T-24-002 : Kevin Lavelle - Performance Fabric to Pediatric Telemedicine
You're listening to TRADEOFS, a podcast about the trials and tribulations of designing and manufacturing hardware. Each month, we sit down with founders, engineers, and other hardware professionals to understand the trade offs inherent in building a business that makes physical products. I'm Nate Padgett, hardware community guy and founder of Informal, a freelance collective that helps companies of all sizes design, build, and ship world class hardware.
Chris:And I'm Chris Rill, startup founder, engineer, and fractional CTO, where I help hardware and software companies build and scale their products. TRADEOFFS captures the best of these conversations so you can learn about the skill sets needed to successfully bring physical products to market. Today, we welcome Kevin Lavelle to the show. Kevin is the founder and CEO of Harbor, Pediatric Telemedicine Company helping parents rest a little easier at night. Before Harbor, Kevin founded and scaled the first performance fabric menswear brand, Mizen and Main.
Chris:In full transparency, Informal and I have been working with Kevin and the Harbor team over the last few years. With that out of the way, let's dive in.
Nate:Hey, Kevin. I think the last time you and I actually had a conversation other than email might have been right when we started working together with Informal.
Kevin:Didn't I meet you in Vegas for the informal meetup?
Nate:Oh, you're right.
Kevin:Were you in Vegas?
Nate:We did meet in Vegas. Yeah. Man, that was
Kevin:But but you were running around like a chicken with your head cut off right before the SWAT team came.
Nate:That was such a... Yeah. Such a... Such an experience.
Chris:Yeah. Wait. Wait. Kevin, you were at the party?
Kevin:The SWAT team party?
Nate:Yes. It wasn't the real SWAT team. It was rent a cops wearing tactical gear, but still.
Kevin:Which obviously you need.
Nate:Yeah. Of course. Of course. I wish I could say that I hired them, but I didn't. Cedar's Palace did.
Nate:You know, the the the story behind that, and then we'll then we'll get to the real topic at hand. We expected 500 people, and we got 2,000 people. So it was, more successful than I thought. Kickstarter afterwards was like, we need to get you a bigger venue next year.
Kevin:You're like, yeah, because otherwise they're going to actually arrest me next time.
Nate:Yeah. Well, I walked to the floor the next day and everybody was like, they let you out of jail? I was like, I
Chris:didn't go to jail. It was fine. That's hysterical. Kevin, we've done a bunch of research. I've listened to a ton of the podcast, both your recent ones, and then trying to go back in history to listen to what young Kevin used to say.
Chris:So hopefully, we can dig into some of that.
Kevin:That sounds terrible. I'm very sorry for you. I... We can also add to that when when, Nate sent me your profile, was like, oh, shit. Like, he could totally copy what I'm doing.
Kevin:And then I was like, no. No one does that. And then my second thought was, oh, man. Like, I just found my cofounder. Chris, would you wanna start this company with me?
Kevin:You're like, abs of fucking lutely not. And so
Chris:I don't actually think I said it directly.
Kevin:No. You said it directly, just not with the... Not with that language.
Nate:Yeah. That was colorful.
Kevin:You you were like... Yeah. I don't think you'd finished your breath before you said no.
Nate:I remember that conversation, Kevin.
Kevin:Yes.
Chris:Well, it's a good segue into Harbor.
Kevin:So let's roll. Let's do it.
Nate:Well, why don't we start with where you where you calling in from and maybe a quick intro into Harbor?
Kevin:Yeah. What did they say? Longtime listener, first time caller. I am calling in from Dallas, Texas, and I've lived here for the better part of twenty years. My wife and I met after college in the area and very happy to call it home.
Kevin:We have a seven year old son and five year old daughter, which are the inspiration for Harbor and what what this second startup is. We'll we'll get more into it, but, Nate and Chris and I, it's been great to work together in varying capacities over the last couple of years and get to know each other. So
Nate:I'd love to dig into why Dallas, what brought you to Dallas, and, like, building a tech company outside of the Bay Area. What's up with that?
Kevin:That's a great question. So I got a full scholarship to SMU, and my sister had also gotten a full ride to SMU and so I'd come out and visited. I liked the campus and ultimately I did not want to go to a giant state school with 30,000 people. I wanted to have the chance to know a very significant percentage of your classmates and somewhat unintentionally and very intentionally, I wanted to go to build a network and Dallas in the South, it's really the biggest place for business. Dallas is home to I think largest number of Fortune 500 companies in America or maybe it's the second.
Kevin:Woah. And there are a lot of other great business attributes.
Nate:Wow.
Kevin:Yeah. I think it's the DFW Metroplex which we get to count all of it. So those were the reasons to head to Texas. And then when I graduated, I got a job working for Oliver Wyman, management consulting firm. Mhmm.
Kevin:And this was 2007, right around the time Lehman Brothers actually collapsed was when I got my offer. And we got a follow-up note from Oliver Wyman that said, you know, you can basically read the news as well. If some of you would like to go back to grad school, we'll hold your offers for you. This would be a great time for you to stay in grad school. Go pursue a fellowship.
Kevin:And then they said if some of you wanna go to our Dubai office, we can't get enough people there and we need people that are full time rather than commuting to The Middle East. And I am very meticulous about writing down questions and so I took my time, I wrote down a list of five questions, wanted to talk to the HR leader, we got on a call the next day and I said, well, you know, before I say yes, I have a couple questions and she's like, oh, we filled those 10 spots within like two minutes of that email going out.
Nate:I
Kevin:was like, of course you, of course you did, Right? You got a 100 of the most like type a supercharged consultants that had an opportunity to move to Dubai, but also part of my personality, which is mostly good and sometimes frustrates the hell out of my family is I just really don't know how to accept no. And so I called them back and said, look. All I wanna do is travel abroad. I just spent a year abroad.
Kevin:I wanna go back. Like, I know you have already met your quota, but please, if you would reconsider it, this is why I wanted to come work for Oliver Wyman. And they're like, oh, yeah. Sure. No problem.
