43: How to Light Up Product Development with Seth McBee

Seth McBee is lighting up the streets with inspiration and LED's. He is the co-founder of You Saw Me, a start-up concentrating on the design, manufacturing, and marketing of their first patented product: a reflective vest (The Verve) with custom-color LED lights embedded inside for athletes, police, military, and various other consumers. Its 60 custom color, waterproof LEDs can be seen from over a mile away in any direction. With engineering backgrounds and entrepreneurial bugs, Seth and his partner Kevin are putting everything they have into a strategic process wrapped with product development, market research, and future scalability. These vests are so?.f*****g... awesome. Here are the highlights of my funky conversation with Seth: 06:06 - Being a young entrepreneur, filing patents back in 2009, studying Engineering at the University of Maryland, bringing his talents to Virginia as a nuclear engineer, and finally landing in Lexington in 2013 to pursue his passion, / 10:07 - Where their idea originated and how customer feedback influenced the development of their product, / 14:21 - About their first prototype, the processes and halts it went through and the next versions which came out after their tinkering, / 17:29 - The challenges he faced including the rejections, discouragements, critics and all the ups and downs, and the things he learned and what he considers his successes so far, / 22:54 - Networking, partnering with startup incubators such as Awesome, Inc., and the support he got from the community, / 28:48 - Lessons learned from his unsuccessful Kickstarter campaign and how it led them to be featured in the Fast Company website,