Things Jamie Says on Podcasts

Money.

Jamie, what do you think?

And how many times, I'm sure you experienced this, you're somewhere, something happens, and you're like, why do they make a, you know, this thing like that? Like, why you're sitting around, you're like, why doesn't somebody make a coffee cup that's, you know, square shaped or that has like a gyroscope on the bottom so it never falls over something, right? Why doesn't X exist? But then there are people who actually do it. They're like, yeah, it's like you. You're like, why can't we see who's ringing the doorbell, you know, when I'm in another part of my house?

And it is. It's like the hard part is like, it's like walking into that dark tunnel. When again, when you simplify it, it's like not that crazy to try it. Like, it's just like, it's like, just do it.

One of the things that I love that comes up from time to time is, you know, we'll have, there's a certain type of founder. And I don't want to say, I hope this sounds, this doesn't sound like I'm typecasting them, but it's like somebody goes to business school. And they're, a lot of them still today go into consulting or into venture and finance. And occasionally we've had founders who were went into venture out of graduate school. And They're the ones who are like the analysts. They're the low-level analysts just vetting all these people pitching ideas for money. And that was a story of Katrina Lake and Stitch Fix. She was at a VC fund in the Bay Area, and she would listen to people pitch ideas to her all day.

No, we were probably going into 500, 600,000 a month or something. So we were like, maybe like a, but like in, but in consumer electronics, like doing less than doing 100 million a year in consumer electronics would be a small, you know, so like, so look, we were the, the market, I'd say was still very open in 15.

So like if I would have had a company and I'm like, fuck, I'm going to spend 10 million on TV ads. Like I said, it would have probably crushed you. It would have crushed us. So you're thinking was, I just need to get out. Someone's got to,

So why are TV ads so good? Because a lot of tech people would say they're unmeasurable and like, you know, just, you don't know where the money's going. So why was it such a good idea?

I, well, I mean, I could see what GodrX was doing. I wanted to do, I did feel also that like to this competition thing and seeing what, you know, one of the companies that I tried to sort of mimic was Dyson. If you look at how James Dyson, again, go back to like Dyson, Dyson James Dyson, how he did his ads and the authenticity. And you go back to when he started Dyson, he's no longer on the ads. And so people don't see it. But for a long time, it's like James Dyson was like on our TV being like, you know, I spent, you know, 300 years trying to build this, you know, thing. And he like, and so I'm like, we need to be the James Dyson, the Dyson of home security in our own sort of voice. And so I felt like TV was the way to do it. I'm seeing this company having success with it. And I'm like, we should just drop the hammer and let's get this. And we had a board meeting and, you know, there's a definitely a bunch, like the board overall, I'd say was like, if you think that's good, let's do it. There was one person who was like, like, that's, you're insane, you know, your size, you can't do, like, you can't do TV. Like, this goes to your Silicon Valley question of like, which I always think Silicon Valley is funny. Like, it's a place that like, you're supposed to be like the most creative, yet they have so many rules. You know, it's like, oh, you can't do TV until you're 100 million. He said, you, until you're doing 100 million in sales, you can't do TV. And I was like, I can do whatever I want. And so we, but we did TV and it is actually very hard and it is hard to measure. And it's also, it usually is like a rubber band where like you pull and pull and pull and pull and pull and nothing happens. And you're like, oh my God, this isn't working. And then all of a sudden the back sort of shoots, shoots forward. So it did for like the first couple of weeks. It was like sales were basically the same. And you're like, oh, like this isn't good. We had this like Google tracker, like this Google sheet that we were doing. We're like tracking the sales and like putting it in and putting how much we spent every day. And it's like, oh, this is like, and then all of a sudden, like the sales, just sales start just like, now you can see them climbing.

And I think it was the TV ads.

And then, so then True Ventures was coming in, and I had to then tell them two things. Well, I basically had to admit that I bought this domain name, which I had not told them yet, um, because I didn't want them to know I bought a million-dollar domain name when they're like putting in a couple million dollars in the company, basically, like you know, a major part of it's going out to the domain name. And um, so I had to tell them before they wired, which was like like that was a little bit difficult.

Had you already signed all the docs? We

like just don't want to know,

exactly. So, like, and I'm like, you know, like, oh, the wire is coming on, you know, Monday or Tuesday. And I'm like, okay, like, any chance it could come like Monday? And they're like, I think we can do Monday. I'm like, okay, great. Just because, like, you know, like, I have the our finance person's in the office on Monday. And so it'd be easier to accept. I'm like, literally just like talking, you know, whatever. Like, okay. Well, Tuesday's when payroll got pulled.

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