Episode 86: How Riptide Pool Vacuum Systems Transformed a Market with David & Matt

Episode 86: How Riptide Pool Vacuum Systems Transformed a Market with David & Matt

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Tyler:
Thank you for joining us today, on episode 86 of the Pool Chasers Podcast. As always, our mission is to help educate and inspire in the form of a podcast. Real quick, before you jump into the episode, I wanted to remind you that we have one stop left on our live tour that's going to be in Long Beach, California, on March 12th at 9:30 p.m.. It's right after the first night of the show. We're going to have a great discussion about independent contractors and employees. We know this is a hot topic right now, especially in California and something many people have questions about. So you don't want to miss it. Now, for this episode, we sat down with Dave and Matt from Riptide Pull Vacuum Systems. This interview is really fun because we got to hear the passion that these two have for their company. Sitting across from them as they explained how an idea turned into the product was truly special. You can tell that they have poured so much into creating a product that has definitely changed the market. During the episode, we go over riptide in full detail from what they are and how to use them. If you're a beginner to each detail, they have designed to make it easier on more advanced users by embracing feedback from customers. They have taken their original prototype and shaped it over the years to provide the best customer experience possible. We promise that you've never heard their story told like this before. Make sure to stay tuned into the end for a special discount code. Please enjoy David Sargent and Matt Lopez of Riptide Pool Vacuum Systems.

Pool Chasers:
Welcome to your go to podcast for the swimming pool and spa industry. My name is Tyler Rasmussen and my name is Greg Villafana and this is the Pool Chasers podcast. Well, thank you for joining us today.

Tyler:
Also from becoming sponsors in the show, we really appreciate you guys coming. Take the time to record with us. Well, we're here at the. Everything under the sun. And you guys are here as well. So thank you for being here.

David :
Thanks for having us. We appreciate it. I'm excited to be on the show.

David :
And we appreciate the professionalism you guys are bringing into the industry. And we've had a lot of customers reach out or tell us that they appreciate where you guys are doing your bringing some great content to them you're helping them with with problem solving. And that's a big deal for these guys. They appreciate it.

Tyler:
Thank you. Yeah. Thank you very much. Can you introduce yourselves to listeners?

David :
I'm David. I'm the president of Riptide. I came to know that the product and the need for the product. In 1998, when I moved to Florida and my wife was using a competitor's brand and. I just got familiar with product at that time, I had never been exposed to it. When I was living up in Massachusetts and came to realize there was a need for some more options out there. So we endeavoured to build a machine that would I be what I consider to be true commercial quality, something that would stand up to the rigors of the industry.

Matt:
And I'm Matt Lopez, vice president of Riptide Pool Vacuums. I got involved because I worked with Dave pretty much since I was like, what, 18? Now it's going to be 34. I've known you entirely too long.

Greg:
Do you guys get this a lot?

Greg:
The father son.

Matt:
Oh, my God. Hey, everybody says every. I feel like two or three times and I'm like, so is he bringing his son?

Greg:
He's not a son. I'm like, oh, well, I'm sorry. You know, if anybody's ever met Davies got you know, he's tall, he's got grey hair. So I say, you know, the moment my hair turns gray, I go into a hair salon and I die. I don't care what color diet guy got somebody.

Tyler:
That's awesome. So what we want to learn more about our guests and that's kind of what we try to do is dive a little bit deeper so that they can get to know you guys. So start with you, David. You know, where did you kind of grew up in?

David :
That's where I was from. Massachusetts moved to Florida in 98. You grew up on a farm environment. That's why he finds everything interesting. He grew up on a farm.

Pool Chasers:
Did you? Is that true? That's true. You find everything interesting. You don't listen to his stories. Tell us a good farm story. No, it's not far. I think what I mean, when like Dave finds everything interesting.

Matt:
So, you know, he's a product designer. That's what he does. So he's always going around wherever you go and he'll just touch different things. I no doubt going with this. I remember I think it was like two or three years ago we were at the pool so international show in New Orleans and walking down Bourbon Street, which anybody that's ever walked down Bourbon Street.

Matt:
I think, you know, there's like one simple rule. Don't touch anything.

Pool Chasers:
Well, I'll talk to anybody. Don't touch anything, especially Suthers.

Matt:
There's you know, it's like an old lamp post or something. I don't know.

Pool Chasers:
Look, I was chubby, a 200 year old lamp post. This thing was cool. At least about 200 years old. It probably was only 20 years old.

Matt:
So Dave's like touching it knocks on it. He's like, you know, feeling. I'm like, I like looking at him in disgust, like, what are you doing?

Matt:
And he's like, I'm interested in, you know. So it's old. It's interesting. And it's like they don't build stuff like this anymore.

Pool Chasers:
I'm like, yeah, your hands, not your body anymore. Right. He was right as several. My.

Greg:
I don't make videos like this anymore.

Pool Chasers:
So I get this break. That's what I mean.

Matt:
When when I say Dave finds everything, you know. Yeah. Interesting. He's he's very. Whenever you are out with Dave, it's always looking at things like how do they build that? What are they? You know, what goes into that? You know, what's the processes behind that? That's the way his brain works, which that's a good a way. Mine. Yeah, it is that my brain doesn't work in that capacity at all.

Tyler:
It's really cool here.

David :
If you're an inventor, though, or designer, I'm sure that's really how Matt and I hooked up was, because that's the way I look at things. That's the way I do things, which is totally different than Matt Matt's realm, where he's great with computers and great with all this digital age. And so it's really it's a good complement. It really works well together. You get the old timer that that is more into the physical world and he does that digitally.

Pool Chasers:
So you can say the word millennial I set on every show you go along.

David :
I'm sure he's fighting back with he's he calls me boomer all the time.

Pool Chasers:
That's awesome. Constantly. So what did you what did your parents do? I mean, you grew up.

David :
My parents my father was over the road trucker. My mother was a stay home mom, which was pretty common back then. So you grew up in on a farm, grew up on a farm in Merrimac, Massachusetts, tinkering with things a lot. You know, it's funny because you don't realize it when you're doing it, when you're living it. Right. But when I look at the way the world is today, then that's definitely what I did a lot. But a lot of welding. A lot. Even as a young kid is building things from go karts to crazy things that didn't work out the time and you got scrapped. But you're when you realize now that it was definitely formative years where you just learned to put things together. Right. Then why'd you move to Florida from Massachusetts? I just figured there was no sense waiting to retire and getting some warm weather. Might as well get it done.

Greg & Tyler:
Sure. Awesome. How about you, Matt?

Matt:
Did you grow up? I grew up and Lake Worth, Florida, which is Palm Beach County. Kind of a little rough area if anybody knows it. I lived in South Florida my whole life. Definitely never move in. Love it down here. I can. I consider myself one of the rare Florida natives that was born here, raised there, never left. Don't plan to leave. But she moved away from that town. Yeah.

Pool Chasers:
Not far away. Florida native, not far away, but that's the same in Arizona.

Pool Chasers:
Nobody's from Arizona. Yeah, us three live there. None of us are from Arizona. Oh, really? Yeah. When you find an Arizona native, it's pretty unusual.

Tyler:
Yeah. Still? Yeah. Still. Yeah. And they're the only Cardinals. Are Suns fans.

David :
Dead or alive, at least in Florida.

Pool Chasers:
Florida is becoming a place that you're actually from. Yes. Kind of an interesting change. That's cool. I guess just nobody in my age range.

Tyler:
So how did you guys I mean, you talked about a little bit. How did you guys meet and start this together?

David :
We worked with a another company in. And it really got to we worked side by side. You really just like we do now and decided that that was a good direction to take things when we when. When I was going to endeavor to do my own thing. And I just approached him asking if he'd be interested in coming in and fill in that that digital side of things. These days, it's so important. What you guys do is so important. It used to be all advertisment was just just impersonal, considered to be professional advertisment today it's regular people talking about real things that need to to be shared with people. And it's it's more real content, real information getting put out there that way. And somebody has to be capable of it.

Matt:
And I'm not you know, I've worked with Dave since I was a teen and I'm turning 34 this year, so quite a long time. We worked really well together, 34 hours.

Pool Chasers:
I don't know what it is about that. No, I'm just saying that because it's only thirty five and it's almost 40, almost 50 dead. That's what I feel like. I want to die. Oh, sorry, I've got deep. Real quick. Let's go back and rewind. It's not that hot. And I can Dave feel sad over here? Oh, yeah. Dave's only got one leg.

Matt:
But yes, I've I've worked with him. You know, I can't do the math in my head, but what it's like is 14 years or something like that over 10 years.

