episode 0077- the invention that changed beekeeping forever with flow hive co-inventor cedar anderson
Cedar, the co-creator (with his father Stuart) of the Flow Hive and founder of Honey Flow, joins us to share the incredible story behind one of the most revolutionary inventions in beekeeping. As a third-generation beekeeper, Cedar spent years experimenting, failing, and refining an idea that would make harvesting honey simpler, cleaner, and more sustainable. He walks us through the early prototypes, the breakthrough moment, and how the Flow Hive went from a backyard project to a global phenomenon, changing the way people connect with bees forever.
Show Highlights:
1- We discuss the intent of the invention, personal vs. commercial use. (13:45)
2- Cedar explains what his invention actually does and how it makes beekeeping easier. (15:50)
3- We talk about the time between creating the first prototype and actually getting it to market. (24:20)
4- Cedar talks about their record-breaking crowdfunding campaign that far exceeded expectations. (31:40)
5- How did you keep up with orders once the crowdfunding campaign proved so successful? (38:30)
6- How much space do you need for a Flow Hive? (51:55)
7- Where can we learn more about Cedar and the Flow Hive? (54:25)
8- Listener question: What advice do you have for someone starting a company while trying to remain environmentally conscious? (1:04:30)
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Follow Flow Hive on Instagram: @flowhive
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Transcript:
All right. Cedar Anderson of Flow Hive. Thanks for joining us all the way from Australia, the other part of the world. How we doing today?
Doing great, and thank you very much for having me.
You are our second Australian guest, so I have to break out my Australian joke.
Please don't.
What happens tomorrow? Can you, do you have, what? Can you give us the lottery numbers
Yeah. Yeah, no worries, because we're, we're half a day ahead, so, um, yeah, if you ever want lottery numbers, then uh, we've got 'em.
all right. I'll send them, send 'em our way, and we'll get a, get us a ticket right after this.
All right. That, that pun that punishment out of the way, Steve.
What we actually like to start most of our episodes off with is this question. What would you say is the worst job you've ever had?
Ooh. Now that's a tricky one because I've never really had, uh, much of a job. I've always been sort of more on my own track. Having said that, I was a, a teacher's assistant once where I would teach primary school kids computer skills, but I actually quite enjoyed that. I was kind of a kid myself at the time, so I used to have a lot of fun in terms of the worst job.
Um. I don't actually have one.
I, you know, that's, that's a blessing in and of itself.
you can't be mad about it.
Yeah. At the very least, maybe you kind of ruled out teaching long term. Right.
Yeah, I guess so. I mean, it does take a toll on your teaching
I.
school children for sure. But. It's also rewarding on another level, but it's kind of a distant past now since then, I've, I've, um, I was a paragliding instructor for a bunch of years and I, I got right into paragliding and I still love flying.
And from that being a, growing up as quite an environmental activist type. I got jobs working for Greenpeace where I would be the crazy guy that would fly to some part of the world to take off with an engine strapped to my back and the paraglider and fly around the Sumatra and jungles photographing the illegal burning of the orangutan forest and stuff like that.
So, uh, I guess I had a quite an adventurous job history.
yeah. I was gonna say Cedar. We asked you for your worst job. Not every cool job you've ever worked.
yeah. Not how you're better than us at all. Your awesome jobs that you've ever had.
Well, I and I, we, we, as Steve said, we usually ask this question of most, most guests, and I figured that your answer might be a little bit different because really kind of, for starters, you're a, a third generation beekeeper, right?
And that's kind of a little bit where this, this whole story begins. Is it not?
Yeah, that's right. My, uh, grandfather kept bees and he still does, he's now nudging 99 in our capital city. He's still got beehives on his balcony 📍 and he's, uh, definitely a big inspiration, a, a great thinker, a uh, science background. And I really do remember fondly the. Fragrance and the smell and the taste of the yellow box honey, on his farm in aptly named Queen Bean.
I love that. So I, I guess maybe this kind of leads into, you know, just the general. Origin story of, of the, the flow hive itself. 📍 So third generation beekeeper, and you're having to work on these bee beehives. So as someone who's not working day in and day out on an apiary, can you kind of talk about what it was that you encountered as a problem, why it was kind of a, you know, an, an unsavory job to have to do and why you sought to originally cr create and mechanize what you've created with the flow hive.
Yeah, so in my young twenties I started keeping bees on what you'd call a boutique commercial scale. So just keeping 40 hives on property harvesting honey in the conventional way, selling those buckets of honey to the local shops. And that process. Anyone who's a beekeeper knows quite well and that's you, you getting your bee suit, you fire off a smoker, you go down to the hives.
You uh, then get through this process of cracking the boxes open with a chisel like tool. You take those boxes off and you gotta get all the bees out and off the. Uh, they're full honey frames and sometimes you'll use a leaf blower or you might just brush painstakingly all the bees off every frame. Then.
Those boxes full of honey frames have to then be transported to a processing shed, which was, in my case, the shed I lived in. And then you've got this long-winded process of taking those frames, getting a heated knife, cutting the wax, capping off that honeycomb, and putting those frames into centrifuge, which.
If you imagine is 📍 a, it's like a large washing machine spinner made out of stainless steel, and you put all the frames in and you spin it for a while and all the honey flings out against the walls and drains down to the bottom. And you keep doing that and keep doing that because the only efficient way to do it is batch processing.
So you might have taken the boxes off 20 hives and you spend days sitting there. Making a big sticky mess, spinning out that honey. And then after all of that, those frames have to go back to the hives again. And it's heavy, sweaty, messy, hard work, and it's fun for a little while. But I sat there and thought, hang on a second.
Can't we just tap the honey directly from the hive leaving the bees bee? And skip all of that, paraphernalia, all of that space in your workshop or shed that you've dedicated to your honey processing factory. All of that and just gently, easily harvest the honey into containers or into jars. And that's what sparked what turned out to be a decade long pursuit of inventing the flow hive with my father.