Kevin:And so, like, this never just accept no for an answer has been a hallmark of how some great things have happened to me in my life. But that brought me to Dubai. I worked there for a year. Absolutely incredible experience. I learned more in one year working internationally and for some incredible consultants and partners than I've learned in my entire life up to that point.
Kevin:And then ultimately came back to Dallas because the slowdown that had happened in The US finally hit The Middle East. And I thought, I don't know I'm gonna survive another round of layoffs, and I'd rather just not sign another lease. So then I went home, and Dallas was the natural fit.
Nate:Cool. One hot place for another. Easy transition.
Kevin:Yes. I love Dallas, but it is... The summers are brutal. But then ultimately, you know, coming full circle back to your question, why stay in Dallas and why build a company here? I think Dallas is one of the greatest cities in the country to build a family and to build a life because you have all the benefits of the biggest cities in the country and very, very few drawbacks.
Kevin:So the cost of buying a house, cost of living is a fraction of major metro areas and so Dallas still is an attainable city and then having built one company where I traveled a lot and another where I'm traveling again, there's a lot to be said for flying three hours to New York or three hours to LA, even traveling internationally. Like, can get a direct to Tokyo. You can get a direct to multiple cities in China, to Australia, to Europe. And ultimately, because of the network that I built here, it's a big reason for me to stay.
Nate:Cool. Yep. My brother moved to Dallas a couple years ago from California for all the same reasons you said. Right? Like, he travels a lot for politics and just the ability to get around the country really easily and be equidistant is is a huge draw.
Nate:And we started a Dallas Hardware Meetup earlier this year, and that's been great. One of our fastest growing cities because there is a lot of hardware in the surrounding areas. There's a of really exciting stuff happening in Texas right now.
Chris:Have you found that Dallas as a tech hub has helped? Know because when you think about technology, you really think about the coasts, Silicon Valley, New York, Boston. Where would you put Dallas on that list?
Kevin:Yeah, Dallas is very much not a tech hub, but there are so many Fortune five hundreds with huge stacks of technology based workers and employees and all the ancillary, you know, vendors that serve those businesses that there is a huge knowledge base of workers here. And more and more companies over the last decade have relocated their headquarters here because it's better for their employees on on so many levels. And so, you know, I think it's it's not a tech hub. And I... I'm a part of a group called Venture Dallas, which is trying to foster ecosystem here.
Kevin:And I think it's a fool's errand to say we're going to supplant Austin as the, like, tech center in the South in Texas, and, you know, we're gonna be the next one right below, you know, New York, Boston, and and San Francisco. We're we're not, and that's okay. But over the next decade, if we can nurture a community and an ecosystem where more founders are meeting each other, where more investors have reasons to come meet founders in Dallas, they're more likely to then meet other investors and founders. And it's a long it's a long push of a flywheel but there are some good things that are happening now that especially in the post pandemic world where remote work is just so much more accepted that we can be concentrated here but not be beholden to I can't find the person that I need and as a very concrete example, my co founder lives in Philadelphia. His wife is a GI surgery fellow and they're gonna go wherever her next job leads her and it would be foolish for me to say like we can't build this company together cause he is the perfect cofounder.
Kevin:Like, our skill sets are exactly what we need to build this company. But otherwise, I'm able to start to hire some of the talent that I need here locally, and that's that's been a great great thing to see.
Nate:Yeah. I mean, it definitely seems like there's momentum in that direction. Also, just a tangent, as we've been speaking with more and more companies in the middle of the country and we being informal, working with hardware startups, There's just more of a focus on manufacturing in the middle of the country, right, and that being where a lot of investment is and where a lot of new businesses are. So startup ecosystems don't have to be just about tech. And I think there really is a searching for where is the big hub gonna be for these, like, alternate forms of startups and tech businesses that aren't necessarily so driven by software, but driven by manufacturing.
Nate:I think Dallas is well suited to be that city or where a city in Texas is.
Kevin:Yeah. Will, the founder of Firehawk Aerospace, I mean, they are manufacturing three d printed rocket fuel for missiles and, you know, the broader defense industry amongst some host of other things. And he was just saying how thrilled he is to be in Texas because you've got people from Raytheon and Lockheed and you've got, DFW is one of the biggest airports in the country. So you've got a lot of, you know, maintenance techs and Dallas is the largest inland port in the country and that's okay. You go, well, what's an inland port?
Kevin:What happens is they will take, they will take containers off of ships in LA and other places, put them on a train and bring them to Dallas where they then go through customs and get things away from the border where there are these massive congestion points and slowdowns.
Nate:Yeah. That's fascinating.
Kevin:Yeah. And, you know, look, I... We could also probably have an entire conversation on the changing dynamics of cities until San Francisco kills itself, which it seems to keep trying to do from... Just I I have heard from everyone that I've talked to that if you are interested in AI, you just literally have to be in SF because the concentration of people there and the ideas and the people that you're meeting, all of those things, until SF goes away entirely, there will be no one that supplants them. It's just the nature of what's there.
Kevin:Now because of the distributed nature of the way that cities are, there is something to be said for the random collisions that happen. And there are aspects of that that are happening in Austin. I think, you know, the eight VC guys moving there and some of the other, startups, like, they all just get together on the weekends and they just say like, hey, we're all going to this person's house. We're all going to this bar. There's no master planner of the startup ecosystem.
Kevin:It's just sort of happens. Spontaneous order is a beautiful thing. But there are more and more of those opportunities now because you don't all need to be in one place. And so, you're seeing more and more great companies being built outside the valley, but we're just... No one's going to replace the valley.
Kevin:There's just opportunities to be different.
Nate:Different. Yeah, exactly. What would
Chris:you say Dallas is uniquely qualified for? If there is a founder out there looking to choose a new city, what would be the pitch for Dallas? And I guess also related The to
Kevin:pitch for Dallas is...
Nate:I was going to say related to that, how much has Dallas shaped your businesses, Harbor and Meisen and Maine?
Kevin:I... I'm... Sure. It's had an effect, but, like, Dallas is the place where I live. It's not shaped the business in any material way.
