Therabody: Jason Wersland

The Theragun was born out of a late-night experiment with a Makita jigsaw, by a man searching desperately for pain relief in his arm. Jason Wersland was studying to become a chiropractor when he got injured in a motorcycle accident. While casting about for solutions, he discovered that the percussive massage from his jury-rigged power tool helped ease his pain and increase range of motion. Jason soon discovered the device worked on his patients, so he MacGyvered hundreds more jigsaws, initially using fence posts and cat toys as add-ons. Over time, with endorsements from top athletes and celebrities, Jason grew his business into Therabody, a wellness brand with revenue in the hundred of millions of dollars. This episode was produced by Chris Maccini with music by Ramtin Arablouei. Edited by Neva Grant, with research from Melia Agudelo. Our audio engineers were Gilly Moon and Robert Rodriguez. You can follow HIBT on X https://twitter.com/HowIBuiltThis & Instagram https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis, and email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. And sign up for Guy’s free newsletter at guyraz.com http://guyraz.com 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?

  build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea, what separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/hibt. We get support from U.S. Bank. A question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't.

• 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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• 5:11Guy Raz?

  Hey, really quick before we start the show. We have an announcement about a really exciting new thing we're launching: a newsletter. And like our show, the newsletter is designed to be interesting, informative, inspiring, and most importantly, fun. It's 100% free, and to sign up, just visit guyraz.com. That's G-U-Y-R-A-Z dot com.

• 5:44Guy Raz?

  You can find an image of this on your website. And it's amazing because I am looking at a Kawasaki jigsaw with a cat toy ball and a fence post. Now that I see this, I'm like, there's the fence post, there's the rivet, there's the cat toy. Like, it's crazy. You really, like, you really jury rigged this together.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Think about this. It was the cheapest jigsaw you could find. The vents on the side of this Kawasaki jigsaw, when you started it and you stopped it, you let go of the trigger, sparks would fly out. So that was my first iteration. But, Guy, people were buying them as fast as I could make them.

• 6:34Guy Raz?

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

• 6:46Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how an injury from a motorcycle crash and a late night experiment with a jigsaw led Jason Wersland to invent the Theragun, a massager that uses percussive energy to ease pain.

• 7:04Guy Raz?

  What you are about to hear today is not a story about a methodical and strategic path from idea to execution. This story is more of a jagged path, and it's about an unlikely invention that was inspired by accident, actually, by a real accident. But to back up for a moment, when Jason Wersland started out in life, he was planning to be a carpet and flooring salesman, just like his dad. And for many years, that is how he made a living, with a carpet and flooring store in Utah. But just as Jason was about to turn 30, his world started to collapse. He lost his marriage, and then, he lost his business.

• 7:49Guy Raz?

  And so, at an age when most people are starting to hit their stride, Jason Wersland was starting over. He decided to move out to LA to become, of all things, a chiropractor. He thought it might be a more reliable way to earn a living. But just as he was finishing up his studies, Jason got into a motorcycle accident. And so after training for years to help rehabilitate other people's back and neck injuries, Jason became a patient himself. And he started to try different therapeutic devices that could help. Now, to digress for just a moment, a lot of founders I've interviewed over the years created their products because there was a problem they wanted to solve.

• 8:32Guy Raz?

  A better thermos, or a more comfortable sweatshirt, or makeup without chemicals. In Jason Wersland's case, he didn't start tinkering to solve a simple problem. He was desperate because he was also in constant debilitating pain. And so late one night, alone and unable to sleep, Jason did something drastic. He grabbed an electric jigsaw. He bent the blade, wrapped a dish towel around it, and then wrapped all of that in electrical tape. He turned on the jigsaw and pressed it against the pain points in his body, and it started to work. The percussive and vibrating up and down motion of the jigsaw blade,

• 9:15Guy Raz?

  now safely wrapped in cushioning, was relieving his pain. And that crude jigsaw turned massager, believe it or not, became the first prototype for what would become the Theragun. Now, it would take another seven years before Jason would figure out how to turn that idea into a business, with several mishaps and bad decisions along the way. But what Jason had was an unshakable belief in the value of the product and a willingness to go out and sell it relentlessly. Today, the Theragun is the center of Jason's larger business called Therabody. It sells all kinds of therapeutic devices, including compression boots, foam rollers, and even a massage chair.

• 9:58Guy Raz?

  And if imitation is a measure of success, well, Jason's hit the jackpot. Since the introduction of the Theragun, countless other similar products have entered the market. Jason Wersland grew up in a family of seven kids in Utah. His dad was an immigrant from Norway and a faithful member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormon Church.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Around 6:00 PM every Monday night, it was time to come in. My dad actually had a whistle.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  And he'd stand out on the back porch and whistle that and he'd have us line up right by the banister of our stairs. And then we'd sit down and it was you'd open with a prayer. Have a scripture. And then there'd be a lesson and the lesson could be about humility or character or confidence. I remember many times when I was growing up, my dad used to get the wooden spoon and you'd hold the wooden spoon like a microphone and he would teach you how to talk. And then as you got to be 12, the, one of the sort of icebreakers into the church is that you would get in front of the whole congregation and you'd give a talk on Sunday. So giving your talk when you're 12, 13, 14 years old, that was a big deal. I mean, those are really fond memories.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  My family and my brothers and sisters are my best friends.

• 11:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  I tell people all the time, growing up, I wouldn't change the way I grew up.

• 11:22Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  You know, I went on a mission.

• 11:24Guy Raz?

  Where did you go?

• 11:25Speaker 01

  I went to Norway, which was crazy because that never happened.

• 11:28Guy Raz?

  So you did a mission when you were 18?

• 11:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:31Guy Raz?

  Oh, so you were actually riding the bike and wearing the suit?

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  I had a badge on, said Elder Wersland. I wore a white shirt and a tie, which I, I try not to wear anymore because I think I got my fill. But the fun thing for me is I got to be around my family. My grandpa was still alive at the time. He lived in Norway, had a lot of cousins, aunts and uncles and things over there. So it was an amazing experience because I got to learn, really learn the culture of Norway. But it was hard because their, their culture there, man, they are not open to Western American sort of thinking. And you know, here I am, this Norwegian heritage, I was so proud to be there and I walked up to a door and they're just like, you're a Mormon, get off my doorstep.

• 12:14Guy Raz?

  Wow. But see, this is the thing, I, I know regular listeners to this show have heard a version of this exact conversation with other founders we've had who were members of the church and did missions and David Neleman of JetBlue or the founders of Cotopaxi and Kodiak Cakes and, and several others. And one of the things that, that has come up is that mission, that two-year mission, that's like amazing practice to becoming an entrepreneur because you're basically getting a hundred people a day telling you, no, I'm not interested in hearing your message.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Literally, we'd do what we call street contacting and I'd stand on the on the main street in Oslo, Norway. And if you got one person to talk to you, or one person to take a Book of Mormon, that was a good day.

• 13:01Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  And you're talking to hundreds of people.

• 13:03Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  And they're just walking by you like you have the plague sometimes.

• 13:07Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  But when I got back is when the real challenge started, because I I realized the commitment that you had to make required a very strong belief in those principles. And I just I learned at a young age, that just wasn't for me. There was something more for me. And but like I said, I wouldn't change it for the world, you know, I wouldn't take that away.

• 13:35Guy Raz?

