Dave Hirschkop
An "insanely" hot idea

Bob Serling: This is 15-Minute Innovation, and today I'm talking with Dave Hirschkop. Dave is the founder of Dave's Gourmet, best known for their Insanity Sauce, which is a very cool story that I'm going to let Dave fill you in on. So, Dave, welcome!

Dave Hirschkop: Hi, thanks for having me.

Bob: So, Dave, what is the biggest business-building idea that you're known for?

Dave: It's always hard to narrow it down to one, but I think what we're probably best known for is, you know, brands have a personality. Whether you like it or not — your brand has a personality. In creating Insanity, we created a personality that's actually interesting, so I think that's what we're known for - creating a brand that has a real personality, something people would want to connect with, something they take note of, something they find amusing, and it really has an impact.

Bob: Great. Why don't we back up just a half a step, and have you tell people exactly what Insanity is?

Dave: Sure. Insanity is a brand of spicy items, spicy sauces and "snacks for an insane world", as we call it. And it's best known for Dave's Insanity Sauce. We actually created a whole niche of hot sauces called the "super hots". Before we came out with Insanity Sauce, there were no sauces of that magnitude of heat in existence.

So we got this cult following and we've now expanded off of that quite a bit, but that's what we're best known for is all sorts of hot sauces and spicy snack items.

Bob: How did you come up with the idea for Insanity Sauce in the first place?

Dave: Insanity was really a joke. I had a restaurant called Burrito Madness, and we had a lot of drunks coming in there, and I didn't like the drunks. So I made hotter and hotter sauces to sort of teach them a lesson and get rid of them. (Laughter.) It sort of became a mission to see how hot I could make it. It was just fun.

Bob: So the product was born out of vengeance? (laughter)

Dave: Yeah, born out of vengeance. It became a passion, but the humor was first and then the passion of doing a project. And then what was a hobby eventually became a commercial endeavor because it just grew too big to be a hobby.

Bob: And how did it switch from being something that you were using to quiet down or get rid of the drunken patrons? How did that transform into a product?

Dave: Well, what happened was we would make different versions of these super-hot sauces and serve them to people. We settled on one version that we thought was the one for them, and they started coming back the next day. We'd serve it to the drunks and they'd sit there glowering in pain or they'd run out the front door. But the next day they'd come back and ask for little Styrofoam cups of it.

And eventually it got to be a little bit much to serve in little Styrofoam cups so we bottled it and then started selling it out of the restaurant. Then, I heard about the Fiery Food Festival in Albuquerque, New Mexico — the national gathering of people who are real hot aficionados, and I went there and it became sort of a sensation.

Bob: That's great. Now, I've heard that Insanity is so hot that it was actually banned somewhere. Is that true?

Dave: Yeah, it's true. It was banned from that show.

Bob: Really?

Dave: Some guy had a minor respiratory problem, and so they banned the sauce from the show, which was kind of amusing. That was part of the sort of lore that helped launch it. The New York Times picked up on that and a bunch of other media outlets, so we became sort of this, "Wow, this is a black-labeled, scary item that people had to have."

Bob: Well, that's a terrific story. Let's shift gears here now. When you need to come up with a big idea for your business, maybe for a new product or a way to market an existing product or something like that, how do you do that? What's the process that you use?

Dave: Well, I think when you hear something like that, the problem is for most people that you describe it as a big idea because a big idea inherently has pressure in it, so people are just sort of hammered by that. And I think what happens is there's too much noise. There's so much information out there now, and I think the hard part about coming up with big ideas is your brain's just everywhere.

So for me, it's a matter of simplifying. You've got to get rid of the noise. You have to get away, you know — go exercise or get away from other people or go for a walk, whatever you need to do. But get away and try to simplify it back down to the basics. What's your brand about? What's really the purpose of this whole project?

Simplify it down to the basics. You don't need 7,000 hours of research. Who is the head user of whatever this item is — if it's a sales pitch or if it's a product, whatever. What are you trying to accomplish, where are you coming from? Have the basic who, what, why, where type of questions.

Just boil it down into very simple pieces, answer those questions, and then put yourself on the other end of the project and look at it and say, "Is that something exceptional? Is that something that's really going to have an impact or not?" So just boil it down because otherwise you'll just get off track.

Bob: That's a great, concise description of a very simple but powerful process. It's interesting, in having interviewed a lot of people for this series, how similar the process is that a lot of people use — very close to what you described. There are some nuances here and there, but it's interesting. It seems to a common the ways that many business leaders think, and I think it's also a way that the brain operates most efficiently.

Dave: Otherwise, your brain just cuts off. My wife and I always laugh because early on in our relationship, there was an occasion where, I don't know, I got flustered about something, and I said, "Paige, help me think". And apparently she thought my tone of voice was so desperate sounding, it became a joke, but sometimes there's just too much going on.