Kevin:Most of the capital I've raised for both businesses has come from outside of Dallas. The money that I have raised here has all been about relationships, many of which started when I was a student at SMU. Like, I met people that were on the board, and I met donors and stayed in touch and built relationships, and I ended up going to work for some of them and then stayed in touch with them. And, you know, the pitch for Dallas is, again, the same thing I said at the very beginning, it's one of the best places to live in the country. Certainly, there are more naturally beautiful places like Colorado and parts of Florida that are more visually appealing, But ultimately, if you want a place where you can buy a house and send your kids to a good school and, you know, easy travel, Dallas is just a really great place.
Kevin:And otherwise, in terms of what's it known for, oil and gas, real estate, and fortune 500 companies. And so there are a lot of opportunities where if you're selling into one of those verticals or you look to be acquired by an entity in one of those, there's no greater place in the country than Dallas. And then I think the other aspect is, like, I don't have to pay New York salaries. I don't have to pay California salaries. But being in a place like Dallas, I mean, the network here is so vast, that I can get kind of anywhere I need to within one or two degrees, and that...
Kevin:That's been very helpful.
Nate:You're building a hardware product. Yep. Now I know you're I know you're working with a lot of partners and everything, how's that been with, like, a fully distributed team, you know, and everybody kinda scattered around?
Kevin:Yep. I mean, because... So we're building our camera and our tablet outside of China, but in India and Asia. The reality is that's where all the work is every day, and so it doesn't matter what table we would sit around. Sean Macbeth, who is our VP of hardware, I I originally was contracting him through Informal.
Kevin:And Sean lives in Washington, and my cofounder lives in Pennsylvania, and I live in Texas. And there are certainly drawbacks to not being able to sit around the table every single day, but I also wouldn't have been able to find the caliber of people that I have been able to find to do this. And what we're doing is exceptionally difficult, but ultimately, we're running a set of processes, and we are running a line. And there's some element of technical risk, how good of a process and how good of a communication system are you running. And vendor management is a challenge, but if you handle those things well, I think it matters less about sitting around a table together and more so do you have the best people in the world on this project working together?
Kevin:And I can confidently say we have an unbelievably great team building this. I was terrified when I started down this road because everyone, you know, bluntly scared the living shit out of me about how unbelievably brutal it would be. And so what I did from the very beginning was collect advisers and consultants to help me preempt some of the problems that stunk other startups. And so I do I do have to chuckle at so many venture capital firms that just say, we don't do hardware, and they just shut it down. But they are open to plunking tens of millions of dollars into, you know, these new AI startups with huge compute costs
Nate:Mhmm.
Kevin:Huge developer costs because they think, well, maybe this will work. I And think we're gonna see in the next five years, there's gonna be a graveyard of AI startups that raised tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, but Mhmm. No great company is is riskless. Where I see the biggest mistakes as the outsider in the hardware world is people that picked a process or a vendor that didn't match the technical or execution risk that they were facing. So, you know, I I talked to some people along the way who they worked with a Centimeters rather than an ODM because they had to, you know, control every aspect of the design, and that was absolutely idiotic.
Kevin:Like, they absolutely should have worked with an ODM, but they spent $7,000,000 before they'd produced their first product with one hardware Centimeters. And, like, they didn't have a single product to even show yet because they'd spent so much upfront on the design. And, like, sure, it needs to be designed well, and you need to make it technically, you know, excellent, all of those things. But one of the earliest conversations that I had with Chris was around selecting the right type of ODM and not going down the Centimeters route and thinking when you have an opportunity to customize something, should you? And what are the downstream implications of that?
Kevin:And making some of those decisions so early on saved us from... You know, in some cases, you see people that have to walk backwards six months because of the vendor that they chose or the process that they chose. And then the other biggest challenge is doing it as efficiently as possible, how much money you have to spend on software and hardware engineering hours to produce your first renewable product. And when you talk to some people in the venture space or the founder space and they go, well, you know, why don't you just try and, like, do more with less or, you know, just try and start selling the product? And it's like, I...
Kevin:You you can't you can't do some of those things in the way that people so flippantly suggest. For the product that I was making, I didn't wanna say, oh, well, I'll just raise some money in Kickstarter and maybe I'll deliver it eighteen months from now. Because to do what we're doing is so tech... Like, you have to nail it. You can't raise enough money on Kickstarter to do the type of product that we were doing because we've spent millions of dollars in development to get to the point that we are going to be selling our product.
Kevin:Now we built MVPs along the way and, you know, we had testers and all of those things, but I couldn't short circuit building something that is going to be looking after people's children.
Nate:Totally.
Chris:We should we should actually, at least for the listeners, what is Harbor? What are you building? Yeah. And why is it different?
Kevin:Yeah. Thank you, Chris. So going backwards, my son was born in 2016, and I did a whole bunch of research, And the leading baby monitor on the market was a product called Nanit. And Nanit is a Wi Fi camera that you point at your child, and it's basically a Nest camera with some features on the back end that make it a a baby product. But it it runs an app on your phone.
Kevin:And I woke up one morning, and the app on my phone had crashed. And I then realized that you can't rely on an app on your phone to be a baby monitor. An app on your phone can do a lot of really powerful things, but it can't tell you if it's no longer working. And that failure modality was terrifying as a first time parent, especially. So I went out and bought an old school Motorola camera and an old school Motorola monitor.
Kevin:And I used that because I had a dedicated device that would tell me if the power was dying or if the battery was dying or if it lost connection with the camera for any reason at all. However, those devices can't connect to the cloud. And so when you go out to dinner and you wanna check-in on, hey. I haven't used this babysitter before or, you know, my parents are watching the kids and they haven't been around a baby in whatever how many years. Whatever that reason is you wanna check-in on your kid, you can't do that with the old school baby monitors.
Kevin:So we ran two systems in parallel, and I started talking to a bunch of other parents, and I found out so many other parents had faced this issue. Three point six million children are born in The United States every year, and I can't find a product that can give me a fail safe notification and go to the cloud. Like, that's absolutely insane for how many children are born in The US every year. And then importantly, for anyone who's had a kid, like, there is no end to the amount of money that parents spend on their kids, especially baby stuff because it's the best. You gotta have it for your babies.
