right. And we had a product that was. Still novel. And so people wanted to try. Um, and so what we did was we launched it on Kickstarter and we didn't, we didn't email all of our backers all at once. We, we emailed, let's say a thousand of them, enough to get high in the Kickstarter rankings and to make the project get high.

And then when it started to fall. In the popularity section, we would email our another 1000 backers and see it bump up. So we called it, we called it riding the wave, like surfing the wave. And we wanted to kind [00:35:00] of keep it in the popularity rankings as high as pop as possible. So then other people who were not our backers would discover us on Kickstarter and see, wow, this is a super, popular product.

And it would give us instant credibility. And then we got backers off of, off of the Kickstarter platform, that we didn't previously have, right? We also worked with Jellup who did some, crowdfunding advertising and they, they specialize in sending traffic to Kickstarter and converting them. And they just had really great conversions with us toward the end of the campaign.

And that gave us another few hundred thousand dollars. And that was, that was huge. and then after that. We delivered the product pretty promptly, got it up on Amazon, and the fact that it delivered on our promises, it became our, our main product. And now it's not called the Rocketbook Everlast, it's called the Rocketbook Core.

It is 95 ish percent of our sales. and just [00:36:00] the, the company just started taking off and this is before Shark Tank even aired. Then when Shark Tank later aired, it barely registered on our sales. Like we, we did maybe an extra 5, 000 in sales that weekend. It wasn't monumental because of, Shark Tank.

But we had already started growing really fast because our next product that we just launched right before that I did because I came home with a chip on our shoulder after Shark Tank, that prompted me to launch this product quickly. And it ended up like launching our company in a new direction.

And I could sleep well at night because people weren't burning their notebooks. In the microwave with our main product anymore. I had a great product that was getting great reviews on Amazon. and finally the app was working really well and we're really starting to like take off.

[00:36:51] Will Nitze: you mentioned the chip on your shoulder thing, which. I think every entrepreneur has to some degree, but I know we've also talked about, [00:37:00] you know, a lot of what drives you is tough experiences throughout your life. Like what do you attribute to your intrinsic motivation to keep going throughout?

Yeah. I would, I would imagine that most people. Might not have, endured what was needed to be endured to bring this product from its idea, into the market and into reality. And I think part of it was what I experienced was, you know, I had a weird idea of a bunch of weird ideas. And, you know, when I was working on them, plenty of people, you know, my neighbors, my friends.

[00:37:36] Joe Lemay: Like, what are you working on? This is dumb. And you think this is going to be successful. You quit your job, a high paying lucrative job to, to work on this. Like, what are you thinking? You know, and I got a lot of negative social feedback from that, but I think, you know, my childhood was filled with. Not fitting in.

like I was just, I was, I was bad at, at [00:38:00] regular sports, anything to do with the ball, I was the worst at, right. Which really sucks as a boy to just be really bad at sports, but then like I showed a little bit of promise at roller skating, right. And so my dad started having me like, go take lessons and compete in roller skating,

I became a competitive figure skater. It was pretty good. Like I was like, went to nationals imagine being like being in middle school and high school being bad at sports. Um, In my case, like, hitting puberty late, so I was kind of small.

And then being a male figure skater. Like, my everyday existence, among my peers in school, just fucking sucked Right? I did not fit in. very few people wanted to hang out with me or be my friend. And I didn't even have time for friends either, because I was training fucking figure skating all the time.

I didn't have like a major career in figure skating, I, but I did, I was able to parlay it into [00:39:00] good essays. That got me into a good college. I went to Cornell and I got into Cornell when people ranked above me in the same high school.

Didn't not because of my academics, but because I had this great story about skating, so it was just like, it was, it was formative in me because I think what it showed me is, all right, there are all these playing fields out there. Where great competitors are filling this arena and battling each other.

And maybe you can't compete there. Go find another arena that is weird, nobody's paying attention to, and go do something original over there. And then that you can kind of cleverly turn that into something that turns into success for you. And I think that happened in my entrepreneurial journey where,

When I came up with a zany weird idea, I was able to stick with it. And even deal with the social ostracism of people telling me it was a dumb idea because I'd like, I'd felt that before. It almost [00:40:00] felt familiar to me.

