Trend to Tribe: How Totem turned virality into community

✍️ Show Notes

Carter Fowler, CEO & co-founder of Totem Labs, shares the incredible journey of going viral and building hardware tech for music festivals. Carter shares valuable lessons in building not only a brand, but also an engaged community of loyal fans, with thoughtful product design and exceptional customer service.

🔗 Article about where Totem is at today

🔗 totemlabs.com

🔑 Bytes:

• In the beginning, do the things that don't scale - e.g. The CEO responding to Instagram DMs and talking 1:1 to potential customers about their experience.
• The shorter the brand message, the easier it is to explain new tech to someone. e.g. The word 'compass' leverages ancient knowledge to effectively communicate the concept of location finding.
• When you're doing customer research, your product DOESN'T MATTER. The only thing that matters is the customer, and the problem they are facing.

💬 Full Transcript

Vignesh Rajagopal (00:00) Welcome back to Fika Bytes. All right. This week's episode is an exciting one. We're talking to Carter. He's one of the co-founders of Totem. Totem has built the world's first friend-finding compass for music festivals and large venues. You know, when there's no cell reception, Wi-Fi is atrocious and there's just no way to find the people that you came with. Totem has solved that problem. And Carter talks all about building the brand, building the product, building the company, including the very thrilling story of the first time that they went viral. and how it changed the entire trajectory of their company. Since we recorded this last year, the Totem team has been really busy. They have shipped out all of their 2024 orders, which is 23,000 plus units to customers in over 60 countries. Insane numbers for a startup this young. They also raised their pre-seed round at $1.3 million, which is the largest ever pre-seed round by a Chattanooga based startup. and currently as we speak, they're back at South by Southwest showing their new developments to the tech world. And, know, it's kind of crazy to think that just a year ago when they were at South by Southwest, they were a newly viral brand - people were kind of curious about what's going on, who they are, and now they're back there again as an emerging leader in the tech event space. So really a winning combination here of a well-designed product with product market fit, strong, complementary co-founding team. and a great set of investors now backing them. let me know what you think of the episode. If you find Carter's story inspiring, drop a comment on Spotify or on YouTube so that I can continue bringing these hardware founder stories out into the world. All right, enough intro. Let's get to the episode. Vigs (01:37) All right, we're live. I've got Carter here with me, CEO and co -founder of Totem Labs. Carter, this has been a long time coming and I'm such a big fan of your brand and I can't wait to get into it. Tell us how it all started. Carter Fowler (01:50) Wow, how it all started, okay. Well, there are a couple of different origin points that we can touch on. I guess I'll take you to the kind of the point when Chase and I, my co -founder met. So a little bit on my background, I'm a go -to -market guy. I've been working in marketing for a long time and had been consulting with startups for the last several years on their go -to -market and brand strategy. I met my co -founder Chase last year because we were both consulting for another startup, a different project. It was an electronics product, a hardware product. Chase was leading all the product development and I was leading all the go -to market for that. A bit of background on Chase, his background is all in R &D. I'm not sure if you are familiar with these crazy little yellow sponges that everybody is so obsessed with, Scrub Daddy, you know, the smiley face. Yeah, so, you know, they were formerly the biggest success story out of Shark Tank before the Ring doorbell guys came through. And so Chase was one of the original R &D engineers for the Scrub Daddy products line back in the day. So it is not his first exposure to viral products. Vigs (02:48) yeah. Carter Fowler (03:08) however, is so like he had kind of seen all this before when it was going. this extent. But Chase and I met last year, we were consulting on this project. And one day after work, we were just kind of had our feet kicked up. And he was walking me through just some of these different gadget ideas he'd come up come up with over the years. Chase is that kind of guy who tinkers a lot. And he hears this thing from people all the time, which is like, my god, that's such a cool idea, you should sell it. We'd make a lot of money. And Chase would always respond to that with, it is way harder to commercialize a product than you think it is. And I do not have that skill set. And so Chase is just walking me through all of these different things he thought of over the years, including a little tiny micro drone, the size of a silver doll, you throw it in the air, it activates just by being tossed up in the air. a little like wand -like apparatus that can ignite and deignite normal wax and wick candles in the room, which I still don't fully understand, has something to do with plasma. But Fred telling me about his first time at a music festival, which was in 2019 at EDC Orlando. This was exciting for me because I have been to many, many, many music festivals over the years, especially earlier in my 20s. I'm now my 30s, but. Vigs (04:13) Cool. Carter Fowler (04:31) Back in the day, I was there six to eight times a year. But Chase went