198: Turning Great Ideas into Great Results with Mark Aramli

By August 28, 2017Podcasts


Mark Aramli says: "The best idea doesn't always win. The best promoted idea usually wins."

BedJet inventor Mark Aramli talks about the essential next steps to turn an aha moment into real-world success.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The best time to work on your big ideas
  2. The “two pizza” rule for great collaborations
  3. A key strategy for convincing executives to buy-in

About Mark

Mark Aramli is the inventor and principal engineer for the patent-pending BedJet CCS. Mark’s first engineering role was at United Technologies, builder of the space suit for NASA. His engineering responsibilities included the space suit primary life support system (PLSS), specifically elements relating to heating, cooling and climactic comfort of the interior space suit environment for the astronauts.  

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Mark Aramli Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Mark, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Mark Aramli
It’s my pleasure, Pete. Thanks so much for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s a lot of fun. I am a big fan of the TV show Shark Tank and you were actually on it. I just watched your piece in preparation for this conversation, and it was some thrilling TV drama. Could you tell us a little bit about your experience there?

Mark Aramli
Sure. Well, first we’re incredibly grateful and thankful we got to participate in the show. The producers were amazing, everybody at the studio was amazing, but for anyone who’s watched the show we got beat up as bad as you can get. They hated me, they hated my product, they even managed to insult my mother – the editors cut that out ’cause it made the Sharks look so bad. But it was as bad as a Shark Tank episode could go, and there was definitely a lot of professional lessons and learnings that came out of that.

It was really an unexpected outcome. In going into Shark Tank, the producers make sure you are incredibly well-prepared – you go through weeks, months actually, of interviews and honing your pitch and preparing for all sorts of questions, having an answer to every question. And the funniest, I think most ironic part, Pete, of how that episode turned out – I prepared for every possible question on my business, every possible outcome, every scenario. The one thing I didn’t prepare for was that they would instantly hate my product and instantly hate me. And so, that really was quite an experience, but definitely net positive for my company and what we are trying to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. And it’s so intriguing, because I loved it. We’ll definitely link to that clip in the show notes here, but I remember at the time you were making a request based on a valuation of $2.5 million, and they weren’t believing that consumers would take your price point for your product – the BedJet – at $500. But tell us, today, what’s your valuation look like and what’s your price point look like?

Mark Aramli
So, the product is the BedJet, and to let the listeners know what is it, it’s the world’s first ultra fast cooling and heating system made for a bed. So if you’ve ever woken up too hot, ever woken up too cold, fought over the thermostat with your spouse or your partner, it just gives you instant, on-demand warming, cooling, everything in between. You can have half the bed warm, the other half crisply cooled. It’s a neat little product and it’s helped a lot of people sleep. When we showed up at Shark Tank, we weren’t in production. We had prototypes, we’d been to some trade shows, we didn’t have any revenue. And I believe after that Shark Tank fail, we have become the top 5 most successful Shark Tank fails in the history of the show.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh wow.

Mark Aramli
So, we’ve gotten the last laugh on that, which was really neat. I made that a personal fire under me to prove them wrong, but we’ve been in two and a half years, we’ve become number one in our product segment, we’ve been beating up billion-dollar companies who have bigger budgets and more marketing budgets in our particular category. We’ve become the number one, and we’re hiring, we’re growing, we tripled sales from year 1 to year 2, we’re doubling again this year.

The valuation – I don’t bother with that anymore. We don’t have investors, we’re not looking for investors right now, but certainly if the Sharks had invested at that time at a $2.5 million dollar valuation, they would’ve easily made five to six times their investment in just two years.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Well, that is the last laugh. Congratulations, that’s cool. And thank you for sending me a BedJet – that was really classy. Much appreciated, I enjoyed it. It was pretty nifty how it’s well put together, sharply designed and really does add a bit of extra cool, which is awesome, ’cause my wife wants things hotter and I want them colder. So, it’s been a helpful addition, so thanks for that.

Mark Aramli
That can actually lead to sleep divorce with some couples. Temperature is huge in bed, and 55% of couples don’t agree on the temperature. You have folks sneaking off the thermostat in the middle of the night – raising the AC, lowering the AC. And I’ll tell you, BedJet has saved some marriages.