[00:40:01] Will Nitze: if you start out, and you're like, I want to do something, start a company. You're, you're not necessarily going to say, I want to be in this category. The category kind of finds you through this meandering path.

[00:40:13] Joe Lemay: Yeah, I think you're right. The, the category does find you in the following way, at least in my experience. first I was sort of enamored with technology and computer vision and things like that, and I just put my brain into a mode of thinking about how it could apply to some problems out there, sort of, and then you just go into a mode.

Of what feels like your, uh, you have your eyes closed and you're groping around in the dark, right? And you're just kind of feeling around. You're like, wait, that feels like that could be a thing. I

And then I would like develop a product or a video and that would get me a little bit of a momentum, but it wasn't quite working and then I had to pivot a little bit. What ended up moving away from just a pure app category over to stationary, just because I was continuing to grope around in the [00:41:00] dark for ideas that could work for what I was sort of working on.

And then it like clicked and I wasn't thinking about whether this was a good industry to be in. And in fact, it was a bad industry to be in. You know, when I, when I looked at the market, I was like, it looks like there's only one or 2 billion worth of paper notebooks being sold in the market. So like, what's up with that?

Right. Um, why am I going into that?

[00:41:30] Will Nitze: But, but, to counter that, I love Blue Ocean Strategy as a book and it seemed like this could be kind of a Blue Ocean thing where you're actually pulling people into the notebook category. is that true or is it, is that not true?

[00:41:48] Joe Lemay: think that's somewhat true. I think you are pulling people into the notebook category or at least reinvigorating their excitement about it. Um, somebody who was previously paying a [00:42:00] dollar 20 cents for a DAO is now interested in paying 30 for a notebook that is reusable, has some digital stuff going on with it, but more from a personality aspect is the embodiment of a tech forward version of a reinvention of a notebook, right?

So I was able to maybe 10x Or more, the, willingness for a consumer to purchase this product because of its function, but also what it stood for, right? Taking a, uh, a dusty category and bringing it into the new world with reinvention of digital and physical ways. I also did see Post it out there and they were a multi billion dollar company and their big innovation was an adhesive.

And I was thinking to myself, if I could innovate in two major ways, digital and physical, Then [00:43:00] maybe I could be big as well.I never drove it to, to become a billion dollar, a billion dollar company.but you know,

A 50 million acquisition for us was hugely life changing for, for me, Jake, and a couple of our employees and, you know, our whole team as well.

[00:43:16] Will Nitze: what was in your mind when you started?

I imagine it was largely survival, but then once you hit the, your first product success, you're like, oh, I could grow this and I could exit this. You Was there some number that was in your mind?

[00:43:30] Joe Lemay: I had a 15 year career or so before I realized I really hate working for large or small companies and I'm like, I consider myself unemployable and I needed to start my own thing.

It just took me a long time to figure that out. And so when I started Rocketbook or Rocketboard or whatever you want to call it at the time, I had like one goal in mind. One was to stay independent and [00:44:00] also to be able to make a living. And also to be working on a product that I was just kind of like, liked waking up in the morning to work on.

I was so like done with working in a traditional way that just changing my career and having freedom, um, was, was my big priority. And I, I was leaving a job. I mean, I left a job where I had, I left about 300 K worth of stock on the table that if I had just stuck around for a little while, I would have like had that in my pocket and I was making, you know, um, Not quite 500k a year, but almost that, you know, so I was like making good money.

[00:44:36] Will Nitze: Damn, that's, that's a big opportunity

[00:44:39] Joe Lemay: I always had the idea that I wanted to be someone who invented something.

Now, I don't think that except for most things, like maybe if you had a small agency or something like that, I think once you're in the world of something that can scale, It's almost impossible to turn it into a lifestyle company. It's just [00:45:00] once you get this momentum and growth starts happening, it starts sucking up cash.

