#035 - How a hardware startup’s product goes viral, with Christian Smith of TrackR, USA

The Hardware Entrepreneur

My guest in this episode is Christian Smith, co-founder and President of TrackR. Their company is a startup based in California, outside Silicon Valley, at a remarkable place called Santa Barbara, and it is a quite successful hardware startup so lots of things to learn in this interview.

TrackR works in the intelligent personal item tracking space, so their products help you find your lost items. Since its start in 2009, it has grown tremendously from being a startup operating out of a garage to a global operation, with over five million devices shipped worldwide. TrackR is built into many products, as Christian explains it in this episode, from leading brands like Amazon, DoCoMo, HP, Cross Pens and more.

In this episode you get to hear the story of how they got their idea on the beach, what it entails to be passionate or obsessed about something. There are many many more topics we discussed as you can see below in the highlights.

Enjoy this episode.

Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com

Show highlights can be seen below:

• A success story of 5 million+ devices – [2:30]
• What’s common between surfing and the idea behind TrackR? - [4:20]
• Being obsessed [not passionate] about giving humanity back 100 hours every single year - [8:08]
• The Lean startup method as a way to engineer great sales - [11:09]
• How did they validate the idea? - [13:22]
• Early failures the founders had while growing the company - [15:05]
• The law of equivalent exchange - [16:27]
• “Great marketing is built into the product” and how the company went viral - [19:38]
• The core value proposition of TrackR - [23:57]
• How will a tracking device look like in the future, according to Christian - [27:02]
• If you could time travel and go back in time, what notes would you give yourself? – [28:52]
• Which book had the biggest impact on his career? – [29:24]
• Christian’s super powerful morning routine – [30:14]
• Observations Christian made throughout his career in regard to cultural differences – [32:00]
• What is the best way to reach Christian? – [33:46]