to his first festival in 2019. It was EDC Orlando. And EDC Orlando is a pretty big festival. There are about 100 ,000 people that attend. And if you've ever been to a very large event like that or music festival, the second there's more than 40 ,000 people there, cell service starts shooting them. So. During his first couple of hours there, Chase went with one friend, it was his first ever festival. Chase had his phone stolen out of his backpack, which is a story as old as time at these festivals. It happens way more than we would like, of course. And then a couple hours later, he just lost sight of his friend for just a few seconds in the crowd. And then that was that. Chase had his first ever music festival, totally lost among all these crowds. And as we like to say here, making new friends at festivals isn't exactly Chase's forte, that's my specialty. Chase's specialty is getting lost at music festivals. So, you know, Chase was then like lost at the music festival without any friends and just kind of looking around noticing all these people wearing beautiful light up jewelry and trinkets and everything. So he told me this story. and told me that he had been thinking about this idea, toying with it, of a bracelet that you could pair with your friends and a light would revolve around the bracelet and point in the direction to its paired friend. And it wouldn't need any cell service or wifi. And so he was just breaking down all these random little gadgets he'd worked on over the years. And when he got to this one, I said, stop. Are you telling me that you know how to make one of these bracelets that can work without any cell service or wifi or anything can help you find your friends in these settings? He's like, yeah, I'm pretty sure I've like worked it all out in my head. And I said, I don't need to hear anything else. Like once we're done with this project, I would love to take that to market with you because I would buy that in a heartbeat. And I have a feeling that a lot of other people would too if we messaged it correctly, you know? So we wrapped up that project in the fall and began working on this together. The earliest prototype of this was in January 2023, but we really kind of started working on it robustly together in the fall of 2023 and went through a bunch of different prototypes. As you can see, it's no longer a bracelet and I can walk you through why we made all those design decisions early on, but. Vigs (06:53) Okay. Carter Fowler (07:10) We just spent a lot of time on the design because Chase and I are both designers. And we knew that early on, we probably wouldn't have a massive amount of budget or resources to market this thing. And so we needed to design it in a way that it could kind of effectively market itself. And of course, if it's going to do that, the design has to be beautiful. Vigs (07:32) Yeah, so I do want to talk about kind of that product evolution. So starting in January 2023, what did that first prototype look like and how has it evolved to now becoming what it is on your neck? Carter Fowler (07:44) So yeah, first prototype in January, 2023, was a big bracelet. It had a big ass like a module, like kind of attachment on the side there and the light would just revolve around the circumference of the bracelet and just point you in the direction. It was chunky, it was thick, it was a proof of concept and... You know, we decided to step away from that for several reasons, but it did go through a few steps before we landed on this compass embodiment here. We thought about wearing it as a necklace because we want to be very visible. But of course, then there's a lot of problems with the necklace too, right? Because if the light is revolving around the actual necklace itself, how are you supposed to see this in real time, et cetera? Even the bracelet isn't that great of a solution because if you just think through the user experience. If you were to try to find your friend with that using a bracelet, like how would you hold your arm? Maybe like this or like this and then the light is on the opposite side of your wrist that's directing you to them so you can't keep eyes on it at all time. Plus, and this was a big reason why we ended up going with this embodiment specifically, just from my time doing go -to -market with many different startups, bringing new products and new technology to market. One of many things that I have come to understand is the fewer words you need to explain a new tech product to someone, the easier it makes your whole life and your whole business. So, you know, when we're talking about like if it's a bracelet, like best case scenario, I think it takes us eight to 10 words to explain that to somebody. You know, like a friend finding bracelet that like has a light that points you in their direction. I don't know, something. If we got really skillful, maybe we get it down to 10, you know? The second we go with this, we're leaning on a piece of technology that everybody in the world already knows and is already familiar with, a compass. Everybody knows what a compass is. It's one of the most ancient forms of technology. So then all we have to say, well, this is a friend finding compass. And then the questions open up and everything, but the main idea gets across in literally three words. And so whenever you can lean on something that people are already familiar with and they already understand when you're introducing new technology, it just makes the whole battle so much easier. They already just have a cursory knowledge in their backs, so you don't have to do as much heavy lifting to get them to that. Vigs (10:12) Yeah, exactly. Carter