Well, I was gonna say, we may have actually found indirectly our answer to the worst job question you just happened to, to solve it. So 'cause that everything. Everything you described there, that's a, that's a special measure of, of tedium, you know, just, and just to know that you have to go back and, and do it again over and over.
It's not like it's a, it was a one-off. It's all the time.
Yeah, but our show is, you know, we're, we're big on the execution of an idea, right? Ideas are great. So I can imagine myself getting this idea like, oh, we just tap the hi the hive, or tap the honeycomb itself. Like easy peasy, but it's probably like not that simple. So when it comes to actually like carrying out this idea, how did that process go?
So I guess it's extreme persistence, and I think anybody on an entrepreneurial journey or an invention journey or an innovation innovation journey would agree that you don't get there without a lot of persistence, dedicating your time and being pretty dogged about trying to achieve what you're trying to achieve.
So in this case, it took a long time because. While you can make a little prototype and put it in a hive, you may not find the answer whether the bees actually will use your invention or whether it actually works for three or six months down the track, because the bees have to go and collect the, the nectar from the flowers, bring it back.
They've gotta create their wax, they've gotta join all of the cells together and all of that. And that makes it a very long-winded invention journey compared to like, if you're trying to make a new kettle, does it work or does it not? You've got your feedback straight away. So when you're working with, I guess, environmental factors like that and animals like that, you end up with quite a, um, long sticky path if you like.
No pun intended. I'm sure we'll have a few of those. I mean, that is a fascinating thing though, to consider just from, from, you know. I imagine that whenever you're going into the idea stage, it's like, all right, I wanna do this and I wanna execute it now. And, but instead you're beholden to all these different factors that maybe other industries or other ideas wouldn't be, and yet you kind of stick with it.
And you said that you were working with your dad stew for the better part of 10 years on it. What would, did you have to go through multiple different iterations of, of the idea itself? Like, I mean, you had mentioned that the bees have to, you know, interact with it and, you know, want to use it. Did you run into instances where, where that wasn't happening kind of thing, or that it was disturbing the, the health of the hive or how, what, what did you run
or also, yeah. I can imagine that like you have to wait for a little while to, for there to be honey. Right? So every time you build one, is it just like a waiting period to see is this thing actually gonna work?
Absolutely, there's this waiting period, and ideally, you know, if it was an endless spring, it'd be a lot quicker because the bees will be bringing in a lot of nectar, creating a lot of honey, building a lot of comb, and that would be a perfect time to get a lot of feedback. But of course, it can't be an endless spring.
So for me, it'd end. Artificially feeding the bees a sugar syrup to try and get answers quicker. However, it's still a lot slower when there's no flowers around for some reason. Uh, we'd often actually be feeding rather than sugar syrup. 'cause we wanted more realistic, I guess, fluid dynamics. We would be feeding them back, honey, from.
Previously collected honey from the hive, but bees would tend to just party with that honey. Like you put, put five big jars in and you get one jar back again. And so whatever they're doing with it, but when there's not a lot of nectar around, they tend to just, uh, you use it up. So that would make that feedback process tedious and long and many months before we'd know that, oh, that didn't work at all and.
It's this process of the prototypes. Just keep piling up on the bench.
Now one thing about this is, was the original, uh, idea that you were going into this just to kind of make your life yours and your dad's life easier, and then it just kind of grew from there? Or did you, as you were designing it, say, oh, this is going to, you know, change the lives of so many people all over the place?
Uh, was it kind of chick or is it kind of chicken and the egg like you were doing both at the same time?
You know, it's funny, it certainly set out trying to solve my own problem, but of course could see the ramifications or the effect that could have, or the interest that that could have. But you never know whether you're a deluded inventor, just whiling away for years on something that the world. Might not even have any interest in or whether you're, you're actually inventing something that's going to be useful to other people and inspiring to other people or not.
So definitely had the goal in mind of making an invention that'd be useful to honey harvesting and for me at the time. Early on, the thinking was that this is gonna be really useful for commercial operators harvesting honey to be able to set up big, uh, systems where you get automatic harvesting from your hives.
You know, load cells test when the weight's there. You've got systems in place to know when it's ready and mechanisms then automatically actuate. And that's where the thinking was. Early on, so it was actually beyond solving our own problem because it, it, I guess there was no real way to make a system that would do what we wanted it to without investing a bit of capital in there, into injection molding and so on.
Tell me about like, well first of all, I think for listeners who haven't seen this thing, hopefully we can, you know, with social media and everything, kind of show them this, how this thing
Well, you can describe the, the hexagonal shape and design. Go ahead Steve.
Yeah. I was just gonna ask you if, can you like explain to everyone, like, okay, this is the ultimate invention that we came up with.
This is how it works, how it functions, and how it makes your life as a beekeeper easier.
Sure, and I think it might be useful to talk about some of the failures as well in the prototyping
Sure.
of understand the dynamics and the problem solving. So I first of all started off thinking, well, if I wanna get the honey out of a frame, then maybe we can suck it out. So I, I got plastic foundation, which is common in beekeeping.
The bees would build, they came onto it and I drew a little holes in the back and try and vacuum, suck the honey out. And that didn't work. So maybe I thought, oh, well, we've got to. Cut the wax capping off inside the hive in order to get the honey really to move. So then I set up some crazy systems where the front of the honeycomb, which we call the cap, or the wax cap, the bees put over the honey when it's ready.
So you've got a hexagon matrix of cells, you cut the wax capping off, and that's when you usually spin it out in a centrifuge. So that was an obvious idea. So I set up. Diaphragms in the hive that moved bits of comb, and I found that when you cut the front off the comb and the back off the comb and you tip the honey even on its side ripe honey has a viscosity and surface tension that will actually mean it doesn't flow out of the hexagon matrix.