Pete Mockaitis
Very cool, very cool. So, I want to hear a little bit – what was sort of your “A-ha” moment for how you came up with the idea of the BedJet, and rather than going deep on your entrepreneurial journey, I want to hear more about the strategies, the principles, the tips, the tools, the tactics for you and your team to have pulled this off where you’ve generated innovative ideas, you’ve made them work on a tiny budget. I’d love to dig into some of the “How” of how you run your brain there. So to orient us, could you take us back to maybe that “Eureka” moment, like, “This is what needs to exist in a bed.”

Mark Aramli
Sure. So, everybody I know has had an idea for an invention. Pete, I’m sure you have had an idea for an invention. And the vast majority of us file that away in the back of our head and say, “One of these days I’m going to do this. I’m going to make this, I’m going to create this.” And the reality is, nobody ever does. And three years later, five years later, you see this great idea you had up on a shelf at the store or on TV and you’re like, “My God, that was my idea. I had that idea first.” And somebody else is making a million bucks off it.

So, with BedJet I had the idea of this thing going back to like 2001 – 16 years ago. I have a background in engineering and technology, and I used to be an engineer working on the space suit program for NASA and I did some of the cooling and the heating stuff in the suit. So, my moment was when I lived in this apartment in California that didn’t have any AC, and the heating system wasn’t working. And I stuck in an electric fan heater under the sheets in the bed, just on a whim. I went to go brush my teeth, I forgot about it, I came back out 20 minutes later. I’m lucky I didn’t burn the whole place down, but I got in the bed and I was like, “Wow, this feels really good. No electric blanket could make a bed feel that good that fast.”

So I file it away in my head as, “It would be really great if your bed had a thermal management system.” We’re going back to 2001. I didn’t do anything with it for 14 years, about 13 years. And the “A-ha” moment came when I actually had a family member stuck in bed for a couple of weeks – my mother. And she was in a 100-year old house and it’s drafty, and we tried electric blankets and space heaters and mattress pads. Everything was too hot and too cold, too many wires in the bed. And I was like, “Wait a second. I have made astronauts perfectly comfortable in space – the most hostile environment possible – and yet here so many of us can’t be comfortable in our own beds.”

So, that moment came in 2013, which is when I actually started working on the invention. But really, if there’s any takeaway from this, Pete, is if you have that great idea for an invention, don’t wait; don’t hold on to it. Somebody else is going to have that idea too, and the longer you wait, the more opportunity for it to be swept away and scooped up and commercialized by somebody else. So, I kick myself for waiting that long. I needed a trigger event to really get me to build it and create it. But you hear the same story from everyone – “Man, I had this idea, I just didn’t do anything with it and somebody made a million bucks.” Don’t sit by; if it’s a great idea it’s worth working on now, and not later.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh Mark, thank you for that, and I will second that. It was right around 2007 – I was a consultant traveling a lot and my roommate Steven was doing forensic accounting, also traveling a lot. And we’re like, “You know what? It’s ridiculous how our bedrooms are just empty for so long. It’d be cool if we could collect money by renting them out on sort of an ad-hoc basis with an online platform.” [laugh] And I don’t know exactly when Airbnb got off the ground, but I thought, “Aw, shucks. That could’ve been us.” Whoops.

Mark Aramli
Right, right. Pete, it happens to everybody.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh man. Okay, so that’s one great takeaway right there – is if you have a good idea, run with it ’cause someone else is going to. And I think that could apply in sort of the broad entrepreneurial space of building your own thing, as well as just even inside your organization. You have an idea for how something can be done better, someone else has probably had it to. So you’re saying, run with it, rather than waiting for years and years until it disappears or someone else does it and you’re like, “Aw, shucks. I could’ve been looking like a rockstar here.”

Mark Aramli
There’s no upside to biding your time with a great idea, whether it’s your coworkers or people in different departments at your company, or your company’s competition. Here’s an interesting case study – I come up with the BedJet – instant cool, instant heat, you’re going to love it, you’re going to sleep great. And I hire the patent attorney to work with me to start patenting some of my concepts, thinking I’m the first guy to make this thing. Nobody’s ever made anything like this before. There’s some things out there, but nothing that was fast and using air and you can put it under your bed, and the whole combination. And as we started looking at the patents, we found, “Wait a second. People have had that idea and patents going back to 1942.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding.

