And he built a two billion dollar company proving it.

In an era when Amazon has crushed one retail category after another, Sweetwater has not just survived but kept growing, entirely on the strength of an idea that was already considered old-fashioned by the time the internet arrived.

The story is a useful reminder that the most durable competitive advantages are usually the ones that are hardest to copy, not because they require technology or capital, but because they require genuine commitment to something most businesses quietly decide isn't worth the trouble.

Here are five lessons I learned from my interview with Chuck:

1. A sale is not a transaction. It’s the beginning of a relationship.

From the start, Chuck kept records on every customer: their spouse’s name, their kids’ names, what they were working on. When someone called back six months later, he could ask about the family.

He says the whole music business, as far as he was concerned, was built on relationships, not transactions. His sales engineers still spend 20 to 30 minutes on an average call, not to stall, but because understanding what someone actually needs takes time.

Every company says it cares about customers. Chuck built one that does.

2. Never quote the price until the selling is done.

Chuck called it the perfect conversation.

Before anyone talked numbers, his team made sure the customer understood they were in the right place, and that they were buying the right product for the right reasons.

His competitors would quote a price in 30 seconds and hang up. Chuck thought that was a waste of everyone’s time, because you can’t know what someone actually needs until you’ve talked to them.

The price comes at the end, after trust is established.

This is obvious in theory. Almost nobody does it.

3. Only sell what you’d use yourself.

Chuck was, in his own words, a little arrogant about this.

If he didn’t believe in a product, he wouldn’t stock it, regardless of what the manufacturer wanted. There were entire equipment lines he refused to carry.

It frustrated some vendors early on but built the kind of credibility that no marketing budget can replicate. When someone calls Sweetwater, they’re not getting a salesperson pushing whatever has the best margin.

They’re getting someone who knows the gear and only sells things worth owning.

4. Train people until they’re genuinely ready. Then get out of the way.

Before any sales engineer at Sweetwater talks to a customer, they go through 13 weeks of training, eight hours a day, with 80 different instructors.

Chuck’s rule was simple: if you can’t operate it, you can’t sell it.

But the other half of this was just as important. Once someone was trained, they had full authority to act. If a customer’s keyboard broke, whoever answered the phone could replace it on the spot, no manager approval required.

Chuck’s line to everyone he hired: you’ll never get in trouble for doing the wrong thing. You’ll get in trouble for not doing the right thing fast enough.

5. Don’t let someone else set the ceiling on what you’ve built.

In the late 1990s, Chuck sold 80% of Sweetwater to a private equity firm. Four years later, when they wanted to exit, he had doubled revenue and had virtually no personal cash because his divorce had taken it.

He decided he wanted the company back anyway.

He went to 18 people in Fort Wayne and asked for loans. Seventeen said yes. He borrowed the money at 12% interest, paid it all back in two and a half years, and built Sweetwater from $20 million in annual sales to over a billion.

The firm’s analysts had told him $12 million was probably the ceiling for a music equipment dealer in Fort Wayne.

The whole difference between where he ended up and where they thought he’d top out was one decision: trusting his own read on what he had built.

Chuck still plays three gigs a week. Walk into the Sweetwater headquarters in Fort Wayne and there’s a replica of the original VW van in the lobby.

His Boy Scout uniform hangs on the door. His first saxophone sits on the floor in front of it.

The whole story is right there in those three objects: a kid who just wanted to play music, who ended up building something that two billion dollars a year flows through, still doing the thing that started all of it.

Chuck Surack joined me on How I Built This. You can listen to our full conversation wherever you get your podcasts.

P.S. If you loved the episode, follow the show in your podcast app so you never miss one. And please SHARE this newsletter so others can learn from some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs!

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On HIBT This Week!

Sweetwater: How a Saxophone and a VW Van Built a Billion-Dollar Company

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Chuck Surack never set out to build a retail giant. He just wanted to play the saxophone.

Right out of high school, he climbed into his mom’s old VW van and spent years touring the country with a cover band (making about $50 a week, barely enough for gas to the next gig).

It didn’t work out. But along the way, Chuck picked up something valuable: he became a sound engineer, running the mixing board with one hand while playing sax with the other.

So he converted that VW van into a mobile recording studio and started making money fast: recording school concerts, church choirs, even CEO speeches.

Then, at a trade show, he saw one piece of technology that lit him on fire. And it would change the entire direction of his life.

But the real secret to Sweetwater wasn’t the gear.

It was something almost no competitor bothered to do: an obsession with customers so intense that people would order from Fort Wayne, Indiana instead of their own local shop.

So how did a broke saxophone player turn a rusty van into one of the largest online retailers in America? What was the machine that changed everything?

And why has Sweetwater managed to survive giants like Amazon and Walmart when so many others didn’t?

Hear the entire story behind Sweetwater on the latest How I Built This!

HIBT Advice Line: Do It Your Way

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This week on the Advice Line, I’m joined by Chris Riccobono, founder of UNTUCKit. Chris walks through the many pivots he’s made over the years… and how each challenge forced the business to evolve.

First up, Adrian: How do I grow into a real brand, not just a product?

Adrian’s Eras Shorts sells affordable shorts aimed squarely at a younger, college-age crowd. He wants to build a brand identity that can eventually stand alongside the big names. We pointed to the one thing big brands like Vuori and UNTUCKit all nailed early… and then gave Adrian a refreshingly simple playbook for what to do next.

Next, Preet: How do I reach an audience that isn’t really online?

Preet’s Snug Safety is a daily check-in app for elderly users. He’s trying to grow awareness, and believes far more people should be using it. Our advice was a little counterintuitive for 2026: the fastest way to his customer might not run through social media at all.

Finally, Derek: Should I chase pro athletes to promote my gear?

Derek’s Hockey Ninja makes hockey equipment, and he’s weighing whether to get it onto professional players or go another route. Our answer was again unconventional… and it involved a move most founders are told never to make.

Chris leaves us with this: Enjoy the journey, and do it your way. There’s no single right path… the most successful version of your business is the one built the way you want to build it.

If you would like to be featured on an upcoming episode, call and leave a 1-minute message at 1-800-433-1298 or send a voice memo to hibt@id.wondery.com

Wow in the World!

Why Cats Go Crazy for Tuna!

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Ever wonder why cats go absolutely bonkerballs for tuna?!

When the crew visits Tuna Time (a brand-new tuna-themed diner for neighborhood cats) business is BOOMING! As sloppy tuna bowls fly out of the kitchen, we uncover the surprising science behind why our kitty friends can’t get enough.

It turns out cats can taste something called umami way more powerfully than we do! Special taste receptors give them a super-boost from the amino acids found in tuna.

Will the cat cafe survive the dinner rush? Tune in to find out!

From the HIBT Archives!

UNTUCKit: Chris Riccobono

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On a trip to Las Vegas, Chris Riccobono noticed something odd about his own wardrobe: he kept reaching for the same dress shirt because it was the only button-down he owned that actually looked good untucked.

Every other dress shirt hung too long and looked sloppy when worn loose. When his friends admitted they had the same frustration, Chris realized he’d stumbled onto a brilliant idea.

And this simple idea was the inception of UNTUCKit.

What followed was a rollercoaster of manufacturing headaches, unexpected imitators, and a dramatic brush with both acquisition and bankruptcy.

But today, UNTUCKit has grown into a thriving brand, proving that the best business ideas often start with a frustration you can’t stop noticing.

See you next time!

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Aman grew up in Nepal and India, moved to the United States as a teenager, earned a computer science degree from MIT, and spent five years at a Boston tech startup before deciding to build something of his own. The first thing he tried to build was a phone app that let restaurant diners pay their bill without waiting for a server.

It failed.

But that failure led him to discover a much bigger problem, which led to Toast, which today powers more than one in five restaurants in America and generates over two billion dollars in annual revenue.

Here are five lessons that stayed with me. And don’t forget to listen to the interview!

Your first idea is often just a door. The real opportunity is behind it.

Toast didn’t start as a restaurant operating system. It started as a payment app.

It didn’t work.

But while Aman and his co-founders were out talking to restaurant owners trying to figure out why it wasn’t working, they kept hearing the same complaint about something else entirely: the clunky, expensive, outdated software that ran the whole restaurant.

The payment app was never the business. It was the conversation that revealed the business.

Most failed first ideas contain the seed of a much better second one, if you stay curious long enough to find it.

Watch which problem makes people forget they’re busy.

When Aman pitched restaurant owners on the payment app, he couldn’t get their attention. They were too busy, too skeptical, too focused on keeping their kitchens running.

But when he shifted the conversation to their point-of-sale system, the same owners would spend an hour with him. They had plenty of time to complain about the thing that was really bothering them.

The signal isn’t who says yes to your idea. It’s who loses track of time talking to you about a problem.

That’s the product.

When you can’t integrate, build everything yourself.

Toast needed to connect to the existing software running restaurants in order to work. Nobody would return their calls. The big legacy players had no incentive to help a small startup they’d never heard of.

So Aman and his engineers just built everything from scratch: ordering workflows, kitchen management, employee scheduling, inventory, payroll integrations, online ordering, loyalty programs, gift cards.

What started as a necessity became the entire competitive advantage. Because they owned the whole stack, nothing was held hostage to someone else’s system.

The companies that tried to plug into the existing infrastructure never found a foothold.

Customer obsession beats competitor obsession every time.

When investors told Aman the restaurant technology space was too crowded, that too many startups had raised too much money, he walked into a few restaurants in Harvard Square that evening and looked around.

Every single one was still running on an ancient on-premise system. He didn’t care who else was in the market. He cared about what was actually happening inside restaurants.

The competitors who had raised more money and had more brand recognition were building for a market they imagined. Toast was building for the one that actually existed.

When everything collapses, go straight back to the customer.

In March 2020, Toast’s revenue dropped more than ninety percent in weeks. Restaurants closed. The company had to lay off more than half its workforce. Everything they had built over seven years was suddenly at risk.

Aman’s response was to do exactly what had gotten them there in the first place: call customers and ask what they needed right now.

The answer was tools for pickup, delivery, contactless ordering, QR code menus.

Toast built those features fast, survived, and came out of the pandemic stronger than it went in. The instinct to go back to basics when everything falls apart sounds obvious.

Very few companies actually do it.

Aman describes Toast as a business built brick by brick over thirteen years, not a hockey stick.

The app that started it didn’t work. The first restaurant they installed crashed within twenty minutes of opening. For years, institutional investors wanted nothing to do with them.

The company that nearly went under during COVID is now worth fifteen billion dollars.

None of that happened because the founders had a perfect plan. It happened because every time they hit a wall, they went back to the restaurants and asked what was wrong.

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On HIBT This Week!

Toast: How a Failed Payment App Became a Billion-Dollar Company

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Aman Narang was sitting in a restaurant waiting for the check to come. It took ten minutes to flag down the server. Then another ten minutes for the credit card to come back.

And, like many great entrepreneur's before him, Aman had a simple thought:

There had to be a better way.

So he and his co-founders built an app that let people pay from their phones. They got 50 family restaurant owners to let them test it. But… it failed on the very first night.

In the middle of that failure, however, Aman noticed something far more interesting: restaurant owners didn’t just hate the payment process.

They hated everything about the technology running their businesses.

The clunky software. Expensive hardware. Systems trapped on servers in back offices that couldn’t talk to each other.

So Aman and his partners made a wildly ambitious bet: instead of building one app, they’d replace the entire operating system for restaurants.

It seemed like a crazy idea. Investors passed on it. Everybody said it would never work.

So… how did three engineers build one of the most dominant restaurant platforms in the country? What made them keep going? And how did they survive the one event that shut down nearly every restaurant in America overnight?

Hear the entire story behind Toast this on the latest How I Built This!

HIBT Advice Line: Focus Wins

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This week on the Advice Line, I’m joined by Curt Richardson, founder of OtterBox. Curt reflects on what he’d do if he were starting over, and keeps coming back to one word: focus. Resources and money help, but focus is what actually sustains a brand over 30 years.

First up, Andy: How do I scale a business when I’m the product?

Andy’s Mr. GameShow hosts live game nights for communities and senior centers. But he is ready to grow beyond what one person can do. Our advice: run an experiment before anything else… because it’ll tell him whether this business can actually be replicated.

Next, Marissa: How do I rebuild momentum after time away?

Marissa’s Gilded Coach Teas sells fairy tale-inspired tea blends, and the business was doing well before she took a year off to focus on family. Now she’s wondering how to get back to where she was. We see real opportunity to grow the business again, but the most important thing we told her had nothing to do with tactics.

Finally, Vince: Should I spread my marketing wide or go deep on one channel?

Vince’s Evrloop makes sustainable baby gear with 100% recycled materials plus a 20% buyback when you’re done with the product. Now he’s trying to figure out where to spend his marketing dollars. We gave him a clear approach to finding his channel, but the bigger insight was about which part of his product should actually be leading the story.

Curt leaves us with this: Figure out what you actually want. There are a million ways to run a business, and once you know how you want to run yours, everything gets clearer.

If you would like to be featured on an upcoming episode, call and leave a 1-minute message at 1-800-433-1298 or send a voice memo to hibt@id.wondery.com

Wow in the World!

The Baby Shark Mystery Trial!

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Order in the court! Has science finally caught the world’s very first baby great white shark on camera?

In today’s Wow episode, we dig into a real ocean mystery. In 2023, a filmmaker and a biologist captured footage of a completely WHITE great white shark swimming off the coast of California.

Could that unusual color mean the shark was just born, still covered in a special nutrient-rich layer from before birth? Some scientists think so. But others aren’t so sure!

Will the jury crack the case, or is this mystery still swimming free? Tune in to find out!

From the HIBT Archives!

OtterBox: Curt Richardson

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In the 1980s and 90s, Curt Richardson was tinkering in his Fort Collins garage, making simple waterproof plastic boxes.

He and his wife Nancy designed them to keep small items dry while fishing or skiing, and gave them a rugged name: “Otter Boxes.”

For years, that’s exactly what they were… a niche product for people who spent time in the elements.

Then the world changed. With the launch of the BlackBerry and the iPod, people suddenly carried expensive, fragile electronics everywhere. Curt spotted the opportunity and redesigned his boxes to fit and protect these breakable devices.

Almost overnight, OtterBox transformed from an outdoor goods supplier into a tech industry staple.

The timing couldn’t have been better. As smartphones exploded, so did the need to protect them… and Otter Products grew by more than 1,000% in just five years.

See you next time!

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Every expert he talked to told him his product couldn’t be made at scale. He moved to Indianapolis, slept on a cot in a warehouse, and used a washing machine as a mixing drum.

Catalina Crunch now does over $100 million a year. Here’s what stayed with me.

Solve your own problem first. The market will find you.

Krishna didn’t set out to build a food company. He built a cereal he could actually eat without spiking his blood sugar, because the grocery store aisle hadn’t changed in thirty years and nothing on it worked for him.

The business started when a friend in Central Park tried the cereal, then Venmoed him $7.99 without being asked, at what looked exactly like a grocery store price. That was the moment Krishna realized you can make something in your kitchen and sell it to people.

The founders who build the most durable products tend to be solving a problem they live with every day.

When experts say it can’t be done, ask why. Then keep asking.

At Texas A&M’s cereal-making course, the instructors told Krishna his product couldn’t be manufactured at scale. The ingredients were too unconventional. The equipment wouldn’t handle it.

He listened, then ignored them. His reasoning was simple: experts know what’s been done, not what’s possible. The ingredients he was using were new. Nobody had tried them yet.

His rule was that if someone couldn’t give him a first-principles reason why something was impossible, he walked away believing it was possible and got back to work.

People will buy your product for a completely different reason than you made it.

Krishna built Catalina Crunch for diabetics who needed low-sugar options. But when he started talking to customers, he found they were buying it for protein, for keto diets, for weight management, as a snack rather than a breakfast cereal.

The Whole Foods buyer asked him to put “Keto Friendly” on the front of the bag instead of “Low Sugar,” and sales took off. The product hadn’t changed. The framing had. Whatever you make, spend time understanding why people actually buy it.

The answer is usually not what you think.

When no one will do it for you, do it yourself.

After his packaging partner dropped him because his volume was too small, Krishna couldn’t find anyone else willing to take on the work. So he rented 3,000 square feet in Indianapolis, bought a cot, moved in, and started coating and packaging the cereal himself.

His first mixing drum was a washing machine he ran on spin cycle. It sounds desperate, but it was also clarifying: he learned the process completely, controlled the quality, and built the muscle that would eventually become a 125,000 square foot facility.

The willingness to do the work nobody else will do is one of the few advantages a small company always has over a large one.

Where you make something matters as much as what you make.

Krishna chose Indianapolis for reasons that had nothing to do with lifestyle and everything to do with logistics. From the center of the country, he could ship to both coasts within a week.

His raw ingredients came from the heartland, which cut inbound shipping costs dramatically. And when he was based in New York, he’d been paying a premium to move everything in both directions.

The decision to relocate wasn’t glamorous, but it changed the unit economics of the entire business. Most founders think obsessively about the product.

The ones who scale tend to think just as hard about the supply chain.

Krishna tried more than twenty different apps, websites, and services before landing on a cereal he made to manage his own health. None of the tech ideas worked. The one that did work was the one he built because he had no other choice. He needed something to eat for breakfast that wasn’t eggs. The rest followed from there.

P.S. If you loved the episode, follow the show in your podcast app so you never miss one. And please SHARE this newsletter so others can learn from some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs!

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Catalina Crunch: From Health Crisis to $100 Million Cereal Brand

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Krishna Kaliannan really wanted to build a tech company. He tried again and again, but none of them took off.

The thing that finally worked came from a much more personal place.

As a teenager, Krishna was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, which meant cutting sugar and carbs from his diet long before keto was cool. For years, he ate the same thing every morning: eggs. Then more eggs.

Until he couldn’t stand it anymore.

So he started experimenting in his apartment kitchen, trying to recreate the one thing he missed most: a simple bowl of cereal. But could he build a version with no sugar and none of the carbs?

The early batches were, in his words, “hard rocks that tasted like soil.”

But he kept tweaking. And eventually, he made something people actually wanted… so much so that a friend insisted on paying him for a bag.

That was the moment it clicked: this could be a business.

So how did a guy who kept failing at tech end up building a $100 million cereal brand? And what did it take to build it all from scratch?

Hear his entire, incredible, story on the latest How I Built This!

HIBT Advice Line: Start Small and Build

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This week on the Advice Line, I’m joined by Jeni Britton, founder of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams. Jeni built a national brand out of Columbus, Ohio, on the strength of her product and branding. Today, she’s ready to give advice to founders that are just starting out:

First up, Jesse: Who should I target my marketing toward?

Jesse’s Jesse & Ben’s makes frozen fries with real ingredients and is already into seven figures revenue. He’s torn between courting health-conscious early adopters and educating everyday fry lovers. We reframed the whole question: the person he really needs to win over isn’t the shopper at all.

Next, Casey: Do I have to raise a ton of capital to grow?

Casey’s Jaju Pierogi makes high-quality Polish dumplings from her grandfather’s recipes. She’s feeling industry pressure to raise money, but doesn’t want to give up control. Our take: the methodical path Casey’s already on might be the smartest way to build… and there are less obvious funding routes worth exploring first.

Finally, Callie: Is a PR firm the right way to reach new customers?

Callie’s Ubae.co makes organic purple sweet potato treats for pets with sensitive stomachs. She’s considering hiring a PR firm so she can focus on product. But Jeni actually offered a word of caution, and pointed to something she already has that’s more powerful than any pitch.

Jeni leaves us with this: Start small and just keep building. The strongest brands aren’t the ones that raise the most – they’re the ones that create real value for customers until the founder has the leverage to grow on their own terms.

If you would like to be featured on an upcoming episode, call and leave a 1-minute message at 1-800-433-1298 or send a voice memo to hibt@id.wondery.com

Wow in the World!

Do Fish Snooze Like Us?!

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Did you know that fish actually SLEEP? and sometimes in ways surprisingly similar to how YOU do?!

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute used a special self-tracking microscope to follow zebrafish around the clock and discovered these little swimmers experience FOUR different stages of sleep!!

Complete with changing eye movements and shifting brain activity (bonkers!)

We also learn how see-through baby zebrafish let scientists peek right inside their sleeping brains, why fish snooze with their eyes wide open, and how dolphins sleep with only HALF their brain at a time!

