View From The Bridge: We Have Liftoff!

I am excited and delighted to announce that we are officially taking our first product to market!

Today, we formally announce the launch of the DogPause Dog Bowl (www.dogpausebowl.com). We're re-inventing the dog bowl to be healthier for your dog. I encourage you to check out the site and the product, as we tell the full story there and I can avoid repeating it here. Suffice it to say if you have a dog that eats quickly (and perhaps even sometimes chokes or vomits because they inhale their food so quickly), you should check this product out. Same if you have a friend with a dog that gulps down their food quickly. Ultimately, we think this bowl, with its integrated portion control, can help reduce the risk of obesity in dogs as it will reduce accidental over-feeding when the dog owner just pours food into the bowl and eyeballs it (when you do that, you generally put 10%-20% too much food in the bowl).

We've loved this product from the first time we saw it and screened it (when it tested incredibly well). For a variety of reasons that I'll explain in some coming posts, we believe this type of product is absolutely perfect for some discontinuous thinking when it comes to new consumer products that are dramatically different, ways to leverage social media/networking with new products, and online commerce. We believe we're playing into some big trends, both with our techniques and with this product/category in particular. As I mentioned in the last post, we think we can execute in ways that most companies can't, and we'll have a ton of fun along the way. We're learning fast and furiously, and are encouraged by what we've already seen in our "soft launch" this past month.

We've been working on this "launch" since late last year, and we're having a blast. We catalyzed a new company, Long Tail Pet Products (I'm sure many of you will note the reference to Chris Anderson), raised some money, and LTPP is now the exclusive licensee of the technology and pending patents on the bowl. The company is largely virtual (we're practicing what we preach with Open Innovation), and is lean and mean. Whether we grow this into a self-sustaining enterprise, or find an attractive partnership with (or exit to) a larger pet products company time will tell.

More to come in some future posts now that the dogbowl is out of the bag (so to speak)... But I'll leave you tonight (this morning) with a thought: Much has been written about how online commerce enables the long tail of product distribution. Might EIP, and our definition/vision of "product capitalism", increasingly enable the long tail of new product creation???