YouSaid · the spoken record

Brad Baxter

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67
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2025-05-05
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2025-05-05
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  1. “That's right. I did get excited about the idea and I thought, well, if I'm going to pursue this, I better see if there's anything out there that I might bump into. And sure enough, I found a patent that was very similar to what I had been thinking about. And at first I was really kind of disappointed because I thought that was the end of it. But I thought more about it and I thought, well, you know what? I'm not really It's not really that important to me who owns or who has the patent. I mean That really wasn't the driving force here was I wanted to build a business around a great product idea and if I could license this patent that would allow me to do it so that was really the path then that I took”

    2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “So, just by turning the globe, you lift that litter bed up. Then it starts cascading down, and then if you keep rotating, you can bring a screen around that starts passing into that litter that's cascading down very gently. It's kind of magical to watch it. I mean, this is a litter box, but okay, it is kind of magical to watch that screen just kind of rise up through the litter. The clump has been floating in there. The litter is cascading through the screen. And then within a couple of seconds, the clump is all of a sudden just sitting on top of the screen. It's not like the screen pushed it. And if it's going to break up, it breaks up on a solid surface and then it goes through the wasteboard. So everything is removed.”

    2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Yep, I was trying to think of ways to gently separate the clump from the clean litter because one of the things that happens with the rake mechanism is that it breaks up the clump. And once the clump breaks up, you're leaving behind all these little nuggets that they're going to smell.”

    2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Are absolutely right. I mean, the dexterity that a human has using a scoop like that is so complicated compared to just moving a rake laterally through the litter. I mean, ultimately, you're just pushing a clump, which is like a snowplow, and it pushes all kinds of clean litter into the tray at the end, as well as the waist. And so it's very wasteful. Just a lot of things going against it that don't work very well. So, again, there may be an easier way, a more convenient way, and a better way for you and a better way for your pet.”

    2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “That's a great description. You got it right The litter maid was, and again, not to trash them or anything, but it was a very literal approach to the problem. Don't really break down into its functions, and how can we best solve this problem? And that's what I tried to do. I tried to step away and look at it from a different perspective and say, hey, what am I really trying to do here? I'm trying to separate these clumps from this litter. What's the best way to do that? And so that's how I came up with the Litter robot idea was through sifting, not through raking.”

    2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “That got me thinking about well, how can I automate this? And it was more really about just solving my own problem at the time. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought, wow, this could really be an interesting opportunity because there's really nothing out there that addresses this concern fully. There was at the time, there was another automatic litter box on the market, and it just came out recently. It was Littermade. And it was okay, but I ended up getting it to check it out. And it really did not work well with my cats. And that even prompted me to look into this even further.”

    2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Well, I had had a couple of cats I had been having some trouble with them. They were actually not going in their litter box. They were peeing outside of the litter box. And the reason for that is I wasn't getting down there quick enough to, or often enough, to clean the litter box. I was going down maybe every other day. And that was not enough for my cats. And so they would protest by peeing outside the box. And so one day I'm down there and I'm cleaning up the mess. I've got a bucket of water and bleach water. I'm on my hands and knees. I'm wiping up this urine and this is not a fun task. And I'm thinking, man, I've got to figure out a way to keep this box clean all the time because this is just driving me nuts.”

    2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Was much more than even a full time job getting that business up and running, supporting these European suppliers. So there wasn't a lot of extra time to experiment with that stuff.”

    2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “I think one comes to mind. We had kids, young kids at the time, and so one of the ideas was a basically a stand that you would put your bottles that have the bags in them with the formula. You always had to push the air out, so I designed a stand that you would push the air out of the baby bottle. And the stand was just a simple stand to do that that fit inside the bottle, and then it had like a hexagonal shape on the bottom of it so that if it tipped over, it wouldn't roll off the table. And just simple stuff like that. The truth of the matter was, is I had a lot of things kind of floating around in the back of my mind, but I was so busy running the business. I mean, it was a...”

    2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “That's absolutely right. I mean, I had had this dream to develop a product to be an inventor for many years. And I had dabbled in a number of different things, but never really hit on the one thing that I thought I could take to a business model. And product design was really my one of my core skill sets too, is being able to take some kind of a functional requirement and then create it either through pen and paper and then on to CAD and then the other aspect was it's one thing to design a product, but it's another to make it manufacturable inexpensive, all those things are integrated into the process of product development. I think I had a knack for all of that and kind of integrating it all into a package.”

    2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Yeah, it wasn't really the path that I had wanted to take, but it was, it provided something that allowed me to be independent to do something on my own, in which I would have taken that any day over. Working for someone else, you know. It could have been anything. As long as I'm independent and I'm working for myself, I'm setting the, you know, I'm charting the course of the business where I want to go. That was the most important thing for me. It wasn't always that important about exactly what it was.”

    2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “The primary factor in a larger company. And so there's a lot that I'd like to do and a lot that I'd like to learn. And I'm not going to probably be able to do that as quickly as I'd like here at Ford Motor Company.”

    2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Yeah, well, what happened even with the salary and all the benefits is I realized that I kind of had some self-introspection and I realized that I'm not really the kind of person that wants to be a manager at Ford Motor Company. And although I respected my managers and I thought they, you know, they did a great job and I learned a lot from them. I saw what they were doing and I knew, you know what, this really isn't for me. This is moving too slowly for me. And I think in larger companies, a lot of times you end up being frustrated because a lot of times you can see the answer, or at least I feel that I could see the answer and it was a fairly common sense thing, but sometimes common sense is not.”

    2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “I was at Ford about two and a half, three years, and coming into the third year, I started to realize, and I had been told this before other people, that you got to be careful about the golden handcuffs at Ford, the benefits, the pay, all that becomes so good that you just can't leave, even if you thought you might want to try something else. So I knew that that was something kind of hanging over my head and I realized if I'm going to do something different, I better do it now before I really get those golden handcuffs.”

    2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “It was interesting because at the time, Ford was moving from what were analog displays, like for the instrument clusters to digital. So there was this big conversion going on and you had to package all this electronics and plastics. So they were looking for engineers to work in that area within electronics division. So this ended up being actually a great foundational start for me because that's ultimately what I've ended up doing over my career is working with plastics and electronics. And I at first I thought, well, that's not exactly what I wanted to do, but what I'm in Ford. I'm thrilled that I even got the job and I'm going to make the best of it”

    2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “As a teenager, I spent a lot of my time drawing cars, fixing cars, fantasizing about cars, and so I was a real car guy, and I really wanted to get into designing vehicles, and I had an artistic streak, so I thought that might be a really interesting path, but I knew that I'd probably want to get an engineering degree as well. So that was kind of the path I took. And once I figured out that you actually had to study in college and that you couldn't just kind of breeze on by like I did in high school, I started to do okay, but I would say the first year and a half were pretty rough”

    2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Realized that even though the volumes were growing, I wasn't really able to make money because it was just so expensive to produce the product. And so at about five years in, I had kind of come to Jesus moment because I was at that time, I think I had dumped about 300 to 350,000 dollars into the business just to keep it alive. And I was taking a very minimal salary. And my wife put up with that for five years and then it kind of came to a head. Like what are you doing?”

    2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT