Peter Thorpe is an entrepreneur and an 18-year veteran firefighter. He is the founder of Fire Avert, a company that created a device to prevent kitchen fires. Thorpe took his product from concept to mass production while maintaining his full-time career.

Nate Wheeler is the host of the popular Manufacturing Insiders podcast. He also owns weCreate, a nationally recognized marketing agency that helps manufacturers grow, save money, and become more efficient.

In this episode of Manufacturing Insiders, Peter breaks down the process of turning an idea into a physical product sold nationwide. He shares the story behind his invention, including the initial design challenges and the strategies used to scale production. His experience provides a clear roadmap for aspiring hardware entrepreneurs.

Thorpe shares his experience with design for manufacturability, highlighting the disconnect between third-party engineering firms and the factory floor. He explains his approach to overseas production, managing tooling costs as a startup, and the marketing pivot that led to widespread adoption. The discussion also provides a timely look at how his company is adapting its supply chain to overcome recent international tariffs.

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Nate (00:00.9): Welcome to Manufacturing Insiders. Today I have Peter Thorpe with me. Peter has a lot of interesting stuff to share with us today. He’s an entrepreneur and an 18-year veteran of the firefighting force. It’s amazing how he’s been able to take a product all the way from idea and conception to really selling a lot of them throughout the country while having a full-time job. It’s an important product and a lifesaving product.

He’s been on Shark Tank and has a lot to share about supply chain, issues we’re having with tariffs, and how to market a product and get it into the marketplace. So welcome to Manufacturing Insiders, Peter.

Peter Thorpe (00:46.254): I appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Nate. Looking forward to the time.

Nate (00:49.282): Yeah, absolutely. So tell us the story of how you came up with the idea for Fire Avert, what it does, and how you’ve been able to get it to where it is today.

Peter Thorpe (01:04.394): Yeah, okay. That’s a fun story and kind of a long story, but we’ll make it short. I started my career off as a full-time firefighter. My grandfather was a firefighter and that’s what I always wanted to do. I got hired by the dream city that I wanted to work for. But early on in my career, I realized that every tour at that firehouse, we’d go on a kitchen fire. It was just something that I started realizing I could bank on. I knew it was going to happen.

We’d get dispatched to smoke showing and homeowners not home. We’d pop the door, crawl in the smoke, and it was just food left on the stove again and again. On one of these calls at an apartment complex, there was smoke coming through the windows and the place was chock full of smoke. We’re excited as firefighters, right? That’s what we train for. We mask up, pop the door, the smoke alarm is blaring, and again disappointment. It’s just food with no flames, just food left on the stove.

Nate (01:52.968): Hahaha

Peter Thorpe (01:54.958): During this call, the idea just kind of popped in my head. I was driving the fire truck back to the firehouse and I looked over at my captain and said, “How cool would it be if that smoke alarm could just turn the stove off? We never would have gotten called here. The apartment wouldn’t be full of smoke if that stove could just turn itself off.” It was like this huge light bulb moment. I couldn’t even sleep that night at the firehouse. I kept thinking of all the different calls I’d been on where only if that stove could turn itself off.

I decided to go with it. I got a team together of people smarter than me who had more money than me, and we just started building it. Within about 15 months we had our first products. We’ve done a lot of different products since then, but that was really quick from idea to being tooled up with products here in the States for us to sell. It was about 15 months. That was kind of our start right there and how the idea came to be.

Nate (02:42.457): That’s huge.

Nate (02:49.107): So I have a lot of questions, but since you mentioned the tooling aspect and the design first, what resources did you need to put together? How did you go about that? So now you have an idea. What was the next step you took?

Peter Thorpe (03:03.75): Man, when we look back on this, that’s a great question. I look back now because we have so much going on. We’re always launching products. Right now we’re launching products in Australia and the Netherlands, and we’re doing a really cool product for Lockheed Martin. There’s really cool stuff going on.

Nate (03:19.706): Wow.

Peter Thorpe (03:25.934): After we had the idea, I’m always amazed now because we did it so quickly and now it seems like it takes so long to get a new product out, but we did it so fast. We had the idea, we got a team together, and first this is kind of a good learning experience.

Nate (03:31.17): Right.