So that didn't work and. One morning I woke up and thought, oh, hang on a sec. Maybe it can be hexagon cells when the bees are filling it, but change into something else when it's time to harvest the honey. And that thought left me scrambling for a pencil. I hadn't even got out of bed yet. I started to scribble all different shapes that could interlock together to form hexagon matrix honeycomb.
And come apart to be a shape that could allow honey to flow. And at first I was focused on imagine a sideways. So picture two egg carton shapes coming together to form honeycomb and pulling apart to form a back section that looks a bit spiky, Ripley, and a front section, right? And the honey would flow down.
And I actually got that to work with for, because neither my father or I had a dollar to our name. I literally would use hard rubbish day to get tools to make things. I would find an old drill that didn't work. I would pull apart the battery pack and I would grab, um, you know, batteries out of an old something else and I would fix it all up and then I'd have a drill to use.
So I, I grew up. That kind of fix it mentality, which was a great piece of a way to grow up in terms of learning lots of skills, but also meant didn't have any funds behind us for prototyping. So everything was made as, uh, as best we could. So the early prototypes were an old car tire in a tube connected to bits of comb and a little pipe you suck on, and hot milk glue and things like that.
And when you're sucked on the tube. The diaphragm would move and it would pull these sections of honeycomb apart. And while that actually worked, it was quite complicated and used lots of space in the hive. My dad, one morning after a couple of strong coffees went, hang on a second. How about instead of going in the horizontal direction, we go vertical.
And I dropped everything. I'd worked on everything I'd done in that split second and went, that is just so obvious. Um, rushed into the shed creating a new prototype. And that idea was what carried us forward into a much more efficient method. So what we've ended up with to really explain the function of our invention is hexagon.
Matrix that form partial honeycomb cells. And while I say partial is there needs to be gaps for the bee's knees, for their legs and their wings. You don't want parts coming together like a, a guillotine, so it's a partially formed honeycomb matrix with gaps in it. And the bees then turn that into honeycomb by bridging all of the gaps, 📍 completing the honeycomb puzzle, if you like, with their wax.
And then they'll coat everything in wax and they could then start depositing nectar. Now when they've de-watered that nectar and turned it into honey and finally put their wax capping over the top, then you've got honey sitting in this lovely honeycomb wax pocket. But we come along from the outside of the hive and turn what looks like a very long Allen key.
And what that does is it splits every single cell in half. So if you imagine hexagon, uh, hexagon cell matrix we call honeycomb, and every single cell line splits in half. Now you have zigzagging channels that flow downwards, so the honey's flowing down and into a collection trough at the bottom and out into your jar.
And that's the invention. It's quite simple in the end.
You've done an incredible job ex explaining it verbally, but I also encourage everyone to go to their website@honeyflow.com to check out this design itself because it's, it's really cool.
Well, tell me about, tell me about that first moment, because I know that's, that had to be huge when you like, okay, we've, we think we've got it and you put it, put it together how you think it should go together. And then you put, you, put you, I don't maybe, and feel free to correct me where the story is off here, but you tap it and then you put your little thing in it and you twist it and honey flows out just as you imagined it.
What was that feeling?
They say inventors forget everything. They lose their sense. Of self, they lose the sense of the world in that euphoric moment of watching the first successful prototype of, you know, because you've spent years whiling away on this thing. You've, you've put everything into it and then you get this incredible moment of watching the honey flow out for the first 📍 time and.
For, for me and my dad, it was turning like a, a spanner on the outside of the hive, if you like, and that operated at the time, a metal cam that then ran every cell line and split the cells in half for the honey to flow out. And the parts were 3D printed, cost a couple of thousand dollars to print a very small section of comb at the time and. That was a lot of money for us and to see the function. Finally, work was euphoric. We sat back on the on the ground and laughed, and there we had it liquid gold flowing right outta the hive while the bees were still walking around on the comb surface, almost unaware that the honey had drained out from beneath their feet.
And. Immediately in that moment, like you just knew everything was different, like in general, or was it just like, okay, great, this has practical use for us, and then you kind of started to tell other people and it started to, you know, garner su support because obviously we'll get into the, the crowdfunding story because that's, that's an amazing in and of itself, and I, I don't want to spoil that too soon, but did you immediately know right away, or did it kind of take some time talk word of mouth kind of thing?
So we kept this invention under wraps because if you've invented something truly new, then. If you publicize it to the world, you forfeit the ability to patent it. Things are a little bit different in the USA, but for the rest of the world, if you publish what you've invented anywhere, then you cannot ever get a patent on it, and depending on which way you look at entrepreneurship.
The patent can be an important point in order to give you the ability then to commercialize that over anyone else for the first 20 years. And we were going through that process of patenting even though we felt like jumping up and down and telling the world, we knew that we should keep this quiet because it will probably, when we put it out there for the first time, send some ripples through at least the beekeeping industry
You sell, you sell one to the wrong person and they just reverse engineer it, and then they go make it themselves and patent it themselves and then you know, then does nothing for you.
Yeah, totally. And. Um, if you're not careful, they'll beat you to market
Right.
So how long did that whole patenting process take? Like between when you, you had the final prototype and the, and the rollout?
Yeah. I know a lot of patents over here take, like upwards of, could be five years.
Yeah.
Ah. Long for it to be like the music industry where you, you put a C in it or an R and put a circle around it and you, it's done right. You can about that in court later. Whereas the invention side of things, it's, I don't know, it's a bit of a racket in a way. You, you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to get your global patent.
Solid and five years, uh, of, um, you know, part-time work on it in a way. And what it gives you in the end is the ability to fight about it in court, just like in the music industry. So it's, um, sort of a necessary part of an inventive journey depending on which way you want to go with what you're developing.
It's also, um, you know, incredibly expensive and frustrating as well. But without it, then you also don't necessarily get the benefit of being able to bring in the funds to, to keep your company going. So, uh, for instance, if you decide you're what you're inventing, you're just going to publicize out there.
