Announcer: Are you ready for an open discussion with the best of the best and the best of what's next? Welcome to the Tony DUrso Show. Join in on a great conversation today with some of the world's great influencers as they showcase great advice and techniques that made them the game-changers they are today. Now here's Tony DUrso

Tony:

Welcome. I'm your host Tony DUrso. I interview elite entrepreneurs and I thank you for joining us. This show is dedicated to helping you turn your vision into reality, and we are the number one show on the Voice America Network. Today we're going to talk with Patrick Sherwin about crowdfunding your dream. As you know, my interviews with the world's elite entrepreneurs are all about helping you launch your new business or take your business to the next level. Sometimes the penny drops with the right information for you to start something profitable yourself or help you do your job a whole lot better. I love to help you and I love to hear how these world-class interviews are helping you. If you'd like to help me get my show to those that need to hear this in the world, please consider giving me a review. The easy way is to go to Apple podcasts or go to ratethispodcast.com/tony. A kind five-star review helps grow and support the show. Very much appreciated. Today's show is about crowdfunding your dream with Patrick Sherwin. Let's see what we can learn today. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary recap of what we went over, so stay tuned for that. Patrick is passionate about having fun, yet remains focused on solutions for our time. Since 2000, his work with green building and solar energy has given him a broad base of experience on what’s needed to fuel our lives. Here we go. Hi Patrick. Welcome to the Tony DUrso Show. So good to have you on with us today.

Patrick:

This is such a pleasure, Tony. Thanks for having me.

Tony:

The honor is mine. You know, I go off-roading quite a bit. I was on the road about three months last year, and I used a lot of fuel. We're going to talk about that in a moment. We're all looking forward on this show to get good business advice, crowdfunding advice as well as we want to learn about alternative energy and the choices to help us no matter where we are, no matter what the energy or the power facilities are that are available to us at any time. This is a really apropos interview. I can't wait to jump in and learn all about it. And what I'd like to do, Patrick is follow your journey to success so let's start there. How did it all start for you? What's your backstory?

Patrick:

Oh, that's great to hear that you love getting outdoors and we're going to try to help fuel your adventure and stay outdoors for as long as you can, without having to come back and resupply. I've been into solar for a long time, about 20 years, trying to figure out how to get solar to power our lives. I became very well aware of the conundrums that we are in with respect to fossil fuel, and I didn't like the idea of a faraway fuel source that I couldn't control. You know, I'm more of a tinkerer. I'm an ad hoc inventor, and my story, the main backstory that I'd like to share goes back to when I was about 10 years old, already a bit of an entrepreneur, and I've got a neighborhood shop inside a honeysuckle tree, selling clay pots and herbal remedies to the neighborhood moms. I've got a small contingent of friends working for me, and we decided one summer to restore the creek in the backyard that kind of ran through the neighborhood and we were able to grab fish and amphibians from a larger creek downstream and bring them up and kind of set them in, and we watched this aquatic ecosystem bloom over the course of that summer. Then an older neighbor in his twenties decided to empty the oil from his truck directly into the creek, and we had ourselves an oil spill and that pretty well destroyed our ecosystem for a little while. Entirely destroyed everything we had set up that summer and in so doing, turned me into more of an immediate environmentalist. So, I basically used that as a reason to work towards solving the conundrum that the two-legged lives in. We are surprisingly ignorant, and yet we have unbelievable tools at our hands and we can really do much, much better. So, my goal is to sustain the great quality of life and the great joys we have of accessing the far reaches of the world and do so without making a big footprint and just ultimately try to do it running directly on those resources that are available to us.

Tony:

Patrick, I've read some of your stories. I've read a lot of your stories on how you came up with this a-ha solar power idea about heating your lunch. I'd like you to tell the story and tell us where and how that vision came about that then set you on this path of go solar power.

