Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S7E26 Paul Vizzio | From Prototype to Product: How Paul Vizzio Engineered RemieDog Into a Real Hardware Business
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Paul Vizzio is a seasoned hardware engineering leader with deep expertise in building complex electromechanical systems and scaling them from early prototypes to full production. Currently serving as Director of Hardware Engineering at Proteus Motion, Paul led the end-to-end development of a patented 3D resistance training system that has been deployed in more than 400 locations across the U.S. and Canada. His leadership spanned the full product lifecycle—from system architecture and CAD design to manufacturing, supply chain development, and field deployment—culminating in a dramatic cost reduction to approximately 20% of the original prototype while improving assembly efficiency and scalability.
Paul’s career reflects a strong ability to operate at both the startup and production scale levels. He has built and led cross-functional teams, driven design-for-manufacturing initiatives, and delivered production-ready systems on aggressive timelines, including bringing initial production units to market in under a year. His work consistently focuses on simplifying complexity—whether through system architecture decisions, supplier strategy, or thoughtful engineering tradeoffs.
In addition to his work at Proteus, Paul is the founder of RemieDog, a direct-to-consumer hardware brand, and Vizeng, a consultancy that helps startups accelerate product development from concept to production. Through these ventures, he has worked hands-on across prototyping, injection molding, supplier sourcing, and go-to-market strategy—giving him a well-rounded perspective on both engineering and business execution.
Paul is also deeply committed to the broader engineering community. He co-organizes a New York–based hardware meetup with over 14,000 members, serves as a visiting lecturer at Cornell Tech, and has been recognized as one of ASME’s Top 25 Early Career Engineers. Across all his work, Paul brings a practical, execution-focused mindset to hardware development—bridging the gap between ambitious ideas and real-world, manufacturable products.
LINKS:
Paul Vizzio LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-vizzio/
RemieDog website: https://remiedog.com/
Aaron Moncur, host
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It started when my wife was pregnant, and I was like, I need to, I'm going to have some big daycare bills coming up. I need to figure out, like, how can I come up with some extra funds in the door? Can I come up with some type of passive income that may take a little bit of effort to get into, but, like, I've always been drawn to, I've always been drawn to hardware and physical products, because that's kind of.. I'm a hardware engineer.
Aaron Moncur:Hello, and welcome to the Being an Engineer podcast. Today we have a return guest, Paul Vizzio, who is a hardware engineer, founder, and product developer, who spent his career bringing physical products to life, everything from complex systems to consumer brands. He is the founder of RemieDog, which is going to be the focus of our conversation today, a direct to consumer hardware company, where he's led everything from concept and prototyping to manufacturing and go to market strategy. In parallel, Paul serves as director of hardware engineering at Proteus Motion, which is what we talked about last time Paul was on the show. If you didn't catch that episode, be sure to go back and find it, where he helped scale a sophisticated electromechanical system into hundreds of deployed units, while dramatically reducing cost at the same time. He also advises startups and plays an active role in the hardware community, organizing one of the largest hardware meetups in New York. Paul, thanks for joining us again.
Paul Vizzio:Yeah, of course. Thank you for having me. I always have a fun time chatting with you.
Aaron Moncur:Cool. Likewise, so I saw a post that you had done on LinkedIn, I don't know, a few months ago, I guess, about a product that you've developed called RemieDog and this is completely separate from your day job, as far as I understand. This is a personal Paul project, and I thought, what a cool topic for discussion, and I was especially grateful because Paul agreed to share some behind the scenes content with us, so he's going to walk us through a few CAD efforts that he did some design efforts right to make this more manufacturable, maybe show us a few of the hiccups along the way. So, super grateful to Paul for being so willing to be open and candid about his journey on this personal project, and I'm sure we're all going to learn a ton from this about how to develop and take a product to market.
Paul Vizzio:Yeah, absolutely. Where do you want to start?
Aaron Moncur:How about we start with just a basic description of what is RemieDog, and where did the idea come from?