Then you may not be able to sell enough units to support a team to, you know, anyone that runs the company knows that it's expensive to hire, to hire staff, to keep everything going to, and without the ability to really, uh, get some revenue from all of your hard work. May not, you may not succeed. And you know, philosophically your invention may not even get out there because if it's a just a competitive playing field, nobody might not wanna put the resources behind putting it out there.
So it's, uh, you know, from one perspective, the patenting is a necessary part of an inventive journey.
Yeah. So Kyle and I have only recently discovered you obviously, I think like three or four months ago, Kyle sent me an Instagram reel of yours and was like, we gotta have these guys on. Um, so I don't know how long you've actually been in business selling these things, but for the entrepreneur out there who thinks, man, I wish things would just move a little faster.
Like, help us understand like at what point, so from this day where you pull the lever, honey flows out to selling your first one, like, how long was that?
Uh, years actually. So it's, um, you, you think you can get it together quickly, but. It's actually exceedingly hard, and what we ended up doing was probably as fast as you could ever go. Now I'll talk a little bit about the, the pathway leading up and, and the decisions we made in order to get to where we did and what factors led us to get there.
But basically at that moment, we're lying on the grass thinking, wow, we've done it. Now what? And of course there's so many roads to, I guess, commercialization of what you've done. So many roads to get it out there in the world, into people's hands. And we, um, wanted to make sure we were real well researched.
So we went and talked to people that had had successful inventions before and how they did it. Talked to people who help people get inventions off the ground, and we went and spent time with the guy who wrote the business book in Australia and really explored all of these different avenues to get our invention from prototype through, to manufacture, through to marketing and in people's hands and.
For us, you know, we had advice that no, no, we should partner with, uh, you know, a, a big beekeeping company. We should partner with so and so. We should, uh, you know, sell the line, share of the shares if you like, or give them away to somebody who's gonna help us commercialize it. And I guess maybe, maybe I like control.
Maybe it would've worked, maybe it wouldn't, but. I didn't wanna take the risk on partnership without really knowing who I was partnering with. So that left us in this position where both my dad and I didn't really have any funds, and the only way to really get funds that I could see without. Giving control away, if you like, or, or, or losing control of the invention, I guess was the, the fear.
I wanted to make sure it would be seen in its best light in the world and make sure that it, it, it had its best chance of success. Now, some might say you should partner with somebody to do that and some might say not, and either one's probably a useful track and you dunno which way one is going to to work.
So I kept coming back to this idea of crowdfunding. Now, at the time, crowdfunding was just starting to get good traction. I'd been following for years. You know, little things like there was a thing called a Glif that 📍 was just a little clip for your phone. I thought, that is 📍 so smart. They've got the orders before they've even put down the money for all the injection molds and the manufacturing process.
Because you never know. You might pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into something and no one even wanted it. And then you've got a shed full of stuff. And it's just a, kind of a, a, a story that didn't work out. Where as getting the sales first, getting a read from the market first. Not only gave you the funds, but it gave you a chance to really launch it, ask the world what they think, get all of that feedback, and then roll out the manufacturing.
So that's the way we decided to go. Now I went to a crowdfunding workshop hosted here in Australia by a successful entrepreneur, and they said, no, don't do it. It won't work. Crowdfunding's for smart widgets and, and gizmos, you know. Your things, you know, too agricultural. It's, you know, crowdfunding's not for that.
And I walked outta there and went, ah, stuff that I'm gonna do it anyway. And to be fair, at the time there wasn't really much in the way of, I guess, agricultural crowdfunding success stories. So in a way I was taking a risk, being so kind of stubborn on my track, but In the end, I'm glad I did
12.4 million in 30 days. I, I think you won.
the,
a stat.
the, um, it was actually ridiculous. Um, and although we were told we should, you know, partner with somebody and start in one corner of the world and work our way out from there, I'm so glad we kept it under wraps because it was a new invention. And being a new invention, it did get a lot of interest.
So we made a little teaser video for the crowdfunding. So I'm lucky that my sister had been studying film and had been flying her up from Melbourne every now and then to to film a bit more about Little Journey. And my nephew, Jay, at the time, he was still in high school, but he was helping as well. So he, he was a budding, you know, filmmaker as well.
So with these family skills, we're able to hone a, a little video that said, Hey, this is what we've done. If you're interested, put your email in here and. And, uh, you can find out more. So that was just a little 30-second teaser video that showed the honey flowing outta the, you know, it was the first the world has seen of honey flowing directly out of the beehive.
And a little aim was, you know, at this point I wroted in another friend of mine who, you know, had some skills in the Facebook marketing space and another one that had more skills than I did on, on, on website development. And the idea was we dropped this teaser video on Facebook. We didn't wanna launch to no one, so we promoted a few posts and built it up to a thousand likes, just generally about beekeeping.
And so we had a thousand likes and we wanted a thousand emails before we launched on crowdfunding. That was the goal, right? So we dropped this video and it. It got a million views overnight and I stayed up all night going, wow. And
so cool.
Just,
not? You're just
just refresh over and over and over.
Let's go.
and at that point. Didn't realize we needed a team. Totally naive. Totally naive. Never run a business before. Grew up on a hippie commune where no one was doing business. You know, in fact, corporations were at the root of all evil. And you, I'm probably exaggerating a little bit, but you get the idea, right?
So no idea what it entails. Luckily, probably, and, uh, so we ended up with was. 70,000 emails in that signup form.
And you wanted a thousand.
Yeah. And so it went totally viral. We're a week out from a pick to launch date, and we're locked in because we put effort into letting the A, B, C, our, our, um, to know that we wanted to launch this thing.
We're trying to get them interested in filming it. And all the rest of it. So we're working hard to make it a success. They say a decade of word, a work to, you know, to be an overnight success. And that phrase really does ring true here. Um, so there we are, 70,000 emails and suddenly needing to write back to people.