Patrick:

Yeah. You know, I have to say that I'm a little nuts about solar. I've been always trying to do more with it, and solar cooking was very intoxicating. The fact that you could cook a meal inside a double layered cardboard box covered in a sheet of plastic was amazing to me. Unfortunately, that took four or five hours, and the average human being did not want to hang out long enough for that to happen. I took that show to Haiti thinking that if you had to gather charcoal or wood and it costs half of your income to create the solid fuel to cook your meal that you'd have the patience. Well, nope. The answer in Haiti was still, we don't want to wait to cook a meal in the sun. And so, I never gave up on the idea of finding a way to cook in an elegant and a rapid manner that was within the timeframe. You know, a human is hungry; we want to eat. All right, let's cook. And when it all came to that; I was playing around with a solar hot water heater I bought off a roof. The guy wanted it to be decommissioned and thrown away. Instead of throwing it away, I took it to my backyard and started tinkering and I discovered that it was extremely hot. I grabbed some hot dogs out of the fridge, tossed them down in there and they sizzled on their way down. And I was like, all right, I've got some pretty amazing lunch and I'm onto something. So, there's something that needs to be done with this technology for the purposes of cooking, because it's going to be fast and reliable and even worked through cloudy conditions and now, we've got them working at night. And so, that was sort of the inception of GoSun, and my entrepreneurial background really had me working on that to concoct something that was consumer available, that was portable and durable and affordable.

Tony:

You've mentioned a couple of things. And while we all probably know some of the answer of this question I'm about to ask you, is there anything deep down like why are you doing this? What's the purpose? It's not just to save money on fuel. What's that underlying, deep down reason that makes you get up every day and made you push forward on this company?

Patrick:

Yeah. I think we just want to build stuff that are useful and better than the status quo. Things that are going to perform without compromise, and they're not going to create problems. They're going to basically solve them, decrease climate change. Of course, we want to be profitable, but more importantly, we want to come up with viable solutions and have a heck of a lot of fun.

Tony:

Patrick, I haven't mentioned this to you at all even off air before when we met. I'm going to do this live here on the show. The reason I wanted to bring the show on...well, actually I've got a couple of reasons. I'm going to talk about one of them at the end of the show, but what caught my attention was you're the only other person in the world that I've ever met that doesn't want to be a billionaire. Do I have the right person? Now I'm on record and I say this periodically. I mean, I help entrepreneurs. I get mentored hours a week by some of the most brilliant, successful millionaires and billionaires in the world. I got so much stuff in my brain, but you know, I'm not even joking. I'm not interested in being a billionaire, and you want to know why? You know why I don't want to be a billionaire? Because Patrick, I can't eat that much food.

Patrick:

Exactly. What would you do with all that?

Tony:

It's like, I take care of the family, take care of some friends. What are you going to do with the rest? Maybe it's my Italian upbringing, working on Lakeshore Drive in Chicago in the freezing cold, 10 years of delivering newspaper and learning the value of a dollar. I don't need a billion of them. Some money is good, pay the bills. You know, I get all that, but there's a point where it's too much, but I'm very curious and I know I surprised you. I don't usually surprise my guests, but I'm really curious. Why do you say that now that you know what I had to say?

Patrick:

I mean, for me, there's so many ways to look at wealth and should everyone be so lucky as to follow their dream, build their truth and wealth with respect to your family, your health, your friends, that's the biggest and best and can never be taken from you. And beyond that, yeah, I'd like to eat some good quality food, and I'd like to have some nice tools to play around with when I have ideas. I'd like to have a few toys, but I just can't get into blowing hundreds of thousands of dollars. I don't have them either, but just to recreate. I mean, for me, recreation is getting rid of everything. We don't go to the woods to rough it. We go to the woods to smooth it. We get it rough enough in the city, and I think when people want all the recreation happens in the city and it's flaunting and flossing around with yachts and Lamborghinis, it sort of twists you and it's not near as fun as just going barefoot and heading off to the beach.

Tony:

I'm like just nodding and saying yes, because you can't take all this stuff out to the forest, to the mountains. A Lamborghini, Ferrari - sorry, it's just not going to cut it on the roads I go. I like my sturdy lifted Jeep, et cetera and just go out there and hang out with what we call God's country and just soak up nature. Absolutely love it. We're talking about crowdfunding, your dream with Patrick Sherwin, and you can find him at gosun.co. Now that's GOSUN.CO. No M, no COM, just CO. gosun.co. This is the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead the chat continues about crowdfunding your dream with Patrick Sherwin, but first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.