Peter Thorpe (03:37.954): We won a lot of money. There are always entrepreneurial competitions throughout the country and we just cleaned houses. We entered a lot of them and always placed in the top three. Within eight months, we had about a hundred thousand dollars in cash. Being a firefighter, I thought we won and this was it. We hit the big time because that’s a lot of money. Then the dirty secret is that’s not a lot of money. That just gets spent in a matter of months.

Nate (03:58.085): Yeah.

Nate (04:02.202): Right. You can spend 60 or 70 grand on a tool.

Peter Thorpe (04:10.54): Yeah, exactly. So that was eye opening. We were told to use this third party engineering firm to design it for us. They designed the first Fire Avert for us and we took it to our manufacturer and they laughed. They said we can’t manufacture this because it’s just not manufacturable. We spent about 15 grand for them to design it, and the manufacturer said they’d do it for free and did it in a week. This big firm took three months while this factory did it in a week.

Nate (04:37.53): Yep. The disconnect between engineering and the actual manufacturer. That’s why I have a lot of customers that really emphasize their design for the manufacturability aspect of their business, and I think that’s really important.

Peter Thorpe (04:39.606): Yeah, it is.

Peter Thorpe (04:53.868): So I recommend to people now, as you’re designing it, get your manufacturer on board early and have them involved in that process. You don’t want to do what we did and show up and have them laugh at you and say we can’t build that. The assembly would have taken 40 minutes to assemble one unit, and we got that assembly time down to minutes. The factories want your business too. We took the plunge and now it’s a whole different conversation.

Peter Thorpe (05:20.94): We took the plunge and went overseas, and the factories over there want your business. So the tooling up wasn’t $20,000, but they kind of bake it into your product cost over the years. I think tooling up was maybe $2,000, and they baked it in. You don’t own the tools though. People always think they’re going to have someone overseas build their tools and then take them.

Nate (05:35.342): That’s not bad at all. Of course, you pay for it on the back end, right? I mean, you will pay for it.

Peter Thorpe (05:43.278): From my experience, that’s not going to happen. You don’t own the tools unless you have that clearly spelled out and you spend the $20,000 to $30,000. Then you might be able to take them, but you don’t usually own the tools at the end of the day.

Nate (05:58.456): Right. That’s important. Now, one thing that surprised me in our initial conversation was it seemed like there was a pretty low quantity of parts that you could manufacture with one tool. So I guess in those cases, it doesn’t really matter too much if you own the tool. But if you have a tool that’s going to pump out a couple million parts, you’re probably going to want to own that tool. By the time you bake in a couple cents on each part, you’re going to end up paying a lot for the tool.

Peter Thorpe (06:31.818): Yeah, you might pay for that tool several times over versus paying it upfront. But when you’re a young company, as a firefighter, I didn’t have any money and we never really went and raised a whole lot of money. We raised about $100,000 to $150,000 from friends, but that wasn’t enough. I didn’t start paying myself until six years into the company.

Nate (06:41.849): Right.

Peter Thorpe (06:57.44): So it was for our benefit to have the factories kind of bake the cost into the product and just have them own the tool.

Nate (07:05.07): That makes a lot of sense. So tell me, how did you get on Shark Tank? And were you successful there?

Peter Thorpe (07:14.262): Yeah, Shark Tank was a lot of fun. We’re from Utah and based here with our headquarters in Provo, Utah. One of my mentors said, “Hey, Shark Tank’s here this weekend. They’re doing an open call for anyone to come pitch. You should do it.” I said I didn’t want to do it and didn’t think I was going to. Then Saturday morning, I decided to go.

You show up and wait in line for a few hours. This was nine years ago, but they give you 60 seconds and you’re pitching your product. On each side of you is someone else pitching their product about 10 feet away, and you have one judge in front of you. You have to block out the other noise from these other people pitching their products. Any judge can ask you a question just to throw you off, but it was really stressful. I think they just wanted to see how you handle it.

Nate (08:00.14): Wow.

Peter Thorpe (08:08.387): I’m talking to this one judge and then out of the blue, the one over there might ask me something. I don’t know if I’m supposed to pay attention to them. I think they just want to see how you handle stress.

Nate (08:11.512): Yep. I think your experience as a firefighter probably prepared you for some of that. I know in the military, they throw you into situations where you have drill instructors screaming on all sides, even in boot camp. Really it’s to desensitize you to the chaos of these situations. Fires are chaotic, right? So you have to be prepared for that.