So you have to continue to sell and be very profitable on an accrual basis. You have to continue to grow and the opportunity becomes evident to you that if you don't grow and chase this opportunity, Somebody else is going to see this and steal your opportunity. And once you start making 10, 000 a month and you see it growing, you get kind of excited about it turning into 50, 000 a month.

And then once you get there, you get kind of excited about it turning into a hundred and five, and so your appetites just increase when you get fed, right? You don't actually satisfy your appetites with success. They

[00:45:47] Will Nitze: You also get more confident. your ego starts to inflate and you're like, Damn, I'm pretty good. Now I want to be great. A self

[00:45:55] Joe Lemay: Nevermind bold about where we could go.

It wasn't until after we were, [00:46:00] you know, regularly doing millions of dollars in sales, where I was like, Oh, you know what? I see the opportunity here. I see that we could be the digital and sustainable option in every Uh, stationary space, right?

We've got legal pads, we've got notebooks, we've got post its, you name it. Now we can turn that into a billion dollar vision. And I started to truly get excited about that. I also noticed something that was unique about our business, which was, you know, unlike if, if you buy this random pen from Walmart, Pilot does not get your email address, right?

But whether you buy a Rocketbook off of our Shopify site or off of the shelf of Walmart. When you sign up for our app, we have your email address. So we were able to develop a, we had the opportunity to develop a business that was direct to consumer in all of our communications and relationships, even [00:47:00] if we had a wholesale distribution model through Walmart, Target, et cetera.

And we were able to build up a several million person email list. And have the largest, very active email list, way larger than all of the other big pen and stationery companies combined. And we became like this, this direct to consumer asset.

we were highly profitable. We showed potential of being a disruptor and. Therefore, we didn't have a lot of potential acquirers, but one strategic one, BIC, really saw the value of what we could become. Um, and, you know, saw upside in acquiring us and downside if they didn't acquire us.

[00:47:42] Will Nitze: You mentioned, uh, you had this huge email list. when I first met you and you told me about that and your ability to just ping another thousand people and ride the wave in a crowdfunding respect, but also, you launched so many new things. You were always, you always had a reason to email [00:48:00] people and then they had a reason to give you money and it was just like, The community, community is kind of bandied about as a term, excessively I would say, but you actually did have a community of people who were super engaged, really liked the products,

I was always super jealous of that, because that's not really possible in many spaces, like, you know what, you can't really build a community around a protein bar,

how else did you leverage community and to what extent did word of mouth and having a high virality coefficient of people referring your products to other people, like how, to what extent did that fuel the business?

[00:48:40] Joe Lemay: people really like a notebook, they carry it around and then reinventing it and doing something novel with it, set up the situation for good word of mouth and press wanted to cover it.

At least when it was fairly new. And so word of mouth was the one marketing channel that we were ever able to [00:49:00] get to work. So you may be jealous of me, but I might also be jealous of brands like you who have a more sizable lifetime value, right? I've probably spent a lot more. On IQ bars in the past six months, then most people do on notebooks during a lifetime, just because the consumption of a, of an edible product, uh, I think I'm a, I'm a multi thousand dollar customer to you.

Whereas we don't have a lot of those in, in somebody who buys one reusable notebook or a few of them. So we were never able to get Facebook ads to work in a way where we were able to like see them be profitable, except for just retargeting, but that's just fish in a barrel. And, uh, we never got any scalable marketing effort to work.

The only thing that we were able to measure was growing our business was word of mouth. So, like, with that, what do you do? Do you just keep throwing money at other marketing initiatives, things like that? Yeah, you, you might. But [00:50:00] one thing that worked for us, at least for some amount of time, was, Alright, let's build a little content engine.

podcasts, live events, TikTok, things like this. The strategy was not to use that content engine to go acquire new customers who hadn't heard of us, um, because that just wouldn't have paid off, but instead target all that content to our existing customers. So that, let's say, you know, John is, was normally gonna introduce Rocket Book to three of his friends.

