Solo Stove: Spencer and Jeff Jan

Over a nine-year period, Spencer and Jeff Jan grew Solo Stove from a DIY project into a 9-figure brand. Their original idea was modest: work a four-hour week and earn a passive income from a DTC camping stove, which was easy to use and as sleek as a spaceship. When they launched the business in 2010, the brothers lived thousands of miles away from each other: Spencer in Shanghai, where he located the manufacturer for the stove, and Jeff in Dallas, where he managed logistics out of his garage. Using all the tools at their disposal—Kickstarter, Amazon, and Starbucks for office meetings—the brothers grew the brand to where it attracted a 9-figure acquisition. Which actually happened twice—making them both wealthy enough to enjoy a 0-hour work week. This episode was produced by Carla Esteves, with music by Ramtin Arablouei. Edited by Neva Grant, with research help from Casey Herman. You can follow HIBT on Twitter https://twitter.com/HowIBuiltThis & Instagram https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis, and email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 0:46Guy Raz?

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• 1:32Guy Raz?

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• 2:16Guy Raz?

  on gas and EV charging, office supply stores, cellphone service, and restaurants. You pick up an extra $750 cash back as a bonus. And you've got a low APR on purchases and balance transfers for 12 months while you're scaling. Same business, same expenses, two completely different outcomes based on one small decision. Visit usbank.com/business to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc. Some restrictions apply. If you travel often, you'll want to hear about this unprecedented offer. For the first time ever,

• 3:00Guy Raz?

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• 3:45Guy Raz?

  or bring a guest to the Delta Sky Club. Make every trip feel more rewarding with the car that upgrades your travel. Apply today at delta.com/cardsocial. Offer ends November 4, 2026. Minimum spending requirements and terms apply. Flights are fulfilled as flight certificates valid for Delta Comfort or Delta Maine to select domestic destinations. Book 21-plus days in advance. Up to $80 per person and taxes and fees apply. Other restrictions apply. When I pull up to a gas pump to fill my car, I'm not thinking about chemistry or engineering. I'm thinking about getting in, filling up, and getting on with my day. And it reminds me a little bit of the founders I talked to on this show, because the best

• 4:27Guy Raz?

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• 5:13Speaker 01

  We started putting out job postings. And one of the first girls we interviewed, we told her to meet us at the Starbucks, because we didn't even have an office. And we didn't even order anything. That's how cheap we were. We just sat outside at the little metal tables and met this young girl who was interviewing for a customer service position. And we would promise that we will have an office if, when this position is filled. And that's how, that's how rough the start was.

• 5:50Guy Raz?

  Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 6:02Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Spencer and Jeff Jan saw the early appeal of e-commerce and the beauty of a smokeless fire and built Solo Stove from a lifestyle business into a nine-figure brand.

• 6:22Guy Raz?

  If you're the kind of person that grinds away at a job that you don't love all that much, and you're looking to earn more money and work less, well, this is not the episode for you, because you will learn how two brothers came up with a brilliant passive income idea, only to discover that the more successful they became, the more work they generated for themselves. Now, not to fast forward too much, but the idea they had ended up working out pretty well. And today, both brothers, Spencer and Jeff Jan, are only in their 40s and also pretty much retired. What they started was a brand called Solo Stove.

• 7:04Guy Raz?

  Initially, it was a camping stove that produced almost no smoke. Today, the company sells everything from smokeless fire pits to pizza ovens to patio heaters. The idea came from years of trial and error, and a desire to build a stress-free lifestyle business. Spencer and Jeff tapped into Amazon's direct selling platform back in 2010, when it became open to anyone. And they realized early on that you could source relatively inexpensive products from China, and then just resell them in the US on Amazon. By the time the brothers sold the majority of the company to investors in 2019, their stake was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 7:49Guy Raz?

  Spencer and his younger brother Jeff grew up in the 80s and 90s in Ontario, Canada. Both of their parents had emigrated from China. Although the brothers were close, they eventually wound up working on opposite ends of the world, Jeff in Dallas and Spencer in Shanghai, where he helped manage a firm that connected Chinese factories to buyers around the world.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  I mean, I guess it was about seven, almost seven years that I was in Shanghai, working for that sourcing company. Boy, I ran around north, south, east, west, just going to all sorts of factories, trade shows, and it just depended on what our clients wanted and what industries we were in. Oddly enough, we were in, heavily in the RV niche. So recreational vehicles and campers. We did a lot of parts and products for that market. Sofas, recliners, tables, faucets.

• 8:46Guy Raz?

  For RVs?

• 8:47Speaker 01

  For RVs, yeah. Elkhart, Indiana.

• 8:49Guy Raz?

  Elkhart is where, is that where where the bagos are made?

• 8:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. A lot of the, a lot of the RVs are made in that area, so.

• 8:57Guy Raz?

  And the component parts, obviously made all around the world. And so their factories specialize in just making the sofas and beds for RVs.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:05Guy Raz?

  And presumably their biggest market was the United States.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, for RVs for sure.

• 9:11Guy Raz?

  I guess, you know, you're, you're doing this job and you're, you know, it seems like it's doing pretty well. But I guess around 2008 with the financial crisis, it also affected your, the company you worked, you worked for, right?

• 9:24Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah, we, we held on by the skin of our teeth. We had to let go basically the entire office. So I had to, I had to go through that. That was a, that was a experience I won't forget. I was probably a year, a year or so into my job, in charge of 20 some odd people, local Chinese in my office in Shanghai. And then suddenly my boss tells me, well, you got to lay them all off, you know, have at it. And I was like, I don't, like, why do I have to do that? I was young, young in my career. And it was a horrible experience to have to do that. And I remember tearing up when I had to tell them that, you know, here's what we can pay you if you leave now. And if you decide to

• 10:07Speaker 01

  wait until we let you, like formally let you go, there might not be anything. And I hated, I hated how everybody rightfully so were upset at me. And, and I just hated that feeling of, of. Of looking at these people in the eye who I thought were my friends and peers, kind of all turn against me and feel like it was my fault and everybody was blaming me. And I just, I took a big pay cut and I'm really hunkered down with my, my boss at the time, and I remember telling him that I still believe in what we can do. It's just the market conditions are horrible.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  And let him know that I want to stick with them, but hopefully I'd get some equity in the future for kind of roughing it through. And that's kind of the direction I took.

• 10:57Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I guess in the meantime, you start to think about maybe doing some like side hustles. Like, tell me about how you, how that happened. I mean, obviously you're in China and everything's made there. And what, how did, how did you even start to think about maybe getting into that?

