I Developed a Product at 18: Post-Mortem Review
It’s late May 2014, the school semester was just about to end and I had summer break on my mind. Was I going to get a job somewhere and earn some extra cash? Was there going to be a lot of parties?! (jk 😉 I wasn’t 21 yet).
Actually, I was only 18 years old and was about to head home for the summer after finishing my freshman year at the University of Iowa. My parents lived outside Chicago so it was about a 3 hour drive back, nothing crazy.
Remember how I was thinking about getting a job [parties]? Well during previous summer breaks I helped my dad with one of his side-project companies, usually entering data into a database. But this summer all my friends were either trying to get an internship or more commonly a job at a local store.
I thought that might be a good idea, I could make some money and get some experience on my resume. But my dad had a better idea (parents usually have better ideas).
His idea was to launch a product filling a need he had, keeping all those darn squirrels off his bird feeders.
My summer job basically was that I worked for him, doing all the work myself under his guidance. It was almost like I was VC backed… 😂
That summer I learned more than I have in my entire life.
Ok maybe that’s a bit of a marketing exaggeration but I did learn a great deal about marketing, product development, packaging and logistics, web development, finances, selling on Amazon, the list is almost endless.
We laid out the schedule for the summer and each week I gave a presentation with the prior weeks accomplishments and deliverables. The general outline went something like this:
I only had about 3 months to do all this so I got started ASAP and had to work quickly. The good news was that I was a eager and excited. This was the best summer job ever. The bad news was I had no experience doing any of this..
Biz Plan & Competitive Analysis:
The very first thing I did was look at what competitive products were out there. If something already fit the need very well the whole entire thing could be a bust. After Googling a bit and looking on various marketplaces I didn’t find too much. Now that either meant that:
- Nobody thought of this idea and it’s an untapped market (not likely)
- The market is too small and people don’t think there’s enough money to be made (more likely)
At the time I didn’t know any better, I thought everybody was an idiot and our product would have barely any competition. I also put together a business plan which contained some financial and market research to try and gauge how big the market was.
One thing I did find was that the bird feeder industry is quite large and bird feeders are very common. I also looked at the prevalence of squirrels and those flying rats are everywhere.
After this, the project was green lighted to continue onto the next phase (Stage-Gate model anyone?). At this point Squirrel Grease was born!
rough logo, I know
Next Onto Research & Development
My dad comes from a science/PhD background and R&D is very large in that field. He wanted this product developed in a very scientific way. So what did I do?
I ran a science experiment. R&D was broken down into 2 phases basically:
- Research possible product candidates/formulations
- Test them against each other as well as a control
I researched all sorts of stuff about squirrels and other mammals and what may deter them and what are the most slippery substances. I landed on a few different ideas that I wanted to test: (had a lot more that I tried)
- Petroleum Jelly + Hot Sauce
- Petroleum Jelly + Cinnamon
- Oil + Hot Sauce
- Oil + Cinnamon
I know I know, very complicated ingredients, cut me some slack though this was all new to me. I did spend a lot of time trying all sorts of hot sauces, oils, cinnamon, and preparing them in various ways like with heat.
Next I set out to create the science experiments and see which formula worked best. I went to my local hardware/outdoor store, bought 4 bird feeder poles and spread them out across the backyard. I kept the far left one as control (no formulation) and applied a different product candidate to the others, then sat by the window…
I sat there with my laptop and took notes of what I observed. After a couple days or weeks (I wish I had that laptop still to find this data) I decided that the product candidate to move forward with was… *drum roll please* Petroleum Jelly + Cinnamon.
I manufactured it in the kitchen by heating up petroleum jelly on the stove, adding in cinnamon, letting it cook, and then straining out the cinnamon.
Here is a short clip I found from Instagram of me making it back in the day.
After successfully finding something that worked better than control, based on my expert scientific knowledge (lol) we had yet again passed another checkpoint (Stage-Gate model). It was time to move onto packaging and labeling.
Bottling this thing up
I had no idea where to begin at this phase. After a lot of Googling, I found out these various containers have specific names, I didn’t know what size to go with, what type of seal I needed, or even what type of lid. What I ended up doing was finding a company who made all sorts of containers and got a whole heap of samples to try out.
From there I went with what I thought made sense based on one thing — what size I was getting the petroleum jelly. I was buying the petroleum jelly in bulk and wanted to be able to fill all the containers without wasting any. I think I settled on 8 oz. or 12 oz. containers.
The labeling was another painful point for me. I wasn’t very aesthetically gifted when it came to design and I also had never printed labels before. I went to my local home office store (or probably Amazon) and bought a pack of printable Avery labels. I set out to design the label and after a lot of wasted paper (sorry trees) I landed on this beauty of a design:
The packaging and labeling portion bleeds into the marketing efforts so I also did things like look at competitors reviews to see what their customers were saying. One common theme was that the products washed away with rain, so I saw from our ‘test’ results that Squirrel Grease worked even after rainy days. I wanted to leverage this by including ‘Weather Resistant!” on the label.
Was I the marketing genius of my time? A whopping no, but at least I tried!
Marketing & Digital Presence
So far we had:
- laid out a business plan
- Developed the product
- Packaged and labeled her up
Now it was time to create the digital sales and marketing channels. Throughout high school I was interested a bit in coding and played around with html/css but nothing very serious. I knew one of the channels I wanted online was a website. I had no idea about payment processing but thought Amazon was a large marketplace and could help handle processing, inventory, invoices, etc. I also thought pursuing some social media marketing would be useful, probably because it’s what I was using personally. I didn’t know about paid ads but that would have been a good route to pursue.
Out of interest I set out to build a website for Squirrel Grease, looking back I should have used an easier solution that could have handled the features I needed:
- Static info pages about the product
- Contact/Email form
- Ordering and payment processing
It’s a pretty simple website and if I did it today I would go with Shopify. However being young and dumb (recurring theme? 😂) I built this website below. It’s taken down now but here it was in all it’s glory:
I set up Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter accounts. I also listed the product on Amazon. I remember running into some trouble with Amazon, I needed the UPC number (Universal Product Code), the barcode and related EAN number in order to list and sell on Amazon. I can’t remember exactly but I had to go back and register this and add it to the label. After all that I listed it up on Amazon:
I didn’t set up a payment portal via the website because I didn’t know how so I just linked to the Amazon page. I think I sold about 10–15 of these over the course of a year or so. And you can see the whopping 3.5 star review. Still not sure if the 5 stars were just family members but I’ll take it.
I also put together this illustrative promo video:
Post-Mortem Review
Sadly after returning to college I had to lay Squirrel Grease to rest. I kept making it for a little while mostly for my dad, and a few relatives who still use it to this day. Some day I may revive Squirrel Grease and give it a much needed face lift.
Some of the biggest takeaways:
- Developing a product is wayyy more than just the product itself, you need to have some flavor for marketing, finances, business, design, etc.
- Easier is better — don’t do something just to do it. Make a list of what you need and pick the choice that accomplishes that with the lowest amount of friction.
- Stage-gating is a powerful tool. Check yourself and your idea/product/business to ensure the path still makes sense. Time is a valuable resource and this helps to conserve that.
Thanks for reading, if you enjoyed this check me out on Twitter @domvacchiano. I Tweet about business, investing, and coding. If you have any questions feel free to shoot me a tweet or message.
Since launching Squirrel Grease I have done a lot things, from working at an eCommerce company customizing Shopify stores, to investing in biotech companies with a fund. Who knows what the future has in store..
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This was an old post I published on Medium in 2020 - ported over to this blog in 2025