Peter Thorpe (08:30.766): Yeah, that’s a good call. Maybe that’s why it worked. So after that 60-second pitch, they asked me questions and said if we’re interested, we’ll contact you next month or in six weeks. Then the next day, they called us and said they were interested. They scheduled a follow-up interview on Monday and then another one.

Almost every week we had one or two interviews and kept getting higher up the food chain to the decision maker. By the end of the month, they said they wanted to put us on air and fly us to LA. We interviewed in May, they flew us out to LA in June, and you spent one day in a warehouse with about a dozen attorneys. Every attorney gives you their spill of what this is and what it’s not. You sign paper after paper and then you go on the show. It was really cool.

Prior to Shark Tank, we sold maybe one to three units on our website. Our website was never meant to be our main channel of selling, but we sold one to three units a month on our website. When Shark Tank aired, our mentors said to just be prepared for everyone to be chatting online. We’re sitting there in our conference room and we air on the East Coast, and our traffic goes from nobody on our website to 50,000 people on our website. It was really cool.

The shopping cart has this sound when someone buys something, and it goes ding. Every five minutes, just ching, ching. All night, every five minutes we were just selling.

Nate (09:46.817): Wow.

Nate (09:51.96): Hahaha!

Nate (09:56.864): That had to be like ecstasy, right? You were probably just beside yourself.

Peter Thorpe (10:02.334): It was really cool. What it taught me is that with the right marketing, you can sell a product. We went from basically zero to every five minutes selling one, and then it kind of died off. Then central time hit with a huge wave, then mountain time, and Pacific. That lasted for about a month, and it never went back down to where it was, but it cooled off quite a bit.

We mainly sell to multifamily owners and huge apartment complexes. We go to trade shows and they would come up and say, “Hey, we saw you on Shark Tank.” People kind of buy it sometimes just because it was a Shark Tank product. So it helped for sure.

Nate (10:38.542): Right, yeah. If Shark Tank bought into it, then maybe I should have a different mindset.

Peter Thorpe (10:43.754): Yeah, it just kind of builds credibility. Our mentors said just get a deal done. Don’t worry about the logistics and the valuation. Just get a deal done because you need the world to see that they’re backing the product.

Nate (10:56.26): So how does that work then? I honestly should watch more Shark Tank. I’ve watched some episodes, but it seems like they’re usually trying to grab a pretty hefty percentage of the company. Was that your experience?

Peter Thorpe (11:12.436): Yeah, it was. We really wanted to get a deal done with Lori and they started going back and forth. Lori’s kind of interested and we’re negotiating. Lori starts asking for royalties and equity and all this stuff, and Mark’s like, “Lori, you can’t have equity and royalties and all this.” She’s like, “Yeah,” and I see her about to go out. She’s getting kind of like, “Yeah, that’s probably not a fair deal.”

We negotiated a little more, but I really wanted to get a deal done with Lori because she’s so powerful and just an awesome partner. So I just kind of said deal, and she’s like, “Wow, great.” We hugged and that was it.

Nate (11:54.584): Wow. So is this a kind of in perpetuity sort of partnership? I mean, you’re still partnered with her essentially?

Peter Thorpe (12:05.102): Good question. I think everyone knows now. I always tell people what happened on Shark Tank stayed on Shark Tank, but I think it’s been nine years and everyone knows that we ended up not closing on the deal. Our legal team and Lori’s legal team tried to negotiate and kind of iron some stuff out, and we just couldn’t see eye to eye. So we ended up unfortunately not being able to close on the deal.

Nate (12:25.134): But a hell of a free promotion.

Peter Thorpe (12:28.48): Yeah, we wish we could have gotten a deal done with her, but we didn’t get a deal done, so she doesn’t own any equity. But yeah, the promotion and marketing was outstanding. It really helped propel the company.

Nate (12:40.226): Yeah, that’s fantastic. I guess I didn’t realize that you had to go through all those different levels of pitches before you actually got to stand in front of the sharks, right? It makes sense obviously because you only want to get good ideas from them, but it kind of surprises me what really lousy ideas you sometimes see on there, right?

