Latest / Scrappy but Successful [Consultant's Personalities When No One's Watching] / 64. How a Marketer Ended Up Selling Spray Drones to NASA with Aruna Inalsingh

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64. How a Marketer Ended Up Selling Spray Drones to NASA with Aruna Inalsingh · Scrappy but Successful [Consultant's Personalities When No One's Watching]

• 0:03
  What's happening, everybody? Welcome to Scrappy What Successful. It's a show where I sit down
• 0:07
  with your favorite consultants and we find out if they're successful today because they're sophisticated
• 0:11
  or because they're a little bit scrappy. I'm your host, Jack Tompkins, CEO of Pineapple
• 0:15
  Consulting Firm and Pineapple Analysts AI, always helping small businesses become more data-driven. Fun fact
• 0:19
  of the day: we're going outer space. The moon moves further away from Earth every
• 0:24
  single year. Only by an inch and a half. But if we're going there, let's
• 0:28
  go there soon. But that is usually I say that's neither here nor there, but
• 0:32
  that is very much the topic of today. I'm joined by my friend Aruna Inalsingh
• 0:36
  She's a founding member of Terranav Spray Drones. She's done fractional CMO. She's worked for
• 0:40
  huge companies. She's worked for startups. She's done all this stuff. At the end of
• 0:45
  the day, she's literally taking us to the moon. So Aruna, I'm so pumped to
• 0:49
  talk about this. We know you're successful. The question we have for you today, though,
• 0:53
  do you think you fall more on the sophisticated side or more on the scrappy
• 0:57
  side?
• 0:58
  Okay, loaded question because it's all relative, which kind of makes sense since we're talking
• 1:05
  about the moon. theory of relativity, right? My my friend Einstein. so I would say
• 1:12
  compared to the people at Terranav Spray Trones, I'm probably more sophisticated than Scrappy, right?
• 1:19
  So
• 1:20
  Okay.
• 1:21
  I'm the one who does like the market research, I'm the one who's kind of
• 1:25
  the the the like the face of the customer. but in reality, spray drones is
• 1:30
  kind of a not random but unusual thing for somebody to be in. And the
• 1:35
  reason
• 1:36
  Yeah.
• 1:37
  I got into it is because I'm actually truly scrappy. So I like, you know,
• 1:40
  when when you when you need to get something done, you do whatever it takes
• 1:44
  to make it happen, right? And part of this is as as as the market
• 1:48
  changes, you know, I I you mentioned I was a fractional CMO and I still
• 1:52
  am. But the demand for that is getting less and less. So I need to
• 1:56
  figure something out. And what happened to come my way were these spray drones. So
• 2:00
  survive surviving is a good thing and scrappy I think is an excellent.
• 2:04
  There you go. And we gotta be scrappy to survive and we gotta be sophisticated
• 2:07
  to make it last. So I think I think your your answer is perfect. usually
• 2:11
  I go back in time and say, All right, where'd you grow up? Any entrepreneurs
• 2:15
  of the family? I think we should still do that, but first, what the heck
• 2:18
  is a spray drone? Let's start there, then we'll go back in time.
• 2:22
  Yeah, that that's actually a great question. So drones, people know of drones in one
• 2:27
  of two ways. Either it's a like a little hobby of theirs where they've got
• 2:33
  this really cute little thing that flies around and takes usually videos. and and that's
• 2:38
  like really fun. It's like what the robotic PhDs get into now today compared to
• 2:44
  what they did 20 years ago. but what's interesting is those drones have gotten bigger.
• 2:50
  And when they get bigger, they can carry things. So the other way people might
• 2:55
  know about drones is based on warfare, which is not the nicest topic, but it's
• 3:01
  a very real topic, right? So in warfare, you have surveillance, and those drones are
• 3:07
  small, like dragonfly small. or you can have bigger drones that would carry payloads, right?
• 3:12
  And the payloads can be whatever the military decides them to be. Generally they're top
• 3:18
  secret, so you don't really know. so you're just providing a chassis and the payloads
• 3:23
  go on top. our perspective, our spray drones carry payloads, but they're tanks, they're injection-molded
• 3:29
  tanks, and they can carry anywhere from 10 liters to 100 liters of liquid. And
• 3:35
  our target market is actually the farmer. So, what we're looking for is the farmers
• 3:40
  to be able to provide water, to provide pesticides, to be provide nutrients. to their
• 3:46
  to their land. And what's interesting is that like there are different kinds of tanks
• 3:52
  and different kinds of shapes and nozzles to be able to do the kind of
• 3:57
  spraying that you need to most effectively. As an additional aside, what turns out is
• 4:03
  when the farming market is dry, literally and figuratively right,
• 4:07
  Yeah.
