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In this episode of The Equity Crowdfunding Report, Nick interviews CEO of GoSun, Patrick Sherwin. Check out the episode, below! In the episode Nick and Patrick take a look at the broad market reach the GoSun products continue to build on and dive a little deeper into what the GoSun team has up their sleeves for 2020 and beyond.
See Company Profile - GoSun Profile Page
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Interview Transcript:
Host: Nick Phillips: With me today, we have Patrick Sherwin, CEO of GoSun. Thanks for being on the show.
Guest: Patrick Sherwin: Thanks for having me.
Host: Nick Phillips: All right.
Host: Nick Phillips: So to review really quickly, GoSun is a leading manufacturer of breakthrough renewable solar technologies. You've raised over a half a million dollars on StartEngine. This is your second C.F.. Your top products are a solar stove and a solar powered cooler. And the company is focused on its social impact in the community to provide support to communities and nations in need of renewable cooking and other power options. So Patrick, you are well-known in the equity crowdfund circles, but for some of those investors out there that may not know a lot about you, talk about how GoSun products came to be.
Guest: Patrick Sherwin: Oh, I've been into solar for a couple of decades trying to figure out how to power our lives on the sun. And I'm a inventor by heart. I ultimately took a solar hot water heater off a rooftop and repurposed it for cooking. And that was a breakthrough in the solar cooking space because previously solar ovens were rather slow and bulky and not very user friendly with that idea. I took it to crowdfunding through Kickstarter and it took off. I had a bunch of other ideas in the works and given the platform with large growing audience, we continue to innovate in the off grid, living space and outdoor lifestyle. So we have a lot of customers and camping and recreation, which is a big part of my background. And then we're doing, as you mentioned, a lot of work with disaster relief, trying to bring these solutions to people that really need them in crisis, who want to prepare to be ready for emergencies.
Host: Nick Phillips: So as a natural tinker and inventor, talk about how important it is for you and your team to be able to put your engineering and design expertise in the products that are actually making a difference or impacting the world in a better way.
Guest: Patrick Sherwin: Well, you know, my team here on the ground is very hands on. I've made sure that everything is an idea adage never show up to a meeting without a prototype. So I'm encouraging everyone to stay in their body, so to speak, and not just get stuck in their head. What that means a lot of times is is hanging out with our customer base. We actually have a board of consumers that give us feedback, critical negative feedback on a regular basis and that we can continue to refine our innovations to make sure there's something that they want. We have a wide team of designers and engineers, and that's ultimately what goes on. It's sort of an incubation of innovation with everybody focused on clean technologies. We work round the clock on on solutions that are focused both in recreation and in serving real needs. And we have sort of higher value, higher design items that are upwards of a thousand dollars for an entire solar powered kitchen on down to value engineered versions with similar performance metrics that are as low below hundred dollars for the developing world. And so our team is using their use on a daily basis. You know, whether whether it's a customer support or an operations individual or designer or engineer, we're cooking with them. We're out of defense, feeding others. We're bringing lights to people in disaster scenarios. And so we like to think that we practice what we preach. Myself, I took a challenge when I turned 40 to cook on these exclusively for 40 straight days. And that was in February and March in some pretty cold and cloudy Midwestern conditions.
Host: Nick Phillips: So you're already kind of touched on this a little bit, but break down for us all the different market cell segments that you are actively selling into.
Guest: Patrick Sherwin: So we started out primarily in like outdoor recreation. We are first products for highly portable and so it was better for like the camping RV and boat. And since we have a strong designer and serving bigger needs, our markets have expanded well into into sort of the developing world. So from as I mentioned earlier, so from Boat RV and recreation purposes through disaster relief and into developing countries where like three billion people still cook with wood and charcoal on a daily basis and about 1 billion are still without electricity. So segments within those we we do a lot with lifestyle of health and sustainability, even just backyard barbecue, tailgate events, van life. We're now doing a lot of business with folks living in tiny homes because they're often off grid and are in all of our technology is really well suited for that application. And then, you know, when we look at the disaster or sorry, if we look at the developing world, largely countries where you have an emerging middle class that still struggles to have access to fossil fuels or electricity or it's still too expensive, somewhat out of reach. So sub-Saharan Africa, we're looking at we're doing business in Kenya. We do some business in Latin America. We have a pilot study now with the Peruvian government. So we go from direct to consumer all the way up to a government, you know, government contracts. And our main focus at the moment is kind of, I would say, wrapping around recreation. in in Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan and of course, our main market in the United States.
Host: Nick Phillips: So right now, for the most part, the products are in cooking, cooling, power and lighting.
Host: Nick Phillips: So could you just kind of give us a basic overview of the products and what makes them unique in these four categories?
Guest: Patrick Sherwin: Yes. So starting with cooking and that was the first innovation that I had about a decade ago. The first product that we brought to market those run on a vacuum tube, making it an incredible insulation so that you can cook in the middle of the winter through cloudy periods.
