The eCommerce A-Z Podcast is aimed at helping eCommerce merchants and entrepreneurs start, grow and scale their businesses. Every week, I interview entrepreneurs and experts to bring you relevant tips and hacks to grow and build your business.
In the episode(8), we capture the story of Genuis Pipe founded by Dyan Ferman. Genius Pipe is a line of innovative high-end, high-tech portable smoking devices built for a variety of substances that delivers a unique smoking experience for discriminating consumers.
Dyan shares why he started Genius Pipe and his experience building his company and advertising a cannabis product without direct online advertisement.
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Dzifa Mensah
Hi There, Welcome to the eCommerce A-Z podcast, brought to you by Kudobuzz Reviews. The eCommerce A-Z podcast is aimed at helping eCommerce merchants and entrepreneurs start, grow and scale their businesses. Every week I interview entrepreneurs and experts to bring you relevant tips and hacks to grow and build your business.
I’m your host, Dzifa Mensah.
This is episode 8 of the podcast and today we interview Dyan Ferman, the founder of Genius Pipe.
Genius pipe is a line of innovative high tech, high end portable smoking devices, built for a variety of substances like cannabis and tobacco that delivers a unique smoking experience. It has been described as the smoothest pipe due to its unique ability to filter and cool smoke without water.
Dyan shared with us how he started Genius Pipe, why he did and his experience building the company. If you consume cannabis or tobacco, you might want to get yourself a genius pipe.
This episode is brought to you by Kudobuzz Reviews, the best way to collect and display kind reviews on your website. Stay tuned.
Dyan Ferman
I am Dyan Ferman and I am CEO of Genius One. We are the company that manufactures different devices for cannabis use.
Dzifa Mensah
How long have you run Genius One?
Dyan Ferman
The company has been in business for five years and have grown from one occasion to multiple offices around the country. During five years of working with our customers, when we started, we started with the idea of creating a product that is somewhat different than other products you would normally, get in a marketplace. The thinking was that we wanted to create products that are about consumers and nothing else, so to speak. A lot of the people that started the company came from working in different, larger and smaller corporations, providing different services and products and we all came together to create a product that is what we call no bullshit product which revolves around consumer. it's not so much as what we want to put into the product and how we thought and envisioned how a consumer would use it. So we did not approach it from a UI or UX perspective but rather what the the user would find useful every time they upgrade this device. This is what we created and this is why. Because it becomes an extension of you.
Dzifa Mensah
How did the idea come about?
Dyan Ferman
It's been a road. It's been a process. It took us about 9 years to make the stride. It started with the technology that’s been used in cooling nuclear power stations and fighter jets and nuclear submarines, and we took this technology and we put it into another use, we put it into use for cooling client servers and gaming computers. And we developed it to a point where it became the best technology applied for cooling different client servers and computers, and from there, once we developed this tech, we had an idea of what if we implement this technology of cooling and filtering into a smoking device. Because when you are from science that, smoking different substances from tobacco to cannabis has been for 15,000 years and during that time, humanity came with a lot of different ways to smoke and a lot of different appliances and devices. If you look at them, a lot of them contain water and that is used to specifically cool and filter smoke. So that is how this issue has been resolved for millennia. But since in our age and in our high technology, we have this new technology, we wanted to replace the water cooling with water free coil. So we had this idea. So we took this device that we made for cooling computers, then made it into a fresh pipe and we tried it and it was amazing. It was nothing like you can get the cleanliness of this with any other device. We quickly recognized it. We quickly understood how important it is for a user to have a totally different experience. It eliminates harshness, coughing just because tobacco are agents of smoking. Evolution wise, humans were not introduced to smoking, so millions of years of evolution, our human lungs did not have much of an experience for smoking. So then I have receptors that tell you that they are overheating. Every time you smoke, you cough that actually means you are burning your lungs.
Dzifa Mensah
How has the response been so far? You mentioned earlier that your company is built for consumers, like strictly for your consumers. How is the response from your consumers so far and what is some of the feedback that you have gotten from them?
Dyan Ferman
Normally there are a few ways where we mostly engage with them and Kudobuzz has been one of them because we have a tremendous amount of reviews from our customers and I probably its because we almost always have five-star reviews. But besides just kind of normal way of communication, we also have our own ways of communication. The way we do it is with every pipe you purchase.