Kevin:And most of what people get for their babies is part of a baby registry. They're not even buying it. It's just, you know, friends and family. So Harbor is a camera and a dedicated tablet that connect directly to each other without Internet, and both devices also connect to the cloud. There is basically nothing like this that exists today.
Kevin:So you have a dedicated fail safe monitor that can watch up to four kids at the same time and alert you if there's any loss of connection. And the camera and the tablet also go to the cloud, so you get remote access with record and rewind functionality. A whole bunch of other really awesome features, but at its core, that is what Harbor is. It is a much better baby monitor that gives you the best of both worlds, and we are then wrapping other telehealth services into our offering as we grow.
Chris:For that solution, I'm curious because I went down a very similar path in terms of building a camera product. Did you receive any advice or direction from either investors or advisors that tried to change that trajectory? I'm curious, what gave you the confidence to stick with the vision rather than perhaps heed that advice?
Kevin:Oh, it just makes me smile. This podcast will either be my opus or my obituary. So
Chris:You don't have to name names, Kevin.
Kevin:Yeah. Because
Chris:I I No. No.
Kevin:No. I won't name names. I won't name names. The reason I have mean, like, I'm so confident in my approach that people will either be like, see, you idiot, or, my god. He was right all along.
Kevin:So
Chris:Well, no, I say that because there was a lot of feedback that we received at Canary were things like, Well, why don't you just run an app on a smartphone? Take the old iPhone from last year and put it in the corner of the room and there you go. Have a security system. And I think the example that you gave about the app on Nanit crashing is a perfect example of where these technologies can go wrong, where an app crash, you don't technically own the device, Apple or Samsung or the cell phone manufacturer does, and you have no recourse. Right?
Chris:So I'm curious
Kevin:if
Chris:in the development process that you're going through, was there any advice that you received that especially for other founders, like how did you know to have conviction about this element of the design versus listening to feedback because, you know, you you were uncertain of your own conviction?
Kevin:Yes. I love this question. And in the other interviews I've done, know, I only get whatever a minute to answer this. So, first and foremost, I was a parent who had lived the awful shitty experience of Nanit, Motorola, and every other device out there that just fundamentally doesn't work in a way that parents need and deserve it to work. And so before I decided to start Harbor, I'd already talked to hundreds of other parents who felt the same way because I'd I'd wanted to start this business since the day that that happened, and I I don't think I promised my wife I wouldn't start another startup, but it was maybe close to promising her.
Kevin:And, you know, when I finally went down the road to do it, I started interviewing hundreds of parents, and it was just such a common experience. And as I looked around me, there are two aspects of being a parent that really stood out. One is the minute you tell your friends you're having a kid, every parent you know will tell you, you gotta get this stroller, you gotta get this car seat, make sure you don't do this. Like, here's all the things I wish I had known. There's this sense of, I think people feel special when they can tell you about something that they know.
Kevin:Right? There's an ego driven approach to that. But also like, oh my god, being a parent is so difficult. And so if I can make your life point o 1% better by telling you about this product or I tried this, this didn't work, I went to this. If I can help you skip that problem, oh my gosh, how much better is your life gonna be?
Kevin:The the second thing was, we we briefly touched on this earlier, the amount of money that parents will spend. It's not a question of cost. And, you know, I think our product is competitively priced from a a retail price perspective, but it's not like solving this problem is going to require a $5,000 device, and that's why no one's done it. It's just no one's done it. And Nanit focused on the wrong part of innovation.
Kevin:They thought, how cool is it? Everyone has a phone. We'll just put an app on it, and you don't need a monitor. Well, no. You do.
Kevin:You need a dedicated device. Like, single purpose devices are coming back in vogue because people are tired of the multipurpose device that is too difficult, cumbersome, distracting to do anything with. I was talking with a friend, Adam Lieb, who wrote a dumb... He he created a dumb smart typewriter so that if you wanna write, you're not getting pinged from everything else because every writer in the world can't stay focused for long enough to put out a page of work. So the...
Kevin:I knew that it's just a matter of parents don't have a better option. Both of those experiences and and firsthand knowledge told me I can... Like, it's worth solving this problem. Like, I have lived this. I've talked to so many people, and there's just no question that we can do this.
Kevin:And then the second thing is I have the, blessing and curse of having started one company before. And in that journey of building Mizzen and Main, when I started the company, every person that worked in the industry that told me that I told this idea to told me how dumb it was, why it would never work. Their customers would never buy this product. And I was young and dumb and, you know, my mid twenties, I wanted to start this business, and I just figured like, I'm just gonna do it. So I actually don't even care what you say at this point in time.
Kevin:Now my total investment was a lot of my savings and a little bit of career risk, but also going into it, I was so ready to build something myself and to build my resume, my career, I still hadn't managed a P and L, let alone hired somebody, managed them, or interviewed them. And why should I? I was 24 years old. But, like, I really wanted to go build and get experience, and I figured I didn't wanna go back to get an MBA. But if I spent that much money or more and built a business that failed, I would be infinitely more valuable as an employee in whatever came next.
Kevin:And so everyone telling me just how dumb and bad my idea was built this numbness in me to people telling me why it wouldn't work because slowly but surely, mezzanine did work. And when I would talk to somebody in the first year and they would tell me why it wouldn't work, I'd be like, yeah. Maybe you're right, but, like, I sold a $100,000 worth of shirts. That's something. And then by 2014, we did a million dollars in sales.
Kevin:And at that point in time, it was like, you can't tell me that it's not working. And it's okay if you don't like the shirt, but a lot of other people do.
Chris:You seem to see the world differently, and that gives you the conviction to continue on. And I imagine a lot of those people you talk to, you would have considered them an expert. But what do you think you saw that they didn't, specifically talking about apparel?
Kevin:So I think I mentioned this earlier that... Oh yeah, I did. That I just am really bad at taking no for an answer. And so from a very young age, I don't know what it was that my parents instilled in me that... I just...