Mark Aramli
Pete, 1942. And you fast forward to 2013 – no product ever existed on the market. So, the takeaway from that is, plenty of people have the idea. Plenty of people have ideas. On their own, actually aren’t worth very much. The value comes from taking that idea and transitioning it, in my case, to a warehouse full of product that works and you can actually sell. And that’s where the rewards come. Coming up with great ideas is great, but if you don’t do something with them and execute them, they aren’t worth a dime.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s a nice warning there. Fantastic. So now, what would you say, if someone has a great idea, would be the very next steps if we do want to kind of put our butts into gear and take some action with it, not shelve it for a decade plus? What would you say would be some of the very next steps?

Mark Aramli
So the thing about great ideas is they may not actually be great. We all get struck with the moment, like, “Man, it would be great if our organization just did this.” Or, “It would be powerful for my career or business if I did that.” It’s very easy to get passionately swept up, and there’s a feeling that overcomes you. I think entrepreneurs know this better than anyone, but even regular rank and file professionals. When you come up with this really brilliant idea you feel is great, you’re passionate about it, it’s easy to convince yourself the idea deserves to exist and is the right thing, just because of your own personal feeling and your own judgment.

And what I’ve learned is, the only opinion that matters on an idea, whether it’s a product or a service or an initiative at work, the only opinion that really matters is not yours, it’s not wealthy billionaires’ like the Sharks – their opinions in the end actually didn’t matter for me. It’s the opinions of people who are going to be your customers and take money out of their wallet to buy your service or buy your product or buy into your initiative, whatever it is.

It’s your customer, and people in professional settings and corporate settings – you have internal customers. It’s the opinion of the person on the other side who gives up something of value to take your product, service or idea or initiative. Those are the only opinions that matter. So, more important than anything else is getting that validation from those people before you get too invested and too committed, because it’s easy to be passionate and let that passion cloud the data – the voice of the market or the voice of the people who matter in the end.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. That’s so good. And so now I’m thinking when it comes to the customer, in some ways you have an internal customer, like you’ve got to convince the VP of product or finance or somebody to say “Yes”, to fund, to invest corporate resources into a move, for example. But then you also are hoping that that move will delight paying customers or clients on the other side. So that’s intriguing. In a way, you could have multiple sets of customers or stakeholders who need to be brought on board, and both of their opinions would matter. Do you have an opinion on who to start the validation with first?

Mark Aramli
Right, so let’s take example you’re going to your department VP, and you’re going to pitch a new product or service for your company. And you have this great idea, you think it’s going to make millions of dollars for your company, it’s going to rocket your career. You’re excited. Never go to that decision-maker with just the raw idea. Get that validation. Decision-makers, people in positions of authority, vice president-level folks – they’ve learned not to depend just on individual opinion, even it’s their own trusted employee.

So if it were me going to the vice president of whatever with this amazing new idea I think the company, we need to do this – get the validation first from customers on outside of the company. And there’s many, many ways to that. In our case, with the BedJet, I didn’t double down and invest my life savings and mortgage my house, which I did all of those things, until I validated the market demand on Kickstarter.

Kickstarter’s a wonderful place to hang a new product out and people can pre-order it and they help fund your idea. But if those people aren’t willing to shell money out of their wallet for your product, well, you’ve got a pretty strong feedback that maybe it’s not that great an idea. So when you’re going to pitch something to somebody at your company, you’ve got to approach them with more than just an idea; you’ve got a present some type of data you’ve collected – whether it’s a market survey – something that validates the opinion other than, “Hey, intuitively it sounds pretty good, right?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Okay, I like that. So Kickstarter is one approach. What are some of your other favorite validation approaches?

Mark Aramli
So I’m in the product business, and I think market validation or a validation voice of the customer, depending on whether you’re a service business or a product business. For me if it’s a product, you launch pre-sales. Kickstarter is a great way to do that, Indiegogo may be a distant second, pre-orders through your own company’s sales organizations, socializing it through customers, through your different sales channels. You just never let yourself get too far without finding that voice of the customer and trying to pitch your idea internally.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I like that. And I did the same thing with this very podcast. I thought, “I’m into this stuff, but would the listener care?” Because maybe it’s like, “Hey, I spend enough time thinking about work at work. I don’t want to do my leisure, travel, workout, cleaning time also thinking about work-related topics.” But I did, I used some really cool tools – one was called Voice Polls, another Google consumer surveys, and another the SurveyMonkey custom audience. And so with that one in particular, I could say, “I want these exact kinds of people in these kinds of cities making these kinds of incomes in these kinds of ages.” And depending on what sample I looked at, 4 to 14-ish percent of folks said they were 10 of 10 extremely interested in listening to such a podcast, and I thought, “Well, 4% is enough.” 4% of workers – that’ll do it.