Fowler (10:12) Then it just becomes like, well, this is a compass, just instead of a normal compass that points you to an objective place like North, it is more like Captain Jack Sparrow's compass, right? It points you to a subjective place. It points you to what you want in life, as long as what you want is the people you love. So, yeah. Vigs (10:24) Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And then the form factor kind of just naturally follows from that. So that's actually like a pretty interesting piece of insight. I'm wondering, did you learn that from a specific previous project of like, when you can summarize a product in as few words as possible, that's the best fit. Like, how did you come up with that insight? Carter Fowler (10:48) Man, I think just trial and error, right? Like I spent a while working on like web three products and it's just so hard to explain those things. And you realize especially like, man, if you want to sharpen your skills as a marketer, especially as it pertains to messaging, then like go try to market web three products because that is just not friendly to like the lay person in the world. You know, you have to use a lot of metaphors. a lot of stories, a lot of it's kinda like this, to just get it through to people in a common place. So I think that's probably where I pulled a lot of it from. But to an extent, otherwise, it just comes from studying some of the great writers throughout history in particular. Orson Welles is like a big proponent of this, but you know, and so I just love this like simplicity thing. The fewer words you use, the better. If it's a paragraph, try to make it a sentence. If it's a sentence, try to make it a phrase. If it's a phrase, try to make it a word. If it's a word, maybe you don't need any words at all. Maybe you can just convey that through design. Vigs (11:58) Yeah. Okay. So we talked about the product journey. and now I want to talk a little bit about the brand journey. So what, what I was saying at the beginning was kind of your brand has been built to be this like almost cult like following, where people are like really passionate about it. Like I've seen your social media comments, all of your branding. I mean, look at the, the all pink conference room you're in, right? Everything is just on point. you have that newsletter called Totem Tuesdays that goes out to thousands of people every week. Carter Fowler (12:04) No. Vigs (12:25) tell me about the inception of all that and how it's evolved. Carter Fowler (12:31) Yeah, so man, where to begin there? So my background is in brand strategy, first off. And one thing that, you know, it all kind of began with the name, but even more so than that. So I guess let's talk about the name and then we'll talk about some of this design and everything with the brand because it's really interesting. We put so much thought into it. So the name, Totem, is something that has like a certain amount of familiarity within the music festival community. So totems at music festivals, in case you're not familiar, are these like big things that people hold up in the air and it lets you be able to kind of see where your group is in the crowd. A lot of festivals don't allow them anymore because they obstruct the view and there's like a safety concern. But it has this familiar, you know, again, it's something that people already understand in the space. You can see how like this is a common theme pulling from the people already familiar with. So with the name Totem, it also has a special meaning, right? A Totem is a symbol that is, like by definition, it's a symbol that holds particular deep spiritual significance to a specific group of people. So when you think about it like that as well, you know, this isn't really just about the This is about what it represents, which is bringing you together with the people that you love and making sure that you never feel lost when you don't want to, making you feel safer and more free. Right? And so like, it just brings in this kind of like emotional context just because of what it does, bringing people who love each other together. Now with the brand design specifically, if you look closely, you will notice that the T's in the word Totem are also the T within the crystal here. It's the exact same thing. And within the crystal exists these lights, right? And so then like, of course, the O in Totem is the compass with the crystal inside of it. And that crystal contains the T's as well. And so it just kind of has this like whole infinity mirror aspect all the way down where like there's just crystals inside of crystals inside of crystals. And a big part of that is of course the crystal on this because as we were talking about earlier if you have a product that needs to market itself it needs to be beautiful it needs to be something that people want to show others. That's why we wanted to make sure it looked like jewelry you know and so having this illuminating crystal I'll tell you Vignesh I have had dreams at night where I fall into this crystal for hours and hours. So that's a big part of it. So when we're talking about the brand, even when we talk about the colors of the brand, we have this like dark aesthetic with all these pinks and purples and blues. It's made to look like a night sky with lasers shooting through it, just meant to emulate and feel like it is from and of the festival. Vigs (15:24) Haha. How important was it for you to be a festival goer in order to know all this? Because I assume you had to do very little customer research upfront because you were the target audience, right? Carter Fowler (15:52) Yeah, so