  So you come back, you're in your early twenties, and what did you do? Did you? Because I don't think you went to university initially.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  No, I didn't. I so when I came back from my mission, I was in the flooring business. So when I was growing up, my dad worked at had a really good friend of his that was a had a flooring store. And my brothers and I would roll remnants in this flooring store. So I would unload pad trucks and I would load guys up with carpet. And so that was just my world as I grew up. And I started realizing that you could make like four or 500 bucks a day doing that. So when I got back from my mission, I started laying carpet. And, you know, people talk about this in that industry where if you start doing that, it's kind of addicting, because you get up early in the morning, you go out and knock it out, and you're done by two, and you got, you know, 1000 bucks in your pocket. So

• 14:27Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  To back up just a little bit, too, my mom's family had a farm. And being around that world, you had to be resourceful. You had to learn how to do things, make things. You're out in the middle of nowhere in a field, and you need a tool. You gotta be, you have, you can't run a Home Depot. So, learning that as I grew up, when I got into the flooring world, they did, I had a contract with Motel 6. We did up and down the West Coast, Motel 6 is hundreds of them. I, I could lay carpet in a Motel 6 room in less than five minutes.

• 14:58Guy Raz?

  Wow. And this was a business that you, you essentially started on your own?

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And I learned at an early age what an LLC was and what a business was. And how'd you have a bank account was different than your bank account. Those are all things I, I thought were a nuisance. I'm like, dang, this is what I have to do. Looking back, it really helped me understand. It's really not that hard to set those things up.

• 15:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And, and I guess you worked, you ended up working in, in the industry for, for a bunch of years. Um, doing like installation and sales and, and, and I think around this time you, you also go to college to get a degree, right? Like a, I think a BA in sales or business.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:34Guy Raz?

  Um, and then from what I understand, after that, you, you decide to open up your own store, your own like flooring and carpeting store where, you know, where you're not just installing it, but you're, you're selling it as well, right?

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and think about what was happening in Utah in the late nineties. It was booming. People were moving from LA. They had tons of cash. And so there were hundreds of homes and, and I, a friend of mine said, hey, let's open a flooring store together. So I thought, okay, let's do that. And my niche was custom flooring. I had access to these really amazing carpet, um, options. And people were spending a lot of money because they had the money and they wanted custom floors. And so there weren't many people that did that and it was successful. My first year I did a million dollars.

• 16:24Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  It was crazy.

• 16:26Guy Raz?

  And you probably were clearing a, a nice profit from that.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  And I put it all right back. I just, I would buy more inventory. I'd buy a trailer. I'd get a new truck. I just tried to put it back in there, hoping that, that, uh, I'd have a, a good, um. Yeah, I'd have a, wow, just remembering some things as you're telling me these things.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  I have to tell you this. So I had, this is a really good experience, I think, for anyone listening. I had gotten married in ninety seven.

• 16:59Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Uh, I had my, my son in ninety eight. He was actually adopted because I was told they couldn't have kids. So we had, we adopted my son Jesse. And then my wife at the time got pregnant with my daughter, which was a miracle. It wasn't for us to have kids. And then she got pregnant. Right after she got pregnant, um, we were having some real struggles and we were contemplating divorce. And I had a business partner of mine that was a, a builder in the community who I was doing some work for. And we were sitting in my office one day and this guy came in and I was upset. I think I may have been crying. And he said, what's going on? I said, I think, I think I'm probably gonna have to get divorced. I don't, you know, that's another story.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  And he said, hey, listen, why don't you write a letter of relinquishment to me? We'll date it as today. I'll put it in your drawer. We'll never take it out. Unless your wife comes after us for the money. And then you just say, I relinquish this to him. I don't have anything.

• 17:59Guy Raz?

  Oh, I see. So because you were worried about getting a divorce, this was a way for you, he, this was his suggestion for you to protect your assets?

• 18:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And I, I was like, okay, that's a good idea.

• 18:12Guy Raz?

  Not a good idea.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Not a good idea.

• 18:15Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  So I'm focused on my business and I got a call from one of our suppliers and it was a company that I used to be a sales rep for. So I knew the person at the accounts receivable. And he said, yo, Jay, you're, you're getting behind on things. I was like, oh, really? Let me go look at that. So I go to the office and as I walk into my office, my business partner's wife's computer screen faced the door. And I walked in the door and I saw the balance on the screen of the QuickBooks she had. And it was a lot. It was like three hundred thousand dollars or something. And I'm like, that's weird. So I went over to his wife and I said, hey, have you been paying these bills? And she got really nervous. What had happened, Guy, is he'd taken that letter,

• 18:59Speaker 01

  gone and opened a bank account in the same name, and was depositing all of the checks into his account. So he was literally embezzling money from me. And I realized this in a day. And he turned on me, had the sheriff come, made me get out of the office. I had to stand outside while he loaded all the carpet rugs, drove my forklift down the road. I went to court six different times to try and get that back. And every time, he showed that letter.

• 19:27Guy Raz?

  This was a letter that you wrote essentially handing the business over to him.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 19:32Guy Raz?

  As an insurance policy. Did you lose all of your money from the business? Or were you able to recover some money?

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Hundred and eighty thousand. I lost it all.

• 19:42Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  So yeah, it was tough. I put so much money into that.

• 19:45Guy Raz?

  So it sounds like chalk it up to just being young and inexperienced and naive.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  For me, you know what? For me, in my life, as I look back on it, I'm really glad that happened. You can't learn that stuff.

• 19:57Guy Raz?

  Sure.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  You know, there's nowhere to go to learn these things. And so it just taught me how to deal with heartache, how to deal with deceit, how to deal with people that are not living in the same frequency that you are. It's taught me a lot of that and not to get down into that with them and just be a bigger person.

• 20:17Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Essentially, you lost your business.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  I lost everything. Divorced. I was living in my parents' basement.

• 20:24Guy Raz?

  And you guys had one kid at the time?

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Two.

• 20:27Guy Raz?

  Two.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  By that time, yeah.

• 20:28Guy Raz?

  Hmm. So you, you come out of this experience, losing your flooring business and your marriage. But, but kind of to your point, I mean, it, it, it open, I mean, it sort of opens you up to an opportunity to make a, a major life pivot, right? One that is going to affect the entire course of your life, right? I mean, you, you basically decide to completely change your career, right?

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Yes. All of that led me to think to myself, okay, if I'm starting life over, what do I want to do? I'd always wanted to be a chiropractor. My neighbor growing up was the chiropractor for the Utah Jazz, Craig Buehler, an amazing man. And I'd watch him work on Karl Malone and John Stockton with his hands. And I'd see him do these things. And I thought, I, I want to do that. So I thought, you know what? I'm going to be a chiropractor. In the meantime, my brother, my second youngest brother, became a chiropractor. He had a successful practice. So I'm sitting in his practice, I'm like, his name's Kirk, I'm like, bro, this is awesome. Like, could I do this? He said, yeah, you, you may have to do some science things, but you could probably

• 21:39Speaker 01

  fast track this and get done in three and a half, four years.

• 21:43Guy Raz?

  But I wonder, given your experience in flooring, and you had had success as an installer and, and, and running a shop, why didn't you just go back to doing a version of that? And, cause you knew you could make money doing that.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  I didn't like what the future looked like. I saw the people in that industry, including my dad, and I just didn't like that world. Yes, I knew how to work. I wasn't afraid of that.

• 22:07Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  But I didn't, I didn't like that I worked for this company and they could fire me whenever they wanted to.

• 22:12Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  The lifestyle, the grind, the, the how quickly someone could take something away from you. As much time and effort as I put in and all the relationships I had, I didn't like that. And they were guys that were my dad's age, who were getting let go. And they're 50s, now they have to go out and reinvent themselves. I didn't want that. There was, the answer to that question, Guy, probably is, there was nothing in the future of those paths that was I, that I was excited about.

• 22:42Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 22:44Guy Raz?