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the, that's the rabbit hole. That's always fun to look back on. You know, I was there going through the rough patch in, in the Great Recession. I was married and had a young kid and I got invited over to a friend's house.

• 11:32Guy Raz?

  In China?

• 11:32Speaker 01

  In Shanghai, yeah. And she invited me over for dinner and she had made these amazing like cinnamon sugar donuts. And I was just blown away because in Shanghai that was a real treat. And went home that night looking online how to make donuts like that. Ended up on a blog that was a really good donut recipe blog. And at the bottom of it, there was this video of this guy saying, learn how this, this blog helps me continue doing what I love doing. And he was a school teacher. And that led me down this rabbit hole of blogging and people making money by blogging. And I, I quickly dove into this program and showed it to Jeff and I was so excited. I was like, look, like people can actually, you can write something, write blogs.

• 12:16Guy Raz?

  It was like a blogging piece of software?

• 12:17Speaker 01

  That's right. It was a, it was like a program, a course that.

• 12:22Guy Raz?

  Okay, right, that you could take.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, that we could take and sign up for, and they would show you how to blog and what to do. And it's step by step, kind of going through the, the whole concept of blogging and making money off of AdSense and clicks and traffic and, and affiliate marketing. And it just blew my mind. And we quickly signed up to blog and Jeff was blogging and I was blogging.

• 12:44Guy Raz?

  What were you blogging about?

• 12:45Speaker 01

  I blogged, I had a, you can go back to the Wayback Machine and find it. It was called China Business Traveler. And had hyphens all between the words and I was like, well, I'll blog about traveling as a business person in China, what to expect with culture and travel and currency and culture and all of that and trying to make a few clicks off of AdSense and maybe some affiliate money off of travel websites and we did that for a year and Jeff, he did one on personal finance. He was working for a bank at the time, I think.

• 13:19Guy Raz?

  So you guys were, and you guys were both just getting into this. You're like, let's try this blogging thing and see.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Let's make some money.

• 13:26Guy Raz?

  Let's make some money.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  Let's supplement our income.

• 13:28Guy Raz?

  And, and what happened?

• 13:30Speaker 01

  And we didn't make any money. We didn't, I mean, I think I made $75 of which like 50 never got paid out from Commission Junction because it didn't meet the threshold of the payout. You had to have like a hundred dollars to get it paid out or whatever it was and it just didn't, it just didn't turn out financially for us, but I enjoyed it. I mean, I learned so much. And so I transitioned from that. I said, well, the blog's not working, but what if I sell something? And it just happened to be that there was this mattress program that we were trying to do at my day job that ended up not working out.

• 14:06Guy Raz?

  What do you mean a mattress program?

• 14:07Speaker 01

  So we called these projects programs. So a project for a US customer, a mattress company, a bedding company. He actually had retail stores in the, in the Pacific Northwest. And he, he wanted us to source mattresses out of China, memory foam mattresses. And so I went out to tons of memory foam mattress suppliers and figured out how the product was made, you know, and the costing of it. And through that, I had, I'd taken the liberty of, of taking some of the samples and putting them in my own apartment and using them. And I loved it. I was like, these memory foam beds are great. And I was just thinking, well,

• 14:48Speaker 01

  what if I started another website where instead of blogging, I just sold memory foam mattresses to expats living in China who all were looking for soft beds. As the Chinese locals, they actually enjoy hard beds. They think it's better for your back. And so this soft memory foam bed was a rare find in Shanghai. And so I started peddling these mattresses, set up a website.

• 15:14Guy Raz?

  What was it called?

• 15:14Speaker 01

  It was called Slumber Max with two A's. It was M A A X because M A X was taken.

• 15:20Guy Raz?

  And did you, by the way, did you just set it up and tell friends about it? Or did you start to buy like, you know, did you start to sort of, you know, pay per click ads and stuff? Yeah.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I set it up knowing that there were little communities online for Shanghai expats. So there's expat forums that all the expats would go to, and it was very active. I also did other creative marketing tactics that didn't cost a lot. I would go talk to all the, to the chiropractors within the city and all the ones that serviced the expats. I would talk to real estate companies who are dealing with the relocations of expats.

• 16:02Guy Raz?

  And this is all the while you were still working as an, sort of an agent between US companies and manufacturers in China?

• 16:09Speaker 01

  That's right, I had a day job. I was working all day long at my day job. And then at night, I would turn on Slumber Max, see what orders came in, deal with all the emails, customer service, and then actually physically myself, I would rent a taxi truck and I would, that would come to my apartment. I would dolly down as many mattresses as I needed to deliver that night, put them in the back of a truck, and I would make deliveries around Shanghai.

• 16:36Guy Raz?

  Where did you store all those mattresses? Just like against the wall?

• 16:40Speaker 01

  On the 25th floor of my high-rise apartment. I've moved the sofas to the side and stuffed the entire, I mean, we had a tiny, it was like 150 square meters.

• 16:49Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  Apartment in Shanghai. And so they were like 80 pounds each. And I attribute a lot of my back problems to having moved so many mattresses. The worst was when I would ask if there's an elevator or not. And sometimes some of those apartments they lived in didn't, and they were on like the fifth floor. And it was just hot and sweaty and moving those mattresses up. The strategy was to take off the cardboard box. And they were encased in this plastic casing. And the sweat of my arms, I could wrap around and it wouldn't let it slide because I was so sticky that I would just get it up and then start making my way up the stairs.

• 17:28Guy Raz?

  And so you were, you basically became the mattress guy for expats in Shanghai. And so at sort of its height, I mean, how much were you making?

• 17:39Speaker 01

  I think annually, I'd bring in a quarter million dollars or so.

• 17:43Guy Raz?

  It's a great business.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:45Guy Raz?

  And you're probably, your cost was quite low, right? I mean, what did you buy the mattress? Like, what would you buy a twin size mattress for?

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Well, I think more so, more so queens and kings is what I remember. Kings mostly. You'd buy for about 200 bucks and I'd sell them for about a thousand dollars US.

• 18:01Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  And so I was making-

• 18:03Guy Raz?

  That's great.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. The thought was not to sell tons at a very low cost. There's a very small market in Shanghai for expats. But they all have a lot of money and a lot of their relocation expenses are reimbursable by their companies. And so I knew that they, you know, would choose convenience and comfort over price as long as I provided them a good product.