Matt:
Over 10 years ago, we went really good. You know, with each other, we have our arguments. We have our battles.

Matt & David:
But I think that's going to be we get better about that. Yeah, we're getting better about that. Don't know what's changed.

Greg:
But I think developing a new product, that that would be a little bit tricky because you might have different opinions on how this is gonna work.

Matt:
You know, when we do have, you know, our ah ah arguments or or anything like that, we it's all we're very both logic based. You know, if you have an idea for something, you know. Tell me why. Explain why. Maybe we'll yell as critics flank us. But no, it's it's we're fact fact based. You know, at present, your reasons why you feel that way. And we don't take anything personally, you know. Maybe we have an argument about, you know, what direction we should do or whatever. But it's not personal.

Matt & David:
It's not like I'm like, yeah, that's what it really all has to come down to a fact seeking. It's just got it. But you got to pry that information out sometime some. And I think it stems from that because we're very passionate about what we do.

Matt:
We love what we do. So we we both, you know, feel strongly that we want the best for the company.

David :
It's kind of interesting, too, that we are passionate about it because I haven't really been passionate about anything in my life.

Matt & David:
And now I'm actually loving what I do. I love designing products. I love when we when we encounter a problem with a product, it's it's actually a solution to write it down and just beat it up until we actually get to a solution. And yes, sometimes sometimes it's almost crazy that you don't you don't see that to begin with. But then you have to stick a step back and say, well, the industry never figured that out before anyway.

David :
So maybe we feel silly that we didn't know when we put the first product out and we develop it and we figure it out as time goes on. It sometimes seems so obvious after you figured out, I guess, what I'm saying.

Greg:
So how did the partnership work? You guys are working at the same company together. And I'm assuming while you're working there, you've developed sort of a prototype of this vacuum, correct?

David :
I had it all designed to do 3-D modeling and we bought a 3-D printer and started running from great some great prototypes of it and confirmed the product design and at least the core of what it was going to be. Of course, it's extremely expensive to get into a new product that has lots of different molds to be made and lots of lots of unknowns. You don't know. You think you know, you think you have a you're on a good path, but you're not sure. You never can be sure. So you have to you have to put your money where your mouth is. It's a. Very scary to start with.

Matt:
Yes. Very scary.

Pool Chasers:
A lot of ramen noodles once you start and I'm sure you're counting on him to know this stuff and get it figured out where you're working together. But being on the digital sort of.

Matt:
Yeah.

Matt:
So, you know, I handle a lot of the marketing, a lot of everything, the day to day business. How we operate. Everything like that. I'm not a product designer at heart. You know, I've got, you know, ideas for something maybe that I can't design it on the computer. You know what, Steve? You know, work in CAD on the computer and he's doing all this modelling like, you know, my mind is like blown away. I'm like, I don't understand. Or he'll be trying to explain something sometimes. And I'm just shaking my head and like, I think I understand. But I'll wait till we get the prototypes so I can actually see because I'm more of a a visual learner. Why art to actually see it. Maybe hold it or touch it in my hands and do it right. Whereas Dave's pulling ideas out of his brain and I'm like, that's pretty impressive.

David :
But it is interesting, though, to to realize human beings have a desire to spend their time with people more like themselves. And that's something you have to get over in business. You need people that complement your weak side. There's no sense linking up with people that just overlap with what you're capable of.

Matt:
Yeah, I think I told Dave all the time I never want I will never hire like a yes man. I don't want the yes man. I don't want somebody to come to me and be like, yeah. Whatever you say. No, Chow, I'm not right. I'm I'm human. I'm imperfect. You're imperfect. Everybody's imperfect. Challenge me. You know, bring your own ideas to the table. We listen. Yeah. And that's what I think. That's why me and Dave, you know, respect each other so much, because he knows I got plenty of opinions. And I'm not afraid to tell him that he's got opinions and he's not afraid to tell me.

Pool Chasers:
I I'm actually doing that. All right.

Tyler:
Well, I mean, that's a lot of stupid ideas, a lot of good ideas. I mean, we do the same thing. Bounce ideas off of one another because, you know, one person may have some concept in their head. Don't have any idea whether it will work. But I think it's a cool idea. And the other person's like, yeah, that's the worst idea I've ever heard, you know?

Matt:
Or we had really awesome idea. Our own line of, you know, product failures where we actually you know, when we first launched, we had our riptide was originally, you know, a big car, had a corddry a lot. It was this monstrosity that we tried to put in the back of our brains because it was big and heavy and bulky.

Pool Chasers:
It's more like commercial and overly, overly overlook.

David :
You know, originally it was not really intended to be for commercial polls. We just thought it was gonna be the everything. Mm hmm. And quickly learned that we were just off base. The cart was wrong. Sam redesigned and the SL model was born in that one. So incredibly popular. It's incredibly robust. It is everything it needs to be, really.

Matt:
And we cut up, you know, the frames of the of the old original cart because we didn't want to sell them anymore. But that was an expensive decision to make. We said we don't want to take and confuse our customers. Let's cut them up. Salvage the parts that we nique that we could take off in the vacuum heads, you know, all the shared components.

David :
Some people just had a bigger is better mentality. It's on you no matter what we told them. They just wanted that product. But then we'd ask him. You're gonna pull through grass because the big one was great for you, I suppose, as long as you weren't leaving concrete because they would load it with two jugs of chlorine, the biggest battery you could possibly put in a car. All kinds of other things. I mean, they could be toting 200, 300 pounds of stuff along with the machine itself. And then, of course, you hit grass and it's it's gonna be ridiculous pulling it through it.

Greg:
Yeah. In a perfect world, there's just a concrete path right. Where you need to go.

Matt:
Yeah. With two feet. Two or three feet. Clarida Yeah. Yeah. But you know I I remember an interesting quote that I told Dave one time because it applied to that first, you know, riptide that we made it was if you're not embarrassed by your first product, you've launched too late. You know, you got to start somewhere. You've got to learn. You gotta just do it. I guess you got to start somewhere.

David :
But fortunately, we we had already endeavoured and created the S.l before we even really kicked off sales yet. So we were already on that path. We already we are ready knew that we had to do that. That was the right thing to do because the feedback we got when we started exposing the the original cart. So immediately some people said, you know, I think they were amazed by the quality of it in in the ingenuity of it. But in the end, they said it's just really it's too big for me. It's just too hard to get in. It's not maneuverable enough. It's whatever the case may be.

David :
And that's a tough thing to say in ...except, because you just think it's the greatest thing. It's like you Chai's. It was his baby and it is tough. So you. But but the reality was, as these people said it and we sat back and we talked about it, we said, you know what?

David :
They're right. They just play right. Let's just go ahead and face that fact. So we originally. We're going to run the two missions to the two of them in parallel, and that's what we mean by when Matt says that we were causing confusion so people would call us and they would actually be leaning towards the big cart just because they had the bigger is better mentality and we knew it was not the car for them.

David :
So in some cases, we would just we would adamantly push them towards the smaller one, but we would end up confusing them so much that they would hang up without even making a purchase. They called just to make the purchase, so be the reality quickly exposed itself that we were just off base.

David :
We just needed to focus on the right cart for the right job and and focus on it. Period.

Greg:
Right. So there are currently two versions. Can you tell us about each one and which scenarios they're best using?

David :
Well, interestingly enough, so it's actually the same exact vacuum had with both versions. One has the car in the transport rack included with it.

David :
The other one is just a battery box that you carry with the vacuum head. And those are two distinctly different different units. However, a lot of people go ahead and get the SL cart unit and then they just get a battery box also, because when you do have a few problem yards where you can't get a car into it, it allows them to grab the battery box, take the head off the car and then just take the take that unit in with them.

Greg:
Right. So say you're brand new to the industry. And this is a perfect question coming from us, because we were very close to purchasing these for our team, because there's a lot of times when, you know, the monsoons would hit the pools or something would happen. You know, they're doing a remodel in a back yard, putting in some new trees, taking out old tree, whatever it may be. And we're like, do we need something like this to really help us out? So can you explain this to us and the listeners that don't have any idea, you know, about the portable vacuums, like what it is exactly and how they how they work and do their best.

David :
And that's actually great topic because there's a lot of people with the frame of mind that these things are just from removing real heavy debris.

David :
And the reality is, especially in the Florida market, it's used for every pool, every day. Nobody would go to work in a vacuum or the system back. It does. It has a tremendous amount of benefits. It's to start with you not even priming hoses. You are not done on your knees.

David :
Everything's ergonomic, you standing up and running all the water back through the filter and getting all that debris in your filter. So let's filter cleaning far less filter clean, which everybody hates.