  So you decide, okay, you want to do this. Um, and you, this is you're like in your late, maybe 29, almost 30, you decide to move to LA to go to chiropractor school. Why, why did you decide to, to leave Utah and go to LA at that, because your whole family's in Utah, your support system is there, like, I mean, you had kids in Utah, that's a big decision.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a lot in there, actually, Guy. Um, you know, talking to my brother, I said, hey, what schools can I go to? And he said, well, there's only a few in the country, and they're not in Utah. So I'm looking around, I'm like, oh, there's one in LA. I didn't want to move to LA. And this is a really profound moment in my life. I was living in my parents' basement, in the room I grew up in, getting ready in the shower, I showered as a girl, and I shut the lights out, got ready, and I turned to go up the stairs. As I'm halfway up the stairs, someone behind me says, get ready to say goodbye to your kids, because you're going to leave for a long time and you have to go on, you're gonna do, you're on a mission.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  I stopped in the, in the stairway and I had goosebumps and I turned around and I was like, what was that? And I walk up the top of the stairs and I kind of stand there for a second and I'm like, oh shit, I have to leave. Like I gotta go. And honestly, Guy, I thought, you know what? Whatever that thing was that talked me in the stairway, I'm just gonna keep moving forward in faith and hope that something works out.

• 24:14Guy Raz?

  I, I wanna, I wanna just kind of ponder this for a moment, right? Because inner voices are real. And whatever they might be, a spirit, or faith, or God, or religion, or just, just your consciousness talking to you, um, there, it's real. Like, these things happen and there are moments that we can all, many of us can point to and when we hear these messages. Um, and, and, and I'm curious because you grew up in a very strong faith community, and yet you still were kind of moving away from your faith at that time. So how do you, how, how are you reconciling those two things? Like, on the one hand, you're kind of moving out, away from faith.

• 24:57Guy Raz?

  On the other hand, you have this kind of God epiphany, road to Damascus moment in your life.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, it's, I, I love that you're asking these questions because they're real to me. There's something about it that was so strong and profound that it felt like, I don't know, looking back on it now, it's, it's, it was, it changed my life. That voice became a, a thing that I checked in with a lot. Because that day in the... You got me talking about this now, I'm getting emotional. But that day, it set a standard.

• 25:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  So that was my yardstick. Yeah, it was profound.

• 25:42Guy Raz?

  I, I, I'm sure. I'm sure it was.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  Sorry.

• 25:50Guy Raz?

  No, no, no, please.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  I'm an emotional person and I've gotten used to that and I'm okay with crying. I think being exposing yourself to those types of things and being vulnerable is strength.

• 26:01Guy Raz?

  It is.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Within weeks, I'm now leaving my kids and that was, I'm not, I don't want to talk about it too much because I'll probably bawl my eyes out, but that was probably the worst experience of my life.

• 26:16Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  And you can imagine, I have two young kids that are younger than two.

• 26:21Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  I had them come to my parents' house so that I could say goodbye to them. I had my, my Jeep, it was a 1987 Jeep Wagoneer, packed with everything I had, literally all I owned. And I drove away from that house and I cried the entire way to Los Angeles.

• 26:38Guy Raz?

  I bet. As a dad, I'm, I'm feeling this.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  It was tough.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  I learned in the church too, this, this, the saying that sacrifice is giving up something good for something better.

• 26:53Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  And I had to believe in that. Like I had to believe in that. I put all my chips on that and I bet on myself.

• 27:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 27:04Guy Raz?

  So you drive out to LA to start, to start this new life and, and how did you find chiropractor school? Like, did you, did you enjoy it? Was it, was it hard? Was it harder than you expected?

• 27:16Speaker 01

  It was super challenging. I, I went to, uh, my first day of chiropractic school, first class, they're taking role. I'm in there for five minutes. This kid opens the door and says, hey, is Jason Wersland here? I raise my hand. He brings me out in the hallway and he says, I'm sorry, I miscalculated your hours. You have to go to school for two more years to get your Bachelor of Science before you can start chiropractic school. So I have to pull you out of this class. Can you imagine? I, I tell this all the time. I'm joking, but I'm kind of not. There was a window behind him and I visualized me throwing him out the window.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  So I called my ex-wife and I was like, hey, listen, I don't know that I can do this. And she said something to this day that was one of the, one of those things. But she said, you are not coming home. You're going to stick this out because my kids are not going to have a failure for a dad.

• 28:06Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  And I was like, thank you very much. So I had to get a lot of my early BS stuff done before I could get into that program. But I was going to the same school.

• 28:17Guy Raz?

  And, and this is like, what, like organic chemistry and things like that?

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 28:22Guy Raz?

  All right.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Things that at a, at age 29, you're not fresh on. So.

• 28:27Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  You imagine how challenging it was. I had to pay for a tutor and like, but I was going to make this happen.

• 28:34Guy Raz?

  Hmm. All right. So you, I, I guess you wind up taking a lot longer to finish school because of all these requirements that you had to do. But, but during that time, from what I understand, you, you also got a job as an assistant to a chiropr, like an apprentice to, to a chiropractor, right?

• 28:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he was a great guy. He had a great place.

• 28:56Guy Raz?

  What, what, what was this guy's name?

• 28:58Speaker 01

  His name was Rob Palmohawk.

• 29:00Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  And he was, he was there to teach me technique. He was there to teach me the flow of a patient. He was there to teach me how to read x-rays and, and like, in my world, I realized that the school was one thing, but out, out in the real world was another thing. And that he was teaching me these real world experiences and he also let me build a practice. So you helped me build a patient base and I had my own patients coming in. I had my own schedule. As my schedule increased, my, his schedule would decrease. So I'm not working on his patients so much anymore. I'm kind of building my own practice.

• 29:33Guy Raz?

  All right. There's something that is just confounding to me about a lifestyle choice that you made at this point in your life. Cause you're a chiropractor, you're focused on alignment and you're focused on a healthy spine and you rode a motorcycle. Now I've ridden motorcycles before. They're fun. It just seems like a really risky and bad decision to make, given the line of work you were in.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  Well, that sounds really smart right now, doesn't it?

• 30:02Speaker 01

  At the time, I lived in Venice, my school was in Hollywood and the practice was in Beverly Hills. So if anyone knows LA.

• 30:10Guy Raz?

  Traffic.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  That's a commute.

• 30:12Guy Raz?

  That's crazy.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  The 10, down the 101, through the city. And I'm just like, I, this is driving me crazy. And I'd see these motorcycles flying by me because you can split traffic in LA. So I was like, huh. So I went and bought a motorcycle and, and it was, I was overconfident in my ability to drive.

• 30:32Guy Raz?

  And everyone rides a motorcycle at some point has some kind of incident.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  Everyone.

• 30:37Guy Raz?

  At some point, everyone.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 30:40Guy Raz?

  You would, you had a pretty bad one.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:42Guy Raz?

  October 17th, 2007, what happened that day?

• 30:47Speaker 01

  I had a test that day at school. It was a physical therapy test. So it was one of my last PT tests, which I think is ironic. I woke up, jump on my bike, flying up the 10, pass the 405, get into downtown. I just wear the 10 and the 110 split in front of the old Staples Center.

• 31:06Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  And I'm flying through traffic and I'm gaining speed as I get into that corner. Out of nowhere, a guy comes off the 10 and he's just shows up in my lane out of nowhere. And I hit this guy headfirst, right into the driver's side door.

• 31:21Guy Raz?

  And you fly off?

• 31:23Speaker 01

  Flew off across two lanes.

• 31:26Guy Raz?

  Oh.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  And I'm unconscious and I wake up and the first thought was, am I dead? I'm bleeding, broken helmet, backpack, shit all over. People were getting out of their cars. And I stand up and I'm like, I'm looking at myself. I'm like, what the heck? I'm not even really hurt.