• 18:24Guy Raz?

  And, I mean, was that sort of the plan? Like, I'll just keep doing this and make some money? Or was there a point where you thought, you know, I should, I should kind of lean into this a little bit more?

• 18:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I definitely felt leaning into e-commerce was the right move. And meanwhile, you know, Jeff, as we were both blogging at the same time. And, you know, he was learning about what I was doing with mattresses. And, and it was, you know, I kind of felt like, oh, I wish I could do this with Jeff, but it's such a niche market in Shanghai, I don't know what he's gonna do. But, you know, my, my feeling was he was on the sideline saying like, what about me? Let's do something together. Like, we can do e-commerce and let's figure something out. And I was like, yeah.

• 19:09Guy Raz?

  Okay, so Jeff, this is a good time to bring you into the conversation because

• 19:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:13Guy Raz?

  clearly you wanted to start partnering with Spencer at this point. Yeah, correct. And I guess, and I guess while Spencer was working in Shanghai, you were raising your family in Texas and Dallas, working at like a chemical company for your day job. And I guess you were looking at, at other Chinese products that you could help your brother sell in the US. And so did you have a specific idea in mind?

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this was another very niche product, which was something we learned from the early days of blogging. They said, you know, pick something that's a niche instead of finding something that's extremely broad. And so there's these products for seedlings in the UK called cloches, and they're basically these covers that you put over seedlings or plants to protect them from frost or just-

• 20:14Guy Raz?

  It's like a mesh cover, right? That goes over-

• 20:16Speaker 01

  It's like a plastic belt cover.

• 20:18Guy Raz?

  And it goes directly over the little seedling?

• 20:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's like a mini greenhouse. And so they're very inexpensive, and they didn't seem like there was much of a market in the US. They're pretty hard to buy.

• 20:37Guy Raz?

  Let me just, let me just understand how it works. So you, you, there was a manufacturer that you found in China, and obviously Spencer, you knew how to find these places-

• 20:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 20:47Guy Raz?

  Because this is what you were doing. And, and the idea was to just buy up a bunch of these, buy a lot of these cloches and then sell them on a website? Just like set up a website called, I don't know, cloches.com and hopefully people would come?

• 21:00Speaker 02

  The Garden Cloche.com.

• 21:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  So that was the website, which in hindsight is not the best name. It's very niche. But if you're looking for a cloche, we probably ranked quite high.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, we'd buy these things for 20 cents a piece and bundle them in maybe a pack of five and sell them for, you know, 15.99, 19.99, and, and just start selling. And we did. We sold. We sold cloches. We were, we cornered that market.

• 21:34Guy Raz?

  And this is sort of, I mean, this is, you know, at a time when sort of third-party logistics businesses are really starting to also to blow up. How did you guys manage it? I mean, Jeff is in Dallas, Spencer, you're in Shanghai. Who fulfills the orders?

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, Jeff is in Dallas and I would get all the product and get it shipped over to his house.

• 21:56Guy Raz?

  Okay. And you just had a garage full of cloches?

• 21:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. This was the beginning of many years of no garage. Of no garage. And it just being filled with all sorts of product and my wife wondering what's going on.

• 22:12Guy Raz?

  And so, how did the business do? How much money were you guys making with this business?

• 22:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, in my mind, I think it was under $100,000 each year. I want to say it's closer about $50,000, $50,000 a year.

• 22:27Guy Raz?

  So meantime, I mean, so you've got this website going, but Amazon is also a place, sort of an opportunity. And were you looking at Amazon as a place to also sell stuff?

• 22:40Speaker 01

  We did. And those were the early days of FBA, fulfillment by Amazon. I had started to explore it. And so, we signed up for Amazon and we would put stuff on Amazon. And we started to realize that Amazon is a huge opportunity and we definitely leaned into that.

• 23:01Guy Raz?

  So, once you realized that you could sell a lot of these, you know, you could sell things, right? You guys had your own business selling these cloches. It's such a weird thing. I'd never heard that word before, until today. So, thank you.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  We're probably not even pronouncing it right.

• 23:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah, right.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Because I think it's a French word for bell.

• 23:20Guy Raz?

  I should know this word.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  And I think there's like an accent on the end and we're probably saying it all wrong.

• 23:25Guy Raz?

  I should, given that my children and wife speak French, I should know this word. But so, what did you, I mean, you know, that business was doing okay, $50,000 in revenue or so a year. But I mean, did the two of you guys start thinking or start saying, well, what else? Let's try other stuff on Amazon and let's set up other websites?

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was it was really just what else can we sell?

• 23:51Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  If we could create a site that sold $100,000 and we repeat those little niche sites 10 times, well, that's a million dollars. And for me, who was making $40,000, $45,000 a year, that's a big deal. And Jeff was probably in a similar boat.

• 24:06Guy Raz?

  So tell me what, tell me about your brainstorming process to figure out what the next thing you would try to sell would be. What did you guys kind of next land on?

• 24:18Speaker 02

  I think about this time, I came across the Four Hour Work Week book. And that was eye opening. There is kind of a formula in there with the different types of products that work in an e-commerce type of business.

• 24:37Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  And there was a list in there and I don't remember everything, but there were definitely things. It was basically something that was, that you could ship easily, that wouldn't break, that was high value, you know, wasn't overly complex.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Or overly seasonal.

• 24:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:56Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  And so with that in mind, we were thinking, oh, what could we do that that would fit that?

• 25:03Guy Raz?

  So you're thinking about a bunch of different things and I guess you start to think about the category of camping, right? And tell me about why you kind of veered in that direction? How did you land on camping as a category?

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Jeff was the one who came up with the idea. You know, we grew up in Canada and did a lot of camping.

• 25:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, we explored so many different industries and products and we thought, oh, there's some opportunities with camping stoves. They're, they're small, they're compact.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  Easy to ship, they won't break. And so we came across the concept of this double walled gasification stove. A lot of people on YouTube would come up with their own ideas and just, we started just trying to make our own, seeing if this gasification stove, if it actually worked.

• 26:06Guy Raz?

  Yeah, and for people who are familiar with this stove, what you'd eventually come up with is basically the stainless steel cylinder, kind of like a can within a can that kind of sucks the air up from the bottom to feed the fire, but also sends the air out through these holes at the top to like to burn off the smoke. And I mean, essentially you wanted to build a camping stove, I gather, that reduced or eliminated smoke, but you also wanted to make it easy to start because starting a campfire is not easy for most people, right?