Kevin:If if, the example that I've given many times before, I got a 93 on a, you know, math test. And I went back through every single question. I was like, no. I know I know I got that question right. And then I would go sit down after class and take the teacher through why the way he framed the question, actually, I was right.
Kevin:And, thankfully, enough of the teachers that I had were like, I love that you care enough to argue with me. That's amazing. And and it just... That kept going. I was studying abroad, and I had to argue my way into these classes.
Kevin:I just built this tendency to just be relentless in what I want to have happen. I have to find a way to make it happen. And so with something in apparel, I used to think I was the one who came up with the idea for a performance fabric dress shirt. I definitely did not. So many people had come up with this idea before.
Kevin:But... And I'm sure you've talked about this book more times than you can count on this podcast. The Innovator's Dilemma is a very, very, very real thing. And the most blatant example I can give is if you walked into Brooks Brothers until about five years ago, they didn't have a single element of performance in any of their shirts. Because when I created Mizen and Maine, I said it stretches.
Kevin:It's moisture wicking. You don't have to iron it. You don't have to dry clean it. We don't treat it with chemicals. It feels better.
Kevin:It wears better. There's no reason why you should ever buy a cotton dress shirt ever again. Brooks Brothers can't say that because they have, I don't know, hundreds of millions of dollars of inventory that are the thing that I'm saying politely, you're an idiot if you go buy this shirt when you have this option. From a consumer's perspective, there's no reason to resist a performance fabric dress shirt. Businesses will resist it because it will kill their business and some people are snobs that, like, they'll just be offended that you don't have whatever thread count, you know, whatever cotton.
Kevin:But for the average guy, and I was our target demographic, there's no reason not to wear a Performance Fabric dress shirt. And so anytime people gave me a reason, and I just thought, well, that's a really dumb reason because you like cotton. Okay. Well, I hate it. And and that ability to just go back to almost first principles, like, well, what would a reason be that people don't like to wear it?
Kevin:Well, it doesn't have perfectly starched whatever. Okay. Well, how many people are starching their shirts anymore? No one under the age of 50. So, that would be what I would sum that up
Nate:to.
Chris:That's great positioning.
Nate:Yeah. I I I would imagine that there's just so much kinda bias and just factors for someone else. It's not gonna matter as much as it would to you, especially if they're coming from industry versus consumers. You know? It's a numbers game.
Kevin:Yeah. And and so coming back full circle, Chris, your original question was, like, how did I stick with the conviction in Harbor? And, like, why did I not change course? With Mism and Main, I was terrified to tell anybody about my idea until I'd gotten far enough along that I actually could, you know, launch a company because I I just knew someone was gonna steal it, and and ultimately, that was silly. And so with Harbor, I told every single person who would give me just a five seconds to hear about what I was working on because I knew I didn't know anything about what I was going to go build, and I had to learn an enormous amount.
Kevin:And, also, I knew that someone would help me make my idea better just along the way. Like, people would have ideas to make the idea better. The original idea is fully intact. We are building a better baby monitor, a camera, and a tablet that connect directly to each other in the cloud. But what has changed is aspects of the service offering, improvements in the product functionality, ideas that maybe I loosely held or hadn't even thought about, and so the the functionality of the product has gotten dramatically better.
Kevin:And then the other piece is all of the telehealth that we will build into the product, our remote night nanny, everything else came from telling everyone I know. And, you know, very importantly, the trust ventures who led our pre seed and seed round, a guy named Sal Churi, who's a friend and director there, he sent me an article that a guy named Jonathan Swanson wrote. Jonathan founded Thumbtack, a very successful entrepreneur. And Jonathan basically hacked together the original idea of the remote night nanny. And it was he had a Filipino assistant who was working for him while he was asleep.
Kevin:And he said, here's my kid's baby monitor login. He just set up like a Wyze camera. And he said, don't call me unless the kid cries for more than five minutes, and only your phone number will come through to my phone. That is not something most people would be comfortable with. But that idea of one person who is awake while we're asleep helping monitor remotely was the kernel of the idea to build what is now a center point of where we think we can transform sleep for families by bringing the cost of an in home night, $400 or more a night to someone helping remotely, which means we can get the cost down to, $20 a night.
Kevin:And that idea, I mean, I never would have had that idea, but it was those things helped me improve the idea. And then the reasons why people said it won't work have helped me refine what I'm trying to do. People go, you can't make enough money on hardware. Motorola's POS $150 thing that breaks all the time is because they can't charge anymore and they have no way to get recurring revenue. Nanit has done a good job of selling up their subscription services and and they've actually done reasonably well.
Kevin:I have no idea from a venture profile return or anything, but I think they are hitting their ceiling because the product's not that great and people don't recommend it and love it, you know, based on my experience and others. And so what we're doing with Harbor is taking just a dramatically different approach. We are going to offer a two year membership to Harbor. You get a camera, a tablet, and all of these incredible features that will continue to get better over time. And that is a business that is viable and sustainable.
Kevin:And, also, we then can use our installed user base as a platform to offer additional services that no one else will be able to offer given the product that we have created. And so I would say this time it's been less me kind of telling people to f off because I'm right and they're wrong and more so like, that's a really good point, but how can I take that and improve what I am trying to do and build?
Chris:Yeah. That's really insightful when it comes to ideating early on. The trade off that you were faced with, which is, you know, holding this idea close to your chest for fear that it would be stolen or integrated into a competitor versus the upside potential of having your idea iterate in real time with feedback from potential customers and industry experts.
Kevin:Yeah. And I will say, I can't remember how I found Scott Miller's name. I I... Bunch of research and somehow Scott came up. And I saw on his LinkedIn profile, his, like, sentence bio is turning your prototypes into mass production.
Kevin:I was like, oh, damn. I need to meet that guy. And I saw Zach Ware, who's a good friend and now a board member at at Harbor, was connected to Scott. He put me in touch with Scott. Scott agreed to be an adviser to my idea.
Kevin:Right? Like, I didn't even have a company, but he's like, sure. I I would be happy to. And this is a big... This...