Every pipe would have a hidden key which is essentially the QR inside the pipe. And when you open with a phone, it will take you to a personal page or profile of this pipe. So much like a facebook profile, but with a genius network. You will be able to communicate with other genius owners and also upload to the profile about the history of your life with the pipe. So whenever you travel, whenever you meet your friends, you could post it into the profile and build it and in this way you get unique value to your device to make it the most personal device and combining with a feature that is a lifetime warranty device you give it to your grandkids is a history of your present scenario. But at the same time it is different from your phone or any other device.
So the way we communicate with our users is once they are present under the Genius social network, we are able to reuse their content to our channels. Whenever we do that, our users with their own groups go on our website and buy exclusive products that are not available for dollars but only for our genius primary currency that you could earn by participating.
Dzifa Mensah
How did you come about building the Genius tribe community?
Dyan Ferman
So again, I guess it was something we did together and we thought of creating kind of a new way of doing business in a way. One was not only creating products that are about user but creating a feedback that our customers would be part of. So all the creative energy, we harness it and then we take it into creating new products. This could be seen in the way we do our fans competitions where we involve our fans into making new designs. We always reward them if we implement those suggestions. We do a lot of giveaways through our channels and also through our partner channels and sometimes they are different.
Dzifa Mensah
How large is your team currently?
Dyan Ferman
Our team right now is about 18 people. And we are strategically positioned in different areas of the country, even some of us are in Mexico and in Canada. So over the years we have been experimenting with different ways of managing teams. When we started off, we were a very distributed team from different places that we needed to be Colorado, we needed to be in New York. About two years ago we made a decision to collect most of the team to one office. The history that we went through all the iterations and different practices has made it easier for us now to work remotely but together. It’s what we call Genius together.
Dzifa Mensah
Now let's go back to five years ago when you started. Do you remember how you got your first 10 customers?
Dyan Ferman
Actually yeah. It’s a very interesting point. There were several launches. Just to let you know, right now we’re in beta 5. It took us different iterations to get to where we are right now. I remember when we launched beta 2, we went for the first time to one of the industry’s trade shows, it's called Champs. We didn’t see anything significant. But the next day, we saw some people coming to our booths. We didn’t even talk to them. We didn’t see them but the news about our product really went like fire and the next day we had so many people come and buy, solving so many issues that everybody knew existed, but nobody thought of solving.
Dzifa Mensah
What has been your biggest milestone since you started Genius Pipe?
Dyan Ferman
I feel it is yet to come.
Dzifa Mensah
I like that. What are your main customer acquisition methods?
Dyan Ferman
We do go to trade shows but it is not our main method of acquiring customers. We mostly work through two different customers that we work with. One which we call wholesale customers, so wholesale customers would be stores and retail customers would be our consumers. With the consumers, we have our own kind of marketing technique. We are in the cannabis industry. They are medically affected by the way our government treats our cannabis and that includes not being able to promote online or advertise online.
So we can not use Adwords, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram advertising. So all those normal venues such as marketing agencies that operate your ads or videos somewhere so we had to create our own unique way of marketing. Probably one of the most successful approaches is Influencer Marketing. We work with a lot of influencers and we create our own ways to communicate with them, manage them and give them opportunities to promote Genius pipe.
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Dzifa Mensah
Talk about the waterless filter, the flavor alternative, the fact that Genius pipe is a healthier alternative, why you used anodized aluminum. Just talk about the product in totality.
Dyan Ferman
The product itself is a reinvented pipe. It is actually made of metal, it is made from anodized aluminum. The reason for this is aluminum has very robust heat transfer qualities which enables the user to take the heat from hot smoke that you inhale. So by the time our cooler’s objective is to cool the smoke from the time you light it in your bulb to the time you actually breathe it in from the mouth piece.
