EPISODE 2 - ERIC KESSLER

Welcome to the Impulse Spotlight where we meet with product development professionals and shine a light on the products they are most proud of.

In this episode we talk with Eric Kessler, a leading expert in motion control development for the filmmaking industry.

Eric built his reputation as founder and CEO of Kessler Crane by focusing on his personal interests. From starting his first company modifying paintball equipment as a teenager to developing the best cranes and jibs in the business.

We discuss the challenges that arise when going from making one product a weekend to hundreds of products a month. We talk about the pro's and con's surrounding competitors and protecting IP, and speak on the exciting potential within 3d printing to produce fast and affordable parts."

Eric delivers a unique story of his personal growth and shares advice to young product designers like = Talk with people actively in the community that are using your product, talk to teenagers who are your future consumers, and play lots of chess to build a habit of thinking proactively.

Show Notes:

Click here to see the Kessler line of products.

Podcast Transcript:

In this episode we talk with Eric Kessler, a leading expert in motion control development for the filmmaking industry. Built his reputation as founder and CEO of Kessler Crane by focusing on his personal interests, from starting his first company modifying paintball equipment as a teenager to developing the best cranes and jibs in the business.

We discuss the challenges that arise when going from making one product a weekend to hundreds of products a month. We talk about the pros and cons surrounding competitors and protecting IP and speak on the exciting potential within 3D printing to produce fast and affordable parts.

Eric delivers a unique story of his personal growth and shares advice to young product designers like talk with people actively in the community that are using your product, talk to teenagers who are your future customers and play lots of chess to build a habit of thinking proactively.

Let's get into it.

Eric, welcome to the show.

Hello, thank you for having me directly.

Sure.

So to get us started, tell us how you got into developing products.

Well, I was kind of raised that way. My father and grandfather were actually looking at camera. We're both engineers and they work for a company called Curtis Products and we, as a child, has grew up anything that we wanted. We usually built it if we could instead of buying things or even if it was a rotor teller or what I wanted to go cart. My dad and grandpa and I, we welded up and we had a lathe and a mill in the garage and we just made everything that we could make. Obviously, it was a Briggs and Stratton 5-Horses engine. We purchased off of a junk something and then rebuilt the engine and then, yeah, so that was just my upbringing. How I got a natural product development, again was just out of necessity. I was playing competition paintball at the around the age of 17, I think. And there was a lot of things, modifications that I started doing to paintball guns that people wanted me to do for their paintball guns because it was making it better. And so, you know, I would machine up these, you know, whether it was like tank mounting brackets or just little gizmos and gadgets that made the guns running, you know, more efficient or had a better feel or ergonomics or performance, whatever, I would just start doing these changes and modifications for myself and then other people would be like, I won't want to. And so, it kind of like, I started making these parts just for side money. I mean, I'm 17 years old. I need to pay for gas and car insurance and things like that. I was working in a Chinese restaurant, but, you know, extra money at that age is always good, so I would just make these bits and pieces for people. And that kind of fueled my hobby and, you know, paid for me to drive around and have a girlfriend which is expensive, you know, that's probably the most expensive thing. And then eventually one of my products got into the hands of TIPM and pneumatics, which is the paintball gun manufacturer and the top designer or dentist at Virginia, it was like, you know, there's not a lot of people making accessories for my gun and that makes it less, it was the most reliable gun on the market, but it wasn't really viewed as a performance gun. And so, the rental level, it was like, indestructible, it was the mini band of paintball guns, I guess you would say. You know, it's very practical, but they weren't cool. So, the stuff I was doing, because I was on a budget and I wanted a good reliable paintball gun, they were just good, but they weren't flashy, they didn't have all the bells and whistles. So I was making the bells and whistles to make them be a performance gun. And so he's like, you should, you know, these are actually great. You should start making these and sell it, you know, sell it. And that kind of just, I never wanted to be in business, I never wanted to, you know, end up where I'm at, I don't know if I still don't really care for the business side of things. You know, it's just, it's the boring, painful part of the job for me. But anyhow, so that was, I'm like, yeah, maybe, maybe I should. So at the time, I was working on an automatic firing system to turn my paintball gun, there was a semi-automatic into a fully automatic paintball gun. There were at the time fully automatic paintball guns, but they were like $12, $1400 and I did not have that kind of money and I knew how to do it. So I made a conversion kit that would make your, you know, cheap $100 gun perform like a thousand dollars. And I started selling those to friends and I didn't have the money. So it really started a company and they did, I don't know, I'm trying to even think, you got to remember this is 27 years, 28 years ago. So remembering my mindset at that time, I don't remember. But anyhow, they thought, they fell into the hands of certain people and it somehow got out to New Jersey, one of these and fell into the owner of national paintball supply, and which was the biggest light distributor for paintball gun products. And his name was Geno Pasta Bino. And he was like, and I remember getting the phone call, I was working over, so now I'm out of high school. I was working at a company called North American Sign. I worked a lot of overtime was a Saturday afternoon at 11 o'clock. I get a phone call from Geno, not knowing who this Geno guy is and he's like, I'm the owner of paintball supply, just got through this widget that you make and you know, this is amazing. How do I get thousands of these? I'm making them one off, you know? Right, right. And I told them, I'm like, you know, I'm like, it takes me a whole weekend to make me one. So how many is it going to take a thousand weekends? That's how long it's, you know? And so he's like, well, if you ever get to the point where you can do that, give me a call. And so instantly, I'm like, okay, you got to remember, I'm 19 years old. I know nothing about manufacturing. I know nothing about any of this stuff. So I reach out to my dad and my grandpa and other people. I started taking these free like South Bend, Indiana, like they were mentor programs from business people and manufacturers, you know, and started putting the pieces of the puzzle together. How do I, you know, produce this thing on large quantity? And so injection molding was definitely the way to make for a lot of the components. Because I was wire EDM-ing now, some of like the sear parts, you know, you know, slow. And like, so, you know, compression, cast parts or what do they call press metal? What's that for? Like powder metal with not saying, not nice. Investments, yeah, or not investment casting. It's a power, it's like they take powdered metal and they press it. Really hard high rock well for the sear when the bolt hits the sear on a gun. You know, I forget the process anyhow. But I mean, these dies are like 30,000 dollars a piece and, you know, this type of thing. I think my first mold was like $18,000. And this is going back 30 years ago for the main housing. We didn't have 3D printing back then, you know, and here I am broke. My wife and I just built a house literally moved in with $83 in my bank account and we're setting up for the light bulbs. And if I didn't realize when you had a house built, like it doesn't come with light, it's like contractor light bulbs that are cramping, got paint on them. And so we had, you know, we had no condiments, you know, like a, or first, you know, so we're living off of borrowed dishes and, you know, we were just starting our life, you know, I mean, so. And we built a house, my wife and I, we bought property in high school together. We weren't married. But I was hanging all, I was hanging around with 40 years, like in high school instead of high schoolers. And so everybody was buying land. And so I have my wife, my wife, my wife was working at part time job and I was working at a Basney Ford body shop at the time. And so I had some income and decided to buy property when I was at high school and we had it paid off. So we used the land as collateral to get alone to build our first house, which I was doing a lot of paint jobs like side paint jobs. I mean, I was working 24 hours. Well, pretty much I was looking at everybody at the age of 18 to 20. You can go like, well, I should say everybody, but, you know, I had stamina at that age to literally work from, you know, four in the morning till one in the morning, almost every day to make money, you know. So I was doing everything I could. So we had built up some equity in the house. So I think I had around $30,000 that I could borrow against the house and that's what I did to buy my first mold and kind of start all of this stuff. And anyhow, six months later, we have parts, production parts. And I am in debt up to my neck. I've borrowed bags from everybody to get to this point. And I call up Gino and Gino answers the phone and I'm like, hey, is Eric Kessler and he said, who? Dude, that day is the first time as an adult I cried, literally not on the phone. I mean, I was naive. We said he wanted thousands. I'm gearing up. You know, it was supposed to be. Yeah, okay, ship me a thousand. I didn't know that that is how this works. You know what I mean? Right. And he had forgot about, you know, in the six months very time. And here I am with like a thousand, you know, enough parts to build a thousand of these units in debt. Like, you know, I've against everything that had any kind of asset value in my life. 5,000 to my grandpa, 10,000 to my dad, everything borrowed from my house that I could, you know, like, you know, anyhow, a lot of promises. And, you know, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Like I said, I remember that night, like, just literally scared to the point where I was like, I just ruined my life. You know what I mean? He did say on the phone call, send me 12. You know, I'm like, you know, you told me you wanted a thousand. He says, did I give you a P.O.? And this guy's a hard-nosed business guy. I'm like, what's the P.O.? He's like, it's a purchase order. If I didn't send that to you, I'm not buying a thousand regardless of what I said. Right. I probably said it loosely to you that, you know, I would, I could sell thousands or something, you know, well, so I learned a lesson there. Either way, I'm here with a thousand. I've built the 12 units. I ship it out to them with fingers crossed. And I start after two or three days of being completely emotionally crushed, picked myself back up and started calling every paintball store that I could and saying, can I show you this item? And each one was like, that's cool. Give me one, you know, and they stick it in their store. After about two or three months, these people start calling me back. I'll take three more of those, you know, and I'm reaching out. And this is before, this is right at the beginning of online, you know, so it's how back, you know, this is going. So everything was through these little mom and pop stores. So I'm, this is still when we had door to door sales. You know, so that was the only way to get, you know, that's what I was doing. I started hitting the pavement. And I didn't have anything else to do, right? Like, I mean, so I had to and I'm stuck in all this and I have bills to pay. So it was really scary the first couple of months, but out and then, you know, Geno's order started getting to where literally he was ordering 100 at a time within maybe, I don't remember the timeline, but within that year, you know, they were selling pretty well. And I could see the light at the end of the tunnel and then a friend of mine, this is, that was right when the wet, the internet was out, but it was AOL as your standard, you know. And so he was my age. He was trying to start a business being a web developer. So he built my online page. It wasn't a store because I don't even know if they had e-commerce at that time. Literally, you just, you know, you call it was an advertisement, you know, right? For Geno's or crap. So you had to pay for banners on full rooms to get anybody to look at your website. So yeah, that was the whole, how it got started type of thing was in, you know, and then once I started interacting with the, the customers, it was just like going to the local pay-ball field, they're like, you know, I hate this about this gun. Well, she had to call that pay-ball marker to be politically correct. You know, can you improve this? Can you improve that? And if I heard it enough time, I would take a look at the problem and see, you know, and some of them are more like, I don't want to mess with it or some of them, it was mostly stuff that I personally could use or would benefit me. So I never worked for money for say. I had bills to pay, but I would only do projects that, that I, that would benefit me and I just hope that there was others like me out in the world that would benefit from it too. So it was, my motto always has been, I don't work for money, I work for smiles. That, you know, money comes after somebody smiles, you know, because it might make, you know, that's what you're always paying money for, right? It's a smile when you think about it. So, my philosophy has always been, if there's a problem, make it not a problem anymore, then when that, you know, people will pay for that. So that's always been, you know, what has driven my, I guess, direction with what products that I manufacture or want to produce.