David :
So what should you not priming the hose? You're not cleaning your filters anywhere near as often, maybe once a month instead of once a week. Where is it? I mean, if you run a vacuum line into it, you got to clean that filter. So you eliminate that problem. You you can literally take in many cases. A, what would be an hour long job and turn into a 10 or 50 minute job. It's just a huge difference. Once a person does start using a powered vacuum, a riptide, they can not ever go back to not using it because you've become so much more productive that there's no way possible to get through your day without your machine.

Matt:
I would say we get, you know, at least one email or call a week from a customer that bought it, used it for maybe it was just a day or maybe a couple days thanking us, you know, because how much it actually transformed their job. You know, I've had companies that have gone from two guys cleaning a pool down to just staring at the sun. One guy or, you know, they were taking, you know, pulls over, taking fifty minutes or an hour, and now they're doing it in 15, 20 minutes. So it's a TrueTouch timesaver. That's awesome.

Tyler:
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Greg:
So let's start from the beginning. Say I were to call you guys or by went online and arrived at, you know, our shop. What what happens next? Do we. Are we putting some kind of deal on the back of the truck? You know, so that you guys have a rack that comes with it, right?

Matt:
Yes. So if if you're if you get the SL model, which has the car and the hitch mount and the vacuum, it it it'll the rack that comes with it will go into any two inch receiver. So it's just gonna, you know, slide right in the back of your receiver. You're going to put your cart together, which is about eight bolts and a couple set screws.

Greg:
You positive not get into a situation?

Matt & David:
I don't think it's a situation, like I put it.

Matt & David:
I put a girl to the last night and I was like, oh, my God, this thing is a lot of pieces. And you could tell it's still in your garage and pieces.

Pool Chasers:
Ninety nine percent there. They're so sad. It gets put together and it's like nothing.

David :
It's like that's what took you five hours to build a little grill. I was I was like, oh, man, I can't believe the riptide on the seas. Incredibly simple. There's literally just put on the axle. You put on the battery pads in the handlebar and that's it.

David :
So, I mean, it's in it's ships of incredibly cost effectively. That was a big part of our design effort was to be sure that these things would break down, go into a box of a reasonable size. Yeah, it's oversized for shipping, but it's it's very much within the realm of reality for UBS. And we can ship it anywhere in the country for no more than $65.

David :
Yeah. And now to touch back on your original question. So you get it, you're going to put it together, which isn't really that hard. I estimate, you know, first time doing it, it's probably 40 minutes. You know, maybe a little bit longer. It depends on how everything depends on how handy our tools. Right. You're gonna buy a battery at the buy your own battery. Just a deep cycle marine battery. Very common batteries are sold at Costco, Wal-Mart, AutoZone. Oh, most of those places haven't. Yeah. Yeah. They sell the battery that way. It's local and you get your own, you know, your battery warranty locally. Right. Plus it idea.

Pool Chasers:
Is that your solution? He said.

Greg:
I know you're in Florida. There's a lot more boats and stuff like that.

Pool Chasers:
So it would make sense anyway because it's still gonna be like a Havi battery. Oh, so just taking batteries. Yeah.

Matt:
Jetskis or you know, even your little they're definitely sold everywhere. It's very common. So you're going to buy your battery and put your battery in it, charge it up obviously with just a twelve volt car battery charger, basically.

Tyler:
What's the reason that they don't work on with the batteries.

Tyler:
Just curious of the batteries themselves.

Matt:
A very heavy first of all f for shipping reasons when you can't ship a lead acid battery.

Matt & David:
Yes, but battery is something that it goes to incredible amount of duty cycles because these guys are using it in charging and discharging it every single day. So batteries are less than a year.

David :
Therefore, yeah, if you get a typical run of the mill battery, you're talking replacing it annually, probably it may be 18 months. That's probably the average. And if you spend, you know, three, four hundred dollars for battery as you people get in multiple years out of them, but most people just go for that run of the mill battery.

Matt & David:
But so there's no sense in us, including a battery with it besides us, you get a warranty waste or hazardous materials and it would just complicate and it's better that, you know, it's warranty locally.

Matt:
So you have a problem with a battery, which is pretty common actually. Just run down your shop, get a new battery. They weren't here. It's like your car, right. And you're back up and running.

Greg:
Very good. And is there. So you got it all hooked up, you go to the first pool and you want to take this thing into the backyard. I've seen some videos that people can watch on how you take it off. So what is the next step?

Matt:
Once you will this to the pool, you're gonna take the power plug. You're going to plug the power cord into the front of the unit. You're gonna hook your pole up, put your bag on. Actually, you're not gonna pull your Paul Anka, put the bag on, tossed the cable and hook your pole up, flip the switch and you're vacuuming. Beth, in 30 seconds.

Greg:
And I know you guys have different like Μ bags. Do you recommend one bag or the other depending on what's going on, an apple?

Matt & David:
Absolutely. So, you know, we have our corser bags, which are for your leaves or your heavy pickup. You know, you come in that pulls just. Dumped with leaves, he'd want to use that because the bags stronger, bags stronger, it also allows more water to go through the bag quickly.

David :
So you get the float to capture the big stuff and you don't really want to slow down that debris travel as it's going through the water. Is it bigger? Two notes? It actually is same size, same size. We you know, we did experiment with larger bags, but nobody seemed to like bags at a certain point, just cumbersome and pain the neck. So we we went down. Everybody seems to like the size as it is now. But as when we ship a riptide, it comes with a 100 micron bag, which is actually pretty fine bag for for the industry.

David :
It would typically be considered a fine or a very fine bag.

David :
We developed a ring that our bag is sewn onto in. It snaps onto the machine in a matter it's impossible for it to blow off. That said, that would allow us to run, you know, even something that didn't allow any water through the plastic bag on there. Of course, we won't back him at that point, though. Once a bag plugs, it does not vacuum. So but the but the bag ring itself. The industry has always had a problem with bags blowing off these machines. It drives people absolutely nuts because it happens at the worst possible moment after you already clean the pool. It's got maximum pressure on the inside of that bag and all of a sudden it just blows off and you're starting all over again.

Pool Chasers:
It's not even starting all over again, because all I can do is raise the load, order Congress passes and go back.

David :
That absolutely drives people bonkers. So. So we developed this ring. It was a very important part of the of the design of this thing. And it's been incredibly positive, really. Really a great thing. But it does allow us to run any micron bag that we want to with respect to the fact that it won't blow off.

David :
That said, you still have to choose the right micron bag based on your your debris because you don't want to cause undue restrictions. You do want to choose a bag that will allow as much water flow through while still capturing what you need to capture.

Matt:
And you don't want to use one of the really fine bags, you know, for for vacuuming up heavy leaves and heavy debris because it's fine. It's it's a delicate cloth. So you don't want to, you know, rip up the $35 bag when you should exit.

Matt & David:
Yeah. To do something. That was actually something we had a challenge with for a little while. We just recently overcame it with all of our finer bags because again, we can run the finer microns consistently with all of the final bags are now double bagged where we do a 400 micron over the outside of it's basically an exoskeleton for the finer cloths. And since we did that, we've put several hundred down as is test at this point. And the response has been 100 percent positive, not a single complaint. It was funny because we are with our original bags. The court was holding up very well for a lot of people. Some people get in 17 months out of a bag, which is unheard of. It's crazy how long it was lasting. Other people who use those literally sometimes two balls. And so so we're literally looking at two poles or eight months in. How do you get these two numbers to come closer together? To be sure, everybody gets a good, fair shake and they get their money's worth out of these bags. And that is something that was actually a bit of a challenge. We experiment with all kinds of cloths and different just different things. But it was as simple as just plain doing a double layer bag.

Greg:
Right. And what does that look like when you're all done vacuuming up the pool? You just bring the whole entire thing up. How is how are you not dumping all this material back when you're bringing it back?

David :
You actually leave it running and take the machine out of the pool. Bags kind of flop over the front of the vacuum and you pull it up, which basically acts like a valve. It's a very, very rudimentary, simple valve. So you just as you're pulling the machine towards you, you do it fast enough that it flops the bag over to the front of the machine. It blocks off the path for anything to read to come out of the bag. And you just keep going, pull it out of the pool and then shut the machine off after you remove it from the wall. If you shut it off in the water, it's going to drop exactly high. And it won't necessarily. I mean, if yeah. If you were you I mean, you could certainly do things to keep that from happening as well. But the easiest thing to do is just leave it running as you draw the machine back towards you to do it quick enough to to cause that bag to flop over it. Probably just an incredibly effective valve. But but it is something it's actually good question because it's something that people sometimes call uswith because they do something a little off in their technique and then they can have some back pressure, which right at the as it purges comes out of the water. It will it can just do a little puff of debris back out of it. So it's as simple as just draw the machine back quick enough that it flops over the front of it, pinches it off and it will prevent that.