Tony:

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Tony:

All right. We're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Today's show is crowdfunding your dream with Patrick Sherwin. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this, and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. Did you know around 1 billion people don't have access to electricity, and over 3 billion people still cook on dangerous polluting stoves that run on dirty fuels, wood, charcoal, and petrochemical fires? All right, and now back to the chat with Patrick. Patrick, let's get into your vision path, and I want to say I'm really impressed at how you skyrocketed in the industry. You took CES by storm; you won multiple awards; you have multiple products. I'm drawn to your solar powered hotdog cooker. Well, just joking a little bit as it cooks more than just that, and at the end later on, I'm going to talk about my most favorite product of yours, but I like to just understand - how did you do this? Tell us more. We want to know. People in the audience are saying, let him talk. How did he crowdfund this?

Patrick:

Yeah, there's a lot here. I mean, crowdfunding was definitely a savior for us. We didn't want to go to a bank or do the friends and family, get down on our hands and knees and beg for money. So, we went to the crowd first and foremost. I did most of the work on my iPhone on the invention with respect to creating the video and photography, and I just wanted to see what would happen with an audience of about a thousand emails and it hit. And within seven weeks we did 200 K and I had myself, my dream, my business, my 80-hour weeks cut out for me, and then it was a process of building a team. I've got a great team, very hardworking, dedicated. There's a really fantastic design school here in Cincinnati. We use the product. We listen to our customers. We focus on making sure they have what they need, what they see will help them learn how it works, and just a ton of dedication pretty much from everyone, myself included heavily. For me, it was a huge exercise and the biggest commitment I've ever had to make, and you could look at it like a ball of stress, but when you're working from your heart, it helps. And then I kind of shifted my perspective and wanted to make it like a question of, or a test of what am I made from, what am I capable of. And so, it turned into a bit of like a fight in the ring and to see how many times I could take a hit and how many punches I could throw and still stay in the ring without collapsing. So early you share that same story, probably from most of the entrepreneurs. I'm just a lucky one because I got to work on something that I truly believe in and use every day and that I really enjoy sharing.

Tony:

I am so impressed at what you did. Many years ago, before the internet got off before cell phones were ... cell phone was a luxury back then and they were big. They were big boxes. I, in a way, I guess you could call it crowdfund. I helped start an insurance technology firm, and in six months I raised $3.25 million from just friends and family, but there was a different procedure then. Today it's so different. It's so changed though the modus operandi of what I use would very well work, but today it's all different. I don't know what it takes to crowdfund today and get five bucks versus $200,000 that you did, I believe in seven weeks. Can you take us through the process and see if you can give some takeaway advice to our audience?

Patrick:

Sure. I mean, I think the key is to have something that you know is going to work on a consumer level, and then you kind of have to craft the messaging and package and pricing. The video is super important in the world of the crowdfund. I mean, it's basically the world of launching a business online and you essentially are using a video commercial. So that first 10 seconds of your video really has to encompass promise the problem and have to tease in the solution, and we were pretty well focused on that. I had a background in video production in a former life, so I kind of knew how to keep an audience attention and then you want to hook everybody up on crowdfunding with a great deal. Kind of an insider discount, an insider view of your process. Let them be a part of the design so they're going to be your first customers. They're going to really take stock. They're kind of the early adopters that are willing to be on that bleeding edge with you. And so, their feedback is super key during the crowdfund. And most importantly, after once you deliver the product, you're looking for their negative feedback, their critique, their ideas, what they would suggest for the next version and refinement. That's it in a nutshell and it's a heck of a lot of fun. To me every crowdfund - we've now done nine successful crowdfunds - each one has been like a bit of a birth. You come up with an idea and you probably want to work on that idea for a couple of years and beat it around and test it up. Build the prototypes, refine, refine, repeat, repeat, and then when you launch it, it's like this little birth and it's going to take on its own life. For the first couple of months, couple of years, it's going to need a lot of your attention and time before it can do its own thing, and before the customers are happy enough to share it with their friends and sort of show it off so it's a fun ride

Tony:

And it also has a lot to do with an actual great product, which we're going to talk about in just a moment here, some of the great products and my favorite, which was also the stimulus to get you on the show. You're going to learn more about that in just a moment. But on crowd funding, from my understanding and from my actual experience in the past, it's important to have friends and family really behind it. I didn't have a video, but I'm Italian. I can talk and help explain things with my hands. My hands are really good at explaining things, and I get that the video, how key that is to really get people. But I want to know if you can share, like how was getting friends and family to warm up to this, to get behind it, because it's so important to have them behind you on something like this.

