Transcript

00:00 All right Casey what's your story I used to not look at my bank account because I didn't want to know how much was in there. That's the position that I was in. This is Casey a normal guy who had never started a business in his life. But one day that all changed we had emptied our savings account. We made the decision to move in with my mom and I quit the restaurant that moment changed my life forever. Then after a few months of work. The idea was ready so we get the inventory we get the website launch hit go and guess what happened nothing. Nobody came nobody bought but in his darkest moments Casey experienced a miracle. The next day we did 3 or 4 x tailes and I remember like dancing in my living room right. Like this is it. This is the moment but what goes up must come down. We didn't know what the heck we were doing. We had no money for marketing and I said well emailing people's free and from that moment everything changed. This is a story of how Casey holiday went from working a restaurant to selling over $100 million worth of silicone.

01:03 Wedding rings from his mom's living room welcome to starter story. Casy grew up like most normal kids. He wasn't building businesses. He was playing sports and chasing his dreams. One of those dreams was to move to LA and become an actor but those plans all changed when he met his eventual business partner Ted. He also managed a restaurant in Beverly Hills at the time and he said why don't you come work at the restaurant. So I then started working at this restaurant in Beverly Hills and Ted managed the place and I bartended and and waited tables. A few months later. Both Casey and Ted get married in one day while they're busing tables at the restaurant. They realize they're both experiencing the same problem. It's like hey man. You married you know awesome congratulations. Like are you wearing a ring and I was like yeah I'm wearing one. But it's been a pain. You know every time I go work out. I go play golf. I do whatever I take it off and I'm a super forgetful person I was excited to wear one but I was always losing it and it also didn't make sense. You don't wear a Rolex to the gym. You don't wear dress shoes to run. A triathlon like people have very specific accessories for very specific things that they're doing and both of us said well.Let's just see if anything else exists like this must be out there and I remember Ted going I'm just going to go buy one and him coming back and going it doesn't exist like it's not out there. I couldn't find anything so Ted and I are there and the light bulb goes off for me of like what what have. We did this despite having no business experience in trying to make it as actors. The boys were excited to start building their own thing some that had more potential than clocking in and out at the restaurant. They decide to give this business thing a shot. It was this really cool agreement between two dudes of I don't have a kid. I don't have as much life overhead. As you do. I have time and energy and effort but you have savings and can we just handshake deal that we're both going to put what we have into this with what our life can afford at this time yeah. Let's do that and so my goal was to replace a $2,000 a month income at the restaurant. We didn't call it finding product Market fit. We didn't call it bootstrapping in our minds.

03:03 It was a couple of broke dudes trying to figure out ways to get people to wear and buy our product and I think there's something really interesting where when you are starting anything you have an idea for a business. You don't really know what you don't know you know you don't know things. But you actually don't know what it is and the best way to learn what you don't know is to talk to people that know what you don't and so when I think about starter story why I fell in love with it. It is a library of inspiration. Practical advice stories that you can learn from and apply to your own situation so whether you're looking for a product that you want to be inspired to try and launch yourself or you just want to find about rat entrepreneurs that started where you are so you can see yourselves in them. I think starter story solves all of those problems so if you want to check out starter story and learn from people just a couple steps ahead of you head to the first link in the description but let's get back to the story. Casey and Ted are excited and they even come up with a name for their brand Kao I'm one of the co-founders of Kao so I'm the president of Kao currently but there's a small problem. They still have no idea where to even start and Ted had this idea of well.He was like I have a friend who has a manufacture in town. What if we crashed the meeting at this fancy hotel in La I was like sure man let's go. For it. We got nothing to lose so we sure enough we did. We showed up we had bought a couple of rings from I think the local Marshals as just an example of you know metal rings sat down with the manufacturer and said can you just make these out of silicone and he said yeah sure why not Ted had very little in the savings and I had even less we combined them and said let's just put everything we have toward. Buying this first batch of inventory.