Greg:
Right. And with that fine bag, be good for vacuuming up dirt.

Pool Chasers:
Like if we have a pool that's covered in dirt, you know, it's an interesting term, dirt, sand where it doesn't matter. And then everybody calls that dirt different thing. Are you. Different all across the country, you learned and even sad.

David :
You guys and you guys in Arizona. We had a customer in Arizona who bought several riptides all at once and tried the 60 micron bags, which he said plugged instantly for him with your really fine sand. And he ended up where he said it was it was blowing through the 100 micron bag. So he ended up going with 75 micron bags and he said they work unbelievably well. And is that something you sell or he got that from somewhere? No, we saw. Oh, so we did. We yeah, we do. We do a pretty wide range. We do 60 micron. One hundred micron is what we call standard. Below that we have a 75 micron and then we have a 60 micron. The micron, the smaller the number the the finer the bag.

David :
And then above the 100 micron the standard bag is 200 micron. Then we have a 400 micron and then we have a heavy net bag, which is about a 16's hole in a net. And then we have a fountain bag, which is the one hundred micron cloth on a short bag. Just so if the bag fills up with sand, it won't get dragged on the ground or if they're just in shallow water. Lot of people that are that are doing fountains need to. That's why we call it fountain bag. They need to be in a vacuum without the bag just flopping down, gets sucked up into the machine gun.

Greg:
And maybe guys can just break down the the overall cart itself because it's a slick lookin rig. Every time I see it, I'm like, damned good thing. Looks like a like a modified sweep BMX bike, you know, with the get the.

David :
Yeah. And it's funny because, you know, some people think they're gonna they're gonna go to like some people, you know, some people buy the XP model, which is the one with the carrying battery box because that's all they can really get into their yards in California has places like that that are just so tight they can't possibly get a carton to them. Other people buy it because they don't have the money to go to spring for the car, which is why we do financing on our Web site. And it does help a lot of people get through that right away and get the cart. But the cart drives a lot of the productivity. So to not get the car is kind of a shame. It's the machines not doing everything it's supposed to do. It's the whole idea is to drive productivity less trips back and forth to your truck, which you know, all that which drives productivity. Yeah, yeah.

Greg:
But if you could, like, you know, break down from top to bottom.

Pool Chasers:
I mean, just getting people familiar with are fully aluminum.

Matt:
It's echoed in aluminum and we powder coat over that. So e coating is a process. They do it a car frame.

Matt & David:
And that's something we actually just started doing research in the past year. We weren't happy with the way the powder coat was holding up. So it's not always a thing before powder. It just it it tends to on aluminum, it tends to you get a chip or something and it would just be enough to start it chipping. I mean, peeling off and in failing, basically a failure of the coating. So we went ahead and we got real serious about improving coating this past year. We invested in a brand new product line, but that's really only half the battle. We had to figure out how we were going to treat the metal beforehand and we bought blast cabinets that blast all sides at the same time. We can get a perfect profile on the aluminum now before coating. But the most important thing we actually that's an extremely important process as well. But we we invested a lot into being able to e coat these before we powder co.

David :
So it's really a whole new animal with regards to how the powder coat holds up and and and what e coating is for.

Matt & David:
You know, everybody's not familiar is they do it on car frames a lot to keep the frames from rusting out, rotting out. So it's a submersion process of the whole car and all the tubing for it's getting dipped into a vat basically and dragged along. And it's an electrostatic coating, but it's coating the inside of the tubing because powder coating does matter how much you spray, you're never going to coat the inside of a tube, not really inside the tubing, but every single nook and cranny well--well on the handlebars of a coat, the inside of tubing. But it basically acts as a hardened primer to giving something for the powder coat to really adhere to.

Pool Chasers:
And as far as the cart goes, that's always been a big failure point for for this type of machine is because it's hollow tubing, of course, which is it's actually a very heavy wall, hollow tubing. But the places that were failing the most, we went ahead and use solid aluminum rod. So we basically have a over an inch diameter, solid aluminum rod where it goes into the transport, reckoned really takes the bulk of the abuse as these things bounce and down the road. That has been a really positive thing. We haven't and we've never had a single failure of the car in that manner. I never thought about that.

Greg:
This thing is cruising down the road and it's you know, you're on a on a rough road. That's great, isn't it? Oh, there's never been one that's popped off.

David :
Oh, yeah. People people close them from time to time. We try to get them to use safety pins all the time. If they get the cord stuck under the the dog. So if you were to use the safety pin all the time, though, it ensures that the latch is properly closed and there's no way it can possibly come off. OK. So everybody out there has a riptide or is thinking about it. Use your say you is your safety pin.

Greg:
People ain't worth it. Having nothing on the road. Down the road. No way.

Matt:
But some of the other features on the card, it's got two storage bands. So like I said earlier, you know, maximize the you know, your time. You don't want to be going back and forth to the car. You know that 30 seconds here, 30 seconds there. That all adds up to real time at the end of the day. So you could carry your chemicals, you carry your test kit. You're not you're not taking those chips back and forth.

David :
And just as importantly, those things are actually staying in the cart while you're transporting. So this thing all you do is you hit a lever in the machine, pivots down, is on the ground, just drop it on the ground pretty much instantaneously within within 10 seconds. That machine's off the back of the truck and you're pulling it towards the back yard.

Tyler:
And that's not a feature here.

Matt:
Yes, I can hear it from your truck, you know, sliding around and then you're trying to reach back there, jump back up in your truck to try to get it. So it makes it really, really convenient.

Greg:
You're watching a video. David Van Brunt it like a year ago. And it looks super easy. Just kind of putting it on, taking it off.

David :
Yeah. It was one thing that we did on this also is typically there's there's always been a mechanism that you had to hold the machine up with one hand. A lot of people hurt their backs doing it. Matter of fact, my my wife hurt her back. She could you picture you trying to hold it up, you twisting and you're trying to reach and pull that lever. So we went ahead and designed this one so you can stand behind it square and you just lift it and it snaps and holds itself up there and providing providing you snap in another way and that dog's down. It's not coming off. mass-produce your safety pin? Well, the main thing with using the safety pin is this. It's not just about the dog not being able to popoff. It is it is the fact that it ensures the dog is all the way down, that you don't have something stuck underneath it, that you don't have something in the bin that's poking up and in keeping the Lache from coming down and locking the car on properly because the pin will not go in unless that dog is properly latched on. Right.

Tyler:
So what about the vacuum features itself? I mean, you've done some cool like the debris guard, your steel rollers, your steering knuckle. All of that is kind of newer you guys have gone through. Yeah, there's like some of those features that you guys have taken time.

Tyler & David:
And now you just talked about the step. All that was on the original version. You know, was on the original version. We went ahead and did away with that because nobody was using. Okay. Met fact. Most people didn't even know it was there. They literally never used it. We could we came to realize they were never using it because every time we saw one, it was never touched. It was never it was obviously not getting anywhere in there. I didn't know that. So what we did is originally we had a pole coupler that we thought was the best thing in the world and it was a quick connect.

Matt & David:
So you could just you know, instead of using the V clips or the butterfly clips was a system, you just take your pole, snap it on and you'd have like a release lever right on. It was Celek. It was it was a cool setup.

David :
Yeah. And it and it still is honestly we still Salla but we don't include it with the units anymore actually. It still says it is online so anyone that buys it while it still says that we'll get it if they want it. But a lot of people didn't want to use it. They didn't want to do anything different. They didn't want to. They just don't wanna go to the learning curve. Or in some cases, it really was impractical for them. A larger company, they can't get all the people on board with it. So at any rate, we redesigned we came out with an incredibly heavy duty staring knuckle that's all cast stainless steel.

Matt & David:
And now you just took your pole up, you know, with the old fashion pins stacked the same way you always have.