Paul Vizzio:Yeah, so RemieDog is a company I started probably about three years ago now. It started when my wife was pregnant, and I was like, I need to, I'm going to have some big daycare bills coming up. I need to figure out, like, how can I come up with some extra funds in the door? Can I come up with some type of passive income that may take a little bit of effort to get into, but, like, I've always been drawn to, I've always been drawn to hardware and physical products, because that's kind of, I'm a hardware engineer, and there's plenty of other ways to make money. This is actually turning out to be a way to not make money, so I do not recommend it if you're trying to fill a gap, but I thought it would be a cool way to see if I could do things by myself, or start really small, and you know, see if I could build something by myself for a hardware product, invest in tooling, invest in product stuff like that. So that's where the general idea came from. And then it's basically just me, as I have now a five year old dog, but she was kind of a puppy at the time, just having issues in New York City with a dog that some people might have elsewhere, but definitely in New York City, you have these problems. So, the first one we came up with was a - it was a poop bag holder that, when you go on walks, you have to carry your poop bag with you and pick up their poop and all that stuff. I was always running out of poop bags, so I invented a new product that has a gage on it, so it tells you how many bags you have left, so you know, like when you're leaving the house, if you need to pack more, if you're gonna run out, anything like that. And then I've just kind of been, as problems keep happening, I just keep trying to throw in more products. So the latest one, and the one that we're going to talk about now, the one that I've been posting about most recently, too, is a leash. So for this particular one, it's very hard in the city to walk a dog, go grocery shopping, push a stroller, and like just do these family walks. I was dropping the leash, I was not having, like, just trying to wrap it around my hand, draw and wrap around my arm, I was trying these waist-mounted ones. And cross bodies and all this stuff, and when you factor in like a stroller into it, and then trying to chase after a kid, a lot of the things weren't working, so it was like, How can I make a better leash that would specifically help me out with with these issues, but then also I'm sure there's other people in the city, and then also just across the US, and maybe even internationally, where that, like, I could use an extra hand while walking my dog and not have to worry about dropping the leash, the dog getting away, stuff like that. So that's where the inspiration came from. And specifically on the leash that we'll talk about today, I'll kind of show you the different ideas I had and how that evolved over time, and how it turned from like an interesting 3D printed idea into, like, hey, let's actually try to make this thing manufacturable.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, I think one of the posts that you had shared on LinkedIn was how you were able, or the fact that you were able to take the cost of the original prototype and reduce it down to 20% of that original cost, so reduce it by 80% Maybe we can start there. What did the early prototypes look like, and what did you do to take the cost down? And if this is a good time to start sharing your screen, by all means feel free to do that.
Paul Vizzio:Yeah, just firing up the old trusty SolidWorks here.
Aaron Moncur:All right, for those of you who are listening to the audio only version, just know that this exists on YouTube, and we'll do as best we can to narrate what we're seeing on the screen, but this might be an episode that you want to supplement, or maybe your primary consumption is via YouTube.
Paul Vizzio:Yeah, so it started out pretty simply. This is basically what I'm highlighting now, is the what's called webbing on a leash, so it's just the the nylon fabric or the silicone rubber, or whatever it is, it's the long length of leash that you're normally used to. So what I wanted to do is I wanted to make something that had an adjustable handle end. So are you able to see my mouse? Yes. Okay, cool. So this is the handle end here, and something specifically I wanted to be able to do was I was always finding myself trying to wrap it around my wrist, but it was never actually working, so I wanted something I could fit my wrist into and then basically slide the leash and then have it lock there, and then also like I wanted to be able to have it where I could loosen it out fully and then have it go around my waist or my shoulder or even like when I'm strolling my son around, can I wrap it around like the stroller somehow, or when we're sitting at a park, can I wrap it around a post or a bench or anything like that, so there's kind of two different design elements in here that I first went with, one is there's this basically buckle mechanism, so you can unclip this end of the leash, and then that's what allows you to wrap it around these tall objects. If you want to wrap it around a pole or anything like that, you unclip it, you wrap it around, and then you clip it in, and it's wrapped around. And then there's this cam mechanism over here that basically just has like a tooth at the end of it, and it's spring loaded, so that when you're not holding it, it basically pinches against this, and then when you push it down, it releases, and then you could pull this hole, you could either pull it out or pull it in, and then under here was just a spot to fit our poop bag holder, and then here was just a spot to fit basically poop bags, so this was the very first CAD rough CAD that I went with and printed out, and was like, does this design actually work? So I mean, obviously there was plenty of issues with it. I had to change a lot of things, but overall it like functioned how I thought it would. This clipped in, and this was going in and out. I had to adjust a lot of springs and things like that, and tooth profiles to try to get the tension right, so I went through a bunch of iterations. Let's see what this is. There
Aaron Moncur:any one feature or component that gave you more trouble than others? Anything that you thought maybe was going to be pretty simple, but ended up being challenging.
