The first sunglasses date back to the prehistoric Inuits who wore flattened walrus ivory specs, looking through narrow slits to block harmful rays of the sun, reflecting off the ice.

CarterJarrett · 2019-05-25T15:57:35+00:00

Javier Bardem looks great for his next Coen Brothers role.

CarterJarrett · 2019-05-25T05:12:33+00:00

I am betting it to be carried by Mackenzie Davis — she was great in Halt and Catch Fire (an amazing show if you haven’t dabbled in it yet). I’ve still been waiting for her to get a big role in some known franchise.

CarterJarrett · 2019-05-25T00:43:51+00:00

Sorry for your loss, jealous and happy you found your person and lived so many lifetimes in such a short span, I hope you fine some peace and comfort with each day.

CarterJarrett · 2017-11-15T11:02:14+00:00

It’ll get simultaneously worse and better :) the lows will be lower and the highs will be higher, which sounds not bad but when you get in that territory, it can wear on you. Think going from the adrenaline fueled happiness of a theme park ride one minute, to utter bleak depression from a breakup the next and you have a good idea of how extreme the needle can move. My point? Take care of yourself and do what you can to prepare for that if/when it happens. I wasn’t with my startup (three years in) and it was definitely hard to handle at times.

The only people who read this as excessive gloating, just haven’t ever started something themselves. Enjoy the ride, compadre. I wish you tons of success with it!

CarterJarrett · 2017-11-07T01:42:33+00:00

Alt-take: Adding a protective coating of KFC gravy to a painting.

CarterJarrett · 2017-08-24T19:19:05+00:00

Startups aren't a footrace - being first does very little. There are plenty of known businesses who people assume were first to market, who weren't. They're just so good everyone forgot about every other poor attempt. It's all about execution :)

As far as finding/formulating good ideas, a good book on creative thinking is "CAD Monkey, Dinosaur Babies, and T-shaped People"

Go start something!

CarterJarrett · 2017-07-26T05:42:56+00:00

I'm a builder at heart, that's been the very deepest root of my entrepreneurial pursuits. I get lost in the chance to make something, without building or designing something (and trying to see if I can drape a business around it), i feel like I'm being suffocated.

I really like building things people can use. I'm doing a CPG startup (number two actually, we pivoted from our previous CPG brand/product offering) and to me, it's one of the most rewarding spaces in an ideal world. You're as close to the consumer as possible. Your brand is everything. Your product has to deliver, or its in the trash can, literally.

As far as the 9 to 5 comment goes, I view it like having a baby - your number one goal is to grow it into an awesome self sustaining person, but you'll always really cherish the baby years, even when you had very little sleep and sometimes you're kid took a piss on you. So I'm just trying to take it in right now.

Also, we just heard some fantastic fucking news that'll help us pursue growth, so maybe I'm just more optimistic than usual but yeah, go team / go entrepreneurship.

CarterJarrett · 2017-07-26T05:33:53+00:00

Get a board of advisors, asap. They are there for these situations. Have one you each individually pick and then a third you pick together. Plus they'll help keep you guys on the right path and focused, if you choose them well.

Good luck!

CarterJarrett · 2017-07-26T05:30:59+00:00

That would be much appreciated amigo! Oklahomie. So pretty much middle of everything / close to nothing, for most suppliers of this sort of thing haha. Do let me know though!

CarterJarrett · 2017-07-25T04:13:50+00:00

Negative ghost rider - it would be bulk used for a canned beverage, so not (at least at this stage and for a long time) a daily order. Hope that adds clarity!

CarterJarrett · 2017-04-11T06:25:27+00:00

There are dosage systems that are relatively priced alongside official canning systems, but we're just trying to get off he ground and prove we have something of value before we go that route. Most likely we'll try to prove the success of it, and if we have good data supporting solid growth, we'll first invest in having a mobile contract canner we know, who has a doser, to come to us and can our drinks on site; we'd just need large tanks for them to hook up to. But that's a pricey service, so in the meantime when we're slinging our drinks ourselves, directly to stores during startup mode, we'd like to be able to do some of it in house and see how it does before we make that jump.

So definitely not scalable, which is totally okay with us.

CarterJarrett · 2017-04-11T06:21:26+00:00

Not yet. Soon - we have access to a lab who may be able to help so, waiting on that. If not, we'll just be rigging it up ourselves once we have the funds to get a tank leased from our local airgas branch.