So, I think we're going to shift gears a little bit. What's your current role in, what kind of products do you develop now?

My role is, I guess if you want to, I'm not a titles person, but president, owner, CEO, whatever of the company. So and then we're still small. We have really big at, there's a time, but going back to what I'm doing now is in the primarily robotics like devices like this city right here, motion controlled units for the film industry or film related image acquisition, primarily broadcast motion picture, live events, anything they, you know, film mostly film or well, it's not film anyway, it's all I am, digital cinema and some stills photography, but primarily in the stills world, it's only for time lapse. So where you need to move a camera, but stop, take a photo, movement, you know, we do some industrial applications that it's not developed for that, but they like we, we have military that uses our products. We don't know what for because they never tell us, but it's not for filming. They alter it. It's really hard designing like right now we're making a product for the military that they just say it is very vague like the product you have already is very close to what we need, but it now needs to hold away at, you know, one foot out that's 50 pounds and they give us these loose specs and then we say, well, what is that? What's the job it has to do? We can't tell you. And like, well, I'm happy to sign an NDA, still ain't telling you, you know, right? Just make it do this. So it's blind to design because like this new product we just did, you know, we sent it over to them and they're like, it's really close, but it's not there yet. We need these alterations made and so, but we don't even know what the objective is. That this thing needs to be done.

That's interesting. Yeah, how did you come from paintballs to motion control for?

Yeah, that's a quick story. So, paintball had a short, well, overall the, so the paintball industry started from a bunch of boards, while there's a couple, there's two stories one, one is probably true and made both at the same time. So paintball originally was a marking device. I forget the name of the company became Splatmaster for paintball as a sport, but prior to that it was mostly used for cattle marking and also forestry marking. So it was developed as a tool to drive around and shoot a tree that needed to be cut down or a cow that needed to be butcher. That was the original origin of it was to not get out of your vehicle or your off your horse or whatever you were on, shoot something to market at a distance and move along. Well, the story is that a bunch of farmers got drunk and decided to start shooting each other and thought it was fine. I mean, that's the story of going around whether it's true or not, I don't know. And then it became like, honestly, there's probably some level of truth to it as a bunch of pride farm kids that would instead of shooting each other with VB guns like we used to start shooting each other with paintballs and it became a sport and it got popular enough because back then they only had like, well, they would hold a little capsule of five markers. Okay. It was permanent paint. Well, that was a mess. So Splatmaster, which I forget the name of the original company, start catching wind that most of their sales were being sold to teenagers to go shoot each other. So they came up with a water based gelatin marking device and it was called the Splatmaster and it was the same five capsule tube, but they put four of them in a magazine that could be twisted. So you got 20 shots out of it. And that was the first marker intended for the sport of paintball. So then it just grew from there and it just started snowballing and other players started coming into it. And anyhow, so I can tell you the whole history of paintball because I was there for it. But anyhow, paintball at some point and I'm assuming just like technology kills most new technology kills little technology, right? Well, it's easier and cheaper to play Call of Duty on a computer than it is to buy a paintball gun and do physical activity and get exercise and be healthy. It's easier to say on a couch and buy a $40 game or now Modern Warfare, which is free, as long as you don't mind paying for advertisements or whatever. And so and you're not bugging your mom for a hundred bucks a week in to go get and induce paint and being shot by five grams of something flying at 300 miles per hour actually. You know, so different people and the young ones now they don't like paint. They don't like, and I loosely say that it's not all of them. But you know, in the masses, so any of any of games pretty much killed paintball and I was there for that. You start sales started declining massively and in towards the end, it was down to two big distributors. It was PMI out of Chicago and Gato and National Paintball Supply were buying up all of the brands. So you have exclusive rights to them to hang on the market share. Well, my company had went from, I don't know, we were up to maybe, I want to say, 18, 20 employees. So still a small company, but most of our products were just injection mold parts that didn't mean you need to simply, but I was selling 10,000 a month of these things, you know, like triggers. You know, so I didn't need a lot of employees, but we were moving, you know, maybe 60,000 pieces of product a month, you know. So it was like two figure, well, just tiping alone at the peak was selling 40,000 paintball guns, markers a month. And I was making a specialized trigger for it that most people wanted and there was some competition, but mine was the best one. And so I was probably selling 10,000 of those a month and it required a pin and a spring for the assembly, you know. So something we had people who were sitting down, you know, one, every two or three seconds was being made and coming off the injection molding machine, you know, just so we didn't need a lot of employees to move a lot of products. So and I get side tracked easy. I got OCD real bad.

