SurfShelf is Now Shipping to Canada!
Now that the SurfShelf is such a big hit in the U.S., we are excited to announce that we are now shipping SurfShelfs directly to Canada too!
We were grateful to receive tons of emails from Canadian customers asking when we would be shipping to the great north… so now we are.
You will now see “Canada” listed in the Country drop-down menu in our shopping cart. When “Canada” is chosen as the country, the cart will automatically update to display the Canadian provinces.
To keep shipping costs as low as possible, we will be using USPS International 1st Class and USPS International Priority as the carrier options. By using USPS, we are not subject to the Customs brokerage fee that we would have been hit with if we used FedEx or UPS. The Customs brokerage fee was $35 per order! No way! That’s totally crazy!
And just like our shipping policy for U.S. orders, WE ARE NOT MAKING ANY MONEY OFF OF SHIPPING. We were able to get our Canadian shipping cost down to $14.85 by using USPS International 1st Class, and that is all we are charging. Period.
Europe and Asia, here we come! We’ll be in the UK by the end of March!
Randy
Tuesday’s Tips (Week 7) – Baby Steps for a Healthy & Happy Life
Today’s Tip for a Happy and Healthy Life: Add Foods Containing Probiotics to Your Diet
Digestion is the complex process of turning the food you eat into the energy you need to survive. So, obviously it is extremely important for everyone and even more so for those who trying to lose weight. The best diet in the world won’t help if you aren’t digesting your food properly. Fortunately, there are some very simple steps we can take to improve our digestion but first let’s look at some symptoms and problems caused by poor digestion.
- Chronic fatigue
- Premature aging (reason enough to improve digestion in my book!)
- Arthritis
- Poor skin and hair quality
- Toxicity
- Gastric ulcers
- Allergies
- Insomnia
- Joint and muscle pain
- Nausea
- Skin disorders
- Sugar cravings
- Heart burn
- Cancer
- Many other diseases
Our bodies host over 100 trillion bacteria most of which are necessary to sustain health. The presence of beneficial bacteria in the intestines aids digestion, inhibits the growth of disease causing micro-organisms like E. coli and salmonella and even helps lower cholesterol. These friendly bacteria are called intestinal flora or “probiotics.” The additional benefits of beneficial bacteria are numerous.
A healthy lower intestine should contain at least 85% friendly bacteria to prevent the over colonization of disease causing micro-organisms. We can maintain our health with 15% unfriendly bacteria, if we have at least 85% probiotic friendly bacteria. Most people have this percentage reversed so…
Foods containing probiotics
Yogurt: Check the label to make sure your yogurt contains live and active cultures
Fermented Cabbage, Brined Olives and Salted Gherkins: Sauerkraut in Germany, kimchi in Korea, curtido in Central America or choucroute in France, fermented cabbage is consumed wherever cabbage itself can be grown. Be adventurous and try new things. Some fermented products might take a while to get used to but once you do your tummy and digestive system will thank you!
Fermented soy products such as miso
Kefir: Lifeway offers a complete line of kefir products
Lifeway kefir
Cultured dairy products: Buttermilk, raw milk & cheese, acidophilus milk and Horizon Organic sour cream and cottage cheese with added “health-promoting live and active cultures for digestive health.” raw milk.
Organic Pastures Raw Milk
LaLoo’s Goat’s Milk Frozen Yogurt: It’s yummy and naturally chock-full of S. Thermophilus, L. Bulgaricus, L. Acidophilus and Bifidus… win/win!
LaLoos Goat
Verb Good Belly Juices
Perfect Food: The name says it all. Not only does it contain a probiotic blend but one serving of Perfect Food Super Green Powder is equivalent to 140g of fresh grass juice. We make a great shake with it using o.j. & bananas, it is very green but tastes great. Your body and immune system will love you!
Perfect Food
Attune Foods: Chocolate & Granola Bars
attune bars
Kashi Vive Probiotic Digestive Wellness Cereal: One of the first cereals with probiotics added to it, Vive contains one billion CFUs of Lactobacillus acidophilus per serving.
Kashi Vive Cereal
Yakult Dairy Drink
Ricera Rice Yogurt
Bizzie Mommy Blog Reviews the SurfShelf… and LOVES It!
Just wanted to let everyone know that Bizzie Mommy reviewed the SurfShelf last week and absolutely loves it!
Here’s a quick excerpt:
“The SurfShelf is easy to set up and I felt comfortable with leaving my laptop on the platform. Best of all you can easily disassemble the device and take it to the gym with you. I was on the treadmill for 30 minutes checking and replying to emails and commenting on twitter, before I knew it my 30 minutes was up. Talk about multi-tasking I was working and working out at the same time.”
“I’m positive the SurfShelf will help me reach my workout goals without giving up.”
She goes on to say… “it has eliminated all of my excuses to NOT work out. Now what? I actually have to?”
Thanks Bizzie Mommy, we so happy that you love the SurfShelf!
If you haven’t checked out Bizzie Mommy, it’s a fantastic blog for, well you guessed it, busy mommies.