If he then maybe sees a Instagram post and gets a great email and here's our podcast, maybe those three friends could turn into six friends. So that's why we developed a content engine. We focused it that way. And hard to measure with any definitive, but it really did seem to drive continued growth for quite a while anyway.

How did it work when you went in, when you went into brick and mortar, I think it was Target and maybe others. Did it just not work? Did it kind of work, but you had all these issues [00:51:00] because you needed to display to really educate the consumer,

if we put Rocketbook on a shelf by itself, even with the best packaging in the world, and we put that on the shelf at Staples or Target, it would do kind of poorly, not so much where they literally kicked us out, but they weren't like the category manager was not like paying much attention to us, but if we put, if when Staples put in a display of a digital writing category with us and Who are competing with us in some digital writing stuff, then Rocketbook would be the number one selling thing in there and it would sell 10x.

So just being in a category, highlighting and having that category evangelized, and then letting the customer be convinced that they need to buy something within this category, which will it be? Helps Rocketbook tremendously, right?[00:52:00]

[00:52:00] Will Nitze: That's super interesting because that has implications for competition, right? Usually people think competition's bad. They're taking my They're cannibalizing my customers. And I've, I've experienced the opposite of that, but I didn't know how to like mentally frame it. You actually framed it in a really interesting way, which is like for the consumer, it legitimized the category that there were two, three, four players.

[00:52:25] Joe Lemay: if you go to the Notebook, the paper notebook aisle in Walmart, and you stand there for five hours, you're going to see like one person buy something, whereas if you go in the protein aisle, protein bar aisle in, in Walmart and stand there for five hours, I think you're going to see a lot of people picking up a lot of protein bars, right?

So the category itself wasn't awesome, but we did fairly well. when they took our product and actually put it in like a gadgets, Area, right. And they position this as not just a paper notebook, but in, and just, that's where the foot traffic was too. And that's where [00:53:00] people were just buying more tech forward things.

So our, our notebook would not necessarily draw people into the paper notebook aisle. Like, but if you put us in the right place, we could do fairly, we could hold our own.

[00:53:15] Will Nitze: that's kind of the Blue Ocean Strategy piece. It dovetails with that, which is someone who didn't go to Walmart or Target or whatever to buy a notebook. They went to check out gadgets. They walk over there, they check stuff out, they find you, they buy you.

They were not there to buy a notebook. They just like the concept. Whereas, you know, for the notebook aisle, someone went in there to get a notebook. They need a notebook. you're pulling people into the category who were not there to get a notebook versus I'm there to get a notebook.

It's so fundamentally different. The, the buyer side psychology

Um, did you go into brick and mortar because oh we need we need to be omni channel to Make the asset more valuable or you were just like hey, we're We could be leaving a lot of money on the table by not Or we hit a [00:54:00] ceiling on digital and we need that's the next leg up. Like How did that all those things factor in?

[00:54:05] Joe Lemay: Yeah, well, we didn't, we definitely didn't do it in terms of like, Oh, we need to be in omni channel to increase our multiple or be interesting to these acquirers. We didn't put that much thought into it. It was really simply like, um, we're not in these stores. We should be because it will drive sales. Also, we started to believe that.

If we did a good job of being in stores, it would be like another billboard for Rocketbook where we start to think this way, right? I ultimately don't think it had that strong effect on the trajectory of our company because inside of a store, you have, there's only so much you can display on packaging, whereas on a, on a webpage with a video, um, and animated GIFs, you can really make a product like ours come alive.

[00:54:58] Will Nitze: Were you vendor central? Were [00:55:00] you wholesaling to them and they were

done

[00:55:02] Joe Lemay: we were, we were wholesaling to them from the beginning because they had a program where they invited people into, um, it was like an Amazon startup thing and they were inviting people off of crowdfunding into that and they made, made you, um, sell direct to them, uh, as opposed to, you know, sell on your own and control your own price.

[00:55:22] Will Nitze: okay. The exit. Um, this is always like the juiciest thing. Why exit? Let's just start there. Like, why exit? You were running a pretty big, pretty profitable business.