• 4:08
  those those those those chassis can be used to actually spray windows. and clean windows
• 4:14
  and clean solar panels and clean blades on windmills. So they're used for so many
• 4:20
  different things as a sidebar, which is really cool, and going full circle, you can
• 4:26
  actually provide those chassis to build different kinds of military intelligence or air sensing devices
• 4:33
  to to look at chemical concentration. So they can be used for many things, just
• 4:39
  just that basic chassis in and of itself.
• 4:43
  Okay. Okay. So we've got we've got these flow these drones that are not even
• 4:47
  being repurposed, but they're built they're purpose built for this to help the agriculture community
• 4:52
  with a variety of different things. how the heck do you get into this? Like
• 4:57
  where where does this come from? You're a CMO at at global companies, you're working
• 5:02
  with startups. How the heck do you get here?
• 5:05
  Yeah, it's such a funny little thing. so I'm an engineer. I'm an engineer undergrad
• 5:10
  in material science. So I always love making things, having deliverables that are physical, right?
• 5:16
  Tactile.
• 5:17
  Yeah.
• 5:18
  but that took me into working for like metering gear pumps that are used to
• 5:23
  put candy coating on MMs and adhesives on tape and you know, like for for
• 5:29
  kind of catheters and IVs, right, to keep them smooth. So I started there and
• 5:34
  then I moved into the tech space, right? So it was a lot about data
• 5:40
  transfer, IT, whether that was financial or data for for books or product information. and
• 5:45
  then I went into education after that and publishing. So in a really strange way,
• 5:51
  spray drones make sense because. You're you're manufacturing products, you're transferring data, and you need
• 5:56
  to educate the market as to why it's important to have these products there. So
• 6:02
  that kind of came together in a beautiful way. the funny part is, you know,
• 6:07
  because I've done so many different things, going back to being scrappy, like I'm also
• 6:13
  helping a beauty company, a fashion company, a
• 6:16
  Okay.
• 6:17
  mentoring platform. You know, like there are lots of different things I do to keep
• 6:21
  my brain engaged. But this one is is definitely the most fun.
• 6:25
  Yeah, yeah, I can believe it. So it sounds very cutting edge. I don't know
• 6:29
  much about the agriculture space, let alone the spray drone within our agriculture space. But
• 6:34
  this sounds pretty cool. And you and I were talking before. This is something that
• 6:38
  is used on Earth. I can say that, because now there's the secondary use of
• 6:43
  using this in space for the moon, right? That's kind of where this is heading,
• 6:47
  right?
• 6:48
  Yeah, it's nuts. So I just came back from this show in conference at the
• 6:53
  Daylong conference in Houston at NASA at the Space Center, and they literally have these
• 6:59
  drones that are are helping the astronauts and or the inhabitants, right? because the goal
• 7:05
  is they call it moon base, and we're investing as a country into having colonization
• 7:10
  on the moon, and we're already there working on things now. but part of this
• 7:16
  is how do we make it more you know, amenable for kind of the average
• 7:22
  person, right? so these drones are going down to help distribute different kinds of of
• 7:28
  items, chemicals, you know, equipment on the moon. And so they look a little different,
• 7:33
  right? I mean, the importance of the agility and the balance between kind of electricity,
• 7:39
  you know, battery depletion and payload depletion are still the same, but they almost look
• 7:45
  like kites because part of this is managing the lack of gravity that's out there
• 7:51
  right now.
• 7:52
  Yeah. Okay. Wow, this is so cool. Okay. Do you control it from Earth? Like
• 7:57
  is i is this happening already? Like are the drones up there yet?
• 8:02
  it's a great question. I I don't know the answer to
• 8:04
  Okay.
• 8:05
  that. We we saw we saw some pictures of those drones. I I think they're
• 8:08
  built, but I don't know where they've been deployed. The control would have to be
• 8:12
  close by. You don't want because one of the things about drones when you're flying
• 8:17
  them is they have you have to have line of sight. So people that fly
• 8:21
  drones are actually pilots. They're licensed as pilots, because you want to make sure that
• 8:26
  there's safety, right? That you're not not hurting anybody, things aren't falling on people. so
• 8:30
  you have to they have to be line of sight. So the controller would be
• 8:34
  coming from the pod or whatever whatever whatever sort of base is there, right? Equipment
• 8:39
  base or home base is there on the moon.