• 31:46Guy Raz?

  And, and so you didn't have, like, you didn't break any bones, but you did get injured. You had some, like, issues that started to come up in your neck and, and part of your back, right? What, what, what happened?

• 31:57Speaker 01

  So I ended up realizing, I felt like I was okay. I had a massive concussion. And then the pain started to come on.

• 32:04Guy Raz?

  Where'd you feel the pain?

• 32:06Speaker 01

  In my trap and my rhomboid on the right side. It was like someone had a knife underneath my shoulder blade.

• 32:11Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  And I kept thinking like, I'm in chiropractic school. There has to be someone here that can fix this. And I'm trying to practice, so I have to go to school. I'm going to practice, working on patients and I'm, and I'm dealing with this pain and it's like unrelenting. I never experienced pain like that. So I started looking for things that could take the pain away. I had to sit around with my, my right hand on the top of my head. Because it would take the pressure off the nerve and it'd take it from a 10 out of 10 to like a five. So I could at least breathe. And this went on for days and days. So like you said, the accident was October 17th of 2007. By Christmas of 2007, I was incapacitated.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Couldn't move, I couldn't sneeze, I didn't want to talk, I didn't want to eat. I'd talk about how much I care about my kids. I literally, when they'd call on the phone, I, I couldn't talk to them. I just didn't have the energy to fight the pain and engage.

• 33:10Guy Raz?

  So presumably you used medication, right?

• 33:13Speaker 01

  Well, I tried it, but when you have nerve pain, nothing, nothing, not Percoc, not the best drugs in the world deal with nerve pain. And in my mind, I think this is really important for people to understand. It wasn't computing. It wasn't making sense. I'm thinking, I, I sacrificed my life to do this thing that I thought I could help people in this exact situation. And there's no help for me.

• 33:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Like, that's a problem.

• 33:40Guy Raz?

  And, and nerve pain is, is it almost always connected to compression, like spinal compression?

• 33:46Speaker 01

  It's nerves always get compressed, but mine was a nine millimeter disc bulge. And it pushed on the nerve. And I didn't realize that nerve pain isn't on a time clock. And it doesn't care about anything.

• 34:01Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  So when someone has sciatica, a, a woman is pregnant and she starts talking about the pain in her legs. There's no way you can understand that pain.

• 34:10Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  Unless you've had it before.

• 34:12Guy Raz?

  All right. So you're you're trying to work through this and also, by the way, still working at this clinic, right?

• 34:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:18Guy Raz?

  So working through the your own pain while you were adjusting other people?

• 34:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it was, I'm I'm looking around my practice, like, what can I use?

• 34:28Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  I'd have different people adjust me and try and do traction and it just never went away. The only thing that I could find in my office that helped was this vibrating table that we would lay patients on to do traction. So I started just laying on the table, like I'd just go to the practice and lay on the table. And I'd have to get up off the table because the pain would come back. I'm going through this cycle, guy, and I'm thinking, there's got to be something better. This, I almost have it. So I was thinking, like, what if I, I'm sitting in my apartment one night, and it was like, three in the morning, and I'm just problem solving, problem solving, and leaning on all the resourcefulness I'd learned in my life. We talked about the farm

• 35:11Speaker 01

  and all the power tools. In my mind, I'm searching for a solution. And I'm looking at my hands, and I'm doing, kind of rubbing my hands back and forth like this. And I'm thinking, what is this? Like, oh, my God, that's a jigsaw.

• 35:24Guy Raz?

  And a jigsaw, for, you know, people who don't know, they're just, it's a knife, it's a blade that goes up and down. You can just, you can cut through wood, essentially.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. If you've ever been, you ever seen anyone cutting wood, they usually use a circular saw, which is around, looks like a plate, or this up and down thing?

• 35:42Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  This is the up and down thing.

• 35:44Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  I ran out, grabbed a jigsaw, brought it in my apartment.

• 35:49Guy Raz?

  A handheld jigsaw.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  A handheld Makita jigsaw.

• 35:52Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  I'm looking at it, and it's three in the morning. So Home Depot is not open. I don't have anything. I'm just kind of like, oh, I know what I'll do. So I bend the blade, I wrap a dish towel around the blade as tight as I can. And then I wrap some electrical tape around that to protect myself from the blade, because I just wanted to see if this worked.

• 36:13Guy Raz?

  You want to see if more intense vibration, more concentrated vibration on your trap, or wherever you were feeling pain, could do the trick. Because you knew that there was some relief from that vibrating table, but not as much as you wanted.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Exactly. So I turned that on. And as I'm moving it around, just back and forth, really slow up and down my arm, my nervous system starts to slow down. And I start to get really tired. I hadn't slept for days. I think it was around 40 days. I'd gotten naps here and there, but I had never, I hadn't had a night's rest. And as I was doing that, I thought, okay, someone had to think, thought of this. Like, I can't be the first one that's done this. Someone had to thought, think of this, this has got to be out there in the world somewhere. But for right now, this is working and I'm going to make it work. So I did that through the night, woke up the next morning. I didn't like how barbaric that looked. So I was thinking to myself, huh, what could I do?

• 37:09Speaker 01

  I had a bunch of practice foam golf balls. I love golf. And I made a hole in the ball with a pen, sort of pried it open a little bit so it would fit over that disc towel.

• 37:18Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  And now I could just, it, it, it wasn't stabbing me. Now it was just hitting me. And I was, I would sit there and the Makita had a dial on the top that went from zero to 10.

• 37:29Guy Raz?

  Mm hmm.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  That was speed, easy, right? Like, okay, I want slower or I'm fast.

• 37:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  So I'm moving it around and I stop and I found a spot and I'm like, oh God, that feels so good. I'm breathing, just moving it around in my body until I find a place that it feels good. I open my eyes and I look and it's on the number four. I'm like, huh, that's interesting. There's something about that number and I don't know what it is yet.

• 37:55Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  I found out later that that's actually frequency. And four was 40 hertz. And if you look now, if you Google 40 hertz, it will come up with the reset frequency. There's, there's a lot of things woven into that number. And I learned by firsthand experience what 40 hertz can do for the body. I was sort of problem solving in my head, thinking, okay, I went through all this, sacrificed away from my kids, started practice, all these things. And now I'm sitting here and I have this tool in my hand. And that number four changed the way I feel.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  There is something to that and it will reveal itself to me later.

• 38:45Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, Jason discovers that this jury rigged jigsaw can also help his patients. So he goes out and buys hundreds more. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 39:09Guy Raz?

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• 39:54Guy Raz?

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• 40:39Guy Raz?

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• 41:24Guy Raz?

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• 42:09Guy Raz?

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• 42:46Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's early 2008 and the jigsaw that Jason has jury-rigged into kind of a massage gun is actually working to relieve the nerve pain in his arm.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  So January, February, March was just to keep me out of pain. And I learned that experience. March, April, May, now I can kind of lift my arm and I'm realizing what it does for the range of motion of a joint. And then the next thing I started doing was getting myself better. I started using this as a recovery tool before foam rolling was even around.

• 43:22Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And just to be clear, you weren't just using this and doing nothing else. You were also stretching. You were doing mobility exercises as well.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  Movement is medicine and that I had to move.

• 43:33Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  By October of that same year, I had been to Utah, came back, walk in, patient, the new patient. Sit down, my secretary hands me the paperwork and I'm going through this guy's story, his injury. How old is he? Wow, he's the same age as me. That's weird. What does he do? He's a bus driver. He was in a head-on bus collision with another bus and it threw him through his windshield and into the other guy's windshield.

• 43:59Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  So he had, I'm not kidding you, I could have put my name at the top of his intake form.