it did help a lot. I didn't have to do maybe as much, but we still did a bunch. And I can kind of talk through why and how. The main reason that it was very, very helpful for me too, and this is something that I used to talk about all the time when I was just consulting for startups, is people talk a lot about product market fit. I'm sure it comes up in probably at least one out of three episodes that you do on here. Vigs (16:21) yeah. Carter Fowler (16:21) Sometimes you hear people talk about message market fit, which is also incredibly important. But one thing that you don't often hear people talk about is founder market fit. And that's, are you the right person to be solving this problem based on your life experiences? Because it can be a great product solving a very smart problem or a painful problem for the right audience. But if you aren't the right founder to do it, then it's just not going to come through well because what happens when you are the right fit for the problem you're solving. You can, to an extent, do customer research by writing in your own journal. So that's a huge help. But we still did need to do a bunch of customer research because we wanted to understand exactly how people talk about this problem. Because you need to use the exact same words that your audience uses to describe it. the closer it sounds like something that they have thought to themselves when they're reading your website, the better it will go, right? So I spent during the early days at least an hour and a half every single day, just talking to people on Instagram DMs, going deep into it on what festivals they went to, their stories of getting lost, how many people they go to festivals with, whether they would be interested in wearing something like this, whether it's like, Vigs (17:22) Mm -hmm. Yeah. Carter Fowler (17:44) like what kind of price point they felt was appropriate, et cetera. And so some of the best advice I ever got, which has helped us so much here at Totem, I got it from a friend of mine who went through Y Combinator several times as a tech founder. And he said, early on, it is most important to do things that don't scale, because that is what most people are not willing to do. Vigs (18:10) Hmm. Carter Fowler (18:11) You know there becomes a point we are at that point now with Totem where you do have to start doing things that scale But at the very beginning you have to do the things that no one else is willing to do and that's things that don't scale and that includes having the founder literally spend hours every day and DMS with customers from all over the world just talking to them, right? You know another thing that he told me was any excuse not to talk to your customers early on is a bad excuse So you need to be talking to every single day And so I think that's what made it so easy, quote unquote, and why we were able to have very, like the trajectory that we did early on, because we spent months, months, months, months before we even had any social media pages, just going over every aspect of the design. Chase and I must've done at least a hundred hours just on this crystal, exactly how the crystal should look, the dimensions, everything in it, but also talking to Vigs (18:43) Mm -hmm. Wow. Carter Fowler (19:06) people in the audience every single day. It could have been very easy for me to just feel like I've been to a bunch of festivals. I already know what it's like. I can just assume. But that's a, it's a dangerous path to go down. Yeah. Vigs (19:18) Yeah, I love that. And if you don't mind, I want to kind of dive into the details of that so that someone else listening to this can like replicate it for their own product. So, you know, let's say I have a product, let's just call it like a smart coffee mug, right? If I'm at that early stage, I've got this initial prototype, this great idea. How would I do what you did for like, you know, finding my target audience? What exactly messages are you sending? Are you like showing them pictures? Are you just kind of asking them if they have a problem? Can you just talk a little bit about the specifics so that other people can kind of have similar success with their product? Carter Fowler (19:51) Yeah, so first thing is the conversation should not be about your product. It should be about the customer and about the customers experiences, right? So you need to first off figure out Who are you going to solve a problem for? I mean, I guess you could start with what problem you're gonna solve but you got to solve for the right people You know, you can't identify the right problem to solve you have to solve it for a specific demographic and I think that's where a lot of people get down and when you're identifying that problem, it's in important to hit the three P's, painful, personal, pervasive. If you get all three of those on the problem, then that's a solid problem to tackle, but you still need to do it for the right audience. And so first off, it was just selecting the right audience for us, right? Because we could have marketed this to a lot of different markets initially. I mean, you've been on our social media, you've seen all these comments, people are like, I need one of those for my dog. I need one of those for my kids. I need one of those to staple on my husband's forehead when he goes to Home Depot. Because getting lost is a universal human experience. So everybody has some use for it, but there's a reason that we went with the music festival demographic. And that's because it's a place of love. A lot of Unity people love to share. It's a very share happy demographic. There were over 20 million