Episode Details

Product discovery and marketplaces are all the rage right now but when Jules Pieri launched a product discovery marketplace 11 years ago she pioneered a cross-section of entrepreneurship that launches products more than 300 times per year. The Grommet is a curated marketplace of small businesses producing unique products from inspirational founders.

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Main Takeaways:

• Brian and Phillip are joined on today's episode by Jules Pieri, Co-founder and CEO of The Grommet.

• The Grommet is a unique marketplace that takes the guesswork out of finding quality brands that represent truthful and meaningful brands.

• Today's market has paved the way for the romantic entrepreneur, but how do you turn your great idea into a successful business?

• The marketplace model has seen a prolific rise in variety, but how do you know what products and brands you can trust when shopping in a marketplace?

Small Business Innovation: The Story of the Grommet:

• Phillip first met Jules at Magento Imagine and was entranced by the founder story of the Grommet, which he had never heard of before the conference.

• Jules started The Grommet eleven years ago, which launches one innovative consumer product from small businesses per day, a lot of which have become household names.

• The Grommet was founded because Jules saw that technology has made it easier for individuals to create products and larger companies were becoming less and less innovative.

• The innovation of small businesses proved to be very disruptive and now The Grommet is viewed by around four million people every day.

From The Wrong Side of the Tracks: An Entrepreneurial Playbook:

• Brian asks Jules to talk more about herself and how she came to start the Grommet.

• Jules recounts how she grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in Detroit, was the first person in her family to go to college, and when she was fourteen, she snuck behind her parents back and applied for boarding school.

• From very early, Jules developed a playbook for doing things that were scary and uncomfortable for her, and she learned to like it: a perfect platform for an entrepreneur.

• Her career tracks through three different phases: an early career as an industrial designer, later working for two separate start ups, and finally, Jules worked for some larger brands that led her to coming up with the idea for The Grommet.

Left on the Cutting Room Floor: The Fallout of Innovation:

• Phillip recently listened to a podcast with Malcom Gladwell and Rick Rubin about the artistry is left on the cutting room floor as a musician and that the final product is only released after several edits and fine tuning.

• Larger brands have a tendency to play closer towards the plight of the musician where a lot ends up on the cutting room floor, but smaller brands have a lot of advantages in innovation, but tend to be capital constrained.

• Brian is reminded of an older episode with Sucharita Kodali from Forrester in which Sucharita describes her experience regarding the purchasing cycle of Toys"R"Us.

• Why do you think most products don't make it to shelve