Patrick:

Yeah. There was a lot of family picnics and neighborhood get togethers where I was the solar hot dog guy over there. Everyone else is working the grill and making the salads and I'm cooking some wieners on the solar thing and people are laughing at me. So, it took me a while to get to the point where I was confident enough that it was going to cook and that they would end up trusting cooked sausage, what have you. I mean, I literally worked on this idea for about eight years. It was from the moment when I mentioned I took that solar hot water heater off the roof to the moment I've launched on Kickstarter. There was a long, long period of time and I was constantly tinkering and thinking about it. I wouldn't say constantly. I mean, it was a noose for the first five years, but the last two or three years before I launched it became a part-time job. And I wanted to make sure that I could really stand behind it, that I wouldn't have any safety issues and that I was addressing all the negative critiques and really fulfilling what the future looked like for the fuel free frontier. And my audience of a thousand emails were very receptive, largely just by knowing me and not everyone had had an experience with the oven, but about 10% of them ended up buying the oven in that first product release. And so again, that was super validating that I was on the right path and that all these people that know me and know that I'm crazy about the sun and doing this ridiculousness with this solar oven would actually say, Hey, here's a few hundred bucks. I believe in this thing and I want one in my garage for my backyard parties, or for when I go camping.

Tony:

Using solar power to cook it. Well, it just cuts right through everything we normally rely on such as electricity, a fire, butane, propane, or even a pile of sticks. I know I just said fire, even a pile of sticks when we're out in nature, just gather them together, cook a little fire, put some rocks around it, and boom, you can pretty much do what you want. What I love about what you have is to a degree and I would like you to tell us about your products or most of your products, well, it doesn't matter if it's rainy, stormy or cloudy cause you have a charger to test the power, to operate others. Perhaps take us through a little carousel of your products and what you've come up with.

Patrick:

Yeah, we have now like a whole solar kitchen and without getting into too many details, that has the ability to cook and cool and clean, purify, brew, light, and charge. And it can do that all on sunshine, but everything is integrated with 12-volt. And then the 12-volt can also be basically charged by wall power by 110-volt AC. So, our products will work day or night, indoors or out, and they don't use any fuel. They're just highly efficient. Everything's totally portable and they're all using kind of the latest in technology with respect to controls and electronics, lithium ion and solar. The ovens run on passive solar or solar thermal. They convert sunlight into heat at about an 80% efficiency, which is about three or four times better than solar photovoltaic. And then everything else runs on electric and solar photovoltaic for the ...

Tony:

I don't understand that word. I'm not familiar with it. Can you say that again? Solar photo...?

Patrick:

Photovoltaic - it's the ability to make electricity with light and that's the classic solar panel that we all think of. That's what goes on roofs, or we see on utility scale wind or solar farms and that's what we think of as a solar panel. We have flexible versions of those. We have a table made out of those; a collapsible table and so we use that technology to charge the battery and we have multiple batteries. They're all lithium ion. And then from that lithium-ion battery, we can run the cooler, run pumps, run fans, run lights. We can even run the cooking device. There's a heater inside the cooking device so if you don't have sunlight or if it's nighttime or you're indoors, you can still cook.

