Drake Roberts

He sells a physical product on the internet and wanted to know what the internet was actually doing with it. I look after the tracking and the SEO for deoblock.com; the product and the company are his to describe.

From a class project. DEOBLOCK came out of school in Palatine, Illinois, and the local paper wrote it up exactly that way: grads who turned smelly gym bags and a class project into a business. It was crowdfunded on Kickstarter in 2019, past ten thousand dollars in thirty days, and he and Anthony Tamras have been building it out ever since.

What it is has not changed. What has changed is everything around it: patents granted, the name registered, a full rebrand, and a new site to sell it from.

• One product, done properly. A block you drop in a bag and forget about. His own line for it is make life not stink. Two versions so far, each one redesigned off what customers said was wrong with the last.
• The paperwork most founders skip. Patents and a registered trademark on a thing that looks like a plastic cube. It is the unglamorous half of a physical product and he did it early.
• Locker rooms, not shelves. First retail was Jerry's Hockey, four stores around Chicago. Their own posts have it in university basketball lockers and at the equipment managers' trade show, which is the room where that kind of product is actually chosen.
• Pitching to anybody who will listen. He goes back to DePaul to talk to founder cohorts, and his advice there is the one he used himself: pitch to everyone, including your teachers. The hard part starts after the money arrives.