David :
So there's no special adapter anymore that you need in that poll, coupled with the intention of it, was this this this class of Klina has always had a problem where it's a large machine compared to those those pins which were designed to hold a little homeowner type vacuum and a leaf rake. They were never designed or intended to hold this kind of machine, especially with a soft aluminum pole. So the poles tear out the holes constantly on these things. And with the pole coupler on there, it completely eliminates that terror problem. So again, we thought it was going to be the best thing in the world and absolutely everybody was gonna go nuts about it. But the reality was, is they have to people did love it in the other house. People absolutely hated it and didn't want anything to do with it. So we faced that reality as well. It in in readers at this dare not go. It was kind of the stair knuckle got kind of goofy to begin with because we had to do several different adapters and things. And again, this is why it's it's nice that we design everything in-house. We're able to pull a single component out on the computer screen and just start reworking it and reconfiguring it and designing until we get a cool until we get it right in that we 3D printed and test it. Yeah, which was important because you have to check all your angles. You have to check to be sure that everything's functioning well. So the 3-D printing these days is amazing for that. But at any rate, so the second version of the staring knuckle became at first B A first because we did all with add ons in adapters and things like that. It became cumbersome still it became large. And in it's kind of ridiculous looking. It was just it was ugly all.

Pool Chasers:
And it was like, how would you treat me like, oh, my God, this thing's like we've got this.

Matt:
You know, let's say that we were where we take what we do and we have, you know, a lot of pride in what we do.

Pool Chasers:
And when I look at that, I'm like, oh, yeah, I don't want to sell this day. I'm like, Alex Thomas. I consider the riptide, my child. And I'm like, oh, you're you're ugly. I think you've got a lot of pimples on your face now. I think puberty.

Pool Chasers:
I have two questions I don't want to forget to ask them. One, is this unit loud at all? Does it have any sound? No, not really. It's totally, totally silent when it's in the water. So you're in a band very early in the morning. It's not going to wake anybody.

David :
You can't hear it at all. Zero. It's just a electric motor that's turning in the water. And you really don't hear a darn thing. Nice.

Greg:
The other one was, is there any any pointers you can give for any kind of ongoing maintenance that anyone should know about? Like you're taking care of this. This is a this is an investment. This isn't cheap. And it's going to help you in a lot of different ways. But what is some ongoing things you need to be paying attention to like after every time or weekly? Monthly.

Matt:
I would say weekly. You need to clean underneath your impeller. We have a debris guard under there that keeps hair and stringy debris from wrapping on the impeller shaft to it.

David :
You know, let's start with that. That's OK. It's been a big deal that that's a very big deal.

David :
And it's funny, too, because the first trade show we ever did was right here in Orlando and everybody kept coming up to the riptide and pulling the impeller off and saying, did you do anything to solve that problem? It was stuff rapping on the shaft. And we said, no. I mean, we didn't even know it was a problem. We didn't even know what the magnitude of the problem. If we did know it was a problem. So within a matter of months, we saw motors start to get ruined because of the mainly hair. Human hair is the worst thing for it. Raps on that shaft. It gets down inside the seals and we start pulling apart motors. They had failed and it was a deep. Grooves in the shaft, believe it or not. I can remember from the human hair.

Matt:
One case of a of a customer who was a local. So he came into the shop and he's like, I'm having a problem. And he's like, well, to clean it. Did you clean underneath your impeller? Again? I just did it. So I unscrewed the impeller and it was thermos to brewery was a bird.

Pool Chasers:
I think a rat was living, you know, like I wanted to say, you know, I'm like, oh, yeah.

Pool Chasers:
He's clean underneath. So how do you how do you answer the impeller on this? It's very simple.

Matt & David:
You could take it off in a palace like the impeller is actually a stall right here where you designed that holds the machine a very ergonomic way with the vacuum facing a vacuum facing up where you can snap back right onto it. But right underneath where the bag snaps on is the impeller.

Matt:
And it's just held on by a bright brass or a plastic nut depending on when you purchased your unit. We're using brass thousands.

David :
Yeah, we top recently developed a breast. It's funny, it's the same thing as simple little thing. The knot that holds the darn impeller on you would think it's the simplest thing in the world, right? So the one set that the manufacturers of the motor supply is plastic and the tabs tend to break off. And beyond that though, it started getting kind of weird because you think that everybody knows you have to maintain under the air and you have to clean the shaft or whatever the case may be. So fortunately, that regard took care of clean the Sharf problem, but every once in a while, a person does pull it off. They're not familiar with the machines and they don't put the impeller back on properly. So then they they put the nut back on it now. The impeller is not pinned to the shaft, so they start trying to take the knockback off at some. Oh, actually they have to take them back off because the machine won't work because it's just free spending in the water. And we actually had people that would have to cut their impeller off because they didn't put that pin in right in the not wouldn't come off. So we redevelop the knot is simple a component as it may be with a hex on it. So you can put an impact on on if you had to know, even if you don't have your pin in it, it will pull it off the pin, the plant or the part where you put the pliers on its pull it off, never break off. And we did also like a acorn nut so that you don't get sand and debris inside the threads and it always comes off smooth that way.

Greg:
And it looks cool. Man, if somebody and the older rip tide is there like a rebuild kit or something that they can.

Matt:
Yeah, and they can. You know, look, I tell everybody, all of our parts are available right on our Web site. And if you ever have any trouble, you just drop us an email, we'll send you a link to it or, you know, lets you know what's up. Yeah. Everything that we do is always retro at it always retrofits. So we don't we don't want to leave anybody out, even if that would mean, you know, giving them another component so that it worked. We don't exclude anybody. We understand that, you know, it's seventeen hundred dollars on that on the SL model. You're making a serious investment with us and we're making a series investment with you. We want to, you know, be a team and grow together. We feel like, you know, maybe only buying one riptide today, but you're going to expand and grow your company and you're going to need more. So we're gonna have your back and we want you to have our back to in that.

David :
And that's a very good statement in the reality is, as you know, originally when we started making these things, we we all hate the idea of the S.l car is we want everybody to unplug the car, the vacuum from the car every single time before they call the hort. They're caught up because when you call the cord up, if it's tethered to the car and to the vacuum head as you're coiling it, you end up with this constant twisting problem and it ends up short now and braking cords and causing lots problems. So we we always wanted the car. I mean, the vacuum unplugged from the car every time before calling it up. The problem was, is that the all the plugs on the market that we could buy were failing like crazy. I mean, we could not keep a plug on these things. And that was another component we sat down in now because the machine was basically solid. Everything was good. We were able to just focus on this plugs. We designed our own plug in. Since then, we went from a terrible failure rate on those original plugs to virtually no failure rate today. And if there is a failure, it's a simple part to go ahead and clean the contacts or or do whatever has to be done. But where it was super important in our early formative years was. We actually once we developed this fix, we we produced control panels with this plug in it with the switch, pre-wired them two bolts. The whole thing could be changed on the cart. And we developed that and it goes on the on the cord and we actually gave every single customer that plug matter fact. If anybody is out there, they have the original yellow plug. That's a free warranty, a free update that they can just could reach us rechargeable.

Matt:
You know, you get a whole, you know, control panel, which has a switch and the contacts that actually bolts on the car and then you get the end for your plug as well. So nice.

Greg:
And is there any kind of like maintenance like on the bags?

Matt:
Like how how long back to where item.

Matt:
And I know Dave touched upon it earlier now of the bags or a double layer bag. So, you know, since we've been doing that, we're getting much longer life out of the bag. So the bag is as a wear item that's expected.

Pool Chasers:
Really is. How do you know? It's it's you know, you'll have holes in it. OK. So you'll see debris starting. You'll know it literally just wears out. You get holes in it.

Matt & David:
And we're expecting now the double layer bags that everybody should be getting at least four months out of it. Now, I would say that's heavy use. Would you agree? Yes. And we honestly, it's impossible.

Pool Chasers:
No, not actions, our intellectual. You can go out and do anything. I mean, it depends on how you're just trying to hear different terms than people. You're determined you can break anything. Yeah.

Matt & David:
In real reality being, we don't really know it. But but the intention is to make sure everybody gets 30 days. But if people were getting seven or eight months out of the original bag, they're probably going to who knows where they're going to get out of these seats. But it really is impossible to say to you sucking up stakes and driving them through the bag. Or maybe just it's impossible. No. Every everybody's situation.

Matt:
Any product. And I know you're asking about maintenance. So now you know, another thing we're doing the past couple months away, including we include a motor test, cable and a contact cleaning brush. You know, straight in the box. So the motor test cables are there. So, you know, which is actually years down the road. If you have a problem, we give you all the tools to diagnose, you know, what you have going on and then you just reach out to us.

Matt:
Makes it very easy to diagnose in a couple of minutes what you have going on.