Paul Vizzio:I would say I knew that this lever mechanism was going to get challenging, because it's very finicky, for like, if you put a really strong spring on it, it's going to clamp it down really tight, and then also just getting the strength right, because as you pull on the actual leash part, it puts a lot of pressure on here, and the pin, and the spring, and I was breaking a lot of these, so that was the thing to really dial in, and that took the most time to dial in, but yeah, I was going through it, and I eventually got to like a design like this, where it was basically two pieces, it was this one main piece, and then it was this lever mechanism, and then everything else was off the shelf. So I found off the shelf webbing, and off the shelf buckles, and off the shelf pins, and springs, and everything like that. And then I started quoting out, because I was like, "Okay, well, this is this is starting to get to a point where I'm like, is this even feasible, like on the side? Perspective, it's only like two inches by like maybe three inches long, one inch by one inch, so like this is a pretty small CNC part. It should be relatively cheap with some of my people, so I started quoting it out, and all together just this mechanism. The very first quotes were about like 4040-$5, so I was like, all right, this is a bit pricier than I was hoping for. I need to start working with them to figure out where can I reduce costs, what can I chop out of here, what can I, how can I make this the minimal products while still retaining the functionality. So I basically just kept shaving. Sorry,
Aaron Moncur:sorry to interrupt that $45 quote, was that for just like one piece of prototype, or was that at that volume
Paul Vizzio:that was at it was C and seed, so the curve wasn't too steep, so it was like anywhere from 500 to 1500 is what I was looking at, and it was basically $45 less than that, it was much higher, but with the CNC, it wasn't seeing there wasn't much price decrease with volume, at least with the suppliers I was talking to initially.
Aaron Moncur:Okay, and you decided to go CNC, so you could make it out of metal due to strength requirements, is that accurate? Yeah,
Paul Vizzio:yeah, exactly. I didn't want to have this. There was two issues, so with the first product we had, it was fully injection molded, which I had totally planned for from the beginning, but the price for the injection molds was, it was a tough pill to swallow, and there was definitely not, there definitely wasn't that much in, in my budget to afford tooling again, so that was the number one thing that I was like, I can't spend, I can't spend an arm and a leg on tooling again. Yeah, so with something like this, it would probably be like 10 grand, anywhere from like five to 15 grand, I would say, for just the tooling part, and then yeah, the secondary part is everything being made out of plastic, for for a structural thing like this, I did not want to take the risk of making anything out of plastic. It's with leashes, it's like if a leash breaks and a dog gets loose, it's.. I don't think I could live with myself, so it definitely was always going to be metal, kind of, kind of from the beginning.
Aaron Moncur:Got it. Okay, do So
Paul Vizzio:this is basically how far I took it in working with manufacturers, and I worked with, like, two of my, to my normal people I work with, a prototyping shop, one prototype shop overseas, two mass production places overseas, and then a prototyping shop domestically. I ultimately got it down to this design, just optimizing based on their tools, and I shrunk everything down, and all of their issues that they were having, I was just basically shrinking everything down as much as I could, and I eventually got this down to like 20 $25 for this main piece, for these two main pieces, it was going to be they were going to be able to fully assemble it, so it included the pin and the spring and everything like that. So this mechanism would come to me at 20 to $25
Aaron Moncur:That's pretty amazing. So you reduced it by 50% just based on what were some of the bigger changes that you made. You mentioned you made the whole thing smaller, right, and that you also worked with them to customize the design based on the tooling that they already had. Is this like I imagine end mill bit sizes are a dime a dozen, so that's not necessarily the tooling that they were talking about. What were some of those bigger cost drivers, especially related to the tooling that they already had?