04:37 I used to not look at my bank account because I didn't want to know how much was in there. I just wanted to trust the fact that my rent check wasn't going to bounce. That's the position that I was in and Ted Ted had a kid. At the time. He was a bit older than I was he was risking more than I was initially to get started but we had emptied our savings account. Casey is 3 months into his marriage and realizes he's dead broke. He's not sure if he'll even be able to make his own rent so my wife. And I we made the decision to move in with my mom to focus on being able to build the company I would still commute 5 days a week to work in the restaurant. I would take the 7:00 a.m. shift and my wife worked there too. She would have the 11:00 a.m. shift she would sleep in our little red Fiat in the back lot of the restaurant in the morning until her shift started bless her so our homes became our offices. Our dining room tables became where we developed our website and his garage became our inventory management location despite all the personal and finan cial troubles Casey and Ted were going through. There still was a light at the end of the tunnel.

05:36 These Rings were the ticket to their freedom and after months of working and waiting the first batch of inventory finally arrived. The Rings were sitting in the garage and and the boxes were stacked to the ceiling lined along Ted's Garage when I opened up one of these boxes so excited to see the first Kalo ring that had been manufactured to realize the product quality was awful. Each ring was unsellable so you had just emptied all of your savings. Accounts put all of this time energy effort into getting these Rings. The first batch of Rings shows up and they're unsellable but we need to make them sellable because we don't have any money left to buy more. Casey and Ted realized they just made the biggest Financial mistake of their lives. They just thrown tens of thousands of dollars down the toilet and emptied their bank accounts. Now they had two options shut down the company or find a way to fix the prod what happened is a ring would show up.It would be uneven edges it. It just was nobody wanted to wear that and I remember stumbling like going through my mom's bathroom and finding this tiny little pair of scissors that I didn't even know existed in the world turns out. It was a pair of eyebrow scissors and so I remember rushing out to my wife grabbing a tiny little ring and putting my fingers in these little scissors and just twisting this ring around while I just sort of trimmed the edges of it and sure enough there was a ring that was sellable. They found a solution and the goal was now clear hand trim 50,000 half in silicone rings with eyebrow scissors but the days ahead were anything but exciting my wife and I watched all six seasons of loss while laying in bed trimming Rings. It was completely immersed in our life and I remember I'd wake up in the middle of the night and grab a drink of water and I would step over piles of rings because we had no place to put them and they were just laid out and we would have ring shavings all over our house stuck to our cat on our tables in our cushions in our bed. Like you'd get out of bed in the morning and like you'd have like shave like stuck to your back cuz. You were just trimming rings in bed that was our life and then up. In La.

07:34 It was the same for Ted. The mission was finished and after getting a couple thousand Rings ready to go. It was time to conquer the next challenge finding customers. The thinking was the only thing that's stopping us from selling. A ton of these Rings is a website I remember toiling over whether or not we were going to buy a $99 theme. I remember stressing out so much about whether or not we could afford this $99 theme or if we should just go with the Baseline model that Shopify gives you out the box. So Ted and I had spent months we' finally built this thing. We've put the effort in we put the time in and the money and I remember just just hitting publish website is live. Ted and I are fired up texting each other and then about noon the next day it was like the text message tone changed from. We're launched to any visitors like is anybody. Coming to this thing have you told anyone bro have you hey bro have you told anyone turns out. People won't magically find the site you've built so with close to $0 in their pockets and over 50,000 rings sitting in their garage. Casey and Ted needed to figure out a way to put Kao out there without spending a penny on ads I thought who are people of influence. This is before influencers who are people of influence that I could send my product to that would maybe supercharge our growth or get more exposure for us and one of them was Andy Dalton and Andy.Dton was the quarterback of the Cincinnati Bengals at the time and I'd gone to TCU and I was good buddies with his wife. There. I thought well I'm I'm going to send Jordan his wife a Facebook message. Hey congratulations on getting married. We just started this company. I thought Andy might like one would he be interesting could I send it to you as a wedding gift. Sure enough a couple months later she responded said hey Andy would love to give one a shot and I remember like dancing in my living room right like this is it. This is the moment so I sent it to him and I got a thanks and that was about it. Nothing else really happened fast forward to a couple months. From then there's a show called hard knocks on HBO. The first episode aired 10 minutes of the episode was about Andy wearing a rubber wedding ring and they interviewed him in the interview. He was like oh I just think it's really cool.