So the sudo distance of the pipe should work faster and better than your normal water pipe which is like a huge device with like a gallon of water in it. It is a pretty clever mechanism that is hidden inside the pipe. How it works is that it contains about 2,000 dimples. The dimples cover the inside of the pipe and when smoke passes through the dimples, it has to by nature, physics, and by the way the layout is created inside the pipe should swirl. So every time the smoke passes the dimple, it swirls into a little tornado. With every breath, it creates 2,000 little tornados that create micro vortices. What it does it that it makes it into an incredibly efficient filter and the flow that is created inside the pipe is called laminar flow. It means there is very little turbulence. What it means for you as a user is you’re able to breath it in without your normal sucking action. Like with a person smoking pipe, they would have to put out a force into sucking air into the lungs. That it made specifically to prevent the flow of hot smoke. Because if they made their opening, you would burn yourself. That’s why you have to suck on a pipe.
Now with the way we design the pipe, you just breathe in normally. That experience itself is pretty unique. Now on top of this because the filter and cooler mechanism we use does not require water, it removes water from the equation of cooling. The water is the ultimate solvent. What happens when you use water for the cooling? It removes most of your terpenes which are actually carriers of your flavor. Also it removes a lot of different other components like CBD so you don’t get the results that you want because a lot of it is filtered by water.
When we remove water from the process, you get the ultimate profile cannabis. You get the full profile so you get to taste cannabis which is essentially a pretty new opportunity because with all the existing methods it is very hard for you to actually taste it. If you would imagine yourself drinking alcohol without being able to determine if it is vodka or white wine or beer, it’s just alcohol. Same thing with cannabis, you take cannabis and put it in your pipe, and you smoke but you smoke three months ago because it is very hard to clean. In our case, the developed product evolve around the user. The pipe that we created is extremely easy to pull apart. It takes maybe half a second to take it apart and then another half a second to put together and it will take you under a minute to clean it all 100%. This way you get your full flavor, or full profile of whichever strain you’re smoking which is a completely new experience for cannabis users especially if we also understand that cannabis itself is one of the plant with the biggest strand of flavors because it has I think it has over 700 different cannabinoids in it. It is way more flavorful than grapes for example. So you have the opportunity to experience the full flavor of cannabis. And on top of this, being able to clean it 100% and use another minute right now. Now with all the things that people have to constantly be mindful of, this becomes a unique opportunity to make it into your personal device and keep it constantly clean. You can clean it with alcohol and make sure your device is not contaminated with any bacteria or viruses which is very important right now.
Dzifa Mensah
What is your advice for upcoming entrepreneurs?
Dyan Ferman
For me, it's been quite a ride and Genius is not the first kind of business that I ran but it is definitely, the most experience that I have had in my lifetime. What I would say to entrepreneurs is that they are in my mind here, right. They create under the extreme of their being because they constantly have to strive, they constantly have to endure pressure, through the changes, all the different people and characters that they have to deal with and keep eyes on their goals.
So I would say right now is a tough time for a lot of people. But in the same time I feel it would give us, as the economy of the world would be changing in the next year, there might be a lot of opportunities for entrepreneurs of companies to strive. Always remember that it is like a cycle or it is not a straight road, it is always like a cycle so once you complete another cycle, another cycle will start, so don't get despaired because of the way business and life works.
Dzifa Mensah
Talking about cycles and all of that, what do you do when you are at a very low time in your business. I am sure you might have experienced a few. How do you go about picking yourself up during those crisis?
Dyan Ferman
That’s a really interesting question. With us, it is two things. One is by the nature of our team, we perform very highly during crises. So for us every crisis is an opportunity to create something different to solve a new problem. And secondly, we always turn to our base, to our fans and to our users around the world because they are the ones who support us and they are the ones who tell us a lot of times and they are the ones we turn to. To give an example, we just yesterday completed our campaign that we did where we offered our visiting users an opportunity to get new pipes 50% off which is an idea we ran 5 years ago when we opened. It is a great idea that we did. But we did it for our base because we have a quarter a million customers out there. So we give it to our base because even though they have their pipes, their loved ones don’t. Right now, everyone should have their own genius pipe, their own personal device. So we gave opportunity for our base to get it for their loved ones. It was a huge success. We got so much response from all over the world. So every time there is something a little up the heat, we always turn to our base.
Dzifa Mensah
Thank you very much for this call. I really appreciate it.
Conclusion
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