That's why Warren Buffet, who's such a phenomenon, that's what people talk about when they talk about him. Bill Gates was saying that the other day, saying what's amazing about him is how he can see things so simply. He really just hits the truth on things because there's a basic truth to most things, and I think for a lot of people it's hard to just catch on to that basic truth. They're just looking at too many factors and too much information.

Bob: I like what you said, too, Dave, about really slowing the process down and maybe getting away, going for a walk, going for a drive or whatever. I think a lot of people, when they try to solve a problem, they try to work harder, and oftentimes the best solution comes when you don't work harder and faster, but when you slow down. I've found that to be very true both for myself and in working with clients to develop new products or marketing strategies.

Dave: And, also, people seek advice, which I think it's often fantastic to seek advice and get other opinions, but sometimes I think we get too insulated and we're only asking experts and industry insiders, people like that.

So I'll just ask a friend or somebody objective who has a lot of common sense, and they'll come up with the answer, or they'll come up with a perspective that helps you hit the answer. And they don't know much about the whole background and the pricing and the details, but they have that simplified perspective, because they don't have too much knowledge.

Bob: That's a great point. When I work with clients and assemble their teams for innovation sessions, generally they want to bring in all the senior management — the CEO and maybe the head of marketing and the head of sales. But I always want to bring in the people that are out there in the trenches daily as well — customer support, the shipping and receiving people, people taking the orders — because they've got input and a view of the company that's very different than top management has. And often it's the mixture of ideas from all those levels that comes up with a great solution or a great product idea for them.

Dave: Yeah, and sometimes you just have to shake things up. You have to do something that almost seems pointless.

Bob: Can you give me an example of that? Can you think of a way you've done that recently — gone in to shake something up that was productive for you?

Dave: Yeah, this is a bigger way of doing it, I suppose, but we made a couple acquisitions in the last couple years — a couple brand acquisitions. And if you look at them from a pure dollars-and-cents standpoint, they haven't been huge wins for us. One was probably better than the other.

But what they did do was they did shake things up and make us look at things differently, and so now we've moved on beyond those and say, "Wow, okay, now we know what we need to do". We were kind of getting in a little bit of a rut and too much of a pattern, and I think that it really helped us get motivated and get more focused on the things we really do need to do.

Bob: Great example. I have one more question for you, and then I think we'll be at about the end of our time. What is your own preferred innovation style? When you're looking for an idea, do you like to work more on your own, out isolated on a walk or something, or do you prefer to work with a team?

Dave: I'm probably more of an individual worker in that way. What I like to do is I love audio books and I also like to work out, so sometimes I find an audio book — something not quite on the subject that you're thinking about, but something that's either an analog to it or maybe something that just gets your mind going.

Sometimes hearing that or sometimes just being off somewhere… like I find on the nights when you can't fall asleep, some fantastic thinking goes on because all the factors — your sight is cut out and there's not much to smell or feel or whatever, so you're limited to very few factors and very few things that can distract you, and I find that that's a great time to sort of mentally innovate.

Bob: That's a great point. In one of these interviews, I talked about how I suffer from my thinking style because I think a lot at night like you just mentioned. Unfortunately what that means is two, three or four nights a week I get awakened in the middle of the night at 3 a.m. All of a sudden, I'm wide awake with some big idea. So there's a benefit to that and there's a down side to it as well.

Dave: I think it's interesting that people who have their sleeping problems, they fight it and they become frustrated and it becomes a negative, but they should embrace it. If you can't sleep, then get up and do something that you want to do, or just sort of rest and relax. Don't fight it because you're not going to sleep either way.

Bob: I agree with you, and I look at the ideas that come at 3 in the morning as a gift because I can always take a nap during the day.

Dave: Yeah, it's great if you have that flexibility.

Bob: Dave, this has really been interesting and you've provided some great advice. Can you tell people how they can find out more about Dave's Gourmet?

Dave: Sure, they can go to our website, which is www.davesgourmet.com, or they can always call us at 800-758-0372, or they can always email us at info@davesgourmet.com.

Bob: And at your web site, they can find out about your entire line of hot sauces, your drink mixes, your pasta sauces and everything else you've got going on there.

Dave: Right. And we're always coming up with new, funky things, like our Lucky Nuts, which are new. Every tenth nut is super hot, sort of like a Russian roulette concept.

Bob: That's funny! Plus, let me add that I really enjoy going to your site because it's really fun to read the descriptions of everything. You've got a slightly whacked approach to the world, and I like that a lot.

Dave: Well, thanks!

Bob: Dave, thank you very much for your time today. It's been a pleasure talking with you.

Dave: Thanks.