09:34 I can wear it no matter what it is that I'm doing. I can wear it out on the field and it represents the commitment that I've made to my wife which is super important to me but also represents what I do for a living which is we could not have sent him a script that was a better way of articulating exactly what our positioning was as a company. The next day I think we did 3 or 4X sales. We would line up the envelopes and put the labels on of the customers and this was the first time that it went all the way to the end of the house and we had more orders. This was this moment for for us of this is real and watching orders laid out all over my mom's house with trash bags of rings that we were yet to cut with eybrow scissors littered everywhere. So it was very much this moment. In time where there was validation there wasn't uptick in sales. There was engagement and people were talking but 2 Days. Later everybody goes back to living their lives and it's what you do with that attention in between your next venture to try and get more attention or have another moment that ultimately matters the most so.This moment with Andy felt like affirmation which was really cool but it also was terrifying because you realize oh this thing could become something and now I actually have to build it. I started to wear Cayo ring several years ago. Kao wedding rings Kao Kao K ring K ring Casey realizes that Kao has outgrown being a side hustle at his mom's house. At this point he's got to make a decision if he's ready to go all in and quit his job at the restaurant. So that was I think the inflection point of now. We're going for this. So now we behave differently and I was coming to to Ted going hey. I think I should quit working in this restaurant and go full-time into Kao and he's like we can't afford for you to go full-time. He's right and I was like. But I think we need to like there's something here. I think I'm going to do it. I'm going to take a risk I'm going to go for it. He was like okay all right. Fine go for it and I quit the restaurant that moment changed my life forever. Now it was Make It or Break It Casey and Ted went all in and there was no going back from that point on it was a ruthless game of business. A big part of our early strategy at Kayla was the recognition that we were the first mover in the category and that if we didn't go fast somebody else with more money better brand recognition better operators were going to come in and crush.

11:37 Us. Over the next 6 to 8 months. We ended up with about 13 people in a 200t office when somebody would call our customer service line. Nobody in the office could talk cuz everybody could hear everyone in the background when they called and we moved to a new office. We were hiring on average about two to three people a month and I remember sitting in every interview building out systems trying to figure out how they're all going to talk to each other. How are we actually going to grow this thing and operate at this capacity that we need to how are we going to develop culture. All of these things that come along with scaling a company.Casey was figuring out how to build a real company and the results started to pay off. At that point we're doing 30 million. We had close to 100 employees operating at a 20% profit margin when you grow a company that size and you grow that fast you realize how big the stakes are pretty quickly. You begin to learn that mistakes are costlier at that stage but the success of it I'm incredibly grateful for and it was unexpected. It was never in our heads. We're going to be this big company. It was always focused on being better as a company not bigger and then it was who are customers and how do we know them better than anyone. In business building. You can't build it without incredible people and looking back on Kayla. That's what I appreciate the most for the people that I did it with and even though we didn't do everything perfectly. We had a lot of success as a result of the team that we built in growing it.You should be able to communicate to anyone as an entrepreneur. This is the problem that I'm solving start there then to determine what the product is to solve that problem and just like the Rings even if they're terrible Focus instead of making it perfect on getting it to customers and then talking to as many of those customers as you possibly can about how to make it better. We are so concerned with other people's perception of us and our product and what we're doing that it paralyzes us and so if you have this idea for a business and you want to start it and you're so concerned with is it going to be successful. What are people going to think of me is it going to be dumb. It's really freeing to realize that people actually aren't thinking about you at all. All you need to do is go find people out there that have problems cuz everybody's got problems and then help people through giving them your solution. You actually are being selfish by not solving the problem that you know people have what's up guys. I hope Casey's starter story inspired you what I love about Casey's story is he found a painful problem and created a solution that the market needed that's why he sold over a $100 million worth of silicone. Rings if you want to understand more about problems head to the l in the description to download our worksheet of $99 million problems worth solving and if you're really serious about building something come join thousands of Founders inside starter story. All right see you in the next one peace.