Paul Vizzio:So, the biggest thing was this, this basically hole going through here.
Aaron Moncur:Okay,
Paul Vizzio:so it is a constant, basically cross section all the way through, so obviously like fileting and stuff like that, but this is only like a cool little over a quarter inch from here to here, but it started out this whole length of like five inches, so in order for most places to do it, they're gonna have to go in halfway on one side and then halfway on the other side, and just with the machining operations and stuff like that, it was adding in cost, so I basically shrunk this whole thing down as as small as I could for where they can just do it in one pass, where it just has to come in from one side, and they could basically just go the whole way, and then obviously just overall shrinking everything. This was a lot taller, everything was a lot wider. The less subtractive surfaces I had to do, like even this thing is basically just like this is one flat piece that just gets cut out, and then just de-burred, so everything I could to just reduce, reduce time on machine, reduce operations, reduce fixturing, stuff like that.
Aaron Moncur:I noticed when you showed your original prototype, and then looking at this one, the finished version, the original prototype started out pretty bad. Locky, and now you get some some filets and some curvature in there. Was that the strategy starting? Let's just make a very basic form, printed, see if it does basically the things it's supposed to do, and then finesse it later. If your company helps engineers design, build, or manufacture better products. We should talk at PDX, the product development expo. Companies don't just exhibit, they teach practical training right at their booth. Engineers walk away with new skills, and companies build real relationships with the people who use their tools and services, the result is high quality connections built through real technical value. PDX 2026 is october 20 and 21st in Phoenix, and booth selection is first come, first served. Many are already reserved. To learn more about exhibiting, email us at PDX at Team pipeline.us
Paul Vizzio:yeah, exactly. So the first one, super blocky, just make sure it works. It was huge, it didn't really, I mean, it worked okay. And then getting it down to this one, where it was $20 but that brought up as I was looking into costs, where if you're going to sell a product, you need at least for hardware, if there's no SAT, if there's no recurring software, anything, you really want to have a 4x sales price, so I would have to sell just this piece for $80 if I wanted to make any money, plus that's not including like the webbing or the buckle or the leash end, so I was like, okay, I can, I sell like $150 leash when, when it's all said and done, I was like, it would be a super premium, people do pay for it, people do have some stupid money, and they do this, I was like, I just, I can't sell $150 leash, so like working with my manufacturers, I was like, can we let's change the process on this, like CNC is cool, and I could make like 20 or 30, and it's going to be fine, but like I can't sell at that price. So I started working on basically changing the whole thing to be in a die-cast design, so that whole mechanism eventually got replaced with this.
Aaron Moncur:Wow, okay. This is way different now.
Paul Vizzio:Yeah, exactly. So, CNCing wise, this is probably going to be about a similar price, but then I went to, I found a die cat, I found a few die casting manufacturers that made similar type of products that we're using, they like made buckles for backpacks and some type of cam locks and like one way locks and things like that, but nothing actually nothing exactly how I wanted, nothing that actually worked that well, so I kind of redesigned, I started with theirs at like a base level, but then started customizing it, and just saying, like, hey, if I make this change, can you do that? Like, can I make this change? Can you do that? And just like, instead of going at them straight with, like, hey, can you make this for me, I kind of took some of their existing designs and just modified it enough to where I was like, okay, this is fully my own unique product. You guys have been talking to me the whole way, and like, agreeing that, yeah, you can make this tooling, so this is where we ultimately wound up with, and I got the tooling I was worried about, because it was die cast, but since these people, they specialize in die casting design, especially in these sizes, the tooling I think I paid like $700 for, which was an order of magnitude less than I would for injection molding, which I was surprised about. That's
Aaron Moncur:surprising to me too. That seems really affordable for what this
Paul Vizzio:is. Yeah, because I was talking to my normal people that I have make things for me. They have die casting as a, as a service, and like I was working with them, and I would show them this, and they'd be like, yeah, okay, we can do this, gonna be$15,000 for the mold, and I was like, God, so I was like, that's not gonna work, and then I eventually just kept finding different suppliers that like specialize in more niche stuff, and then that's when I was able to find this, and I was like, even at, like, it's gonna suck to lose $750 personally, but I'm willing to take a gamble and see what they can make, and with that tooling price, this whole mechanism just they send these to me, basically fully built with this with the two parts, the pin and the spring in there. The at I have to order quantity 500 at a time, but the price they sell it to me at like $2.50$3 