Techpreneurship: Whirling Fishing Line

Evil time sink or genius business model?

This Thursday night, I’m feeling a bit like Andy Rooney. For those of you too young or too hip to know who Andy Rooney is, he serves as the end-of-show comedy relief on 60 Minutes, and has been a reporter since the sometime around the Spanish-American War…

Well, these days my eyebrows need trimming, I’m feeling my age, and I just feel like being a grumpy, old man and really teeing off on a product and a business model that have made my life a little less fun this week.  So, here goes with mostly full attribution to Andy Rooney.

Ya’ ever wonder what happened to trimmers and edgers with real metal blades? I sure do. My first job at the age of 11, like so many kids, was mowing yards.  The summers after my sixth- and seventh-grade years, I wore out my Dad’s perfectly good Lawn Boy push mower in search of the almighty dollar.  I made just enough to buy my very own Remington 870 pump-action shotgun. Yeah, I’m one of those guys who made the rapid transition from rock-throwing, to slingshots, BB-guns, pellet guns, to shotguns and rifles. Shot a lot, hit very little…

In those days, there were no electric or gas powered trimmers that used whirling fishing line as the cutting blade. No sir, we had trimmers with large, nasty, rotating, metal blades.  Blades that would edge the sidewalk and cut down anything in their path including shrubs, Barbie Dolls, body parts, and the occasional unfortunate small animals (kidding on that one — don’t call PETA, please). Yep, these were manly tools that lasted a long time, seldom needed sharpening, and well — they just worked!

As is always the case, some misguided inventive soul came along and ruined the art of trimming and edging with the invention of the “Weed Whacker,” “Weed Eater,” or as I like to call it, the “High Speed Shin Flogger.”  Rather than sticking with something reliable, effective, and “dangerous” like a spinning metal blade, by spooling heavy gauge mono-filament line on a rotating trimmer head, well, by golly you had yourself a weed destroying machine that was “safe.”  Ha!  Could the end of civilization be far off!

Some might blame Ralph Nader, but that’s another story for another time.

In this master stroke of genius, trimmers moved from being something you could buy and use for five years with almost no maintenance nor recurring cost to something you had buy and then continuously resupply with that blasted whirling fishing line! Oh, how I’ve grown to loathe that whirling fishing line while truly appreciating the evil genius behind this business model.

This was yet again another instance of the dreaded razor handle and blades model.  The trimmers themselves are relatively cheap  at $50-$250, but the line, oh yes, that line is where the margin lives.  Sometimes they turn up the level of torture.  They give the unsuspecting consumer the option of  “saving” money by buying the line and re-spooling it yourself for $3 dollars or buying a pre-wound replacement spool for $9.  What they don’t tell you is that no normal, non-robotic human being can possibly rewind the spool in a manner that works for more than 5 minutes of trimming.

So, the poor saps, with no intention of cutting into even more of their drinking time, are left with no alternative but to buy a pre-wound replacement spool for $9.  Oh, and by the way, that $9 spool is good for about two trimming expeditions around a normal yard, with at least 50 interruptions to vise-grip the line out of the spool.  Starting to get the picture?  Am I bitter?  You bet.  Beers have been missed, sunburns have been had, tools have been thrown, and obscenities have been shouted…

They also fail to mention that unless you wear Kevlar-titanium full length pants, your legs are going to look like somebody shot you with my Remington 870 shotgun!  Yep, evil, evil device — no question about it, but definitely “safer” than that big, nasty, rotating metal blade that never required changing, never wore out, and just worked…

So what’s the point of all of this?  How is this relevant to the techpreneur of 2010?  Business models driven by occasional, infrequent, hard-to-forecast capital purchases are not nearly as interesting to investors as those business models that virtually give away the instrument but require continual recurring purchases to actually make use of the instrument.  Investors tend to love business models built around recurring revenues that are easier to forecast. In many instances, the initial purchase is subsidized in these models in favor of larger paybacks from recurring service or maintenance fees. Printers and cell phones are great examples.

So, ya’ ever wonder how the “green” LED lighting guys are going to work the razor/blade recurring Mojo into their business models?  I sure do, and for what it’s worth, if it doesn’t involve whirling fishing line and bleeding shins, I’m all for it.

Thanks, Andy.

(Jeff Amerine is an IA advisor, entrepreneurship educator, and officer with the University of Arkansas Technology Licensing Office. Each Thursday, his Techpreneurship blog will appear in INOV8. Drop him a line in comments.)

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