• 44:05Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  Seven millimeter disc bulge, no insurance.

• 44:08Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  So I was doing his initial exam and I'm looking at him and guy, this thing was screaming in the back of my head. He needs this. He has to use this. But I'm like, how do I tell this guy to use a jigsaw? So I asked him to come back the next day to bring his wife. I said, I have something I think that'll help you. Comes back the next day. I bring my Makita jigsaw to the office in a Ralph's paper grocery bag. Think about that. Walk in, sit down, and I'm telling him, listen, I went through what you're going through. I just kind of came out of it and I think this is going to help you. So I take it out, plug it in, turn it on. His wife's looking at me like, what are we doing here?

• 44:50Speaker 01

  I put it on his shoulder and in seconds, his shoulders drop and he lifts his chin, looks at me, he's like, oh wow.

• 44:57Guy Raz?

  But what was the idea? Was the idea like you would give him this jigsaw or you would, he'd buy it from you or something or cause like, what did you think you would do with it?

• 45:08Speaker 01

  My intention was to use this as a team.

• 45:12Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  He would come in, I would show him how to use it. Okay, do this and do that. And I was seeing him have the same experiences that I was having. And so I just went down the same path. And I kept having to exchange the attachments because I ran out of practice foam golf balls. So I went to the Pets R Us and I bought these cat toys, the rainbow color foam.

• 45:34Guy Raz?

  Oh yeah, I got those. Got tons of them at my house. I know exactly what you're talking about.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  So I would go and buy a bag of those and I'd just tell him, hey, just replace this as your poke, as the as the thing pokes through because by then I'd actually got a wooden dowel and kind of made it a little bit better. But I went through the same experience with him.

• 45:50Guy Raz?

  I mean, this was sort of your. You're patient zero, right?

• 45:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:55Guy Raz?

  I mean, you were, and I wonder, I mean, I wonder, Jason, at this point, were you thinking, I'm just gonna see what it does for him because maybe I can actually start using this on my other patients? Or were you thinking, maybe I'll turn this into a business? Or not quite yet?

• 46:13Speaker 01

  Not then. I mean, my goal was to do what my brother and Dr. Rob did was have a practice and,

• 46:19Guy Raz?

  Have your patients and maybe have this weird tool, this Makita drill. And people, oh, you gotta go see Jason, Dr. Jason. This guy's got this like Makita drill tool that he uses. It's awesome.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  That, that's what it was. I kept thinking to myself that someone's made this. I'll run into it somewhere, but in the meantime, I'm gonna keep this thing low key and use it when I need to.

• 46:40Guy Raz?

  But what did your fellow chiropractors think of it? I mean, were people like, dude, that's a jigsaw. What are you doing with a jigsaw?

• 46:47Speaker 01

  Exactly. I mean, the number of times I heard literally that statement.

• 46:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  Bro, that's a jigsaw. What are you doing?

• 46:57Speaker 01

  But watching this guy get better was fascinating to me. And now it's December of 2008 and I fly home to be with my family for Christmas. I taught this guy what to do, said, hey, I'm gonna be gone for a few weeks.

• 47:10Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  You know, come back, walk in my office. My secretary's at the front desk. She's like, hey, your patient's in your room. So when she said that, I was like, oh, like he may have digressed. Maybe he did something he shouldn't have. I've been gone for a few weeks. Maybe he exacerbated the problem. I'm walking down the hallway and I hear the jigsaw going. And he looks up at me with this biggest smile on his face. And he holds it up and looks at me and goes, doc, you have to figure this thing out. It saved my life.

• 47:40Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  It was like that voice from the stairway was coupled with the universe and it just opened hand punched me in the chest. And I realized, I gotta figure this out.

• 47:56Guy Raz?

  Okay, so, so this is, this guy's like, dude, he's like, you have to do something. And, and so you knew you were on to something, right? And so what did you do next? Did you say, all right, let me make more of these jigsaws? And see if I can like sell them to my patients?

• 48:14Speaker 01

  By the time I'd used that on him, there were a handful of people that were interested in it. And they were

• 48:21Guy Raz?

  Cause they saw, probably saw him using it.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, in, in my clinic and there were other, um, Kairos that were coming in to this, to that clinic from our school and friends. So I'm like, I'll just start, like, I just need to get some of these and start experimenting with them. Cause I'd only had this one.

• 48:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  So I was like, well, where can I buy jigsaws for really cheap? So I go to Home Depot and the cheapest one I could find was like $39. And I'm like, man, and it was a Kawasaki. And I thought in the carpet world, there's wholesale, retail, there's gotta be wholesale. So I literally looked up Kawasaki jigsaws. And there was a warehouse, like a, I don't remember what it was, but they were in Long Beach. But I just picked up the phone and I called them and there was a customer service girl on the other phone. And she was so cool. I said, Hey, listen, I wanted 10, like I want to buy 10 of these jigsaws that I see on your website. What's the wholesale price? And she said, the wholesale price is $19.99. I was like, oh, wow. Can I get 10 of those? And she's like, no, you can't.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  You have to have an account. Like, oh, what do you have to do to have an account? So you have to have a credit line. I'm like, well, I'm not going to get credit. What do I have to do to order these? She said, well, if you place an order for $2,500 and you pay for that, then you have an account and we'll give you a credit line. I'm like, wow, where can I get 2,500 bucks?

• 49:44Guy Raz?

  You were still, you were still working towards your final degree, right?

• 49:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I was still like, this was going to be a side project, a side hustle. Like I might sell them in my clinic. I don't, I didn't know what I was going to do. I had to figure it out.

• 49:55Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  So I call my brother and I'm like, hey, I know it sounds crazy, but I think this jigsaw thing I'm working on is gonna turn into, I wanna figure it out. Can I borrow 2,500 bucks from you? I'll pay you back as quickly as I can. He's like, "Yeah, sure." Gives me his credit card. I call this girl. I order him. And because I ordered 2,500 dollars worth of product, my cost went way down. So now I had, it was almost 11 dollars for each one of these jigsaws.

• 50:22Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  So I get 250 of these jigsaws. And they're all around me in my life.

• 50:29Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Alright, so what did you do with these 250 jigsaws? Did you, did you start to retrofit them with, with, you know, these like, hard foam, you know, cat toys?

• 50:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I went to Home Depot and I bought 250 3-inch bolts. Then I went to the rivet section at Home Depot and I bought these little screw-on rivets that fit that bolt. And then I went to the fence post cap section in Home Depot and I bought a bunch of fence post caps. And I measured a ball, a foam toy ball, and it fit inside of that upside-down fence post cap. I'd, I'd literally put super glue around it and I'd stick the ball in there. After I put a rivet in it, I had a guy out in the valley in LA powder coat them, so they were black. And he welded them into the piece of this jigsaw. And then I would put them back together and I would sell

• 51:23Speaker 01

  one jigsaw retrofitted with two of those ball attachments that I made.

• 51:28Guy Raz?

  And, and, and by the way, this was a plug-in, was it a plug-in jigsaw? Or was it a, was it like a rechargeable, like, you know, like?

• 51:36Speaker 01

  It was a plug-in that had a shorter cable than your iPhone cables. I mean, it was, I couldn't get more than three or four feet away from a plug.

• 51:43Guy Raz?

  So you had to sit next to the outlet, plug it in and, and put the Kawasaki jigsaw thing on your body?

• 51:51Speaker 01

  Yep. And it was the cheap, think about this. It was the cheapest jigsaw you could find. The vents on the side of this Kawasaki jigsaw, when you started it and you stopped it, you let go of the trigger, sparks would fly out. So that was my first iteration. But guy, people were buying them as fast as I could make them.

