After the grocery store test market program fell through I found myself regrouping from yet another major set back. One of my mentors said it best when he said "an inventor's journey is like an ant clinging to a YoYo, not only is your head is spinning but there are so many ups and downs you can't tell if you're moving forward or not, but the important thing is to keep moving forward". Six weeks had passed since I spoke to the vice president of marketing from LegalZoom.com and I had been through 3 different interviews along the way, when I finally got the email I had been waiting for. There's so many email scams, its not always good when an email starts off saying "congratulations", but this time is was.  This was the email that told me I had been selected to appear in next years LegalZoom.com TV commercials and I would be flying out to Hollywood to shoot the commercial at the end of November. Talk about ups and downs, two week ago the test market program deal fell through and now I was going to star in a national TV commercial.

Its funny how my wife and I look at things differently, although we knew that me and my product were going to be featured in a multi-million dollar television campaign, we didn't know if I had won the prize money associated with the LegalZoom.com customer story contest. To me it really didn't matter, after all what's a couple of thousand dollars prize money compared with millions of dollars worth of advertising for my product, but to my wife it was a big deal, I guess she was looking at our checking account. It would be almost two more months before we got the news that I won the contest and another 2 months before we received the prize money.

I knew I was going to be in next years LegalZoom.com TV commercial, what I didn't know was how big a role my product would play. Was it going to get a casual mention or was it going to be central to my story? The excitement and anticipation was almost more than I could handle as I boarded the flight for LA. When I arrived at LAX there was a chauffer holding a sign with my name on it, wow this is cool. When I got to the hotel in Hollywood there was a huge gift basket waiting for me. It was apparent early on that something special was happening to me. The next morning a car picked me up to go to the studio and get fitted for wardrobe. What happened next was one of the biggest thrills of my life, as I walked into this huge sound stage, front and center was a 14 foot tall by 30 wide back drop covered with blown up pictures of my design drawings. Imagine the thrill of seeing your own 6 inch drawings blown up to the scale where they were 12 feet tall. It was as this time that I realized that my product would be prominently featured in however this commercial turned out. That night I had dinner with the people from the three other customer story's along with all the key executives at Legalzoom.com. Everyone was just plain good people and I enjoyed getting to know all of them.

The next day I shot the commercial, I have never had so many people fuss over me, makeup, wardrobe, lighting, cameramen and the director. For seven hours I stood in front of that camera while the director asked me questions and had me tell my story. I remember when we got to the cooking demonstrations they gave me a spittoon, I asked "what's that for?" "that's for spitting out the bites of hotdog, we are going to film you eating" the director answered. "Why would I waste a perfectly good hotdog?" I asked, she said "we may have you do several takes", I said "that’s not a problem" I was pretty hungry by this point. I think we went through about 7 rolls of regular film and 3 rolls of high speed special effect film to capture the steam in slow motion that day. The total film crew was comprised of about 25 people. These guys worked hard for 14 to 16 hours that day and really knew what they were doing. Before I knew it the shoot was over and I would be heading for home the next day. Now all there was to do was wait for the commercial to be edited and start appearing on TV, which would take three more months.