Tune in to discover why a good night’s sleep might just be one of nature’s greatest superpowers, whether you live on land or deep under the sea!

From the HIBT Archives!

Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams: Jeni Britton Bauer

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Jeni Britton Bauer always knew she’d start a business someday… she just never imagined it would turn out to be so sweet.

She asked a simple question: why did most ice cream taste so bland and one-dimensional? She saw an opportunity to elevate ice cream – layering unexpected ingredients into something extraordinary.

This was the inception of an idea that would become Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams.

But the road was anything but sweet.

Jeni spent years hustling, experimenting with wild flavor combinations and selling scoops at a Columbus farmers market, learning the craft one batch at a time. Her approach was radically different from the industry norm: real, whole ingredients and bold, artistic flavors that most people had never tasted in a scoop.

That relentless experimentation paid off. Signature creations like Brambleberry Crisp and Lemon Buttermilk turned Jeni’s into a beloved national brand with close to 100 stores nationwide.

See you next time!

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He went to NYU, learned the basics of purchase orders and inventory, and spent his early twenties looking for an idea worth betting on. In 2004, he launched e.l.f. Cosmetics, selling quality makeup for a dollar a piece.

Every major retailer told him nobody wanted it.

A viral email he didn’t write changed everything. T

he company went public in 2016 and now carries a market cap around four billion dollars. Here’s what stayed with me.

Every industry has a price gap. Find it.

When Joey broke down why a CoverGirl lip gloss cost six dollars while e.l.f. could sell one for a dollar, the answer had almost nothing to do with the product. The formulation cost roughly the same to make regardless of brand.

What the incumbents were paying for was the celebrity spokesperson, the circular ads, the shelf fees, and decades of corporate overhead. Joey stripped all of that out and handed the savings to the customer.

In almost any mature industry, there is a gap between what something costs to make and what it costs to sell under an established brand.

That gap is someone’s opportunity.

Never lead with your price.

When Joey pitched beauty editors at Glamour, Vogue, and Good Housekeeping, he walked through the entire product line first and saved the price for last. He’d ask editors what they thought it would cost.

Then he told them everything was a dollar. In most pitches, people lead with the number and spend the rest of the time justifying it. Joey let the product make the case first, so the price landed as a revelation rather than a red flag.

Don’t fight for the customer. Expand the pool.

For years, Joey’s biggest obstacle with retailers wasn’t that they disliked the product. It was that they were afraid of it. A dollar lip gloss next to a six dollar CoverGirl meant potentially losing five dollars of revenue on every customer who switched.

The fear was cannibalization.

Then H-E-B took a chance, and the buyer emailed the next morning: e.l.f. wasn’t stealing customers, it was creating entirely new ones. That single data point became the entire sales pitch going forward.

If you’re trying to break into a space controlled by incumbents, the most powerful argument isn’t that you’re better. It’s that you add something they don’t capture.

You can’t manufacture luck. You can be ready to sprint when it shows up.

In September 2006, someone sent a mass email claiming e.l.f. was being acquired by Bloomingdale’s and that prices were going up. Joey didn’t write it and has no idea to this day who did.

Within days, the site went from fifty orders a day to eighteen thousand. He got on a plane to China and figured it out. That year they’d been projecting two million in revenue. They ended up at eight million and turned their first profit.

What he engineered wasn’t the lucky break. It was the decision to treat it as a mandate rather than a crisis.

The unglamorous work is the moat.

When the L’Oréal deal collapsed after a $225 million handshake, Joey went back to running the business. When the company eventually went public and reached a four billion dollar market cap, what made e.l.f. worth that much wasn’t a patent or a secret formula.

It was a decade of accumulated proof: data showing the product was incremental rather than cannibalistic, a direct-to-consumer operation built years before D2C became fashionable, and a customer base earned one spinning rack at a time.

That kind of proof is impossible to replicate quickly. The most durable advantages tend to look, from the outside, like nothing special.

That’s usually the point.

Joey is clear-eyed about how much luck ran through all of it. He didn’t write the Bloomingdale’s email.

He didn’t engineer the moment when Revlon and L’Oréal launched expensive drugstore lines that flopped, accidentally opening the shelf space e.l.f. would eventually occupy.

But he was also the guy answering customer service calls himself, printing shipping labels by hand, and flying to China on a moment’s notice to fill forty thousand orders he hadn’t planned for.

Luck showed up. He was already in the building.

P.S. If you loved the episode, follow the show in your podcast app so you never miss one. And please SHARE this newsletter so others can learn from some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs!

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e.l.f. Cosmetics: Turning A $1 Lipstick Into A $1B Company

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In 2004, Joey Shamah launched a makeup company on a question almost everyone thought was insane:

Could he sell high-quality cosmetics for… $1?

At the time, the whole beauty industry ran on the exact opposite belief. Expensive meant good. The big brands poured fortunes into celebrity faces, glossy ads, and premium shelf space.

And passed the cost on to you.

But Joey had a different thought: What if you spent the money on the actual product, skipped everything else, and handed the savings to the customer?

Every major retailer told him the same thing: it’ll never work.

The dollar stores he was sure would love it passed. Meeting after meeting ended in no.

But then a couple of unexpected breaks changed everything. And his entire business turned around.

So how do you actually make a good lipstick for a dollar? What was the strange twist that sent orders through the roof overnight?

And how did a scrappy operation run out of a New Jersey warehouse turn into one of the most disruptive brands in beauty?

Learn all this and more on the latest How I Built This!

HIBT Advice Line: How To Stay Fresh

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This week on the Advice Line, I’m joined by Ronnen Harary, co-founder of Spin Master and PAW Patrol. Today, Ronnen is working on a new book about why your 20s are the best time to start a business. But the theme he keeps returning to is innovation: in today’s world, staying fresh and constantly reinventing your product is what keeps a brand alive.

First up, Ann: How do I handle rising costs without scaring off my customers?

Ann’s Yearly Company sells gold bangles, and after 10 years of success, soaring gold prices are squeezing her. She wants to protect her margins without breaking the promise her customers love. Our advice: nothing in her branding actually locks her into a single product… and that opens up more room to maneuver than she thinks.

Next, Felix: How do I scale a small family business without breaking it?

Felix is taking over Island Bee Company, his parents’ decades-old honey and skincare business, and wants to scale it way up, but worries growth could break what makes it special. Ronnen and I landed at odds: he sees a path through social media, I lean slower and steadier. The real question underneath it all is what kind of business Felix actually wants to run.

Finally, Matt: How do I separate work from life when the work is personal?

Matt’s Wandering Soul Beer was born from a personal tragedy, created to honor and memorialize it. The business has had its ups and downs, but the deeper challenge is that running it can feel like reliving the loss. Our advice centered on boundaries… concrete, hard-and-fast rules that create real separation between the work and the life.

Ronnen leaves us with this: Staying fresh isn’t optional. The brands that endure are the ones that keep innovating, never resting on what worked yesterday.

If you would like to be featured on an upcoming episode, call and leave a 1-minute message at 1-800-433-1298 or send a voice memo to hibt@id.wondery.com

Wow in the World!

America’s 2,000-Pound Time Capsule!

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What do you bury underground for people to dig up 250 YEARS from now?!

Well, on this episode we find out! And it’s all to do with America’s official 250th birthday time capsule!

This massive 2,000-pound steel container is being buried 10 feet underground in Philadelphia, filled with items from all 50 states. But here’s the really cool part… engineers are using incredible science to make sure it survives anything!

They built it in a tube shape with no corners (so it won’t leak), wrapped it in a capsule INSIDE a capsule, and even designed a trapped air pocket to push water away – the same engineering used in submarines and rockets!

What will the people of the future think when they discover this message from our time?

Tune in to discover the bonkerballs engineering behind preserving history for centuries to come!

From the HIBT Archives!

Spin Master/PAW Patrol: Ronnen Harary

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Ronnen Harary built a $4 billion toy empire by ignoring everything the industry considered essential.

Instead, he trusted something far less quantifiable: the gut instinct that comes from thinking like a seven-year-old and chasing that magical “ah-hah” moment when an idea just feels right.

Spin Master’s origins were humble and a little absurd.

In the mid-1990s, Ronnen and his friend Anton Rabie started selling the Earth Budd. It wasn’t glamorous, but it taught them how to spot a fun idea and bring it to market fast.

Over the next 25 years, that same intuition led to a string of hits: Air Hogs, Bakugan, and the global phenomenon PAW Patrol.

What set Ronnen apart was his willingness to bet on instinct in an industry obsessed with playing it safe. While competitors analyzed trends to death, he and his partners followed their childlike sense of wonder.

Today, Spin Master is a publicly-traded company spanning toys, TV shows, and video games!

See you next time!

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He had never worked in a restaurant. He had no food background whatsoever.

Today he owns nine of the hundred highest-grossing independent restaurants in the United States, and his portfolio pulls in nearly half a billion dollars a year.

Here’s what stayed with me from my recent interview:

The best market research is going somewhere and paying attention

Stephen walked into a martini bar on First Avenue in New York City called Global 33, felt something, and immediately understood two things: this concept didn’t exist in Philadelphia, and people would lose their minds over it. He went back a couple more times to make sure he wasn’t wrong.

Then he leased a Greek diner at Second and Market Street, spent $90,000 transforming it, and opened The Continental, which became one of the most iconic restaurants in the city’s history.

He did the same thing with Buddakan: he had been to Chinois on Main and China Grill and saw the appetite for Pan-Asian food in cities that didn’t have it.

His competitive advantage for thirty years has been walking into a room somewhere in the world, feeling something, and asking whether that feeling could be transplanted somewhere else.

That’s not a complicated research methodology. It’s just genuine curiosity combined with the discipline to act on what you notice.

When you’re the underdog, outgive the competition

When Stephen was a young concert promoter competing against more established, better-funded rivals, he couldn’t win on connections or money or reputation. So he won on generosity.

Artists asked for chicken and steak; he gave them lobster and caviar. He gave more than what was asked for, every time, because he understood that the people he was trying to build relationships with had options and knew it.

The agents and managers who decided which promoter got which act chose Stephen not because his offers were the biggest, but because they trusted him and knew he’d deliver. The lesson scales well beyond the music business.

When you’re outgunned, the most reliable way to compete is to try harder and give more than anyone expects. It’s not glamorous, but it works.

The experience is the product

Stephen is not a foodie, and he’ll tell you so himself. What he is obsessed with is the temperature in the room, the lighting over the tables, the music at the right volume, the way someone is greeted at the door.

At The Continental, he spent $90,000 turning a Greek diner into a visual postcard by reupholstering existing booths in olive green with red piping, encasing the bar top in concrete, and hanging giant olive-shaped light fixtures over every table.

People drove from New York to eat there. At Buddakan in New York, he hired the same lighting designer who did the Delano Hotel in Miami, because he wanted people to catch their breath when they walked in.

The food has to be good; it’s not a stage set. But what brings people back, and what they describe to their friends, is how a place made them feel. Stephen understood that before most of the restaurant industry did.

A short-term loss can be the smartest long-term investment you make

When Stephen ran the Ripley Music Hall in Philadelphia, he booked unknown bands at a deliberate loss. R.E.M. played for him when 65 people showed up. INXS played for him before anyone knew who they were. He lost money on every one of those shows.

The reason he did it was straightforward: the big booking agencies told him that if he did them a favor with their new acts, they’d take care of him when those acts became enormous. And they did.

He eventually got Madonna and Bruce Springsteen and U2 into a 500-seat club in Philadelphia. Taking a calculated short-term loss to build a long-term relationship is one of the most underused strategies in any business.

The discipline is in knowing which relationships are worth the investment before you make it.

Keep the inner circle small and specific

For most of his career, Stephen operated with a tiny core group. Owen Kamihira was his design partner, his Lennon to Stephen’s McCartney, who would tell him when an idea was genuinely great and when it wasn’t.

David Robkin was his financial person, who watched the books and reminded Stephen when costs were drifting. That was essentially the whole inner circle for years, even as the restaurant group expanded to dozens of locations.

He was precise about what each person was for and kept the circle small enough that trust could be maintained and decisions could be made quickly.

Founders who struggle to scale tend to either try to do everything themselves or add too many people with overlapping roles and no clear authority.

Stephen’s model was simpler: a small group, clearly defined, with genuine respect for what each person brought to the table.

Stephen still remembers standing in the back of his own clubs as a young man, arms folded, watching everyone else have a good time, and feeling vaguely pathetic about it. Eventually, he figured out that was actually his position.

Not in the party, but responsible for the party.

Throwing the party, as he puts it, without ever really being in it. After forty-plus restaurants and nearly half a billion dollars in annual revenue, that instinct looks less like a personality quirk and more like the whole secret.

P.S. If you loved the episode, follow the show in your podcast app so you never miss one. And please SHARE this newsletter so others can learn from some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs!

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On HIBT This Week!

Starr Restaurants: How a Failed DJ Built a Half-Billion-Dollar Restaurant Empire

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Stephen Starr didn’t know anything about food.

In fact, he spent 15 years in an entirely different industry: the music business. The shows were loads of fun. But the business side of things? It barely survived.

Then one night in New York, he walked into a martini bar and everything clicked. It wasn't the food that grabbed him. It was the feeling… the energy, the design, the sense that you'd stepped somewhere special.

He had to recreate it.

So he opened his first restaurant in Philadelphia for $90,000. And although he had no idea what he was doing… he went to work: reupholstered booths, put in a concrete bar top, and olive-shaped light fixtures.

The previous owner had been doing $3,000 a week. But when Stephen opened… he did $100,000 in a week.

Incredible.

From there, he just kept building.

One restaurant became three. Three became a dozen. And somewhere along the way, people started flying to Philadelphia — not exactly the center of the culinary universe — just to eat at his places.

Today, Starr Restaurants generates nearly half a billion dollars a year across 40+ locations, including some of the highest-grossing independent restaurants in America.

So how did a guy who was “scared to death of food” build one of the most successful restaurant empires in the country?

What’s the design philosophy that makes his rooms feel like nothing else?

And why does he say it could never be done again?

Learn all this and more on the latest episode of How I Built This!

HIBT Advice Line: Make or Break it

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This week on the Advice Line, I’m joined by Susan Griffin-Black, co-founder of EO Products. Susan reflects on her own journey… including moments in her business journey that almost broke her.

First up, Ruchi: Where should I actually be selling my product?

Ruchi started Yobee, a probiotic skincare line, after her baby’s eczema sent her looking for something gentle and chemical-free. She’s torn between expanding retail, doubling down on DTC, and Amazon. Our advice: distribute as widely as you can—but there’s a catch with a product like hers that makes one ongoing effort non-negotiable.

Next, Peter: How do I grow from a distributor into a real brand?

Peter’s Culture Wine champions organic South African wines, what he calls the oldest of the new world blends. But he wants to build this brand into something bigger . We zeroed in on the biggest asset he already has after a career in the industry, and pointed to where it can take him.

Finally, Dominic: How do I expand without breaking the bank?

Dominic’s Wyndhams Bajan Coffee Roasters makes a premium coffee you can only find in Barbados, bootstrapped with his partner for years. He’s eyeing the U.S. and UK, but expansion is costly. Our advice was all about branding… because right now, the packaging and website aren’t telling the full story of what makes this coffee special.

Susan leaves us with this: People and relationships can make or break your business. The partnerships you build—and how you treat the people around you—matter just as much as the product itself.

If you would like to be featured on an upcoming episode, call and leave a 1-minute message at 1-800-433-1298 or send a voice memo to hibt@id.wondery.com

Wow in the World!

Inside a Superfan’s Brain!

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Why do some sports fans go completely bonkerballs when their team wins or loses, while others stay totally calm?

We attend the biggest event in Bee-Ball history, where the Buff-Tail Buzzers battle their bitter rivals, the South Town Stingers.

But here’s the mind-blowing science we discover: researchers from Chile used MRI brain scanners to peek inside the minds of 60 super fans while they watched their teams win and lose!

When your favorite team scores, the brain’s “reward system” lights up like a celebration parade, but when your rivals score, the “control system” (the referees of your brain!) gets drowned out by emotions, making people yell, flip tables, and act without thinking!

Even cooler… scientists discovered that this extreme team loyalty is actually something we LEARN as kids from the people around us.

Tune in to discover the wild brain science behind why we go crazy for the teams we love!

From the HIBT Archives!

EO Products: Susan Griffin-Black & Brad Black

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In the early 1990s, Susan Griffin-Black was working for Esprit in San Francisco when a business trip to London changed the course of her life.

Wandering into a Covent Garden apothecary, she picked up a bottle of lavender oil and breathed it in. The scent sparked something she couldn’t ignore: a desire to build her own line of essential oil products.

But turning that moment of inspiration into a business proved far harder than the spark itself.

For 15 years, Susan and her husband and co-founder Brad Black barely scraped by, navigating the slow, unglamorous work of building a brand around natural products before “clean” and “wellness” became billion-dollar buzzwords. They believed in quality ingredients and authenticity at a time when the market hadn’t quite caught up to them.

Eventually, EO Products found its footing and thrived.

The personal side of their story took its own unexpected turn: though Susan and Brad’s marriage ended, their working partnership endured, a testament to a shared vision bigger than any single chapter of their lives.

See you next time!

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At 48, she walked away from all of it to open a store where kids could stuff their own teddy bears. People told her, to her face, that she’d lost her mind. Build-A-Bear now does over half a billion dollars a year.

Here’s what I took from her story, and what applies whether you’re building a stuffed animal empire or anything else.

Pay attention to the sentence nobody else would have noticed

Maxine’s idea for Build-A-Bear came from a ten-year-old. She was driving her neighbor’s kids home after a failed hunt for a sold-out Beanie Baby, and the girl, Katie, said something offhand about how easy stuffed animals would be to make themselves.

Most adults would have smiled and changed the subject. Maxine went home and started writing a business plan that night. The skill that matters here isn’t creativity.

It’s attention.

Good ideas rarely arrive labeled as good ideas. They arrive as small, unremarkable comments that most people let pass through them without friction. Build the habit of catching them.

Your old career is not separate from your new business. It’s the foundation of it

When Maxine opened the first Build-A-Bear store, she filled it with merchandise made by the exact same vendors who’d made shoes for Payless. The landlord who gave her a generous first lease did it because he’d done business with her for two decades in her old job.

Every relationship she built over twenty years at a department store conglomerate became raw material for a company that had nothing to do with department stores. People treat a career change as a clean break from everything that came before it. It rarely is.

The contacts, the trust, the credibility you’ve built doing one thing are transferable in ways you won’t fully understand until you need them.

You can’t protect an idea. You can only protect your execution of it, and your ability to defend it in court

Build-A-Bear’s basic concept, a store where customers make their own stuffed animal, was never something Maxine could trademark. Anyone could have copied it, and people tried. What she actually protected were specifics: the brand name, the design, exclusive mall lease agreements that kept competitors out of the same shopping centers.

Her own words on this are worth remembering: it’s not so much that you protect an idea, it’s that you make sure you can afford to protect what you’ve built. If your business depends on nobody else thinking of your idea, you don’t have a business yet.

You have a head start.

Spend it building something specific enough to defend.

When you see the downturn coming, move before you think you need to

During the 2008 financial crisis, Maxine assumed holiday sales would carry the company through, because surely nobody skips buying a teddy bear for their kid at Christmas. She was wrong, and she ended up laying off seventy five employees in January 2009, the worst possible month to be looking for a new job.

Her own assessment of that decision is blunt: she should have made the cut months earlier, when it would have been easier on the people losing their jobs. The lesson isn’t about layoffs specifically.

It’s about timing. The cost of acting on bad news always goes up the longer you wait to admit it’s bad news.

The hardest part of building something isn’t building it. It’s handing it to someone else

Maxine ran Build-A-Bear for sixteen years before stepping down as CEO in 2013. The instinct for any founder is to keep a hand on the wheel, to second-guess the next person’s decisions, to treat every change to the thing you built as a small betrayal.

Maxine made a deliberate choice not to do that with her successor, Sharon Price John, even when John made calls she personally disagreed with. Most of those calls turned out fine.

Some of them turned out better than what Maxine would have done herself. She says the second most important thing a founder can do, right after coming up with the idea in the first place, is find someone who can run it better than they could.

