If you are not familiar with RunReviews, it’s an awesome site with tons of really informative (and completely honest) reviews of treadmills and associated gear (and now treadmill laptop holders and desks as well!).

In addition to exercise equipment reviews, the site also has great sections on Treadmill Workouts, 101 Running Tips, How to Buy a Treadmill and the Most Influential Runners.  It’s a really fun and informative site.

The reviewers are also very serious about what they publish, and they typically get 2-3 different reviewers to provide the feedback necessary for the detailed equipment reviews that they provide.  You can totally trust what they say.

When it came to reviewing the SurfShelf, they totally loved it.

Here’s a quick excerpt:

The advantages of using this product are unlimited. We can now have free entertainment on our treadmill (we don’t need a TV screen, sound system or iPod deck which add significant costs to a treadmill). Plus, we can have permanent access to the Internet anytime we are on a treadmill, even at the gym. We simply connect the laptop to the Internet with a wireless modem and place it on the Treadmill Desk.

You can read the full RunReviews SurfShelf review here.

If you looking to buy a treadmill, check out RunReviews before you buy… they’ll help you out in a big way!

Have fun!

Randy

SurfShelf: A Long Overdue Fitness Innovation!

Treadmill Laptop Holder/Tray | SurfShelf Exercise Desk for Treadmills, Indoor Bikes and Elliptical Trainers

Here’s a long overdue innovation that helps alleviate the inevitable boredom that comes with working out on a stationary exercise machine.

Google and Dell have installed SurfShelfs into all of their fitness facilities. Jason Chen, Editor of Gizmodo.com called it “one of my favorite inventions ever.”

The SurfShelf securely attaches any laptop or portable DVD player to your treadmill, elliptical trainer, exercise bike or stairmaster. It fits 99% of existing stationary exercise machine models. It also works great as a book holder.

Regular laptop computing tasks using a mouse and keyboard are possible but awkward. The SurfShelf is best suited for watching video — either a DVD or on YouTube, Hulu etc. It’s also good for games that only use the directional keys or a game pad.

SurfShelf laptop trayThe product consists of a 100% Polycarbonate tray that will not break, nylon belts and a Velcro strap to hold everything rigidly in place. The secure mount is important because you don’t want your laptop falling to the ground during a workout.

The SurfShelf also comes with a free membership to In-Gym.com, a video entertainment site built specifically for SurfShelf users. The interface allows you to locate and launch a wide variety of online video feeds, all from one place. By using the arrow keys only and not pausing your workout you can choose from Sports, News, Hollywood Entertainment, Health & Lifestyle videos, Music videos, Online TV and Teen Stuff.

Jeff Scott Soto

So, it was a normal day at the office last week when all of a sudden I get an email from Jeff Scott Soto asking if he can come to our office to buy a SurfShelf before he leaves the next day on tour to London.

JSS wants to come by our office to grab a SurfShelf to take on tour?!? HECK YEAH!

So about two hours later I’m shaking hands with a true rock star. And he’s a totally cool guy too… very down to Earth and extremely personable. He’s one of those guys who has a super cool vibe about him without even trying.

To keep in top shape as necessary to jam on-stage, Jeff uses elliptical trainers in the hotels between shows… and he’s on them pretty much every day. Now with his SurfShelf, he’s able to watch DVDs and online TV on his laptop while he keeps himself fit.

If you’re not familiar with JSS, he’s been rockin’ for over 25 years with a wide variety of killer bands (he was the lead singer for Journey for their 2006 tour, Talisman, etc.), other artists and on his own (I’m spinning his solo album “Lost in Translation” as I write this post!).

Currently he’s touring with Trans-Siberian Orchestra for their holiday show. And my wife and I are definitely going to hit the show when it comes through LA and San Diego in early Dec.

Check out his sites below. You’ll find great sample tracks that totally rock as well as lots of great videos, photos and back stories…

www.jeffscottsoto.com

www.myspace.com/sewtoe

www.trans-siberian.com

and of course the JSS post about SurfShelf he wrote on his MySpace blog… how cool is that?!?