Peter Thorpe (13:03.478): Yeah, it was interesting how many interviews we had. Then one of the last stages was, “Hey, make a video of yourself selling your product. We want to see what you look like on TV.” I didn’t want to just use my iPhone holding it on a tripod or something, so we hired a camera crew to come in and they made a really cool video for us to submit. A lot of steps. I mean, we probably went through a dozen different interviews.

Nate (13:27.151): Yeah.

Nate (13:31.738): Yeah, and I think a part of your success is obviously the product just makes sense. You saw the need. A lot of times that’s where these ideas come from. It’s a problem you’re trying to solve in your life. But I think a big part of your success too is I think you’re just a good storyteller.

Peter Thorpe (13:51.158): Yeah, potentially. I think for Shark Tank for sure, they’re more interested in the story than really the product because we didn’t have the strongest financials and I’m not a business guy. I didn’t know what I was doing. I still don’t know what I’m doing. But the story of a firefighter making a product was a cool story to share.

It still is really cool. So for the listeners, what Fire Avert is: we just made a small box that plugs in behind your stove. We know if the stove is on, and if the stove is on and hears the sound of your smoke alarm, it waits about 30 seconds. If no one does anything, we just turn the stove off and remove that heat source before there’s a fire. So no heat source, no fire. We are now the leader in kitchen fire prevention across the country.

Nate (14:08.676): Yeah.

Peter Thorpe (14:34.924): We move about 10,000 of these every month in new homes. So it’s been a really cool adventure.

Nate (14:41.498): Yeah, which I thought was brilliant because I was kind of wrapping my head around what’s the mechanism that actually triggers this? Is it communicating with smart smoke detectors through Wi-Fi, which obviously creates some potential disconnects and failure points? But no, I mean, the way that you did it is really impressive. I want you to kind of talk a little bit about that. And then also the other question that I had that I think you should address is, what distance can it actually hear the smoke alarm at since normally you’re not going to have that smoke alarm in the actual kitchen?

Peter Thorpe (15:21.71): Great questions. Yeah, when I first had the idea, I brought one of my good buddies who was a mechanical engineer and we’re like, “Man, should we wire it? Should we use radio frequencies?” Then he’s like, it was actually his idea to use sound. It was Mike Sanders. He said, “Hey, let’s use sound. That sound can be the trigger.” I’m like, “That’s awesome. Let’s do it.” That keeps costs down.

We kind of found out that smoke alarms are required by NFPA to have a certain decibel and cadence pattern to them. So that’s part of our patent technology is that we listen and hone in for that frequency, that decibel, and that’s how we do the magic. Distance wise, it really depends on the acoustics of the home, but it works about 60 feet away.

We’re on version five right now and next year we’re launching version six, but version one wasn’t that good. Version two was maybe even worse. We struggled to recognize the difference between AC/DC and the sound of a smoke alarm. AC/DC was the worst. We knew if someone plays AC/DC super loud, like “Thunderstruck” I think it would trigger it.

Nate (16:21.124): Wait, wait.

Nate (16:25.978): Hahaha!

Nate (16:31.087): You have them check a box when they’re ordering it. Do you listen to any of these types of music?

Peter Thorpe (16:34.734): Yeah, and you can’t use your blender and don’t vacuum.

Nate (16:40.452): Don’t watch any TV shows that might have fires in them.

Peter Thorpe (16:44.108): Yeah, so it was just growing pains. I remember in the earliest part of the company, the early years, everyone would come in and it was like, “Everyone’s on customer service today. We’re going to get a lot of complaints.” But it’s just the growing pains every company goes through. We didn’t know what we didn’t know.

We started learning about false positives and we started collecting every sound out there that had triggered Fire Avert. So we now have this test bank of thousands of different sounds that can possibly trigger it. Then we hired the best engineers in the world, I say, but we spent about a million dollars on redesigning the firmware and electronics. We upgraded everything from capacitors to the best memory you can have on there. Now we don’t have any false positives and every product gets run through our sound test bank to make sure it’s not gonna have any false positives for it goes out in the retail so we’ve come a really long way.

Nate (17:41.528): Wow. So how many years has it been now?

Peter Thorpe (17:45.048): From the idea, it’s been 14 years.

Nate (17:48.322): Okay. Man. And so now you’re selling, you said I think like 10,000 units a month, something like that?