tweets. posted from Coachella this year alone. So like, it's just kind of a unique demographic like that. So you have to solve the right problem and you have to solve for the right people, but then you have to talk to those people and understand how they think about the problem. And something that I came to realize from all that is that people, especially at music festivals, They, you know, a music festival is something that you spend so much time planning for all year long, for months and months and months. Some people just go to one a year, right? So with that in mind, they're kind of like a dream. Like a lot of young adults, especially, who haven't had some of these, I don't know, bigger major life events, like music festivals are some of their top three memories ever in life. And... there are only a couple of negative parts of it. And those are these moments when you're getting lost. And so that's what I originally keyed in on. But what I learned as well from talking to people was that it wasn't just about getting lost. It was about not feeling free to detach from the group because you didn't want to get lost. It was actually about the fear of getting lost rather than getting lost. Vigs (22:28) Interesting. Carter Fowler (22:32) Because what that results in is you compromising what you want to do at these events. You go into a big festival, you know, like this artist is playing here, there's another artist playing over there. I might be more interested in that one. Most of my group wants to see this one though. And I'm not going to split off because I don't know how hard it will be to find out everybody and link up again later. You know, and so this like freedom aspect was really, really big for people. And yeah. Vigs (22:32) Mm -hmm. Carter Fowler (22:57) I mean, there were a lot of interesting lessons, but just in terms of things for people to take into customer interviews with their own product, don't make it about your product. You ask leading questions, they will give you insincere answers. You need to ask them about their experiences and their problems and keep your product away from it for as long as possible because the second you do, You bring your product in, people know you have some kind of vested interest in here, and people want to make other people happy in conversations. You know what I mean? And so then they feel like it's kind of about you, and then they're going to start filtering their answers. So you just need to fight the ego. Your product is not what matters during those phases. Purely the custom experiences. Vigs (23:36) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And that's a really good insight, the fear of getting lost. Like I've been to Lollapalooza a couple of times and that frantic fear of like, even if you're like, no, I don't see my friends for a second, where did they go? Or in the example you gave, wanting to go to a different stage altogether. That's something that I wouldn't even have considered that this is solving for, but you know, clearly it is because that's part of the feeling secure, feeling connected with the group that you're with. Carter Fowler (24:06) Yeah. Yeah, it's cool that you've been to Lollapalooza. I went once as well. I think it was 2017 for me. And those crowds are some of the most disorienting crowds that I have been around. Like someone can be 10 feet away from you and you could feel like you totally lost them. Vigs (24:30) Yeah. And something about the layout of it too, like, I mean, I live in Chicago and so I've seen it in broad daylight without the festival and it's just like, it's just a park. But something about the way they set up the venue is super disorienting and like I would always get lost. And obviously the cell signal is atrocious as it is at these festivals. Carter Fowler (24:31) Yeah. Yeah. And importantly, something else I realized from talking to people, you're just jogging my memory here because this was so long ago, but was that it wasn't just about cell service being poor. It was also about your friends in those environments being bad at their cell phone. You know, like even if the cell service is great, you just can't trust Johnny to be checking his phone and letting you know where he's at. You know, every group has that problem, child. And the thing is a lot of these Vigs (25:06) yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or even. Carter Fowler (25:18) problem children are very proud of being the problem child. And so this is something interesting that we realized too was that like, there is some people would see this and think to themselves, or you might even see it in comments, like, well, I like getting lost. It's like, great, now you can do it. And then just what it means now is that when you're done being lost, you can opt out, right? Vigs (25:35) Mm -hmm. Yeah, you have the choice. Carter Fowler (25:47) Yeah, exactly. Now like the power's in your control and you know, if you really want to go off the grid, just turn it off. It's okay. Vigs (25:52) Yeah. Yeah. I want to hear the story of how you guys went viral. The only context I have is, I think, an old LinkedIn post of yours where you kind of talked about some of the numbers and the stats. But I want to hear the whole story and your emotions through it all. Carter Fowler (26:07) Man, okay, yeah, let's get into it. So, and let me back up to like the winter. So in the winter, we applied for South by Southwest Creative Industries Expo because we wanted to do our product launch there. I was not anticipating anybody knowing who the hell we were. And so I was thinking that would probably be our big coming out party to the