So our little team grew from me and my dad, a couple of mates, my sister. In those first few weeks to literally 40 people overnight, and people were just so motivated to help. It was incredible. So I even had my grandfather, right, helping answer all of these questions about bees and so on, and uncles and sisters.
Everything. Everyone. That was incredible.
Well, you, sorry Steve. You, you bring up a great point and that's part of what I wanted to, to talk about a little bit too, is because you're doing more than just selling and distributing these flow hives. Like you have a whole section on your website about starting beekeeping, an online bee course, getting to know a beehive.
You've got ambassador services and all these different things. And that was part of what originally drew me to what you guys had going because it's like, gosh, you know, I've always kinda had a cursory interest in this kind of thing. Um, and you know, you hear a lot about the, the plight of, of bees and their relationship with agriculture.
And so to see what you're doing beyond, of course, just the sheer benefit of being able to harvest your own honey is what I think is a really cool thing. But go ahead, Steve.
I was gonna ask how in the world I, so in my mind, I like to put myself in your shoes and think like how I would handle. This overnight success because I've built a couple of these, I don't know how many you had built at this point, and suddenly you've got thousands of people interested. So how do you go from like handcrafting, a couple of these to manufacturing thousands of these within a month?
Yeah. Um, it's. An extreme amount of optimism.
Well, I wanted, I wanna say, I wanna say to your comment earlier about like, it was a good thing that you didn't know what it took. I think that's, we found that that's common in entrepreneurship because if you, if you go into it with eyes wide open, knowing the risks and, and what it's gonna actually take, a lot of people would stay on the couch, but people get off the couch because they're like.
Ah, it can't be that hard. Right? And then they find it's pretty hard,
Or that you, you rise to the occasion,
but you rise to the
every step.
day at a time and you figure out this part and then this part. But if you knew what lied 10 steps ahead, you might have never got off the couch to begin with, but now you're already off the couch, so might as well keep plowing
Yeah.
yeah. I
you're I'd be hap happy flying around the sky in my paraglider still.
Yeah Just go back to that.
so you've got all this money now suddenly you have all this interest now and you're beginning to try and distribute commercially.
Well, we chose the crowdfunding path, right? So we had then, you know, weeks of extreme interest. You know, a thousand emails coming in a day, every day to answer, you know, sorry to all those people we haven't gotten back to. And this not only that, the media got hold of it and we're. Featured on 10 new US publications every day, that was just this, I don't know, a whirlwind of attention, I guess, where I guess life would start in the morning with being on some radio interview on some part of the world.
And then I would, uh, head down to. The, a local city here to dial into a TV show somewhere. Then, uh, you know, Washington Post, New York Times, like everything. Incredibly exciting, but. Not necessarily fun, I guess.
Yeah, I mean, it's a life, a life adjustment. You go from being kind of nobody and broke to, everybody wants you, everybody has, everybody wants a piece of the pie. They want some of your time and attention,
Mm.
because they've loved what you've built.
Yeah. Or I was just thinking really just the contrast between waking up and sketching down an idea versus waking up and you're calling into an interview with the Washington Post. Like those are, those are pretty different things.
Yeah. And uh, so that was incredibly busy as well as trying to, trying to work out how to, you know, run a company, manage people, all of that. All of those necessary pieces of the puzzle. Legals, you know, uh, all of the supply chain pathway where we wanted to do that. Of course, being incredibly idealistic, we want to manufacture in every local continent in the world because we don't want to use shipping miles and all of this stuff.
Right. Um, you know, navigating the, the pathways. From, I guess growing up in a very idealistic way and very conscious environmental impacts and sustainability. Uh, so that's all going on as well as Kylie, my other half is pregnant and we had this idea that we would get the baby, uh, we would get the crowdfunding outta the way before the baby came.
So it was a bit of a pressure cooker. he had other ideas and came early. So
Of course.
in the middle of the we're just like, hang on, hang on. Just wait everybody, I've just gotta go and have a baby. I'll be back in a second.
And
I wouldn't necessarily recommend this, but there are a lot of instances of people that we've talked to where it's like they wanted some kind of breakthrough in their life, and it's like, have you tried, have you tried having a baby? Because
uh
That'll escalate everything
happens, doesn't it?
You
decide that those things you are working on have to be done now, and it's, it's a, it's a big push. So, um, yeah. And at that point, right, the crowdfunding, we'd broken all of these records for fastest in the world to reach a million dollars in the first, like, you know, few hours of our crowd funding.
And that's the story that started to take off. And then, you know, the fastest to 2 million and so on. And so at that time when the baby came, I think we're up to 10 million us right? And so hang on and gotta go, gotta go and have a baby come back and it's a 12 million and, we thought, you know, that's enough.
Turn it off.
Well, you know, it, it's funny 'cause there's other aspects where my family was kicking in there, you know, not having the business experience and so on, not being aware of what it costs to get a company off the ground and all of that. You know, at, on day one with a, with with, with a few million dollars worth of sales, they're like, turn it off.
That's enough. You've got enough orders, don't you? And I'm like, I'm pretty sure that this is what dreams are made of and we need to keep this thing going and we will work out how to make them later. And so, despite the pressure, I just kept it rolling and we, we, we topped out at over 12 million us.
Almost 25,000 orders from 130 different countries and no manufacturing set up yet.
Yeah. That's, that's not, so is that how you did it? Did you, so did you have to, like, in my mind, you're flying to say, America, I don't know how many manufacturers you have over here, and you're teaching them how to build it before, shortly after flying to Europe and you're teaching them how to build it. And then shortly after you're flying to China and you're teaching them how to, is that, is that kind of how it went?
stayed right here and what ended up happening is I was hedging my pathways. I was trying to get the wooden wears of the hive, uh, made in New Zealand, and at the same time to hedge our bets from making it in America. And the injection molding, because we'd made a start on that here in Australia. And ideally I wanted to do a lot of manufacturing here in Australia where we're from.