Letting go is not the end of the founder’s job. It’s one of the hardest parts of it.

Maxine still believes the outcome was half hard work and half luck, but she’s quick to point out that luck has a habit of finding the people who show up tired and go anyway. Build the company. Show up tired. Go anyway.

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On HIBT This Week!

The Unlikely Story Behind America's Favorite Teddy Bear

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When Maxine Clark left her job as president of Payless Shoes, people assumed her next move would be something big. A new fashion concept. A footwear brand. Something that “made sense.”

Well, instead, she opened a store where kids stuffed their own teddy bears.

Unusual… In fact, many of her contemporaries thought she had lost her mind.

But, as most of these stories go, it turned out to be a brilliant idea.

The first Build-A-Bear store opened in a Saint Louis mall in October 1997.

And to her complete and utter shock: she hit her yearly sales projection in ONE quarter. Absolutely incredible!

Of course, it wasn’t always smooth sailing: the financial crisis nearly broke the business and she made the tough decision to step away from the company for a time.

But, all of this led to one of the most iconic kids brands ever created. Build-A-Bear has withstood the test of time.

And may very well endure another 30+ years of success by the time she’s done with it.

HIBT Advice Line: Earn Your Confidence

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This week on the Advice Line, I’m joined by Shazi Visram, founder of Happy Family Organics. Shazi built one of the most successful organic baby food brands in the country, and she sees entrepreneurship as one of the most creative outlets a person can have.

First up, Daisy: How do I grow my brand in America?

Daisy is taking over her dad’s barefoot shoe brand, Freet Barefoot, and wants to build up brand awareness in the U.S market. We pushed her to think about a distribution channel she probably hasn’t considered yet… one that’s increasingly shaping purchase decisions before customers ever visit a website.

Next, Rachel: How can I make my product grow faster?

Rachel’s SprinkleBites makes protein-packed sprinkles, and she’s weighing whether to private-label for other brands to boost revenue. Shazi and I were aligned: why dilute your own brand to build someone else’s?

Finally, Andrew: Should I raise money or keep bootstrapping?

Andrew’s PlantAmika makes a soil additive that releases fragrance when you water your plants. He’s invested about $30K of his own money and is wondering if it’s time to raise. Shazi and I saw things slightly differently. But we agreed on the real question Andrew needs to answer before either path makes sense.

Shazi leaves us with this: You earn your confidence along the way. It doesn’t arrive before you start—it comes with time, with caring about your product, and with figuring things out as you go.

If you would like to be featured on an upcoming episode, call and leave a 1-minute message at 1-800-433-1298 or send a voice memo to hibt@id.wondery.com

Wow in the World!

Do Bees Play for Fun?!

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What if I told you that BEES might play games just for the fun of it?!

Today, we dive into a fascinating discovery from Queen Mary University of London, where researchers taught buff-tailed bumblebees to roll tiny wooden balls into goals for rewards (we call it "bee ball"!).

But here's the unexpected part that changed everything… scientists noticed that some bees were rolling balls around even when there was NO prize to earn!

One single bee played with the balls 117 times over an 18-day study! Scientists discovered that for it to count as play, it has to be voluntary, spontaneous, and rewarding all by itself… and these bees checked every box!

Tune in to discover why even tiny insects know that sometimes the best reward is simply having fun!

From the HIBT Archives!

Happy Family Organics: Shazi Visram

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While she was in business school, Shazi Visram ran into an old friend who had recently become a mother of twins. The friend confided that she felt like a failure… she simply didn’t have time to make healthy, homemade meals for her babies.

That offhand conversation planted a seed: what if organic baby food could be both convenient and genuinely nutritious?

Shazi’s insight was deceptively simple. Most baby food came in jars, processed and shelf-stable but stripped of nutrients and flavor.

Why not sell it frozen instead, preserving the quality of fresh organic ingredients?

When she shared the idea, plenty of people thought she was crazy to take on Gerber, the entrenched giant that dominated the category. But Shazi believed parents wanted something better and convinced dozens of friends and family to invest in her vision.

Building Happy Baby meant fighting for freezer space, educating skeptical parents, and competing against a brand with decades of trust.

But Shazi’s timing aligned with a growing demand for organic, transparently-sourced food. And 15 years later (at the time of our recording), she was doing hundreds of millions per year.

See you next time!

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He set out to sell snowboards.

He was a 22-year-old German programmer living in his girlfriend’s parents’ house in Ottawa, couldn’t get a work permit, and decided the only logical move was to build an online store from scratch. When he couldn’t find software that did what he needed, he wrote it himself. When other people started asking if they could use it, he and his co-founder looked at each other and said: skateboards or software?

They picked software. Today, more than a trillion dollars in sales have flowed through Shopify.

I talked to Tobi a few years ago on How I Built This, and here are a few things I learned from our conversation:

1. The product you build for yourself is often more valuable than the product you set out to build.

Tobi needed an online store for snowboards. The software to build one didn’t really exist in 2004, at least not in any form that matched what he had in mind. He wanted to tell stories around products, wrap good writing around the things he was selling, break away from what he called “the Sears catalog metaphor.” So he built it himself, in a programming language he loved, working sixteen hours a day out of Ottawa coffee shops.

Within a season, other people were emailing him asking if they could license the software for their own stores. They had seen Snow Devil and wanted whatever was powering it. Tobi had built something for a problem he personally understood, which meant he’d built it right. The snowboard business was the vehicle. The software was the destination. He just didn’t know it yet.

2. Constraints can clarify your path when options would have paralyzed you.

Tobi moved to Canada for Fiona. He couldn’t get a work permit. A lawyer told him he could start a business, but he couldn’t take a job. That narrow legal window, which at the time felt like a frustration, turned out to be the thing that put him on the right road. If he had been able to take the job he was offered, he almost certainly would have. The snowboard business, and everything that followed, would never have happened.

He talks about this without romanticizing it. He was anxious. He knew he had valuable skills as a programmer and was hoping, in his words, that he kind of didn’t have to use them for a big company. The constraint gave him the push he needed. Most of us spend our energy trying to eliminate constraints. Tobi’s story is a useful reminder that the walls we run into sometimes point us toward the door.

3. Uncertainty doesn’t go away. You just get faster at cycling through it.

Tobi described the experience of running Shopify as existing in two states: total confidence that the company was going to be unstoppable, and complete dread that it was dead by morning. He said those states never went away entirely. What changed was the frequency. Early on, he might spend a month in one state, then a month in the other. Eventually it compressed to a week, then a day. By the time I talked to him, he told me it could flip three times before breakfast.

That is a more honest description of what it feels like to build a company than almost anything I’ve heard on this show. Most founders perform confidence in public. Tobi just described the actual experience, which is that the dread is always there, the confidence is always there, and your job is to keep moving regardless of which one is louder that morning.

4. Sometimes the worst external event is the best thing that can happen to your business.

When Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, Tobi had just returned from Silicon Valley with term sheets that were worth less than the paper they were printed on. Every VC who had been interested pulled back. He was running out of money. He thought the company was finished.

Instead, Shopify’s user numbers started climbing. People who had just lost their jobs reached for the one thing they could control: starting something of their own. The financial crisis, which had killed the investment pipeline, had simultaneously created an enormous wave of first-time entrepreneurs who needed exactly what Shopify provided. Tobi had not predicted this. He had been preparing to figure out how to tell his team he couldn’t make payroll. By 2009, the company hit cash-flow neutral for the first time. The recession that was supposed to end Shopify turned out to be its inflection point.

5. Admitting what you don’t know is a competitive advantage, not a weakness.

When Tobi arrived in Silicon Valley in 2008 on a used bicycle he’d bought on Craigslist, staying in a youth hostel bunk bed, he had no deck, no financial model, and no idea what terms like CAC ratio or lifetime value meant. When VCs asked him questions he couldn’t answer, he wrote down the terms, went back to his hostel, looked them up, pulled the data from Shopify’s database, did the math, and came back to the next meeting with the answer.

He told his investors the same thing from the beginning: I’m not going to pretend I know things I don’t know. That honesty, combined with his obvious willingness to learn quickly, turned out to be more compelling than a polished pitch from someone who had rehearsed all the right answers. Benchmark and Sequoia both offered him term sheets. He credits the relationship he built with his investors partly to that early transparency. They were all, as he put it, on the same side of the table.

Tobi Lütke raised his first outside money from his father-in-law, who was a government bureaucrat putting his life savings into what Tobi himself described as a money bonfire. He lived in his in-laws’ house for thirteen years, long after Shopify had raised $100 million in venture capital. He was paying himself minimum wage while building one of the most consequential technology companies of the last two decades.

Every 52 seconds, somewhere in the world, someone gets their first sale through Shopify. Tobi says that number is the company’s north star, the thing that tells him whether the work is still worth doing.

He remembered the day he got his first order. He had to walk home from the coffee shop to tell his co-founder because he didn’t have a cell phone. He still talks about it like it happened last week.

P.S. If you loved the episode, follow the show in your podcast app so you never miss one. And please SHARE this newsletter so others can learn from some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs!

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On HIBT This Week!

Shopify: How Tobias Lütke Revolutionized How Everyone Buys Stuff On The Internet

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German programmer Tobias Lütke just wanted to sell snowboards online. But every piece of available software was either clunky, expensive, or… both.

So Tobias did what programmers do: he built his own solution from scratch.

The snowboard business was fine, but something unexpected started happening. Other online merchants kept asking about his e-commerce platform – could they license it for their own stores?

And in that moment, Tobias realized he had accidentally solved a much bigger problem than snowboard retail…

So, in 2006 they made the pivot that would define their careers: they launched Shopify and got out of the snowboard business entirely.

What started as a side project to sell winter gear became the foundation for millions of online stores worldwide.

Today, Shopify is a publicly-traded company with thousands of employees and billions in revenue, powering everyone from small artisans to major brands.

Revisit this incredible episode on the latest How I Built This!

HIBT Advice Line: Trust What You Know

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This week on the Advice Line, I’m joined by Christina Tosi, founder of Milk Bar. Christina recently stepped down as CEO to focus on the creative side. Her take: the biggest opportunity for Milk Bar is showing up in unexpected places, and growing the brand’s spirit matters more than just driving revenue.

First up, Whitney: How do I close a funding gap when investors aren’t biting?

Whitney’s Beau Collective is a fitness hub where locals exercise, socialize, and shop. She’s been running it for 10 years, and now has ambitions to expand. She’s trying to complete a bridge round… but struggling to align with investors. Christina and I both pushed back on the premise: there might be more creative paths to growth that don’t involve institutional capital at all.

Next, Chloe: When your product serves three different markets, which one do you build around?

Chloe’s Cotton Clara makes beginner-friendly craft kits, and is on track for $1.2M this year. The brand appeals to crafters, gift-buyers, and the wellness crowd, but Chloe isn’t sure which persona to prioritize. Christina offered a reframe: when you’re stuck between two options… find a third door.

Finally, Christy: How do you turn a one-time gift into a repeat customer?

Christy’s Vashon Island Coffee Dust makes ultra-fine spice blends you dust on your coffee, a clean alternative to syrups and sweeteners. Many customers discover the product as a gift, then start buying for themselves. We zeroed in on the gifting experience itself… and whether the unboxing moment is doing enough work.

Christina leaves us with this: By year three to five, you know your business better than anyone.

Stay open and curious, but don’t shortchange what you inherently know.

If you would like to be featured on an upcoming episode, call and leave a 1-minute message at 1-800-433-1298 or send a voice memo to hibt@id.wondery.com

Wow in the World!

Tag Champion’s Fish Trick!

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What happens when the world’s greatest tag player learns his secret moves from a FISH?!

In this episode, we become sports commentators for the World Series of Tag, where reigning champion “The Trumpeteer” uses an incredible technique called “the stalking horse” to sneak up on his opponents!

But here’s the bonkerballs part… this move is based on real science from trumpet fish, who are super long and skinny and would totally scare away their prey if they approached head-on. So instead, these clever fish hide behind bigger parrotfish, sneak up close, then POP out and pounce on their dinner!

Tune in to discover how underwater hunting tactics became the ultimate tag championship strategy!

From the HIBT Archives!

Milk Bar: Christina Tosi

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Christina Tosi had trained at culinary school and honed her pastry skills in high-end New York restaurants… but she was tired of making precious desserts for precious diners.

What she really wanted was to recreate the unfussy, nostalgic treats from her childhood. The kind of desserts that made people smile before they even took a bite.

So in 2008, Christina opened the first Milk Bar in the East Village.

Her creations were wonderfully weird: cereal milk soft serve, compost cookies loaded with potato chips and pretzels, and birthday cake truffles that tasted like childhood celebrations.

These weren’t refined French pastries, they were playful, messy, and unapologetically American.

The response was immediate and intense. People started calling from around the country, begging for her gooey crack pies and confetti birthday cakes.

What Christina had tapped into wasn’t just nostalgia, it was permission to enjoy desserts that were fun rather than sophisticated.

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He spent sixteen years importing sheepskin boots from Australia, selling them out of the back of a van in Malibu, losing control of his company, getting it back, nearly losing it again, and then selling the whole thing in 1995 for just under $15 million. Deckers, the company that bought it, turned UGG into a $2.5 billion brand.

Brian walked away without bitterness, which is either remarkable or instructive, or both. I talked to him recently on the show. It’s a great listen. Here are five things he said that stayed with me.

1. The product isn’t failing. You might just be talking to the wrong people.

Brian spent his first few years trying to sell sheepskin boots to surf shop owners who couldn’t imagine why anyone would want them. He got polite enthusiasm and zero orders. Then a shop owner in San Diego called a group of teenage surfers to the back of the store and asked them what they thought of UGGs. Their answer was immediate: the ads were fake, the models couldn’t surf, and they wouldn’t be caught dead in them.

That one moment reoriented everything. Brian went out and found two surfers who were about to turn pro, paid them in boots, took his own camera to the beach, and ran the photos. Sales went from roughly $45,000 to $200,000 in a single season. The product had not changed. The audience and the imagery had. Brian’s lesson from this was simple and durable: if something isn’t working, start with the assumption that it’s you, not the product. “It can’t be the product,” he told me. “It’s gotta be me. What can I do to fix this?”

2. Growth without financing is not an opportunity. It’s a trap.

This is the tension that defined Brian’s entire tenure with UGG, and he describes it with the clarity of someone who lived through the same nightmare multiple times. Every time the business grew, the cash requirements grew faster. Orders would come in. He’d have no money to fund production. He’d find a new investor, give up a chunk of ownership, get the product made, ship it, collect the revenue, and repeat the cycle at a slightly larger and more precarious scale.

By 1995, pre-season orders were pointing toward $18 to $20 million in sales. Most founders would have celebrated. Brian called it the kiss of death. He knew he couldn’t finance the production gap between ordering and collecting, and he knew the hole would swallow him. The accounting instinct that should have protected him, he told me, actually worked against him for years. “My accounting thinking was, we just sold a million dollars worth of product. We’re broke. What’s the answer? We’ll sell two million next year.” The math doesn’t work that way. The faster you grow without proper financing, the more broke you become.

3. The most important marketing decision you’ll make is who carries your product.

In the early 1990s, one of Brian’s oldest friends suggested he stop trying to reach celebrities directly and instead send boots to the stylists who dressed them. It was a $0 strategy: find a mailing list of Hollywood stylists, send each one a free pair, and wait. About 400 people responded. Within a few months, Cameron Diaz was photographed on Beverly Boulevard in UGGs. The boots started appearing in People and Us Weekly. The product had not changed. The context had. It was now a celebrity accessory, which meant it was a fashion product, which meant Brian could finally start telling a different story about what UGG actually was.

The parallel lesson from his advertising failures is just as useful. The Rush Limbaugh campaign in 1994 reached the biggest radio audience in America. It cost half a million dollars. Sales moved from $9 million to $11 million, a modest bump that did not justify the spend. The audience was real. It was just the wrong audience for that product at that moment.

4. A bad partner can cost you more than a bad product.

Brian gave up ownership of UGG multiple times, always under financial duress, always to partners who turned out to be misaligned in ways he didn’t fully see until it was too late. One partner thought he had simply bought the company outright. Another died of a heart attack the week before he was scheduled to return Brian’s equity stake. A third, a CPA brought in to provide financial oversight, turned out to be so disruptive that Brian spent most of his time managing the internal chaos rather than selling boots.

The pattern was consistent. Brian would approach investors in September or October, when he was already desperate and had no leverage. He would take whatever terms were available. He would discover, too late, what those terms actually meant. He told me he now sees his lack of financial planning, not accounting but forward-looking financial planning, as the defining weakness of his time running UGG. He had the skills to understand a balance sheet. He lacked the discipline to forecast what he would need six months ahead, which meant he was always negotiating from the worst possible position.

5. Knowing when to sell is its own kind of wisdom.

Brian sold UGG to Deckers for $14.6 million in 1995. Deckers eventually turned it into a brand worth twenty times that in annual revenue alone. People ask Brian whether he resents it. He says no, and I believe him, partly because of the intellectual framework he uses to explain it.

He describes every business as moving through stages: conception, birth, infancy, toddler, youth, teenager, and adult. Brian built UGG through its youth, the stage where sales are predictable and the operation mostly works. The teenage phase, where all bets are off, required capital and infrastructure and a different kind of management than Brian had ever wanted to provide.

Deckers had those things. Connie Rishwain, the executive Deckers eventually brought in to run UGG, took the brand from $10 million to $1.5 billion. She also had something Brian had spent sixteen years without: a stable financial platform to meet demand when it arrived.

He sold at the right time, to the right buyer, for the right reasons. That’s not a small thing. Most founders either sell too early in a panic or too late out of attachment. Brian sold when he could see clearly that the next chapter required something he didn’t have and wasn’t sure he could build.

Brian Smith created one of the most recognizable footwear brands in the world from a van full of boots in a Malibu parking lot. He did it without venture capital, without a business school degree, and without any particular expertise in the footwear industry. He did it mostly through stubbornness and a deep belief that if the product worked in Australia, it would eventually work here.

He was right. It just took longer than he ever imagined, and by the time it fully arrived, he was watching from the outside.

P.S. If you loved the episode, follow the show in your podcast app so you never miss one. And please SHARE this newsletter so others can learn from some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs!

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On HIBT This Week!

UGG: The Unexpected Story Of A $2.5B Boot Brand

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In 1978, Brian Smith quit his accounting job in Australia and flew to California with a vague plan: find a product, build a business, bring it home.

But, even a year later… he was still searching for the right product..

And then it hit him. He spotted an ad in a surfing magazine for Australian sheepskin boots. Back home, these “uggs” were everywhere. In fact, they were so common that the name was generic.

But in America? Almost nobody had heard of them. And was the inception for the idea of UGG.

Brian was convinced he would become an “instant millionaire.” But, as so many HIBT stories go, the road was long, winding, and completely unexpected.

In short, nobody believed it would work.

He sold boots from the back of his van. He worked odd jobs just to survive. And even when the company did start to see success… he nearly lost it all.

So how did a guy who said he hated sales end up building one of the most iconic footwear brands in history?

Learn all this and more on the latest How I Built This!

HIBT Advice Line: Run Tiny Experiments

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This week we have a throw back Advice Line with Tim Ferriss! Tim is a legendary investor and podcaster. And today, he reminds us that no decision is permanent. In fact, sometimes the best way to run a business… is by running dozens of tiny experiments along the way.

First up, Lauryn: How do you scale two completely opposite markets at once?

Lauryn’s GOB makes biodegradable earplugs grown from mushrooms. She landed a national venue partnership, but is simultaneously scaling DTC. The use cases couldn’t be more different. So Tim suggested one market might fund the freedom to figure out the other.

Next, Emily: Should I follow the revenue or follow the growth?

Emily’s EB and Co saw sales jump 50% after an iconic celebrity wore one of her rings! Now she’s reconsidering where to put her attention: brick-and-mortar or wholesale? We encouraged her to do both, but by focusing on a low-cost move she hasn’t tried yet.

Finally, Kimberly: How do I get American consumers to wait for clothing?

Kimberly’s Kay Becker designs high-quality women’s fashion, sourced from premium material around the world. She wants to shift from inventory to made-to-order, but worries customers won’t want to wait. We reframed the scenario entirely: don’t make it permanent… make it a feature.

