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Relentlessness and other Entrepreneur Traits: Tim Kehoe

 

Tim Kehoe’s Story: If it seems like it should be a simple thing to color the soap bubbles that kids like to blow into the wind, think again: Tim Kehoe spent more than a decade coming up with a formula that both holds its hues and doesn’t stain.

Yet only this fall will Tim’s product, Zubbles, finally debut, in time for the Christmas retailing season. Everyone expects Zubbles to be a big hit – Tim; Guy Haddleton and Sue Strother, his partners in Zubbles; focus groups of kids and their parents; toy-industry analysts; and, especially, the mammoth toy company that has paid one of the industry’s biggest advances ever for the right to introduce Zubbles.

Even if Zubbles fails to become a huge business success, the very creation of the product is a big victory in itself for Tim.  As a child, he became fascinated with thinking up new toys, and from then on he filled notebooks with his creative riffs. Often he developed toy prototypes. Tim’s 200 toy creations have ranged from a Frisbee that becomes a ball to radio that you can hear underwater.

Early in his career, he licensed several inventions to toy maker Hasbro. But even after he found a ‘day job’ as a website designer, Tim would continue to dabble in toys on the side. And colored soap bubbles was one notion that remained firmly in the back of his mind from the moment he thought of them in 1994.

Then Tim’s work in website design intersected with his passion for creating new toys. In the late Nineties, Tim served as the director of web services for a company that Guy and Sue had founded in the United Kingdom, and had built into a major software provider. When Guy and Sue sold their company to an industry leader for $160 million, they were ready to start anew as entrepreneurs.

Shortly thereafter, Tim ran into Sue – who was aware of Tim’s toy hobby – and she asked him if we was working on anything worth investing in. “I told her that I had dozens of toys that I hadn’t licensed yet, all this stuff that I hadn’t touched for awhile,” Tim recalls. In no time, the three were pooling their resources and launching a toy-creation company.

Their first project was a video game that Tim had developed. But after attending a major gaming trade show in 2004, the partners folded that idea because they realized they were too small to compete with major video game producers.

“And we said, ‘OK, what are we going to do now?’” Tim remembers. “And I said, ‘Well, I’ve got this idea for colored bubbles.”

Tim’s Key Move: Relentlessness and other Entrepreneur Traits

When Tim first mentioned Zubbles to Sue and Guy, they had no idea what their partner had poured into his quixotic pet project to date.

They couldn’t have known that only Tim’s uncommon relentlessness and other entrepreneurial traits had kept his favorite idea alive through more than a decade of frustration and disappointment – through many thousands of hours and dollars spent on the bubbles, through the destruction of bathtubs and pots and pans and carpeted floors, through gnawing self-doubt and the vexation of one near success after another.

“First I was trying to come up with a wand that connected regular bubbles to look like teddy bears and float away,” Tim remembers. “And then I thought it would be a good idea if they were colored. So I went down to the store, and came back and popped in a bunch of food coloring – and nothing worked.”

A trick that Tim thought would be so simple became, for him, the unsolvable puzzle. He faced at least two big formulation challenges. First, colors didn’t integrate with the soap and tended simply to slide down the bubble walls to the bottom. Second, dyes and pigments by nature were permanent, so colored bubbles would tend to stain everything they came into contact with.

“I destroyed every place we lived with the stains,” he says. “Every pot and pan was ruined, ceramics, porcelain – everything. At one point I had to evacuate the kids out of the house because I had set off an explosion.”

And then a few years ago, just when Tim thought he’d perfected a colored bubble, Procter & Gamble changed the formula of the dish soap that he had been using and it became unavailable.

So high were these technical hurdles that Tim never could bring colored soap bubbles to any kind of a critical mass, even after what he estimates were 10,000 experiments. Mentally, at least, he put the idea in the deep freeze.

That is, until his involvement with Sue and Guy led them to revisit what would become Zubbles. In 2004, Tim revitalized his pursuit of the elusive formula for colored soap bubbles. He dabbled with everything from contact-lens solution to “invisible” Crayola crayons. After a year or so, he came up with bubbles that he thought were fairly colorfast, and that more or less disappeared without staining.

But the product still wasn’t ready for the market. So the three partners decided to bite the bullet, outfit a laboratory and hire a chemist. After an additional investment of about $2.5 million and several more months of effort, Zubbles was born in 2005.

“We ended up taking a known chemical and pulled out of it some previously unknown derivatives, and we combined it with a solution in which the dye gives the bubbles color – and then also takes the color away,” Tim explains, without revealing too much. “The bubbles go clear when you rub them, or with exposure to air or water, and so now you can blow them in the house without seeing a trace of them when they land.”

According to Tim, the disappearing-colors technology is so versatile that the partners’ holding company, called Ascadia, is developing a whole range of other products such as markers, spray paints, adhesives, soaps and even toothpastes.

“It’s been a bit of a struggle,” Tim says with obvious understatement. “But pretty soon, we should be seeing the rewards.”

Tim’s Bonus Insight

Never underestimate the power of publicity in creating market demand for your products.  Just when Tim and his partners were beginning to negotiate with toy companies over Zubbles, Popular Science magazine selected the product as the Innovation of the Year for 2005. Zubbles had more than 10,000 e-mails and website sign-ups immediately following the article. Within two weeks, Zubbles was listed in the top 10 of the Google Desktop “what’s hot” list. Media requests came from outlets ranging from CNN to the Late Show with David Letterman.

“When you’re an 18-month-old startup, and you’re not even sure about all the particulars of your product, and you win that award against the likes of Apple – well, that took us and everyone else by surprise,” says Tim.

In 2006, Reader’s Digest magazine is adding to the buzz about Zubbles as the product gets close to hitting the market. In its May issue that features “America’s 100 Best” things, the magazine selects Zubbles as one of its “Best Innovations” of the year.