Kevin:If you know Scott, he's an adviser to, like, a 150 company. And and Scott introduced me to two of his, I'll say proteges or mentees, And one of those, folks was Andrew Bajeri, who told me about Informal. And through Informal, I met Chris Rill, who was instrumental in helping me frame up what does it take to build something like Harbor? And then through another thread, I met my cofounder. Through Informal, we found Sean, and Sean now runs our hardware.
Kevin:And so I think back to, like, what if I hadn't met Scott Miller? How many things would be different? And it took being open to talking to anyone who would listen and not being reserved about what I wanted to do in order for these doors to begin opening. Now I could also probably follow 52 other trails that led to dead end conversations and nothing productive came out of it, but you gotta have as many of those as possible. And that's why startup cities can be so magical because you're just bumping into these people in the coffee shop and, hey.
Kevin:I'm gonna be here next Friday, and I know my friend, you know, Tina is gonna be here, so come so you can meet Tina. But, in the absence of living in SF and, you know, trying to do that type of thing, being very open is is a trade off, and it's one that I would not have felt comfortable with had I not realized from my first startup that no one's gonna steal your idea. Like, everyone everyone has had the idea. It's just a question of who's willing to actually go do it.
Nate:When I was at Quirky, we would always say that, like, you know, everybody everybody has ideas. It's the ideas that you start talking about and making momentum on. You actually make some progress. Because people are always like, oh, I don't wanna post my idea on the website. Like, someone's gonna steal it.
Nate:It's like, well, then nothing's gonna ever happen with this idea.
Kevin:Yeah. Absolutely. No. Certainly, there are some trade secret types of things that people have to navigate. But, like, should I or shouldn't I go start this shirt company or baby monitor company?
Kevin:Like, you should just be talking to people and getting feedback.
Chris:On the topic of things that you learned at your prior venture, what are some of the things that didn't transfer over that you kind of had to learn the hard way, which is my mental model for this new venture doesn't necessarily transfer? Like, things have gone wrong because you're like, Oh, wow. I miscalculated that because this isn't apparel. Just... Something didn't go as planned.
Kevin:Yeah. So I think maybe two months ago, Jen, my wife, said, you know, this just feels different this time. Like, something's different with you on this second startup. And she wasn't saying it was a bad thing. What she was getting at was with Missing and Main, I just poured my life savings into making the first thousand shirts and went anywhere I could and tried to get anyone to buy them.
Kevin:And with Harbor, I still don't have the product to go sell to people, and I've been working on it for two years. And that, like, my skill set is building a brand, building a team, and sell, sell, sell. Like, go get the product out there in the world and convince people that that they should have it. And, I've been on hold for a long time to do one of the things that I think I'm best at. And, that is only possible, like, to get this far because with Harbor, I had to build a very technical team that has done most of the man hours over the last eighteen months with almost nothing to do with me.
Kevin:I found an incredible cofounder who has led all things technical from the very beginning. And so that has been the most marked difference where I couldn't brute force my way to success in just selling and proving that, like, I can go sell this thing. The things that haven't carried over very specifically, the two things come to mind. I was really, really, really good at getting press from ISM and Maine. We punched way above our weight class.
Kevin:I got a full page above the fold color photo in the New York Times, and we were, like, two years old. And I was able to just get so many great press hits for us and get our name out there in a big way.
Chris:Can we unpack that? How were you able to get that coverage?
Kevin:Sheer relentless. Again, don't take no for an answer. And we just didn't have any money to spend on marketing. I mean, we weren't funded. Like, we...
Kevin:I raised a little bit of money from some angels, and I used it to buy product that sat on the shelf because, like, we weren't growing that fast. But we had something that no one had ever made before and was interesting. And so I basically just did everything I could to get anyone who could possibly write about us to write about us. And so very specifically, and poor Tim is probably gonna get a lot of cold... Well, I don't know.
Kevin:We'll see. I found a story in the New York Times about the puffer jackets that were everywhere in the nineties in rap videos and rap culture. Tim Timon wrote this really interesting deep dive on, like, how it happened, and businesses were built and lost because, like, they weren't the puffer jacket that Tupac was wearing. Whatever. And I just remember thinking, this is not a normal fashion story.
Kevin:This is like a very... It's a human interest piece almost. And so I sent Tim an email and was like, hey, I'm gonna be in New York tomorrow. Your piece about, you know, Tupac's puffer jacket was amazing and I think you'd like to tell our story. And so it wasn't a PR firm blasting.
Kevin:This sounds silly to say, but, like, I honored him as a writer because I found his work valuable, and I said, I think we fit a similar mold. And we sat down in some diner in New York, and he was like, I think this is a really cool story. And we did an interview, and then he sent a photographer and took a picture of... We had a little pop up store. And, like, two and a half weeks later, we were in the New York Times.
Kevin:And it was so, obviously, moment in terms of professional career. Right? Like, a business I built. I got in the New York Times, and and Tim and I have stayed in touch. I just have this fondness and gratitude for him.
Kevin:It was great. And then there's so many other crazy PR stories, but I I I have to share because it's just the craziest, when you think about the thread to pull. My dad, after the New York Times piece, he said something along the lines of, like, well,
Chris:you should get an article
Kevin:in the Sarasota Herald Tribune, which is the local hometown paper in Sarasota, Florida. And I was like, I mean, I've been in the New York Times. Like, come on. Like, I... And I just was like, don't be an idiot.
Kevin:Of course, you should be. So I reached out to someone in the Herald Tribune, and I was a Sarasota High graduate. They wrote a story. It was great. And about two months later, a very famous baseball player named Ian Desmond, followed me and on Twitter in the same day.
Kevin:I'd gone to high school with Ian and hadn't talked to him in years. He was the only kid in our hometown that made it to the big leagues, And we knew each other in high school, but not that well. But he reached out, and he said, I absolutely love your shirt. And at this time, I was packing and shipping every single shirt out of our house, or my wife was. We absolutely would have known had had he bought a shirt.