• 26:38Speaker 01

  Well, that was the beauty of when we looked at YouTube and saw how people were DIYing and when we were playing with cans and cans, we realized that the airflow, how it works, just naturally makes it easier for fires to light. I mean, it's not rocket science, fires need oxygen. And so the more oxygen you give it from different areas, from underneath it, fires take a lot faster. And then it being contained within the camping stove, it's protected from wind. And then you add on the ring that sits on top, which supports the pot that's put on top, that kind of creates an added extra windshield as well. And so it naturally was easier to start fires. But we weren't thinking like, we're going to revolutionize this category with something brand new. It was just, can we make a slightly better mousetrap?

• 27:22Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  And with my experience on the China side, I could be able to mass manufacture these. And then with our e-commerce abilities and with our understanding of digital marketing, we could have another portfolio brand that would bring in a hundred thousand dollars and be another drop in the bucket for our path towards financial freedom and the four hour work week. And I mean, the thought process wasn't complicated. It was just, what's next? This looks good.

• 27:49Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Let's iterate, let's design.

• 27:52Guy Raz?

  And but I guess, I mean, neither of you guys were or are engineers. And is this, is it complicated? I mean, how long did it take you guys to figure that out, that design out?

• 28:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, Jeff was right. That time when we were playing around, we were literally getting cans out of the pantry. And going, buying different sized cans and putting cans in cans and seeing what worked. And it is somewhat complex. It took us a while to find a supplier that was willing to work with us. And we actually shelved the idea for a year or so because it was so difficult. It was far more difficult than anything we had done up to that point.

• 28:29Guy Raz?

  What I'm trying to figure out, though, is given that you had sold things that were already being manufactured, why didn't you just find a Chinese factory that was making camping stoves and just sell those on Amazon?

• 28:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's a good, that's a good thought. I mean, I think one of the ideas, as our evolution of thinking changed as to what was a good product, it needed to be unique. And if we were able to buy it off the shelf at some manufacturer, and they're selling it to other people as well, it would be that, that much, just as easy for the next guy to buy it.

• 29:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  But no manufacturer was making this. And so for somebody, you know, if you understand how manufacturing works, nobody wants to help a little startup. And we didn't even consider ourselves that because we were like, well, we'd buy $5,000 worth of this product. Well, the tooling and dies and everything that you need to set this product up to even try to make is more than that. Why would a manufacturer take a risk on, on us?

• 29:24Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, a manufacturer decides to take that risk. And Spencer and Jeff discover that the four hour work week of their dreams is about to get a lot longer. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 29:48Guy Raz?

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• 30:30Guy Raz?

  The agents bring speed and scale, and people bring taste, judgment, and control.

• 30:36Guy Raz?

  Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/built for 30% off a Framer Pro Annual Plan. That's framer.com/built. Rules and restrictions may apply. AI isn't just opening new business opportunities. It's changing the way businesses get work done. The questions they ask, the decisions they make, the routine tasks they can hand off. That's the idea behind NetSuite Next, the next generation of NetSuite with AI woven into the tools your business already relies on. NetSuite Next surfaces insights exactly when you need them,

• 31:19Guy Raz?

  puts agents to work on routine tasks and problems, and lets you ask complex questions in plain language, like talking to a knowledgeable colleague. But technology is only part of the story. AI is also reshaping how people and teams work together, and that shift is already underway. That's why NetSuite wants to put a new, expert-created business guide in your hands today. It's called Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work. And right now, it's yours, absolutely free. Inside, you'll discover how AI could reshape work across your entire organization and how to position your business to prosper from it. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures,

• 32:03Guy Raz?

  get NetSuite's free business guide, Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work, at netsuite.com/built. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/built. netsuite.com/built.

• 32:19Speaker 03

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• 33:04Speaker 04

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• 33:20Guy Raz?

  As a business-to-business marketer, your needs are unique. B2B buying cycles are long and your customers face incredibly complex decisions. So isn't it time?

• 33:40Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2010 and Jeff and Spencer are learning that finding a Chinese manufacturer to make a camping stove is complicated.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  It's like finding a dance partner, is you really need somebody to match your level, match your size, match your stride, match your ambition. So finding that was really just an exercise of meeting a lot of different factories, talking with them, understanding the machinery, getting my dumb questions out at the front so that when I met the next guy, I was a little bit more able to speak the lingo of different machinery needed and different welding techniques and all these different things that were needed to find that right partner. But I found a guy who was making coffee percolators for Europe. He was an engineer by trade and was very curious about what we were trying to do.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  And it was a puzzle for him that he became pretty obsessed on how do I make this thing if I have to, if I have to make this from scratch, right? How do I bend the metal this way? Can you bend it this way? And, you know, perhaps, perhaps, I don't know what else he saw in us, but he was willing to say, hey, let's try this.

• 34:57Guy Raz?

  And, and when you got that prototype, did it, did it do the job?

• 35:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, it performed and was beautiful. I mean, a flame when it burns, using the, the double wall design that, that we had in the stove, it's mesmerizing. It looks like there's jets shooting out the side of the stove. And for anybody who uses it for the first time or sees it is just kind of taken back and is like, what is going on right now? I've never seen a flame burn like that. And that's, that's the feeling that we got when we burned this and we thought this is going to be, this is going to be awesome. People are going to love this.

• 35:32Guy Raz?

  All right. So you got this prototype and you want to start to mass produce it and then create a direct to consumer company around it. First question is, how much, how much money did you need to get this off the ground? I mean, because you guys didn't have a lot.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, we didn't have a lot. I remember it's $15,000 we put in.

• 35:54Guy Raz?

  And that was to, to do what?

• 35:56Speaker 01

  That was to get the tooling paid for.

• 35:58Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  It was all we were willing to put at it because we didn't know, Guy, if this was going to work or not.

• 36:03Guy Raz?

  Wow. All right. So first of all, you guys, you've, you've made the decision to try, you know, to make a go at this and, and you call, and you decided to call it the Solo Stove. Where, where did the name come from?

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, we literally just sat around thinking of names and really just at the same time searching for what domains were available that we could get. And we had gotten to the point of realizing that a long name, a long drawn out name like ChinaBusinessTraveler.com is very hard to remember and to type in. And so we always wanted something really short and something that spoke to what we were doing. And we really thought it's the only stove you need if you're backpacking or camping. And it's great for one person. It's kind of a single person size. And so Solo kind of clicked on all corners for us.

• 36:56Guy Raz?