BizzieMommy.com chronicles the life of a mother trying to reach her goal to financial freedom (she has two great kids, two jobs, and two blogs with one supportive husband). She writes about the struggles and successes that come her way, and reviews products and services that help make mommy’s life simpler.
She’s also the founder/owner of an online baby boutique, www.lalababyboutique.com. She sells some really cool baby products that you won’t find at Babies-R-Us or Target. You can shop for cool baby t shirts, maternity t shirts, baby carriers, children’s furniture and a lot more. Great stuff for gifts too!
She does other stuff too, so you gotta check her out… she is indeed one Busy Mommy. Hopefully with the SurfShelf she’ll now be able to at least get some of her work done while she squeezes some exercise in on her treadmill too.
Have a great day,
Randy
What it Took (Part 5: Initial Market Research) – My Journey Launching a New Business and Becoming a New Father
Okay, so our story is just starting to unfold… this is the blog series where we examine how to bring a new product to market by looking at what it took to develop the SurfShelf.
So far we have talked about…
Building the first prototype to make sure it works
Performing your initial patent searches to make sure you can legally sell it
Filing your Provisional Patent application to put your stake in the ground as the inventor
And today’s topic… performing your initial market research to see if there is anybody out there in the world who would buy this thing.
That’s the real bottom line right? If you build it, will they buy it? And exactly how many people is “they”?
So that’s what you need to figure out.
Who is your user? Does your user have a specific attribute that will influence them to buy your invention?
For instance, the shark attack suit mentioned in the post about patent searches would only be sold to SCUBA divers right? And of all the SCUBA divers in the world, only the ones who dive in shark infested waters would really want to buy the suit. And why would someone dive in shark infested waters? Are there professions the require someone to do this. Or diving clubs for people who like to chase sharks? Who the heck would want to chase sharks?
Make a list of the type of people who you think will want to buy your product and try to break it down as far as you can.
Once you have your detailed list of exactly who these people are and why, you can go online to see if you can find any market research for these groups.
So for me, my customer was someone who already owned an exercise machine, someone who wanted to buy an exercise machine in the near future, or someone who frequented the gym.
The lowest hanging fruit was the home exercise machine user. So it makes sense that the first thing I did was to get a number on how many treadmills, exercise bikes and elliptical trainers had been sold in the U.S. in the last five years. This was my first potential customer pool.
Here’s a trick I use all the time. I perform Google searches on keywords to find as many articles, research papers, market reports, etc. pertaining to the fitness industry and home exercise. Then I scoured the articles for any references to market reports (“according to the recent market study America’s Home Gym Market published by Marketing Inc., the home fitness market grew 10% last year…).
Then I Google the name of the report (“America’s Home Gym Market”) and who wrote it (“Marketing, Inc.”) to try to find excerpts I can use from the study. Many times these types of reports cost thousands of dollars, but if you can find an executive summary re-printed somewhere, or a few sentences here and there from the report that gives you some info, you can sometimes get the market numbers you need for free.
Using this technique, I was able to find several reports from the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association (SGMA) that gave me the yearly sales figures for exercise equipment broken down by category. Bingo.
Make a spreadsheet of all the different market figures you can find for all the different potential customers you can think of. Then add all the numbers up.
How many potential customers did you find? If you get 1% of these customers to buy your product, how many people is that? Run the numbers for a few different levels of penetration, like 1%, 2% and 5%.
Also, are the sales recurring (is the product disposable)? Or is the sale a one shot deal. Employ this into your spreadsheet as well.
So now that you have an idea regarding how many people might be interested in buying your invention, you need to figure out how much money you think you can make on each unit sold.
This is going to require that you get a rough idea on how much it’s going to cost you to make your invention.
So that’s what we’ll talk about next time: Estimating your cost of production.
Have a great day,
Randy
Two Great New SurfShelf Reviews!
I just wanted to post real quick about two new SurfShelf reviews that we had last week that we are really excited about.
1. Lisa over at WorkoutMommy.com wrote a great review Surf and Tread with SurfShelf where she describes using her SurfShelf on her True treadmill to Twitter, watch NetFlix on her laptop or to go to In-Gym.com to use our “hands-free” online video entertainment guide. Thanks Lisa!
2. And Kristen over at La Dolce Vita wrote another tremendous review A Blogger’s Dream, the SurfShelf where she says “I worked out longer and harder and had fun while doing it!” She checks her emails, watches online TV, reads blogs… no more excuses not to exercise. Thanks Kristen!
Workout Mommy is a great blog about health and fitness for moms, and has tons of great content from a former fitness enthusiast (personal trainer, group fitness instructor, marathon runner, and overall fitness junkie) who now has kids of her own.
La Dolce Vita is all about Kristen’s journey as a WAHM. She creates custom hand stamped sterling silver keepsake jewelry out of her home. You can check out her beautiful work at Kristen’s Custom Creations.
Please help support these two great blogs! They’re both awesome! Thanks!