• 8:42
  Wow. Okay. All right. So you're at a NASA conference. We're doing space drones quite
• 8:47
  literally. This is so cool. take us back to the very beginning. You grew up
• 8:52
  in Trinidad, is that right?
• 8:54
  Yes, that and that's so my family is from Trinidad, but we actually my folks,
• 8:59
  aunts and uncles were all educated for the most part in the UK. So so
• 9:04
  I was actually born in London. I have
• 9:07
  Okay.
• 9:08
  a British passport. I was lived in Trinidad until I was the ripe old age
• 9:11
  of seven.
• 9:12
  Yeah.
• 9:13
  and then we moved to the States to Baltimore, Maryland. And I myself have been
• 9:16
  an Eastern seaboard gal, which has been I I am really like when I go
• 9:20
  out west, like I love there as a vacation, you know, but but I like
• 9:24
  to come home to the east coast for sure. Yeah.
• 9:27
  Yeah. Okay, and then take us through the the career journey here. So I think
• 9:32
  you've got a a Duke MBA in there too. You've got some East Coast schools
• 9:37
  going on for education. You work the big corporates, you work the startups. Take us
• 9:42
  through kind of like high school. Like were you entrepreneurial as a kid? Like were
• 9:47
  you doing lemonade stands and stuff?
• 9:50
  Yeah. So I got in trouble because my entrepreneurial skills started when I was probably
• 9:57
  around nine-ish. so I love to hold shows. And like shows, yeah. So we
• 10:04
  To hold shows, okay.
• 10:06
  had this large basement, right? And so my brother's sister and I would hold shows.
• 10:10
  My brother was the collector of money, which is probably why he loves money. He's
• 10:14
  the one who started the spray drum business. And my and my sister and two
• 10:18
  neighbors, there were well they had they had a boy and two girls, but two
• 10:22
  the two girls, we would all hold these dance shows. And we had this is
• 10:26
  way before your time, Jack, we had a little phonograph, you know, like a single
• 10:30
  machine and we put it on and we would do all these dances. And we
• 10:34
  would charge people like anything from a nickel to a quarter. And so then we
• 10:39
  were very happy, you know, because there was a candy store nearby when mom and
• 10:43
  dad were gone. Me to run over and buy all
• 10:46
  There we go.
• 10:47
  our candy. You know, those were the days when you didn't need a babysitter, because
• 10:50
  you know, generally speaking, you'd stay at home. So anyway,
• 10:53
  That's great.
• 10:54
  but we got in trouble. Dad made us give all the money back. Woe is
• 10:58
  me. Anyway, so and that's probably why I'm so altruistic now, giving away my syphysis
• 11:03
  for free. It was it was taught to me at a young age.
• 11:07
  Right. Okay, so you're hosting shows, you're getting some good candy. high school, how were
• 11:11
  the grades in high school? I mean you turned out to be an engineer. Grades
• 11:16
  were good, I
• 11:17
  Yeah.
• 11:18
  assume?
• 11:18
  Yeah, very good. I was second in my class. and yeah, that
• 11:21
  Okay. That's pretty good.
• 11:23
  that that's pretty good. I mean, you know I was competitive. You or maybe now
• 11:26
  you know I'm competitive. So I wanted to be number one, but I
• 11:29
  Yeah.
• 11:30
  was number two. but but the the the cost of that was I I took
• 11:34
  a lot of AP c courses and I I was on a lot of different
• 11:39
  clubs, you know, like National Honor Society, you know, So there were there were, you
• 11:44
  know, a math club. Like, you know, it was kind of fun and crazy. I
• 11:48
  also play tennis. So decent balance in the scheme of things, right? Which is probably
• 11:53
  why I don't like to be bored still to this day. I like to keep
• 11:58
  myself busy. Probably too busy sometimes.
• 12:00
  Yeah. I was gonna say if we jump forward in time now, today you're technically
• 12:06
  running or heavily involved in three businesses.
• 12:10
  Yeah, that's right. So I'm the the spray drone is is like I said, the
• 12:14
  most fun one. probably the one that's the most meaningful is the one that I
• 12:19
  just started this month, which is called Life's Guardrails. And the goal for that company
• 12:24
  is to help people plan for the future, especially as they're aging. one of the
• 12:28
  things that a lot of my friends now have have parents who are aging and
• 12:33
  they don't know what they don't know, right? What they generally know, I find people
• 12:38
  sit in two categories. One is they understand financial and legal, or they understand healthcare
• 12:43
  and insurance. They never think about property, right, and real estate, which is a big
• 12:47
  part of as you're aging, where you're gonna live, what sort of taxes you're gonna
• 12:52
  pay, especially when you're retired and you don't have a lot of income coming in.