Tony:

This is the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead the chat continues about crowdfunding your dream with Patrick Sherwin, but first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment. How did you choose which internet service provider to use? The sad thing is, most of us have very little choice because ISPs operate like monopolies in the regions they serve. They then use this monopoly power to take advantage of customers. Data caps, streaming throttles, …the list goes on. But worst of all, many ISPs log your internet activity and sell that data on to other big tech companies or advertisers. To prevent ISP from seeing my internet activity, I protect all of my devices with ExpressVPN™. So what is ExpressVPN™? It's a simple app for your computer or smartphone that encrypts all your network data and tunnels it through a secure VPN server so that your ISP cannot see any of your activity. Just think about how much of your life is on the internet. Sadly, every site you visit, video you watch, or message you send gets tracked by ISPs or other tech giants who can then sell your information for profit. That's the reason I recommend ExpressVPN™ as the best way to hide your online activity from your ISP. You just download the app, tap one button on your device and you're protected, and ExpressVPN™ does all of this without slowing your connection. That's why it's rated the number one VPN service by CNET and Wired. So, stop handing over your personal data to ISPs and other tech giants who mine your activity and sell off your information. Protect yourself with the VPN I trust to keep me private online. Visit expressvpn.com/durso. That's expressvpn.com/durso to get three extra months free. Go to expressvpn.com/durso right now to learn more. All right, guys, check it out, sign up and tell me how much you love it. expressvpn.com/durso Announcer: You're listening to the Tony DUrso Show with special VIP guests. Now back to Tony and his guest.

Tony:

All right. We're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Today's show is crowdfunding your dream with Patrick Sherwin. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this, and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. While volunteering with nonprofits in Haiti and Latin America, Patrick experienced firsthand the vulnerability of energy poverty. Touched by the resilience and happiness of those living on just $2 a day, he spent years facilitating technology, energy and social innovations in the developing world. All right, and now back to the chat with Patrick. All right, let's kind of break this down a little bit. I got that there is an oven. We all understand that, but not everything needs an oven to cook. Power's off and I want to cook some eggs. Does it sit on a stove type heating element that's powered by the battery or the sun?

Patrick:

That's right. Yes. And it's not quite as hot as your plate when you're frying eggs so it's going to make them a little slower and they're going to be a little bit more soft and sort of baked. We have some temperature constraints given the technology, but in that situation where your power's out, I know you're in California so that happens often, you might also need a cup of coffee. I found an image sent to me from a friend of a guy running his minivan with a inverter attached to his battery, running a coffee pot, making some morning coffee. He was a refugee from one of the fires this summer, so we came up with a coffee brewing system that's all in one, and it's a travel mug with a French press and a heater, and you just plug that into your cigarette port on your vehicle, and you can brew two cups of coffee. So, you don't need to run this giant 200 horsepower engine in order to make a couple of cups of coffee.

Tony:

That is my most favorite, favorite item in your whole plethora of products that you have. The GoSun coffee brewer. I want that. I want that. It was like, yeah, I want to do a whole show just about that. I love French press. I love making coffee from fresh grounds if possible, but if not, okay. I just love having a good aromatic cup of coffee. It is so important to me. Hey, I am Italian. And what I like about it is it has a little charger on it, so it's got its own charge. Picture just a tall, not quite slender metal cup and the charger is at the bottom cause it's got a little battery. Maybe you could describe it better and it heats up the water and it heats up everything so that you can basically brew tea, coffee, or hot chocolate or anything hot.

Patrick:

Yeah. Yeah. That's good to hear. I know coffee has changed my life for the better I believe, and it made me far more productive and we never found a coffee device that really was truly all in one. I'm with you on the grinder. That's the one thing that we haven't incorporated into this product. I like to grind the beans first, but basically the cup has this heating element in it that runs on 12-volt and 12-volt ... the cigarette port on a car. That's the most common port in the entire world. Every car, truck, boat, and RV built since the '50s has one and those ports can put out quite a bit of power. It turns out that most 12-volt appliances are kind of crap. They're poorly built and they fall apart so we're trying to bring 12-volt back and making it truly viable. It's everywhere and it's super simple and it's robust. So, you pour some water in this cup. You plug it into your cigarette port or our battery if you go with the upgrade. Give it about 10 minutes and that water is going to heat up and the heater will automatically turn off at about 190 degrees Fahrenheit. You pour your grounds in, give that about four minutes to soak and then press the French press and then you can just drink right out of it as you go.