  Okay. So you've got the name. And, and by the way, did you? Did you apply for patents for this product?

• 37:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, we did.

• 37:05Guy Raz?

  And you create a website presumably called solo stove.com?

• 37:09Speaker 01

  That's it, yep.

• 37:11Guy Raz?

  And the same playbook, the same playbook that you'd used for the gardening business and the mattresses, you do AdSense, you buy, you do search engine optimization, the same playbook?

• 37:24Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, a combination of creating content that people would search up and stumble upon our website.

• 37:30Guy Raz?

  And what was the content? Like, what were you writing?

• 37:33Speaker 01

  I don't know if we did a lot of blogging in the early days for it. We actually, we spent a lot of time on making the site look beautiful and evoking emotions. You know, being in the outdoors and camping is a very emotional exercise and we really wanted to lean into that. We eventually got to the point of buying banners, ads on different sites that we thought were useful. So eventually then putting it on Amazon, which was another source of traffic and revenue. Everything we could think of to bring people to our website.

• 38:07Guy Raz?

  And, I mean, you flipped the switch, right? The proverbial switch, and the website launches. And, I mean, is it an instant hit? Or are people discovering it? What's the response from anywhere?

• 38:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was quick and fast. It was more than we expected. The first year was about half a million dollars.

• 38:30Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  In the first year of putting it out there.

• 38:33Guy Raz?

  And how much did the stoves cost you to make?

• 38:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, the margins were really high. You know, we were in the 80%, 80% margins.

• 38:43Guy Raz?

  Wow. And you also sold them on Amazon, right?

• 38:47Speaker 01

  That's right, yeah. And that's where a lot of the sales really did come from, is Amazon.

• 38:52Guy Raz?

  All right, so you've got... This product that seems to be taking off. But both of you guys kept your jobs, right?

• 39:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 39:04Guy Raz?

  I mean, at what point, you know, if you're doing the first year, half a million in sales, at what point did you, I mean, did the two of you start to say, well, maybe we need to think about this in a bigger way? Like, what was, what happened to get you there?

• 39:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think for me, it was, you know, it was just being overwhelmed with everything. It's just, you know, we had this, I had this idea of this four hour work week. That's why we set out to do this. And as things became too much, you know, performance in my day job kind of slipped. It was a situation where I had a tough conversation with my boss. I called him my business partner. I gained some equity in that company I was working for. And that was a tough conversation. I mean, even now, it's hard to articulate all the, all the feelings that went into figuring that out and the misunderstandings and what I should have done, maybe. But I never thought any of this would really amount to much.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  I thought it would be a great side hustle and why talk about it?

• 40:06Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  If it's not going to be a big issue. And the problem was, is the bigger it got, the more I was afraid to bring it up to the guy I was working for, because now it is an issue.

• 40:19Guy Raz?

  Was he, was he disappointed in you? I mean, or did he understand or what?

• 40:23Speaker 01

  He was upset. He felt like I had talents that maybe I didn't share with him, which I think is understandable. But then, you know, after a night's, night of sleep, you know, the next day was a different tone and it was, you know, a more tone of, you know, you betrayed me. And this was, you know, this, we were supposed to build this together. And in my mind, I was like, this is what I was building with my brother. This was never going to be something that, you know, we were going to create and then bring every, you know, bring him on board. It was just me and Jeff's side gig that ended up blowing up.

• 41:01Guy Raz?

  Wow, all right. So you've got this product, you've got this company and

• 41:07Guy Raz?

  And I guess you guys decide in 2014 to turn to Kickstarter for the next iteration, a larger version of the stove. And was the idea to go to Kickstarter to generate attention? Because I think you guys, I mean, I'm assuming the cash flow was was pretty good. I mean, you guys were probably, all of a sudden, both of you guys were making pretty good money.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no, cash flow was good. It was profitable. You know, we didn't pay ourselves anything in those first years because all the money went back into buying more inventory.

• 41:40Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, we did Kickstarter in Jeff's backyard with our kids, their feet, so you can see kicking around in that video.

• 41:49Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  But yeah, that was our first foray into Kickstarter and we did all right. And we were pleased with the results. But once Kickstarter is over, it's back to back to building, you know, our website and selling on Amazon.

• 42:03Guy Raz?

  So, all right. Meanwhile, I think, this is around 2013, Spencer, you make a major move. You decide to come back to to the US and you settle in Dallas where your brother is. And I guess you're still working your day job for that same company in China. But Jeff, around around that same time, you actually decided to leave your day job, right?

• 42:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 42:29Guy Raz?

  Like, what, like, I guess you became confident enough at this point that this thing was going to be, or was already successful and that you needed to put all of your attention into it. And by this point, it was still just the two of you? Like, help me understand how you were running a business doing, you know, close to a million dollars in revenue. Well, I mean, it's possible to do it, but you had to fulfill the orders, you had to deal with customer service. I mean, you were you were building a brand and it was just the two of you?

• 43:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think I knew before 2014 that this was on its way to be more successful than any of the other businesses, but I don't think my wife had the same confidence. And so I kind of had this plan of, well, if we can get rid of all of our debt, it was basically three things. If I could bring in enough income to allow her to be a stay-at-home mom, and we had, I think, two kids at the time with the third on the way, and we could pay off our mortgage and then pay off our cars. If I could do those three things, then

• 43:43Speaker 02

  I had permission to quit my job. And so I eventually met those goals.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  Guy, just to add more flavor into this, we had started yet another brand as we were doing solo called Fox Outfitters. And Fox Outfitters was a lot of products, but they were in the camping space. So like camping mats, hammocks, stainless steel drinking cups, and microfiber towels.

• 44:12Guy Raz?

  All branded Fox Outfitters. And it was, again...

• 44:17Speaker 01

  Same play.

• 44:17Guy Raz?

  You can go to Alibaba or one of these sites and you can pick the products you want and put your logo on it.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah. And we would do as much customization as we could to make our own unique styles, or bags, or sizes, or whatever it was. But I mean, they were very commodity products. And we sold more of that than Solo did all the way. I mean, I don't want to say, I mean, I don't remember when we stopped selling Fox, but probably about 2016, we were selling more on Fox than we were for Solo. Millions and millions of dollars of Fox stuff. I mean, we probably, altogether, by the time we got to about 2016, I mean, just with those two brands, we were probably doing like three, four million dollars with.

• 45:04Guy Raz?