• 52:12Guy Raz?

  How much were you selling it for?

• 52:13Speaker 01

  Two hundred and fifty bucks.

• 52:15Guy Raz?

  That's great. So you were buying them for eleven, but putting, you know, considerable amount of time in each one. And you had, you had clients, you had, so those were your first customers.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would tell the guys, look, I can sell these for probably four hundred dollars, but I'll sell them to you for two fifty, but I want your feedback. After you use it, it's mandatory that you tell me what you would change on it. So the feedback I got from that experience was, I can't have a cable. I don't like have to screw the attachments on and off, like that takes too long. Other than that and the noise, it's great. Okay, that's awesome. How much would you, if I perfected all of those things, how much would you pay for that? This is what got me. Everyone said I'd pay a thousand dollars for that.

• 52:59Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  That's the first time I thought to myself, wait a minute. There's something here. Like I can make a couple thousand bucks a month doing this.

• 53:07Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I'm, you can see, you can find an image of this on your website and you can find it on the internet. And it's amazing because you're, I am looking at a Kawasaki jigsaw with a cat toy ball and a fence post. Now that I see this, I'm like, there's the fence post, there's the rivet, there's the cat toy. Like, it's crazy. You really, like, you really jury rigged this together.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  I knew it wasn't perfect. I knew I wasn't even close to perfect. But I needed input. I needed feedback.

• 53:39Guy Raz?

  And it worked. Clearly, it was like, there was a, there was a percussive vibration that people felt was helping their pain.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 53:48Guy Raz?

  So tell me about how you first were approached by somebody or decided to turn this into something bigger, more formal. Like, you, you kind of struggled through this for six years, right? Like, I mean, the odds that this would succeed, I still think were low.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, so in two thousand fourteen, I had six ten ninety-nine tax forms. Because I had six different jobs that I was doing, trying to keep the money coming in while I was doing this on the side. So one of the ten ninety-nine jobs that I had was doing medical billing in the workers comp and PI world. And that's a kind of another story, but I ended up meeting this guy named Todd. And Todd had a business that he was creating a software platform for medical billing in the work comp and PI world. And I thought that was a great idea. So that was what I was kind of doing at night. And I treated Todd one day in his office and he was like, oh my

• 54:50Speaker 01

  God, dude, that thing's amazing. So suddenly now Todd had the brains, the capital, and potentially the relationships in that work comp space where I thought, hey, maybe this is like the path.

• 55:03Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  So Todd and I, we were doing some billing late one night. We'd gone down to Maria Callender's and had a couple of drinks. We came back upstairs and it was like 1:30, 2 o'clock in the morning. And he's in his office 50 yards away from me. I'm in my office and we're kind of yelling back and forth to each other what this thing would be called. The thumper, the rabbit. Like, we're thinking of all these things it could be. And he's like, therapy gun. And I hear him saying it and he finally yells out, dude, I got it. And I go in his office, I'm standing in his doorway, I can't remember this. I'm leaning against the door, I'm like, what? And he goes, Theraguns. I'm like, Theraguns? He's like, yeah, Theraguns with a Z, because your name's Wersland with a Z. And I'm like, yeah, but my name's Wersland with an S. He's

• 55:48Speaker 01

  like, yeah, but people say it that way. So I think Theraguns. So that's what it was called for a while. I actually have t-shirts made that says Theraguns with a Z.

• 55:58Guy Raz?

  All right. But so you have a name at this point, which is great, right? Even though it's temporary. And obviously, the next step is like manufacturing these things, right? Like, you're not going to keep building them out of a jigsaw and a cat toy, right? I mean, and you can't have like a wire connected to it. So how did you go about getting these made?

• 56:20Speaker 01

  So at that same time, my younger brother, youngest brother, was working for a woman that owned a distributor, a flooring distributor. Her and my brother and my dad knew her. And she was from China. And I was like, hey, there's a link.

• 56:32Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  So my brother says, hey, let me introduce you to Angela. So I go and I meet Angela.

• 56:38Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  And then I moved into the first Theragun that I mass produced came from a connection that Angela met, introduced me to. The guy's name was China Bob. Not joking, that was his American name. His business card said China Bob. And Angela paid for China Bob to come over and sit with me in a room in her office. He didn't speak a word of English. So now I'm sitting here talking to Angela and she's translating to Bob. And Angela doesn't know amplitude, frequency, attack. Like she doesn't know any of those things.

• 57:08Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  And I don't know what she's saying to him. So he leaves with his big smile on his face. And I'm thinking, he didn't have a clue what I'm talking about. So I literally thought, Guy, that that was it. I'm like, this is the end. I can't go any further. I really can't mass produce these.

• 57:25Guy Raz?

  But why? Why did you have that? Why did you feel that way? I mean, he was the guy who had the factory. You were just telling him your specs.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  I didn't think it translated.

• 57:33Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  And I think, I really believe now, as I look back on it, we all have a bully in our head.

• 57:40Guy Raz?

  Mm hmm.

• 57:41Speaker 01

  And that guy was coming at me. Like, what are you doing? This is a waste of time. Why are you doing this? And I would kind of succumb to that. You know what? You're probably right. Like, I don't know why I'm doing this. It's not going to work.

• 57:56Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, Jason finally gets more Theraguns out into the world and then into the public eye, like really into the public eye, during one of the most watched sporting events of 2017. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 58:34Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's around 2014, 2015, and Jason has entered into a partnership with his brother and his brother's colleague Angela. Angela knows a guy named China Bob, and China Bob has connections to Chinese factories, where Jason is trying to find a manufacturer for Theraguns. And when we left off, Jason didn't think China Bob was going to deliver. But then...

• 59:03Speaker 01

  I get a call from my brother and he's at Angela's office. Dude, I got a gun from Bob. I'm like, what? Yeah, I got this thing from Bob. I said, show it to me. So he, it's FaceTime. So he FaceTimes me and I'm looking at it. And it was still real grainy FaceTime at the time. And I said, turn it on. I want to hear it. And he turned it on and I could just hear that it was too high. The frequency wasn't right. So I'm like, hey, of course they didn't get it right. I'm that kind of an attitude. Tell her to tell him it's got to be slower. Three weeks later, we get another one. My brother calls, hey, we got this thing. And he turns it on. I was like, whoa, bring that home. So he brings it home and it's this orange ugly looking thing

• 59:48Speaker 01

  that had this attachment that Bob made. And I turn it on and I'm like, oh, my God, this is it. This is it.

• 59:55Guy Raz?

  Yeah. All right. So now you've got this prototype and presumably, I mean, you already knew people, right, who would, who would be interested in buying it. I mean, I mean, by this point, you, I think you'd, you'd built out a pretty nice network of patients and you were also working with a lot of professional athletes, right?

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:00:14Guy Raz?

  And so, and so you're thinking, okay, with Angela, my brother, I'll, I'll make these things in China. And then I'll just kind of sell them through my existing channels. Is that right?

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. So what happened was I was working with a guy, a friend of mine named James Anderson, who played for the New England Patriots at the time. And he was so fascinated by what this did. He's like, I'm going to get this in the NFL for you. So I said, what does that look like? He said, well, the trainer at the Patriots is one of the best trainers in the league, and I know him really well. I'm going to connect you with him. So he goes back to camp, talks to him, and that guy calls me. His name's Jim. Jim calls and says, hey, James says you got more of these. How many more of these do you have? I said, how many do you want? He said, I don't know. Can you bring me like 20 of them? And I was like, what? My dad had these big carpet sample bags that you could like fit a Volkswagen in. They're

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  huge. And I packed two of those full Aether guns, loaded them on an airplane. I flew out to the New England Patriots, the beginning of the 2014 season. I met them at their hotel. Belichick and the team let me set up in the lobby. I, I sold 20 Aether guns in 20 minutes.