Tim leaves us with this: There’s no one right way to build a business. There are dozens of path to success. But whatever you do… pay as much attention to your social and mental wellbeing as you do to the business itself.

If you would like to be featured on an upcoming episode, call and leave a 1-minute message at 1-800-433-1298 or send a voice memo to hibt@id.wondery.com

Wow in the World!

Caterpillars’ Secret Ant Code!

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What if I told you that some caterpillars are SO sneaky, they can hack into ant colonies by pretending to be baby ants?!

In this episode, we discover an incredible scientific study about gossamer-winged butterfly caterpillars that pull off the ultimate con game… These tiny tricksters don't look ANYTHING like ants, but they've figured out how to chemically smell like ants AND make vibration sounds that perfectly match the ants' secret communication code.

Scientists placed teeny tiny microphones in ant nests and recorded tens of thousands of vibration patterns, discovering that the caterpillars who best match the ants' rhythm and timing get treated like royalty … sometimes even better than the ants' own babies!

Tune in to discover how nature's greatest impersonators survive by mastering the ultimate secret handshake!

From the HIBT Archives!

Author and Podcaster: Tim Ferriss

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Tim Ferriss turned himself into a human experiment.

While most people approached new challenges haphazardly, Tim developed a systematic method for rapid skill acquisition. Whether he was learning to tango, growing a business, or mastering a new language, he broke each challenge into manageable components, documented every step, and optimized relentlessly.

By age 30, Tim had cracked the code on everything from automated income to accelerated learning, but his real breakthrough was recognizing that his process was the product.

So he started sharing his process publicly, beginning with “The 4-Hour Workweek” and the premise that most people could achieve more by working smarter, not harder.

What began as personal optimization became a movement.

Tim’s approach resonated with millions of people looking for shortcuts to success. Through five bestselling books and a popular podcast, he reminds us to run tiny experiments with our lives.

See you next time!

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They were building a new way of seeing a category that everyone else had stopped looking at.

Justin Gold is the founder of Justin’s Nut Butter, which he started in a Boulder apartment with a food processor, a journal full of numbered jars, and a stubborn conviction that peanut butter deserved the same variety as jam. He eventually sold the brand to Hormel for $280 million.

And…as you will hear…later bought it back!

Here are five things I learned from our conversation:

1. Look at what everyone else has stopped looking at

Justin was a vegetarian waiting tables in Boulder when he noticed something that nobody in the industry seemed to care about: the preserves section at his local co-op was three times the size of the nut butter section.

That observation became his entire business thesis.

He wasn’t a food scientist. He had no CPG experience. But he was still seeing the shelf the way a customer does, not the way an industry veteran does. Familiarity is the enemy of opportunity.

The founders who build category-defining companies tend to be the ones who walk into a room and notice what’s missing, rather than cataloguing what’s already there.

2. Naivety is a competitive advantage, so use it before it runs out

When Justin started writing his business plan, he didn’t know what an S corp was, how UPC codes worked, or where to find an FDA-certified kitchen.

So he just asked.

He walked into the CU business school library, started talking to a librarian, and ended up with free access to business professors who would tear apart his plan. He cold-called salsa companies to learn about jar fillers.

He talked his way into a 40-year-old industrial grinder from an equipment rep who probably shouldn’t have sold it to him.

Experienced people stop asking basic questions because they think they already know the answers, or because they’re embarrassed to reveal what they don’t know. Neither problem applies when you’re just getting started.

That window closes. Use it.

3. Watch what people actually do, not what they tell you

When Justin’s squeeze packs failed to move at Whole Foods, he stood at the shelf for half an hour and watched customers shop. What he saw: people picked up the packs, got confused, and put them back. The product made sense to him in the athletic aisle, next to energy gels.

But customers had no mental model for peanut butter in that context. When he moved the packs next to the jars, where peanut butter already lived in people’s heads, they started selling.

Most founders kill good ideas because early feedback is discouraging. The better diagnostic is observation.

People will tell you they don’t want something while their behavior is showing you exactly what they need.

4. Hire the person who knows things you don’t, then actually listen to them

Justin talks about Lance Gentry, the former IZZE executive who joined Justin’s and pushed him to raise a million dollars, repackage the brand, and go national. Justin’s description of that partnership is blunt: Lance knew what he was doing, and I was learning.

This sounds obvious, but most founders hire people and then spend enormous energy second-guessing them, or surrounding themselves with people who confirm what they already believe.

Justin handed Lance the wheel on the things Lance understood better, and focused his own energy on the things only he could do: quality, culture, the brand’s soul. The division of labor was honest rather than political.

That’s rarer than it sounds.

5. Build it like you’re going to keep it forever. That’s also how you sell it

Justin spent 13 years building Justin’s before Hormel came calling with $280 million. He didn’t engineer the outcome. He followed the advice he’d been given early: build the best company you can build, and let someone want to buy it.

The founders who are always half-focused on the exit tend to make decisions that optimize for the story they’re telling investors rather than the business they’re actually running. The ones who stay obsessed with the product, the customer, and the next problem to solve tend to build things that are genuinely worth acquiring.

The exit, if it comes, is a byproduct of that obsession. Not the cause of it.

Justin spent 13 years making peanut butter before anyone wrote a check with eight zeros on it. He wasn't managing toward an exit.

He was managing toward the next problem: the right grinder, the right shelf placement, and the right partner.

The outcome followed the obsession, not the other way around.

That sequencing matters more than most people want to admit.

P.S. If you loved the episode, follow the show in your podcast app so you never miss one. And please SHARE this newsletter so others can learn from some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs!

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Justin’s Nut Butter: From An Obsession To A $280M Brand

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At 25, Justin Gold was a waiter in Boulder with a food processor and an obsession.

He’d noticed something strange: the jam aisle had endless variety. But the peanut butter section? Not so much…

So he started experimenting. Late nights. Hundreds of jars. Meticulous tracking different flavors and ingredients. Batch after batch after batch.

And after months of this, he decided to turn his hobby into a business – Justin’s Nut Butter.

But there was just one problem…

Almost nobody wanted it.

Stores said no. Distributors flinched. The only way he could make his butters was if he worked overnight in a shared kitchen (in a facility 1 hour away, mind you.)

And even after all that effort… still, he struggled.

Then one day on a mountain bike ride, he had an idea that sounded laughably simple. But that little idea would transform the entire company.

So how did a former law school student build one of the most iconic natural food brands in America? And what was the idea nobody would help him make?

Learn all this and more in the latest episode of How I Built This!

HIBT Advice Line: Go Slow on Purpose

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This week on the Advice Line, I’m joined by Jeffrey Hollender, co-founder of Seventh Generation. We dig into a question that I’ve been thinking a lot about: do consumers actually care whether a product is sustainable, or do they just care that it works?

First up, Kristina: Is social media still worth the effort?

Kristina’s Twenty Five and Pine designs furniture that works for both toddlers and parents. She’s questioning whether organic social is a dead end and wondering where else to spend her energy. Jeffrey and I were emphatic… she’s thinking about the channel wrong.

Next, Phil: How do you market a product people don’t know how to use?

Phil’s Red Truck Orchards makes farm-made cherry vinegar from his Michigan orchard. It sounds like regular vinegar, it looks like regular vinegar, but it isn’t. The burden is on Phil to show people the difference, and we pushed him toward a content strategy he hadn’t considered.

Finally, Caroline: How do you sell a product that’s inherently polarizing?

Caroline’s Petaluma makes plant-based dog food, a concept that meets real resistance from pet owners. Our advice: stop positioning it as an alternative. There’s a stronger frame that converts skeptics into buyers.

Jeffrey leaves us with this: Today’s startup culture is obsessed with scaling fast. His advice? Be patient. A slower, more deliberate trajectory is often the healthier path.

If you would like to be featured on an upcoming episode, call and leave a 1-minute message at 1-800-433-1298 or send a voice memo to hibt@id.wondery.com

Wow in the World!

Why Mosquitoes Pick YOU!

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What starts as a simple game of mosquito tag turns into a bonkerballs scientific mystery when Thomas Fingerling gets covered in mosquito bites while everyone else stays bite-free!

We dive into incredible research that reveals exactly how mosquitoes choose their victims like tiny flying detectives. Here's the mind-blowing discovery… mosquitoes don't just randomly attack people! They LOVE dark colors against bright backgrounds, plus they're obsessed with carbon dioxide from human breath, body heat, and certain smells.

Can scientists use this mosquito-attracting combo to build better traps and protect people from dangerous diseases? Tune in to discover why you might be a mosquito magnet!

From the HIBT Archives!

Seventh Generation: Alan Newman and Jeffrey Hollender

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In the late 1980s, when most consumers had never heard the term “eco-friendly,” Alan Newman and Jeffrey Hollender saw an opportunity hiding in plain sight.

They believed people would pay for household products that didn’t harm the environment: paper towels, diapers, and cleaners made from sustainable materials.

Starting as a scrappy mail-order catalog, Seventh Generation became one of the first successful green brands in America.

The company’s mission was deeply personal for both founders: they wanted to create products safe enough for the seventh generation of children to inherit the earth. Their timing was prescient. Environmental consciousness was growing, but the market was wide open. Seventh Generation’s products proved that being green didn’t mean sacrificing quality, and their success paved the way for an entire industry.

But success couldn’t save the partnership.

In the early 1990s, just as the company was gaining momentum, Alan and Jeffrey had a bitter falling out that ended their business relationship and their friendship.

Their story became a cautionary tale about the fragile nature of partnerships, proving that even shared passion and commercial success can’t always overcome personal differences.

See you next time!

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He runs the most valuable publicly traded company in human history. He did it by spending nearly a decade subsidizing a technology that almost no one wanted, while his stock price languished and investors called for his head. He did it by walking into the CEO of Sega’s office and asking for money to fund the very project he was abandoning. He did it by buying a piece of machinery from a bankrupt company with half of the money his company had left.

And when I asked him recently on How I Built This whether he would do it all over again, he said absolutely not.

Here are five things from that conversation I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

1. The only way to solve a chicken-and-egg problem is to pick one and commit.

When NVIDIA built CUDA, their revolutionary computing platform, they faced a problem that should have been fatal. Developers wouldn’t write software for it because not enough computers had it. And not enough computers had it because there was no software to justify it. The loop had no exit.

Jensen’s solution was brutal and expensive. He decided to load CUDA onto every single GeForce gaming chip they shipped, essentially giving away the technology for free to tens of millions of gamers who had no use for it. “GeForce carried CUDA on its back for literally 25 years,” he told me. The margins were terrible. The logic, from the outside, was hard to follow. But Jensen understood that the only way to break a chicken-and-egg problem is to manufacture the egg yourself, at whatever cost, and wait for the chickens to arrive. When AI researchers eventually needed massive parallel computing power, CUDA was already sitting inside computers all over the world. The market didn’t find the technology. Jensen had placed it there, years in advance, and waited.

2. When the architecture is wrong, burn it down. Even if it costs you everything.

In NVIDIA’s early years, the company spent two and a half years building a graphics chip that turned out to use the wrong fundamental approach. Competitors were doing it the right way. Microsoft’s new Windows 95 was incompatible with what NVIDIA had built. The company had a $12 million contract with Sega that depended on continuing down the wrong path.

Jensen flew to Japan, sat across from the CEO of Sega, and told him to find another partner. Then he asked Sega to convert the remaining $5 million on the contract into an investment in NVIDIA instead. He came home, laid off two thirds of the company, and started over. The reasoning was straightforward, even if the execution was agonizing. Finishing something fundamentally wrong would burn two more years, and in two years every competitor would be so far ahead they could never catch up. Bad architecture is not a problem you can outwork. You have to abandon it, regardless of the sunk cost, and rebuild on solid ground.

3. Conviction is not the same as certainty. It’s what you have instead of certainty.

For most of the period between 2006 and 2012, NVIDIA’s CUDA platform had almost no commercial traction. The stock was flat or falling. Investors were frustrated. There were whispers of hostile takeover bids. Jensen was standing up in quarterly earnings calls delivering what he himself described as humiliating news, quarter after quarter.

What kept him going was not a crystal ball. He told me he had no idea when the market would materialize or which application would crack it open. What he had was a reasoned belief, built from first principles, that parallel computing would eventually be essential for something important. “The question was not whether we would succeed,” he said. “The only question was when and who was gonna be the first application.” That’s a meaningful distinction. Certainty is knowing the outcome. Conviction is believing the direction is right and being willing to stay in it long enough to find out. Jensen stayed in it for nearly a decade before AlexNet won the ImageNet competition in 2012 and the AI era began.

4. Forgetting is a leadership skill.

Jensen said something in our conversation that I have been turning over ever since. He told me he spends almost all of his energy trying to forget yesterday. Not because the past doesn’t matter, but because carrying it is incompatible with moving forward. Every humiliation, every failed product, every brutal earnings call: he works to process it, learn from it, encode the lesson in his body, and then release it.

He was candid that talking to me about his past triggered real anxiety. “That’s why I don’t love talking about my past,” he said. “I spend all my time forgetting it so that I can get back on that horse.” Most leadership advice points in the opposite direction. Reflect more. Process more. Be more self-aware. Jensen’s version is different. He’s suggesting that for people who build things, excessive backward-looking attention is a form of self-sabotage. The athlete’s version of this is simpler: forget the last point. The founder’s version, it turns out, is the same idea, just applied across decades.

5. It’s always personal. Anyone who says otherwise is fooling themselves.

Near the end of our conversation, Jensen said something that felt almost out of character for someone known as a hard-charging, analytically precise engineer. I asked him to explain, in technical terms, how he thinks about building and running a company. He tried, and then he stopped himself.

“I built this one from the first day,” he said. “And it’s much more personal. I frankly believe, because people say it’s not business, it’s personal. It’s always personal.” He talked about how the safety he feels taking risks is connected, in some way he can’t fully explain, to knowing his wife will be there when he gets home. About how every decision he makes is in service of the people around him. About how he channels his impatience not against people, but on their behalf. The version of Jensen Huang that the world sees is the leather-jacketed CEO of a trillion-dollar company. The version I talked to is someone who missed his kids’ karate tournaments for years and still isn’t sure whether he’s processed what that cost. The two things are the same person, and the second one is, I think, the reason the first one exists.

Jensen Huang has now run NVIDIA for 33 years, longer than any CEO in the history of the technology industry. His children are 34 and 35. The company is 33 years old. They have never known a world without it.

He built the most valuable company in the world by doing things that looked, for years, like they weren’t working. And he survived it by learning to forget almost everything that happened along the way.

P.S. If you loved the episode, follow the show in your podcast app so you never miss one. And please SHARE this newsletter so others can learn from some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs!

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NVIDIA: The Most Valuable Company on Earth

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NVIDIA is one of the most valuable companies in the history of the world. But for years, Jensen Huang kept telling his employees the same thing: “We are 30 days from going out of business.”

The first chip was a catastrophe. Every single unit came back. Jensen laid off two-thirds of his team and started over with almost nothing.

Then he made a bet that nearly everyone – investors, analysts, even his own board – thought was crazy.

He poured money into a technology almost nobody wanted. For nearly a decade, there was nothing to show for it. The stock flatlined. There were rumors of a hostile takeover.

But Jensen kept going anyway.

And when the bet finally paid off, it didn’t just save NVIDIA. It changed the world.

So what was the technology Jensen refused to give up on? What kept Jensen holding on through a decade of doubt? And why does he say that if he could go back, he wouldn’t start NVIDIA again?

Find out on this latest episode of How I Built This!

HIBT Advice Line: Founder First, CEO Later

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This week on the Advice Line, I’m joined by Sarah LaFleur, founder and CEO of M.M. LaFleur. Sarah’s been through it all: COVID wiped out 60% of revenue, she closed every store, did three rounds of layoffs, and clawed back to profitability. She calls it a meaningful “second shot” at building the brand smarter.

First up, David: How do you keep going when self-doubt won’t go away?

David’s Sorsoap is a muscle-recovery bar shaped like a physical therapy scraping tool. He’s wondering how successful founders learn to trust their instincts and push through self doubt. Sarah pushed back on the premise: managing self-doubt isn’t a side task, it’s the number one CEO job.

Next, Marnie: How do you justify a premium price in a category people buy cheap?

Marnie’s Tick Socks have permethrin bonded into the fabric—lasting 70 washes versus 5 with DIY sprays—but $119 for four pairs is a tough sell online. I reframed what she’s actually selling: it’s not socks. Sarah pushed a bigger pivot—DTC might be the wrong channel entirely, and there’s a built-in distribution partner she hasn’t considered yet.

Finally, David: How do you get people to refill instead of throw away?

David’s Siblings makes refillable candles, but has been stuck at $2M for years. Sarah and I both challenged a core assumption about the brand’s messaging. Consumers care more about the value of the product itself!

Sarah leaves us with this: It took her a full decade to actually become a CEO. She was a founder from day one, but learning to truly run a business happened in real time. She wishes she’d given herself more grace… and asked for more help along the way.

If you would like to be featured on an upcoming episode, call and leave a 1-minute message at 1-800-433-1298 or send a voice memo to hibt@id.wondery.com

Wow in the World!

Smart Underwear Tracks Your Toots!

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What happens when you accidentally discover that scientists invented underwear that can COUNT YOUR FARTS?!

In this epusode, we learn about incredible smart underwear technology from the University of Maryland that uses tiny sensors to track exactly how many times you toot each day!

But here’s the bonkerballs part … scientists discovered that healthy adults actually pass gas 32 times a day (twice what they originally thought!) and they’re building something called the Human Flatus Atlas to create the world’s first fart map.

Will this smart technology help doctors understand what’s normal and keep our bellies healthy? Tune in to discover why your underwear might be smarter than you think!

From the HIBT Archives!

M.M.LaFleur: Sarah LaFleur

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Every morning, Sarah LaFleur faced the same frustrating routine: standing in front of her closet, overwhelmed by choices that somehow never felt right.

Working in corporate New York, she needed professional clothes that fit well and lasted, but everything she found was either poorly made, ill-fitting, or required too much thought to put together.

And so an idea was born…

Sarah’s solution was deceptively simple: create a line of elegant, well-tailored pieces that could mix and match effortlessly. And in 2011, she partnered with a top designer to launch M.M.LaFleur.

The brand found its audience immediately: working women who were tired of fashion that didn’t work for their actual lives. From Capitol Hill to Silicon Valley, customers discovered clothes that solved real problems.

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He’s never raised outside capital. He’s never taken his company public. He spent decades quietly building one of the most respected furniture brands in America, mostly by doing things that conventional business logic would have told him not to do.

I talked to John recently on How I Built This, and what struck me most was how consistent he was. The same instincts he had at 23 running his father’s store are the ones that guided every major decision at Room and Board for the next fifty years.

Here are five things he said that I keep thinking about.

1. The decisions you don’t make are often your most important ones.

At some point in the late 1990s, John found a location in Los Angeles that he loved. The team sat down, talked it through, and said no. They weren’t ready. Three years later, they opened in San Francisco and New York within six months of each other, and both stores thrived.

John put it in a way I haven’t been able to stop thinking about: “People remember the decisions that they made where they did something. Sometimes the decisions you made where you did nothing is the most important decision in the business.”

Most entrepreneurs are wired to move, to act, to capture every opportunity before someone else does. John built a billion-dollar company partly by training himself to resist that instinct when the timing wasn’t right.

2. Keeping prices fair is also a business strategy.

From early on, Room and Board had a simple rule: no sales, no volume discounts, no special pricing for interior designers. One price for everyone.

John explained the thinking this way. He said he wanted to treat every customer like a best friend, and asked himself what it would feel like to tell a friend they could have paid 20 percent less if they’d come in last week. The answer was obvious.

But there’s a less obvious operational benefit too: without sales, the business runs in a straight line. No artificial peaks, no chaotic surges in fulfillment, no customers waiting three months for a sofa because you ran a promotion that overwhelmed the warehouse.

Pricing discipline, it turns out, is logistics discipline.

3. Growth targets can be the enemy of good decisions.

When Room and Board started doing well, the calls came in constantly. Private equity firms, investors, strategic partners, all with the same pitch: we can help you grow this faster. John’s answer was always no.

His reasoning wasn’t sentimental. He’d looked at the track record. “Generally they’ve ruined more businesses than they’ve grown,” he told me.