So the injection molding we were setting up here and we started to work with a company in the US to help us with our wooden wears manufacturing. And that ended up being the pathway we chose. So. We had this really, uh, logistical nightmare of a situation where we had part of people's orders in the USA part of people's orders here in Australia, and we needed to get a database, which was a dog's breakfast, and it was hard to even work out what they ordered. And, and, and bring all of that together and get those two packages to arrive on their doorstep in time for the crowdfunding pledges that we had made, and the first orders had to, to be three months after that crowdfunding date. So we were, we had to get on our skates.
That's incredible.
one thing to make $12 million in 30 days. It's another thing to fulfill $12 million worth of orders
I know, and at the time
months. Yeah.
it, it became this thing of. I was really attached to making sure we met what we said we'd done. In hindsight, I wouldn't have air freighted so many hives. That was expensive, but I was so attached to making sure hives got to people on time that, uh, we made decisions like that.
Now what we did is we hit that three month goal. Amazingly, the, the injection molding we act up here in Australia. We worked with a local company who, who really put their all into it, which was fantastic, and we got a 24 7 production line going. Which, you know, doesn't happen here. But we were lucky to work with people who were, were that keen.
So there was round the clock manufacturing there. At the same time, we're also getting manufacturing going in Portland, Oregon, and we really wanted to impress our customers as well. So instead of the, um. Uh, you know, the pine box that they saw on crowdfunding. We decided to upgrade everybody to a beautiful crafted western red cedar hive body, WW with, uh, more features than they expected and so on.
And in hindsight, we didn't need to do that, but we were of the mind. We wanted this to get, build a really good reputation out of the gate. And we kept hitting our goals amazingly. The next one, a few months later, the next batch of 10,000 orders, we, we got there and so on and when, except for when we got to Christmas and that was painful.
Only about half of our orders that fell right on Christmas got them under the tree. And the other half were a few weeks later and that was grueling. That was the first we really started to cop some flack and it, you know, it was painful, but in hindsight, everybody who does crowdfunding is late and we just needed to tell the story.
But at the time, we didn't want to let down these amazing people that had taken a risk on us and really put what was 600 US down. On our crowdfunding.
So armed with the benefit of hindsight, what would you have done differently?
I would've just communicated in that case and said, we want to build you the perfect product, so we're gonna take more time here. And yes, it's going to be another month later, but that is important because of X, Y, and Z. And that's what you see every other crowdfunding company doing. Almost always, it's delayed and almost always it's because they're having trouble with their supply chain.
They want it to be better. And, you know, instead we played catch up with our 24 7 production line we built, uh, did inventive things like spent a couple of hundred grand on dehumidification setups in the factory to get three seconds in fast, faster injection molding, timing per cycle, which meant we could catch up on production and so on, like crazy stuff.
But. In hindsight, you just tell the story to the customers and say, it's gonna be late, but it's going to be great. And, and that would've saved incredible expense and stress, I guess. But
There was, at the time there was a coolest cooler, but from my, uh, from what I believe, they never actually delivered all of their coolest coolers. So we became the most successful crowdfunding in the world to actually deliver, and we were for the most part on time, and I'm proud of that.
Yeah. I was gonna say, I mean, those exact words, you should be, so that, when, when did that crowdfunding take place? And we can maybe fast forward to today, how, how has business gone since then? Uh, and kind of tie up the story in a neat bow, at least as it stands today.
So that was. The crowdfunding launch on February the 23rd, 2015.
So we're now a decade and a little bit later, and here we are still working hard to help people, uh, with their hives to get started in beekeeping and improving our products and inventing more things.
So for anybody who's sitting at home right now, and they're, they're interested in purchasing one of these for themselves, obviously we're gonna give you the opportunity to tell people where they can find them, but how much space do they do you need?
Uh, potentially asking for myself here, how much space do you need, uh, like, uh, for a yard or anything like that, to have this unit set up and for the bees to have ample space.
That's a, that's a great question and it's one that a lot of people, uh, don't necessarily realize. You can actually keep bees in a very small amount of space.
So whether you're in an urban backyard or even a balcony in, in a high riser or on the rooftop in a cityscape, people keep bees in. It's incredibly popular to keep bees even, you know, in really built up city landscapes now. It, it's amazing in, in my opinion, to be able to do some real farming and real agriculture and to get what is probably one of the most beautiful pieces of produce you can, and that's a jar of honey from your local area and.
You only need a very small footprint in your garden or on your balcony or on your rooftop. And with the flow hive, it takes it a step further because you no longer need to dedicate a room in your house or your shed or your laundry to a honey processing facility. All of that's built right into your flow hive with our flow frame invention.
So the footprint of the actual hive itself is. Everything you need to actually do your beekeeping and harvest the, uh, beautiful thing we call honey directly from your hive. So that makes it incredibly versatile and I, I think humans really yearn to do. I guess some type of farming or growing their own food and beekeeping's wonderful like that.
'cause you don't even need land. Your bees will fly out and spread themselves out over a six mile radius and bring all of that nectar that tells the story in the way of taste back into your hive for, for if you look after the bees, then you get to share in the amazing thing we call honey.
So like Kyle said, we wanna give you the opportunity too, to plug, like if somebody wants to purchase one or just wants to know more about Flow hive, hear more from you, et cetera, can you plug for us your social medias, your website, anywhere that we can go and learn more about you?
So if you jump on honey flow.com, that'll take you to our US store. Now we have u US warehousing set up, so it'll be very, uh, quick for your order to be shipped out. And we have warehouses in most major areas of the world. So we've set up a supply chain that we had to set up out of the gate because we had orders from 130 countries.
