Founder Journal #2
"Ideas don't become real when you think about them. They become real the moment you can hold them in your hand."
About the Founder Journal
Building a company isn't a straight line. It's a series of experiments, setbacks, unexpected lessons, and small victories that rarely make it into product announcements.
The Founder Journal is where we share the stories behind PFV Innovations—not as a marketing campaign, but as an honest record of what it's like to invent, build, and keep moving forward. Whether you're a musician, an entrepreneur, an inventor, or simply someone with an idea you can't stop thinking about, we hope these stories encourage you to keep going.
One of the questions we get asked most often is,
"Do you still have the first Flip Pick?"
We do.
In fact, it's sitting just a few feet away from me as I write this.
When I pick it up today, I don't laugh.
I don't cringe.
I don't think about everything that was wrong with it.
I feel proud.
Because that little black prototype proved something that changed the next four years of our lives.
It proved the idea could work.
Everything that came after wasn't about inventing Flip Pick anymore.
It was about figuring out how to make it real.
The Goal Was Never Perfection
When I opened Blender that afternoon in September of 2022, I wasn't trying to design a finished product.
I wasn't thinking about patents.
Or manufacturing.
Or starting a company.
Honestly, I was just trying to answer one question:
Could a guitar pick actually rotate out of the way and still be playable?
That was it.
If the answer was "no," I could move on.
If the answer was "yes," then maybe the idea deserved another day.
Borrow What Already Exists
One of the biggest misconceptions about inventing is that you have to create everything from scratch.
That wasn't my experience at all.
I found an STL file for a standard teardrop guitar pick.
I imported it into Blender.
Then I started modifying it.
I cut a hole near the back of the pick.
Added a post.
Built a ring around a larger cylinder.
Removed part of the ring so it could flex and fit different finger sizes.
Added two stabilizing posts to help keep it centered while playing.
Finally, I designed a small cap that glued onto the post, allowing the pick to rotate freely.
The entire prototype consisted of only three printed parts:
- the ring,
- the pick,
- and the cap.
Simple.
Crude.
But functional.
Looking back, I smile because it was less an invention than a conversation between existing ideas.
The novelty wasn't the individual pieces.
It was the way they worked together.
Then We Printed It
There's a unique feeling that comes from watching a 3D printer build something that existed only in your imagination a few hours earlier.
Layer by layer...
An idea becomes an object.
When the printer finished, I assembled the three pieces.
Glued the cap onto the post.
Slipped it onto my finger.
And strummed a guitar.
It worked.
Not perfectly.
But unmistakably.
That moment is hard to describe.
I wasn't thinking,
"I just invented something."
I was thinking,
"Wait...this actually works."
There's a big difference.
What It Got Wrong
Looking at that first prototype today, it's easy to see its flaws.
The pick rotated too freely.
It caught on the strings.
The pick shape wasn't quite right.
The ring was bulky.
Assembly required multiple printed parts and glue.
Even if we'd somehow found a way to mass produce the individual pieces, putting them together one by one would have made manufacturing painfully slow.
If we'd tried to launch that version, we never would have built a sustainable business.
But here's the interesting part.
None of those flaws mattered that day.
Because they weren't the question we were trying to answer.
It Solved the Only Problem That Mattered
The question wasn't,
"Is this ready to sell?"
The question was,
"Can this idea exist?"
And the answer was yes.
That changed everything.
From that point forward, we weren't trying to invent Flip Pick anymore.
We were trying to improve it.
Every Improvement Created a New Problem
That's something I never expected.
Every prototype solved one issue...
...and immediately exposed another.
Make the ring thinner.
Now it isn't strong enough.
Improve the pick shape.
Now it becomes harder to manufacture.
Reduce assembly.
Now the material behaves differently.
The project became an endless cycle of solving one problem only to discover the next.
At first, that felt frustrating.
Eventually, we realized that was the process.
Innovation isn't about finding the perfect solution.
It's about continually finding better ones.
The First Big Pivot
Originally, I thought we'd make Flip Picks ourselves.
Maybe we'd sell them on Etsy.
Print a few in the garage.
Ship them on weekends.
That seemed ambitious enough.
So I bought a resin printer.
Unlike filament printers, resin printers cure an entire layer at once.
Whether you print one part or ten, each layer takes the same amount of time.
That felt like a breakthrough.
Even better, we figured out how to print Flip Pick as a single assembled piece using tiny breakaway supports.
When you rotated the pick for the first time, the supports snapped free.
No glue.
No assembly.
It felt brilliant.
Customers agreed.
They loved the concept.
But they also taught us another lesson.
Resin wasn't the right material.
Not for a flexible ring.
And not for a guitar pick.
Once again...
The solution had created the next problem.
Jamie Saw Something Bigger
When I handed Jamie that first prototype, she didn't analyze the hinge geometry.
She didn't critique the CAD model.
She put it on her finger.
Pretended to strum.
Smiled.
Then she reminded me about Crawl-ees.
And another idea we'd had years before.
We'd even built a website for an online grocery delivery service we called Groceries-a-Go-Go—long before services like DoorDash and Instacart became part of everyday life.
Twice we'd watched ideas slip away because we weren't in a position to pursue them.
Jamie looked at the prototype and said, in so many words,
"We're not letting this one get away."
That conviction changed the course of our lives.
Looking Back
We still have nearly every major prototype we've ever built.
Sometimes people ask why we keep them.
The answer is simple.
They're reminders.
Not of what we got wrong.
But of how far we've come.
If I could hand that very first prototype back to myself, I'd only say one thing:
Be patient.
Keep improving.
Don't be discouraged by the flaws.
Every version teaches you something the previous one couldn't.
Our first prototype wasn't the first version of Flip Pick.
It was the first proof that Flip Pick deserved a second version.
Looking back now, I don't think that first prototype was important because it was good.
It wasn't.
It was important because it gave us permission to believe the impossible might actually be possible.
Thanks for reading.
The Founder Journal is our ongoing record of what we're learning while building PFV Innovations. We don't have all the answers, but we believe there is value in sharing the journey honestly. If you're building something of your own—whether it's a business, a song, a piece of art, or simply a better version of yourself—we hope you'll keep going. So will we.
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