Kevin:And I said, how did you get one of shirts? And he goes, my wife's mom read about you in the Sarasota Herald Tribune and got me one of your shirts for Christmas. And he then invited us to do a trunk show at Nat Stadium in DC. We sold $10,000 worth of product in about forty five minutes. We weren't doing that in a day.
Kevin:And then what happened from there, because of the nature of pro ball players, someone from that team and that trunk show was traded to the White Sox. And they then called and said, hey. Would you come to a trunk show at the White Sox? I'll get you in touch with the equipment manager. And in 2014, I think I went to 10 Major League ball locker rooms.
Kevin:And then in 2015, I think I went to 30. Wow. And we just absolutely took off in the world of pro baseball because these guys are supposed to wear dress shirts. They travel all the time, and they don't have shirts that fit because they're all in incredible shape, but our shirts stretch. And so it was a natural fit, and that that also changed the trajectory of our company.
Nate:Very, very cool. Do you still do all your own PR, or do you have feels about engaging agencies?
Kevin:So this is one of the things that I learned and has not carried over into the new company. We got a great firm, came from a recommendation from a fellow founder. We have a handful of prototypes right now that are not the devices that I am prepared to send to Wirecutter or Good Housekeeping for their reviews. So I assumed that I would be able to carry forward my skill of PR with a great firm and get us a lot of coverage. And what I have seen is they're very happy to meet and talk.
Kevin:And then once we send them a device for one of their friends or them to test for, you know, one week, one month, three months, whatever, then they will write about us. And so I had incorrectly assumed I would be able to get press ahead of our launch, but we're launching ahead of having the product ready to send to everybody. The product is great. Like, it's... We're we're good to go.
Kevin:We're moving into mass production, but I just didn't have... I don't have lots of finished goods quality units to send to people and say, you know, go ahead and try and break it because that's ultimately what they're going to do. And that has delayed our ability to generate the awareness that we would have liked to have had.
Nate:Yeah. That's a pretty pretty common, encounter. Like, so often when we informal are working with early stage teams that are making tech products, they wanna launch on Kickstarter. They wanna get, like, pressed before they actually launch. But it's like these journalists aren't going look at you unless you have a product to put into their hands.
Nate:Like, they want to know this thing is real and it's not a bunch of vaporware. So, yeah, it's challenging with the tech products for sure.
Kevin:Yeah. Let's use a company, Chucero. The, like, fawning, oh my god. This is the most amazing thing ever. All those articles are sort of, like, held up as, are you guys this...
Kevin:You guys did basically no research into how these things works. Because, like, the one journalist who's like, wait. I can just squeeze the bag. And that one journalist was like, everyone sort of held him up or her. I can't remember who it was.
Kevin:It's like, oh, that guy did his job. Right? And so I think there's a level of let's just make sure that what we're talking about is real.
Chris:I... So I know Juicero probably better than most. I shared an office with Juicero in the early days. I got to see and drink juice. Nate's eyes just lit up like...
Chris:He's like, I didn't know this. I did not know this. So yeah. Yeah. So we shared an office with Doug.
Chris:Doug, I'm sorry, I forget your name. He is actually a very memorable guy. He's a vegan and he doesn't shake hands, he hugs. And that was my first interaction with him was with this great big hug, and I'm like
Kevin:He wants to squeeze everything. He wants to squeeze everything.
Chris:No. You know, he does, but that was really memorable. Like, I feel like there's a story to tell here, and perhaps this is the catalyst for me reaching out to Doug because I feel like
Kevin:We need Nick Bolton to go write the 400 page deep dive on Juicero. That would be a that would be a page turner.
Nate:Oh, man. I would read that. Alright.
Chris:So I heard... So there's a podcast agent I don't recall way back in the day with Mizzen and Main, and you were talking about being quite proud of US centric manufacturing and making sure that this was designed and made inside The United States. I'm curious about the journey transitioning from a US made product to moving it outside The US?
Kevin:So transitioning Mizun and Main from being American made to not was one of the hardest decisions I made professionally, not least of which is the optics, and I had made it a center point of our company, but also because I really cared, and I really wanted that to be something that we could do. And I would sum it up as I reached a point where I realized I can try to build an American manufacturing entity, or I can build a brand. And as it turns out, I don't know how to build a manufacturing company. I've learned that I know how to build a brand, and that's where I'm I'm really good at it. When we were making 10,000 shirts a month in The United States, it was humming smoothly.
Kevin:When we started making 20,000 shirts a month in The United States, everything broke down. And we just reached a point where it was impossible to make all of it in even just two factories and maintain throughput because there's just so few cut and sew shops left in The United States. And so we were able to find some work in those factories, but then you get to a point where you're making 20,000 shirts a month across three or four or sometimes five factories, and you get into very serious quality control and logistics management issues. And so we moved because it was literally the only way that we could keep going. It was fundamentally a matter of survival.
Kevin:It really was actually emotionally very difficult to deal with get... Effectively giving up on American manufacturing for my business. But again, it came back to, do you just can't make enough product at any level of consistency and quality? The cost savings were, I don't know, nice, but it wasn't like, oh, we're gonna save 50% in our margins, so we have to move because we need to make more money. When you add in the additional cost and the headache of working with international factories and, you know, all of the ancillary costs and the time, the duties, and freight costs.
Kevin:And by the way, everyone who's shipped anything in the course of the last five years has seen the chaos in freight rates and the planning and the ports and all of that stuff. It it had only to do with, if we don't do this, we will not be able to keep making our product. I I will say I know what a nightmare manufacturers can be. And, Chris, you were the one that recommended the book poorly made in China, which, oh my gosh, anyone that wants to make any physical product ever, regardless of if you're working in China, should read that book. And so it was more the, I know that most manufacturers, it's not a question of whether they're lying to you or telling you the truth.
Kevin:It's how much of what they're saying is actually true. And then the subtext of that is, like, they may not know either. Yeah. They may think they are a 100% transparent, but, like, they don't actually know either. Even if everyone is operating with the utmost levels of integrity and desire to execute everything perfectly, there's always something that someone doesn't know is a surprise.
