GUEST: Fred Perrotta, Co-Founder and CEO of Tortuga, which makes carry-on-sized travel backpacks.
THEME: Scrappy approaches to building physical goods
BIG IDEA: Use constraints to your advantage. Tortuga used its inherent constraints as a fully-remote, bootstrapped company to find efficient ways to identify their customers and build products. Customers care most about carry-on size and durability, so they design their backpacks around those goals. Instead of getting side-tracked by speculation, create an objective scorecard to evaluate your products. FAVORITE QUOTE: “Our mission is to make travel easier and more enjoyable. I feel like the airlines have the opposite mission, whether they want to admit it or not. For us making luggage, we’re a little at their mercy for how they charge people. But it allows us to be the hero, or at least the helper."
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