Mark Aramli
That’s a lot of millions, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
We haven’t reached full saturation there yet, of that 4%, but we’re growing and it’s exciting and it’s organically… Real people are recommending it to real other people, and seeing growth. So thank you, listeners who are doing that. And it’s been maybe the one business initiative I’ve had that went better than I hoped, planned, expected going into it, and it’s the one business initiative that I did the most validation to upfront.

Mark Aramli
I don’t think your success there was an accident. There’s a huge correlation between planning and validating before a project, and success. And I think it’s served you well; it’s served us well. And a lot of those services you mentioned – SurveyMonkey, Google Surveys – they’re reasonable. You don’t have to spend a lot of money to gain a huge amount of upfront knowledge from a wide demographic, and from the right demographic.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s fantastic. And then when you chat with some real people in person and get sort of behind their thinking, behind the responses, it gets even more insightful, so awesome. So validation is a key point there. Can you share with us a little bit when it comes to thinking and validating in groups and team kind of environments, how does the game change a little bit when it’s not just you and your SurveyMonkey custom audiences and your ideas, but you’re working in a collaborative environment?

Mark Aramli
Right. So, there is definitely a correlation between the size of your collaborative environment and the amount of group smartness or group dumbness that sets in. Our company, our little tiny startup company – shoestring budget – we created a product and brought a product to market that’s running circles around the best the billion-dollar mattress companies can do.

And the way we did that was with very small and compact teams. The way we were able to get a product to market that was probably a quarter the budget those guys would spend and a quarter of the time they would spend, was because we had a small number of very brilliant people, versus you walk into the engineering and marketing group of a Tempur-Pedic or a Sleep Number or any of these billion-dollar sleep companies, and there’s literally dozens of people that these new technologies or new products or new innovations have to weave their way through and everybody’s got to touch it and everybody’s got to approve it.

And when you’re in a collaborative environment with a new idea, the best advice I can give – don’t let that environment get too big. You don’t want 20 people or 15 people working on your project. Projects succeed more often when you have a small number of very brilliant people who really get it and really get what you’re working on and are intimately involved with it, than 25 people or 20 people who are spending 2% of their time each. And trying to make all of them happy you wind up with something completely discombobulated.

I see it all the time, I’ve seen it in every business I’ve been in when you have billion-dollar or well-funded corporate companies making incredibly bad products or bad decisions – those almost always come out of a large group decision with too many people involved. And I can’t remember the name of the famous corporate titan who said – it’s one of the tech titans – “The right of number people in any meeting is no more people than you can feed with two pizzas.” And if you’ve got to get three pizzas, there’s too many people at the table on the project.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great, thank you. Okay, so now you’re talking about people and satisfying them all. I’d love to get your input on when it comes to ego, in terms of people fighting for their idea or poo-pooing others’ ideas, and this notion that their value or their worthwhileness stems from their being right or their ideas winning out. Do you have any pro tips for navigating those waters?

Mark Aramli
Absolutely. There’s a way we think the world should work, and then there’s the way the world actually works. And the way the world actually works is, whether it’s entrepreneurship, product, invention or internal corporate politics and egos, it’s all the same – the best idea doesn’t always win. The best promoted idea usually wins. And so, you see it time and time again when it comes to products. You have a product that’s the better technology, and yet some other product becomes the market leader. It’s because it was promoted better, it was sold better, it was packaged better.

And the same goes to ideas at work. You may have the most amazing new initiative idea in your workplace, and somebody may have a crappy idea, and the guy or girl who has the crappy idea may be the one picked for the limited resources for what everybody’s going to work on for the next six months. The ideas themselves carry a lot of weight, but more weight is carried on the promotion of those ideas – how you package them, how you make them look, how you pitch them. Can’t stress that enough.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, any pro tips on the packaging and promotion and making them appealing so that they’re winners?