No you're alright.

Rain me in whenever you need to.

You're alright.

So what was the question now again?

How did you get from paintball to the motion control?

Paintball starts dying off the distributor buying up all the small brands for market share. I happen to be one of those during the period of transition. I was sitting in an empty building with my marketing guys, which doing text phone support. And because the phone, the sales are now going to national paintball supply directly, but they didn't know how to support the product. So they kept us on basically sitting in a big building, two guys just answering tech calls until the contract was up. And we were pretty much bored. And so we were at the time land gaming. I don't know if you remember that with the beginning of like first person shooter games, mostly playing video games most of the day as we were forced to at computer. And he was and he was my marketing guy. And digital film was just starting to become a thing or digital, you know, digital video. And he was an aspiring filmmaker and you know, that was what he always wanted to be. So he was editing a lot of his personal projects at work because we just have to sit here. And so I started saying this and he was showing me how to do it. And so I bought some cheap editing software and at the time it was just my new hobby. I didn't ever want to I never wanted to be a filmmaker, but I just thought it was a cool thing. And you can videotape things and then chop it up and make it funny or whatever you wanted to do with it was just I've always been a gadget geek. So it was just a new technology that I wanted to play around with. So he was trying to make a film, low budget indie film is first one and he's like, I need a gym, which is a camera crane. I need a way to smoothly raise a camera for the shot that I want to get. So we saw a lot of my fabric went in and you know, the machines that I personally own. So I built him one and he used it and loved it in a couple of his buddies like, can you make me one? But it was kind of a repeat of how pay ball got started. And then he, you know, I didn't know what I was going to do. I ain't going back to North American sign because I, you know, it's all my company. I got out with my shirt on. I didn't make millions, but it was because the market had gotten so bad. The value of my company wasn't really that much, but it was enough to get out better than what  most, I think I was 23 years old. Roughly, and so for a 23 year old, you know, I made, I was in pretty good shape. House paid off. You know, had a decent amount of point in the bag, not a millionaire by any means, but, you know, I was comfortable. So I, but I still needed to work. So on the weekends, I would, I would build these camera gyps for him. And because, and then for him, he's a starving artist. He's out of a job. So he was selling my gyps on eBay. And under no brand. He was just like, so every week, you know, it started off as building me too. And then it was building me five this week. And then it was building me 10. I need 10 of them this week. I sold 10 on eBay. And I'm working a full time job. And so it was just the joke, what, and my retired neighbor would help me because it got to be where 10 was a lot to do in a weekend. And so we lived on a lake. And so we, we called it beer and float gas money. You know, that's what it, that's pretty much, you know, we were doing it to, you know, buy as each a case of beer for the week or not each a case. We didn't drink that much beer, but, you know, buy a case of beer and fill up our boats and, you know, fund our weekend and probably our fund, you know. So that's how it started. And then he was doing, he was pitching his own TV show called Night Lights. And he got picked up on a channel locally here that it, so our local news, our local channel was WSJV. And then they had this like weird channel called WSJV2, which is like a B channel to like, it didn't even air stuff 24 hours a day. It was just like crap programming. You know, almost like a test platform, you know, it was a channel like back in the day when he had to start the UHF, BHF dials, it would show up. And so they picked him up and his show was about reviewing. It had three segments. It was basically he'd go to mom and pop restaurants and redo a review, talk to the owner, and probably like what we're doing here, like why do you do what you do? And then it wasn't him. He was the cameraman, but he had this girl. And whoever his favorite of girlfriend for the week was the young girl, the girl talking that was doing the interviews, that would do a review on like a local store usually. So it was like non-commercialized stuff he wanted to get out. It was brilliant because it was actually informative for locals because like, there was all these hidden gyms of like boutique stores or entertainment purposes or restaurants, you know that nobody knew about. So they had like a, it was a half an hour show. So whatever was broke up into was three segments. And it was like six to eight minutes roughly in between commercials. So he get food for dinner or he get dinner for free then I and he would charge them $500 to shoot the segment. So basically it was commercial for these. But then I enjoyed watching it because it was like, oh over an elk cart at this restaurant looks amazing. I'd never heard of this restaurant. Or my wife was like some dress boutique shop, you know, and the owner could actually say why they're doing what they're doing and what their highlights were and why they should come in the visit. And so that showed actually took off to the point where he didn't want to sell my stuff on eBay anymore. But at that time we were probably selling 30 a week. So I was like, I didn't want to lose that. That was my side income, you know. So I at that time hired a guy to build a more professional website and you could buy them through the website. I was still selling them on eBay. So I took it back over. He went off on his own way and his show ended up getting picked up in Annapolis doing the same thing. And he's still doing TV shows now on a much higher level. But that was kind of like his step. So his life went off in the track that he wanted. And being that I again am now dealing with the customer, you know, they're like, yeah, I love your jibs. But the tripods that I'm putting them on can't support it. And the tripods that are strong enough to support a jib arm because you know, the arms 20 pounds, you got a camera that weighs 10 pounds and I have counterbalance weighted. This is 60 to 100 pounds now. And I'm a cheap, bro, artist. And I can't afford a $2,000 tripod. So that was the next thing to build. I need to build a heavy new tripod just for jib arm. I mean, it need to have all this other, it just need to support my, my jib arm. So that was the second product that I came up with. And then it was the Pan Tilt Head. Then people wanted to be able to move the camera at the end of the jib arm. They want it to pay an until. So my first Payant Tilt Head was an analog remote Pan Tilt Head. And then people wanted at the time cameras were large. They had these big right on dolly systems, you know, to move cameras left and right. So being that these are small cameras, why not make it a little slider, you know, something that can just go on a tripod? Well, that was the range. I mean, I mean, we were selling sometimes four to 500 of these a month. So it was, you know, I just kept listening to the customer and they were telling us what, you know, what they needed next. Well, that was all great. We grew to like 70 and almost 70 employees, 68 I think was our peak. And this was over a short period of time. Five, six years we went for working out of my pull barn. You know, building camera jibs with a retired neighbor that pretty much was working for a case of beer weekend. I mean, to, you know, owning our own scene machines and, you know, eventually into a 60,000 square foot facility with 68 employees, you know, over probably a period of five to six years. So pretty fast. I mean, it was like a two 300% a year growth and it could have been faster because the demand was there because everything was shifting so quickly that digital was as digital was getting closer and closer to the quality of film. Not only was it accessible to high schoolers because it was affordable as a hobby, but the film industry was converting from film into digital, which that's right where we fit, you know, they weren't buying the big giant jib arms anymore. They weren't buying all the big industrial equipment. They wanted smaller cheaper stuff. And the internet was becoming the thing where you watch videos. So content production was going through the room. So there was all of these like perfect storm that, you know, the film industry was just blowing up and that we, I mean, we grew leaps and bounds until about 2012. And then it started tapering off because it had gotten so big that now all the knockoff started coming out, you know, the overseas company just started knocking on products off. The trade shows they were so bold. I'm a member. I don't know if they were like, it was either Japanese or Chinese guys that were literally with my cameras in my booth measuring my products and taking photos, you know, like, I'm like, guys, I'm staying right here. You know, I mean, and they were wearing fancy suits and, you know, they're just to go back home and start making and under selling, you know, and next thing, you know, three months later, identical products to mine, without having to do the years of research and development. I mean, they didn't have the brand in the beginning. It wasn't bad because it was still crap, but they got better and better and better. And like now today, the sliders coming out of India and China are, I wouldn't say there's good as ours. They still have their own issues. They are still horrible on tech support, but they're cheap. I mean, they're so cheap, you know, so as for where like our products for a slider quality sliders, $1,000, there's $100 units out there that will get the job done, but, you know, may not do it for longer than six months before the wheels wear out on them or whatever. But to some people, it's all they have. It's the same reason why if you're a mechanic, you don't go to Harbor Freight if that's how you're making your living. But if you're just a guy that needs to take a spark plug out of his, you know, Juan Mouro engine once a year, or a Harbor Freight ratchets, just fine, you know, so it's kind of a concept. Sure. So yeah, that's how I got into the film industry.