But beyond rejecting outside capital, John also rejected the internal version of this pressure. Room and Board never had a plan that said we need to hit X stores or Y revenue by a certain date. Growth happened organically, when opportunities were genuinely right.

“You make a bunch of bad decisions” when you force yourself to hit arbitrary growth targets, he said. The LA store they passed on is the proof of that.

4. Your suppliers can be partners, not just vendors.

The steel manufacturer that Room and Board works with today started out making security gates. John walked in and asked if they wanted to make furniture instead. That relationship has now lasted decades, and the company became Room and Board’s second-largest manufacturer.

What John built with that manufacturer, and with many others, was something he described as being “vertically integrated through partnership.” He cares about whether they’re profitable. He works with them on new product development. He balances business across their operation so they’re not dangerously dependent on one customer.

In return, he gets quality, continuity, and loyalty that a purely transactional vendor relationship could never produce. Most companies treat their supply chain as a cost to be managed. John treated his as a competitive advantage to be cultivated.

5. Hardship is not a detour. It’s the road.

John spent roughly a decade after leaving Gabberts in what he described, looking back, as a scattered and unfocused period. He started a kids furniture business. He bought a design studio. He ran a wholesale showroom.

None of it was going anywhere meaningful. He was 40 years old, estranged from his family, competing in the same city as his father’s store, and running businesses he didn’t believe in. That’s when the clarity arrived.

“Life’s not about how fast you run or how high you jump,” he said. “But how well you bounce.” The patience he developed in that decade, and the hunger it created, turned out to be part of what made Room and Board what it became.

He didn’t know who he was as a founder until he spent years figuring out who he wasn’t.

John Gabbert is 78 years old. He stepped down as CEO in 2017 and has since transitioned the company to an employee ownership structure, so the people who helped build it will benefit from its future.

Take a listen to the episode. It’s a good one!

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On HIBT This Week!

Room & Board: How a Family Feud Built a Furniture Empire

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John Gabbert grew up in his family’s furniture store in suburban Minneapolis. By 23, he was running the place.

Then he took a trip to Sweden and walked into an obscure store called IKEA. What he saw changed everything, not just what he thought about furniture, but what he thought about the entire industry.

He came home with a new vision for the business. But… his father (the owner) wanted nothing to do with it.

What followed was a deal to buy the family business that fell apart on the day it was supposed to close. And a family rift that lasted nearly a decade.

John walked away with a tiny spinoff brand called Room & Board.

But, sadly, he had no family support, no outside investors, and certainly no safety net.

From there, John built Room & Board his own way. Slowly. Deliberately. Saying no to almost everything the industry told him he should do. When competitors chased growth, John chased durability.

So how did a family feud and a trip to Sweden lead to one of America’s most distinctive furniture brands? What was the unconventional manufacturing model that made it all work?

And what did John’s father say about him in one of his final moments?

Learn all this and more on this episode of How I Built This!

HIBT Advice Line: Scale Deliberately

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This week on the Advice Line, we’re doing a mashup of three former guests, three callers, one theme. Joining me are Chieh Huang of Boxed, Hernan Lopez of Wondery, and David Neeleman of JetBlue.

First up, Kristina: How do I scale a pottery studio into something bigger?

Kristina’s Seagrass Pottery in Florida runs workshops, memberships, retreats, and wholesale. She wants to scale beyond a single location, but Chieh and I converged on a more fundamental question she needs to answer first: what is the business actually trying to be?

Next, Jim: Should I take a retail deal or stay direct-to-consumer?

Jim’s Lemur Strap is a patented camera carrying system that’s caught the attention of a big retailer. But this route means more exposure but thinner margins. Hernan leaned toward DTC… but flagged a structural problem with the product that makes that path harder

Finally, Will: How do you change a behavior that’s been ingrained for decades?

Will’s Tool Club delivers rental tools straight to your door. But tool ownership and traditional rental are deeply ingrained habits. David’s advice: become the face of a movement, and show people exactly how much money they’re leaving on the table.

The throughline across all three calls: scaling isn’t about chasing every channel. It’s about picking the right ones and resisting the pressure to dilute what made the business worth scaling in the first place.

If you would like to be featured on an upcoming episode, call and leave a 1-minute message at 1-800-433-1298 or send a voice memo to hibt@id.wondery.com

Wow in the World!

Dogs Learn Words by Eavesdropping!

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What happens when you combine a spelling bee, a memory game, and the fluffiest competitors on Earth? Welcome to the Dog Vocab World Championship!

But here’s the mind-blowing part… scientists in Budapest found that some dogs can learn new words just by OVERHEARING humans talk to each other! That’s right, your dog might be secretly learning vocabulary while you chat with your friends, without anyone directly teaching them!

In fact, some Border Collies can recognize hundreds of words, and in rare cases, over a THOUSAND!

Will the doggie champions remember which word belongs to which toy under the bright lights and barking crowds? Tune in to discover why your four-legged friend might be the ultimate eavesdropper!

From the HIBT Archives!

Roblox: David Baszucki

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After selling his educational software company in the early 2000s, David Baszucki faced a classic entrepreneur’s dilemma: what comes next?

For his next idea, he wanted something with mass appeal, something that could truly go viral. And the answer came from watching how kids interacted with technology: they didn’t just want to consume content, they wanted to create it.

So in 2006, David and co-founder Erik Cassel launched Roblox with a radical premise: instead of making games, they’d build a platform where anyone could make games.

Users could design their own avatars, create virtual worlds, and play millions of different experiences created by other players. It was part game, part social network, part creative studio.

And it was unlike anything else in the market.

Today, with millions of young creators building businesses on Roblox, David’s platform has become more than a game, it’s a new economy where imagination literally pays the bills.

See you next time!

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She sold her first company, the Wedding List, to Martha Stewart.

Got fired from a CEO job by messenger (literally! a messenger delivered her pink slip in the middle of a team meeting.)

Built Beautycounter into a billion-dollar brand, got pushed out by a private equity firm, watched it collapse…

Then bought it back for pennies on the dollar. And now she’s running it again under a new name.

I talked to Gregg recently on How I Built This, and I keep coming back to five things she said that I think every founder and aspiring entrepreneur should hear.

1. Blind naivete is an asset, not a liability.

When Gregg decided to enter the beauty industry in 2010, she knew almost nothing about it. And she says that turned out to be part of why it worked. “Don’t spend so much time looking at the industry that you’re entering into,” she told me. “You have a vision. You see opportunities. Focus on what you’re trying to do.”

She wasn’t trying to iterate on what already existed. She was trying to build something that didn’t exist yet. The incumbents in the beauty industry couldn’t see the opportunity for clean, high-performing cosmetics because they were too close to the existing model.

Gregg walked in without the baggage of knowing why it couldn’t be done.

2. The “unfashionable” distribution channel is often the right one.

When a friend suggested Gregg use a direct sales model to move her products, her first response was “hell no.” The model carried a stigma. It sounded like Amway. It felt at odds with the premium, mission-driven brand she was trying to build.

But she dug deeper and realized the model, when structured carefully, was actually a perfect fit. She had a product that required education and trust, and she was building a movement as much as a business. Direct sales gave her an army of passionate brand ambassadors who acquired customers at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising.

Within eight years, the company scaled to hundreds of millions in revenue. The lesson isn’t that direct sales is always the answer. It’s that the distribution channel that seems embarrassing in a pitch meeting might be the one that actually works.

3. Growth-at-all-costs is a great strategy until it isn’t.

Gregg watched this movie twice. With her first company, the Wedding List, investors pushed her to expand retail locations faster than she was comfortable with. When the dot-com market imploded, she was overextended and had to sell prematurely. She described the dynamic with clarity: “They’re like, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go. Growth at all costs. And that’s all good when things are going well. But if you’re out over your skis, you’re screwed.”

The thing about growth-at-all-costs is that it works beautifully in a rising tide and becomes catastrophic the moment the tide turns. Founders who internalize this lesson early tend to keep more control over their companies and their destinies.

4. Being pushed out of your company is not the same as being finished.

When Carlyle removed Gregg as CEO of Beautycounter just months after buying a majority stake, it was humiliating. She had built the company from nothing over nearly a decade.

She was its face, its voice, its engine. And then she was out.

What followed was, by her own account, a dark period. But she stayed close. She supported the brand publicly because she still owned a stake in it. She worked quietly behind the scenes when the interim CEO asked for help.

And when the opportunity came to buy the assets out of foreclosure, she made the call in 48 hours. Founders who get forced out rarely get a second crack at their own creation.

Gregg got hers because she never fully walked away, even when walking away would have been easier.

5. Market timing matters as much as the idea itself.

Gregg is direct about this. She thinks the Wedding List was a genuinely good idea that arrived a year or two too early. E-commerce wasn’t quite ready. Consumer comfort with online purchasing hadn’t reached the critical mass the business needed to fully take off.

Beautycounter, by contrast, launched at almost exactly the right moment. Consumer awareness around toxic chemicals in personal care products was growing. The direct sales model had been modernized by social media. The clean beauty category was nascent but building momentum. “I think timing more than luck,” she told me.

A great idea in the wrong year can fail. The same idea, properly timed, can become a billion-dollar company.

Founders can’t always control timing, but they can pay close attention to whether the market is ready to receive what they’re building.

Gregg’s story isn’t a clean arc. It’s more like a winding road with a few cliffs along the way. But that’s actually what makes it instructive because it’s messier, harder, and I think a lot more honest about what building something real actually looks like.

P.S. If you loved the episode, follow the show in your podcast app so you never miss one. And please SHARE this newsletter so others can learn from some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs!

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Beautycounter: The Founder Who Lost Her Company… Then Bought It Back

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After college, Gregg Renfrew’s mother handed her $5,000 and told her she was on her own.

What followed was a winding path through cold-calling copier sales, a five-month marriage, and a startup she built to $4.5 million in revenue… only to watch it collapse when the dot-com bubble burst.

But that' wasn’t all…

At her next job, she got fired in the most humiliating way imaginable.

Most people would’ve slowed down or just plain given up.

But Gregg got found a new obsession: the chemicals hiding inside the beauty products millions of women used every day.

That obsession became Beautycounter – a clean beauty brand powered by an army of tens of thousands of women selling a mission, not just a product. It grew to nearly $400 million in sales and a $1B valuation.

And just when things seemed on the up… everything fell apart. And Gregg had to start all over (again).

So how did a founder who was pushed out of her own company end up buying it back? What was the phone call that changed everything? And why did she have just 48 hours to make the biggest decision of her life?

Find out on the next How I Built This!

HIBT Advice Line: Follow the Obsession

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This week on the Advice Line, I’m joined by Jonah Peretti, founder and CEO of BuzzFeed. Nearly 20 years in, Jonah’s navigating one of the toughest chapters of his career… but he’s leaning back into “founder mode” and reinventing himself (and the business).

First up, Anthony: What’s the best way to scale a seasonal business?

Anthony’s Motionflix brings pop-up outdoor cinemas to beaches and rooftops across five cities, crossing $1M in sales last year. He wants to bring in local operators to launch new markets but isn’t sure which model fits. We walked him through the franchise playbook, but pushed him to think even bigger – what if screenings could spin up spontaneously?

Next, Andrew: How do you own a category when knockoffs are already coming?

Andrew’s CATSUMO makes an interactive cat-wrestling glove that did $1.2M last year after a viral video took off. Competitors found his factory and undercut his price. But we realized that the most defensible move isn’t another product… it’s turning the business into something competitors can’t copy at all.

Finally, Melissa: How do you get parents excited about a muffin?

Melissa’s Unrefined Foods makes frozen muffins from stone-milled whole wheat berries and real ingredients. Jonah was honest: muffins are a tough category for organic virality. And we flagged something on her packaging that’s hiding the product’s best selling points.

Jonah leaves us with this: Advice is overrated. Success comes from the rare confluence of something you’re truly obsessed with and an opening in the world where that obsession can become something bigger.

If you would like to be featured on an upcoming episode, call and leave a 1-minute message at 1-800-433-1298 or send a voice memo to hibt@id.wondery.com

Wow in the World!

SnotBot Saves the Whales!

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What if I told you that collecting whale SNOT could help save the ocean?!

It all started when superhero scientist Dr. Iain Kerr got completely covered in whale mucus and had a brilliant idea… what if we could catch whale snot right out of the air using a drone?!

The real SnotBot can collect whale blow that’s full of incredible clues like DNA, whether a whale is pregnant, and what tiny microbes live inside its body. Unlike noisy boats and expensive airplanes, these nimble drones can get close to whales without disturbing them!

Will we master the art of mid-air snot collection before his drone battery dies? Tune in to discover how whale mucus is helping scientists protect these amazing ocean giants!

From the HIBT Archives!

BuzzFeed: Jonah Peretti

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In 2001, Jonah Peretti ordered a pair of custom Nike shoes with the word “sweatshop” printed on them. When Nike refused, he shared their email exchange with a few friends as a joke. Within days, that simple prank had spread to millions of people around the world… and Jonah realized he’d stumbled onto something much bigger than a shoe order gone wrong.

This was years before anyone understood what “going viral” meant, but Jonah became obsessed with the mechanics of how information spreads online.

He started studying the patterns: what made people share content, how ideas moved from person to person, and why some things exploded while others disappeared.

That curiosity led him to co-found The Huffington Post in 2005, applying his insights about viral content to political news.

But Jonah’s bigger bet was BuzzFeed, launched in 2006 as a laboratory for understanding internet culture.

While traditional media dismissed listicles and cat videos as frivolous, Jonah saw them as the building blocks of a new kind of storytelling. BuzzFeed became the first media company built specifically for the social web, proving that understanding how people share is just as important as creating what they share.

See you next time!

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Offices were going casual. Tech was rewriting the dress code. Even Wall Street was starting to loosen up. If you were going to start a business, this was probably the worst possible category to pick.

And that’s exactly what Shep and Ian Murray did.

They didn’t have fashion experience. They didn’t have investors. What they had was a feeling. Summers on Martha’s Vineyard. A sense of ease. A version of life they wanted to hold onto.

So they put that feeling onto silk. Tiny whales. Boats. Street signs. And they started selling ties out of the back of a Jeep.

There’s a moment early in their story that stuck with me. They’re standing in the rain, going store to store, getting rejected over and over again. And Ian says something simple: we didn’t know the business, and we needed to learn the business

That’s really what this story is about.

Here are five lessons I took from it.

1. Don’t follow the trend. Follow the tension.

Everything about the market said “don’t start a tie company.”

But the Murray brothers noticed something subtle. Even as workplaces got more casual, people still wanted ways to express identity. A tie wasn’t just functional. It was symbolic.

They weren’t selling ties. They were selling a signal.

And that’s often where the best ideas live. Not in what’s growing, but in what’s changing.

2. You don’t need expertise. You need proximity to the problem.

They didn’t come from fashion. They learned by doing.

They cut apart other ties to understand construction. They met suppliers during lunch breaks. They made cold calls out of the New York Public Library.

At one point, they literally hung around retail stores just to learn how the business worked.

That’s a pattern I’ve seen again and again. The best founders don’t wait until they’re ready. They get close enough to start, and then they figure it out.

3. Distribution is the business. Not the product.

The first big break wasn’t some viral moment. It was a small boutique on Martha’s Vineyard placing an order.

Then another store.

Then a twist. One shop moved inventory to Nantucket, and suddenly sales doubled. That’s when they realized the idea was portable.

They rode bikes to stores. Drove up and down the East Coast. Sent ties to TV anchors. Showed up at church fairs and school events.

They didn’t scale the product first. They hacked distribution.

And in the early days, that’s everything.

4. Build a brand people can join

Very early on, something interesting happened. People who wore the ties felt like they were part of something.

Not because of marketing. Because of what the product said.

“I go to the Vineyard.”
“I get this lifestyle.”
“I’m in on this.”

That’s a powerful shift. When your product becomes shorthand for identity, you’re no longer just selling inventory. You’re building a tribe.

5. Stay focused longer than feels comfortable

This one is harder than it sounds.

As the business started to work, they saw opportunities everywhere. Shirts. Shorts. Accessories. A full lifestyle brand.

But a mentor told them to wait. Get to $5 million in tie sales before doing anything else.

That constraint mattered.

Because focus isn’t just about discipline. It’s about earning the right to expand.

Most businesses don’t fail because they miss opportunities. They fail because they chase too many too early.

There’s a line from Shep that I keep thinking about. He said they were ready to fail now rather than stay unfulfilled.

That’s the trade.

Not success versus failure. But fulfillment versus regret.

And for a couple of guys selling ties out of a Jeep, that was enough to get started.

P.S. If you loved the episode, follow the show in your podcast app so you never miss one. And please SHARE this newsletter so others can learn from some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs!

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On HIBT This Week!

Vineyard Vines: How Two Miserable Office Workers Built a $500M Brand

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Every day, Shep and Ian Murray met for lunch at the same Manhattan burger joint and had the same conversation:

“How was your day? It sucked. When are you going to quit?”

Shep was at an ad agency. Ian was in PR. They were… miserable.

Then on a family trip, they noticed something about neckties that nobody else was seeing. Everyone assumed ties were dying. The Murrays thought that was exactly the opportunity.

And this was how Vineyard Vines was born.

They financed the whole thing with credit card cash advances. Quit their jobs on the same day. And spent that first summer knocking on doors with no connections and no plan.

From there, a tiny tie company slowly became something much bigger… a full lifestyle brand with over 100 stores.

They bootstrapped every step of the way. They still own the whole thing today.

So how did two brothers with no fashion background turn a product everyone had written off into a half-billion-dollar lifestyle brand? What was the accidental marketing break that put them on national TV? And how did they nearly undo everything they worked for decades on?

HIBT Advice Line: Obsess and Execute

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This week on the Advice Line, I’m joined by David Neeleman, one of the most prolific airline founders in the world: five airlines,, including JetBlue and most recently Breeze Airways. David breaks down the brutal math of running an airline right now. His motto? You can’t control the macro, but you can control whether your team delivers a flawless experience every day.

First up, Barbara: How do I keep my company alive for the next generation?

Barbara’s FoodPlay Productions has been touring nutrition education theater into schools since 1982. But after 40+ years, she’s trying to figure out succession and whether live theater still makes sense in a digital world. David suggested a structural change that would unlock entirely new funding sources… and how to find a successor without giving up the mission.

Next, Jeff: Should I raise $9M for a pro league or take a shortcut?

Jeff’s Ultimate Ninjas runs 15 ninja-style gyms and is eyeing to launch a professional league ahead of the sport becoming an Olympic sport in 2028. But then… an opportunity landed in his lap. We advised him to think bigger… without overcomplicating things.

Finally, Vince: Should I launch new products or double down on what’s selling?

Vince is 25 and bootstrapping Gotchies, a men’s certified organic cotton underwear brand – projecting $150K this year, with a 17% repurchase rate. Customers are asking for new styles, but cash is tight. We laid out three criteria for knowing when it’s actually time to expand… and why Vince is only hitting one of them.

David leaves us with this: A lot of people say they want to be entrepreneurs, but they’re not willing to be completely immersed. Pair obsession with flawless execution on what you can control, and it will be very difficult for anyone to defeat you.

If you would like to be featured on an upcoming episode, call and leave a 1-minute message at 1-800-433-1298 or send a voice memo to hibt@id.wondery.com

Wow in the World!

Mindy Learns Bonobo Language!

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What happens when Mindy downloads a language learning app to chat with her pen pal in Congo... and discovers her friend is actually a BONOBO APE?!

We travel to the African rainforest to test out Mindy's new Bonobo language skills. But here's the mind-blowing part… scientists at the University of Zurich discovered that bonobos actually use something called "compositionality," where they combine different calls to create totally new meanings.

Will Mindy's four Bonobo phrases be enough to have a real conversation? Tune in to discover how apes are developing their very own languages!

From the HIBT Archives!

JetBlue Airways: David Neeleman

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David Neeleman had already proven he could build an airline: his regional carrier out of Salt Lake City had been acquired by Southwest in the mid-90s.

But despite his admiration for Southwest’s no-frills model, David saw an opportunity for something different: a budget airline that didn’t feel budget.

JetBlue launched in 2000 with a bold promise: low fares with high-tech perks like individual seat-back TVs and leather seats. David’s vision was working… the airline flew over 1 million passengers in its first year and cultivated the kind of customer loyalty that budget carriers rarely achieved.