• 12:57
  and the other thing is those are siloed, right? So they're actually five silos. So
• 13:02
  this this business is about breaking down the silos, having cross functional conversations, and understanding,
• 13:06
  for example, If you have Alzheimer's running in your family, you want to make sure
• 13:11
  you have some sort of long-term care policy. You want to make sure that you
• 13:16
  also have savings because you're you're living in some home that might have all these
• 13:21
  bills you don't expect. and you, you know, and then you also wanna make sure
• 13:25
  that you know you're you're you've chosen some good, you know, memory care communities where
• 13:30
  you can be taken care of. And and and and then course you have good
• 13:35
  care managers because as you make changes, you want to make sure the knowledge that
• 13:40
  you have in your healthcare is being transferred. generally speaking, that tends to be a
• 13:44
  partner or a family member, but that can be a lot of work for one
• 13:49
  individual. and taxing emotionally taxing as people change in front of your eyes. So part
• 13:54
  of that is finding like the right care managers and understanding what that might look
• 13:58
  like. So the goal of this business. is to essentially educate people on how the
• 14:03
  pillars work together to organize them so that they know the questions to ask, like
• 14:08
  financial power of attorney versus healthcare proxy. and then also providing the the appropriate professionals
• 14:13
  that they need, whether that's a you know doctor, lawyer, et cetera.
• 14:17
  Okay. Okay. That's really cool. That's I've definitely seen some of that with my grandparents
• 14:21
  and even some, you know, friends' parents
• 14:23
  Yeah, yeah.
• 14:25
  and my parents kind of thing too. There's so much going on at that time
• 14:29
  when you know, some of the worst things hit, then you don't want to be
• 14:33
  talking about financials. You don't want to be talking about this stuff. Okay, so you
• 14:37
  put in you put in sort of the guardrails to your point to kind of
• 14:41
  put all this together to make it the worst time the easier time.
• 14:45
  Yeah, exactly right. And and trying very hard to make sure people the planning part's
• 14:48
  important. And and the reality is that nobody thinks they're getting older, but they notice
• 14:52
  everybody else getting older, right? So it's not
• 14:55
  Yeah.
• 14:56
  like it's a little bit of like, just think about it. Like my goal isn't
• 15:00
  to beat you over the head and to say you have to do this. My
• 15:04
  goal is so that you when you're ready, you know the questions to ask. The
• 15:09
  other thing is it's it's a subscription model, it's like a hundred dollars a month.
• 15:13
  Now That might be expensive to some people or inexpensive to others, but generally people
• 15:18
  go to their lawyers or their investment by advisors or their their care managers. Those
• 15:22
  people charge a few hundred dollars an hour,
• 15:25
  Yeah.
• 15:26
  right? So it's a little bit of like, why not make a small investment now
• 15:29
  to get yourself prepared so you know what you need to do as you're moving
• 15:32
  forward.
• 15:33
  That's very much a value versus price conversation for sure. Yeah.
• 15:37
  Yeah, yeah. And and Jack, sorry, I don't want to make I want to make
• 15:41
  sure all my other people that have that are you know are helping bleed me
• 15:45
  dry are mentioned so I also yeah
• 15:47
  Yeah, what else we got?
• 15:48
  I've got a a great a fashion company that's kind of organic and trendy but
• 15:54
  long term quality wear that's called niche niche. I've got a a beauty company called
• 16:01
  Ready to Beauty. I am also working with a platform called Revise that's a mentoring
• 16:08
  platform to give people access to the technology sec people jobs and networks in the
• 16:15
  technology sector.
• 16:16
  Okay, so a couple of through lines. One is definitely altruistic, right? It's for all
• 16:20
  of these are for the better of everybody. The other thing I'm thinking is kind
• 16:25
  of a through line here is you've got sort of the organic fashion side, sustainable
• 16:30
  stuff. You've got the elder wellness stuff, again, sustainability kind of focused, and then the
• 16:35
  spray drones. So you've got this whole ensemble of things to keep living the best
• 16:40
  that we possibly can, and potentially for the next. million years on the moon too.
• 16:45
  Like how how do how do you balance what first off, how do you balance
• 16:49
  all of this stuff? Let's start there and then I'll ask my more sophisticated question.
• 16:54
  Yeah.