Very cool. So the whole purpose of this show is to let folks like yourself kind of spotlight on a product that they're proud of. So tell us about the product that you want to talk about today.

Well, the one I'd love to talk about is the one we're releasing in two weeks, but being that I can’t talk about that yet. I'll just show you one of our current products. This here is the Cine Shooter, I don't know how well you can see it in this camera, but this is a motion control head. It has a laser right now on it because I was doing some testing. Really a camera. I should have been better prepared for this would sit right here on a platform. And this would move up and you know, you can basically tilt camera up and down, left and right. It controls the camera as far as when to turn on, turn off, do our software. You know, if you really, I don't want to bore people, but it's a robot for cameras. We have motors that can mount to the lens to adjust your zoom and focus. We have a slider system, which, you know, so basically we make devices that can move this camera without a human in three dimensional space to do whatever, perform whatever tasks that they needed, whether it's for repeatability because you're overlaying multiple layers of shots and they all need to sync up live events. If you want cameras, I get a concert without human beings behind them. I can be sitting here. You know, I have a 36 inch monitor with running six different cameras and I can do like AI tracking. So I just draw a box around a certain face that I want that camera to track and it can track that person until I say, okay, now I want to track this person or this subject. So it's automation for time lapse people. I want that beautiful, you know, I want to start the camera, let's say, focus down on a rock or some cool item on the ground and then slowly go wide with the image to reveal, you know, a beautiful landscape that then turns tonight and see the stars moving. So this camera is moving very slowly over, let's say 14 hours of time, taking a photograph every whatever you tell it to every five seconds, I want it to move a little bit, take a photo, move a little bit, take a photo when you string that all together, you have this day to night transition and subject change and focus pulls and all this other kind of stuff that a lot of people, you know, see these things, they just don't know how they're done, you know, unless you're in the open streets, but it's robots. And you can do that. You know, like, you can set it up with like PS4 controllers and we have iPhone apps, iPad apps, we have very sophisticated Mac and PC software, like I give a program and move and have it either triggered by an I/O device. So we have ports saying let's say you wanted to film a fox for the BBC getting out of the day. Well, but humans around there never going to come out, right? So you can go camouflage this camera, have a motion shot built up ready to go and then put an IR laser on that hole where you know he's going to come out and say when I get triggered, start the camera, get the shot that I want, you know, and stuff like that.

So that's all in your software?

That's all in our software. It does anything you want. Yeah, literally our software is it's taking, you know, like our first analog system, you know, is basic. This is still used today, but it was manual control. You can read your head, some technology in it, but now we're to the point where you don't even need a human, you know, it just needs props. I want to get this shot, figure it out. You know, put the right camera on it, right lens on it, tell it what lens is on there, give it the props that you want it to do and the way that has, when it's supposed to do its job, it does its jobs, you know. You can still manually control it like if I want to have manual control of it, like let's say it's a live event and you don't know what your subject is going to do. You can either use tracking, but sometimes auto tracking as well as it works, you might change your mind, right? Like so you may want to actually grab a physical joystick and, you know, in tracking has some limitations like if, you know, it can still sometimes get confused as to the subject. If it's just let's say a singer walking slowly across the stage, it's easy to do, but if it does, if that singer does a back flip or does a closed change like where they whip their outfit off and go into something else, it can get confused and then now you need to grab the controls, you know, like so you never know in a real life situation when, you know, the software is not that good, yeah. I mean, it's getting there. It does things like for stop-motion animation, which is very similar to time-lapseing. I mean, I can bore you with, you know, if you really want to like study the product, just go to the product website and there's a bullet point list of, you know, anything you could ever want to know about it. But it's pretty much like a computer. It is. It's just it's a motion device and within the ability of the, we make a lot of attachments for this. You have a role feature, we have like robotic arms. We have, you know, so it's, you can start off with something simple like this, which is just pan-and-tilt. Then you can add zoom, focus, and iris control. You can add a slider. You can add a robotic arm. You can, you know, start making, it's like a Lego system or an erector set that can be programmed to do whatever it is that you want, you know, want it to do. And then there's IO abilities so that way you can have it be, you know, you can trigger a bit of date and time. I mean, you can say, I've always wanted to do it, but how that feature came up was we had a beach front place up on Lake Michigan. And every year the ice pack would move from the north across Lake Michigan and shove up on the beach. And it was massive. I mean, we're talking ice that bigger than barges, you know, I mean like massive icebergs if the wind was in the right direction, these things would shove up on the beach and they would beat stories tall of these blocks of ice. And it would always happen overnight. I never did to see how this would happen. And then when they would melt, sometimes it was faster than others, but like I was never up there full time. It was like a vacation home. So what I wanted was I asked my software engineers, I want to do this motion shot over the whole winter season, but I only wanted to come on at these hours of daylight. So I'd say, you know, for the time of, I don't remember what it was. Let's say 11 o'clock to one o'clock in the afternoon. I want to take 24 photographs and move that much to move things. So I'm doing it three month time lapse. So every 24 frames is one second of video output, right? So I had to do the math in my head, how many images am I going to need to have a 30-second spot? To cram three months in the 30 seconds and then I divided that by how many days and then how many windows of time that it's coming on, how many photos I need during that time so I can get the final shot. You know, that's like, when you see all these really neat, how do they do that shots for the BBC and National Geographic and those kind of shows, it's a lot of, you know, some times where we've had customers, were they taking year-long time lapses of a section of forest? And you know, the camera is spinning or doing this motion over a year's time, but you're seeing the blossom of flowers, the decay, the snowfall, the, you know, how it changes, it's, you know, stuff like this that does that.