[00:55:34] Joe Lemay: we started off just kind of exploring optionality. Meaning, I wanted to know if this thing was sellable. Right? I was not determined to sell it. So I got my, uh, corporate lawyer was also kind of a, a really experienced M& A lawyer, and he introduced us to some investment bankers who work in middle market, you know, smaller, you know, things of this, of this size.

[00:56:00] They put together a list of companies, everyone from Google, right? Google could have bought it, had some digital elements, um, to. You know, stationary players, et cetera. So we went all over the place. we got a few offers. We had somebody else in the stationary space who was interested in buying us. we had a private equity sort of private office wanting to buy about 49 percent of the company so that Jake and I would take some money off the table, but then we would then grow it to be ultimately much larger.

et cetera, et cetera. but when Bic came along, they gave us You know, at least in the beginning what was an awesome offer that looked like it might be all cash. We ended up having to restructure it after COVID, et cetera. where we had earnouts. but we ultimately decided to sell it for a few reasons. One was. Like pure burnout. We, we got creative at so many points in this business to [00:57:00] like get to the next level of growth, make this thing successful, not die at this stage that it just from the beginning to the end, it just felt like we were always in a form of panic mode. there was adventurousness to it.

the experience was awesome. And I look back on it, like, type two fun, but it was also like our adrenal glands, me and Jake, both were in agreement that our adrenal glands were kind of shot. And the idea of taking this rocket ship and parking it at a space station successfully for us and for our employees and for the brand sounded like a gigantic relief to us.

even if it could become a billion dollar brand under our watch, Just having it. Not burn in flames was like, felt really, really good. and so, you know, we took the offer. We at first had a great offer, but then they wanted to restructure it. Once COVID hit, [00:58:00] we had a bunch of renegotiation. Finally, we're able to come up with something, that was really good.

I think good for all involved. we had a two and a quarter year earn out period, where Jake and I had to stay on to achieve certain goals to hit our earn outs and, and, and we're on board. I think that that earn out period was too long for everybody involved.

[00:58:21] Will Nitze: Yeah, that's pretty long.

[00:58:22] Joe Lemay: we thought it was a good idea.

at the beginning, we both thought that the founders were super important because the, The company was so complex with a digital app infrastructure and with some physical innovations, et cetera, that Jake and I would be really instrumental, for two years.

But I think we were, both parties were incorrect about that. We were instrumental for one year, if you ask me. but I mean, we were just excited to, to really be able to declare success and to be able to sell this in a way that, you know, is very, very meaningful to the company. Financially for both me and Jake, and for our early employees as well.

[00:58:57] Will Nitze: And you just want the win at some [00:59:00] point. You want that validation. I'm actually like impressed by people who could sell and don't.

[00:59:07] Joe Lemay: it depends on your phase in life. I think, you know, I still have kids who are in the house, and are, you know, 11, 14, 15, et cetera. If I waited another five years or 10 years or something like that to have a financial windfall, I would not be able to share that with them at all.

It would be like after they left the house. And so there's, it's not just like how much money you make. It's how much you can like experience the time with some amount of, of money. And, and literally just like, even if I could have made 5X five or ten years later, I don't know. If it really would have had that as much impact on my life, whereas, you know, the, this age where [01:00:00] I'm like between 45 and 50, I'm still pretty young.

I'm, I'm still able to have a lot of fun with some money and get a boat and live on the water and do these fun things. whereas like, you know, how many more years do I, or decades do I really have left? To enjoy and deploy wealth in a fun lifestyle to have fun with, with kids and, and be able to do whatever the F I want and work or not work, et cetera, et cetera.

, there starts to be a giant opportunity cost of time. Like time becomes so much more valuable.but now I'm curious because often people say something like what you just said. Book the win and get right back into it. And so they like contradict themselves, which you haven't done.

No.

[01:00:49] Will Nitze: But I could see you doing it.

Because you just have built up so much muscle memory of, Oh, I need to be solving a problem. And often too, you want to solve a [01:01:00] bigger problem the second time around. An even more ambitious problem. Because you need that, you need to fight that habituation, and get that new, bigger stimulus.