David :
And that actually brings up a very important point. So we started talking about the riptide and what we did different with the vacuum head. So we didn't we never really finished talking about that. The first thing that we did with that is we did a single piece, rotational molded vacuum head. It's the same plastic and process they used to make kayaks. So it's made to be in the sun all day, every day. It's a it's a it's so thick. It's extremely rugged and durable. I mean, when you knock on this thing, it's solid, but it's also very flexible. You can drop it on coping and it just bounces it. It means it just does nothing to it. We did ceramic ball bearings in the wheels, on the vacuums. And interestingly enough, we have machines that have been on the road for over three years now and we've never replaced a single wheel or a single bearing. You can walk up to any one of our machines that you see anywhere in the country and spin the wheels is gonna sound and looked in spin just like a skateboard. And that's basically what it is. I mean, it's the same. It's like a high end skateboard bearing, which is a solid ceramic bearing lova anology.

Pool Chasers:
Right. You're talking to the right guys. I don't think they've ever skateboard. And like, I could be wrong, but I don't think you did much skateboarding on the farm. He's right. He's too many holes too fast. There was that too many too many wild animals.

David :
So why? But going further than that, as far as maintenance of these things go, we made it so that the cord separates from the motor. So when it's time for repairs, whether you need a cord or you need a motor, you're not forced to buy the unit together. We're able to get the cost of each item way down. That has been hugely beneficial to the customers. And that's where we're at. Matt started talking about the motor test cable. So if if a riptide head was to go dead in, in, in, you don't know what's wrong with it. You need to be the diagnose and figure out what's going on with it. We don't we designed this riptide specifically so that everybody can do their own maintenance. There's no need to send it to anybody. You can literally with this test cable, if your head was dead, you would simply unscrew the cord from the motor plug this test cable in, test the motor independently from the cord. And if it works, you know, you have a court issue if it doesn't work. You have a motor issue. And it's really as simple as that.

Matt:
And I know a lot of, you know, companies say that their product is user serviceable. Ah, surely is, you know, a couple of handles. You know, you could pull a motor out in five, 10 minutes. Helen, by three bolts, you know, the whole control panel comes off. That's Harlem. That's all your wiring that's held on by two bolts. And there's not that many wires, only like four wires.

Matt & David:
Well, that's in the back. There's only two of that plane in the. And they yes. Hook them up to the battery. So it's a very literal ten minute I change a control panel done in a job to change a motor.

David :
It's a ten minute job to change a cord.

Matt:
It's it's just very, very, very it comes off the whole diagnostic guide and the user manual and we're actually in the process for about a month ago we filmed all these tutorial videos that are going to be on our Web site. So, you know, tutorials for everything.

Greg:
Oh, you have some that are going to be coming out.

Matt:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Our whole Web site's is going to is in the process of being up to being updated.

Pool Chasers:
That's really cool that you guys eyes stand. Dan, if I if I actually had some time and I wasn't going to every trade show country, it probably would be done. Yeah, but are.

Greg:
Yeah, that's cool that, you know, educating the people out there on, you know, the riptide vacuum so that if there's anything that ever happens, it sounds like it's pretty easy to be able to diagnose what's going on.

David :
Make a goal for us. We do it. We do it with people, with customers right over the phone, some nice customers that aren't not that mechanically savvy. They give us a call and there's nothing that we can't troubleshoot and get to the bottom of. I had a guy call the other day. He. It's funny, too, because he calls and he said, point my machines making all this weird noise. And so he said, I could hear it on the phone while he's on the with me. And I said, pull your impeller up your pillow, you impeller pins not lined up with the shirt with the. The impeller itself. And he's a really. You can tell that in it, I said that we check. So he takes it off in, he looks and he said, damn, you're right. He puts the thing back together and it's perfectly quiet.

Greg:
So he doesn't freak Amalia's like you. You run him.

Pool Chasers:
You see the cameras on these. It was funny. It was really funny the way it all went down.

Matt & David:
But really, the whole thing is designed to be sure that these guys you know, it's funny, like I said earlier, their productivity, our customers productivity goes through the roof when they get one of these things and they cannot afford to be down. They really cannot afford to be down. So it's important that that when they have a problem, they can fix it as quickly as humanly possible. You know, more prudent customers will end up when they get a little age on the machine, they're going to keep a cord on the shelf, motor on the shelf, maybe even a whole control panel on the shelf. And then then if they have to switch at the old one or something. But no matter what. They literally 10 minutes away from from keep making sure that their machines up and running.

Greg:
I think it's a great marketing piece too. I feel like when I see any truck that has a riptide back on it, that they're like a real pro.. That is not messing around. You know, it's it's somebody that, you know, just cares about cleaning up.

Matt:
You know, I tell everybody, you know, if you hired a handy man and he showed up and he had a stick with a brick taped to it as a hammer, you know, you're gonna feel confident about that guy working on your house or forgot. You know, you show up a, you know, professional looking. It goes a long way.

David :
I think in a lot of our customers have told us even that they actually market themselves as not using and abusing the customer's equipment, which I thought was an interesting angle. It was something I had never considered before. But they say that because farmers actually respond to that, they seem to like that aspect of them showing up with a self-contained machine like this.

Greg:
I don't know if I mean, just being honest, I don't know if I would pitch that to them. I would more like I have the equipment to be able to vacuum this up. You know what I mean? Because you're still we still want to clean that filter every six months extra that it's all right, you know, optimize. I mean, because you still need to do that regardless if you're doing that by.

Greg & Tyler:
You know, it's still like a maybe take away some of your other opportunities to make money if you sell it to art on that.

Greg:
But but that's an awesome thing because you're not running that pool as hard as you have to. Like you said, you're having a sink hose and you might be, you know, bogging down the pump. This is like a unit you can bring back there and you don't ever have to rely on their equipment. You don't know what's been going on. You don't know at this time last week. Exactly. This is your rig that you're bringing into a backyard. You get to control the maintenance on it. If anything goes wrong and it's not sucking, something's going on. You already know what to do on this equipment. You might not be the right person to go back there in, you know, troubleshoot, you know, the filter of the pump.

David :
Exactly. You know, it it's it's actually it's it is interesting to see how people do approach different aspects of the business and the benefits that they get from it and how they perceive things and how professional they become and in marketing their services. And and I guess that's what separates people in the customers that they get.

Tyler:
Yeah, I agree. Absolutely. Anything else you wanna touch base in a vacuum before move on?

David :
You know, we talked about the car earlier. You know, big an incredibly important feature of that cart that was so important to me because while I used to maintain a the old system that my my wife would use and it was absolutely ridiculously difficult to work on the battery made to get out of the car and put it back in. It would oh, I'd get so mad, you know, because I'm going I'm going out there nine to ten o'clock at night sometime to work on this thing. And it should be minutes to pull a battery out and work on it. And instead it would drive me while then I I'm very obviously I built this thing so I'm very mechanically inclined person at that. They've got to brag about how tall you must've been.

Pool Chasers:
Mad Man made a company. I thought he was I was six foot. So I said, I'm sorry, man.

David :
I consider myself to be mechanically, but I'm telling you, the batteries were so hard work on these things and it would chew up your knuckles trying to get them back in. And then just as you're getting a man, they fall down through the frame and they yell to pull him completely back out. So we designed ours with a spring rod and you can literally slide the battery out onto the ground and within 30 seconds, check your water, clean your turmoils to which you have to do, slide it back in and slap this spring right back on there. That is a simple little thing again. But it's so important to make these things user friendly and to make things what they should be.

Tyler:
You know, you can tell from the whole conversation is that you guys have really spent an enormous amount of time on all these small details, which I think, you know, us understanding. And, you know, we've looked at doing different products and doing different things. We understand how much time in detail and how much you guys spend on doing that kind of stuff and how often goes overlooked. A lot of times like people I don't if you're not a manufacturer or.

David :
Yeah, there's no way anybody would appreciate or understand. And people do that.

Matt:
They they can tell, you know, the quality and the thought that goes behind it because, you know, it's oh, it's always funny from our customers. It's always seems like there's one thing, one feature that they see that they like that they latch on to is it had maybe a guest. And also that was what was their issue in the past. So it's always funny. Like, you know, it could be the bags for somebody or could be the battery compartment for somebody else.

Pool Chasers:
There you plan. Exactly how I saw my problem. We see it. It's pretty awesome.

Matt:
It's pretty cool, you know, feeling, you know, when when do we like wow. We made this. We you know, we made their life a little bit easier.

Greg:
And, you know, it just shows how smart you guys are. And you're actually listening to the to the customers because you guys weren't out cleaning pools.

David :
I mean, like for years to be able to be like, oh, know both of us really never did, you know, cleaning professionally. My closest associates from with it was the fact that my wife did it. And the. I did do all of the maintenance on her machine, though, and I saw the shortcomings. I was already doing product design. But this was this was a big endeavor. This wasn't something, oh, I think I'll do this. This was how long was it, man? Five years at least. I think it was maybe closer to seven.