Then came February 14, 2007. A Valentine’s Day ice storm stranded JetBlue passengers on tarmacs for up to 11 hours, an operational disaster that became a public relations nightmare.

And though this crisis ultimately cost him his CEO role, David had built something that outlasted his tenure… an airline that proved budget travel didn’t have to mean bad travel.

See you next time!

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It was a beautiful idea.

There was just one problem.

People loved the story.
They just didn’t buy the product.

Years later, that lesson would become the foundation for KIND. And ultimately, a $5 billion company.

Its an incredible episode. Please listen. In the meantime, here are five lessons I took away from my conversation with Daniel:

1. A mission is not a product

This is the hardest truth for purpose-driven founders.

Daniel believed that if the mission was powerful enough, customers would respond. And they did… emotionally.

But not commercially. He told me:

“If you’re too mission forward, consumers will give you one shot… but then they think they’re doing you a favor.”

People don’t buy products because they feel morally obligated. They buy them because they taste better, work better, or feel better.

The mission can amplify a great product. It can’t compensate for a mediocre one.

2. Focus is a force multiplier

One of Daniel’s biggest mistakes at PeaceWorks was trying to do too much.

Too many products. Too many geographies. And too many ideas.

“I was so enamored with the social mission,” he said “I was my own worst enemy.”

When KIND launched, he did the opposite. He focused. Ruthlessly. A handful of SKUs.
Clear guardrails. And no distractions.

And that discipline is what allowed the brand to scale.

Focus isn’t just about saying yes to the right thing. It’s about saying no to almost everything else.

3. Control your destiny—or someone else will

For years, Daniel built his business on top of other people’s products.

Then one day, it all disappeared.

A supplier changed the formula. Whole Foods dropped the product. And overnight, his revenue vanished. That moment changed everything.

From then on, he controlled the recipe, the manufacturing and the brand. That decision became the backbone of KIND.

Because when you don’t control your core product, you don’t really have a business.
You have a dependency.

4. Distribution is strategy

There’s a counterintuitive moment in KIND’s early days. Whole Foods didn’t know where to put the bars. They didn’t fit in the “nutrition bar” aisle. They didn’t fit anywhere.

So they put them… at the checkout counter.

But that “mistake” became a breakthrough.

Suddenly, KIND wasn’t competing with 50 other bars on a shelf. It was alone and SUPER visible. This was impulse-friendly real estate.

And it changed everything.

Where your product lives is just as important as what it is.

5. Don’t let scarcity thinking limit growth

For a decade, Daniel operated in survival mode.

Every dollar mattered. Every cost was scrutinized.

That discipline kept the company alive. But it also held it back.

At one point, their annual sampling budget was $800.

Later, they increased it to hundreds of thousands. Then millions.

And they discovered something powerful: when people tried the product, they loved it.

The constraint wasn’t demand. It was exposure.

There’s a difference between being scrappy and being small-minded.

The bigger idea

What I admire most about Daniel’s story is not the outcome.

It’s the evolution.

He didn’t abandon his mission. He just learned how to separate it from the product.

KIND didn’t replace PeaceWorks.
It made it possible.

And maybe that’s the real lesson.

Sometimes the thing you set out to build isn’t the thing that works. (see Chipotle episode for more on that idea!)

But if you’re paying attention, it might lead you to something even bigger.

And sometimes… that’s how you change the world.

P.S. If you loved the episode, follow the show in your podcast app so you never miss one. And please SHARE this newsletter so others can learn from some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs!

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On HIBT This Week!

KIND Bars: How a Peace Activist Built a $5B Snack Empire

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Daniel Lubetzky didn’t leave his law career to sell snack bars. He left to build peace in the Middle East.

His idea was bold: get Israeli and Arab businesses to make products together. He called it PeaceWorks. The press loved it and it had momentum.

But there was a problem… customers didn’t care as much as he thought they would.

For nearly a decade, PeaceWorks barely survived. Scratching and clawing for every single dollar. At one point, an unexpected partner helped explode the brand in the U.S. Until… more problems appeared and nearly sank the business.

Daniel was broke, exhausted, and grieving his father’s death. His team gathered and voted to give it one more shot, but this time they would take a radically different approach.

They called the brand KIND and it changed the entire trajectory of Daniel’s life.

So what exactly changed?

How did a founder who spent a decade struggling to sell anything end up building a $5 billion brand?

Along the way, hundreds of hard fought lessons and a reminder that entrepreneurship truly is a long road.

HIBT Advice Line: The Mental Game

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This week on the Advice Line, I’m joined by Eric Ryan, co-founder of Method, Olly, and a whole string of consumer brands. Eric made the leap from entrepreneur to investor—joining Greycroft to launch a $150M consumer fund. After years of getting “sacked” as a founder, he says playing coach from the sidelines feels really good.

First up, Christina: How do you sell a product to people who’ve been told the product is the enemy?

Christina’s Havyn Beauty is the first fine fragrance brand formulated without the 82 known fragrance allergens—inspired by her son’s severe eczema. She’s tracking toward $400K this year and just launched at Anthropologie. Eric’s advice: stop building a brand for just the sensitive-skin audience. Build something bigger.

Next, James: How do I break through in a saturated market?

James’s Pidgin Toes makes customizable kids’ flip flops, but he’s struggling with awareness on a limited budget. Eric and I zeroed in on the same idea: the customization isn’t a feature, it’s the entire business model. And it works best somewhere other than a website.

Finally, Ben: Should I raise money before someone copies me?

Ben’s Reserved for Humans makes the Spire Pendant: a crystal necklace with a built-in light that reveals hidden textures in natural stone. He did $92K in December alone and the audience turned out far broader than expected. Eric reframed the question entirely. The product isn’t the moat… something else is.

Eric leaves us with this: The hardest part of building a company isn’t the capital risk or the time risk, it’s the mental game. What separates the founders who break through is self-confidence and the ability to keep going when things get hard.

If you would like to be featured on an upcoming episode, call and leave a 1-minute message at 1-800-433-1298 or send a voice memo to hibt@id.wondery.com

Wow in the World!

Earth’s Ultimate Birthday Bash!

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Mindy is throwing an Earth Day party and literally brings the ENTIRE planet inside her gingerbread mansion!!

We’re talking a baby Grand Canyon in the entryway, a real beach made of actual sand, and even the SUN hanging over the kitchen counter! The whole WOW crew brings bonkerballs presents for Earth’s 4.5 billion birthday.

Along the way, we learn about amazing real science like direct air capture machines that work like giant vacuum cleaners for the sky, solar-powered roads that can melt snow, and even adding seaweed to cow food to reduce their methane burps by 40%!

But when it’s time to blow out 4.5 BILLION candles on Earth’s birthday cake… how in the WORLD do we do that?? Tune in to discover why this inside-out party teaches us that when we take care of Earth, Earth takes care of us!

From the HIBT Archives!

method: Adam Lowry & Eric Ryan

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In the late 1990s, the cleaning aisle was dominated by harsh chemicals in ugly bottles that consumers hid under their sinks.

Adam Lowry and Eric Ryan saw an opportunity everyone else had missed: what if cleaning products could be both environmentally friendly and aesthetically beautiful?

Adam, a chemical engineer, started experimenting in his San Francisco apartment with natural ingredients like baking soda and vinegar, creating formulas that actually worked. Meanwhile, Eric focused on design: sleek, colorful bottles that people would want to display on their kitchen counters instead of hiding away.

Their products looked more like boutique cosmetics than traditional cleaners.

The breakthrough came when they convinced Target to give them shelf space, a bold gamble that required them to scale production almost overnight.

But Method’s success wasn’t just about creating effective green cleaners… It was about reimagining an entire category. By making environmentally responsible products that were also beautiful and effective, Adam and Eric proved that sustainability didn’t require sacrifice.

See you next time!

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Just send a tweet to @guyraz or a message on IG to @guy.raz or LinkedIn and put #GuyRazNewsletter at the end so I can find it.

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What he was not building was a vacuum cleaner.

And yet, that’s exactly what changed everything.

The story of iRobot is not just about a product that worked. It’s about how a company stumbled its way into a category it didn’t even respect at first, and in the process, invented something entirely new.

Here are five lessons that stayed with me after this interview:

1. The market tells you what to build. You just might not want to hear it.

From the very beginning, people kept asking Colin the same thing: when are you going to build a robot that cleans my floor?

At first, it felt trivial. iRobot was working on machines that could save lives. A vacuum didn’t exactly feel like the mission.

But the question never went away.

That’s the point. Sometimes the clearest signal is the one you ignore because it feels too obvious. In this case, the breakthrough wasn’t some flash of genius. It was finally listening to something customers had been saying for years.

2. Breakthroughs are usually assembled, not invented

Roomba didn’t come from one big idea. It came from a bunch of smaller ones finally clicking into place.

iRobot had learned navigation from military robots. They’d learned low-cost manufacturing from toys. They’d worked on cleaning systems with commercial partners. None of that led to a hit product on its own.

But together, it did.

That’s how this often works. You pick up tools over time. You learn things in different contexts. Then one day, those pieces line up in a way that suddenly makes sense. Roomba wasn’t just a vacuum. It was the result of a company that, almost by accident, had become uniquely suited to build it.

3. If customers won’t pay for it, you’re not done yet

Early versions of the product dragged a cloth across the floor. It worked. But customers didn’t care.

They valued it at around forty or fifty bucks. The battery alone cost that much. It was a dead end.

Then came a simple shift. If it vacuums, people will pay hundreds.

That insight changed everything. It’s a good reminder that function isn’t enough. Value is what matters. You have to build something people believe is worth paying for. And sometimes that means going back and rethinking the whole product.

4. The product matters. But the story is what unlocks growth.

For a long time, iRobot didn’t really understand marketing. They were engineers. They focused on building.

What changed things was how they showed the product.

Colin would walk into meetings with Cheerios in his pocket. He’d crush them into the carpet, drop the Roomba, and let it clean everything up. Suddenly, people got it.

Then came the real unlock. A Pepsi ad with Dave Chappelle featured a Roomba. It wasn’t even their ad. But it showed the product in a way that clicked instantly.

Sales took off.

That moment says a lot. Even a great product needs context. People need to see it, understand it, and feel it. Once that happens, growth can look almost effortless.

5. Protecting trust is often more important than protecting margins

At one point, Roombas started failing earlier than expected. The company had a choice. Protect the numbers or protect the brand.

They chose the brand.

They replaced units for free. It cost a lot. But it built trust.

Colin said something that stuck with me. If you stand behind your product, you can create more loyalty than if nothing had gone wrong in the first place.

That’s hard to do in the moment. But it’s often what separates companies that last from the ones that don’t.

What I keep thinking about is how this story ends. Not with a clean win, but with a mix of success and frustration. iRobot helped define an entire category. It sold tens of millions of units. And still, it ran into the realities of global competition, supply chains, and regulation.

That’s part of the deal.

Even if you invent the future, you don’t get to own it forever.

Colin signs his emails with one word: onward.

That feels like the right way to think about all of this.

P.S. If you loved the episode, follow the show in your podcast app so you never miss one. And please SHARE this newsletter so others can learn from some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs!

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On HIBT This Week!

How iRobot Conquered America’s Floors

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Colin Angle spent two days as a kid designing a machine to carry a glass of milk from the living room to the kitchen.

And as it turns out…. that was only the beginning of his journey with robots.

At MIT, he found his way into a robotics lab, and when his professor asked if he wanted to start a company, Colin didn’t hesitate. iRobot was born in 1990.

For the next twelve years… almost nothing worked.

The company survived by taking whatever contracts came through the door: toy dolls, bomb-disposal robots, corporate research projects. Anything to keep the lights on and the engineers tinkering.

Then one idea changed everything: a robot vacuum.

It became the Roomba: a product so beloved it felt like a member of the family. Tens of millions sold. A genuine cultural icon.

But dominance didn’t last. And the way iRobot lost its grip on the category it invented is one of the most painful stories we’ve ever told on this show.

So what finally turned a decade of survival into a breakthrough? What nearly killed the company right after its biggest hit? And how did the technology he spent 35 years building end up slipping away?

Learn all this (and more) on the latest episode How I Built This!

HIBT Advice Line: Enjoy The Ride

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This week on the Advice Line, I’m joined by Chieh Huang, co-founder of Boxed. Chieh took Boxed public in 2021, then watched it hit bankruptcy by 2023. But if someone told him the whole story beforehand… he’d still sign up for the ride.

First up, Alec: When do I stop making everything by hand?

Alec’s Surfing Cow makes beef tallow skincare out of his home in San Diego. And it’s projecting $250K this year as a true solopreneur. Chieh drew directly from his experience fulfilling Boxed orders out of his mom’s garage. The advice was unanimous, but we had differing opinions on how to fund the next step.

Next, Jessica: Will a major retailer help my brand or hurt it?

Jessica’s Tail Cinch makes reusable tail ties for horses but has plateaued around $75K per year. Now she’s eyeing Chewy and other opportunities to expand the brand name. Chieh saw it as a low-cost awareness play… but we also spotted a much bigger opportunity hiding in plain sight.

Finally, Eli: Should I change my recipe to fit more machines?

Eli’s Makor Coffee blends organic coffee with anti-inflammatory spices, but the fine-ground ingredients overflow standard drip makers (a big problem for the office market!) Chieh reframed it sharply: do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy?

Chieh leaves us with this: The reward is the journey. He expects to still be starting companies at 75. You’re going to have ups, you’re going to have downs… enjoy the ride, because it will be worth it!

If you would like to be featured on an upcoming episode, call and leave a 1-minute message at 1-800-433-1298 or send a voice memo to hibt@id.wondery.com

Wow in the World!

Planet Wow Adventure Time!

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What happens when Mindy becomes the president of the Neighborhood Climate Crusaders and discovers that EVERYONE is accidentally harming the planet?! The whole gang realizes they’ve been making Earth’s invisible heat-trapping blanket way too thick!

But here’s the really cool part… our friends at Aspen Institute, Geocaching, and Nature Conservancy have teamed up to help Wowzers like you explore amazing places and learn how to take better care of our home planet.

Will the gang save Planet Earth from getting too toasty? Tune in to discover how working together can create a brighter future for everyone!

From the HIBT Archives!

Boxed: Chieh Huang

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Chieh Huang had already bet once on the power of smartphones. But when that venture didn’t pan out… most people would have moved on to something safer.

Instead, in 2013, Chieh doubled down on mobile with an even bolder idea: selling bulk groceries from his New Jersey garage, competing directly with Costco and Amazon.

The concept for Boxed seemed almost naive: a tiny startup taking on retail giants by delivering cases of toilet paper and laundry detergent straight to customers’ doors.

But Chieh saw something the big players missed: people wanted bulk shopping without the membership fees, crowds, and massive warehouse trips. His secret weapon wasn’t technology or capital… it was personal touch.

Starting with Chieh and his co-founders literally packing boxes in his garage, Boxed grew by focusing on what they could do better than the giants: fewer products, competitive prices, and customer service that felt personal.

See you next time!

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Just send a tweet to @guyraz or a message on IG to @guy.raz or LinkedIn and put #GuyRazNewsletter at the end so I can find it.

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They’re about the moment before the win. Or the mistake after it. Or the thing that looked like success from the outside, but felt a lot more complicated from the inside.

That’s what struck me in my conversation with Antonio Swad, the founder of Wingstop and Pizza Patrón.

Antonio built not one, but two restaurant concepts that broke through in categories where the odds were stacked against him. He came from a working-class family, never went to college, started out washing dishes, and eventually built businesses that generated real wealth, not just for himself, but for franchisees and employees too.

And yet the part of his story that stayed with me most wasn’t just the rise of Wingstop. It was what happened when he sold it.

Here are five lessons I took from our conversation.

1. Great businesses often start with a very narrow bet

Wingstop sounds obvious now. Of course people love chicken wings. Of course it became a giant.

But in 1994, a restaurant built almost entirely around wings sounded ridiculous.

Wings were not considered dinner. They were bar food. A side item. Something to eat while drinking a beer and watching a game. Not the basis for a standalone concept.

What Antonio saw was something most people missed: simplicity.

A focused menu. A product people craved. A format that was easy to replicate. A concept built for takeout before takeout became the dominant model.

This is something I hear again and again from founders who break through. They are not always inventing something new. Sometimes they are just seeing a familiar product more clearly than everyone else.

Oftentimes, the winning insight is not, “What can I add?”
It’s “What can I strip away?”

2. Respecting the customer is not branding. It’s strategy

Before Wingstop, Antonio built Pizza Patrón by serving Latino neighborhoods in Dallas with real intention.

He noticed that many customers were ordering through their children because the adults were more comfortable speaking Spanish. So he adapted. He hired bilingual staff. He built the brand around a customer other businesses were not really seeing. And he did it without a big ad budget.

That wasn’t performative. It wasn’t marketing language cooked up in a conference room. It was practical respect.

And customers felt it.

They told their neighbors and the business grew organically. Store by store.

There is a tendency in business to talk about “community” in very abstract terms. Antonio’s story is a good reminder that community isn’t abstract at all. It’s concrete. It lives in language, in pricing, in menu choices, in promotions, in whether a customer feels understood the second they walk through the door.

A lot of founders think brand means logo, color palette, and clever copy.
Often it really means: do your customers feel like you built this for them?

3. Franchising is powerful, but only if the system is truly repeatable

Antonio understood something early that many founders eventually discover: franchising can be one of the most powerful growth models in business.

Other people put up the capital and build the locations. You own the brand, the system, and the intellectual property. And that is a very attractive equation.

But it only works if the model is tight.

Wingstop worked because it was highly trainable. The product was simple. The operating system was repeatable. The differentiation lived in the sauces, the branding, and the consistency. It wasn’t dependent on a genius chef in the kitchen or some fragile in-store magic that couldn’t travel.

That matters.

Because people often confuse a successful local business with a scalable business. They are not the same thing.

A good business delights customers. A scalable business can be taught.

And that distinction is huge.

4. The wrong deal can turn triumph into trauma

This, to me, was the most painful and important part of Antonio’s story.

He sold Wingstop for what sounded like a life-changing amount of money. But the deal structure was a trap.

He got paid a portion up front, and the rest was supposed to come over time. Buried in the documents was language that tied payment to “available cash flow.” That phrase ended up changing everything.

The buyers used the company’s cash in ways that ensured there was never any “available” cash flow to pay him what he was owed.

And just like that, a founder who had built a wildly successful company found himself in a years-long legal fight to collect money he had already earned.

It is such a brutal reminder that the headline number in a deal is not the deal.

Not even close.

The terms are the deal.
The definitions are the deal.
The lawyer is the deal.

Founders spend years obsessing over product, hiring, margins, fundraising, and growth. Then some of them get to the finish line and treat the sale documents like a formality.

They are not a formality. They are the whole thing.

Antonio eventually got every penny. But it took seven years of litigation.

5. Success without alignment can still feel wrong

One of the most surprising parts of this interview was hearing Antonio explain why he sold Wingstop in the first place.

At the time, the business was taking off. It had momentum. It had franchise demand. It had scale. It was becoming exactly the kind of company he had dreamed of building.

And yet he felt increasingly uneasy.

Antonio had been a vegetarian for years, in part because of his discomfort with industrial meat production. Then one day, sitting in a Dallas Cowboys stadium, he looked around at 65,000 fans and imagined every seat filled by a chicken. That image stayed with him. Haunted him, really.

You can disagree with his conclusion. You can argue that he was creating jobs and wealth and opportunity. All true.

But what I found compelling was this: even in the middle of success, he was paying attention to the friction between what he was building and what he believed.

That kind of inner conflict is easy to ignore when everything is going well. In fact, success often gives us more reasons to ignore it.

But eventually, if what you’re building is at odds with who you are, the tension catches up with you.

Not every founder has the luxury of walking away. But every founder should at least be honest enough to ask the question:

Is this still the thing I want to spend my life amplifying?

This is not a soft question. It’s one of the hardest business questions there is.

Antonio’s story is, on one level, a classic American entrepreneurial story. A working-class kid with grit and instinct builds something enormous.

But it is also a story about focus, customers, leverage, contracts, hypocrisy, intuition, and the strange emotional cost of getting exactly what you wanted.

And maybe that’s why it stuck with me.