Guest: Patrick Sherwin: We even have an oven that cooks with the sun at night using a fraction of electricity that you would otherwise cook with. So it enables for electric off grid cooking primarily. If you're off grid, you're using a butane or propane canister or charcoal or wood. With GoSun we got rid of all the burn and that's the same thing with our cooling device. We have a cooler that doesn't use ice just like our cookers don't use gas. Our cooler eliminates the need for ice and you can charge the battery during the cooler day after day using a small 30 watt solar panel that they can sit on top of the cooler. So that's what makes that unique. And then with our lighting and power solutions, it's pretty similar.
Guest: Patrick Sherwin: We have these small, powerful packages that we've built to make a a good, inexpensive consumer offering where, you know, solar has traditionally been very expensive. Now it GoSun, has found the right blend of controls. Lithium ion photovoltaics and packaging to make highly performing low cost solutions, if that makes sense.
Host: Nick Phillips: Sure and talk about a little bit with your engineering and your design. The intellectual property side of this. Do you have patents on different kinds of utility patents, design patents? Tell us about that.
Guest: Patrick Sherwin: Yeah, we have a five utility patents and those surround largely are cooking. And like both solar and electric cooking technology. And then we have a bunch of design patents in and again, how we sort of package products. And then I think we have upwards of 20 trademarks. So we do focus on intellectual property both in the United States as well in China, where we do a lot of our manufacturing. And that way key to our intellectual property costs to a minimum while giving us coverage and the two main places where we operate. As you know, the proliferation of technology in China is pretty challenging with our utility patents both here and there. We've been able to knock a lot of the knockoffs out of the markets, particularly the online.
Host: Nick Phillips: And to round out the rest of your product categories, the future of some new products that you have on the slate are going to involve water and also shelter. Talk about what you guys have planned for the future.
Guest: Patrick Sherwin: Yeah. You know, going along this resourceful path of being able to bring people what they need in a time of crisis or when they're just off grid, which can start in your backyard or on your camping trip. We got the cooking, cooling, power and lighting. The next natural fit will be water. And we're developing a neat filtration technology that will run on electricity. But it's just a fraction of electricity that, you know, you can pull power from your cell phone or from a little baby power by running a u_s_b_ pump to filter water for for the whole family. And that's going to be really neat because it's got some other really helpful bends to support a offering scenario. In other words, if you're really good, you go camping with everything but the kitchen sink. We're going to bring you the kitchen sink and we're working on a shower. So cleanliness next to godliness in a time of crisis. Super, super important. Just like keeping your frozen foods, meats from thawing and being able to cook food or sterilized or this is all part of putting it all under one roof is where we're going with it goes on tiny house. So we we have all these amazing, highly efficient technologies and our whole team works around energy, performance and design. And we're excited, too, to build a tiny house with that goes on brand.
Host: Nick Phillips: All right. Patrick, we lost you there for a second, and now we have you back line. Tell us a little bit more about those tiny houses.
Guest: Patrick Sherwin: Oh, we're seeing a huge opportunity with the growing trends of the tiny house and barn. Like basically everyone from millennials to baby boomers are looking to downsize to some extent to live a little more rich, a more life full experience than a life full of stuff. And since we have such a team centered around design and energy and energy building performance, which is a space that a lot of our team spent their careers, we see that GoSun can build a tiny house that encompasses all of our technology and does things that nobody else is doing in the space, essentially making going off grid really easy, a house that can roll into a property for 50 grand. And you know, the moment it arrives, it's ready to it's ready to go. You can use that as your second home, your main home, your AirBnB, your hunting cabin. And we're building it to go into a wide variety of climates with with solar as the main emphasis, the main source of fuel for, again, cooking, cooling, power, lighting and all the other stuff that goes on in a home of hot water, ventilation. We're going to do a passive solar design and that will be coming out later on this year. So stay tuned. The GoSun Tiny house is planned to be emerged this summer. It's a one stop shop where all of our clean technology dreams come come to life.
Host: Nick Phillips: All right. Patrick, this is amazing. If there's investors out there that want to learn more about you, your team and the company. Where should they go to do that?
Guest: Patrick Sherwin: Yeah, the current offering on our StartEngine/gosuninc.
Guest: Patrick Sherwin: G.O.S.U.N.I.N.C And then our Web site is GoSun.com So take a look at those offerings. We'd be excited to help you help us feel the the wild and open, clean technology frontier. Solar is the future and GoSun is here to make a real inroads with consumers, to create appliances and whole house solutions that really help us usher in a new era without using fuels.
Host: Nick Phillips: Well, everyone here, we're gonna be watching closely and following the success of your company, especially over the next few months. You and your team should be very proud. And I have a feeling this is just the beginning for all you. Thanks for being on the show.
Guest: Patrick Sherwin: Yeah. Thank you. Appreciate it.
Host: Nick Phillips: Well, we hope you enjoyed this interview.
Host: Nick Phillips: Be sure you're watching our Equity Crowdfund News program with Andrew Dix, as well as our weekly equity crowdfunding report, taking a deeper dive into how much capital all these companies are raising on a weekly basis. All of that can be found in your dashboard. I'm your host, Nick Phillips, reminding you to always do your own due diligence. See you next time.