• 16:55
  Yeah, I'm tired, you know. At the end of the day, I'm tired. a lot
• 16:59
  of this is interesting in that it's about it's about setting up infrastructure and scalability,
• 17:04
  which sounds really nerdy, but I genuinely mean it, right? So in other words, like
• 17:08
  my my the value that I bring is the thought process behind what needs to
• 17:13
  be done and how we get there. And then going back to the importance of
• 17:18
  education, right? So for me, I wanna be I wanna surround myself By people that
• 17:22
  are either better at me than I am at certain things or want to learn,
• 17:27
  right? And and so that way I my time isn't needed as much because I
• 17:32
  have all these, you know, I don't want to say disciples, but that's the first
• 17:36
  word that came to mind, like all my mentees, right? That that kind of are
• 17:41
  like, okay, we now know what Aruna wants. So I can delegate and I can
• 17:45
  kind of give myself quality of time. it's a terrible coincidence that but it's not
• 17:50
  that all of these things happen at the same time because as the market has
• 17:55
  been really slow over the past few years. I've been looking for things to get
• 17:59
  involved with. And so I ended up with these companies not realizing that they were
• 18:04
  really all in the same spot and they all were needy at the same time.
• 18:09
  So I'm really hoping that the the kind of the the full-on whatever it is,
• 18:13
  you know, I I mean literally it's probably like 13 to 15 hours a day,
• 18:18
  like that that's gonna go away eventually because we'll have some humming teams. And then
• 18:22
  as as one of my bosses says, I can use my brain for strategy, not
• 18:27
  actually all the the tactical things that need to get done.
• 18:31
  So a as we stay in the sort of AI world and presumably that's here
• 18:36
  to stay for a while, right?
• 18:38
  No.
• 18:39
  Strategy and just like that human level of thinking, I think is gonna be most
• 18:43
  one of the most valuable assets out there. How much of your day is actually
• 18:48
  spent like strategically thinking as opposed to execution on tasks?
• 18:52
  Very little right now.
• 18:54
  Yeah.
• 18:55
  Yeah. it's kind of interesting. I actually brought on another client. So I brought on
• 19:00
  another client because all they want is strategy, right?
• 19:04
  Okay.
• 19:05
  so it's kind of exciting to work with them. They're they're in a very niche
• 19:10
  market and what they're trying to do is they're actually trying to adapt to AI.
• 19:16
  So not as much digital as AI, which is interesting, and that's really wreaked some
• 19:21
  havoc on marketing, right? So so the whole it for example, the whole infrastructure back
• 19:27
  end of a website is different if you're trying to optimize AI search versus optimizing
• 19:33
  Google, for example, search. So this is very it's a t and the fact is
• 19:38
  it's so early days that no there's not it's kind of like sorry, this is
• 19:44
  very old, beta versus E VHS, right? It's like
• 19:48
  Sure. Yep, yep, yep.
• 19:49
  we don't we don't know which way it's going. Right. But but you kind of
• 19:53
  have to be vested because this this is exponentially accelerating, right? so whatever lands, you
• 19:58
  gotta be ready for. So so so that's interesting. so right now, a lot of
• 20:03
  AI helps with certain things like a job description. Okay. So I know what I
• 20:08
  want, I want to make sure I don't forget anything, so I can do all
• 20:13
  my prompting, throw it into AI, I get a nice job description, I read it
• 20:18
  to make sure it makes sense. for this other new company though, I actually need
• 20:23
  a chunk of hours to sit down to look at all of that and understand
• 20:28
  what it means. And and for the record, what's interesting is when I was first
• 20:33
  talking to them, I did that. I I prompted, I did that, and and and
• 20:38
  what was in what came back to me from AI was the company is very
• 20:43
  good at what they do, but they're not pitching the fact that they are digital
• 20:47
  first, AI first. Which really means dashboards and access to information. And what's funny, it's
• 20:52
  almost aspirational, right? So it doesn't necessarily mean that's what they literally are doing today.
• 20:57
  It just means that's where they're going. So people want to be with them because
• 21:02
  they're on the train. The train has left the station. so I'm hoping that I
• 21:07
  can do more strategically. in with this company in particular, what's interesting is that. They
• 21:12
  don't have a marketing team. So there's an element of saying, I'm going in there,
• 21:17
  I'm getting my hands dirty, I'm looking at stuff, I'm coming up with a strategy.
• 21:22
  Then then what we're gonna have to do is we're gonna have to have to
• 21:27
  find the right people that that can execute. 'Cause then 'cause 'cause after a while
• 21:32
  they you know, once the strategy's going, you can touch base regularly, right? Three, six,
• 21:37
  twelve months. but in the beginning you kind of need to to do that deep
• 21:42
  dive yourself, at least for me.