something like that. So huge price reduction overall. The tooling cost was way reduced, and then with that price, and then factoring in, you know, the webbing and the buckles, and I have somebody else actually doing the full assembly and sewing and putting on the carabiner and stuff like that, so I. Overall, the entire thing comes to me boxed landed at like 12 ish dollars, 13 ish dollars, so that allows me to sell it in like the $50 price range, which is it's still on the higher end for leashes these days, but it's like not unheard of, you can go to like Petco and you'll see 5060 $70 leashes. So, I thought at that point I was like, we finally got to a point where we priced it down pretty significantly. It retains the main functionality that I wanted, which, like, it goes in and out. I had to disjoin the buckling from this main main mechanism. I had to let go of the poop bag holding spot, and stuff like that, but to be able to make it at a $50 MSRP instead of like 150 those type of trade-offs were worth it to me.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, that's awesome, man. Looking at the spring-loaded part, the light gray part, there's a line in the center, a little recess, looks like a tiny cut in there. What, what is that cut for? Is that some kind of indicator?
Paul Vizzio:So that cut is strictly just for ID purposes. So I don't have it pulled up, but on my poop bag holder, basically the gage that goes up and down has this exact design to it with this little notch in there, and this notch is what tells you, like, there's numbers that say, like, full three zero, so this is the gage that goes up and down on the pope bag holder. So I kind of just wanted to draw some, some brand identity there, for, like, you know, factoring in some type of designs, adding in some personality, and like I have this little logo in here, and stuff like that, but ultimately I tried going minimal branding on this, so it doesn't say it only says RemieDog way down at the leash, and I don't think, I don't think it's on here, but it only says RemieDog there, and then everywhere else it's basically just like hidden brand details like this in the face and stuff like that. I didn't want to be shouting like some companies do, like this is us, we made this, here's the brand name, here's the, here's the part name, all that stuff.
Aaron Moncur:Nice, nice. As I sit here with a giant pipeline logo behind me, no, that's fine, I the loop on the lower cast part is that to hold a poop bag, like you tie a poop bag around there,
Paul Vizzio:so that's to hold our poop bag holder, so we have a strap that goes around it, and then that's just where you dangle our holder from,
Aaron Moncur:gotcha. All right, so as you were going from supplier to supplier, trying to find someone who could make this at a cost-effective price point. What was that process like? Did did you already have most of these suppliers in your rolodex, or or if not, how did you find the.. I'm not asking you to give up your, your current supply chain, of course, but what was your process for, for finding, you know, going down the line and finding these, these suppliers. Yeah, so ultimately I actually wound up using none of my actual suppliers that I've been using for the last, like, 10 years. I've tried using them throughout the whole process, and they would be able to do the CNC one, and, like, I mentioned, they were able to do some of the die casting stuff, but at the quantities and cost I was getting from other people, I was like I was trying to have them price match, but even then they were like, yeah, we can't,
Paul Vizzio:like, if you found these people that can do it for you, you should go with them, so every component on here was sourced from somebody I hadn't used before, so there's there's webbing, there's buckles, there's this mechanism, there's the carabiner at the other end, and then there's an overall assembler, because I didn't want to have to, I don't know how to sew, and I don't know how to rivet, I get rivet stuff, but like I don't want to be the one responsible for if the leash breaks or not, from like a craftsmanship standpoint, so I found professionals to do that, but basically I had to source all of those, so I had like five different sourcing operations in one. I first went with basically just like seeing who other people use, finding a lot of domestic sources, and I'll usually start with domestic sources for because they're quick to get in and quick to get samples in, and like somewhat name brands, if you will. Basically, just testing their stuff, just so I get things in quick and see how things are, and basically have them in the gold standard. And then I would go on. It was mostly like Alibaba, where I would find, like, who is a factory that makes plastic buckles, who is a factory that makes metal buckles for backpacks. Who's a company that makes this strapping? Who's a company that makes carabiners? And I wasn't like looking in dog industry specifics, I was looking for like what people are actually making these things. It was mostly in the, in the like hiking world, actually. A lot of this stuff came from and I. Wanted to make sure that everything had like load ratings, and it wasn't just ornamental stuff, that it was actually like that's why I kind of tailored it towards hiking companies, because even if they're even if there may be quality issues with certain ones, if it's meant for hiking and there's load ratings on it, it has to be at least be tested and somewhat certified and stuff like that, so I thought having that was important to me, and it was basically every, every individual part here. I, I