Tony:

And that's about average if you're out there and you don't have power and you're using fire or something like that. That's about an average amount of time to brew a good hot one out there. I think one thing that caught my eye in reading about you is you've lived extensively off-grid. You know what you're talking about. You understand the use and utility of these types of products in almost any kind of setting.

Patrick:

It's super important to me to - I don't know what the word is in Japanese - but to live the design, to really be active with the product, very hands-on and that's super important across my entire business, but particularly in engineering design phases. A lot of the marketing material will ultimately come from camping trips that I'm doing. I'm currently building out a sprinter that will be ... It's diesel upfront and that's kind of hard to get around, but everything in the back where I camp and multi-use is all GoSun stuff and it's all electric or solar, one variety of another. That includes obviously the cooking, the cooling, but it includes the shower, all the electronics. I've got a 600-watt solar array on the roof, and that is one of many little R & D products. We get to take that wherever we want, and really, we work at trying to stay off grid and live in the ethos of what we're creating - a fuel-free frontier where we don't have to plug in. We don't have to go to a campground and listen to yipping dogs and people watching television. We can boondock, which is a big thing now. Now, it sounds like you're well familiar with the world of overlanding and be where we want to be, pretty much out in the forest and away from others. And I think that's the future of camping is, like I said, that real rugged situation where you're actually smoothing, just where you're truly alone in solitude and the peace of nature.

Tony:

I encourage the audience to go to gosun.co. Take a look at all of the types of items, and this came from an idea. This came from oh, we don't have this. Oh, this is needed and then crowdfunding. Yes, it's hard work. He didn't fall off a log. He didn't wake up one day with all these products. It's work, but it shows you everyone out there in the audience that when you apply yourself, that when you're tenacious, when you try to figure it out and you get support, as in the case of friends and family, for this type of an idea, it can really launch and propel you into something that's even bigger than you may think you are individually. It's a big thing. It's a big company. He's got other people that work there. They have a job; they have a life.

Patrick:

I'm going for a lifestyle. There is the whole world of the lifestyle, and this idea of GoSun was a little bit bigger and propelled me a little bit harder than a lifestyle business, which is where you work 25 hours a week in order to make enough to live and you make a few things, sell them, then you go back to relaxing on the beach. You know, my impetus in creating a larger impact really propelled me and pulled me into a much deeper exercise, a much longer work week. For me, I guess I'm driven by the need. There's so many needs and they're increasing, so I'm actually working a little harder that I was. I thought the 70- and 80-hour work weeks were enough, but then Coronavirus hit and then Australia is on fire. And then in California and in Washington, this summer was so difficult and sad. And that was a big inception for the brew that we just talked about. And then when coronavirus hit, we accelerated the development of this water purification and sanitation system because sanitation became a new need. We weren't into mask designs or better PPE cause that's not our business, but we did have this backlog idea of creating a water pump that runs on USB power and we can adapt it and turn it into a sink and a shower so that you can have that stuff when you overland, or when you camp, or even just when you grocery shop. I'm not a huge fan of Purell. I'll use it, but generally my hands get kind of dirty and the Purell just moves that stuff around. I appreciate that they're probably sanitized after that, but they get all sticky and nasty. My partner is a nurse practitioner. She's got me washing my hands more than I've ever washed them in my life, and I got to say, that's kind of been the secret to health over the last eight months. And so, we created a hand washing station but what's next? There's just so, so many needs, and it's really kind of unbelievable how technology is helping us to meet those needs. Like if you can come up with an idea, if you have a dream, there is a way to build that thing practically tomorrow. You know about 3D printers. You know about the power of the supply chain. You can now basically 3D print circuit boards. You come up with an idea tonight about a piece of electronics, send that thing on the internet. You can have 10 circuit boards within three days that are going to do all these crazy functions. You know the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi; we're using those a ton. This is no longer just Lincoln logs and Legos. I'm not getting into AI. I'm not trying to go across that barrier between our brain and cyborgs, but just the idea of creating an implement, creating a tool. The moment you think of it, you can start building it in today's world, and the barriers for all that are so reduced that dreams should be dreamt and not squashed. And really, it's just the power of the idea and of course then, your marketing, your team that is going to go and build the impact or the reach for that. But it's just a new world. It's a little bit like a hundred years ago when electrification was happening and everybody that was formerly creating hand-cranked washing machines realized that they could put in an electric motor and automate the process. That's kind of happening again now with electronics and I'm not even getting into the data and the AI. I'm more of a Luddite than that. I'm more interested in things that I can touch and feel and utilize physically than I am the realm of the digital space personally.

