214 | Cooking With No New Ingredients | with Tim Swindle and Scott Brown

Honest Ecommerce

Tim Swindle is an entrepreneur and investor, helping build and exit multiple companies.

As an early investor and employee at PointDrive, a Chicago-based sales software company, he had roles leading sales, marketing, and operations before the company was acquired in 2016 by LinkedIn.

During this time, Tim created Utter Nonsense, an entertaining card game that was quickly carried by several retailers and ultimately within all 1,800 Target stores. Utter Nonsense was acquired in 2017 by private equity backed PlayMonster.

In 2018 Tim co- founded Playtacular, a boutique publishing company that designs and creates innovative toys and games.

In addition to this, Tim is a Managing Member of Hubbard Street Capital, an early stage venture investing firm. Tim lives in Nashville, with his wife, daughter and very good boy, Tucker.

Scott Brown is the co-founder of Marbles: The Brain Store, a retail concept focused on building better brains through play, which eventually grew to 40 stores, a website, a catalog business and a proprietary product division.

While there, he headed the curation of all store products and formed Marbles: Brain Workshop, overseeing the creation of more than 150 proprietary products. In early 2017 the Marbles brand was acquired by Spin Master.

For the past three years, Scott has served as VP of Creative over Games at Spin Master, helping bring dozens more games to market.

Beginning in January 2020, Scott will be leaving Spin Master to form an independent game publishing studio. Scott lives in Utah along with his wife and four daughters.

In This Conversation We Discuss:

• [00:00] Intro
• [01:03] What is PaddleSmash?
• [02:23] How Tim got started in the game space
• [04:05] How Scott and Tim met and formed PaddleSmash
• [06:50] Where the idea of PaddleSmash came from
• [08:08] How to come up with ideas or be inspired
• [10:29] Look for opportunities, make it unique
• [11:53] Sponsor: Electric Eye https://electriceye.io/connect
• [12:49] Sponsor: JSON-LD for SEO https://jsonld.app
• [14:14] Joe Bingham’s backstory
• [15:47] 2 routes you can go in the toys and games space
• [17:13] What royalty contracts look like?
• [18:47] The upsides and downsides to licensing your idea
• [21:33] What happened after licensing PaddleSmash?
• [24:47] PaddleSmash is on the testing and learning phase
• [25:56] The inherent virality to outdoor games
• [28:29] Increasing the surface area of luck
• [29:11] Picking an audience from a hybrid
• [30:13] Where to find PaddleSmash products?
• [30:54] Sell the products that you love
• [32:05] Get feedback and just jump in with your product

Resources:

• Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on Youtube
• A new outdoor game that combines the best elements of Pickleball and Spikeball into a fun, and easy-to-learn game paddlesmash.com
• Connect with Tim linkedin.com/in/timswindle
• Connect with linkedin.com/in/thescottbrown
• Take the first step towards Shopify success electriceye.io/connect
• Get your free structured data audit for your store jsonld.app

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