So yeah, I mean, that's what it's intended purposes. So it's everything from live events, what's happening right now. You know, during COVID, there was an uptick because people couldn't have camera people doing interviews in the same room. So that was kind of a big thing, you know, so our sales, we lost, COVID was so hard on us like because our normal market died completely because they weren't making films or were no very few live events. The only thing we were selling, paying a tilt heads for was people that like, hey, we still got to interview this person. So we're going to ship them one of your heads and tell them how to set it up and we're going to turn the internet, control it and get the shots that we need to get. So that was really the only sales that we had, you know, just remote, you know, most people zoomed cameras like what we're doing right now was good enough, but like for news stations, they still wanted to have that beautiful wrap around shot or whatever. It sparked up a lot of companies. One of them was called, I think called camera box, which were buying our systems and putting it like an appellating case ready to go. And they would, I don't know if they're renting them or selling them, but they would ship them to the interviewee and say just open the box and it had lights in it. It had the camera already ready to go. And it was like a portable like state, you know, video station and they're like set in front of it and then they would just like a zoom call, but they now have this lighting motion and all this other stuff and proper lighting, you know, if it had to be something better quality than just like a zoom call or I think we're on G-Chat, right? Is that what we're doing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, this is fine for a conferencing and doing basic podcast, but if you wanted any production quality to it, like as you build your podcast, eventually you might want to be cam, right? Like in every camera off to the side that's just, you know, doing this slow back and forth wrap around shot that you're cutting into to add more dynamics to what you're doing. And you don't want to pay somebody eight hours to sit there and do that for one is almost physically impossible for someone to do that perfectly for eight hours and a cost of money. Right. So that's the other product that we make which is called with the smaller one, which is called the second shooter, not to be confused with the guy that took out the FK, but it was the second cameraman that you didn't have to pay for. You know, already paid for it once you can have that thing have to keep paying them. So that was more of a budget specific use product, although it still does a lot of what this one will do. It's a little bit more streamlined down into like just interviews and doing more of a specialized set of jobs. So to speak extra where this is more of a flagship. This is our current one before this was Cine Drive, which was actually a more powerful system in regards, well software wise, this is more powerful and electronic wise, more powerful, but from a mechanical aspect, it was way more precise. Well, this is pretty damn good. But at the time it was we we shot for the moment. So we had an analog system and then everybody said we went digital, motion control, it was programmable and all those other stuff. So we at the time, we were very lucrative in the industry. So I'm like, I want the best motion control system. So we put a team of engineers together and we overbuilt this thing and it was very expensive, but we had no  competition. And at that time, people were actually buying industrial robots that were, you know, let's say positive of $30,000 to do this as from my system was $10,000. But by today standards, nobody will buy a $10,000 motion control system. These are like $30,000. And so we've actually gone backwards. And as far as we had to come up with a way to make it more affordable because the market shifted and the days and competition is on. At that time it was the only guy doing it. So $10,000 was cheap because your alternative was $30,000 to $200,000. Now there's tons of options out there that are $1,000. So now it doesn't do what our system will do, but we have to stay down in that range. So it's like a race to the bottom, like it usually is in most industries. But the volume of what you sell goes higher, you know, too, at the same time. So they become more of like a consumer grade type product versus an industrial grade product, which is what we built originally. And then we had to reduce it down to more of a consumer type product. But feature-wise, we've continued to grow. So it actually does more from a software and electronics standpoint than what our other system, our original digital system did. Cool. Can you walk us through a little bit of the journey of actually developing that product and like what were the steps involved? This one here in particular, you have remember this is like, let's say generation 4, or 5-ish. So the beginning, it was putting motors, they analog DC motors, they just move things. And then it was some level of control. So it was PW, writing PWM, basic firmware to control the motors more smoothly. We didn't have it. Then it got to where people wanted, you know, repeatability. So we had to have encoders put on there so we can re-position. So everything was like stepping stones of adding components, components, components based off of the demand to the point where we're at now, which will do pretty much anything. And we're just now getting ready to develop new hardware, electronic hardware that has more components on it that will allow us to grow in the future of doing other things, which is I have to be careful about what we're talking about. So in case the competition's listening, they don't know where else going. So what was the specific question?

The journey of developing the product.

Like, yeah, I mean originally it was just literally an L-shaped piece of metal that had two motors that paid until, and then it had an analog joystick that just moved it around with the re-estabts for speed controls and a logarithmic dampening system for how fast the motors would take off and it would respond to soften the motion. To get a slowly, you know, increasing, you know, we went to digital that said, all right, now we know where the head is at, you know, in space and time. And so therefore we had control over it. And when our circuit boards at the time couldn't do the next feature, we built more powerful processors on there, more I/Os, peripherals, you know, things like that that was required. And so it's kind of hard, but it's like any other, you know, we look at the first automobile compared to what we drive now, you know, it wasn't like it went from the Model T to what you drive today over nine one step. And so it was, you know, let's put a horn on it. So people get out of the way, you know, like, so let's put air conditioning in it, you know, let's do these types of things, you know, fuel efficiency changes, stuff like that. So that was the, in a nutshell, you know, that's probably every story of a product is, you know, it's like, let's just get it doing something. And then people will tell you what it's not doing. And then if you see an ROI in that, then let's go ahead and do it, you know, and then you just keep going and then competition drives you as well, right? So it's like, I know many times there were speakers that, you know, it's like, well, we can do this, but I know one's really asked me for it. And so I don't want to put money into it, but then my competition comes out with it and I see people respond positively to it. It's like, well, we need to do that now too, but let's do it that, you know, let's one up then. So that, you know, so you have, that's the nice thing about me. Competition sucks in the way of, you know, you're constantly fighting to always outdo your, you know, your competition, but for the consumer, it's great because it's always getting them more and more tools and also keeping the price in check as well. So, and it gives us a job, right? I mean, if it wasn't for competition, I'd still be selling our oracle system that we had 10 years ago because, you know, like it's the only thing on the market. So if you want to move a camera, that's what you get. So, yeah.

That's cool. I was just going to ask, good on time.

Yeah, as long as we can wrap up, that's what two o'clock now. Maybe next half an hour, 45 minutes.