Tony:

You brought up some interesting questions and concepts here. Very thought-provoking on this, Patrick. There's so much room to expand. What are you looking to accomplish in the next few years?

Patrick:

Boy, I don't know how much it differs from where we are in just being as responsive as possible to addressing needs. I am intending that this van that I'm building out can be a disaster response vehicle. It's basically built as a multi-use multipurpose, so everything in it can kind of come out and anything can go in. So I'd love to build a solar cafe and maybe have that attached to a trailer so that we could feed hundreds or thousands of people when needed. And we're trying to find solar chefs out there. We just launched a prototype of a tiny house, and we're trying to get into tiny house developments where you can rent the tiny house, almost like an Airbnb, and it's placed on an off-grid property and you can truly experience what it's like to live off-grid on our technology. I'm just hoping to get out more myself and really go deeper. I did 40 days of sunshine when I turned 40 just a couple of years ago. I used the product for 40 straight days, the cooking products and I didn't supply food from any other means. Nothing raw and nothing uncooked that wasn't cooked in the sun, and that was a really neat experience because it was through like the winter in Ohio, February and March, and it was challenging. So, I'd like to do another big challenge like that using our tech to really prove its reliability and viability in the austere. Yeah, just try to be a better person and connect better with the fine people that need this stuff. And the big one for us is the developing world. There's 3 billion people still cooking with wood and charcoal on a daily basis, and for the last five years, we've spent close to a half a million in time and energy in trying to address that issue, and we really haven't been successful, to be quite honest. It is way more challenging to address these problems than we anticipated. The cultural nuances and local manufacturing and customs and immigrations. I mean, it just is such a squirrel's nest.

Tony:

This is the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead the chat continues about crowdfunding your dream with Patrick Sherwin, but first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.

Tony:

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Tony:

All right. We're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Today's show is crowdfunding your dream with Patrick Sherwin. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this, and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. Patrick's latest adventure is living off of only solar cooked food for 40 days, which he calls living on sunshine. More about that in this interview, and now back to the chat with Patrick.

Patrick:

I'm really hoping that we can break through. We've got a big project that we're pushing in Sub-Saharan Africa and in Kenya at the moment, and I'm real optimistic about that and I'd love to see us proliferate these cooking devices where they're really needed the most.

Tony:

We are always on the lookout for what helps bring us success or takes our business to the next level. Are there any personal habits that helped you contribute to the success that you got with your company?

Patrick:

Yeah, I think really making sure that I use the product and I stay super active with it. I've made a habit to kind of be one of the first to take the product once we have a viable prototype and go on a trip and use it and develop a lot of the initial feedbacks and that helps also stimulate what the next products might be the more I get out, the more I do it. I like to make sure that I'm energetically involved so I built a standup desk. It's too easy for me to get sedentary. Sitting down, I think is a bit of a problem. The standup desk has really kept me able to crunch at this business versus I never sat down so much having to look at a computer and manage things. So, the stand-up desk that most people buy are not quite oriented properly either. You want your head to be sort of looking straight at your screen and then you want your arms quite a bit lower and your elbow is at like a 90 degree so it's a very natural position. And typically, a stand-up desk is not much better than a table because you're still looking down at the screen and your arms are still going up to the keyboard. But I think for us, setting deadlines, listening to our customer, making sure that our product is not just green and affordable, but it's actually better than the ones that they replaced. We look at Tesla and we think, well, one of the main reasons Tesla is really successful is not so much because their cars have a much less carbon footprint, but rather that they're just way better than the incumbent. They're sleeker, they're faster, they're quieter and comfortable, they respond better on the road, they have better technology and that's the same thing we're going for. Again, without reducing convenience or performance, we have a thing that is way less impactful and it turns out it's actually easier to use. When you're not lugging around ice, when you're not carrying fuel and having to resupply with all that, your life gets freed up. It's liberating to use this technology.