• 21:44
  Put put these in order for me. people, process, strategy, and product. What comes first?
• 21:52
  What comes last? Is there a defined order for you?
• 21:58
  People, process, strategy, product, not the people, not the product. So process or strategy. I
• 22:04
  would say with the companies I've worked with, it's process.
• 22:09
  Okay, interesting.
• 22:10
  yeah, the reason is they've got stuff going on, right? You can't go into a
• 22:15
  even if it's just a single person, right? Like they have stuff going on. And
• 22:20
  most likely they're looking for help because the way stuff is going on, like is
• 22:26
  bot their bottleneck. They become a bottleneck now. So you really need to look at
• 22:31
  what they're doing. and kind of say, listen, maybe maybe you can buy Claude work
• 22:36
  and get some skills set up there for you. So now now you're still doing
• 22:42
  it, but somebody else is helping you, you're saving time. So you could open up
• 22:47
  some time for something else, right? So I so I think that's really important. And
• 22:52
  then then actually, strange enough, I'd say people, because at the end of the day,
• 22:58
  people serve two purposes. One purpose is they help you get stuff done, but
• 23:03
  Uh-huh.
• 23:04
  the other person, the other purpose is proselytizing. Like if you have
• 23:07
  Sure.
• 23:08
  people that work for your company and they believe in you and they like you
• 23:12
  and they want to help you, that that's free press, right? So so you can
• 23:17
  do that. And and you know, it's interesting sidebar to the drone company. Like we
• 23:22
  were talking while building this factory about all of this equipment. You know, the the
• 23:27
  equipment costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. and then we spoke to somebody, Elon Musk
• 23:32
  connected, AI connected, humanoid connected. Okay.
• 23:35
  Okay.
• 23:36
  He's like, You don't need that equipment. He goes, get this is a nerdy joke,
• 23:40
  get off the Cartesian system. You can use
• 23:43
  Ha ha.
• 23:44
  it humanoid, and they can get a lot more stuff done. And I'm like, Okay,
• 23:48
  I like that idea. And then my brother said, But you know what? We got
• 23:53
  a lot of people. Arkansas, a lot of people. Not necessarily employed people, right? Not
• 23:58
  necessarily educated in digital stuff yet. So why not start with the people first, right?
• 24:03
  Start with
• 24:04
  Yeah.
• 24:05
  the people first, teach them, learn from them. And by the way, the American ingenuity
• 24:09
  still lives, right? Get better at what everybody else is doing and then move into
• 24:13
  humanoid. I like humanoid. I think it's good. It's only thirty thousand dollars. Why would
• 24:17
  we not like humanoid? So so I say that because I think that's the people,
• 24:22
  the people are important in that way. But you have to be you don't want
• 24:26
  to like as many companies do, you don't want to overinvest and then need to
• 24:30
  cut back. That that that's not a good place to be either. So you have
• 24:35
  to be thoughtful about what where you're expanding and how. and then we're left with
• 24:39
  strategy and product. Well, I guess maybe at this point you have to look at
• 24:43
  product. Now I I say that because you're now understanding what the people need, right?
• 24:48
  So so now
• 24:49
  Right, right.
• 24:50
  you can start tweaking. and it's not to say that strategy isn't important, but I
• 24:54
  guess what I'm saying is that if you like, I wouldn't want to spend months
• 24:59
  working on strategy because there's an element of all the other stuff you could be
• 25:03
  doing that's moving just as fast. So and and this is a shift, by the
• 25:08
  way, right? Marketing always used to be you start with strategy.
• 25:12
  Yeah.
• 25:13
  but but The way I work is I kind of know what the long-term goal
• 25:17
  is, right? I know where we're heading. So all of these bits that I'm putting
• 25:21
  in there are moving towards that without me explicitly saying I need three months to
• 25:25
  put strategy together, right? So at the end of the day, we go, you know,
• 25:29
  when when I've got everything else aligned, now I can go back and say, okay,
• 25:33
  you know, here here's what we've got with the with the process, the people, the
• 25:38
  product, and and now we know that the strategy, which we thought was this is
• 25:42
  not right or The strategy is right and here's how we tweak it.
• 25:46
  It's interesting 'cause like the the classic thing, I think it was like Abraham Lincoln
• 25:49
  or George Washington or something like that was like, I'm gonna sharpen the axe for
• 25:53
  three days and then I'll finally cut it on the fourth day, or whatever that
• 25:57
  like proverb saying was. And it was all about let me strategically think for a
• 26:01
  while. And now the more that I talk with people like yourself, it's more like,
• 26:05
  Hey, like we know where we want to go. We don't have the roadmap and
• 26:09
  it's almost irresponsible to build a roadmap because we don't even have a customer yet.