Mark Aramli
I’ve got to relate it to maybe a specific scenario. You want to have all the good stages of a basic business plan behind your idea, even if it’s something minor. You want to have that validation. You want to have thought the process through from start to finish, so that all the questions your boss would ask if you pitched an idea to them, just the idea – and imagine the conversation that would follow – all the questions he’s going to ask: “How much is this going to cost me? What resources are you going to need? How long are you going to tie the resources up? When is this thing going to ship, or when is this thing going to be implemented? What’s the net benefit to the company? How much are we going to make off this over the next few years? What’s my ROI?”

All those questions an executive leader at a company would ask after hearing the idea – you want to have that done; you want to have that in writing, you want to have it look polished, you want to have it in a little booklet or a PowerPoint or a Word document – something that looks well-thought out, well-rounded, and most importantly data-driven. I think that’s the best way to promote an idea. I’m not a big believer that… And this does help, but socially promoting your idea inside an organization – that might help you a little bit if there’s a bunch of decision-makers, spending FaceTime with those decision-makers.

One other big, big help actually – now this may go counter to what I just said – but, when I’ve pitched big initiatives or big ideas inside a company back when I used to have a job, before I was in a meeting setting with, let’s say there’s three big decision-makers, three executives – I would meet with each one of them individually before that big meeting. And even if it was 10 or 15 minutes to have a private briefing, bounce it off them, ask them what they think, ask them what information they’d like to see.

Because once you get in that group environment and one person goes negative on you, that can feed the rest. That’s exactly what happened to me at Shark Tank. You had a couple of the Sharks go negative and the rest just felt like jumping in. That dynamic happens in boardrooms and it happens at work, so you want to have touched each one of those people. And this isn’t an email, this isn’t impersonal; you want to go see them face-to-face, read their expression, read their personal feedback and try and catalog their concerns and their objections so that when you’re in that meeting you can adjust your presentation to address the issues that they saw.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent, thank you. Well Mark, tell me – is there anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Mark Aramli
I’m good for what’s next.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. Could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Mark Aramli
My favorite quote I’m going to misquote, if that’s okay. But this guides my thinking as a business manager as I look at, particularly again on the entrepreneurship and BedJet. It’s Sun Tzu who wrote the ancient Art of War in the 5th century BC. And this guy was a general in ancient China. And modern American military strategy still pulls from this guy’s book.

And he’s got so many good quotes in there, but one of my favorite ones is, “You never attack an enemy of superior force and superior numbers head-on in an open battlefield.” He didn’t use those exact words but that was one of his major pieces of advice. And you can apply that to many, many decision points in your life. If you are going up against an opponent who is stronger, more powerful, more forces, superior, whatever – you don’t meet them on a level playing field, you don’t fight them or oppose them head-on in a level playing field. You find a playing field where you have an advantage.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I like it. I think he also said, “A cart of ore stolen from the enemy is worth six mined yourself.”

Mark Aramli
Oh man, that book is so rich. It’s such good reading. So many people still draw on this guy’s writings of 25 centuries ago, it’s still relevant.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. And now can you share with us a favorite book?

Mark Aramli
I think one of the most enlightening reads is a book called Influence by Dr. Robert Cialdini. And he was a psychologist who studied the psychology of how the human brain is influenced. And really this book became a handbook for every marketer out there. It outlines in very scientific terms natural triggers that influence our decision-making, and our affinity to people, and things that can make us go from a place of “No” to “Yes”.

And when you read this book and you see all of these different tactics that are brain tactics – they’re working on the circuitry of your brain, not your conscious level brain – when you see all of the tactics that are being used on you by all of the product-selling companies of the world, all the big brands, the commercials, the TV, everything – suddenly that knowledge helps you be a little bit immune to all of this marketing stuff that’s being set on you. And you begin to look at advertising in a completely different way after reading that book. It’s been around for quite a number of years, it’s a valuable read I think to anybody who is in a job where you have to influence people, deal with customers, deal with sales, or even coworkers.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s so good. It’s so good. And I had to check – I think I misquoted Sun Tzu. It is, “A cart of the enemy’s supplies is worth 20 of your own.” Any fact-checkers – that’s the story. Yes, and Influence is one of my favorites. I read his second book, Pre-Suasion, on my honeymoon on the beach, ’cause that’s what I do for fun on vacation, is read these sorts of books. But he brings the goods, no doubt. And how about a favorite tool, something that you use frequently and you find helpful?