• 1:01:25Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  As fast as these guys could buy them. I have photos from it. It was the most amazing experience.

• 1:01:29Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  So I walk out and I'm sitting in my car, empty bags, and I've got a wad of cash in my hand. And I'm like, that's what I'm gonna do. Not one of them asked me how much, not one of them tried to negotiate, and they knew what it did for them because of what James was saying. So that was like a huge aha moment for me.

• 1:01:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  So I come back, I go to the bank, literally load it into ATM. Come back to LA, I go to Angela, go to her office, super excited about this and she hands me a check and she says, here's your commission. And I was said, what are you talking about? So, well, that's what you make. And I started looking at it, didn't make sense to me. I was asking a lot of questions and she's like, well, that's, you know, we have this business partnership. I'm going to run the bank account and you'll just make a commission.

• 1:02:15Guy Raz?

  You were not an owner.

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  I was an owner, but she was paying me a commission on the sales of the product.

• 1:02:20Guy Raz?

  I see.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  None of that made sense to me.

• 1:02:23Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  So I call my brother, his name's Alex. I'm like, Lex, what's going on? He said, I don't, what are you talking about? So I called Davis, the guy in China. I said, can you send me the bill of lading for that last order? Cause the bill of lading will tell me how much we paid for those products. Angela was telling me we were paying 150. So I'm like, something's fishy here. Davis sends me the bill of lading and he was charging us $71. So I went back in Angela's office. I sat down and I said, I just got this bill of lading and I need you to tell me what's going on. And she said, you need to leave my office. And I said, I'm not leaving until you tell me what's going on. And she just stared

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  at me, like, didn't say a word. It was the most, it was like a movie. She just, it was like a stare down. And I said, look, you telling, not telling me what's going on is telling me what's going on. So we're done. Went, got an attorney. I had to go, she had 250 jigsaws in her warehouse and she would not give them to me until I bought the company back from her. Those are the only 250 I had left, literally.

• 1:03:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  So I rented a U-Haul, got a sheriff, got a warrant, went out, gave her like $24,000 in a check, bought my Theragons back.

• 1:03:46Guy Raz?

  So you bought her, you entirely, you bought her out entirely or no?

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  I bought her and my brother out.

• 1:03:52Guy Raz?

  And how did you, how'd you have the cash to do it? 25 grand?

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  I didn't.

• 1:03:55Guy Raz?

  Did you have, you didn't?

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  I had to go borrow the money. Like I literally had to go to a bank and borrow the money.

• 1:04:00Guy Raz?

  So you, you basically paid 25 grand or whatever, which is, you're lucky, it wasn't more than that.

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Thank God. And that's funny. At the time I was like, man, I hope this company's not worth a lot.

• 1:04:15Guy Raz?

  All right. So after that partnership ended, you eventually did find a business partner that did work out, a guy named Ben Nazarian, who you work with today.

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:27Guy Raz?

  And I think you met him through some of the connections you had in the NFL, right? But how did you end up partnering with him?

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  So Ben Nazarian, Ben's family owned Qualcomm. Ben's dad was an amazing person in the business world. So their family had quite a bit of money. And so I was like, I gotta go meet Ben. So I called his secretary, set up an appointment. Now, they're in the Rolex building downtown Beverly Hills. He's on the top floor of the Rolex building. Imagine where I've come from. This Utah kid.

• 1:05:01Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  Like scrappy. And I walk into this dynasty of a family's building. And I'm meeting Ben. And I set up my little chiropractic table that had a hole burned in it. And I'm sitting there with two theraguns, waiting for him to come in the room.

• 1:05:16Guy Raz?

  Because he was the guy that you needed as an investor? Like this was, those were the stakes?

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. If you think about this, and I hope people that are listening realize, think, imagine the journey that I went through. And now I'm sitting in a billionaire's office, going to present him with something that I think changes people's lives.

• 1:05:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  All stakes were there. And he walks in the door, he swings the door open. And he had this positive energy and this big smile. And I immediately felt like I knew him. So I'm like, hey, my name's Dr. Jason, and I have this theragun. And do you have anything that I could like work on that you particularly have with your body have issues with? I couldn't have planned it better. He looks at me and goes, actually, I have scoliosis. And I get massages on my upper back all the time to relieve the pain. And I'm like. Of course you do. So he lays on the table face down and I treat him. And you can imagine, I'd treated thousands of people at this point.

• 1:06:15Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  I did the very best treatment I could on this guy. And he sits up off the table and he says, oh my God, what is that? So I kind of tell him in 30 seconds what it is. And we sit down at this conference table and he said, what do you want to do? And I said, honestly, I want to get this out to as many people in the world as fast as I can, because I feel like someone's going to steal this idea from me. Literally reaches across with his hand, shakes my hand and said, let's do it.

• 1:06:45Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  That was a Friday. He said, what are you doing tomorrow? And I said, nothing. He goes, can you come here in the morning? I said, yeah. So I show up Saturday morning. We sat in that room from eight o'clock Saturday morning until three o'clock Sunday morning, building out this company.

• 1:07:03Guy Raz?

  I, I mean, I, I have so many questions about this meeting, right? Cause I mean, I think it's clear that this was also another like gift from the gods. Like Ben coming into your life was another moment. It was like that voice, you know? And we've all had that, you know? I've had people who've come into my life that have changed my life fundamentally. My wife is one of them. And so, I mean, if Ben was going to put in the money and was going to help you build this out, what did it mean for your stake in, in your company that you started?

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  Good question. Yeah. So in that conversation, he said, well, listen, I, I, if I'm going to do this with you, I usually like to have majority shares. And I said, I'm fine with that. Like, cause I, look, I needed someone like Ben. And I think what's really important that I learned is that I'm really good at what I do. And I'm not too good at some of the things he does. I needed someone to run the business side of things. And he's like, listen, I'm going to put in half a million and we'll use that half a million and we'll see what we can do with that half a million. But I get 51%. I'm like, done. Like, oh my God, thank you.

• 1:08:14Guy Raz?

  That's amazing. So like, this is 2015 when you meet him. And with that half a million dollars, you guys were gonna really make the first official pro. Well, there was a previous version, but you were gonna make a better version. It was the G1.

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:30Guy Raz?

  Tell me about what his, when he said, you know, when you agreed that this was the right partner, what was the first step in creating the business that could then sell this? Like, what was he, because your strategy up until that point was like, let's get this to the NFL. Let's get this into the, you know, and, but that's a limited market.

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think Ben will tell you the same thing, that he thought the same way you did. He's like, okay, hang on a second. How many NFL players are there? 1,500? How many baseball players are there? How many college? He's like, even if I go all the way down, that's like 30,000 athletes. That's not a business.

• 1:09:07Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  But he was, I think he, he, he was okay with what we'd done at that point. So we literally sat down and started drawing these out. We got an engineer. We started creating the G2. We started selling G1 in June of 2016. By July of 2017, we launched the G2 Pro. And that was our first product we made that we had control of.

• 1:09:32Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  We actually designed that whole thing.

• 1:09:34Guy Raz?

  Where were you selling them? Was it a direct to consumer? Was it, was it a website initially?

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  Uh huh. Yep. It was a direct to consumer. It was teams and athletes. It was gyms and physiotherapists and chiro's.

• 1:09:46Guy Raz?

  And, and I think a big breakthrough for you also was Kyrie Irving. Right? Like, you got, you got that in the hands of Kyrie Irving, who then used it on the sidelines during the NBA Finals, like on the bench or something, right?

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  Couldn't have planned that.

• 1:10:02Guy Raz?

