Find your inner child with Truest North Compass

✍️ Show Notes

Karl is one heck of a storyteller. Join us in this week's episode as he regales us with stories of adventure and creativity, and talks about his latest joy-inspiring invention: Truest North Compass. Designed to point to any location in the world, this device will not only serve as a source of adventure for kids but also as a way of commemorating special locations as adults. His passion for creativity really comes through, and I loved seeing him apply that to tinkering with hardware throughout his career. Go follow their Kickstarter!

🔗 Check out truestnorthcompass.com

🔑 Bytes:

• Do childish things with an adult focus and energy :)
• Use storytelling to capture your audience and truly reach them.
• Find your core principle (e.g. not another app) and problem-solve around it (mobile browser)

📖 Chapters

00:00 The Story Behind the Truest North Compass

06:50 From Tinkerer to Entrepreneur: Challenges and Lessons

11:06 Design Changes and Innovations in the Truest North Compass

23:57 Understanding Limitations and Testing Assumptions

💬 Full Transcript

Vigs (00:00) All right, we're live. Karl, I'm so excited to have you here. We connected briefly on LinkedIn. You gave me a glimpse into your story and I'm really excited to unpack the rest of it. How are you doing today? Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (00:10) doing great. It's good that it's Friday, right? Vigs (00:14) Yes. So let's start off with, you know, you've created this product, the Truest North Compass. Before we talk about the product, I actually want to start off with your story of how you came up with the idea for the product. So why don't you kick us off with that. Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (00:28) Sure. Well, it's a fun story. And I found actually that it's kind of a dangerous story for reasons that I can get to after I tell it to you. So, when I first became an uncle, it profoundly changed my life. My first niece was born and I now have three nieces and a nephew. I just really realized that I loved working with kids. And I really love in particular, like doing childish things with an adult focus and energy, you know, like, I don't know, building like an enormous snow fort, like an adult size snow fort, stuff like that. And so when they were little and still now, I just loved making little inventions for them, puzzle boxes, you know, I would send them letters that were jigsaw puzzles, and then you had to put the puzzle together and flip it over, you know, and just like dollar store 24 piece puzzles. My oldest niece, she, she's really good at putting together puzzles. She always start with the faces, which is the way you got to do it. Vigs (01:17) Cool. Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (01:27) And so my niece and my nephew were going to come up to Pittsburgh and stay with my parents for like a long week, and they were going to go explore the state park that we—my dad has a sailboat on the lake, and so we were—we just—I've been there a ton growing up. And so I wanted to write a mystery for them. And so I came up with this like whole story about the Dutchman's rubies, how like, you know, these— gemstones were lost in the coal mines that flooded the lake when they built the dam and everything. And so they had to put together a jigsaw puzzle, flip it over, solve the riddle that was on the back, and then the grand finale was I gave them an early version of this compass, which at the time I was calling the rumpus compass. I just still love that name, but it doesn't quite work as a, you know, mass market product. And so the compass pointed to this abandoned water tower up on a hill. Vigs (02:08) Ha ha ha. Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (02:21) And to get there, so there was a secret way to get there. And so the night before, my brother, myself, and my mom, we all hiked down to the water tower through the road. That was like the back way. But, you know, the compass just points, it just gives you a heading. So the kids didn't know that there was a secret back way to get there. They only knew that you had to cross the lake to get to it. So what we did was we towed a canoe with the sailboat. So we powered out the sailboat to the middle of the lake. And then we hopped in the canoe, all of us, my brother, my niece, my nephew, and me. And then we rode to shore and we hopped on shore. And then we had to hike through the most god-awful brambles you can possibly imagine. In Western Pennsylvania, we call them jagger bushes. So the night before, like I'd done some inspection. I'd gone a quarter mile down the hill or whatever to make sure that the trail was passable. And it was, it was totally fine. But coming from the other direction, it was an absolute nightmare. And the brambles were so bad, the kids couldn't walk through it. I mean, up to a height of like four feet, just like jaggers everywhere. Vigs (03:00) Okay. Wow. Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (03:20) So my brother and I, we threw the kids on our shoulders and Evie, my oldest, my niece, she had the compass in her hands and she was sitting on my shoulders and she was directing us which way to go. We're like staggering over like all these logs and stuff. It was very unkempt forest. Like, you know, it was really tough going. And we eventually made it up to the top where I stashed a glass jar filled with glass diamonds in it. And the kids were so excited. My niece was saying, oh, I'm going to buy a sports car with these Dems. You know, I think they're real. It was, oh, it was so fun. My brother almost killed me because he's really allergic to poison ivy. He was being a spoiled boy the whole day. It was great fun. Then we hiked back down and got back in the canoe and the sailboat got back. And, you know, it was just, it was such a fun experience. For the next like year or so, I just kind of sat on the compass. Vigs (03:50) Ha ha ha. Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (04:15) I kept coming back to the idea, I loved it, but I didn't really see it being a market, there being much of a market for it, you know. And you know, we just had a kid, and I just didn't have a lot of time with work and everything, but it was always kind of churning back there. And then one day I had this realization that, you know, you might get this compass for your fiancé and have it point to the place where you got engaged. And that was it. I was like, oh my gosh, that's it. This is... A gift that celebrates a person's connection to the place. And the key here is that the compass works better as a product if it's not a device for creating new stories, but a device for celebrating your existing stories. So I don't know, that was the distinction in my mind that I really had to get past. And why this is a dangerous story is if I tell people the true story of how I came up with this, they often won't. Vigs (04:45) Hmm. Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (05:06) the price point they're willing to pay is often much lower because it sounds like it's a gift for kids, you know, like, and their first question after I tell them about this adventure we went on is usually, how do you reprogram this? Which they are all gonna be reprogrammable and I would love to talk about how that works because it's really fun. But if you are wondering that right off the bat, I feel like I've lost you as like understanding what this thing really is and what it's supposed to do, you know, so, very long winter day. Yeah. Vigs (05:11) Ah. Okay. So the gist of it. Yeah, so the gist of it is, you know, you have a compass, you program in a location, which we'll dive into that later. And that compass, which is actually, it's actually a mechanical compass that looks like an actual compass, um, we're having a super cool that you preserve that characteristic and, uh, you're kind of now thinking of marketing it as a way of preserving moments, sharing memories and things like that. Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (05:56) Yeah, yeah, probably should have made it clear what the compass is. Yeah, so there's a GPS chip inside it, and it's got two hands, which, so there's a red hand that always points in the direction that you want to go, and the black hand tells you how far away you are on a nice logarithmic distance scale. And yeah, so it's all about the celebrating the person's connection to a place. It's a beautiful object made out of wood and brass, and it's got the nice mechanical hands and all that, so. Vigs (06:22) Wow. Yeah, I looked at some of the photos. It looks truly like an antique, something that you wanna put up and display somewhere. So kudos for that design. So I wanna ask you, when did you decide, I think you said you first had that first prototype for your nieces, took a couple years off, and then came back to it. And that was kinda when you decided to jump into it full-time. And I think that's something a lot of entrepreneurs, not just hardware, but in general, they struggle with knowing, when should I commit to my idea full-time? And I would love to hear about what was some of your decision making process. Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (06:54) Yeah, sure. So at the time I was working as a software developer for some startup based out of Denver. It was fine work. You know, we had a young son and so I just was just kind of going through the motions. But I really was getting a little antsy at work. I just, you know, software is fine, but it's like not really where my passion is. And so we moved to Buffalo and it was kind of this nice like clean slate, you know, we didn't really know a lot of people here, but basically nobody. I have a cousin that's 40 minutes away. I was closest to you know that we knew. Um, so it was new city, new start. And the other thing is I got laid off the day that we moved here at the time was like the worst timing, you know, like, I, like, I opened up my laptop after taking two days off to move and I've got a scheduled meeting with the, you know, with the NFHR and I was like, what? There was mass layoffs. And so, you know, I just was going around tech at the time, but I was like, you know, maybe this is like, like a sign that, I mean, not really, you know, but like this is a good place to start something new. And I've had this idea, I'm pretty sure that it's gonna be a good product. I still need to do some product work and really get it working the way I wanted to. But now's the time, you know, I had some money set away and my wife was fully supportive of me trying something new like this and giving it a shot. And so it was a tough decision, but also like, it just felt right. You know, I was ready to do something like this. Vigs (08:20) Yeah. How'd you know? So I understand like the personal side of it, you know, everything kind of aligned and you just jumped in. Obviously you took a big risk. How did you know that the product itself would sell? Did you, had you done any research? Was it kind of a gut feeling? Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (08:36) At the first, when I just decided to pursue it, it was a good feeling. I was doing customer discovery interviews, just like a couple here and there. I mean, you know, my son is two years old and so I don't, it's really quite hard for me to get out and like see people in the real world and interview them, you know. So, but I had like this week, weekly meeting where I was going and talking to people. And, you know, if I did it again, and I hope to with another product, if this is at all successful. I definitely would start much sooner with customer discovery and in particular, like, you know, getting some pre-orders, collecting emails, having people take an action that shows they're actually interested in buying it and not just like having a conversation with them and getting some general feeler information, you know. When I finally started getting, so I'm collecting $5 pre-orders for the Compass, you know, and you get 30% off in stickers in the mail and all that. And when I finally started getting an appreciable number of those, I feel like that was really the, the validation that I needed outside of actually selling them, right? I still have only sold two or three of them at this point, but I've been trying to force everybody to kickstarter and, you know, it's been tough. I would do more customer discovery going forward, and in particular, like some Facebook landing page, instant forms kind of things right off the bat. Vigs (09:51) Yeah. And I fully agree with you. Like once you start seeing that interest, that kind of will help convince you of the idea. And I think what you've done is like gone a step above just collecting emails. Like I love the $5 to reserve idea because that's forcing someone to pull out their credit card and enter in all this information. And it shows a much higher level of commitment to purchasing your product compared to just submitting an email, which can be kind of ubiquitous. So emails good, but what you're doing is even better in my opinion. So kudos on that. And you said you're on Kickstarter. Are you live already or are you planning to launch soon? Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (10:23) We're gonna launch, the plan was May 15th, and for marketing reasons, I'm gonna kick it back another month to June 15th. So, and then Composites will ship by, people who pay the deposit are gonna get them by Thanksgiving and everybody else will get them by Christmas for sure. And I think it should be quite a bit sooner than that, but that's the plan. Vigs (10:40) Okay, let's now dial it back to kind of the origin story again. So you had that initial prototype and that was just kind of for fun for your niece that, you know, you want to explore your inner child with, which by the way, great life motto to just live, live through your inner child. Um, how did you, you know, software background for you sounds like, how did you create that initial prototype? And then now what changes and what have you learned along the way to kind of get this to mass production? Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (11:06) Alright, so my story actually begins next to a creek in New Mexico. There's this boy scout camp there called Philmond Scout Ranch. And one night in 2009, I fell asleep next to the South Poneo Creek. And when I woke up the next morning, I was a storyteller. I hadn't been one the night before. This transformative experience that's been always very mysterious to me. You know, I don't understand why that happened, and I'm so glad it did. I was, you know, 20-ish, maybe 19. I don't know, somewhere in that range. Vigs (11:29) How old were you? Okay, okay. Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (11:36) just profoundly transformative experience. And so for the rest of that summer, every single night we would do these campfire shows and I would tell these dramatic monologues. I was supposed to be a logger from the year 1914 and so I would tell these grand and sprawling mythic tales of what it was like to be in the woods when everything around you was dark, as dark as you can imagine at night, you know. There weren't any lights anywhere and it was great. I loved that. And so I kind of had that as my north star for a long time. when I was in grad school, getting my PhD in biophysics at the University of Rochester, whenever I was working for Amazon, always in the back of my mind. And I had these side projects too. I was, maybe not worth getting into, but I had the storytelling project where I was writing stories for people on a typewriter and a bunch of other stuff. But when I was at Amazon, I realized I needed to do it professionally. I really wanted to be a professional storyteller. And because I had this background in software and the PhD stuff, I set about creating this persona, this Dr. Sparks persona. And after I left Amazon, I became a professional storyteller. I toured the East Coast with a stage show, with a series of inventions and a bunch of stories that I'd written that kind of conveyed these, like, you know, sciency concepts in bite-sized chunks the kids could understand and then illustrated with these inventions that I'd made. And the inventions were so dope. Like, and I still have my, still do a couple shows a year. Oh, let's take a more backseat. But we've got these light-up suspenders. And so there's a string of two strips of LED lights on either suspender. And then it's all connected on this wifi mesh. And so I've got these juggling balls. And so like I can shake the juggling ball and the accelerometer sends its data to the suspenders and you can see the acceleration in real time on my suspenders. And so I've got like this like juggling riddle and the kids can change the color of the suspenders with this big boat winch like, chuk, chuk. So all that is to say was I was tinkering, making. Vigs (13:26) Wow. Yes. Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (13:31) inventions for the stage, which is a very specific product use case. You know, like, they can be, they can require a lot of maintenance. That's okay. But they also need to be bulletproof when you're in the moment, right? Like this, this weird thing where like the juggling balls could be made out of Christmas ornaments. Cause if I drop them, like I'll just pick some and replace them the next day, but they can't fail mid show for any reason at all. You know, like it's strange, um, space. But anyways, I had been making these like quirky whimsical inventions for a while. So I buckled down to sit down and make the compass for my niece and nephew. It really was like stitching together a couple of things that I'd already figured out. I'd already been working with Arduinos and C++ and all that for a couple of years now making these inventions. And then I hadn't done anything with, you know, a dedicated GPS chip that was new at that point. But you know, it really was just a pretty minor step forward. Vigs (14:09) Hmm That's super cool. I love kind of taking that stage experience and transforming it. The other thing that's unique about the stage props, sorry, like stage props, right? That's where you kind of, your tools that you use. The other thing that's unique is you don't have to necessarily worry about mass production. You're probably making like one of one or two of two. And that allows you to kind of use your creativity and like do things that maybe, you know, mass production is going to make complicated, but you're just building it together for you to use. That's super cool. Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (14:50) Yeah, absolutely. And my wife still says that I need to make the suspenders a mass market thing and I keep telling her, like it's just, you know, I bent the plastic suspenders to my body. Like it's form fitted, it worked great, but like I can't, you know, and then how do you ship them? There's like weird suspender, rigid suspenders. Like I built a custom box for them, but like I can't do that, you know. So yeah, you're absolutely right. They can be much more bespoke, which allows you to do some, you know, it's- Vigs (15:02) Ha ha. Mm-hmm. Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (15:18) It's, I actually really like making inventions for the stage. Although it's also very funny. You never know what's gonna fly on stage and what isn't. Like, I went down a lot of false paths with making things that in my head were gonna just be awesome on stage. And then you get up there and it just, like it requires too much one-on-one or, I don't know, just like a funny. Vigs (15:40) Hmm. Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (15:42) I don't know, I've got a lot of really fun inventions that are fun to show kids in like groups of three or five, but just don't work with larger groups. Yeah, I know. Yeah. Vigs (15:48) Interesting, interesting. I went and saw a Life of Pi in Broadway. It was my first Broadway show. And as an engineer, okay, like great storyline. Everything, acting was great. But as an engineer, I just was wowed by all the onstage. Like everything was just so well coordinated. I was like, who is engineering this? I like went and looked to see if they were hiring at Broadway for engineers. And it's so cool you got to do like a microcosm of that and you got to do it your own way. come up with these ideas and try to educate kids through science. Yeah. So tell me a little bit about that transformation from that one of one compass to now where you're looking to scale, looking to sell, you know, thousands of units, what were some of the design differences in that transition? Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (16:36) Yeah, well the biggest one was the mechanical hands. So the prototype for my niece and nephew was a ring of LED lights. Then it worked great for navigation. It actually is totally fine. It's precise enough, you know, you got a nice density of LED lights, but it just doesn't look good. You know, at that point, you may as well use your phone. You really want a physical hand that moves. But whenever you add a physical hand, you add a stepper motor, and the stepper motor interferes with digital compass readings. So it's not enough to have a GPS on the compass. You also need digital magnometer. So the interference from the stepper just gives you absolute garbage whenever you do it. And so I had to set up this like orchestration. So that was the first real step to like make it mass-producible. And then like dumb stuff, finding the hands, the clock hands, you know, that took me like four months. I mean, I was making them by hand, like hot super gluing. You can buy clock hands off Amazon, but they aren't quite the right size. This stepper motor has a very specific, you know, two shafts, diameters, and nothing out there on the market fits it. I had to get something custom from China and it took me forever. Finally got it. These guys are amazing and the clock hands are nice and snug. They pop right on, they pop right off if you need to take it off and they never... Anyways, but like yeah, dumb stuff like that. Sourcing the hands took me forever. And then this is also like, I kind of stumbled my way through it. So the next iteration smaller and quite a bit cheaper and I'm going to make some real decisions for you know designing for manufacturers that'll make it just ever so much easier in every way. You know I just kind of I didn't know what I was doing and so I've got something that works just great but the next version will be significantly cheaper and easier to assemble. Vigs (18:23) Okay. And on that note, you know, you said you wanted to do all the manufacturing state side and you said you wanted to do it yourself. Um, it's your workshop. So tell me more about that decision-making. Why, why do you want to kind of be in control of that? Is it a quality control thing? Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (18:38) It's partially quality control. The biggest thing is it's changed a little bit in the past, like three weeks, I had a breakthrough, but, um, so the, I was convinced that the use case for this compass was personalized to one spot that you would buy this for a dedicated spot and you would never reprogram it. And in fact, some of the research that I'd done at the start made me think that if it wasn't reprogrammable, it was a more expensive and better product for some people that. Vigs (19:07) Interesting. Yep. Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (19:08) because it was fixed to one spot, you know, if you buy any points where you get engaged, are you going to get engaged again? Like, you know, it's kind of nice that it's always fixed. It becomes like kind of like heirloomy at that point that like you might pass this down to your kid. You know, I don't know, but there's a there's a just a kind of luxury to it if it is always fixed and personalized that way. But when I started running these Facebook ads, number one question I got was how do you reprogram this thing? However, because I was gung-ho for it being Vigs (19:15) Yes. Mm-hmm. Hmm. Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (19:37) fixed in one spot, you couldn't assemble it overseas because you needed to know where it was going to point as part of the assembly process. There was no way to reprogram it once it was in there. So some of the pieces, so the wood is machined and the cavity is formed and stained and everything. The wood comes to me from China, fully ready to go. The brass comes to me from China as well, stamped and ready to go. But then the assembly has to happen stateside because I need to know, I need to program the chip as they go out. Vigs (19:46) Oh. Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (20:06) Now I just figured out a way... What's that? Sorry. Vigs (20:06) And so is it, I was gonna, so is it kind of the customer place and order and they include the coordinates or the location as part of their order? Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (20:14) Yeah, absolutely. So I put a lot of thought into, like, you know, the moment you take this thing out of the box, it should immediately work. I want that needle to be pointing the right direction, regardless of whether it's connected to the GPS, regardless of anything, you know, it just knows where you want it to point and it knows where it is and immediately, the second you turn it on, it's pointing the right direction. And so, yeah, you need to give me the coordinates when you buy it and then it comes pre-programmed to that spot. Vigs (20:37) Okay, so now what are you doing to make a programmable? Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (20:40) Oh boy. All right. So I really had backed myself into a corner. You know, to my wife's credit, she had said from day one, make this thing reprogrammable. You're being crazy. Like people want it. And I was like, no, I know what I'm doing. This is a better product if it's not. And I don't want to add. The other thing is, I don't know about you, but I hate junky one function apps on a smartphone. I just like I don't want to download another app. Like, just dumb. I don't like that. And Vigs (20:52) Hahaha Fair. Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (21:09) That's the way to do it, right? Like if you're gonna reprogram this compass, the far and away the best way to do it, you're not gonna include a touch pad on it or anything like that. It is just better to have a Bluetooth chip on there and reprogram it that way. I just didn't want to do that. So I had an epiphany, there is another way to do it. So the compass, here I've got one of my prototypes set up so you can see how it works, but there's a hole in the front of the compass. And when you first turn the thing on, Oh, this one doesn't have a battery. When you first turn this thing on, the hands rotate fully 360 degrees. And the reason for that is the kind of stepper that I'm using, it doesn't know where the hands are when it first turns on. So normally what you do is you'd have a Hall effect sensor and a magnet and whenever the magnet passes in front of the sensor, you know where the hand is. But I can't use magnets because I'm making, you know, compass measurements. So instead it's a light sensor, a proximity sensor. It's got a little LED in there. And so even if it's full dark, there's a little It knows whenever the hand passes in front of it, but it also, this sensor also has an ambient light sensor in it. And so what you're going to do is instead of connecting via Bluetooth, you'll go to trus slash reprogram. It'll all be in the browser on your smartphone and you put in your coordinates or you pick a pin or whatever it is. And then you set the compass face down on the surface of your phone and the phone will flash. The screen will flash white and black in a binary sequence. Vigs (22:25) Mm-hmm. Okay. Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (22:37) and you're not passing a lot of information. It's 51 bits will get you a latitude and longitude. So it takes about 20 seconds right now. I think I'll get it down to 10 by the time we launch. And it transmits the new location and it does it without an app. And so then you just immediately know is where you're supposed to point in any way. Yeah, right? What's that? Vigs (22:44) Wow. That's awesome. That's a great idea. What protocol do you use for that? Do you encode that in some way? Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (22:58) I wrote my own. Yeah, nothing crazy. It's such a small amount of information and I really wanted it to be fast. So me and ChatGPT, we got to it. Vigs (23:06) Hahaha. That's super fascinating. As you were telling the story, my mind was going like NFC, obviously Bluetooth, but you kind of had this principle of not another app. And I love that you had that one core principle and then based on that you've problem solved around it and came up with that solution. That's super elegant. What's the percentage? Does it work 100% of the time? Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (23:28) I have not been dropping any bits. It does work very well. So I haven't added like a, so I have a friend that works in hardware. He, I don't know, just stuff for SpaceX or he did, and he was doing satellite communication with them. He's like, ah, you know, you got to have this. It's not a checksum, but it's something like that, an error correcting code at the end. So I will end up implementing that. So I'll know if it didn't work, but you know, if it takes 10 seconds and it didn't catch one time, one time in 100 or whatever, we should know if it was a failure because if it's not a GPS coordinate, like clearly something went wrong. So you just will reprogram it. Vigs (23:30) Wow. Exactly. Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (23:57) But it seems quite reliable right now. I was actually pretty astonished at how. Vigs (24:02) Yeah, that's super innovative. I'm gonna be telling my friends about that one. Tell me a little bit, so you're so interesting with your background and stuff, and I see that you have this creative approach to problem solving, and I was wondering if you could give some advice to someone else, how do you take such creative approaches and not kind of stay limited within what's already out there? How do you bring creativity into engineering? Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (24:26) question. I would say that It's important to understand early what the limitations are and to just kind of chew on it. I mean, usually... You know, if I'm stuck on a problem that I really can't see through, it just takes time. Like, you can't do it quickly if you're going to try to think of a creative solution. And it just... I don't know. I mean, like, honestly, sleeping on it is like the biggest thing, you know? You're just stuck. You're going around in circles and you cannot see the way forward. And then you come back to it in the morning, you're like, oh my God, it was easy. Like, I see it the whole way through. And, you know, just like, making sure that... you're really testing your assumptions too. That like. You know, like I said, it's not going to be reprogrammable. And I had built these parameters for myself of what the problem space had to look like. And then in the end, those things weren't as hard and fast as I thought they were. But it's still important to have the constraints that you're going to work in, but also try to recognize where you've made a constraint that doesn't really exist for yourself and to maybe see if that's the way forward. I don't know, I feel like that's kind of generic advice, but I don't... I feel like maybe that's creative problem solving. There is no one way to, you know, like. Vigs (25:49) Yeah. Well, on a similar note, not with problem solving, but more with storytelling, ever since you had that transformation at 19, 20 years old, how has that kind of impacted your approach to engineering? Like, are you more, I don't know, like tell me a little bit about how storytelling comes into play here. Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (26:05) I'd say the Compass is a storytelling device, you know. I do want to celebrate people's stories. When it comes to the device itself, I mean, it's different. You know, like, I don't know. I was a scientist for a long time. I got my PhD and everything. And everybody would say like, oh, science is such an opportunity for storytelling. And it does. The best scientific journal articles do have a strong element of narrative and use that as another dimension to convince you of what they're trying to convince you of. But it's not getting on a stage and roaring about life and death and revenge. And it's I found in the marketing, I found more opportunity for the actual storytelling side of things to come through. And it's funny, like, you know, what you think is going to work and what's not. I started off and like, you know, my gold star customer was always like, somebody is going to get engaged and they're going to use this thing to engage. You know? And so. The first couple ads that I wrote were all like, you know, interviewing a woman and she's talking about her and her fiance and about how she got this compass for him and how it's really important to her. And I was like, oh, these ads are great. They're gonna sell so many of these compasses. But then they weren't really performing the way I wanted them to. And I went out and I did a time-lapse video of me. Like, it was, I can talk about it, but there were a lot of technical challenges to overcome with like, when you have a camera that's pointed at something that's very close and also very far away, it's really hard to get both things in focus. And then... way that actually works for your eye. Anyways, I went out there and just like one day with like a GoPro hooked up to the compass, filmed a video of me walking to this like public art statue. And it was like three times better than any other video that I'd posted in terms of like how much it was costing to get people to click on the ad. And at first I was like, I don't get it. Like it's all about storytelling. Anybody will tell you that marketing is storytelling, you know, emotions, this and that. But it was the kind of story that I was telling. Like When I say the text would pop up on the screen, this compass doesn't point north, I've got you hooked. You want to know where it points. Like, you know, you see the thing moving. It's much more compelling than somebody telling you about, like, even the relationship in this lovely story that they have. And they're just it's so clear that they're selling you another piece of jewelry. Like, you know, it's it just was funny how the kind of storytelling that is intended to do, it didn't end up being what was resonating with people at all, you know. Vigs (28:05) Yes. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think there's a way to tie those two together. So what if, you know, you started off with that hook of this doesn't point north and then, you know, that captures attention and that tells people like, oh, I'm like part of this experience, especially that camera view of walking through. Then that person is like, okay, like, let's see where this goes. And then that ending could kind of be like a full circle back and be like, oh, like being my fiance, like we got engaged right here and I can't believe. So I think there is a way to tie those two together. Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (28:52) We're gonna try on Sunday. I've got, I've hired two actors and I'm gonna try to play it that like, she has the compass and she's like, my boyfriend got me this compass. He says it points somewhere special to us. Let's see where it goes. And she goes there and then it's a beautiful place in Buffalo. And she's like, yeah, this is great, but why is this important to us? And he says, turn around. And he's done on one knee, you know, and like, he's gonna ask you, you know, I think that'll, like you're saying here, like it's got that adventure side of things, but it also has the emotional hook of like, Vigs (29:13) Aww. Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (29:21) there is people doing this that we're invested in. And so we'll see. I don't know if it's gonna work or not, but we're gonna give it a shot. So. Vigs (29:31) Good luck with that. I've got a last one for you, and this is kind of a loaded question. So if there's someone out there that's listening to this, and they're a tinkerer, just like you, what advice would you give them to go from tinkerer to entrepreneur, product launcher, someone that kind of has the tenacity to do all the things that you're doing? You're reaching out to people, you're figuring out who's gonna manufacture what, how am I gonna streamline this manufacturing? What advice would you give? Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (29:58) So my background's in academia, and then I went to go work for Amazon. And the difference there is in academia, we often solve problems, fascinating problems, really, really interesting problems that nobody actually has. Like, you know, we came up with these incredible solutions to problems that did not actually exist in the real world. And what I learned at Amazon is that, you know, that's great. It's useful and it often opens up doors that you couldn't foresee, and it does move things forward. But in the end, all that really matters, is if your solution actually does impact somebody, if somebody actually finds it useful. And for years, I really was gung-ho all in on whimsy. And I still would like to think that even this compass has a touch of the whimsical about it, even though it is very much a practical product and I think it'll pull on people's heartstrings in a meaningful way. It does like, it's like Jack Sparrow's compass. This is a thing that's pulled from fiction in a way. But I think when you want to make a product that people will actually buy, You can't just follow your own North Star as much. I mean, you need to be open to what people are telling you, and you need to understand that, like, the best ideas, good ideas fail all the time. It's not just a good idea. It's a good idea that people get. And that was something that I still struggle with, that validating your product is actually a very difficult step because you love it and you know it's amazing. And you know that if you could just sit down with these people and explain what your product does and why it's awesome, they're going to fall in love with it. But you don't have that opportunity. You've got three seconds to get them to stop scrolling, less than that even, when they're on Facebook and click on your ad. And you need to make a compelling case for why your invention is actually something that will make their life better or will make their life easier, you know. And I don't know, that's something that I'm still very much learning, and it's not something that comes naturally to me. There's some element of that in storytelling. You know, you got to get out of your own head. The stories that you tell. Like they have to be compelling to other people. You can't just do something because it makes you seem clever or like, you know, something that you think is really neat. They have to be hooky. But I don't know. I don't know that I could fully make that analogy, you know, B load bearing. Different analogy that also not. Yeah, anyways. So yeah, that's my answer to that question, I guess. Vigs (32:15) Hehehe Cool. Well, this was a great conversation. I, the time flew by. I didn't even realize we're already at 30 minutes. Um, but you know, Karl, I just want to say thanks for coming on. Uh, super interesting story. All the best to you with your efforts. Um, if people want to support you want to follow along, where can they go? Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (32:33) Thank you. Yeah, so the easiest places to go to my website, trus or also on Instagram, TikTok, at trusnorthcompass, you'll find us. And I think if you just Google trusnorthcompass, you'll get there. Vigs (32:49) Perfect. Well, thanks so much for your time. Thanks for joining us. Karl Smith (Truest North Compass) (32:51) Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Pam.

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