So, okay, you're out, right? You exited. Just like walk me through the psychology of all of that. Um, Did you have this gaping hole in your life?

Having, um, a windfall and establishing like the level of wealth that, you know, is going to freeze you up a lot of ways can also be like very disruptive in a way. about a year after the, the deal was done, uh, we were beginning a divorce proceeding, right. Um, and very amicable, very amicable, still very amicable today.

[01:01:49] Joe Lemay: they say like money. tears people apart or like money problems, tear people apart. But I think actually, if you have a [01:02:00] marriage that isn't working, but also isn't horribly bad. I think being middle class can keep you in that marriage because imagine your middle class, you got a house and you're doing okay, but if you were to get divorced.

You bet you go from middle class to basically poor.

[01:02:21] Will Nitze: Yeah.

[01:02:22] Joe Lemay: And that was, um, you know, we split things up and, and, uh, she deserves every penny because she supported me during the darkest days. but then getting that windfall just loosened things up and allowed. Us to take that step. So there was some disruption there.

[01:02:39] Will Nitze: so it's like disruptive, but it's like relieving too, in a

[01:02:43] Joe Lemay: and I mean everyone's divorce story is different, but whenever anyone said like i'm so sorry I was like no the proper words are congratulations.

[01:02:51] Will Nitze: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:02:52] Joe Lemay: um But I mean, during that, now I am a, I'm a, uh, single dad 50 percent of the [01:03:00] time. it's weird, like I'm, I'm both, you know, hyper busy and, overwhelmed by trying to keep up with being a parent, mostly on my own.

we still co parent and, and we help each other, et cetera, uh, so we're not like totally on our own. you know, I also had to make up for some lost time.

So my kids, you know, 11 and 14, 15, uh, there were times during early Rocketbook where I just like was barely present or ruining vacations because I had to work in a surprise way that like ruined everything when they were all, you know, at the Cape or, or at a pond or something like that. and so I just decided when I, when I did exit, BIC to, you know, I I made it a rule that I was not allowed to think about my next startup or network or anything for at least like six months and just try to be a super dad during the summer, connect as deeply as I could with my kids and I'm still very much like in that mode.

so being able [01:04:00] to take a step back from ambitions of world domination or business or invention and just be a dad. is something that, you know, maybe I put off for way too long, but now I'm able to at least attempt to make up for lost time. And it seems to be. Really enriching my life and their, and the kids lives too.

I'm, I'm pretty psyched about it.

[01:04:21] Will Nitze: So you're not sweating it. Like, you don't, you're not like, I have to do something tomorrow.

[01:04:28] Joe Lemay: this stance I had where like, Oh, I'm going to do nothing with business for a while. It's been a while now. So now I'm starting to pressure myself and to think, okay, what should I be doing? so it started the pressure is self imposed, but it's starting to like creep back And I am starting to think about expectations and get a bit uneasy because I don't want to be retired.

I have developed certain, you know muscles and skills. I'm a sort of turned into this type of warrior I need to go out and find a war to fight. I don't want to become

[01:04:57] Will Nitze: yeah, you can't just turn that switch off [01:05:00] at all, should we finish up with some rapid fire? The standard rapid fire?

[01:05:05] Joe Lemay: Yeah, let's go for it

[01:05:05] Will Nitze: Okay, starting with the classic, Peter Thiel question. What important truth do you, do very few people agree with you on? What, what super contrarian thing do you know to be true that everyone else thinks is not true?

[01:05:19] Joe Lemay: if you're going to do achieve something unusual, like inventing something or bringing something to market, like, which was my goal, I think you have to realize that there's a million other people who have the same day to day as you.

Why are you going to have some idea and bring it out? And so you've got to, you've got to expect your brain to become different in some way. So doing exercises, or even frankly, taking certain psychedelic drugs and combining all different types of things, are really essential to put you into different states of mind.

So I'm constantly trying to think of, just different ways to get my brain in [01:06:00] a different state.