  Wow. I mean, so you had, and they were, again, all being handled by third-party logistics, but did that enable the two of you to have a lifestyle job? I mean, given that, you know, you had these manufacturers in China making it, being shipped to the third-party logistics center, I mean, did that mean you could just kind of watch the money come into your bank account?

• 45:30Speaker 01

  Some days it felt like that. There were days on Mondays that we would, you know, go fishing and realize that everybody else is going to work and we're going to the lake. And that felt great. But those days became very few and far between as the business continued to grow and that, that quote-unquote "lifestyle" business was fading quickly. Everything between supply chain and fulfillment and customer service, we were doing every customer service email. It was just a lot.

• 46:00Guy Raz?

  So, most of your day was probably taken up by just dealing with customer service emails?

• 46:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Guys on Solo Stove would, they loved the product so much, we would, I mean, we didn't take phone calls early on because we tried it once. And people would just call in wanting to talk about camping and hiking. I was like, you know, old timers that had nothing better to do. And they were great, but you'd get on these calls for 30 minutes and realize like, this can't, this can't happen. We gotta just switch customer service to an email only.

• 46:28Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  And for me, it was, it became way too much and I just didn't want it anymore. I mean, there were times where I was like, the money's good, but, you know, this isn't worth it. And now we were approaching that point, you know, this is probably about 2016, where we have to say, if we want to keep growing, we have to hire people. And we never wanted to do that.

• 46:49Guy Raz?

  Why didn't you want to hire people?

• 46:52Speaker 01

  I personally just had a bad experience with managing teams. I just, I felt like I went through 2008, having to lay off my entire team in a very short period of time.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  And and going through that, I felt like I wasn't a great leader. I felt like I wasn't the type of person that was skilled at building teams. And I don't know if that's a narrative I just told myself.

• 47:18Guy Raz?

  Huh.

• 47:19Speaker 02

  I think about this time as well. It was becoming more and more competitive on Amazon.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:26Speaker 02

  And so we were realizing there was a lot more competition. And we noticed that in our sales. And so we had to start making hard decisions as to what direction we were going to go.

• 47:39Guy Raz?

  And I guess the direction you guys kind of landed on in 2016 was maybe let's see if we can sell our company, our business.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that was there's two decisions, right? It's either let's get rid of this thing.

• 47:50Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  And maybe start again and keep it small and manageable from, you know, we we had learned a lot of things. So it's not like we were starting from zero. We would just start another company and make it even better and more efficient. Or we hire people and get in office. And I remember really just talking about it with Jeff. And I remember him saying that, you know, if we're gonna if we're gonna sell this thing, then we should maximize the outcome. But that's what we decided to do was sell the company. So we found some brokers. We had a friend in in this area, in the DFW area, who had sold a company before. And he introduced us to an investment banker. And we found some other investment bankers through some other friends.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  And we just started talking to them, saying, this is our business.

• 48:39Guy Raz?

  And what was your revenue at the time?

• 48:41Speaker 01

  Revenue at that time, I think, I think was, I mean, between Fox and Solo, I was probably close to about, I want to say like seven-ish million bucks, Jeff. Is that, do you think that's about right?

• 48:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, probably.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, seven to 10 or somewhere around there.

• 48:57Guy Raz?

  And it was just the two of you?

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Just the two of us. And it was really profitable. And so.

• 49:00Guy Raz?

  That's a super efficient business.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, profits, I remember between everything we were selling. I think it was, I think it was a few million bucks of profits every year. So we, we started talking with people and said, here's our numbers. Here's what we're doing and here's how profitable it is. Isn't it a great business? Like, are there buyers out there for this? And really the feedback was, is like, yeah, we could find one. They're not going to be, it's not going to be a great outcome. And really your business isn't a business because it's just you two working out of your homes.

• 49:31Guy Raz?

  But you had a, you had a brand, you had solo.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  That's what we thought, right? It's like, here's a brand, here's a great product, here's websites that we thought were amazing. And we could tell the next person exactly what we're doing, what buttons to push and how to drive traffic and what, and we thought that was a very sellable asset.

• 49:51Guy Raz?

  And by the way, what would you, what would you have sold it for?

• 49:53Speaker 01

  Well, I think at the time, one of the bankers told us that we could probably get about seven or eight million dollars from, from solo. I think that was the number in my head, in my recollection of, you know, carving out just solo on its own, that it was, if you can build that out to be a, a real company, then that would be a really attractive company for, for someone to buy.

• 50:21Guy Raz?

  So, all right, so you, basically everyone, the feedback you're getting is, listen, you know, it's, you don't really have an infrastructure, you don't really have a company. You've got a brand, you can make a little bit of money on it, but it's not really, you're not going to have a lot of people like banging down your door to buy this thing.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  Right. Which was hard for me to understand, you know? I, I thought businesses were all about making money. I thought businesses were all about being profitable. And what we had was something that made a lot of money and was really profitable. And I couldn't understand why, why, why this wasn't something that everybody was pounding down the door and wanting to buy. And I, you know, we, I have a liberal arts degree, so I never understood how M and A works. I didn't even understand the term until we started selling our company, that that was the term you used. And I remember that one of the investment bankers we met, we had to borrow an office to even have the meeting because we didn't even.

• 51:15Guy Raz?

  At the logistics.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  The logistics office, because we were like, well, they either come to me and Jeff's dinner table, or we actually find some place to look presentable. And that's how far off we were from having a company that was sellable.

• 51:28Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, Spencer and Jeff start to hire a team out of a new open floor office, a metal table and chairs outside Starbucks. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 52:00Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. So it's 2014 and at this point Jeff and Spencer want to sell Solo Stove, but nobody wants to buy it, at least not until they can build it out more. So in order to do that, they decide to get rid of their other company.

• 52:18Speaker 01

  When we realized what we needed to do was build Solo, we focused in and we said, let's just focus on Solo and let's just forget about Fox.

• 52:26Guy Raz?

  So you sold Fox for like pennies on the dollar?

• 52:28Speaker 01

  Pennies on the dollar is what we did. We really just said, here's the inventory. We'll give it to you for pennies on the dollar. We got introduced to some good guys in Houston who wanted to have a stab at e-commerce. And we said, hey, you know, this is an opportunity you can go with and run with and kind of get your feet wet. Here's, take it for pennies on the dollar and let's just clean up our books.

• 52:47Guy Raz?

  All right, so you realize it now. You've got to do the thing that you don't want to do, which is to hire people and build an infrastructure. Meantime, I think you go back to Kickstarter to launch a new backyard fire pit. And this, this one does amazing. I mean, you think it could raise over a million dollars.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:10Guy Raz?