reached out to probably like 20 or 30 different companies, and then wound up getting anywhere from like five to 10 company samples, and then each of those samples I would test, I would do physical testing, cosmetic testing. I would pass them around at shows, I would pass them around to like dog people I know. My wife is pretty involved with a lot of this stuff too, so like saying, like, does this look good, does this feel good, and basically whittling things down from there. And then the end, I have essentially like two or three suppliers for each individual component, and then two suppliers that could actually make the full thing too, so there's some built-in redundancy, and a little bit in there for like, if any one supplier goes down, I can still make this product, but right now it's optimized for like out of those two to three for each one, it's either the highest quality or the lowest cost, which isn't always the case, like some are higher, some are higher cost, some are higher quality, and the lowest cost, but some are higher quality and higher cost. I always went for basically the higher quality where I could, but yeah, that's that's how I ordered this first round, and how I whittled it down, and yeah, hopefully that helped answer your question.
Aaron Moncur:Definitely, yeah, for engineers who are listening to this right now, and they're thinking of themselves, I've got ideas for products I'd like to develop, I want to follow in Paul's footsteps and do something like this, maybe we can get later to the part about how this is not a good thing to do if you want to make money, but for the creative outlet, anyway, developing something you were going back and forth with these factories, getting feedback from them, right, like DFM type stuff. What, how should engineers be thinking about that interaction with their factories? Like, are most factories perfectly willing to give you some DFM feedback for free, or do they typically charge for that? Is it, is it consistent between different factories? At what point do does a factory say, okay, we've given you, you know, plenty for free, now we're going to start charging you for our time. How does that all work, and how should engineers be thinking about that? Pipeline now offers procurement of custom machined parts at significantly lower costs without sacrificing speed or quality. We design and build custom machines ourselves, so we consume a lot of precision machined components. Over the past several years, we developed a proven overseas supply chain to support that work, and in 2025 we successfully piloted that capability with select customers. Now we're opening it up more broadly. If you'd like to see how our prices and lead times compare, send us a drawing or two for quote. Visit Team pipeline.us or message me directly on LinkedIn.
Paul Vizzio:Yes, I think that's why I always try to cast a really wide net, because it varies. Some companies will be very strict about DFM, and they're like, if you're only ordering 100 of these, you give me the design, I'm going to make it, and that's it. Whereas some are like, yeah, I understand you're a small company, I'll work with you as much as I can, like, here's what I think of your design, let's change it this way, and ultimately, the companies I usually choose might not be the lowest cost, but they're the ones that I like, get the most help and most advice, and work with the most. So, like, there's a few suppliers that I'm like, if I text them right now, they would text me back, even though it's seven, I guess it's 7am in China, so they would text me back right now, but the ones that I have, like, basically text relationships with, where I'm like just sending them a picture, and, like, hey, can we do this? What would happen if we do this? What would happen if we do this? They, as you go through, basically finding all these people, you whittle it down real quick from like 30 to like one or two that that work with you well, and they, you have to understand that they might not be the lowest cost, but they're going to help you out the most, and like, if there's an issue, or if there's a problem, for me at least, I think communication and helpfulness is more important than final cost, because you're going to get the product you want, it might be a little more expensive, but you can work with some. These cut rate factories that will send you a product that they know doesn't work, and then they're like, well, here, thank you for your money, here's, here's what you wanted. So that's generally how I work. And then over the years, I've basically developed relationships with all different cup, all different factories and all different companies across the globe, so I tend to stick with them early on, so it's like anything with your career, and I always want to be networking and finding people and finding things and drawing them into your network and always recommending them and stuff like that, so that's that's very helpful, but when you're going into new domains like this one, where I didn't use a single supplier that I've known beforehand, it just gets pretty time consuming, and you have to know it's going to be a big time suck, and you're spending late nights and early mornings just like reviewing sheets and testing, and there's a lot that goes into finding suppliers and sourcing it. I'd
Aaron Moncur:love to talk briefly about the profitability aspect. You mentioned, you know, if you want to make money, you shouldn't be doing this. Maybe that was a little tongue in cheek, maybe there was a note of seriousness to it as well. But are you open to sharing a little bit about that?