[01:06:00] Will Nitze: And is that an ongoing thing, right? Because you're talking about it with regard to idea generation. But once you get the idea, Oh, I'm going to build, I just had the, I took psychedelics. I thought of this cool thing. I'm going to build that thing.

[01:06:15] Joe Lemay: It might be more episodic. And in my case with Rocketbook, I mean, we, we did need a constant stream of ideas and product and marketing tactics and things like that. So, ideation and having wacky and weird ideas was instrumental throughout my tenure, in Rocketbook. I do believe that. But of course, having the initial idea for a product Could become product market fit was the most important thing.

And you probably need that, creativity a lot more. I think as your company more matures, then, dealing with culture and team and ERP systems and HR processes and things like that, take a little bit less creativity,

but now I'm back to it right now. I need to think of an idea. So I need to, play with breath work. You know, I think walking on uneven surfaces, like when you're [01:07:00] hiking is, is really instrumental to walking. I think just sitting down and forcing yourself to come up with 10 ideas a day, which may be very crappy ideas is, is changes your brain.

okay, cool. So, commonly cited platitudes about what it takes for a startup to win that you think are wrong.

I've mostly heard investors talk this way, and that is that they want to invest in a startup founder who's like perfectly morally virtuous and maybe an angel.

Like they talk about integrity, integrity, integrity. and I get what they're saying, but I also want to work with other founders, whether I'm investing in or working with them, who have the ability. To maintain integrity so that, they can have a strong bond with their teammates, people trust them and they deserve that trust yet when they need to, they can be a fucking killer. [01:08:00] Right. And they can slit a throat because I need somebody like there's been times in Rocketbook history and others where you just, you need somebody Who can play dirty because survival is at stake from time to time.

[01:08:18] Will Nitze: Yep. All right. Cool. What was your single biggest regret or mistake that you made along the way? What would you do differently?

[01:08:26] Joe Lemay: I think I regret this and that is I just had like a good Even before I started up, but like a good 10 15 year Run where I just did Adderall during the day and then drank at night, at the night Right. So I just definitely, um, sacrificed my health way too much. Um, and gave into the stress and came up with an unhealthy pattern, whether it was a coping mechanism or whatever, but [01:09:00] I would like to go back in time and see what would have happened if a.

If I lived cleaner, took more walks, didn't take Adderall in the morning, and didn't drink. And now I'm like free of that habit and I'm like so grateful I'm no longer there.

[01:09:16] Will Nitze: how did you define success pre startup and then how do you define it today?

[01:09:21] Joe Lemay: pre startup, I really just saw, success as being able to work on what I dreamt of is being able to work on something creative day in and day out. And I wasn't actually, I had some dreams of making money, but only so that I would have the breathing room to be able to work on creative stuff, not have to sit down and do email and work on a boring to do list, but be able to, you know, think of an idea and work on it.

and to this day, I kind of still think that way. I mean, I also now. Have a bigger appreciation now that my kids are older, for how important it [01:10:00] is to be a big presence in their life now that like time is running out. so that's a huge part of what I consider success. I feel like I'm now achieving that level of success in my parenting, that I wasn't achieving before.

but I think, you know, being able to express yourself. and realize that you are just a part of the universe attempting to express itself and then figuring out a way to fulfill that role, I'm not that religious or anything, but that's like a form of spirituality that I subscribe to. So, being able to be creative and having the ability to do that and then expressing creativity, I think, is a success to me.

[01:10:41] Will Nitze: Boom. I think that's a good spot to end it.

[01:10:44] Joe Lemay: Yeah.

[01:10:46] Will Nitze: Went a little over, but we always do.

[01:10:48] Joe Lemay: Great.

[01:10:49] Will Nitze: for, uh, sharing all that. And, uh,

[01:10:53] Joe Lemay: That was fun.

[01:10:53] Will Nitze: Alright, that's a wrap. Thanks for listening, and thank you to our sponsors. IQ Bar. Go to Amazon. com, [01:11:00] search for IQ Bar, buy one, wait for it to arrive, leave a review. Please leave a review.

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