Tony:

We have just a moment here, Patrick. Are there any great resources that you'd like to share with our audience entrepreneurs? Maybe some tools or applications that you think are really cool that has helped you a lot?

Patrick:

Sure. we made a decision five years ago to put our website on Shopify and that's been super helpful. We're also now using a software called Figma. FIGMA, which is kind of managing all kinds of assets, mostly graphic assets, and that's been extremely helpful. Of course, Slack and the Google drive and Dropbox. Our business is running more and more virtual every day and we're working harder and harder to create a process so that it's quick and easy for people all over to sort of plug in and add value.

Tony:

Once again, we talked about crowdfunding your dream with Patrick Sherwin, and you can find him at gosun.co. Again, that's CO, not.com so it's gosun.co. Patrick, I learned quite a bit about crowdfunding and a lot about solar, and there are so many opportunities that you've just touched upon here that I'll tell you, if some good enterprising entrepreneur listens to this a couple of times, you can start coming up with all sorts of ideas and put them in action really fast.

Patrick:

That's right. Yeah. If you can dream it, you can build it and you can crowdfund it. I should say too that the thing that really set us free more recently has been equity crowdfunding, and that is the ability to sell a little bit of the capital, sell a little bit of ownership, and that has been a game changer because it's enabled us to kind of fuel our machine. Not so much from the revenue that we generate when we make a sale, but from people that believe and people that want to contribute and be a part of this ride.

Tony:

That is such a great, important piece of information. Patrick, thank you so much for sharing that with us. Thanks for hanging out with us today.

Patrick:

Thank you so much, Tony. It's been a real pleasure.

Tony:

Hey fellow entrepreneurs, thanks for hanging out with me while I featured an elite entrepreneur who took his vision to reality. I'm sure this was as inspiring for you as was for me to do this interview. We learned some excellent crowdfunding tips with Patrick Sherwin. As I off-road quite a bit and love getting lost in the mountains, this interview is unique to me in that we speak about a number of good alternative energy sources, as well as how to crowdfund your dream. We take a hard look into wealth and discuss some very good business savvy too. Like everyone else, you are so dependent on electricity. What do you do when there's a severe power outage? We don't plan them, but they happen. The year before last, I was caught in a three-day outage. That wasn't fun, but it can be just fine if you plan for such emergencies. Patrick is all about working to get solar to power our lives, and Patrick's future here in solar came about from his wanting to heat up his lunch one day. It's fascinating how in trying to solve a problem, it can launch you into a business and career for the rest of your life. Has anything similar happened to you? Please share. As you know me well enough from my other shows, I'm serious about not being interested in being a billionaire. It's just not my thing. I'll never eat that much food. Now you may have ideas of what you would do with that kind of money, and that's cool. Please share your ideas. If your business earned a billion, what else would you do with that kind of money? Patrick did most of the work on his iPhone for video and photos, and then they send it to the crowd of a thousand emails and it took off from there, hitting $200,000 in 7 weeks. If you're crowdfunding now or want to crowdfund, listen to that carefully and play this interview again. The secret is in the sauce right there. There's so much more I got out of this interview. What did you get? I'd love to know how you use this information to help you in your business or career. Did this interview give you some ideas for your business? Did it stimulate you to take some new action? Please share and grab hold of your vision. Decide you're either going to start something great or take it to the next level. You have to decide first. It always starts with a decision and you can get my Vision Map to help you along the process. The eBook is at tonydurso.com/books. I created my empire in just a few years. That's all it took. I had the Vision Map as my guide. You could do it too. Let's help you move on your journey to success. Once again, please consider supporting the show with a nice review. Just go to ratethispodcast.com/tony. Thanks, and remember: just take action. Success awaits those who persevere and remain steadfast despite the odds. Sow good seeds, do good deeds and join me on the next episode of the Tony DUrso Show. Announcer: We hope you've enjoyed this week's edition of the Tony DUrso Show with his key influencers. Be sure to tune in again next Friday at 5:00 PM Eastern time, 2:00 PM. Pacific time on the Voice America influencers channel.