• 26:13
  So let's go scrappy, let's go get a customer. Let's go talk about it. Let's
• 26:17
  have the people give us their feedback internally. Let's have the end customer or whoever
• 26:21
  that is give us their feedback. And then we can adjust strategy. And then we
• 26:25
  get this full picture to where it's not just piecemeal together. We're collecting things along
• 26:29
  the way to then put it into the full picture.
• 26:32
  Yeah, it's counterintuitive, right? I
• 26:34
  Yeah.
• 26:35
  mean, and it really is. Like, but the thing is also, I I think there's
• 26:38
  a lot of white noise. So so what's happened with with the world of digital,
• 26:43
  everybody's out there, and that's fantastic, right? Everybody deserves access, right? But the problem is
• 26:48
  it's really core very difficult to sort sort through that white noise to figure out
• 26:52
  what's valuable and especially valuable to you. So what started to happen is you have
• 26:57
  a good sense of the market. But there's an element of let's see what sticks.
• 27:02
  Now it has
• 27:03
  Yeah.
• 27:04
  to be within your scope, right? Like you have to understand what you want to
• 27:08
  do, what you can do, right? And what's easy to do. But but but you
• 27:12
  kind of need to see what sticks. And then once you do, now you can
• 27:16
  start building upon that, right? The danger there is no scope reap. Like you kind
• 27:21
  of have to say this is it. Because I I I believe, and I it's
• 27:25
  funny, I j I wrote a piece for PMA, Product Marketing Alliance. I believe that's
• 27:29
  what it stands for. about this. Like I think the way right now for companies
• 27:34
  to survive is to have a very specific niche. So people come to you for
• 27:38
  that one need. Then you can grow it. Right. But start with something. Otherwise being
• 27:42
  everything to everybody all the time is only gonna make it that much harder for
• 27:47
  you to succeed.
• 27:48
  Okay, so now take me to the strategy of the spray drones. Let's get back
• 27:52
  to the moon, let's get back to the agricultural world where we started this.
• 27:56
  Yeah.
• 27:57
  what's where are you in that stage? Like, is this a couple months in business?
• 28:01
  Is the idea there? Are you fully launching with a fully formed strategy? Where are
• 28:06
  we?
• 28:07
  Yeah, so the business started a little over a year ago. and it it lives.
• 28:12
  It exists. we we started in Jonesboro, Arkansas. We had a farmer who was good
• 28:17
  with chemicals and with drone assembly there. we had somebody who was really strong in
• 28:22
  sales strategy there. and what we have been doing is we actually have we we
• 28:27
  are manufacturing drones there. So that's like that's good. In the meantime, over those Three
• 28:32
  not the what went from we started with this being drone distributors to being drone
• 28:37
  assemblers because we want to made in the US to being drone manufacturers. So that
• 28:42
  that plan was a three-year plan. It's now shrunk to one year, and the one
• 28:47
  year is manufacturing. because of what's happening in northwest Arkansas, the that's where the the
• 28:52
  Waltons are based, and they have a great think tank and and and manufacturing kind
• 28:57
  of community campus there. They they brought on this company called Skyline that's going to
• 29:02
  do drone deliveries for them. And we are going to relocate over there so we
• 29:08
  can be part of this drone capital, which is where we're heading. And there's a
• 29:13
  lot of great funding for that in Arkansas and SBA as we talked about in
• 29:18
  NASA and federal grants in addition to investors. So manufacturing is happening. We're in the
• 29:23
  process of relocating to Northwest Arkansas. We are going to be doing manufacturing. We're going
• 29:28
  to start with the humans, in addition to acquiring the technology that we need for
• 29:33
  the facility as well as for the drones themselves. We'll have an exclusive on what
• 29:38
  we're calling a medium-sized chassis because that's good for medium-sized farms and also good for
• 29:43
  deployment of payloads that are unknown, like with the military. We have been bootstrapped up
• 29:48
  until now. So where we really are literally now is we're looking for What we'll
• 29:53
  call financing. Prefer to stay away from kind of in big time investors like VCs
• 29:58
  because we don't want to we're not ready to give away any of that equity
• 30:04
  yet. we also want to incentivize the people that work for us. So if the
• 30:09
  cash flow isn't great, like we want to be able to give you some equity
• 30:14
  in the company, so you're you know, you've bought in a hook line in the
• 30:19
  sinker. but we're also open there are some people that are just you know really
• 30:24
  want to kind of do the right thing, and this is a cool thing, especially
• 30:29
  for Arkansas, because We are expecting to bring lots of jobs there. and and training
• 30:34
  and education, going back to getting people back into that tech sector sector. So so
• 30:39
  we're hoping if we there might be a couple of angel investors that could, rumor
• 30:44
  has it, you know, throw two million dollars at us and that would be good
• 30:49
  for at least a year, right, to get us going. that then just want their
• 30:54
  you know, their money back with interest. or an option, you know, an option to
• 30:59
  buy in. So that's that's where we are and we're super excited about it. In
• 31:05
  fact, One of the things right now the the founder, my brother, is off in
• 31:10
  he's in Little Rock talking to some of the the government officials over there about
• 31:15
  what we're doing for the state. I am working with the US commerce, Department of
• 31:20
  Commerce, to go on some trade missions. right now we're looking at Pakistan, which has
• 31:25
  no agri tech and they want to buy US product. So that could happen in
• 31:30
  the next month or so. so we're we're kind of we're we're we're we're we're
• 31:35
  getting there slowly but surely getting some traction. More traction.