Okay. Yeah, just a few more questions and then we can wrap it up. I was going to ask what kind of manufacturing processes are involved. I mean, do make these overseas? Do you do this at your place? Is it injection molding, machining what, what all is involved in getting it done?

We do it all in house for the most part. And almost I can say 95% of everything that we sell is done actually in Indiana. So, almost all the design aspect is done in house, not all of it. You know, we work with you guys now on some stuff, but I would say the major up until now, it's almost all design was done in house. Manufacturing as far as machining goes, probably 90% is machined under this roof. There are certain components that require specialized machines that we don't want to invest in, so we subcontract those parts out, like to a local shop. Electronic manufacturing, the design of it's done under the Kessler employment, but the actual circuit board manufacturing is done in Elkhart, Indiana, which is like an hour away. The all, all final symbol is done under this roof. So, you know, we haven't, or like circuit board show up, you know, we put them in the housing, put all the motors in. We do have some overseas components. I mean, when you're dealing with electronics, it's almost impossible to not have that summer German, summer Chinese, actually, I don't think we have any, maybe some fasteners are Chinese, which I don't know if they are not. Most of our electronic components are all Taiwan, which most people are, you know, the headquarters for semiconductors. So all of our electronics mostly come out of Taiwan. Our motors are a combination of Taiwan and Germany. The Germans are really good at gearboxes and those kind of components. And then everything else is made by us. I mean, I would say this device, the whole, and external, and the whole, and the whole and chassis, and all the main bits are made here. The circuit boards are made in Indiana designed by us. The components on the board come out of Taiwan, mostly as far as I know. And the motors come out of Taiwan. And even our like, like gears are made in Indiana, they're a local gear company. So very few things are, and we like that for a lot of reasons. One, we want to keep US money in the US. You know, quality is the best part of it. Control of availability. Like during COVID, you know, Taiwan hurt us. And it was not their fault. But like, you know, that's why we're developing a new circuit board right now is because it really disrupted the electronics industry. Great. So it was a good time for Taiwan to, well, they read, they absolutely need a lot of components that's in this basically. So we're being forced into it. They had a streamline. And so they kind of did a shift on us with a lot of like motor drivers and things like that. And they're like, hey, at the volume that, you know, because Taiwan produces, I think there's only like three chip, you know, I think it's TSMC that, you know, it's, you know, it's TSMC that does the, like what is a 90% of all chips or major TSMC? They're wearing other. So they had a streamline and they obsolete it a lot of their stuff and they developed a lot of new components that do multitask. So that way they have to make fewer parts. Well, now we have to design around those. So we drove our cost up because what happened is the hoarding started happening like our motor driver in this, in this unit. Just before COVID, we, there were six dollars a piece. Now we're paying $90 if we're lucky to find them for just a motor driver because they're obsolete. They're out there probably in the 10th of thousands, but people started hoarding them. And just like us, I mean right behind my chair is a box full of them that's like sitting on goal, you know, because if you, if your product still requires it, it's whatever you'll pay, you know, and there were people that took advantage of that. You had a lot of people that were by, I mean, there was a lot of money to be made in if you knew what SMC was doing, buy up all of it. Now you know, you know, you can name your price and that's what happened. I mean, I heard some of the, we have people trying to sell us some of our motor driver chips in near a thousand dollars a piece. Well, I can't make it. I mean, I need eight of those, you know, let's eight thousand dollars increase is not one component. No, I can't do that. Basically, there were people that weren't gouging as bad, but we got gouged. I mean, our circuit board in here went up almost 600 percent in manufacturing cost overnight and we had to absorb it, you know, the market, our market was dead. So he didn't raise the price and our manufacturing went through the roof and it cost 11 and a month through the roof. So you have your employees asking for more money to survive and, you know, it was like we are getting squeezed, you know, like I mean, you can't sell for more, but people need more. And, you know, everybody kind of felt it's still going on to this day. I mean, it's a struggle, but our, I think one of your questions were like if you could do something differently in the future, what would you do? I will say going into producing a product, make sure you're to invest in, this is the best advice I can give, that your supply chain is locked down for the shelf life of what you expect to get out of that product. I know it's still looking in a crystal ball, but keep that in the back of your mind. It never, it never used to be an issue, but if I would have known two days before COVID, I would have bought 10,000 of these drivers and some people did know or saw, the thing is even in the beginning of COVID, I didn't think anything, the price didn't go up immediately. That happened six months in COVID. But a lot of people that were smart said, hey, somebody sold the writing on the wall and they bought them. Or bought a lot of them. I mean, I think Elon, you know, at Tesla, that's how they survived it. They saw it when GM and all the other big car manufacturers had tons of car sitting based off of a computer chip that they couldn't get. Elon saw early and bought all that ahead of time. And it bought up 10 years worth of chips. Now he might be throwing them away now because they've moved on behind that. Anyway, kept them in business. I don't know how many times in the last three years, I thought, well, I'm going to be thinking, we were going to have to go out of business because without this guy, nothing else that we make was worth anything. So that's how, you know, I mean, one little $8 part can shut down a whole operation. And it's a lot of first hand. So keep that in mind when developing. Where are you going to get all of your stuff? And even with our new electronics, whether this is smarter or not, well, I don't think it's going to be dumb. It's not buying three years worth of these components because the components are buying are available now. They're better than what I'm paying $90 a piece for, but they're $3. So I'm going to go ahead and spend the money and make sure at least for three years,we're not going to have this issue. Yeah. Because we don't know. So it's kind of like once bitten twice shy, right? So that's my, I guess, advice to people is make sure you understand your supply chain very, very well because the world is a different place now. I mean, I've been doing this for 20 plus years and we never had to worry about what we're going to get parts for, you know, up until now.

Yeah, that's, that's pretty crazy. Besides the supply chain stuff, what are some of the biggest challenges you saw in developing this product?

I would say, you know, I mean, the challenge is always benefit us is everybody wants a Cadillac and pay a Ugo price, you know, that's always been the challenge, right? Like how do, so how do, how to achieve that? And we've done a very good job. I mean, if you knew, we make magic, I can't, you know, those are trade secrets, but some of the stuff that's inside of this machine should not be doing what it's doing, but we find out ways to make it do it. And that's allowed, it allows us to give the performance of a Ferrari on a, you know, Ford S-Core costs. So it's doing things like that.

Those are the challenges. Those you got to figure out on your own, and that's what makes us different than our competition, you know, it allows us to stay competitive, but we outperform them by two or three times, but we're cheating. But we're doing magic stuff that they haven't figured out how to do yet. So, yeah.

What kind of prototyping process is, did you employ when you developed this, anything outside the ordinary?