Thanks Jeff! Can’t wait to see your show soon!

If you like gadgets, then I’m sure you’ve heard of Gizmodo.com… it’s the top gadget site on the Internet. We love Gizmodo, and it has been a dream of ours to be reviewed on their site…once you’re on Gizmodo, you’ve arrived.

The fact that they contacted us asking if they could review the SurfShelf was absolutely HUGE! And now that the review is up, we couldn’t be happier.

Here’s the link:

Gizmodo Review: SurfShelf Treadmill Stand For Laptops Is Brilliant

“This is one of my favorite inventions ever.”

- Jason Chen, Editor of Gizmodo.com (09/01/09)

Did Jason just say “ever”?

Here’s a guy who is THE EDITOR of GIZMODO.com, the #1 gadget review site on Internet, who reviews thousands upon thousands of really cool inventions for a living, saying that the SurfShelf is one of HIS FAVORITE INVENTIONS EVER!

WOW! That is the best compliment I think we’ve ever had!

Here’s his full review (without his pictures)…

“The SurfShelf does what many home-made and Ikea-bought shelves, tables and stands do: put your laptop in front of your face while you’re walking on a treadmill. And it works beautifully.

The Price: $40

The Verdict: This is one of my favorite inventions ever. Treadmill computing—or using a treadputer—is one of those ideas that’s ideal for out-of-shape people who work at home, since you’re still capable of doing all the work you were doing before, except now your legs are moving. Its major barrier is the fact that you had to have a treadmill, plus a stable enough platform to keep your laptop on. If you could rig that up yourself, great, but most of us were too lazy or too disinclined to. Now it just costs $40.

To answer your first question, yes, it is ill-advised to type and run at the same time. But typing and walking fast, or running and just watching something on your computer works just fine. In fact, I’m typing this entire review up while I’m walking on my treadmill.

How it works: The SurfShelf consists of two interlocking polycarbonate pieces supported by either one or two straps to your treadmill, elliptical or stationary bike. If rigged up correctly—something I had to ask for help with—it’s incredibly stable, capable of supporting somewhere in the neighborhood of 55 pounds. Plenty solid enough for your laptop provided you don’t constantly lean on it.

This thing has basically turned working into exercise. By spending 2-3 hours a day typing, emailing, and reviewing while walking, you basically get free calorie burn doing something you’d be doing anyway! According to Nike+, 2 hours of fast walking while working burns 1,000 calories. And even if you’re not lucky enough to work from home, being able to watch YouTube or BitTorrented content makes any workout go faster.

Assuming you already own a treadmill that’s gathering dust, the SurfShelf is the easiest way of getting you back on that thing. And if you’re a freelancer or the type of person who spends much of your day on a computer, this could be the healthiest gadget you buy this year.

Here’s the link again if you want to see his pics:
Gizmodo.com Review: SurfShelf Treadmill Stand For Laptops Is Brilliant

Thanks Jason, that was awesome!

SurfShelf is excited to announce that we have joined the Commission Junction affiliate marketing network!

What does this mean?

It means that for every SurfShelf you help sell, we’ll pay you a commission. It’s that simple. We also have an incentive program to pay you even more money for extra sales.

We could all use a little extra money these days, and this is a great way to earn it. And because the SurfShelf makes people happy and healthy, it’s good karma for everybody!

And, we’ll provide you with all the marketing materials you’ll need including copy for your website and a wide variety of new banner ads.

You’ll also be included in all of our promotions including summer fun, back-to-school, winter holidays, New Year’s resolution season, etc.

How do you sell SurfShelfs?

Actually, once a potential customer hears about the SurfShelf, the product pretty much sells itself. The only problem is that not many people know about it yet.

So that’s where you come in… put up our banners on your site and use them to drive traffic our way. Tell your friends on Facebook and MySpace, Twitter about it, write a blog post… you get the picture. We’ll keep track of all the sales that come from your site (Commission Junction does this for us) and we’ll cut you a check each month. Cha-ching! It’s that easy.

