220: How Storytelling Drives Consumer Product Sales

Akeem Shannon is the mastermind behind Flipstik, a consumer product startup that commenced its journey with a crowdfunding campaign and has achieved resounding success leveraging the immense power of authentic storytelling. In addition to achieving over a million units sold and robust partnerships with over 3,000 resellers, Flipstik has garnered substantial attention from tens of millions of consumers across various social media platforms, including the legendary Snoop Dogg. Today, Akeem will take listeners through his journey in the hardware startup space and impart valuable anecdotes for inventors, startups, and small-scale manufacturers. He will delve into the significance of storytelling in consumer product promotion, emphasizing its dual utility: leveraging personal narrative as a founder and harnessing customer experiences. Moreover, Akeem will elaborate on how to strategically implement these storytelling techniques to propel the growth of your product business.

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Key Takeaways in This Episode:

• It always helps to have a genuine love for sales as you are always selling something as a hardware founder.

• You can recover from failure if you don’t give up!

• Self-belief will take you farther than anything!

• Most people don’t have big imaginations, so your biggest obstacle is convincing them to buy something they were previously content with living without.

• Show consumers how your customer's lives were changed by using your product.

• Sometimes, you are not the right messenger for a specific audience, so utilize the stories of others to get your message across.

• Find people who love your product and work with them to amplify your message!

• Authenticity is the most important thing when telling your own story.

• Your story will get you into rooms and meetings that you may think you are too small for.

MAKO Design + Invent: www.makodesign.com

Kevin Mako: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevmako

Producer: MAKO Design + Invent is the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. Simply put, we are the leading one-stop shop for developing your physical product from idea to store shelves, all in a high-quality, cost-effective, and timely manner. We operate as one powerhouse 30-person product design team spread across 4 offices to serve you (Austin, Miami, San Francisco, & Toronto). We have full-stack in-house industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, patent referral, prototyping, and manufacturing services. We also help our clients with business and product strategy, marketing, and sales/distribution for all consumer product categories.