So we use those 3PLs. When you're. Place your order on the website and if you go to honey flow.com, it'll redirect you to your local store and your order will then be automatically post posted out from your nearest. Warehouse so that way you can enjoy your short, uh, uh, shipping time and not have to pay for global shipping as well.
And if you wanna find out more in terms of our social channels, you can look up Flow Hive on Instagram or we've also got our YouTube channel. Uh, we've got TikTok, we've got the, uh, Facebook page, and. On those channels also is a wealth of information to help get you started in beekeeping. And also, um, I'm probably a bit overed, but every week on a Wednesday morning our time, which is uh, your, uh, Tuesday evening.
I will be there for an hour answering any questions you have about flow, hives, bees and beekeeping, and often giving you a show and tell inside a hive or harvesting honey. And, uh, there's a beautiful community that gets thousands of people tuning in and, uh, just helping each other learn in the beautiful pursuit of bee keeping.
That's awesome. That's very generous of you. I do have one more question before we have. We'll finish up with our listener question, which I think Kyle has today, but you mentioned. Uh, I think before we started recording, um, sometimes one of the most headaches, one of the biggest headaches of entrepreneurship, which we might overcomplicate and don't necessarily need to, is naming the company, picking an Instagram handle, things like that.
Website, uh, uh, domain name, and all of that. You know, you mentioned you can find, we can find you@honeyflow.com. Your company's called Flow Hive. Your Flow hive on Instagram. Is there a story there?
A hundred percent. Uh, so not having any money, I actually haggled with somebody for several years to buy the domain name honey flow.comand eventually landed at for.
500 bucks. And then I was like, beauty, we've got, we've got this starting to line up and I got the trademark as well. And it was all trademark honey flow, a website, honey flow, beautiful. Then a kerfuffle with the trademark attorney. No one paid for the renewal and we lost the mark. So that was a bit of a downer at the time.
But what happened is we went again and actually ended up with a better one, which was flow. So we now have the trademark flow in the uh, category. So basically. We can now have a flow hive, a flow frame, a flow super lifter, which is our next invention. And that works nicely, but it's incongruent with our original mark trademark that we lost and the the honey flow.com.
Domain name, so we're still, maybe we'll fix it up one day, but at the moment we're still honey flow.com. As our website flow hive on Instagram and our trademark is flow, that's, yeah.
I noticed in our email exchanges that flow, just the word flow had the TM above it. Which was interesting, but now, now we know
well after all the haggling he did for the honey flow domain, I think you just have to keep it.
So,
yeah, exactly. Exactly. But, um, you know, we're, we're really, um, dedicated to, to helping anybody that wants to get started in beekeeping and really early on. You know, part of the story is we realized that the people that were most interested in our flow hive was not the, uh, commercial beekeepers, but the backyard beekeepers.
And so it was quite a pivot to, I guess, turn our minds towards that and develop useful things and useful marketing and useful material for the new beekeepers, which turned out to be half our market. And half were existing beekeepers. So right away we actually got a bunch of criticism saying, Hey, you guys are inspiring all of these new beekeepers.
And we're like, oh, hang on. Isn't that a good thing? Yeah, that's great. They're like, yeah, but they wanna know how to keep bees. And we're like, well, okay. That's easy enough. We'll start training them how to keep bees. So, uh, we still get that criticism that, hang on, you're inspiring new beekeepers. And we're like, well, I'm pretty sure that we're doing more than any other beekeeping company on the planet to educate our customers.
And from that space, and I was talking earlier about being available every week for an hour to answer questions. We've got like countless, uh. Hour long live stream showing you how to do beekeeping. And we also developed a online beekeeping course@thebeekeeper.org where we got people from all around the world, experts in beekeeping to contribute to that course.
So it's not only us with our expertise, it's people from all around the world with expertise, whether you're in a snowy region or whether you're in a desert region, wherever you are. So we wanted it to be. A beekeeping course that really was made to take it from square one right through to a deep knowledge in beekeeping, wherever you are in the world.
And we decided to go down, you know, being, um, environmentally focused, sustainability focused and already doing multiple things along the way to, to raise funds for, for habitat, to raise funds for great things in the world. We decided to make that one 50% of profits for the bees. And from that it's, we're now at several years, three years into that, we have now put over $1.5 million.
Into great projects to help the bees to help, uh, advocacy for the bees and also for habitat which everything needs, including our pollinators. So we planted 1.5 million trees in high quality restoration projects around the world. And the idea is we create literally billions of blossoms for not only our favorite honeybees safari, John, but all of the native bees.
And all the species that need. Desperately need more habitat. So have a look@thebeekeeper.orgas well. And, uh, we also have a, a new invention to help people with their beekeeping part called a super lifter, 📍 which is a bit of a pun 'cause the super is the heavy honey box on top and you no longer need to brunt the weight of that with a nice little neat lifting device.
If you've ever seen the happening, we don't want 📍 that happening anytime soon. So keep the bees around
obscure two thousands movie reference. It's
a terrible movie. Don't watch it.
It's, but the whole disaster is predicated on the collapse of the bee population, I think is what it's like
the bee population.
Declines. And so people start like spontaneously committing suicide or something. Oh, okay. A really weird movie, but
yeah. Yeah. But, but you know that, that thought has been around for a long time in the world and it, it's true. If you pull out keystone species. The whole thing starts to unravel. Yeah. And scary as it is.
We're seeing massive losses in insect populations. Mm-hmm. We're talking about 50%. We're talking about the sixth mass extinction happening right on our watch. So it's extremely motivating for me to do whatever we can and we happen to have this business success. And for me, it's not good enough to basically sit there and do some manufacturing, even though we're doing a, a product that we stand behind and is inspiring the world to keep pbs, which in turn inspires people to, to, to really get out there and look after their backyard in a different way.
That's all great, but it's not enough. And that's why we developed the beekeeper.org and we continue to develop all sorts of programs to. Help with the sustainability side of things to help bring back some of that habitat, which everything needs, including us,
and that between your education and your your Billions of Blossoms program, I think that that's steps in the right direction.