Matt:
I think closer to seven, you know, with the touch upon it, you know? Where I was earlier, Dave Dave's a thinker, so he's always looking at ways to improve something or make something better. And that's what that's what he was trying to do. And I think we, you know, achieve that goal.

Tyler:
But you're taking the customers feedback quite a bit. I mean. Oh, yeah, from from the customers that we've talked to that use it and from our previous conversations that we've had. I can tell that that's very valuable.

Greg:
A smart company would be at a trade show. That would be a big piece of it.

David :
We actually love. We love the customer feedback. Love it. Eat it up. Because, you know, it's a lot of it. A lot of it. You probably can't do too much with. But all it takes is that one utterance, something somebody tells you that really matters.

David :
And now you can incorporate it. Now you can you can start going in that direction. So we absolutely love to get that feedback and we can utilize it if we possibly can.

Matt & David:
If there's anything that we can do to make the product better. Right. You know, there's an interesting again, on the. Simple little thing we when we when we started. Designing this thing we wanted smooth tires for it seems like the simplest thing in the world, right? You think he'd gaily go out and buy online? So again, scoured the planet looking for a smooth car tire that we could just buy. They didn't exist. Everybody has tread on their tires, but we didn't want tread because when you pulled the machine through the dirt just before you get up onto that, decades now loaded with dirt in the treads and you put tracks all across the deck. So we actually had to go out and mold our own tires for this darn cart at a significant cost, of course.

Pool Chasers:
But we were committed to the concept of smooth tires. So we did. They're solid, right? This solid. Solid. And you begin flats, I guarantee. All right. Let's do it.

Matt:
And so with the concept, with the with the smooth tires, you just carry a rag with you and lean the cart forward and spin the tires, get all the mud off. Now, you're not tracking it all across the deck and not having to worry about cleaning it. Or if you have employees, you know, you got to worry about your employees not cleaning it and getting the phone call from the customer. You think there's mud all over my deck? All right. All right.

Pool Chasers:
That's crazy. It it seems it seems like such a goofy thing, right? You would not think. We don't think that. Yeah. Yeah. You just wouldn't think it would be such a thing.

Tyler:
And that's that's what's fun about the podcast. You just get to hear pieces like that. You guys just talk about and that's what I enjoy most like about it is just getting these little bits of information that you're remembering like, oh yeah, this is this is what we did. And it's cool to hear those stories for sure about how the products are developed. It leads us to my next question, really. But, you know. Yes, selling direct to customers. Why? I know part of the reason why. But why did you choose to do take that route?

Matt:
It was the only way that I knew for a fact that we could provide the best customer service in the industry. There's no middlemen. There's no hoops to jump through. You call our 800 number. You know, eight to five Monday through Friday Eastern Time. We're going to answer that phone. We're going to have the answers that you need. We're going to you know, there's nothing we haven't heard or encountered yet that we can't figure out.

Matt & David:
And if you need a part, like I said, these people are going to rely on this machine so much they can't afford to go to a distributor who forgets to make the phone call, who doesn't have the part in their inventory system or whatever the case may be. And they have the special order. And we hear nightmare's now of our competition. The people using their machines in not getting parts for weeks. You have parts for us the next year. And I don't think it's the manufacturer's fault necessarily. I think it's a supply chain. So to be fair, it's the supply chain. And we thought originally that we were going to go do go through distribution. And it became evident very quickly that we could not uphold the service and quality that we expect to to supply our customers. And never mind the fact the technical aspect of it is simple as the machine is, somebody still has to be capable of helping these customers, at least get them through the learning curve of whatever it may be, obviously, once they know it. Once you know something, it's always easy, but sometimes you need a little assistance in you. We cannot have our customers, our people using our product, walk into a store and get an indifferent attitude from a person, sit behind a desk.

Matt:
Yeah, we we are, you know, a customer service company as much as we are pull vaccuum company. You know, like I said earlier, if you're buying from us, we're investing in you and you're in investing in us. That's what we believe in. We're gonna have your back. So. There's no way you'd be able to do that through distribution. All right.

Tyler:
That's a really cool, cool way to look at it, for sure.

Matt:
Yeah. And we love we love it. I love talking to our customers. I love getting the feedback. I love that personal touch that we can provide.

Greg:
And that's cool that you have, you know, a database not to get too technical, but a database of, you know, past customers information so that you can figure out, like email them all and say, hey, you know, do you have any suggestions? How do you like this? Here's a new retrofitted, you know, equipment like it's you can't really do that if you're selling, you know, to the masses through this.

Matt & David:
You have no idea who you know. Yeah. And that's so important. You're right. Because we actually have people, especially when we first change that plug in, we were having that plug failure problem. We would have people call up in auto bags, for instance, would quickly run the history and we'd see that they got a machine within a certain date range and say, hey, you got a yellow plug when you machine in. We have a update for that.

Matt:
So free update when I send you the parts and people that well and I need am I having a problem, then we're like, yeah, we're gonna give it to you. So when you do have a problem now you're not down.

David :
You already have the parts on top of that. You know, typically if you buy through distribution, you buy through a distributor somewhere. You have to register the product to get a warranty. You have I mean, you have to jump through hoops, which a lot of people never do. I know I buy a lot of hand tools, is supposed to have a lifetime warranty if you just register them and I never register them.

Pool Chasers:
Banking having to do it. I'd never do it. And I know that the banking on it and I just can't bring myself to read it.

Matt & David:
And I have registered different things throughout time and I can't remember where or how or what. You know, I just don't know. But with us, every one of our customers can call in. We can look them up. We can see if they have a warranty and, you know, with us to it. If anything, we are guilty of over warranty. We don't really care that it's a year warranty. We would care about making it right if we know that there was a problem with something. It's not a it's not about the time period. It was a problem. It gets fixed for free, period. We send them that. Pado And you can read online. People talk about that. They know that that's what we do. And it's the right thing to do for customers. We're not looking to arbitrarily hitti a fictional date and not be responsible for something. If we did have a failure, we definitely don't want to sell people. We we have we actually have people that will order apart sometimes on the Internet and we'll look up there in the system and we'll see what the age with the machine was and say that's a warranty item. So we'll refund them the money. Give me a call and let me know that we refunded them. And this part's coming up for free.

Matt:
And most of the times in that situation, it's because the part's been updated. Yeah.

Tyler:
What's a big customer service move? I mean, you're keeping track. Keep those customers for life.

Matt:
You know, that's the thing. It's you. We make the customer happy. What's he going to do? He's gonna go out and tell everybody at his supply house, which he's got to go home to anyways. All right. Distribution center buys cans. Somebody is going to come up to him and say, hey, how do you like a vacuum? Other they agree. So we take care of the customer. They're going to take care of us.

Pool Chasers:
All right. Facebook group, they're all over that now. When you get all your know news, well, you mentioned financing earlier.

Tyler:
If someone needs to do that or wants to do that, how would they go about did that?

Matt:
Very simple. So we work with a company called a firm. You've probably seen them on other Web sites, pretty massive company in the world of Internet financing. You get pre-qualified to literally you know, I use the other day to buy a mattress, you know, myself online. It took all 10 seconds. It was actually I was pretty impressive. I've never actually gone through the whole process myself. All right. I you know, I'm like, I'm going to try to buy it with a firm because let me see how this goes. And I was blown away, how quick it is. So on our Web site, you would just click a button, says Pre-qualify. Now you put in your cell phone number, I think. They text to code. And then the Ali asks, what is the last four digits of your social? There's no hard credit check. And they're gonna come back, you know, right away with what the what the terms. So, you know.

Matt & David:
Yeah, it's amazing. People think they're going to have to fill out a form or something, a real questionnaire. But it's not. It's absolutely blows my mind. What is a Social Security number? Oh, no, no, not even so. Your last webpage or what else?

Pool Chasers:
And your date of birth? Well, even though they know everything. I don't know that they can actually do it in 10 seconds. You know, it's actually funny.

Matt & David:
It's like they know if it's your phone that you're using or not, like if you tried to use somebody else's phone. Well, we we originally made the mistake of trying to help a customer, and they immediately called us and said, don't you ever do that again. We're pulling it. Yeah. Yeah. Is it like we didn't even know it wasn't allowed. But we saw the ad is in my office.

Matt:
But we also offer, you know, a big thing is zero percent financing right on our website.

David :
So it's actually really, really that's actually a great way for customers to to break into this thing. It's it's zero percent financing, even if they do have the money sitting there ready to go. It's 7 percent financing. There's no sense really strapping themselves. Take advantage of that. It's a great way to go ahead and get the machine and not be strapped whatsoever.