Paul Vizzio:Yeah, I've on LinkedIn, I've been sharing our yearly profit and loss statements to my LinkedIn investors who may or may not be interested in my posts, so from a strictly hardware perspective, what I, what I buy versus what gets sold, I make money on everyone, which is great. The issue comes in with advertising, general cost of running a business, a lot of these things I have patents for, or in development of patents, so there's like six different patents that I have going on right now. Those get expensive, shipping costs, inventory costs, there's a lot of costs that add up, and I was not, I was not kind of prepared for how much money gets spent outside of the, like, I buy something and then I sell it, if I sell it for four times, I buy it, and I'm going to make money, it's true, if you only look at those two things, but then when you look at the business from an overall standpoint, you start, at least for me, I didn't gain virality, I didn't sell a million of these right away. If I did, and I didn't put any marketing effort towards it, it would be great. But it's essentially been a losing money effort for the last couple years, not a tremendous amount, but I severely underestimated how much money I'd have to spend on like marketing and all these extra things I didn't think about as coming in as strictly as an engineer, where I'm just like, yeah, I buy things and I sell them.
Aaron Moncur:What are some of the marketing efforts that you have tried?
Paul Vizzio:So it's mostly social channels, Instagram, TikTok, I did LinkedIn, I basically tried all of them, Google Ads, LinkedIn, Reddit, Facebook, and then just doing paid ads, trying to do non-paid ads, doing affiliate marketing, doing like paying creators to make stuff for me. I've tried throwing money at a lot of things, and I'm realizing that there's a lot more strategy that needs to go into it, and instead of just trying to make a viral video that you spend a few $100 on, like promoting, it's probably better to just come up with a better strategy, try to grow organically, you can throw money into it, but for me, as it's all funded for me, it's not like I don't have a VC or anything like that. If I had that, I sure I'd gladly throw some money on fire and just put a whole, like, a few $1,000 in marketing, but I'm trying to learn, like, and it's interesting to me, which is something I would never have access to, is like, how do you market a direct consumer product, and like, I had Amazon going, and all these different sales and distribution channels that didn't quite pan out, because each one of those has their own marketing and their own advertising, so I was like spreading myself really thin on the budget I had, and I was hoping there would be like one that's like, oh yeah, you put$100 here, you're gonna get 200 back, but none of them ever really panned out so quickly. So now it's there's a lot more strategy in in how I'm trying to at least market this product.
Aaron Moncur:You're preaching to the choir here. We've tried so many different things marketing here at Pipeline, and it's been astonishing to me how difficult it is to come up with effective marketing, like you said. There's so many things that you can try and throw money at, and we have, and there have been very few things that, like, actually worked.
Paul Vizzio:Yeah, yeah.
Aaron Moncur:Well, where can people go to buy one of these Dog leashes?
Paul Vizzio:RemieDog.com R E M I E D O G, name the company after my dog Remie.
Aaron Moncur:Cool, I've got a nephew named Remie, so I'll remember that easily. I am genuinely, I'm going to go there and I'm going to buy one, because we have, we have two dogs, too many golden doodles, and I get dragged out along with them to walk around the neighborhood on a regular basis. So, having a cool dog leash that a fellow engineer designed and is selling, I think, would make it far more palatable for me to go out on all these walks.