  On Kickstarter. I'm curious about, I know they were all patented and you filed, you know, you got your patents and it was trademarked and everything, but. I'm surprised that there weren't copycats, or were there copycats popping up on Amazon?

• 53:26Speaker 01

  So in the early days, no. And I think, you know, a big part of that was, one, the Amazon rush was starting, but it wasn't in full force. And then, two, you know, we were really quiet about things. You know, we did Kickstarter, and that was one of the concerns we had, is if people see how much we sell, then there's more likelihood that people will want to copy. But at that point, product development needed to get going. And we said, well, what's next? And that led us to creating Bonfire, which was our first backyard fire pit. And the other point of it was, if we could show demand for the product, perhaps we could get interest from retailers, well-known retailers, who we know are always looking for new product.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  We thought this would be a great resume builder for us to approach a potential retailer, like an REI, who, if we could get in, that's yet another checkmark on the box of what we need to build in terms of our resume.

• 54:24Guy Raz?

  You thought, okay, you thought we, in order, because now you're focused on how do we sell this company? This was the goal.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:30Guy Raz?

  And so one of the ways was Kickstarter. The other one was now we've got to get into brick and mortar. We can't just be DTC.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  Sure, a little bit. We just wanted to show a glimmer of hope.

• 54:40Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  That retail was an option, because when you sell a company, you're selling hope and future and future growth.

• 54:46Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And so I guess the Kickstarter was really what attracted REI's attention, right?

• 54:52Speaker 01

  I like to think so. I don't know, you know, in the past, we thought about reaching out to REI and talk to some guys who had sold into REI. And

• 55:00Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  They had explained how difficult it is and how hard it is to pitch them. And then you got to fly to Seattle and all of this. And after hearing it all, I said, you're right, that sounds horrible. I said, I don't want to do that. We're going to stick to selling online. But during Kickstarter, when we were doing that, we were in our first little office, which was no bigger than a shoebox. And I remember, Jeff, we saw that email come through from the REI buyer, and he said he wanted to carry all of our products. And we couldn't believe it. And I

• 55:28Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  But that was the one thing that I remember getting really excited over. It just felt like validation. For all the years of grinding, trying to build a brand, trying to, you know, create something unique, I felt like getting into REI was a badge of honor.

• 55:42Speaker 02

  And it was such an easy experience. It was just one email, very brief email, saying that he wanted to carry all of our products. And we just replied back, like, there was no meeting, there was no testing.

• 55:56Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 55:56Speaker 02

  It just went straight into their stores.

• 55:58Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And again, in terms of like protecting the brand, I mean, you briefly mentioned there were copycats coming onto the market, but not, it never seemed to sort of threaten you guys. How did you avoid that?

• 56:12Speaker 01

  It never felt like there were big copycats we were afraid of all the way through when we sold the company and even through those early years. I think the key to it was nobody really understood how much we were selling. It was hard to gauge. And then the second part of it, it's a very difficult product to create because we had invested a lot into custom machinery with our manufacturers. And so the barrier to entry was much higher than any other me too product that somebody could go get.

• 56:40Guy Raz?

  So essentially, when you made this decision that you have to figure out how to turn this into a sellable company, one of the things you had to do was to hire employees.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 56:50Guy Raz?

  Right. And so, and this was something you both resisted doing. So how did you start?

• 56:56Speaker 01

  I mean, it's just that. We started putting out job postings. And one of the first girls we interviewed, we had, we told her to meet us at the Starbucks. And we didn't even order anything. That's how cheap we were. We just sat outside at the little metal tables and met this, this young girl who was interviewing for a customer service position. And, you know, we would promise that we will have an office if, when this position is filled. And that's, that's how, that's how rough the start was.

• 57:26Speaker 02

  And we realized from when we tried to sell it the first time that we needed a leadership team. We needed managers in place. And so we could explain to any potential buyers, hey, if we step back and aren't involved in the daily operations, there's a team here.

• 57:46Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 57:47Speaker 02

  That can run the business without us being involved.

• 57:51Guy Raz?

  How was it, how was that for you guys to start to train people and essentially become? Leaders and managers, how did it go?

• 58:00Speaker 01

  It was a, it was a exercise of trial and error. And there was a lot more error happening in those early days. And I feel really bad to those early employees. You know, we gave it our best effort. And, you know, I openly apologize to those that had to suffer through our, my inexperience in being a leader. You know, I wish I was the one that could rally the troops and, and, and care about every aspect of their personal lives and, and, and work wholeheartedly to make them a better person. But it just wasn't me. I was about doing and getting things done. The problem was I wasn't excited to get better at this.

• 58:40Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  I was excited about the stuff that we used to do, product dealing with marketing strategies and grow the brand and what the brand means. Like, those were the things that were fun and exciting. We just didn't get to do them a lot in the latter times.

• 58:51Guy Raz?

  And so you, but meantime, in the back of your minds, you're always thinking, we gotta find somebody to lead this team.

• 58:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. And Jeff was the one, I remember him saying that, you know, the root problem isn't, isn't our people, it's us. And we need to find somebody to replace us. And so we did, we just started talking with everybody we knew.

• 59:12Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And, and I guess eventually you landed on this guy, John Maris, but he, he was not, I don't know, initially you guys approached him to, to talk about something else, like for advice, but, but I have to assume that secretly you were thinking, maybe this guy will come work with us.

• 59:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, John was a, a guy who was working at a local company called Claris Glassboards. And so I knew of this company, obviously, and I knew that there were some, some really capable guys over there. Yeah, we reached out to John over LinkedIn, really and honestly, just to ask about how to build a sales team. And chatting with him, it just felt like when he left, I kind of looked at Jeff and said, this is, this is a guy that I think could run this thing. He's very sales oriented and he was a very energetic guy, really likable guy. And I think it was a matter of weeks and he was in there taking the bull by the horns. If anything, I felt like we probably let go too fast.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  We really just, we didn't just hand over the reins, we balled him up into a tight ball and threw it at his face.

• 1:00:21Guy Raz?

  So what, you just introduced John to the company one day and said, hey, everyone, this is your new boss?

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  Pretty much, that's how it went. But time freedom and financial freedom was all we had our sights on. And anything, any means to that end was acceptable by me. And if that meant, quote unquote, handing my baby over to somebody else, I was ready.

• 1:00:44Guy Raz?