Mark Aramli
I’m still an engineer at heart. I still hit the calculator all the time. Not much of a tool, but I’m constantly punching numbers. And I have found that – maybe I’m old-fashioned – I still have on old school push button calculator next to my computer. So you can use your phone, you can use your computer, there’s a million different ways. I still have a little adding machine next to me, and I hit that thing all the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh cool. And how about a favorite habit, a personal practice of yours that boosts your effectiveness?

Mark Aramli
Well, this goes back to what I do for a living, which is sleep. Sleep is so important. The medical doctors these days are preaching to everyone that sleep is as important to your health and well-being as exercise and nutrition. And we’ve all been taught to worry about exercise and worry about nutrition, and sleep is that third leg. You cannot have good days without good nights. And the American public is chronically underserved with sleep. I think that the Center for Disease Control actually had a press release some years ago saying that lack of quality sleep is actually a national health epidemic. It leads to all sorts of things during your day – increased depression, heart disease, stroke, diabetes. The list goes on and on and on of all these health problems that are correlated with a lack of good sleep.

So, the business I’m in is a machine that helps sleep – that’s what I created – and I have found in my own life I use my BedJet every night when I go to bed, and it does help me sleep better. And focusing on things that help me sleep better, focusing on setting aside time for adequate sleep, it turbocharges your days, Pete. And we all it – we have all had that day where we go to work and we only slept six hours or five hours and we are just slow all day. When you pay attention to that extra couple of hours or not doing the things that keep you from going to bed, like spending time on your phone just before sleeping or having your computer open just before trying to go to bed, having a noisy room, being too hot or too cold in bed – whatever it is – when you focus on those little things as a habit and correcting those little things in your life that impinge your sleep, you turbocharge your days.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m a believer, yes. Thank you. And tell me – is there a particular nugget that you share with maybe your colleagues or when you’re doing media appearances that seems to really resonate with folks – they nod their heads in agreement and say, “Yes, Mark, that was a brilliant nugget. Thank you.”?

Mark Aramli
This goes back a little bit to validation, and it goes back to my experience on Shark Tank. I had five very successful, wealthy people telling me, “Your product’s going to fail, you’re going to fail, you’re stupid, this whole thing is stupid, and you’re going to burn in hell.” That’s the Mr. Wonderful part, right? So, a big nugget that I took away from that and then I share with people whenever I can is, when you’re out looking for advice, it’s logical to go to people who are more experienced or more successful or wealthy or whatever. Business people that you hold in super high esteem – let’s just categorize them.

What I’ve learned is that just because someone has become very successful financially, very successful with business, very successful with their career, doesn’t mean they’re right 100% of the time. In fact, those people – those billionaires – they only need to be right 60% or 70% of the time. And what people don’t always realize in business is, success in business isn’t about being right all the time; it’s impossible. You just need to be right more often than you’re wrong and make sure when you’re wrong you minimize the downside.

So, when you have somebody like that telling you, “No, your idea is terrible. This is terrible, just shut it down”, keep in mind they’re not right 100% of the time just because they’ve been successful. Their success in their business doesn’t mean their word is gospel. You’ve got to go get that validation and talk to other people – people who are closer to your project or product or initiative, and really talk to people who are your customers.

Pete Mockaitis
Great, thank you. And Mark, if folks want to learn more or get in touch with you, where would you point them?

Mark Aramli
BedJet.com. You can write an email anytime over there, you can say, “Send this to Mark” – it’ll come straight to me.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. And Mark, do you have a final challenge or call to action you’d issue to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Mark Aramli
I would. You can’t be awesome at your job during the day unless you’re sleeping well at night. Look at your sleeping habits, ask yourself are you getting seven to eight hours at least every night? Are you doing small things that will increase your quality of sleep? Are you eliminating things from your life that are causing you not to sleep? Spend a little time and energy on that and you will be amazed at the improvement in your general sense of well-being, your productivity, your energy, your health, and your ability to succeed at your job.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Mark, thank you. This is awesome. I wish you lots of luck with BedJet and what you’re up to. I know I’ll continue enjoying mine at the night time, and I hope that you keep on just rock and rolling over there. It’s awesome.

Mark Aramli
Thank you so much, Pete. I appreciate it.

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