Because the older I get, the more I understand business stories are never just about business.

They’re about identity.
They’re about judgment.
They’re about what we miss when we’re hungry.
And what we finally see when we slow down long enough to ask what all this is actually for.

P.S. If you loved the episode, follow the show in your podcast app so you never miss one. And please SHARE this newsletter so others can learn from some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs!

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On HIBT This Week!

Wingstop: Building A $5 Billion Franchise

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Antonio Swad walked straight from his high school graduation to his shift at Ponderosa Steakhouse. No college plans. No money. Just a work ethic that wouldn’t quit.

Over the next decade, that hustle carried him from Columbus to Dallas, where he bounced between bartending gigs, got fired for being “too intense,” and eventually scraped together $11,500 to open a tiny pizza shop.

That shop became something unexpected. And it wasn’t the last time Antonio would spot an opportunity hiding in plain sight.

Because while the pizza business was growing, Antonio couldn’t stop thinking about chicken wings (of all things).

Not as a bar snack… but as the main event. In 1994, he opened the first Wingstop. And that same day, a friend told him he’d never make a living selling nothing but wings.

But by 2003, he had 150 locations and owned the whole thing outright.

Just as things were looking up… he sold the business (for reasons that might surprise you).

And the deal that was supposed to be his biggest payday became a seven-year nightmare, all because of a single phrase buried in the contract.

So how did a steakhouse kid from Ohio build two franchise empires from nothing? What made him walk away at the peak? And what was the one word that almost cost him everything?

Find out in the latest episode of How I Built This!

HIBT Advice Line: Stay Focused, Stay Different

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This week on the Advice Line, I’m joined by Steve Ells, founder of Chipotle, to give advice to three up-and-coming entrepreneurs.

First up, Rebecca: How do I stand out in a sea of competition?

Rebecca’s Streaky Bay Distillers makes small-batch spirits from one of the most remote corners of South. She’s doing about $400K and growing fast. Steve drew a direct parallel to Chipotle’s early days and reminder her that the answer is already within reach!

Next, Sri: How do I serve multiple markets without losing my mission?

Sri’s Mat Zero makes USB-C powered heated mats that warm the body directly—tested in some of the most extreme climates on earth. But the product fits quite a few (different) markets. Steve and I agreed on which market should come firs… and why that choice actually protects the mission rather than compromising it.

Finally, John: How do I reach younger drinkers when alcohol consumption is declining?

John’s Cantina di Rosina has a stunning origin story: his family produced wine until WWI destroyed the vineyards… and a 100+ years later he bought back the original land and replanted everything. He’s scaling to 15,000 cases this year. Steve compared it to what Chipotle had to do: not ride existing demand, but create new behavior one customer at a time.

Steve leaves us with this: He was so obsessed in Chipotle’s early days that he rarely took a day off. Looking back, he wonders whether a more balanced life might have actually allowed it to grow even bigger.

If you would like to be featured on an upcoming episode, call and leave a 1-minute message at 1-800-433-1298 or send a voice memo to hibt@id.wondery.com

Wow in the World!

Mindy Dreams of Moon Landing!

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Humans are going back to the moon for the first time in almost 50 years – and Mindy is SO excited that she's literally dreaming about it!

So the whole WOW crew take a wild journey through the endless dreamscape that is Mindy's mind to discover everything about NASA's incredible Artemis program.

Here's what's absolutely mind-blowing:

This time, NASA plans to land the FIRST WOMAN on the moon, plus they want to build a permanent base where astronauts can live and work! Inside Mindy's dream world, we explore the massive Space Launch System rocket and the super cool lunar gateway that will orbit around the moon like a space station.

Will Mindy's moon dreams come true when real astronauts blast off for this historic mission? Tune in to discover how NASA's Artemis program is turning science fiction into science FACT!

From the HIBT Archives!

Chipotle: Steve Ells

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In 1992, Steve Ells was working as a classically trained chef at a high-end San Francisco restaurant when a simple burrito changed everything. After eating at a local taqueria, he had an epiphany: he could apply his culinary training to fast-casual Mexican food and make enough money to open his own fine dining restaurant.

It was supposed to be a stepping stone, not a destination.

The first Chipotle opened in Denver in 1993, and Steve’s approach was revolutionary for its time. Instead of pre-made food sitting under heat lamps, he insisted on fresh ingredients prepared throughout the day.

What started as a way to fund his “real” restaurant dreams became the real thing itself. And Steve never ended up opening that gourmet restaurant because Chipotle became his masterpiece.

By treating fast food with the same respect as fine dining… he transformed an entire industry. Today, Chipotle’s “food with integrity” philosophy has influenced countless restaurants and proven that fast doesn’t have to mean bad.

See you next time!

What do you want more or less of?

Just send a tweet to @guyraz or a message on IG to @guy.raz or LinkedIn and put #GuyRazNewsletter at the end so I can find it.

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Selling diapers online in the early 2000s was one of those ideas.

Heavy product. Brutal margins. Expensive shipping. No supplier support.

In other words, a terrible business.

And yet, Marc Lore built Diapers.com into a company that Amazon ultimately had to buy for more than half a billion dollars.

I recently revisited my conversation with Marc, and what struck me wasn’t just the scale of what he built.

It was how many of his decisions seemed irrational in the moment… and obvious in hindsight.

Here are five lessons I took away.

1. Sometimes the worst business idea is actually the best wedge

If you walked into a venture capital firm in 2004 and pitched this idea:

“We’re going to sell a product online that everyone else loses money on… and we’ll lose even more money than they do.”

You’d get laughed out of the room.

But Marc wasn’t really building a diaper business.

He was building a customer acquisition machine.

Diapers were the hook. The Trojan horse. The thing every parent needed, constantly, urgently.

And once you had that customer?

You could sell them everything else.

That’s the lesson: the entry point doesn’t need to be profitable. It needs to be inevitable.

2. If customers love you, you can figure out the economics later

At one point, Marc described the business like this:

They were buying a dollar for a dollar… and selling it for 90 cents… while paying for shipping.

On paper, it’s madness.

In practice, it’s strategy.

Because what they were really tracking wasn’t margin.

It was love.

Were customers coming back?
Were they telling their friends?
Did they trust the experience?

Marc’s belief was simple: if you build something people genuinely love, the business model is a problem you can solve later.

Most founders do the opposite. They optimize for margin before they’ve earned loyalty.

And that’s usually where things break.

3. Constraints don’t kill businesses. They force better ones.

Procter & Gamble wouldn’t sell to them.

Kimberly-Clark wouldn’t sell to them.

So what did they do?

They went to Costco. Sam’s Club. BJ’s.

And bought diapers at full retail price.

Loaded them onto trucks. Built a business anyway.

That constraint forced them to get scrappy, to move faster, to prove demand before they had permission.

And eventually, they flipped the leverage.

Once they became a real distribution channel, the same companies that ignored them had to come to the table.

There’s a pattern here: the early disadvantages are often the thing that builds the muscle.

4. Efficiency is where the real money is made

Marc knew they would never make money on diapers.

So he asked a different question: Where is the hidden margin?

The answer was shipping.

Most boxes were half empty. Which meant they were paying for space they weren’t using.

So they built a system to optimize every shipment. Right box. Right size. Right combination of products.

And here’s the key insight:

Once the box is going out the door, the next item you add costs almost nothing to ship.

That’s where the margin lives.

Not in the hero product. In the incremental one.

It’s a subtle shift in thinking, but it’s everything.

5. Big exits don’t always feel like wins

When Amazon finally acquired Diapers.com, the outcome was, by any objective measure, a success.

Investors made money. The founders made money. The company survived.

And yet, Marc describes that moment as… depressing.

Because it wasn’t the outcome they wanted.

They didn’t sell because they were ready.

They sold because they were cornered.

That’s a part of entrepreneurship we don’t talk about enough.

Sometimes you “win” on paper… but lose the story you were trying to write.

And that tension between financial success and personal meaning?

It never really goes away.

Final thought

The Diapers.com story isn’t really about diapers.

It’s about seeing something everyone else dismisses… and understanding it more deeply than they do.

Marc saw that convenience could beat economics.
That loyalty could beat price.
And that a losing transaction could build a winning company.

Most people stop at the first layer of logic.

Great founders go one layer deeper.

And that’s usually where the opportunity is.

P.S. If you loved the episode, follow the show in your podcast app so you never miss one. And please SHARE this newsletter so others can learn from some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs!

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On HIBT This Week!

Diapers.com: How Marc Lore Sold Two Companies for Nearly $4 Billion

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Everyone told Marc Lore the idea was stupid.

Diapers are a loss leader.

Stores literally price them below cost just to get people through the door. Selling them online, with shipping on top, meant losing even more money on every single order.

Marc did it anyway.

He and his co-founder drove to wholesale clubs, bought pallets of diapers at full retail, and shipped them to customers at a loss.

First-year revenue: $11 million.

Profit: Zero.

But Marc saw something no one else did. And within a few years, Diapers.com was on track for $300 million in revenue.

That’s when Amazon noticed.

What followed felt less like competition and more like corporate warfare: slashed prices, aggressive tactics, and an acquisition offer that came with an implicit threat. Marc sold for $550 million. The day the deal closed, he was depressed.

But Marc Lore doesn’t stay down.

Within a few years, he raised $750 million, launched a new company, and told investors to expect $3 billion in losses before it turned a profit.

So how did a guy who lost to Amazon come back and sell his next company for $3.3 billion? What was the insight that made a “stupid” idea work? And what happens when you finally find your sixth gear?

HIBT Advice Line: Put the Phone Down

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This week on the Advice Line, I’m joined by Angie and Dan Bastian, co-founders of Angie’s BOOMCHICKAPOP. They went from popping kettle corn at Vikings games to building a snack empir…and they’re candid about the cost. It’s an honest reminder that building a business is hard, and the human cost is real.

First up, Michelle: Should I take outside money after 15 years of bootstrapping?

Michelle’s Nana Joe’s Granola is a certified organic, paleo-friendly brand doing $2.2M in revenue. She needs money to scale but is fiercely protective of her values. Dan and Angie reminder her about what matters the most: run the company your way.

Next, Gloria: How do you create word-of-mouth in a category defined by stigma?

Gloria’s Elidah makes an FDA-cleared wearable for pelvic floor strengthening, but women won’t publicly recommend a product tied to incontinence. We reframed the positioning entirely:

Finally, Eric: How do I compete against giants without losing what makes us special?

Eric’s Maple Roo makes maple syrup-based sports nutrition. He’s fielding international interest in his first year, but Dan drew a parallel to their early days and urged a different approach.

Angie and Dan leave us with this: Even in survival mode, it’s worth putting the phone down and having dinner with your family. It's going to be okay… even in survival mode.

If you would like to be featured on an upcoming episode, call and leave a 1-minute message at 1-800-433-1298 or send a voice memo to hibt@id.wondery.com

Wow in the World!

F1 Racing Science Fair!

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What happens when Mindy shows up to the 25th-Annual DIY Homemade Go-Kart Derby with a cutting-edge Formula 1 race car?!

We discover that Formula 1 racing is basically "one giant science fair" where teams of scientists work together to design the FASTEST cars possible!

But here's the bonkerballs part… instead of driving her high-tech race car to the track, Mindy insists on preserving the precious engine by having the sleigh cats PULL it there!

From aerodynamics that help cars slice through air like butter to engines that can reach speeds of over 200 miles per hour, we learn how real F1 engineers use physics, chemistry, and math to create these speed demons.

Tune in to find out how Formula 1 technology turns racing into the ultimate STEM adventure!

From the HIBT Archives!

Angie’s BOOMCHICKAPOP: Angie & Dan Bastian

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When Dan Bastian saw an internet ad claiming you could make big money selling kettle corn, he wasn’t dreaming of building a snack food empire… he just wanted to save for his kids’ college tuition.

In 2001, he and his wife Angie invested $10,000 in popping equipment and set up shop in front of Twin Cities supermarkets, learning the business one batch at a time.

Their early setup was charmingly low-tech: a kettle, a tent, and whatever weather Minnesota threw at them. But customers kept coming back for Angie’s recipe, and soon they were popping corn at Minnesota Vikings games and local festivals.

The folksy “Angie’s Kettle Corn” eventually became the bold “BOOMCHICKAPOP,” a rebrand that captured the fun, explosive crunch of their product.

And when General Mills acquired the company for a reported $250 million in 2017, Angie and Dan had turned a college savings plan into one of the fastest-growing snack brands in America.

See you next time!

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Not a brand. Not a premium product with a point of view. You bought a dozen based on size, price, maybe shell color, and moved on.

Which is what makes the story of Vital Farms so interesting.

Matt O’Hayer didn’t just build a company that sells eggs. He helped reframe how millions of Americans think about a basic grocery staple.

He took something that had long been treated like a commodity and turned it into a values-driven brand. Humane treatment of animals. Better product quality. Stronger partnerships with farmers. A business built around the idea that profit and purpose did not have to be at war with each other.

What makes Matt’s story especially compelling is that Vital Farms was not his first act. Or his second. Or even his third.

Before he got into eggs, he had started and sold a carpet-cleaning business, built a barter-exchange company, launched a travel business, went public, lost much of it after 9/11, became a charter boat captain, and only then stumbled into the idea that would define the later part of his life.

There is something reassuring about that.

We tend to tell entrepreneurial stories in reverse, as if success was always inevitable. In reality, most founders are improvising their way through years of false starts, wrong turns, bruised egos, and expensive education.

Talking to Matt, I kept coming back to five lessons that feel useful far beyond the food business.

1. Commodities become brands when someone gives people a reason to care

A dozen eggs used to be just a dozen eggs. Matt saw that differently.

He understood that consumers were not only buying the product itself. They were buying a story, a standard, and a set of values. He believed eggs could taste better, look better, and come from a system that treated animals more humanely. He also believed that if he could communicate that clearly enough, people would pay attention.

This is one of the hardest things to do in business.

It’s relatively easy to invent a new gadget or a new app. It’s much harder to take something familiar, even boring, and make people see it with fresh eyes.

The founders who do this best aren’t just selling function. They’re changing perception. They’re helping customers understand why something they once ignored is actually worth noticing.

Matt didn’t invent eggs. He just saw meaning where others saw a shelf-stable commodity.

2. Every “overnight success” is usually built on a pile of previous failures

One of the most striking parts of Matt’s story is how much life he had already lived before Vital Farms ever existed.

He started businesses young. Some worked. Some did not. He made money, lost money, tried to take companies public, struggled with cash flow, learned painful lessons about leadership, and after 9/11 watched the value of a business he had spent years building collapse almost overnight.

That kind of experience can harden someone. Or humble them. In Matt’s case, it seems to have done both.

By the time he started Vital Farms, he wasn’t a bright-eyed twenty-something founder intoxicated by his own genius. He was older, more weathered, and far more aware of what he did not know.

He had enough scar tissue to recognize that building something durable is rarely about brilliance alone. It’s about endurance, pattern recognition, and the willingness to begin again after things fall apart.

I think this is important because we celebrate first-time prodigies and underrate the builders who need decades to arrive at the right idea at the right moment with the right mindset.

Sometimes the business that works is only possible because of all the businesses that didn’t.

3. Self-awareness may be a founder’s most underrated skill

Matt said something in our conversation that I wish more founders would admit.

He realized, eventually, that he was good at growing companies but not especially good at the blocking and tackling of operating them day to day.

That is a profound insight, and one that many entrepreneurs resist for far too long.

A lot of founders confuse control with competence. They assume that because they created the thing, they must also be the best person to run every part of it.

But building a business requires very different skills at different stages. The person who can spot an opportunity, sell a vision, and will a company into existence is not always the same person who can build systems, manage complexity, and scale operations well.

Matt learned that the hard way. He talked openly about lacking humility earlier in his career and about believing he was the smartest person in the room. Later, he came to understand that real leadership often means hiring people who are better than you at crucial parts of the job.

That shift in perspective may have mattered as much as the product itself.

The best founders are not the ones who can do everything. They’re the ones who know when not to.

4. A great business model does more than serve customers. It aligns incentives for everyone involved

One of the smartest things Matt did was realize early that he could not scale Vital Farms by running one farm in Texas. If the business was gonna grow, he needed a system.

What he built was essentially an upside-down franchise model. Independent farmers followed Vital Farms’ standards, and the company bought their eggs, packaged them under one brand, and sold them into retail. That structure allowed the business to scale without owning every farm itself.

But what made the model powerful wasn’t just efficiency. It was trust.

Matt understood that farmers often get squeezed. Contracts are broken. Terms change. The little guy loses in the final scene. So he wanted to build something different. He wanted farmers to be treated as stakeholders, not expendable vendors.

That matters. Businesses become far more resilient when the people who make them work actually believe the relationship is fair.

When you study enduring companies, you often find the same pattern: they are not simply extracting value from a supply chain. They are creating a system in which multiple participants can win. Customers get a better product. Partners get predictability. Employees get meaning. The business gets loyalty.

5. Humility is not just admirable. It is useful

By the end of our conversation, Matt said something that stuck with me. If you had asked him twenty years ago how much of his success came from luck, he would have said: all me.

Today, he sees it very differently.

He now says that everything he has earned is the result of luck, timing, other people, and the circumstances that made his path possible.

That perspective helps explain why he was able to keep building. Humility isn’t only a moral virtue. It’s a practical advantage. It keeps you teachable. It makes you more open to talent, feedback, partnership, and reinvention. It stops you from mistaking a good break for permanent genius.

And perhaps most of all, it helps you survive success without becoming insufferable.

There is a version of Matt’s story where he makes some money in an earlier business, congratulates himself, and never grows. Instead, life kept sanding him down. And by the time he built Vital Farms, he was building with a different set of priorities.

That may be the deepest lesson in the whole story.

A lot of entrepreneurs want freedom, money, or the exit. Matt once did too. But what he eventually found was something more durable: a sense of purpose, and a way of building that made the work itself more meaningful.

That’s not just a better way to build a business.

It’s probably a better way to build a life.

P.S. If you loved the episode, follow the show in your podcast app so you never miss one. And please SHARE this newsletter so others can learn from some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs!

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On HIBT This Week!

Vital Farms: How A Few Hens Built a Billion-Dollar Egg Brand

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For most of American history, eggs were invisible. You grabbed a dozen at the store based on size, maybe color, and moved on. Nobody built a brand around them. Nobody told a story.

Matt O’Hayer thought that was exactly the opportunity.

But Matt didn’t start with eggs. Not even close.

Over three decades, he built and lost businesses in industries that have almost nothing in common:: carpet cleaning, barter exchanges, travel. One of them made him millions. Another was wiped out overnight on September 11th.

What he did next surprised everyone: he bought a sailboat and spent four years as a charter boat captain in the Caribbean. But while it looked like a retreat, it turned out to be the thing that made everything after it possible.

Because when Matt finally came back to business, he was a completely different founder. He bought 27 acres of scrubland, started with 20 hens, and loaded eggs into his Subaru to sell door to door.

Nobody thought it would work… until it did.

So how did a serial entrepreneur in his 50s turn one of the most overlooked products in the grocery store into a billion-dollar brand? And what did four years of fixing toilets on a sailboat teach him about building a company?

Find out on the latest episode of How I Built This!

HIBT Advice Line: Make Small Bets

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This week on the Advice Line, I’m joined by Marcia Kilgore, the serial entrepreneur behind Bliss, Soap & Glory, FitFlop, and most recently Beauty Pie. Her frame for founders in 2025: competition is fierce, digital visibility is hard-won, and the antidote is testing small before betting big.

First up, Victor: Should I focus on my shops or wholesale… or both?

Victor’s Sol Dias brings the flavors of Mixtlán, Jalisco to Dallas-Fort Worth through ice cream, paletas, churros, and spicy gummies. But, he’s worried he’s spreading too thin across channels. Marcia says keep both, but the real unlock might not be the ice cream.

Next, Lydia: How do I stop holding myself back?

Lydia’s Clērstory makes small-batch botanical skincare that customers love, but she’s been paralyzed by a fear of putting herself out there. Marcia didn’t sugarcoat it. She also spotted a practical problem with the brand that Lydia hadn’t considered.

Finally, Jack: How do I keep customers from dropping off mid-purchase?