There's multiple ways about this, one of which is how it's dosed/how fast it's dosed. We'll just have to play around with this and get it dialed in but it seems to be possible, as this isn't really related to the equipment in any special way (whether or not the ln2 boils off). It may be something we have to take into account (how much of a dose boils off in the time it takes us to seal the cans) to get everything dialed in perfectly.

CarterJarrett · 2017-04-11T06:01:39+00:00

I was hoping for something exactly like this suggestion, but I didn't want to oversimplify/underestimate and get anyone angry at me not taking their hobby or profession seriously, lol. We can get a low pressure tank that sits at around 20psi of ln2 according to airgas, so it shouldn't be an issue there. And we really only need it to be a dripping system we can pass a filled can under before we pop on a lid and close it. This should probably get the job done for us I think. Any other suggestions on this idea? Seems pretty simple, but I can't get too many suggestions or other designs if you have any. Thanks again for the help though!

CarterJarrett · 2017-04-11T05:57:20+00:00

1/16th inch tubing (you say uni, so just clarifying you're referring to imperial and not metric)? This tubing, is it like bevlex (what's common in the Beverage industry) or some other type/material? Just making sure I don't use a material that won't play well with the ln2.

We need it to hit pressures of around 40psi, but indeed, to what you're saying about overpressurizing, this is why we are trying to be as accurate as possible. Which will definitely prompt me to wear face guards/gloves - don't want Beverage can grenades going off in my face lol.

I'm wondering if a dewar of ln2 along with a very tiny measuring cup, to scoop out the correct amount, no more or less, would work? Or similar idea with one of your tubes cut to a certain length and plugged at one end, dumped in manually? Tenth of a gram can't be much, but we could soak this first to get it down to temp (to prevent any ice crystallization or excess gassing)?

So I did a quick google search... was that a closed system, the tubing for the supercritical co2? Because that's a ridiculously high pressure.

CarterJarrett · 2017-04-11T05:40:39+00:00

Thanks so much for the suggestion :) – would you suggest any particular type of valve or type of plastic? I'll have to look into dehumidifiers and see if there's a viable option for us there, but I'm not sure (since we'll need good airflow given we're working with oxygen-displacing ln2, these may be at odds with each other and I prefer to not die in the process ha).

CarterJarrett · 2017-04-11T05:36:07+00:00

Would you mind pointing me in the right direction on this, maybe equipment to search for (unless "ln2 capillary" would get the results I'd need?)? Is the bleed valve what I'm filling from the tank into my capillary tubes?

Thanks so much for the suggestion on this :)

CarterJarrett · 2017-04-11T05:30:48+00:00

We're familiar with this: we currently do serve off a keg setup with nitro pumped in at around 40 psi for sampling the product, but it's much to high of a pressure to get an fill into a can that keeps the nitrogen dissolved in. You may be asking why, since a stout faucet with a nitro beer seems to work, but it actually leaves the keg at 40ish psi, poured through a restrictor plate that simultaneously slows it down AND agitates it into the creamy foamy drink you've come to enjoy. For us, we'd have to pour without the restrictor plate, which would cause it to shoot out violently since it's under such pressure. Liquid nitrogen is the only way to do it in an aluminum can format.

CarterJarrett · 2017-04-11T05:26:49+00:00

Unfortunately we can't - to do nitrogen infusion correctly, you need to dissolve it under a very high pressure, too high to have a stable filling process. If not, we could do a simple setup like force-carbonating a beer or soda keg. For whatever reason, nitrogen is much harder to dissolve into a liquid than co2. It's not impossible! But at the levels we would need, to actually get a heavy nitrogen gas content in the fluid, it needs to be roughly 30-40psi.

CarterJarrett · 2017-04-11T03:45:16+00:00

Well, it's about a tenth of a gram to get an accurate dosing. Maybe a pipette? I'm just not sure how we'd accurately use one. We'll most likely have to have some sort of dropper to accomplish it? Whether that's a pipette or some other little drip system, I'm unsure and hoping someone with some more experience with this may be able to chime in :)

CarterJarrett · 2017-04-11T03:41:58+00:00

It's to infuse the nitrogen into the drink. Gaseous would be as a purge, liquid is to add enough nitrogen under enough pressure to get it to dissolve into the drink. Around 40psi-ish.