Peter Thorpe (17:56.098): Yeah, 10,000 units a month and we just signed distribution contracts this year with the Netherlands over in Europe and Australia. Great partners over there. They’ve actually just won an award internationally for the technology over there. So we’re rolling it out there. Probably Q4 to be ready to go through certification now. It’s been really cool.

Nate (18:20.802): Yeah, it’s amazing. So tell me about some of the challenges that you’ve been experiencing. We bring up tariffs a lot in these conversations recently because it’s kind of top of mind for a lot of manufacturers, especially since you mentioned some or all of your manufacturing is out of the US. What are you seeing right now? How are you dealing with it?

Peter Thorpe (18:42.358): Yeah, it’s something we talk about every day in the office and I should be worried. I should be devastated, but for whatever reason, I’m just not. I guess once you’ve been doing it long enough, you know. I just had the mindset that we’ll overcome it. I have enough grit and willpower and believe in the company that we will find a way to overcome this. We’ve had a lot of obstacles over the last 14 years.

We also got really lucky that I feel bad for a lot of these companies. How tariffs hit is you don’t get tariffed until it crosses the port here in the US, like in LA. That’s where we import. People that had shipments on containers, on boats, it was out of their control. So when the tariffs hit, they just got hit. That would bankrupt us. Honestly, if we got hit with a container and it was tariffed at 145%, it’d be cheaper for me just to be like, “No, what? Destroy the product, keep it. I cannot take it.” That will bankrupt us.

Luckily we didn’t have any shipments on the water. So we kind of just held the product and froze it. We had products in different stages. So we hurried and diverted to Vietnam and different countries that had better terms and final assembly there, and we were able to mark that country of origin. We’re still being hit, but we are rapidly looking at India, Poland, Israel, even US countries. We’re having US manufacturing companies here in the US and Mexico.

It is something scary, but we’ll work around it. China for us is fading very quickly. Every day we’re less and less there.

Nate (20:15.674): Yeah. That would be a very tricky situation. It seems like they would have to have some sort of exemptions, right? Because you’re obviously then just hurting US companies if they’ve got a container that’s about to land on the port, and it’s going to more than double the cost of their product. There would have to be some sort of time delay. OK, it’s for orders going forward, but it’s not for the ones that are already in process.

Peter Thorpe (20:45.774): Yeah, you and I would think that, but that wasn’t the case. It just hit like midnight. We have a lot of different factories and own a lot of different parts. Our main core product, the Fire Avert, we didn’t have anything on the water, but we had power strips and smaller stuff, less value that did get hit. But luckily, they weren’t that much to begin with. So we can absorb that and just lose money on those.

It’s a nightmare for a lot of companies. I think a lot of companies will destroy them. If this doesn’t get resolved, my personal opinion, it doesn’t get resolved by the end of summer, a lot of small companies will be out of business.

Nate (21:25.006): Yeah. And that’s obviously negating the point of the whole battle. The only reason we’re doing this is hopefully to help US manufacturers. So that would be very unfortunate. I think it’s a good thing overall. And I think you have the right mindset. Just kind of stay cool. Try to adjust to it. Things are going to work out. I think they are going to work out.

I think if it’s done anything, it’s immediately turned everybody’s mindset into, “Can I find somebody in the US to help me out with this?” And they’re at least thinking about it. And I think that’s a really good thing, because we’ve been preaching this for my entire lifetime, “buy American made, buy American made,” but it’s like, it’s just a cliche, right? Buy American made if it’s cheaper than overseas, right? So I think it’s good if it does force people to think.

Peter Thorpe (22:18.222): Yep.

Nate (22:25.348): But I’m a big free market guy too. And I think that in a lot of cases, US manufacturing needs to innovate. They need to find ways to become more competitive. Obviously, when you’re paying somebody in China $5 an hour to assemble these products, you’re not going to be able to compete in the US. But when it comes to advanced technology and robotics, automation, all that kind of stuff, we need to be more aggressive about competing on a global scale with our US companies. And I know it’s easy to say. There’s a lot of expense that goes into it. I mean, you’re not just going to flip a switch and be like, “we’re automated.” It costs money, but we need to start thinking about it.