Greg:
And what's usually the turnaround if, like, say, we're on the West Coast or Arizona?

Matt:
How long before we are for a vacuum? It be to the West Coast about by business days for parts being get it there however fast you need it next day. You know, if it's a warranty thing or, you know, a lot of our parts or bags shipped out, priority mail, which is to day service. Oh, yeah, everything.

Matt & David:
We keep everything in stock. There's not a single nut or bolt or piece of that or you don't have we would not have in stock that we can can't get out. Everything can go out that day.

Matt:
A very big thing for us. We're we don't want any back orders or anything, not in stock ever.

David :
It's interesting, too, because sometimes customers machines go their old machines go dead or whatever the case may be. So whatever they were using. Now they want to try it. Riptide. So they they'll call up and they're panicking because they don't have a machine. And we happened to be straight across the street from U.P.S. and they closed late.

Matt & David:
What time did they say close? I like a second. Literally, it was like they tell us that they're really in trouble. They need this. Anybody in Florida, certainly we get it over there and they'll have it the next day.

Matt:
Oh. So we literally just put out a little hand truck, dolly, and walk it across the street and drop it off.

David :
Yeah, I love that place.

Greg:
And I know we talked about this a little bit, but these all come with a 10 year warranty.

Matt:
Correct. So that no, that's not yet the case. The plastic housing has a 10 year warranty. OK. Everything else has a one year walkies.

David :
And the movie do that because we're trying to prove to the industry that we solved the problem. There's always been a problem with this class of cleaner where the cases just don't hold up. And we're trying to prove to the community that we solved that problem. So we do a 10 year warranty on the vacuum case itself and the rest is one year.

Greg:
Ok, cool. And what does that process look like? Pretty much when somebody buys it. Is that them registering for it or they still.

Matt & David:
Yeah. Because we sell direct. Ninety nine percent of the time we have a record of that sale. We can look it up. Beyond that, honestly, as long as they can prove to us that they have a failure and you're on the side of, you know, make the customer happy.

David :
Yeah. We've only seen a few cases get broken out of war.

David :
I'm actually shocked that anybody could ever break one of these cases because they're so ridiculously adorable. But some people we had people drive over them with the truck, literally. They had the battery box unit. They put it down behind the truck and drive over and just crush it.

David :
But we still warranty the case.

Matt:
They said, hey, you're having a bad day, so we'll help you out.

Greg:
Very good. Thanks, guys. And where can people get. More information about you guys in riptide.

Matt:
So riptide calm are Instagram's riptide však or Facebook is riptide back? Our phone number eight hundred seven thirty five thirty twenty nine. SALES at replied.. backon were were easy to get ahold of. I pride myself on how easy we are to get hold of them. We're not hiding somewhere.

Greg:
Right. And you guys are. Is there any other trade shows besides the one here in Florida going on? You're gonna be a. So you guys gonna be a Long Beach? Yep.

Matt:
We'll be in Long Beach Boys and Beach. Yeah. Love that area of the country.

Greg & Tyler:
Oh, yeah. That's a sweet show. It's a big service show, that's for sure.

Pool Chasers:
Oh, we love the California shows in general. We go up to Monterey and it's a tiny show, but it's just such a darn nice place that we go. Yeah, I think I feel like I've been a show somewhere to go there on the Long Beach show that starts at, you know, late at night, like I think it's like 6:30 or something.

Matt:
So I'm like to get the whole day in California. This is an episode, right?

Greg:
So is there any, you know, books or podcasts or anything like that that's had any kind of impact on you guys?

Matt:
His like, you know what a book I've read recently, the past year called Rework. I don't know if you guys have read it as a base camp. Yeah. But base camp book. Yeah. You know, basically meetings are useless. Planning is dumb.

Matt & David:
Yeah. You know, because that's the last book I read too, because we're sitting next to each other. I think Dana was so easy. We both read it before we land.

Matt:
We don't read so good. But no.

Matt:
You know, it sounds weird to say that stuff, but it's true. It's like you could plan all day long. But if you don't actually got there, do it. You don't know what's going to happen, right?

Tyler:
Yeah. And you got to execute the plan. Yeah. There's no time to call me.

Matt:
Yeah. Interesting. As far as podcasts I listen to, I'm a Big Planet Money fan. I just love to hear about other businesses and the way things work out there.

Pool Chasers:
So, yeah, there are some great podcasts out there. I have to get used to this microphone thing. Sorry about that. Do you have any books or podcasts that you like? You know, I don't read a whole lot, to be honest with them. Most most reading that I do is it's technical stuff, manuals. I can't stand reading stories or novels or any of that useless to me. I just I've never been able to get into.

Matt:
Basically, I keep Dave locked in his office in front of the computer.

Matt:
I can slide off laughing a like you sit in design. That's my job.

David :
He just built me a new computer at my house. You should see it. Get this forty nine inch monitor lines for you. Those things are amazing.

David :
I'm trying to do more work in the guise of productivity.

David :
I'm like, yeah. Does that make you more productive? Get get in there.

Greg:
Oh, hey, thank you guys so much for taking the time to be with us on the show. We really appreciate it. We think that this was a really fun and very educational episode. So, you know, it's good being here in Florida. We appreciate you guys.

David :
Thank you, guys. It's if you if he can be any assistance, give us a call and we'd be happy to help anybody out that needs us spiritually. A lot of fun.

Tyler:
Yeah, it's been really cool. A lot to listen. Hear your ideas and see you guys. The sparkle in your eyes and like light up when you're talking about it's something you don't get to see a lot and you can tell that you really enjoy what you do. And that's a big deal cause you're talking earlier about, you know, the system teaches you that you should know what you should do in high school. And a lot of times that's difficult when you'd find something you love, like you can really you know, we're sitting cross me to watching you talk. I can see it in your eyes.

Matt & David:
I was a patriot. It is amazing. They expect you to figure out what you want to do by the time you leave home. I had no idea what I wanted to do and I would never want to do anything else either. That was it. I was terrified. Went under.

Matt:
I don't think I could go back to ever doing anything else. I got to go live under a bridge or something.

Matt:
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing I do. It would place hate me.

Greg:
Well, you've poured your time and money and efforts and your your passion into it. We can see that and it shows. Thank you.

David :
You know, one of the best things about it, too, is I've never done anything my life where we reach out and work with so many great people doing these shows. Doing the shows a lot of fun. Usually we get a lot of customers we hook up with and we take him to dinner at these shows. And that's a lot of fun even. Yeah. And never really experienced that before. But it's a lot of fun to get out there and lot of good people truly visit with your customers and take advantage of that opportunity to get together. Yeah, very good. Thank you, guys. Thank you.

Tyler:
Thanks for checking out this episode. As promised, the guys at Riptide provided a special discount for our listeners. Just enter the code pool chasers at checkout for free shipping, 1 ultrafine bag and 1 course back. If you want to find out more about our guest or the sponsors of the show. Please check out the link in the write-up below. See out there port chasers.

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In this episode, we sat down with David Sargent and Matt Lopez to discuss the Riptide Pool Vacuum System. We really enjoyed this episode because it dives deep into how their idea turned into a product. By embracing feedback from customers, they have taken the original prototype and shaped it over the years to create the outstanding product that it is today. Being across the table from these guys as they told their story was truly amazing. You could see their eyes light up when they were talking about each little detail that they have invested time and money into perfecting. That sparkle is rare to see, but it shows that David and Matt are truly passionate about what they have built. We promise you have never heard their story told like this before, we hope it inspires you the same way it did us. 

Where to Find Riptide

• Riptide Website

• Riptide Facebook

• Riptide Instagram

• Riptide Twitter

Resources Mentioned

• Rework by Jason Fried & David Heinemeir Hansson Founders of Basecamp

• Planet Money Podcast

Show-notes

• 2:17 Getting to know riptide

• 6:35 Growing up on the farm

• 7:48 Matt is a rare Florida native

• 11:35 Loving what I do

• 15:08 We have failed before

• 18:45 Two versions

• 22:31 It arrived what do I do

• 24:10 Buy your own battery

• 26:32 Which bag do I use

• 34:11 How is the cart built

• 39:50 Vacuum features

• 43:10 Ongoing maintenance

• 47:10 Serious investment in each other 

• 51:00 Vacuum head like a kayak 

• 54:35 Trouble shooting over the phone

• 55:55 Great marketing piece

• 1:01:30 Customer feedback is key

• 1:03:55 Why are you selling direct

• 1:07:20 Automatically registered for warranty

• 1:13:40 Where to get more info for Riptide

Sponsor

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