How do you sign up?

If you are currently a member of the Commission Junction network, you’re all ready to get started. Just go to www.cj.com and search on keyword “SurfShelf” to sign up for our affiliate program and download our banners for your site.

If you are not yet a member of Commission Junction yet but would like to join, please GO HERE to join our program. It only takes a minute to join and is totally FREE.

Please let us know if you have any questions by using our Contact Us form.

We look forward to having you on our team!

Thanks!

Randy

Standing Desks for Kids in School

Last month I wrote a post entitled “Walk and Work” where I talked about the phenomenon that is getting a lot of PR these days: walking on a treadmill while you work.

It all started with research from Dr. Levine at the Mayo Clinic where he showed that the normal person can burn about 130 calories per hour by walking at an easy pace of 1-2 miles an hour.

At this pace you will not break into a sweat… but you will get in better shape.

Dr. Levine went on to develop the WalkStation with Steelcase and it is really cool. The only downside is that it costs $4500!

And at $59.95, the SurfShelf is a much easier solution… easier to get and easier on your wallet.

Today I want to talk about another cool idea that is being employed (and studied) in a few elementary schools in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

“Stand-Up Desks”

That’s right; the kids are using desks that allow them to stand.

Elementary School Classroom with Standing Desks

I recently read an article on this in the NY Times, and that’s where I’m getting my info for this post. Along with the quotes below. And the pictures too.

Given the childhood obesity problem that our country is facing, and the decline in physical education and recess activities at our schools, this sounds like a great idea to me.

Here are a few excerpts from the NY Times article:

“The stand-up desks come with swinging footrests, and with adjustable stools allowing children to switch between sitting and standing as their moods dictate.”

“Researchers should soon know whether they can confirm those calorie-burning and scholastic benefits. Two studies under way at the University of Minnesota are using data collected from Ms. Brown’s classroom and others in Minnesota and Wisconsin that are using the new desks. The pupils being studied are monitored while using traditional desks as well, and the researchers are looking for differences in physical activity and academic achievement.”

“We just know movement is good for kids,” Ms. Bormann said [Marine Elementary principal]. “We can measure referrals to the office, sick days, whatever it might be. Teachers are seeing positive things.”

And the word seems to be spreading. According to the article, orders for the desks are now spreading across the country from North Carolina to California.

“Dr. James A. Levine, a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic, advocates what he calls “activity-permissive” classrooms, including stand-up desks.”

“Having many children sit in a classroom isn’t the craziest idea, but look at how children have changed,” Dr. Levine said of the sedentary lives of many. “We also have to change, to meet their needs.”

“We’re talking about furniture here,” [Pat Reisenger, director of the Education Minnesota Foundation] said, “plain old furniture. If it’s that simple, if it turns out to have the positive impacts everyone hopes for, wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing?”

I know lots of adults who use stand-up workstations in their offices. It only makes sense that kids would benefit from them too.

UCLA Pauly Pavilion Half Court

March Madness is here! Gotta love it!

So we’re having a FREE SHIPPING SPECIAL so you can catch the action of the tournament while you get fit on your treadmill with a SurfShelf!

It’s that wonderful time of the year again when we can all sneak out of work a little bit early, take lunches that are just a little bit longer than usual, have a little browser window open on the desktop all day linked to our favorite sports site, or walk around all day with a transistor radio plugged into our ear… and not feel bad about it!

After all, college basketball is all American, good for the kids, promotes team spirit… you name it, it’s all good.

This year the online coverage of the NCAA College Basketball tournament continues with NCAA.com and ABC Sports announcing their free online broadcast of the tournament dubbed MMOD: March Madness on Demand.

Additionally, coverage of the tournament will be distributed across a variety of partners, including ESPN, Yahoo Sports and MySpace.

It’s 100% free and starts this Sunday March 15 with the NCAA Basketball Championship Selection Show at 6:00 pm ET.

That’s why we’re so excited to have a MARCH MADNESS FREE SHIPPING SPECIAL! So you can get a SurfShelf, attach it to your treadmill (or bike or elliptical), watch the games live on your laptop, and get your workout in… all at the same time.