Peter Thorpe (23:07.126): Yeah. I’ve had a lot of family in the military and being a firefighter, nobody would love to make this product in the US more than me. I think that would be the coolest thing. I’d love to do it. It’s just the Fire Avert would triple in cost. It’s so hard. We are looking at it. We are in talks with many factories in Arizona and Maryland that we’re looking at.

They’re excited to quote it and we’ll see what their prices come back with. We’re looking at doing our own assembly here, buying our own machines to make our PCBA boards and just finding ways to do it. On the other side of this whole coin is one of the businesses in our strip mall here. They make these really cool belt buckles and they do all their manufacturing right here. They have their own tools, they pour their molds, everything. Really cool belt buckles.

They love the tariffs. They’re so excited about it because they said for the first time China is not cheaper than us and so their sales have gone up. So there’s definitely two sides of the coin here and I’m happy for them. It’s going to hurt companies like mine and it’s going to help companies like theirs, so it’ll be interesting to see how it all lands.

Nate (24:06.734): Yep.

Nate (24:21.422): Yeah, I agree. So when it comes to the marketing side of things, I always enjoy talking about this because obviously I’m a marketing guy and really specialize in working with manufacturers. What have you been successful with? What’s been the most successful modality of marketing for you guys?

Peter Thorpe (24:42.318): Just hard work and good follow-up. I can tell you what we haven’t been successful at is the biggest opportunity for us is online sales and just sales on our website because there are more single family homes than multi-family homes. On our website they pay top dollar, meaning multi-family buyers are buying hundreds or thousands at a time so they get a huge discount.

I have spent so much time and so much money trying to crack the code to get online sales just to have a machine and just sell hundreds of thousands of these, and I can’t do it. Shark Tank was our biggest peak and we’ve dropped. We still now probably sell maybe 20 a month on our website. That’s not even worth writing home about. So that’s what we haven’t been successful at. I’ve spent a lot of marketing dollars.

Nate (25:18.874): Hmm.

Peter Thorpe (25:33.71): On the other hand, we go to a lot of trade shows. We spend over $100,000 on going to trade shows and we meet the owners of these big apartment complexes and we get their contact. We wine and dine them, send emails, help them to see the value of it and that’s where we find our success.

Nate (25:49.592): Yeah. So here’s the product, right?

Peter Thorpe (25:53.869): Yep.

Nate (25:55.268): So just curious, because I want to see if I can leave you with a tip that can help. So if I’m the owner of a multifamily complex, build that persona for me real quick. So is this somebody that, like I’m buying your product, is this somebody that has already experienced some of these stove fires in their apartment complex and just cost them a lot of money to kind of renovate and fix the damage?

Peter Thorpe (26:33.666): Yeah, I guess so. You and I have maybe never had a kitchen fire, but when you own 10,000 or our biggest customer has over 80,000 apartment doors across the country. So they have a kitchen fire somewhere in their portfolio every week or every month. They for sure have the same pain that you and I have but on steroids. So when we meet them at a trade show, we talk to them. They’re like, “Yes, we have a whole team that goes from renovation to renovation to fix these fires so we can help reduce that.”

Some of our customers, we eliminate it. We limit that risk. So now their insurance premiums are staying low. It’s just the headache of taking care of the aftermath of this. They love the product. They usually put it in a few apartment complexes, test it for six to 12 months, and they see huge success. And then they roll it out through their entire portfolio.

Nate (27:25.166): Gotcha. Yeah, and I see that you guys have put quite a bit of effort into writing various blog articles, trying to kind of capture that market. Because that’s one of the things I was thinking was if I’m that property manager and one of my tenants just had something burn on the stove, caused some damage that I had to take care of, and I’m like, “I don’t want this to happen again.” What am I going to look for? How to prevent stove fires, right? How to prevent kitchen fires. So these types of articles are good, some of them anyways.

Peter Thorpe (28:10.22): I guess maybe they’re not. I saw that one up there, like “how to build a fire pit” or something. Is that really the best?

Nate (28:16.448): Right, right, yeah, that’s not really relevant, at least as far as what I know about your products. I noticed a lot of these articles too kind of have these non-transactional keyword sets. Like this one, “house fire smoke the invisible destroyer.” So you always want to think about the title of your blog articles as the keyword that you would expect somebody to Google to find it. And something like this, nobody’s going to Google that.

