We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Ezra Bird. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Ezra below.
Ezra, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today So, let’s imagine that you were advising someone who wanted to start something similar to you and they asked you what you would do differently in the startup-process knowing what you know now. How would you respond?
If I were start over again with all of my different entrepreneurial ventures I would focus all of my energy on customer validation. The hardest thing when creating something new is ensuring that someone else besides you actually wants the solution that you’ve created. There have been countless projects that I’ve sunken an unbelievable amount of hours into before actually showing it someone else. Isolating yourself while creating something innovative might seem smart — you’re protecting your grand new idea from being stolen, right? In reality it does far more harm than good, you’re preventing other perspectives and potentially critical insights about your product from ever reaching you. Learning to let others into my design process has been challenging but well worth it as the feedback that I receive gives me direction into how my solutions are received and what things I’ve overlooked. If I was able to go back in time and put my products into the target customers hands earlier I would’ve saved time, money and gotten to market faster.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I am a self taught engineer and maker *shout-out Youtube*. I got into industrial design and physical product development watching people on the internet create the things that I wanted from music reactive LED strips, to custom electronics. I was heavily inspired by people taking design into their own hands and documenting their process creating tech. I started with a 3d printer, designing fixes for items around the house that were broken as the parts were no longer being made and I needed a way to hone my craft. From there my hunger for creating stuff then exploded as I reached into programming and custom electronics design.
The most recent product that I’ve created with my other co-founders at HappyWorks is “The Thermometer” a new meat thermometer that’s made for beginner chefs to build their confidence in the kitchen. Loaded with pre-set meat profiles to take the guess work out of what temperature your chicken needs to be at, with interactive progress bars and encouraging messages all along the process. We made this product to bring delight back into the kitchen and to help simplify a sometimes daunting process of cooking.
What sets us apart is that we are focused on cross-functional development, meaning that everyone in the physical design process can be working at once. This significantly shortens the time that it takes for us to get a product to market. We want people to know that we are human-centered meaning that at the heart of the products that we create is a focus and drive to bring delight and understand the user process when they interact with our products.
Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?
At the end of the day you are dealing with people. In order to maintain high morale and high output you must recognize that the people you are working with are complex individuals each going through their own journey on this planet. Once you start to see others as these complex beings and can understand who they are it is much easier to understand their actions and understand their motivations.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
I have had 4 failed start-ups and I’m incredibly proud, with each one I’ve learned and grown an incredible amount. Balancing the excitement and hope that your new idea is going to make it big but also understanding that it could fall flat and it’s completely out of your control is a hard pill to swallow but it’s necessary. Being a founder can be incredibly crushing, lying in bed wondering if everything is worth it and if you’re going down the right path. But at the same time it’s incredibly gratifying, when others can see the vision in you and when you can deliver value and solutions that no one else could see, there’s no feeling like that.
Contact Info:
- Website: ezrabird.com
- Instagram: ezrabirdy
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ezrabird/
- Other: https://github.com/Gangwa-Labs