world was at the South by South Creative Industries Expo. So when we signed up and they, or when we applied and got accepted to the startup village there, we were super excited. Because we were like, man, in March, that's going to be huge. People like, that'll be our coming out party. People will know about us there. You know, when we signed up for it, we had about 200 followers on Instagram and maybe like 40 subscribers on our mailing list. So, you know, we're moving forward towards South by Southwest. That was in March. And I am getting us all buttoned up as a brand to look very professional at South by Southwest. One thing I wanted to do for that was create a nice homepage video for us. So this is back when it was just me and Chase here. So it was February 19th, I think, Friday night. And as part of that homepage video, I just filmed a little video of like the compasses compassing on. on a table, like, you know, just a demo right there to include as a snippet in the video that just described that feature of the product. And kind of thoughtlessly that Friday night, I just threw up that clip on Instagram with those words that I told you earlier, right? Friend finding compass for festivals. That's it. That's the five words, nothing else on screen at loops. No ashtray. Well, like there was some caption, right? I'm talking about like in Vigs (27:44) Yeah. No hashtags. okay. Carter Fowler (27:56) most right there, right? Vigs (27:57) Yeah, okay. Carter Fowler (27:58) So, you know, there wasn't anyone explaining anything, no faces, literally just a hand holding it, showing what it does, and those five words on the screen. So I just threw that up on Instagram. There was no ad spend behind it whatsoever. Again, we didn't have any budget. And went to sleep that night. I woke up the next morning, thought it was a normal morning, went to the gym, came back. opened up Instagram and I have never seen anything like it before. It is a crazy experience to be on the other side of the app when something like that is happening. Just that next day, like 16 hours later, it had already done like 8 million views and had 80 ,000 shares and it just accelerated from there. It just kept getting faster and faster and faster. Vigs (28:38) -huh. my goodness. Carter Fowler (28:50) Like thank God I had gotten our wait list live on the website three days before that. Otherwise we wouldn't have been able to capture this whole moment, but the wait list was just freshly up, the stars aligned. And yeah, like we didn't boost this post at all. People saw it. And to an extent, I think, you know, we did just have these 300, 400 followers at that time, but so many of them I had spent a lot of time talking to. Vigs (29:16) Okay. Carter Fowler (29:17) We only had like 400 followers, but man, like a hundred of them had had over an hour and a half of chatting time with the co -founder. So it just blew up, man. And right now it's sitting at that same post, sitting at about like 37 million views, over half a million shares. So that was our first time going viral. At the time it was just me and Chase on the team. Vigs (29:24) Wow. Carter Fowler (29:44) And I was the sole marketer there. And it is a crazy experience. I probably slept, I don't know, 12 hours that week total. I lost pounds. I don't have that much weight to lose. I lost whatever I could. And it's just insane because when things are rolling in that fast, our website was getting flooded. Our spreadsheet was breaking. That was cataloging the wait list and everything in time. Vigs (29:47) Mm -hmm. Wow. Goodness. you Carter Fowler (30:12) At one point we were doing about three pre -orders a minute, like on average for the whole day, right? Vigs (30:12) Mm -hmm. And this is people putting down their credit cards, not just their email address. Carter Fowler (30:25) Well, no, so this was joining the wait list. So this was still joining the wait list at this point, right? So yeah, we were getting, so I mean, it was wild. 70 ,000 people joined the wait list. Yeah, and the really interesting thing is, you know, as I was saying, like, there is, it's just so hard to wrap your mind around the facts. That's funny. It's so hard to wrap your mind around the facts. Vigs (30:28) It was a waitlist, okay. Okay. Oof, wow. That's on brand. Carter Fowler (30:54) the fact when that's happening that these are real people. You know, like, I could log into the app, put it down for a minute, pick it back up. And then when I log in, it's maxed out again, you know, like it lets you know when you have 100, 100, 100 every time, you know, our story was just filled with people tagging us all day long. It was like, like, like, like, like, like, it was just around the clock job, just responding to all this engagement, honestly, it was kind of terrifying. Vigs (31:08) my God, yeah. Wow. Mm -hmm. Carter Fowler (31:24) too, because we weren't expecting, like, that's kind of the essence of going viral. It's not in your control. You don't do viral. People make it go viral. You know, like I said, like we weren't putting any ad money behind this. It was just kind of a thoughtless video that went up. So yeah, that's one reason why South by Southwest was so meaningful. Vigs (31:24) Yeah, I can imagine. Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. Yeah. Carter Fowler (31:50) because that was our first time actually getting to see these people and realize that they are real humans and get to like hug on them and love on them. But yeah, so that was our first viral moment in February about three weeks before we went to South by Southwest. And so when we were going to South by Southwest, man, it was a totally different situation than what we thought it was going to be. Now we were like. Vigs (32:10) yeah. Carter Fowler (32:12) the viral product that everybody has seen. We ended up even putting a screenshot of that reel on the back of our shirts and people would like it everywhere there. Then our second time going viral was from the floor of the South by Southwest Expo that was on TikTok. And that one hit a little harder. It didn't get, I think right now it's done like maybe 20 million views. Vigs (32:16) Yeah. Okay. Carter Fowler (32:40) Not as crazy as the first one, but the difference there was that one was not just, it wasn't anonymous like the original, it was me explaining the compass on the floor, right? And so that just hit totally differently. I mean, it begins with, hey Carter, what's the Totem compass? And like my face is there and I'm explaining it. And so at that point, then I started getting contacted by all kinds of people that know me. Vigs (32:50) Yep. in your real personal life. Carter Fowler (33:07) Real personal life, some people I hadn't talked to in a decade were like, this just showed up on my feed, this is so cool, et cetera. And to be honest, like it was really exciting in the moment. You know, we had people coming to us on the last day of South by Southwest saying like, I saw you on TikTok this morning and I had to come see you guys at the expo. Like you're the guy. But also it's my first exposure to like that level of fame. And it definitely was a strange experience. Vigs (33:27) Wow. Carter Fowler (33:35) You know, like when I got back home to Chattanooga afterward, I definitely like, it's kind of like side eyeing, like in the gym, I was like, is that person looking at me? I don't know. You know, and it's like kind of on edge a little bit about it because it's just a strange thing to be associated with a product like this and have it spread so quickly. And in particular, the fact that it's like not Vigs (33:45) huh. Carter Fowler (34:01) regionally or locationally based, like geographically based, like it's truly international. You know, we have customers in over 40 countries and we just like get hit up by people from all over the world. You know, like we sold compasses into the island of Rayo Nyon in the Indian Ocean. We sold over $10 ,000 a product into Dubai, you know, like all over the world. And so that's kind of the wild and humbling thing about it that I'm still struggling to put my mind. Vigs (34:18) Wow. Carter Fowler (34:31) is the amount of conversations that have taken place all over the world around this and our team, like us here, when we're just like six people here in our little Totem HQ in Chattanooga, Tennessee, it honestly sometimes is really mind blowing to. Vigs (34:50) Yeah, I've heard a common kind of suggestion from people who are building something. Maybe they don't have as big of a wait list. It's like, even if you have just a hundred followers, imagine if all a hundred of those people were in your room. Like that's a lot of people. Right. And for you, like in the millions, like you're filling up stadiums at this point. Right. So it's like cities, not even stadiums. so just insane. And you're telling that story. I feel like I was long for the ride. Like my heart is pounding right now. Just like the, the emotions of going viral. So. Congrats, congrats on all the success you've had. There's so much more I want to talk to you about, but I do want to be respectful of time as well. One last quick thing for you. In kind of the roadmap for Totem, what are you thinking of as far as hardware, community? What's kind of the next five, 10 -year plan for you guys? Carter Fowler (35:37) Yes, well, one thing that we are committed to is our aspect of staying screen free with all of our products and app free. That's just something that we've realized like really hits differently for a lot of people out there. You know, we originally thought that it was going to be about like overcoming the problems with cell phones, but something else I've realized for so many people is that they're tired of being like enslaved to their cell phone. Like they want to break free of the screens, especially at events like this, the screens rip you out of the moment. And so that's just something that we really hit. And I don't think we didn't plan for it. Maybe we kind of intuitively made that decision, but sticking with this aspect of screen free and products that help you, that don't pull you out of the real world, but keep you immersed in the real world and actually more deeply connected to the real world around you is really, really important for us. So we do have a couple of additional consumer products that we plan to roll out. One, and this will actually be the first time we have ever publicly mentioned it or disclosed it, is the Totem Beacon, which is a fun thing here because it's basically, if you took this crystal out, bust it out, make it its own device, that is the Totem Beacon. it operates more like a traditional Totem. So like 16 people can track that. It's made for like leaving in your tent site or your car, or you can hang it on your Totem or leave it on rave mom, you know, and like everybody can find her at the festival. We have plans for a Gen 2 Totem compass as well, a little further down the road, but long -term what we are looking to build toward is integrating these products in with the festivals and events themselves. Vigs (37:16) Nice. Carter Fowler (37:33) because then we can do a lot of really interesting things and accomplish our mission on a much grander scale. That mission being making live events safer, more immersive, and more beautiful. And so when we're actually integrating in with the events themselves, we can just do that on a whole nother level. Like for example, instead of the SOS button, sending an SOS to your friend, it could actually send the SOS to a medic at the festival and know exactly where you are. A lot of other really interesting features there, but it just goes to show you like what, like the levels further that we can go once we're actually working with the festival organizers and the event organizers themselves and actually integrating in with their event because this market is so interesting, but they focus so much of their tech. Vigs (38:04) Mm -hmm. Carter Fowler (38:29) on the stage, right? They invest so much money on the stage, on the headliner experience, but there's this whole aspect of the attendee experience that I think is really, really unexplored in terms of the tech here. And they're still operating, they still run on some pretty old classic tech festivals to manage that experience and also just coordinate their own crews. Vigs (38:52) Yeah. Carter Fowler (38:57) Yeah, that's the that's the kind of plan, you know when we originally went viral like that and we were talking, you know, everybody's like, my god, I want one of these for this use case and this use case and this use case. Of course, there was temptation to think about growing horizontally and being like, well, we could just make a Totem for every individual person, all their use cases, right? That's a different kind of growth path that is really committing to being a broad long -term Vigs (39:10) Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. Carter Fowler (39:26) consumer electronics company and potentially inviting competition from much bigger electronics companies. Staying laser focused on this vertical and moving very quickly with our innovation can work us a little faster toward a potential exit and also can just help us stay focused. Vigs (39:48) Exactly. I think the focus will go a long way here because you know, the big players, they might look at music festivals as like a tiny niche, but that tiny niche, if you guys own that entire thing, like that's a huge, huge slice of the industry. Carter Fowler (40:00) Yeah, just in the US, five times more people go to a music festival every year than die. So, you know, we can confirm that music festivals are indeed more popular than dying. But that's just the US, and we're not even talking about like South America, like Brazil goes crazy with these kinds of festivals and large events. Vigs (40:11) What? Carter Fowler (40:26) And Europe is the whole origin of the word fest, right? No one fests like Europe as well. And we're not even, we haven't even gotten into like the APAC region. So that's like a big part of, you know, why it was so important that we use like the 2 .4 gigahertz and also, you know, it'd be so simple and kind of like not have an app, no language required, just very simple intuitive user interface. It makes it like internationally accessible. Vigs (40:55) Yeah, you just inspired me to come up with a new slogan for you guys, a hook for one of your social media videos, if you will. You can say, there's only three things in life that are certain, taxes, death, and me going to a music festival this year. Carter Fowler (41:02) yeah. There you go. Yes. Yeah, you'll see it on our socials in the next. Vigs (41:13) That's awesome. I love the ambition here as well because a lot of people might look at you guys and say, hey, they got their virality, they got their millions of views, they're set. But no, you guys have a much grander vision of basically going from D2C to going B2B and wanting to hold the entire experience. So hats off for that and good luck with everything to come. Carter Fowler (41:34) Yeah, thanks. You know, this really is just the beginning for us. This is just our daily product. There's a reason that our company isn't named Totem Compass, because this is just the very first product from us. And we have a lot more planned for this whole space worldwide. You know, we aren't going to stop until events all around the world are more beautiful, more immersive and safer than they have ever been, because, you know, they are some of the most beautiful memorable experiences we all have and we're just here to take it a little bit closer to that dream state, you know? Vigs (42:11) I love that. I gotta have you on here a year from now just to get an update on all the progress for part two. Carter Fowler (42:17) Yeah, that'd be great. We'd love to do it. Vigs (42:20) Well, thanks so much for taking a moment with me here today and sharing your story. And again, all the best and keep doing what you guys are doing. You're killing it. Carter Fowler (42:27) Thank you so much, Vignesh, appreciate it. Vignesh Rajagopal (42:29) Hey, before you go, since you made it all the way to the end of the episode, I have something new that I'm trying out. You know, whenever we hear these stories about people building products, one of the key lessons we hear is talk to your users early, get customer feedback early. I'm not building a hardware product, but I am building this podcast. And so I want to talk to you, my listener, and get to know you better. So shoot me an email, vr at vigs.io. Tell me a little bit about what you're working on and what your challenges are. I'm happy to try to help you with my product development experience, make some introductions to other founders, whatever you need. I'm happy to chat and see how I can help. Shoot me an email, vr at vigs.io. All right, see you next week.

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