Obviously, it has a little bit of emotional appeal to it as if it were a social media post, but it’s really a different sort of animal. Something like this, “how to put out grease fires” is fine. However, once again, it’s not exactly the right person. We’re looking for the person that has already had the problem. And so you’d be more looking for “how to prevent grease fires,” “how to prevent stuff burning on your stove.” So there’s just nuances. I think you’re like 60% of the way there with some of this stuff. But I think if you could go into the data, I would use a tool called Google Search Console.

Let me just think of a good example here. I didn’t really expect I was going to be doing a demo for you, but since we’re on it, we’re on it. Let me think of a good one here. OK, here we go. Perfect. So this is another safety product. These guys invented this product that is, no, I guess I can’t show you right now because I have to re-log back in.

But they made a product that is intended to prevent an overhead door from slamming down and injuring somebody, which actually firehouses are a great target market for that. Because there’s a shocking number, something like 200,000 injuries from falling overhead doors every year. But at any rate, we write blog articles for them.

Nate (30:33.166): They’re really targeted towards that chief safety officer inside of a company. And so we’re addressing things like warehouse safety. What are the things you need to be thinking about? And then just those transactional keywords like “how to prevent overhead door failures” and things of that nature. And we get a ton of really transactional traffic coming to that website and buying the product because of it.

So those are just the kinds of things that you want to be thinking about in terms of how to generate more sales through the website.

Peter Thorpe (31:05.889): Yeah, I love it. I want to make our website just like, I want it to be our best salesman. I have seven sales reps and I want our website to outperform every single one of them. So I think you’re onto some good stuff here.

Nate (31:17.72): Yep. Yeah, and the other thing that I wanted to chat with you about that kind of flows into the website is, tell me some compelling statistics about kitchen fires that could help sell the product or number of deaths per year that originated from a kitchen fire. Do you have some of that information?

Peter Thorpe (31:43.598): Yeah, so kitchen fires are the number one cause of home fires across not just the US but even the world. So number one, if you’re going to have a house fire, if your home is going to have a fire, it’s going to happen on your stove. Your beautiful stove that you love to cook food on is the culprit for house fires. And nothing even comes close. I always ask people, “Hey, what do you think is the number one cause of home fires?” Like, “Oh, dryers.” No, there’s only about 3,000 dryer fires a year. And there’s almost 200,000 kitchen fires. So dryer fires are not a concern.

What the numbers come down to is every four and a half minutes, a fire department responds to a kitchen fire somewhere in the US. It’s the second most common cause of home fire fatalities, the number one cause of home fire related injuries, over a billion dollars in damage every year. That’s in single family homes. And if you go to multifamily, the number goes from 50% to 72% of all your fires in multifamily happen right there in the stove, all because someone started cooking and they walked away, they forgot, they leave their stove on.

Nate (32:54.412): Yeah, and to me, those are the triggers. I mean, because selling online, it’s an emotionally driven process. And so that’s the information. I just kind of took another look at your homepage when we were talking. It doesn’t say any of that, right? Like “prevent the number one cause of home fires in the US or globally” or whatever. So yeah, that sort of information is perfect fodder for your marketing.

Peter Thorpe (33:24.544): Yeah, the other fun stat that is out there is so 10% of all the kitchen fires happen from our pets. You’re gone and they smell food up there and they jump up and they hit the knob and they turn the stove on from pets. 10%.

How we kind of solve that problem, our technology does it, but the really cool thing is about three years ago we added radio modules, the option to have radio modules. You saw that Fire Avert Pro. And so now if you’re at the store, you get a real-time text when your stove turns on and you could be like, “Wait, nobody’s home right now. It shouldn’t be on.” And you can just turn it off and turn the stove off before there’s even a smoke, before the smoke alarm even sounds. You can just turn it off and prevent the fire.

Nate (33:57.658): Wow.

Nate (34:05.124): That’s fantastic. I thought your recommendation was we get rid of your pets. We never grew up with pets in our house. I get why people have pets. I mean, it makes sense. But for me, it’s like, I don’t want something pooping on my carpet and getting hair everywhere and smelling and turning my stove on.

Peter Thorpe (34:10.254): That too maybe, yeah.