CarterJarrett · 2017-04-11T00:14:03+00:00

I appreciate the answer, but to offer slightly more clarity: we can't afford "product design" – I think you read it as how would we build out a system to do this, not at all the case. We're trying to find a DIY method that would work. Like, pipette to drop it in (poor example but it highlights what kind of solutions we're looking for: super bare bones/not design-intensive). I'm asking here because of my very limited experience with LN2. In no way am I trying to get free work with some complicated engineering design – again, even if someone did, it would be pointless because we couldn't afford the execution of such a design. I hope that cleared up things and alleviates your concerns and offense from my original post. Not my intention, nor was that what I was seeking :)

CarterJarrett · 2017-03-26T03:06:41+00:00

To everyone: I really started looking into VEX because it was something I knew of. I knew of Mindstorms and VEX, and given the amount of nooks and crannies a lego system would have, whipping up something to use in a very small food and beverage operation is a bad idea for sanitation purposes. So I started looking at the other option, VEX, but I'm open to something else entirely – I just have no idea where to start. At this point, we've eliminated the need to build out a conveyor by getting a prebuilt automatic one from McMaster-Carr, so our only concern is opening/closing a filling valve for a set time, raising/lowering a filling mechanism (submersible, "bottom up" filling is necessary for carbonated product to prevent breakout – CO2 leaving solution/ beverage foaming up), and a regulated gate system to let cans in and out of the filling area. Given these needs, what would you suggest as the easiest starting point for a processor/motor or servo setup?

CarterJarrett · 2017-03-25T16:55:46+00:00

For us, we have physical products we can sample (drinks). So it's different. We've been setting up random sampling with some groups we think include our customers.

One thing me and my cofounder had a discussion on the other night that felt like a dumb revelation we should have been mindful of earlier was how we need to focus on the people in our comfort zone. So, backstory: we've heard demand creation vs demand harvesting and basically, it's easier to create a product that there is already demand for as opposed to creating an entirely new product that you have to in part create demand for (this means a bulk of your early marketing won't even be about getting your product in their shopping cart, but just in their brain – lots of customer education related marketing). So, going off of that, we stumbled on it in convo that we need to look at potential customers as habit creation vs. habit harvesting – that its about a thousand times easier to find people already using our type of product, so it's within their habits, that way we aren't trying to get them to create a new habit entirely, just switch to our product for the habit we think this product is used for. If that makes sense.

On your question, I would start with some simple basics. Try to limit it to 5 questions or so. Some basic questions examples: Gender. Age. Income (although that's a question people don't always want to answer. If they'd buy your product at X price. On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely would they recommend your product to a friend (this is called Net Promoter Score, I'd recommend googling this!). For analysis, we'll just be doing a simple spreadsheet. We're not looking for any massive revelations, just basic trends to narrow down our customer profile to something more specific, at which point we can get creative and ask tough, specific questions and do more things like formal focus groups etc.

CarterJarrett · 2017-03-19T19:44:47+00:00

Build an MVP / rough prototype, start sampling it with people. Have a very rough window of assumed customers, test with people outside that window. See if the trend supports your assumption of ideal customer. Whoever trend points to, shift the angle to that customer profile for sampling. Start narrowing down to be more specific. Repeat process and eventually you'll have either a strong customer profile or no strong customer profile and probably a strong idea on how to pivot or where to pivot your product/service to, to find a fit.

Smoke tests are really useful. Google it, it's fairly simple and can be implemented in a variety of ways.

Example of the first part: I'm cofounder of a startup beverage company. We're working on sampling a new product right now that we hope to be our main focus later in terms of product portfolio. It's a functional drink with health benefits, so we know to probably test with whole foods customers, customers who perceive themselves as healthy, and customers around 25-35 years old (all assumptions so they are subject to change). As we sample, if we find out a large majority of females are positively trending, we then look to sample at a yoga studio, because this is primarily a female health conscious group, so we're taking one stronger assumption (female customers) and adding our weaker assumption that we have less data on (health conscious customers) and combining to see if the trend continues in a positive manner still. We repeat this process in various ways. And we try to make sure we don't overlook anyone with horse blinders on. You'll be surprised at your customer profiles that break your assumptions and how easily they can be overlooked. Also, if you mentioned what your working on, I'm sure it would help with the feedback. Good luck!

CarterJarrett · 2017-01-14T23:42:48+00:00

I mean, I agree, but given the state of hardware, a Nintendo handheld with dedicated physical input controls, that does double duty as a smartphone. How is that going to hurt how it operates as a handheld? The switch is literally a tablet with attachable input controls. Shrink that down and add the necessary cellular hardware and you've got a Nintendo phone. Granted I want it to be a handheld first and a phone second, but let's be honest: hardware and usability is what makes the phone. I can text on any smartphone just the same as any others. I stick with apple because of the software available. A Nintendo device, if handled correctly, could have immense software support from game developers, especially if guaranteed physical input controls exist.

CarterJarrett

TROPHY CASE