Kevin:Information got buried intentionally or unintentionally. And with clothing, I could deduce most of the problems and the solutions quickly enough. And with hardware, I needed to find the partner that could help me get there and also importantly have the right mentality. So so Sean, as our head of hardware, we're all aligned. We do not want to iterate this product.
Kevin:In a year or two, like, there will be some things that we decide require us to technically advance the product, but we're not gonna do, you know, the iPhone one, the two, the three, the four, the four s. That... Have no desire to do that. And so how do you design the product today for the appropriate cost that future proofs some of the advancements that will come? Like, do you really need two k in your baby monitor?
Kevin:No. I think, no, you don't. But as streaming improves, we don't have to replace our sensor because two k is an extraordinary sensor. And great. We'll be we'll be doing just fine, and we won't need to make a change just to keep up with the basic levels of technology.
Nate:I I imagine that if consumers don't have to buy a replacement to keep up to date with the latest technology, like, that creates brand affinity. Right? Because they've got a product for you. It works. They can trust it.
Nate:They'll recommend it to their friends. There's just software upgrades. It's awesome. Yes.
Chris:I think that's an underutilized strategy, which is selecting hardware that your software can grow into, with the anticipation that the software team will be able to utilize those resources going forward, continually making that product better. I'm biased here because I'm sure I've said this to you over the last couple of years, that you should absolutely be selecting components that has some longevity.
Kevin:Yeah. We've thought very carefully about what is our competition and what could we be outmaneuvered on in terms of feature selection? What do people actually care about? Things like the chip inside our camera has some really advanced functionality that we are going to be able to supercharge AI feature capabilities that others just aren't based on the chips that they have. And their latency is often you walk out of the room, you shut the door, you open your app, you look at the picture, and you're still in the room on the camera.
Kevin:Is that the worst thing in the world? No. But when you hear your child cough and then two or three or four seconds later, hear it on your app, you lose confidence in the device. And when it comes to, well, can't these Wi Fi camera companies add a tablet? Sure.
Kevin:They're gonna have to engineer an entirely new product line because their existing product, they can't just change the software. They have to change the guts of the camera. And Innovator's Dilemma, we talked about this earlier, is a very real thing. They have millions of dollars worth of product that they've already built and lines that they've already committed to for the six, twelve, eighteen months ahead that they either have to scrap, fire sale, or say, this is our new one. It's great.
Kevin:This is our old one. It's not so great. But if you want it, you can still buy it from us. And that is a brutally difficult process for any company to go down. And then importantly, because I've been trying to raise capital off and on for the last two years, no one is investing in this space.
Kevin:No one wants to invest in consumer or hardware right now. They all wanna wait until we launch, and then I've I've I've joked all about this a lot. I've got a 150 VCs that are thrilled to participate in my series a. They just didn't wanna participate in the seed. We've made a lot of progress, and now we're off to the races.
Kevin:Like, we've raised what we needed to. But when I look at companies coming up behind us, this is not a space that's getting a lot of investment or or or otherwise, which comes full circle back to makes me chuckle that some of these VCs just write off an entire category because of mistakes other people had made, but will plow into the most overheated, overhyped, just insane category because that's where everybody's running into and not blink at investing in a $150,000,000 pre seed, pre revenue, pre product AI company because someone left OpenAI and they're gonna transform how people, you know, call into restaurants or whatever that is.
Nate:Macroeconomic stuff aside, and it's, like, a really weird time to be fundraising in general. Right? But can you juxtapose the experiences of fundraising, doing apparel, and doing, like,
Nate:a a hard goods product?
Kevin:I don't think I could because of how unbelievably different it has been. You know, with Mizzen and Main, I did everything myself. I spent a lot of my savings and made the first product. I started selling, and then I raised a $100,000, and then I raised a $100,000, and then I raised a million dollars, and then I $3,000,000 over years. And, you know, I I remember one of the conversations I had with the guy, we were doing, I don't know, 4 or $5,000 in revenue a day.
Kevin:And I was raising Angel Capital because I just needed more money just to keep going. And he was like, you don't... Not to be disrespectful, like, you don't have a business that I can invest in right now. And I was like, okay. That's fair.
Kevin:Other people think so, so thanks. And then I bumped into him, like, eighteen months later. I was like, oh, wow. Like, kinda surprised to see you're still going. How's it going?
Kevin:And I was like, oh, cool. You know, we did a million bucks last year and we'll do four this year, whatever. And he was like, oh my god, why didn't you call me? I was like, remember when you told me I didn't have a business? Like, that's why I didn't call you.
Kevin:And so, you know, ultimately building Mizzen was eking out piece by piece of progress and getting people that I knew at first and then it started to extend into people that they knew and it took many many many many years of progress before serious investors took us seriously.
Chris:So we're almost up on time. I guess, there any... Like, where can people find you? Are you hiring?
Kevin:So look. Our mission at Harbor is happier parents and healthier families. And so I would just encourage folks, go to harbor.co and we have so many great free resources, interviews with pediatric sleep doctors, sleep guides for infants, sleep guides for toddlers. So start there. By the time this launches, we'll officially be live.
Kevin:And then we are at Harbor Sleep on the socials and I am at Kevin S. Lavelle on on X. I try and post on LinkedIn parts of the journey and and things that I'm working on to... You know, so that people can understand what we're working on and certainly when we're hiring.
Nate:Awesome.
Kevin:Guys, thanks. This was fun. A wide ranging... I liked triple clicking into some of the things, and hopefully, we can do this again sometime soon, and it will be, what did I say, my opus and not my obituary.
Nate:One of those. Thanks, Kevin. Really appreciate it. Exactly.
Kevin:That was fun.
Chris:Yeah. Thank you, Kevin. Appreciate the time. TRADEOFFS is hosted and produced by Chris Rill and Nate Padgett. Editing done by the illustrious Alex Michael.
Chris:Our logo is designed by the talented pixel alchemist, Tanya Shika. If you'd to be a guest on the show, reach out to us on our website at tradeoffs.fm.