Peter Thorpe (34:33.292): Yeah, that’s what we have. That’s what I said. We got kids to do that. Yeah, we don’t have any pets either. And my kids want a dog. Sometimes we got him a fish. Like we’re good. A fish. It will die in a few months and we’re done.

Nate (34:34.082): I’ve got kids to do that.

Nate (34:45.294): Yeah, yeah. So you’re volunteering now. You’re not a full-time firefighter at this moment, are you?

Peter Thorpe (34:55.03): I’m not full time. I worked full time for a great city for 16 plus years there. I started the business after being in the department for four years, just a pretty young firefighter. I started the business and it was really just like, it was never meant to make money. It was just kind of like, this might be a really cool hobby or project. This might really work.

Then three years ago, it was kind of the point where I had to make a decision. I’m so busy. I’m stressed too thin. So it was a really hard decision, but I hung up the hat and retired from the firehouse. I do this full time now. Where I live has a small volunteer fire department. So I volunteer like one night a week there.

Nate (35:36.546): Okay. So what’s kind of like your long-term goal for the company or maybe intermediate term, in terms of revenue and growth?

Peter Thorpe (35:47.788): Yeah, so people always find this strange but 100% honesty, this was never meant to make money. I never thought, “Hey, Fire Avert can make a lot of money.” It was more like, “This could really help people. This would be really cool.” Money didn’t start crossing my mind until I started getting all these bills for the patent and products and just people helping out. So I was like, we better start making some money.

We ran this out of my garage, my basement, and now we have an office space and we’re crammed in here. We have 27 employees. I never thought it would get this big, but now I realize there’s no limit to this. We’re going to be a hundred million dollar company here. I think the next three years will triple in size. We have amazing partnerships. We just signed a partnership with iApartment and we have six huge partners around the country, even the world that we’re signing deals with probably this year. And it’s going to transform this company. I see us just becoming a staple technology in every home.

Nate (36:54.074): Yep. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, if we can spend $120 on an arc fault breaker, I mean, we can spend that money on a Fire Avert, I would say.

Peter Thorpe (37:04.328): Yeah.

Peter Thorpe (37:10.658): Yeah, and our technology, one of the products we’re launching this year is right now our technology is all plug and play, but it’ll be the outlet in the wall. So during new construction, you just put our outlet in and the home is protected. Yeah, so we see that as just being, and then we’ll probably take that over time and try to make it part of the safety code. If NFPA or just different organizations out there want to see this really help, that’s where it’s going to be just built in during construction.

Nate (37:21.221): Great.

Nate (37:30.617): Yep.

Nate (37:39.31): Wow. Yeah, I mean, yeah, the repercussions. I mean, imagine if you could really prevent the majority of fires with one product. And not only that, but the tax on the fire department. If you’re going out every day doing these calls, that gets expensive. It isn’t cheap to fire up the truck and get everybody on there, right?

Peter Thorpe (38:00.3): No, it’s not. I ran the numbers. I’m like a number freak. I loved math. That was the only subject in school that I did well at. I had probably Cs and Ds and then math was an A, but I love numbers because it’s the truth. I called the city shop and said, “Hey, tell me all the costs on this ladder truck for maintenance, tires, oil changes, fuel.” So they had every penny that went into that truck.

Then I had the miles that that truck was driven and I started doing the math. To drive that truck just to go get lunch was like $100. It was $15 a mile that we drove. So all these, yeah, it’s crazy. And that was just the truck. That’s not the four firefighters and their salaries that you’re paying there. It’s huge, it’s a necessary expense. We got to keep these homes safe. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be doing this, but it’s very expensive. So if we can limit the call volume that we’re going on, we save taxpayers just thousands and thousands of dollars.

Nate (38:43.258): Wow.

Nate (39:03.778): Yeah. Wow. Amazing. Yeah, I love the product. I love what you’re doing. I love the fact that it’s saving lives and has a very practical widespread purpose and use. I’m very excited to see what you do in the future here. I love the fact that you’re innovating and you’re thinking about new applications and new ways you can improve the product. So congratulations on building this awesome company and thanks for coming on today, Peter.

Peter Thorpe (39:32.622): Really appreciate it. Yeah, we love the journey. It’s been fun and even talking to you today. It’s been a lot of fun. We appreciate it.