• 31:39
  That's I it's I mean it sounds amazing for a bunch of different reasons. One
• 31:43
  the technology, one the mission of it, but also like you're combining I and I'm
• 31:47
  in this boat, like super nerdy tech forward AI people, drone people, with also people
• 31:52
  that just really want to do good, also with people people like the mission itself
• 31:56
  is really cool, the technology is really cool, that sounds like the group of people
• 32:01
  that you're working with are really cool. Something that is potentially gonna be global in
• 32:05
  the next month and even galactic in the next month too. Like that's so
• 32:10
  Yeah.
• 32:11
  cool.
• 32:12
  It's it's it's you know, Jack, it's actually crazy. Like it's just
• 32:15
  Yeah.
• 32:16
  one of those things that you couldn't like you can't make it up, you know,
• 32:18
  it's like everything just kind of came together in this way. And I think there's
• 32:22
  a a hokey like hokey saying of, you know, like find what you know, what
• 32:25
  makes you happy and that's great. I don't think it necessarily works that way. Like
• 32:29
  you can't say, this makes me happy and now I'm gonna make a bazillion dollars.
• 32:32
  And it's not about the bazillion dollars, but there is something about when you find
• 32:36
  something that really works for you. Like I myself have my drone pilot license, right?
• 32:40
  My small drone pilot license. And it was like easy. Like my whole brain changed
• 32:43
  from being number two in high school where I had to get everything right,
• 32:47
  Yeah.
• 32:48
  right? To being like, I just need to get this done because I need to
• 32:52
  fly a drone. And if I can just pass this, then it helps our company
• 32:57
  get established as being official certified service and sales people for spray drones. And so
• 33:01
  you you kind of did it, and it was easy and fun. You were reminded
• 33:06
  about weather and, you know, physics and all this stuff that nerdy people like me
• 33:10
  really like. And so it's neat. It's neat when everything comes together and it's kind
• 33:15
  and it is doing the right thing. You know, everybody we talk to gets so
• 33:19
  excited about this. so so I I I think you know, it it it's happening.
• 33:24
  A as somebody says the f the future is now.
• 33:27
  Yeah. I this is so cool. I'm so bummed that we have to cut off
• 33:31
  the conversation and we gotta jump to the next one here. But this is this
• 33:36
  is so interesting. You've lived the entire scrappy life and the entire sophisticated life, and
• 33:41
  you're combining it all into one now. And by into one, I mean into what
• 33:45
  sounds like about 27 different businesses ranging all over the place. Aruna, this is so
• 33:50
  cool. 50-50, scrappy and sophisticated. I think you're right down the middle, just depending on
• 33:55
  the scenario.
• 33:56
  Well, this has a bit of a treat, Jack. Thanks for having me on. I'm
• 33:59
  super excited to talk to you. You asked them it kind of forced me to
• 34:02
  dig deep and kinda think about things that I haven't thought about in that way.
• 34:06
  So appreciate that. And if there's anything else I can do for anybody in the
• 34:09
  audience or I can help it, or if you need anything else from me, you
• 34:12
  know where to find me, okay?
• 34:14
  Awesome. So much appreciate the time, Runa. Great talking with you as always. and everybody
• 34:18
  check out the different websites that are gonna be in the in the links or
• 34:23
  in the whatever in the description stuff here. Give Aruna a follow. It is an
• 34:28
  awesome time.
• 34:29
  Thank you. See you later.
• 34:30
  Thanks so much, Aruda. Stay data driven, everybody.