  Like, it was on camera. He was using a Theragun during the NBA Finals.

• 1:10:06Speaker 01

  So Kyrie's back started to spasm. And people don't know this, but you cannot take a product onto an NBA floor unless it is sanctioned and authorized by the NBA. Unless the athlete specifically asks for that tool. So Kyrie said, I need you to bring that out on the floor. But the rule is they have to cover it. If it's not sanctioned or doesn't have the NBA on it, they have to cover it with something. It can't be seen.

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  He covers it with a towel. Kyrie's over there because his back's spasming up. And he starts using this blue Theragon on the back of his back. But he tries to cover it. As he's moving it around, the towel falls off. ABC zooms right in right at that time. I was driving to San Diego to a trade show. And I look at my phone and it's my son and I'm like, I'll call him back in a second.

• 1:10:57Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  Well, he calls me again. I'm like, what is going on? Answer the phone and he's like, Dad, Dad, are you watching TV? He's like, no, he's like, it's the finals and Kyrie just used the Theragon on TV. We sold out that weekend.

• 1:11:11Guy Raz?

  I'm sure. There's an article I came across at the time. It was like a blog post. What was the machine the Cavs trainers were using on Kyrie Irving's back? And then this is like all over the internet. But still, it was at that point, kind of a product seen, I'm assuming, as a product for like athletes, professional athletes. It wasn't, you know, yeah, you'd worked with some, some of your clients and patients, but it wasn't, you know, in sort of the popular imagination, it wasn't seen as a mass product yet.

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Not even close.

• 1:11:44Guy Raz?

  So when did you? How were you able to make the transition from getting this in the hands of professional athletes to like making it a mainstream product? Like, how did it just happen naturally? Because it was filtering down from the celebrities and athletes? Or was there a plan? I mean, was COVID, was, was, was there a COVID element, like people at home?

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, yeah, COVID was huge. I mean, our company went hockey stick. I mean, it was like just shot out. Our message hadn't changed. Take care of yourself, increase blood flow, take away pain. Take care of yourself. You don't have to go to someone all the time for things. Learn your body. Think about how that resonated when COVID hit.

• 1:12:27Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh, I can't see a massage therapist. How can I take care of myself? And I think that messaging just started to build this underswell.

• 1:12:36Guy Raz?

  What's amazing to me is that you guys were profitable from year, really your first full year in business, 2017.

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:43Guy Raz?

  And you didn't raise any, I mean, you had the $500,000. You didn't bring on, when was the first time you actually raised outside of capital? What year?

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  So we did a strategic round. We raised between 20 and 25 million, end of 18, the beginning of 19. That wasn't necessarily to do anything other than just get them, it was about voices. I needed voices. And and I wanted people that had a larger voice than I did to tell our story.

• 1:13:09Guy Raz?

  Yeah, and that was that was some, I think, celebrities and celebrity athletes.

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  Yes, that's when the Justin Timberlake thing started.

• 1:13:16Guy Raz?

  He was a he was a customer or a client of yours?

• 1:13:18Speaker 01

  He was a he was a client and he was also a client of a friend of mine that was his trainer. And Justin loved the Theragun and he was the first person that said, I want to invest. So Justin came on and then I started having celebrities that I worked with, like Two Chains and Daniel Craig and Jay-Z and his group.

• 1:13:40Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  And and we signed a deal with Ronaldo. We signed some other deals with like Carly Claus, James Harden. And what we ended up doing with these guys, we said, hey, do you want to be an investor and an ambassador? So we had a little bit of investment and a little bit of payout for the ambassador side of things. So that model worked for us.

• 1:13:59Guy Raz?

  You basically give them some equity, they would promote the product and then you would pay them a small fee. But you essentially the value was their equity in the in the company.

• 1:14:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we ended up raising our final our A round in September of 22 with North Castle Partners. And they were a godsend because they knew what we were trying to do. They knew the industry and over the last couple of years, I think I've learned more than I have in my entire life.

• 1:14:32Guy Raz?

  Yeah. All right. So you have one of your fears when you met Ben was if you don't get this out there quickly, you're going to get copied. And that happened. I mean, I mean, what what was really the first of its kind and in this kind of percussive therapy, inspired a lot of competitors, right? Because you can't, I mean, to make a sort of a handheld gun that, you know, you can put against your body. There are only so many parts of that that you can. Patent, but it meant that all of a sudden you probably saw things that looked pretty similar to what you were doing and that that would mean litigation.

• 1:15:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. So right now, I think we have almost 600 plus patents. And so we that's one of the ways we've protected ourselves. Companies like Amazon were amazing. They were shutting people down. So there was there were months in 19 and 20 and 21, where we'd shut down 500 resellers or sellers on Amazon because they're copying us. And we have a full time team now in our office that that's all they do is enforcing cease and desists. They're scrubbing, looking for things on the internet of people that are copying us. So yeah, that was the the the engine behind our protection is as important as our manufacturing.

• 1:15:56Guy Raz?

  You just just to clarify, like the division of labor, you were not once Ben came aboard, you you're you were not the CEO, right? Your role, you had a different role. What role did you take on?

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  So I was I was founder and then eventually we called it chief wellness officer. But in the early days, I was just founder and product development. I was helping with ideas and stuff. But the business aspect of this company was Ben. This is the secret that I think happened with Ben and I. I knew at what point to hand it off to him. But he also knew at what point I needed to be involved. So he sees things through that lens that I don't. So I to be able to create the the relationship, the essence, the soul, and then hand it to Ben to be able to build the business model around it. That's really what made us successful.

• 1:16:47Guy Raz?

  Jason, when you think about your life story and all those years grinding through chiropractor school and coming up with this weird jigsaw thing and failed partnerships and then meeting Ben and like how much of where you got to now, do you think is because of all that work and grind? And how much do you attribute to luck?

• 1:17:11Speaker 01

  I think that in my life, there were life moments that prepared me for that luck when it hit. But I have a deep belief that when you do hard things, it always pays off. Anyone that does that, whether it's getting up in the morning and working out, or going to school, or, you know, taking a job cleaning out oil tanker, whatever the job is, it's just gross and ugly and it's hard, it always pays off when you invest in yourself. But I also go back to that voice, you know, on my stairway when I was younger where like, this is bigger than me. And I think I knew that early on. You have to create missions and purposes that are bigger than you. I'm not going to see the full fruition of this.

• 1:17:54Speaker 01

  I don't know. There might be someone who's not even born yet that might benefit from this. And I think that's what, that's what keeps me humble and, and driving for the growth of this company and, and the story.

• 1:18:09Guy Raz?

  That's Jason Wersland, co-founder of Therabody and inventor of the Theragun. By the way, remember when he was first coming up with the name and landed on Theraguns with a Z? Well, pretty early on, Jason decided to take out the Z and change it to just Theragun. And because it was still early days for the company, guess who helped him change all the labels?

• 1:18:32Speaker 01

  I had my kids take some scissors and I, I got, I told them, you have to cut all the Z's off of these things. And they're still, we still laugh about them like complaining, I'm so tired, my hand hurts, I'm cutting these Z's off. So they've been involved since they were little.

• 1:18:49Guy 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 free. And don't forget to sign up for my free weekly newsletter filled with helpful insights and ideas from entrepreneurs and founders. Sign up at guyraz.com.

• 1:19:09Guy Raz?

  This episode was produced by Chris Messini with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant with research assistance from Melia Agudelo. Our engineers were Gilly Moon and Robert Rodriguez. Our production staff also includes J.C. Howard, Casey Herman, Alex Chung, Sam Paulson, Kerry Thompson, John Isabella, Carla Estevez, and Elaine Coats. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.