We're doing it
well. Kyle hit us up with the listener question.
Yep. So Cedar, uh, we, we aggregate questions just from our listeners. Uh, they write into me at kyle@witnessbusiness.com. And, uh, this question that we pulled for you from our, our queue here, I feel like is one that's perfect for you. It says, uh, what advice would you have for someone who is looking to start a company but wants to remain environmentally conscious?
Ah, that's a beautiful question. Now, I guess. It's to continually fine tune. Now we're a B Corp, which is a whole organization built to help you staying on track and to improve where you are from a sustainability point of view. But I wouldn't, wouldn't suggest rushing out and doing that straight away 'cause it is an extreme amount of work and a lot of diligence, which does make you do things better.
But to start off, I would say just. Think about what you can do in order to really do something good, whether you're in a social, you know, aspect or the environmental aspect. Anybody that has an audience can do something good with it, and it's just about thinking about how we can, uh, turn that interest into something good.
For example, really early on. We are like, oh, we've got, we've got a bunch of um, waste here in the corner of the shed. What do we do with it? And from that thought, we cut them up and made a little donation product called a pollinator house, which is for native B species. And we basically gave that to people.
When we didn't give it to people, we, we, we gave a hundred percent of proceeds for habitat regeneration and protection and advocacy for bees. So we turned it into a fundraiser. So we got the waste, we turned it into a fundraiser. Which in the end helps build your brand as well. And also it created these great funds we could then support.
And what, what we did is we created a whole microgrants program, which was an incredible amount of work. Probably don't do that out of the gate, but uh, um, we were able then to turn what was a problem into a solution and do something good. So whatever business you're doing in the world, you can apply the thinking of.
How can we leverage, I guess, the, the traction we've gotten or the problem we have or, uh, the ability to reach people, to advocate for the very world beneath our feet, the matrix of life that we completely depend on. And if you put your thinking cap on, you'll definitely be able to find something.
I would say that, you know, step one is just having the, the consciousness and the willingness to do it.
And then step two is fine tuning the execution, right?
Absolutely. And it, it's a continual, you'll never get to a perfect point. And there is no such thing as no impact on the negative side. Just driving to work, for instance, is using energy is coming from somewhere. Shipping your stuff around the world is using energy.
It's coming from somewhere. The question is how can we do it better? How can we improve? And often things will be incongruent with ideals. Where now we are made in Australia, we're a hundred percent made in Australia, and that's great. It's a great thing to be able to support local manufacturing and all of that, and we're proud of that.
But that does increase shipping miles. So you've, you, we are then filling containers, shipping it off to you guys in the states and you go, how can we do this better? And of course there is ways to do things better, but it's not always the easiest path. So as time goes on and time allows. It's a process of refinement and to keep improving and keep bettering what you've done holding, uh, environmental impact at the forefront.
You just try, right? You do your best. I think I watched this show, I guess we're movie and TV show references today for me. Uh, I watched this show called The Good Place with 📍 Kristen Bell and, uh, Ted Danon and some others. And, uh, I. Spoiler alert for those listening. If you don't want to hear what happens in the good place, turn this off.
We're almost done. But, but at the end they realize that like, you know, theology views aside, they realize in this show that like nobody's going to the good place. They're all getting sent to the bad place because this is like the afterlife because. The world has become so complex that you think you're doing good, but by you doing this thing that you think is good, it's setting off a whirlwind of things that are bad over here.
And so like the whole thing in the end is like. There hasn't been a person sent to the good place in so long because of all these rules that you're, you know, you're doing all these bad things by think doing these things that you think are good. So the like, kind of the moral of the story is like, just do your best.
You know, like when it comes to being earth conscious, like just do your best. Yeah, you're gonna drive to work and you're gonna cause some pollution. But like, if you are consciously thinking of like, man, I'm trying to make, leave the world a better place. Than when I, than it was when I entered it, then that's all we can really ask for.
Absolutely. And I'd I'd say it, it's also thinking about the, the net benefit. For instance, if, if en enough companies, and it would only take. Around 1% of companies in the world to plant a million trees. And we would be back at the level of forest we once had, half the trees had gone off the earth, and if 1% of the companies planted a million trees, it would all be back.
And that's ignoring, you know, where do we put them, the farmland, all of that. But let's just think simple for a moment. So the, I guess the power of doing something. Is actually profound and you can have a positive net benefit as well.
I think. Didn't Mr Beast do that? I don't know. 📍 I think I saw a YouTube video from Mr.
Beast recently where he planted like a ton of trees, but, uh, but yeah, that I, that concept I think rings true. That just, yeah, you make, you could make more impact than you think. With that Cedar, thank you so much for just spending time with us. Um, I didn't know the first thing about beekeeping before this interview, so I'm grateful just to be able to like, have an intelligent conversation about it. Now, on the other side of this. Uh, my mother-in-law is staying overnight and she has some questions that I can now answer.
So just, uh, you know, we're grateful, uh, for the business insights, uh, for the entrepreneurial wisdom. I think it's incredible to see what you've built. Um, this, I love that you said it's, you know, it takes 10 years to have overnight success, um, and. I think it's just an incredible story, um, and a, and an incredible product that you've built and created for the world.
You've, I think you're leaving the world with. Uh, a better place with this product that you've created. It's, that's what I love about this show is like you had an idea in your head and now it's a thing that people can buy and it has made the world a better place. So just kudos to you. Thanks again for being with us.
We look forward to watching you continue to thrive and grow and succeed from here.
Yep. We appreciate your time. And uh, now I am going to go and try and convince my wife that we have room for this.
Absolutely. Thank you very much for having me, Kyle and Steve, and uh, best of luck with your, um, beekeeping there.
We're gonna go to bed and we'll let you go. Have lunch.