Well, the first thing, you know, back in the old day, you just built something before we had Cad, you know, usually we would start off like with a proof of concept, well, a bunch of metal together in general shape, throw things at it and just see if it like kind of does what we want it to do. So we're not wasting a lot of time. Now with SolidWorks and, you know, with Cad in general, you know, you can kind of get in there and draw things and animate it and see if it, you know, so you can kind of prove it out. So it's way more efficient now. And it doesn't cost as much money in your not wasting materials and stuff. So we start off with here's the problem, do we think we can solve it? Is it something in our wheelhouse that we know, you know, not only can we do it, but is our customer base that we're, you know, we're our brand, right? We're not a startup. Start up can do whatever they want because they have to establish themselves. But if you're already kind of, you know, known for doing something like I'm working on a project right now completely outside of our, out of the film industry, that I know is going to be amazing, but nobody knows who I am. So I'm starting off, you know, they, you know, hard to people in the film industry, they know the brand, Kessler, and it holds a lot of weight. But where this other product is going to go, they don't know me from Adam. So it's like, I got to go out there and, you know, start marketing and prove. And I'm going up against guys that, you know, have been in the industry that have the trust of the industry, you know, and the report. So that's going to be the difficult challenge there. But yeah. No, I mean, again, I forget the original part of the question.

Prototyping processes.

Oh, right. So we now usually come up. The first step is a proof of concept and do it as crudely as possible just to know, like I'm working on one. Right now, like, will this even do roughly what we think we want to do? And so we sometimes use off the shelf components, whatever pieces to get. Okay, yes, it will do it, you know, right? So then it's the refining stage. So then we start working towards a production prototype from there, like what is it going to look like? You know, how heavy is it going to be? What's the physical restraints of it? We start doing board layouts, stuff like that. Can we cram everything into a package? You know, and then we start looking at, yeah, being able to do it is only going to be always possible, but can we do it for the price point that we need to fit in the customer base? You know, like, so we have to analyze, we know the customer only wants to pay a ceiling amount of this. And but we're already at, you know, components already so close to that. We drop, we say, we're walking away, you know, like we're too, like the spread isn't there for us to make, you know, but if we're only at 10% of what we know the market will pay, like, hey, we have something here. So even if we're off and we got increased cost by 30%, there's still 70% of margin there, you know, by the time you pay for taking advertising out and dealer cost and all this other stuff. Now, you know, we, the rule that I was always taught by Tipman when I worked there in our manufacturer, which is where I learned a lot from manufacturing from was the rules of four. If you take the wrong cost of a device in times that by four, that's what the retail price should be. So like, you're not, people, well, you're not because a quarter of it goes to the dealer, you know, a quarter of it goes into future design, a quarter goes into the labor and manufactured out that product and leaves you a quarter left for profit, you know. So that's, you know, and that's just sometimes we get lucky and get six times and there's other products we sell when we barely make an eye on, but it's a crucial component to the ecosystem, you know, like there's maybe a device that we make for this that we might even be almost borderline losing money on, but people need it, but it sells another part of the string, it's the in between these, but we make money on that part, you know. So what there's loss leaders, right? So, or it's not really a lost leader, but sometimes there's necessary loss somewhere in the whole path that overall you, you generate your, you know, your profitability off of having that available.

Sure. Sure. But what are some of the trends you see in product development like it's as far as in your world? Are there any interesting trends?

3D printing is the fastest one right now that's making things change really fast, you know. 3D printers, you know, we bought our first one, which was the dimension, I think that, I think SolidWorks was the one that was like, I don't think they designed it, but they had like some exclusive, right? So, that was kind of like the first one that was popular or became mainstream, and, but 3D printing now is getting to be production. I mean, we have a lot of parts that are 3D printing for production, and it's, you know, if you're going to do 20,000 of something, it makes sense to do injection molding. But there's still a lot of times that even if the quantity is there, 3D printing, they're getting so fast and affordable now that the flexibility of being of a change of product every year or every time it's like, in our case, you know, we couldn't get screens. So we can change this housing overnight to if it had to do screen, you know, and as to where if we had an injection mold, that was a six month process and it cost $30,000 or more to do. And so now it's literally overnight, we changed the screen whole year, and by the next day we're up and running and had the parts overnighted with the new screens because we got a bad batch of screens and so, you know, or LCDs or OLEDs and whatever. So the flexibility of 3D printing now with MJF and the next big one that I see that isn't there yet, but I cannot wait is metal 3D printing. It's there, but it's too expensive for the masses. You know, rocket ships are fine when you got a billion dollar budget, you know, to have 3D metal, but selling, you know, consumer grade type products or prosumer really is where this probably fits into. You know, the metal printing isn't quite there. And you know, you still, the parts are really close, but the finish quality isn't great and so there's still like, there's still some secondary work on a lot of metal parts that need to be done. It still speeds it up, but the product, it's good for prototyping, it's good for making those parts that are impossible to make on a mail or a lathe, but as far as running production, that's where I see, you know. I think within the next five to 10 years, they're going to have 3D metal printers where it's going to oscillate, obsolete mills and lades for a lot of the industry. I know that's where they're pushing for because I'm seeing the machines that are in there. They're actually printing now. I think Haas is doing it where they're 3D printing with a robot arm and machining for the final, at the same time.

So they're printing into the machine?

They're in the machine, like based away, it's like a wire welder. There's a 3D printer that's welding the part, but it's crude in machining right behind the well, so to speak. And so that's where I think, you know, because you don't have any wage, right? Like you're not, you're buying schools of material and it's getting it within 10,000s of what it needs to be. And it's cleaning it up right behind where it's laying the bead down or the layer down. And so I see that actually being in, it might be in the sooner than five years. I know that I've seen videos of them doing it. So it means they're in proof of, well beyond the proof of concept stage. These powder bed machines, I don't think the speeds, I think Haas is on the right track, but there's so many people running to that race who, you know, you don't know who's going to win, you know?

Yeah.

But that's where it's going to be. But you know, they're, they're using a robotic arm that's basically building your part, you know, just like a 3D printer would, but then they got these other robotic arms that are coming in and machining literally seconds behind the metal being welded together. So when you take the part out, it's done, you know, and you're tumbler and have an anodizedor serifoted or whatever you got to do in shipping, you know? So it's, and I see multi, and I know they're working on this too is multi material printers. You know, you got PCC or, you know, PC boards that can be 3D printed will eventually say I'm marrying all of this stuff where maybe this final product might come out of one machine done. I know that Boeing was working on 3D printing wings for planes and actually being able to print the wiring and electricity and like hydraulic tubing all inside of the part of the structure. So basically you have a final product at the end and then you just slap the wing on the fuselage, which would also be, you just plug everything together.It saves weight, saves material. So I think don't, you know, 15, 20 year out range might, you know, I see over at L-Cart's 3D printing bow holes, you know, and set in up fiberglass molds. They're doing processes over there. At first they were 3D printing the molds, which spent up the mold making. Now they're actually printing the boats. So they just have, they're on huge like trolley systems with big heads and, you know, they, they're, so I think, you know, that's really has changed the ability to go from concept to sellable products in a very short, I wouldn't say short anymore, but a shorter period of time and doing it much more cost-effective.

Yeah, that's an interesting perspective. So as we start to wrap up, I always like to ask this, reflecting on all the challenges and successes you've had throughout your career, while developing products, what words of wisdom would you share with people looking to make, you know, a significant impact in the product development industry?