Paul Vizzio:Nice. I appreciate that.
Aaron Moncur:I'm looking forward to having one, all right, Paul. Anything else that you want to share? Anything else you think might be interesting or useful for budding product company owners out there to hear about?
Paul Vizzio:I think if you, you could either follow me or follow RemieDog directly on LinkedIn. I like what you mentioned before, you saw my post about, like, the product cost down. I'm kind of using it as building in public type of deal, where I'm, as I build things, I'm posting it out to the public. I don't care who knows what my prices are, I don't care who knows what my suppliers are, like I'm not, I don't envision this being like I'm gonna make a million dollars from this company. It's more like I'm trying to learn, and I wanna.. I don't wanna have a textbook learning or like read a website where somebody's like, yeah, I think this is how you do it. I wanna actually put my money down and like I spent $100 on a Facebook ad and it sucked, like I'm putting out all these learnings with actual dollars, actual files, actual financials, actual companies, like where am I dabbling in AI, where I'm not, what's working, what's not. So I'm trying to share this to hopefully either inspire other people or help guide other people, and for me, I didn't really have many resources, of like, how do you do marketing outside of somebody telling, like, telling me, oh yeah, you need to do Instagram, like, I don't know what that means, like, so all of these learnings I'm finding out, I'm just like posting, and I'm sure anybody that has a marketing degree is like, yeah, you're an idiot, but, like, as an engineer, I'm like, these are things I never would have learned if I didn't start a company.
Aaron Moncur:No, man, I love what you're doing, and honestly, I think that is the best form of marketing that you can do. It's kind of what we've been, been doing, trying to do anyway at Pipeline, and with the various community efforts that we have, is teach, don't pitch, right? It's all about we're going to teach you something useful, and by doing that, you're going to develop trust with your consumer base that eventually lead to sales. There's this guy I follow on YouTube, his name is Mark Bone. I don't know the guy at all personally, but I've really gotten into documentary filmmaking. I think it's super interesting, and he has this wonderful YouTube channel online, and that's that's what he talks about. He's a professional documentary filmmaker, and I've learned so much from this guy over the past, I don't know, six months or so, and it's all free content, right? But he does a great job, he's a great teacher, and he just puts like all this great stuff out there for free, and then he has a paid course as well, and after six months of watching this guy and learning so, so much from him, I was like, you know what, yes, here, take my money, I would love to give you my money, give me your course, and so now I'm into his course, and it's not an inexpensive course, but I was, I was happy to do it, because of how much I've learned from him. So, I think you're going down exactly the right path, and it's interesting, too. Right, people see what you're actually doing. It's not like this contrived corporate marketing baloney. This is, these are lessons that you're actually learning, and you're sharing it all completely, opening the kimono, I just, I think that's fantastic, and I'm sure you are inspiring and educating a lot of people out there. So, thank you for doing that.
Paul Vizzio:Yeah, of course, thanks, man. I'm glad you, I'm glad you like, and I'm glad you've been following along, and every time I hear somebody say that, like, it gives me a little kick to be like, okay, I am, I am helping some people out there. Sometimes I feel like I'm just shouting to the void to have like three people like my page, and then like two of them are me.
Aaron Moncur:I have no idea what that's like ever. All right, Paul. Well, thank you so much for being so open and just walking us through that entire process. I felt like that was a miniature master class in developing a product company, and you know all the joys and headaches that go along with it. So, thank you again. I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of Pipeline Design and Engineering. If you liked what you heard today, please share. Share the episode to learn how your team can leverage our team's expertise developing advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines, and custom fixtures complemented with product design and R&D services. Visit us at Team pipeline.us to join a vibrant community of engineers online. Visit the Wave dot engineer. Thank you for listening. Being an engineer has more than 300 episodes, and you don't have to listen to them in order. If you're dealing with a specific challenge right now, there's a good chance we've already interviewed an engineer who's been through it. You can jump around, search by topic, and listen to what's most relevant to you. See you on the next episode.