All you have to do is order a SurfShelf and we’ll pick up the shipping tab for free. After all, it’s all about team spirit here at SurfShelf.

CBS is pretty funny: with MMOD, they will have a “boss button” on the site that launches a fake spreadsheet and shuts down the audio upon clicking it. What? Watching March Madness? Nope, not me, just working on this here spreadsheet all day. In fact, everybody at the office seems to be working on the same spreadsheet…

Go UCLA!

Randy

To make a treadmill, you need to first break it down into the individual parts

Sorry for the delay in getting this next post up but we have been super busy expanding our business (a topic for another day once we have you up and running).

Okay, so you’ve come up with your crazy idea, built your first prototype to prove it works, searched high and low on the Internet for any patents that might stop you from moving forward, filed your own provisional patent application to put your stake in the ground, performed your initial market research and found that there are indeed people out there that will buy your product and… now what?

Now it’s time to get an idea of how much it will cost to produce your product. All we are looking for at this moment in time is a back-of-the-envelop estimate so that we can make a judgment as to the whether or not we can make this thing.

The first thing to do is break down your invention into the basic components that make up the whole. Then figure out how each of those parts is going to be made. And how you are going to put them together.

Most likely, some of the parts you need will already exist out there in the world and all you will need to do is buy them. For instance, the SurfShelf comes with two nylon straps that each has a snap-in buckle attached to it. I obviously did not produce the snap-in buckles myself, but instead bought them in bulk from another manufacturer.

There will also undoubtedly be other parts that do not exist in the world that you will need to produce yourself. Are these parts molded plastic, machined metal, electronic?

The SurfShelf back plate and tray are molded parts, so I needed to find an injection molding manufacturer to do the job.

Ultimately, for each part that you will need to produce, you will need to find the right manufacturer to produce it for you. But right now we just want to get an idea of the cost, so it’s time to get some quotes.

Get on the Internet and start doing localized searches for the types of manufacturers you need that are in your area. These are the people you are going to call and go visit.

For instance, I visited five different injection molding facilities in Los Angeles and got quotes from each one of them to make the SurfShelf. I also met with them each individually and learned a great deal about the injection molding process, what it took, the costs involved, how to improve the product design, etc. Don’t feel bad about asking them to spend some time with you and to prepare you a quote — this is what they do all the time. And who knows, you might even end up doing some business with them in the future.

It’s important to note that at this time I did not have the final design of the SurfShelf in hand. In fact, it wasn’t even close. All I had was a PowerPoint sketch of what I thought it might look like. And this was close enough to get me some quotes to give me some ballpark information. All I really wanted to know was is it going to cost me in the neighborhood of $10 to make or $50? At $10 I might be able to make a business, but at $50 no way. This is what you need to find out.

If you can’t find local manufacturers to do the jobs you need done, that’s no problem. It’s easy to have phone conferences while sending drawings and quotes to each other using email. People do it all the time. It’s just fun to actually visit a manufacturing plant if one is close by.

Get ballpark quotes for each of your components and add them together to get your final cost. I took the quotes from the five different manufacturers that I met with and entered the information into an Excel spreadsheet to order to compare them and get the average.

Now take the average cost and DOUBLE IT. Seriously. DOUBLE IT.

Then throw in another buck or so for packaging (depending of course what the packaging is going to be) and maybe a few more bucks for stuff you never would have imagined.

And that’s your number. At least for now…

You will most likely be able to trim it down when you actually move into production, but use it as it stands for now. If you can make things work with this number, then any money you trim off the top is just an added bonus (but don’t necessarily count on it, trust me).

So, can you now add a profit margin to this number and still have a price that you think people would pay for the product?

What’s profit margin? Profit margin is a way of representing how much you are actually going to make on each unit sold after you pay off all the costs to produce and get the product into the hands of your customers. So we’ll talk about that next…

Cheers,

Randy

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

So far we have talked about…

Coming up with the crazy idea

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