Jack’s Wompy Bikes makes custom bike frame bags, but his ordering process requires a physical postcard that kills momentum. Marcia diagnosed two separate problems… and borrowed a behavioral science trick to solve one of them.

Marcia leaves us with this: Today’s founders have a gift her generation didn’t: the ability to test ideas and get immediate feedback.

Take small risks, learn quickly, and don’t bet the farm before you know what’s working!

If you would like to be featured on an upcoming episode, call and leave a 1-minute message at 1-800-433-1298 or send a voice memo to hibt@id.wondery.com

Wow in the World!

Cats Sniff Out Their Humans!

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Get your whiskers ready for the wildest game show EVER! The Purrr-fect Match, where cats have to sniff out their humans based on smell alone!

We dive into some incredible research from Tokyo University of Agriculture that shows cats actually CAN recognize their owners by scent (even though they sometimes choose to completely ignore us!).

The real science behind this furry game show reveals that cats have super-powered noses and can detect their humans’ unique smell signatures from across the room. Sometimes the cats get it right, sometimes they get it totally wrong, but either way it’s bonkerballs hilarious!

Will these feline contestants choose their real humans or just wander off to take a nap? Tune in to discover why your cat’s nose knows more about you than you think!

From the HIBT Archives!

Serial Entrepreneur: Marcia Kilgore

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When Marcia Kilgore arrived in New York City after high school with just $300 and no plan, she had one asset most people overlooked: she knew how to figure things out.

Her first move was leveraging her high school bodybuilding experience to become a personal trainer. But Marcia noticed her clients were just as concerned about their skin as their fitness, so she taught herself to give facials.

That curiosity led to Bliss, the spa and skincare line that redefined the beauty industry in the late 90s.

Marcia’s irreverent approach (bright packaging & cheeky product names) made skincare feel fun instead of clinical. Bliss became so popular it was booked months in advance, with a waiting list full of celebrities and beauty editors.

But selling her shares in Bliss was just the beginning.

Marcia went on to launch four more successful companies: Soap & Glory, FitFlop, Soaper Duper, and Beauty Pie.

Marcia’s story proves that the best entrepreneurs aren’t just idea generators… They’re problem-spotters who can’t help but build solutions.

See you next time!

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They show up half-disguised. Misunderstood. A little awkward. Sometimes aimed at the wrong customer, sold in the wrong channel, or wrapped in the wrong story.

That’s what makes Aaron Krause’s journey with Scrub Daddy so fascinating.

Before Scrub Daddy became a staple in kitchens across America, it was a failed hand scrubber for mechanics. Before that, Aaron was running a car detailing business outside Philadelphia, trying to invent better buffing pads for auto shops. He wasn’t trying to revolutionize the sponge aisle. He was just solving problems he kept running into himself.

And that is usually where the best businesses begin.

What struck me most in my conversation with Aaron wasn’t just his inventiveness. It was his ability to keep revisiting the thing that didn’t work, until he understood why it didn’t work.

Here are five lessons I took away from our conversation.

1. Sometimes the product is right, but the market is wrong

Aaron originally created what would become Scrub Daddy as a tool for cleaning greasy hands in auto shops. He spent a year trying to sell it. Nobody wanted it.

At $4.50 a unit, mechanics saw it as an unnecessary luxury. They already had cheaper, familiar options. So Aaron boxed it up, labeled it scrap, and shoved it in the back of the factory.

That could have been the end of the story.

But years later, when he used the same material to clean outdoor furniture and then dishes, he realized the problem was never the product. The problem was the context. He had been selling a kitchen solution to the wrong customer.

This happens all the time in business. Founders assume a weak market response means the idea itself is flawed. Sometimes it does. But sometimes the product is fine and the positioning is off. Or the customer is wrong. Or the use case hasn’t clicked yet.

A lot of failed products aren’t failures at all. They’re just introductions that happened too early or in the wrong room.

2. Great founders notice what everyone else ignores

The breakthrough moment for Aaron didn’t happen in a lab or a strategy meeting. It happened while cleaning lawn furniture and doing dishes.

He noticed that the sponge changed texture depending on water temperature. Warm water made it soft. Cold water made it firm. Then he noticed the round shape worked better than a rectangular sponge on plates, pans, and mugs. Then he cut a smile into it and realized the mouth could clean both sides of utensils at once.

That sequence matters.

Innovation often looks dramatic in hindsight, but in real time it’s just attention. It’s a founder being curious enough to ask, why is this behaving this way? What else could it do? What am I actually looking at?

The best entrepreneurs are unusually good at seeing around corners because they are willing to stare longer at ordinary things.

Most people use a sponge. Aaron studied one.

3. If customers need a demo, your job isn’t over

One of the most revealing parts of Aaron’s story came when he finally got Scrub Daddy onto the shelf at a local ShopRite.

He was convinced it would sell itself. Bright yellow. Smiley face. Neon packaging. Impossible to miss.

And then nobody bought it.

Not one person.

Shoppers walked straight past it, grabbed the sponge they had always used, and moved on. That moment is such an important reminder for anyone building a consumer brand. Visibility is not the same as understanding. Just because people see your product does not mean they get it.

But once Aaron started demonstrating it in person, everything changed. People watched. They understood. They bought. In fact, he sold around 100 a day through demos in stores that normally sold only a handful of sponges.

That is the difference between invention and adoption.

If your product requires education, then education is part of the product. You are not done when the item is manufactured. You are done when the customer understands why it belongs in their life.

4. Distribution can matter as much as invention

Aaron had created something distinctive. He had patents. He had packaging. He had conviction. But none of that mattered if he could not get in front of enough people.

Retail buyers ignored him. Big stores would not call him back. His website did almost nothing. Even early success in local stores was not scalable because it depended on Aaron being physically present to demo the product.

Then three things changed everything: a newspaper profile, QVC, and Shark Tank.

The Philadelphia Inquirer story got the phone ringing. QVC gave him a national stage. Shark Tank blew the doors open.

Founders love to talk about product. Investors love to talk about market size. But distribution is usually where the real story lives. It is one thing to build a better mousetrap. It is another thing to put that mousetrap in front of millions of people at exactly the right moment, with exactly the right explanation.

Aaron did not just build a better sponge. He found the channels that allowed consumers to understand it instantly.

That is why distribution is not a support function. It is strategy.

5. Conviction is often lonely, and expensive

One of the hardest parts of Aaron’s story is that the people closest to him often did not believe in the same thing he believed in.

His parents were skeptical when he chose entrepreneurship over a more conventional path. His early hand-scrubber idea failed. His retail launch flopped. Mark Cuban passed. Even Aaron’s longtime business partner did not want to reinvest in turning Scrub Daddy into a consumer brand.

That disagreement ended their partnership.

There is a tendency to romanticize founder conviction, but in real life it can be isolating. It can cost relationships. It can force uncomfortable choices. It can make you look reckless right up until the moment you look visionary.

Aaron kept going because he believed he was not selling a novelty. He believed he was building a brand in a category where brand had barely existed.

That takes more than optimism. It takes stamina.

By the time the world sees an overnight success, the founder has usually spent years being the only person in the room who can already see it.

The bigger takeaway

What I love about this story is that it’s not really about a sponge.

It’s about iteration. It is about pattern recognition. It is about understanding that business success is rarely a straight line from idea to scale. More often, it is a zigzag through misfires, bad timing, wrong customers, rejected pitches, and second chances.

Aaron Krause didn’t win because he had one flash of genius. He won because he kept refining the insight until the market could finally see what he saw.

That’s a much more useful lesson for founders.

You don’t need a perfect idea at the beginning. You need the willingness to keep paying attention until the real opportunity reveals itself.

And sometimes that opportunity is sitting in a dusty box in the back of the factory, waiting for you to look at it differently.

P.S. If you loved the episode, follow the show in your podcast app so you never miss one. And please SHARE this newsletter so others can learn from some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs!

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On HIBT This Week!

Scrub Daddy: The $100 Million Sponge That Sat in a Box for Years

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Aaron Krause wasn’t thinking about kitchen sponges. He was a car detailer from suburban Philadelphia, the kind of kid who turned neighborhood car washes into a real business.

That hustle led to a professional detailing shop, then a manufacturing company that made foam buffing pads. Business was good.

Then one day, trying to clean the grease off his hands at the factory, Aaron grabbed some extra-rough foam and shaped it into a scrubber.

It worked beautifully. So he tried to sell it. But…

Nobody wanted it.

So he did what any of us would do: he boxed the sponges up and shoved them in the back of the factory.

They sat there for years.

Then one afternoon, cleaning patio furniture, Aaron grabbed a few of those forgotten sponges. In hot water, the foam went soft. In cold air, it hardened. That night doing dishes, he cut a smiley face into one with a steak knife.

And suddenly… Scrub Daddy was born.

But getting it into people’s hands was its own battle. Retailers wouldn’t return his calls. His sales pitches were rough. And the entire business nearly went under… more than once!

So how did a car detailer’s forgotten hand scrubber become one of the most successful products in Shark Tank history? What was the moment that turned a box of junk into a household name? And how did Aaron force one of the biggest companies in the world to triple their offer during acquisition talks?

This is an episode I can’t wait for you to listen to! Enjoy!

HIBT Advice Line: Make Your Value Visible

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This week on the Advice Line, we’re doing something special. I’m joined by FOUR former guests – Miguel McKelvey of WeWork, Alexa Hirschfeld of Paperless Post, and Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali of Chomps – to help three founders tackle one of the most fundamental questions in business: what exactly is your value proposition?

First up, Meagan: Is my pop-up experience a distraction or a growth engine?

Meagan’s Shiki Wrap makes reusable, zero-waste gift wrap and bags inspired by Japanese furoshiki. She sells online, but the product is tactile and unfamiliar… people need to see it to get it. She’s been experimenting with in-person “gift wrap bar” pop-ups and wondering if they’re worth the effort. Miguel and I both said yes… this isn’t a distraction, it’s a customer education tool.

Next, Amanda: How do I explain a product people have to see to understand?

Amanda’s Woofsie is a deck of 52 dog enrichment activity cards. But online, people think it’s literally a card game for dogs. But once they see it in person, they get it immediately. Our advice: start leading with the outcome. Listen to what happy customers actually say the cards did for their dogs, then use that language.

Finally, Mark: What kind of help do I actually need?

Mark’s In Mark’s Kitchen makes premium pesto and has made about $80K in revenue across 50 stores. He’s doing everything himself and knows he needs someone, but isn’t sure what kind of person. We encouraged him to think deeply on this: the right hire depends on goals. Find someone deeply aligned with the values, not just experienced at scaling.

Whether you’re explaining a new product, teaching customers why it matters, or figuring out what kind of help you need… the first step is understanding what problem you’re truly solving and making that impossible to miss.

If you would like to be featured on an upcoming episode, call and leave a 1-minute message at 1-800-433-1298 or send a voice memo to hibt@id.wondery.com

Wow in the World!

Hair Fairy’s Tooth-Fixing Magic!

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What if I told you that Dennis's terrible helmet-shaped haircut could actually help fix your TEETH?!

When the crew discovers that Thomas Fingerling and Grandma G-Force believe in the mysterious "Hairy Fairy" who collects hair clippings from under your pillow, things get bonkerballs fast!

But here's where it gets really WOW… scientists discovered that keratin (the same protein in your hair and nails) can actually help repair damaged tooth enamel!

Since enamel is the hardest material in your entire body but can NEVER grow back once it wears away, researchers have been searching for ways to rebuild it.

Could hair clippings really become the secret ingredient in future toothpaste?

Tune in to find out how a bad haircut leads to jaw-dropping dental science!

From the HIBT Archives!

Kodiak Cakes: Joel Clark

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When Joel Clark was eight years old, he loaded bags of his mother’s whole grain pancake mix into a red wagon and went door-to-door in his Utah neighborhood.

What started as a kid’s entrepreneurial experiment became a decades-long obsession.

By the mid-90s, Joel and his older brother had upgraded from the wagon to a Mazda sedan, driving around Utah selling what they now called Kodiak Cakes.

The transition from local curiosity to national brand nearly killed the company. Joel made a series of risky decisions trying to scale quickly—overextending on production, taking on debt he couldn’t service, and chasing growth that wasn’t sustainable.

At one point, Kodiak Cakes was so close to bankruptcy that Joel was preparing to shut down the business his family had built over two decades.

The turnaround came when Joel finally landed a deal with Target, a breakthrough that took years of persistence and product reformulation. That placement became the foundation for everything that followed.

Today, with annual revenue approaching $200 million, Kodiak Cakes is one of America’s best-selling pancake mixes.

See you next time!

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Just send a tweet to @guyraz or a message on IG to @guy.raz or LinkedIn and put #GuyRazNewsletter at the end so I can find it.

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Beryl Stafford’s story started with heartbreak.

When Beryl’s marriage fell apart, she was around 40, raising two daughters and trying to figure out how to support herself after more than a decade largely out of the workforce. She didn’t have a business background. She didn’t understand food distribution. She didn’t know how to price a product or read a P&L.

What she did know was how to cook.

So she started baking oat bars. She wrapped them in plastic and nervously dropped them off at local coffee shops around Boulder. One shop sold out. Then another reordered. Eventually Whole Foods called.

Today Bobo’s does more than $100 million a year in sales.

What struck me about Beryl’s story wasn’t just the business she built. It was how she built it: awkwardly, instinctively, and without waiting to feel ready.

Here are five lessons that stayed with me.

1. Necessity can be the most powerful co-founder

We often romanticize entrepreneurship as a pursuit of passion.

But for many founders, it begins with survival.

Beryl wasn’t trying to launch a startup. She was trying to earn a living. She had reached a point where she felt the skills she’d developed as a mother didn’t translate neatly into the job market.

So she started with the one thing she knew she could do well.

Urgency strips away vanity. It forces action. And sometimes that pressure becomes the spark that gets a business off the ground.

2. You don’t need to know what you’re doing to begin

Beryl freely admits she had no idea what she was doing at the start.

She bought ingredients at Whole Foods retail prices because she didn’t yet understand supply chains. She made up prices on the spot when a barista asked what to charge. She put “organic” on the packaging before she knew certification rules.

In other words, she learned while doing.

That’s how most businesses are actually built. You start before you feel ready, and competence comes later.

As Beryl put it during our conversation: almost anyone can figure anything out. Not because they’re the smartest person in the room, but because desire, focus, and time eventually close the gap.

3. Reinvention requires a tolerance for embarrassment

One part of Beryl’s story really stayed with me.

In the early days she was embarrassed. She worried someone in Boulder might see her walking into coffee shops selling oat bars. She’d been a stay-at-home mom with a social life, and suddenly she was pitching snacks to baristas.

Some people even dismissed it as her “cookie business.”

Reinvention almost always includes a phase where what you’re doing looks small or strange to others. You’re a beginner again. And beginners rarely look impressive.

But that awkward phase is the toll you pay for starting over.

4. Community can turn a hobby into a company

Bobo’s may feel like a solo founder story, but ecosystem mattered.

Beryl was building in Boulder, a place with a dense network of natural foods entrepreneurs. She joined Naturally Boulder, asked questions, and leaned on people who had done it before.

At one point she even shared a kitchen, employees, and expenses with Justin Gold from Justin’s Nut Butter.

Great founders are rarely building in isolation. They plug into communities that shorten the learning curve.

5. Trends fade. Identity compounds.

As the snack bar market exploded, there were constant pressures to chase trends. Protein. Keto. Superfoods. Functional ingredients.

Beryl resisted most of it.

She kept coming back to what made Bobo’s different: the bars looked homemade. Slightly imperfect. Bigger than most. More like something your grandmother might bake than something engineered in a lab.

That consistency turned out to be the brand’s moat.

Markets change. Trends come and go. But identity compounds.

Beryl’s story is about oat bars. But it’s also about reinvention.

It’s about discovering, sometimes later in life, that you are capable of figuring things out you never imagined you could.

Not because you’re the smartest person in the room.

But because you refuse to stop trying.

P.S. If you loved the episode, follow the show in your podcast app so you never miss one. And please SHARE this newsletter so others can learn from some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs!

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On HIBT This Week!

Bobo’s: How a Divorced Mom Built a $100 Million Brand

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At 40, Beryl Stafford’s life nearly fell apart.

Her marriage ended. She hadn’t worked in years. She had two daughters to raise and no idea what came next.

So… she baked.

One of her daughters found a simple four-ingredient oat bar recipe. They made it together. Friends loved it. People in Boulder’s natural foods scene told her she should try selling them.

But Beryl was terrified.

She had no sales experience, no food industry background, no business plan – nothing! But she walked into a local coffee shop, dropped off a few bars, and made up a price on the spot.

Somehow, someway, this was the birth of Bobo’s

From there, Beryl figured it out as she went.

She bought ingredients at Whole Foods because she didn’t know wholesale existed. She rented space in a shared commercial kitchen. She took out a second mortgage to buy a packing machine.

She said yes to nearly every opportunity… then figured out how to deliver on her promises.

That pattern is what built Bobo’s. And it’s also what nearly broke her.

So how did a first-time founder with no industry knowledge build one of the top-selling natural snack bars in the country?

This is a story I think you will really enjoy on the latest How I Built This!

HIBT Advice Line: Go From Zero to One

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This week on the Advice Line, I’m joined by Hernan Lopez, co-founder of Wondery. Hernan left a successful TV career to bet on podcasting, nearly ran out of money, and built Wondery into a powerhouse. He’s back to give some well-timed advice to up and coming entrepreneurs!

First up, Heather: How do I pivot to DTC?

Heather’s Heali Medical makes kinesiology tape and patches infused with ingredients like magnesium and menthol. She’s on track for about $10M in sales, but it’s almost entirely retail… should she pivot to DTC? We encouraged her to focus on the economics – don’t rush it!

Next, Nawal: Should I rebrand before I grow?

Nawal’s Studyus Monday designs modest school uniforms for Muslim students. She is growing fast,, but worries the actual name of the business creates friction for the immigrant families she serves. Hernan was direct: if you’re going to rebrand, now is the time. But… test every assumption!

Finally, Casey: How do I diversify revenue when my product is inherently cheap?

Casey’s Snake River Seed Cooperative is a worker- and farmer-owned seed company in Boise doing about $400K a year. But with tough competition, she’s struggling with her next move. We encouraged her to tell a better story – and use her community to help spread the word!

Hernan leaves us with this: He wishes he’d become an entrepreneur sooner. Going from zero to one is scary and uncertain, but once you know you want to create something and bring it into the world, it’s hard to imagine being fully satisfied with anything else!

If you would like to be featured on an upcoming episode, call and leave a 1-minute message at 1-800-433-1298 or send a voice memo to hibt@id.wondery.com

Wow in the World!

Microbes Munch Plastic Bags!

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What happens when biodegradable plastic bags meet the tiniest, hungriest creatures in the ocean?

Inside Mindy's giant seawater tank, we discover that ocean microbes are like tiny pac-men… they actually EAT biodegradable plastic bags and turn them into harmless byproducts!

Using the amazing Wow Machine, we witness these microscopic heroes chomping away at plastic pollution and helping save marine life one bite at a time!

Can tiny microbes really help solve the Great Pacific Garbage Patch problem?

Tune in to discover how nature's smallest creatures might just be our biggest environmental superheroes!

From the HIBT Archives!

Wondery: Hernan Lopez

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When Hernan Lopez arrived in the U.S. from Argentina in his late twenties, his English was so poor he could barely hold a conversation. But he had big ambitions and slowly worked his way up in television, eventually becoming CEO of Fox International Channels.

By 2016, though, he was ready for a new challenge… and a new audio format was just starting to go mainstream – podcasting!

Wondery seemed like a logical next step for someone with Hernan’s media experience, but investors didn’t see it that way.

Despite his television credentials and industry connections, he struggled to raise money for what many saw as a risky bet on an emerging medium. Early podcast networks were scrappy, one-person operations, not the kind of business that attracted serious investment.

Everything changed with Wondery’s first breakout true crime series that proved podcasts could be appointment listening. The show’s success opened doors to bigger productions, better talent, and serious funding.

Five years after launch, when Amazon acquired Wondery for a reported $300 million, Hernan had built one of the largest podcast networks in the world.

Five years after launch, when Amazon acquired Wondery for a reported $300 million, Hernan had transformed an immigrant’s ambition into one of the world’s largest podcast networks

See you next time!

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