  So the idea was, once you brought him on, John, to build a company, 2018, 2019, and then explore a sale in 2020. But it didn't, it turns out that in 2019, you already started to get some interest from people who started to approach you. They were, clearly, there were people who had been following your growth. And now there was, there was interest.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, most of it came unsolicited, but yeah, it started to come in and they started to get really attractive. But I remember Jeff and I explicitly telling John, stop entertaining all these inquiries because we'll get them when we're ready to get them. And they'll be there when we run a process and put it on, on the market and have that competitive bidding process. Just grow the business, don't worry about selling. But as those inquiries came in, they started to throw numbers at us that we didn't ask for. And those numbers started really big and just got bigger to a point where we couldn't turn it down and we couldn't say no.

• 1:01:46Guy Raz?

  It got to a point where you were being offered in the low nine figures, valuation in the low nine figures for the business. And, and some of these private equity groups were like, listen, you know, and I guess you couldn't ignore it, it was a lot of money.

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, those offers came in and John said, here's what one company said. And I remember us just saying, we've got to entertain this.

• 1:02:11Guy Raz?

  So I think the first, the first, because you would go on to have essentially Three exits from your company, in a sense. And the first one was when this private equity group bought a majority stake and you and your brother retained a minority stake. And at that point, this is 2019, what did you guys do? Did you, did you fully disengage from Solo Stove?

• 1:02:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, we were, we were ready to be out and to kind of move to a, a board seat as board advisors. We were, man, I was so stoked to get out and to, to get to a point where I don't have to go into the office. I mean, all of that stress, I could now shut off and spend time the way I wanted to spend it. So we've moved to board seats.

• 1:03:00Guy Raz?

  And then the timing is both great and also would get even better because it turns out COVID would be an incredible engine for, for, for growing this brand even further. And I think about a year later, after, a year after the private equity group made that investment, another private equity firm came in with another offer to buy, essentially to buy out a huge part of, most of your remaining stake.

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. There was this new group that wanted to come in and buy a majority stake at a much higher valuation, well north of what we, we had just exited for a year ago.

• 1:03:46Guy Raz?

  Wow. Wow. So they were going to make money and you guys were going to make more money?

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, really. That's right. I mean, it was mind blowing to me that, you know, from, from being in the low nine figures, just over a hundred million dollars, to now being well into the mid nine figures on this next

• 1:04:03Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  private equity exit. You know, we would sell less shares than we did the first time, but the rewards were much greater the second time.

• 1:04:12Speaker 02

  And I think one of the things that made it much easier the second time was that we weren't involved in the whole process of selling it.

• 1:04:21Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:22Speaker 02

  Which was nice to step back and let other people deal with that part of the business.

• 1:04:29Guy Raz?

  The company eventually went public in 2021 and you guys had shares. I think you still retain those shares, right? Your old stock? Yeah.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  That's correct. We didn't sell any stock at the IPO. That IPO was truly an IPO where new stock was issued.

• 1:04:45Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:46Speaker 01

  So it wasn't a liquidity event for us.

• 1:04:48Guy Raz?

  And you guys today are completely not involved with the company at all. You have no connection to it.

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, other than we own

• 1:04:56Guy Raz?

  Some shares.

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  An equity stake. Yeah, and we own shares of the public company. From an operations standpoint, we're totally out. It feels great to say it. I mean, we don't do anything with the company and hardly hear from them these days.

• 1:05:10Guy Raz?

  What do you think, Spencer? What do you think? I mean, you've got a long life to live. Do you see yourself starting another business? I mean, what do you see yourself doing with the rest of your life? And how will you keep yourself occupied? I know that some people are going to hear this question. They'll look, what do you mean, guy? He's gonna go running every day and go to the gym and do yoga classes and be involved in this church and go on vacation. But I don't know. There are a lot of people who I've interviewed on the show, hundreds, who are multimillionaires, billionaires, who don't stop working until the day they die because it gives their lives meaning. And I understand

• 1:05:48Guy Raz?

  that. Work is also, can also be incredibly fulfilling and meaningful. And I wonder if you see that in your future.

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think fulfillment's the right word. And if that takes me down a road of starting something for whatever reason, then I'll never say never. And at this current stage in my life, the most impact I can make, I think, is with my family, is with my kids and making sure that they grow up with a father at home, with the support of parents. And until I finish that task, I don't think I'm super hungry right now to start something that would take me away from doing that. What about you, Jeff?

• 1:06:37Speaker 02

  Well, I think one of the important things in life is to

• 1:06:43Speaker 02

  Know when you have enough. I don't necessarily look at work as working at a job to make money or get a paycheck, but there's all sorts of different types of work where there's work at home that parents do all the time and I'm trying to be better at that. There's work inside your community that you can do. Work at our church and I don't see starting a new company right now, but I'm not going to say I won't later on.

• 1:07:18Guy Raz?

  Do you, when you guys think about your journey and, you know, where you've been and what happened, how much of what happened do you attribute to luck and how much do you think has to do with the hard work and the skill that you have?

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  For me, I think luck is definitely a huge part of our outcome. And the paradox is, as I think about luck, right, it's something you can't control. You have to realize that it's a part, while at the same time, working as if it doesn't matter. I think it helps you not pat yourself on the back too hard when things go right, while at the same time, not getting too hard on yourself when things don't go right. Some things are just out of your control and luck is definitely one of them.

• 1:08:05Guy Raz?

  Jeff?

• 1:08:06Speaker 02

  I think the older I get, I'm not sure if I believe in luck as much, but I definitely believe that there's some, something out of your control, some sort of, you know, divine help. All of the important things that have happened in my life, including starting this business with Spencer and meeting my wife and having kids and all of those other important things, I don't really consider as luck, but as things that I was blessed with. I certainly think Spencer and I both worked very hard at it, but I think we both acknowledge that there's something that was beyond our control that definitely helped with this.

• 1:08:52Guy Raz?

  That's Jeff and Spencer Jan, co-founders of Solo Stove. By the way, remember how years ago they sold garden cloches, those little tent-like things that protect plants from frost? Well, it turns out that business is still a wide-open frontier. In fact, the domain name cloche.com is currently on sale for $120,000.

• 1:09:17Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show, and as always, it's totally free. This episode was produced by Carla Esteves with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Casey Herman. Our audio engineer was co-Takasugi Chernovin. Our production staff also includes J.C. Howard, Sam Paulson, Liz Metzger, Alex Chung, Elaine Coats, John Isabella, and Chris Messini. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.