If you still want to have hair and not turn to alcohol, don't do it at all. If you want to stress free life, don't do it. You're going to punch a crock, you know what I mean? You know, I don't know. I think it, that's different depending on your personnel. You know, I don't do what I do because for money or it's how I'm wired, right? Like it's just what I am as far as like advice again, trying to look into the crystal ball, you know, really pay attention to where you think futures are going. You're never going to get it right, but the more you pay attention, the closer you're going to be to get it right. And it's going to save you a lot of headache going forward. I mean, a lot of people put their blinders on. I know I did it certain times and just thought, you know, there were points where the most control product that I said I'd drive at one time. I got, you know, I'll be honest with you just to be honest, I got lazy. It's like the best thing on a market, you know, white, you know, I wanted to sit back and not design for a while or only maintain and just build on the design I had. Well, competition came in and stuck me and got me in the butt pretty good because they made a product that was a third of my price. Wasn't as good still, but it was good enough. And people, when it comes down to it, they didn't want to spend $10,000 and they wanted to spend $3,000. And if I didn't see that writing on the wall, you know, always be always trying to stay ahead of the game. Play chess a lot. Seriously, it trains your brain into trying to be seven, eight moves ahead is very critical to not only for the product you're building now, but from a business aspect. You know, if you're just a designer, your logic in your head might not be so concerned with the help of the company, but just the product itself. But if you're the owner of the company, you want to, you're, but as the developer, even if you're working for someone else, being as proactive on your design for what it's going to make you stand out as a better developer, you know, you're more valuable to the company you're working for. And you're saving them, just make sure that they know it so they pay you well enough. You know, if you're saving them money, you should be getting a kind of it too. But anyhow, yeah, just proactivity is proactive is possible, reactive sucks. It costs you a lot of money. It's inefficient and you're always playing catch up and it's hard to get your head above the water again. So yeah, I mean, that's trying to read the futures, you know, talk to teenagers because you're going to be making things for them. They don't have money now, but they will in about five years. And those that's going to be who you're going to be making things for. That's another bit of advice.

Awesome. That’s great advice. So yeah, this has been fantastic before we wrap up. Is there anything else you want to mention with regards to your product or product development in general or Kessler or anything like that?

No, I don't like to do. Or whatever, I mean, we just try to do the best that we can do. I don't want to turn this into a commercial. I thought this was more of a just a hopefully maybe I said one thing that can help somebody else out and maybe save them a headache. One less gray hair that they have to endure going through the painful process of, you know, building one thing is easy mass producing something is, you know, now you have to build the things that need to build the things. So there's a whole, you know, lineup of that. Keeping your stress on, I guess, more personal level. And again, you're speaking to the guy develops product and bears the responsibility of the company at the same time. So that's two different things. So if I'm talking to an employee that's a product developer, he's the only way I'm part of the burden. I'm hearing a lot of the other burdens too, but keep your stress even for somebody that's working for someone else, keep your stress under control. And I know they have stress because they're under deadlines and timelines and they know their job, the healthiness of their company, might mean whether they still have a job or not. And so, but if you look, it's not worth, you know, now that I'm almost 50, you know, I gave up a lot of myself. You know, in the process of trying to, you know, get to success that I'll never get back again. So manage that in a balance. I mean, you also don't want to not do anything and sit on a beach all day. But make sure you're setting aside your sanity, at least a section of your sanity, you know, for yourself. You know, that's, that's also very critical. Otherwise, you know, you get to a certain point, you don't want to get to burnout, you know, and I've been really close to it a lot over the years. And, you know, at the end of the day, we want to be happy, right? So if you burn yourself out, you're not happy and then all of a sudden, you know, it's not fun anymore. So try to keep it fun, understand that producing new things for the betterment of the world in some way is important, but not at the expense of killing your, you know, oneself's happiness. So always try to keep a section of that alive. And if it, you know, you can give up 70% of it, but keep, you know, 25, 30% for yourself at all times, because once it's gone, it's gone. We're not getting it back or getting it back is very difficult. That's sure.

That's great advice.

Yeah.

So, yeah, before we end, where can, if somebody wants to know some more, where can they, where can they find out about your product?

kesslercrane.com is our website. If you want to just check out what we do, a lot of neat stuff, especially for geeks, people, even if you're not a film person, it's geeky robot stuff, you know, so a lot of mechanical moving things. So yeah, if you're bored and want to watch some, you know, or if you just want to see how certain film shops are done, we have a lot of that stuff on our website because we use that as part of our marketing is like, look at this cool shot and people go, "Oh, ah, it's like, guess what? This is how they did it." You know, so it's almost like when a magic magician tells you how they do the trick, you know, that's part of, you know, kind of, you know, the way they do it. It kind of kills a little bit if you want to, once you figure it out, but at the same time, it's pretty neat seen, you know, how things are not, you know, behind the scenes. So yeah, if you want to check it out, it's Kessler, K-E-S-S-L-E-R, Crane, C-R-A-N-E.com, a lot of resources on there and whole industry is kind of a cool industry. As there are many, I spend my whole morning coffee time watching YouTube videos. I was fighting me out this morning that the Blue LED was almost impossible. So almost 30 years, RCA and GE and all these big electronics companies could not figure out how to make a Blue LED. It was impossible, they said, by many people, and it took one person to figure out, and it was, for me, it's like, when some people watch a movie, it's like, how, how do they do it? You know, our aliens real and, you know, whatever. It's that one thing that, note that said was impossible. And then it's like, when they figured it out, it's like, when that was the simple thing in the world, what do you know, what they spent? It was their race because, you know, right now what we're watching on is our G-B-LEDs, right? It's a combination of red, green, and blue. Well, they had red and green, that was easy. But nobody could do the blue. And they actually said it was impossible based off of the technology of LEDs to ever create blue. But obviously, we have blue, and so that was a really interesting, that's how much of a nerd I am, that's how I spent my boarding was watching stuff like that, but it was fascinating. And it was really, really thinking outside of the box on how to get it to do it. So, I really applaud so many things that we take for granted, you know, like, that, you know, I mean, you know, this cell phone in your hand is 10 times, you know, a million times more powerful than the internet, put a rocket ship on the moon. And I really really want to the moon. That's all in the podcast. That's all in the discussion, but, you know, but we, you know, kids walk around with it all day long and it's, you know, just, you know, taking it for granted, you know, but the amount of power, the ability that you and I are talking on this right now, you know, I'm a little enough back, you know, you had to ride into your bicycle to your friends house if we wanted to have this kind of conversation. And then you couldn't share it with anybody else unless you wrote a book, you know, so, yeah.

Cool.

This has been awesome.

I'll post the website in the show notes and, and make sure everybody's got a way to, to read more about your stuff.

Okay.

Sounds good.

Well, I really appreciate you being on here.

Yeah. No, I appreciate it.

Yeah.

Thank you, Troy.

I'll get with you another project stuff as we get going on, that stuff.

Have a great rest of your day.

I appreciate it. You put it up with my long-winded ridiculousness.

Yeah.

My wife can't handle it. She kicks me out in the garage every day. You only had to do it once that poor woman. She's got, she's got this every day.

All right, Eric, I appreciate it.

Take care.

Have a great day.

To learn more about impulse and how we might be able to help you, visit impulseproductevelopment.com.