“In Santa Monica, if we go out of business, I want the hole to be so deep that it can never be filled. … A lot of these VC backed companies will over 20 years go out of business. … They squeak out of business. … I wanted to blow a hole in the ground.”
The Peel with Turner Novak · Startups & Venture · October 2026
With about a million dollars left and Ring still selling product, Siminoff decided to put it into TV advertising. He got the idea at his son's soccer game, from a founder of another small company that had just started running TV ads.
Transcript
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,
like, someone's going to take it. And I would say like our office was in Santa Monica. And I said, like, in Santa Monica, if we go out of business, I want the hole to be so deep that it can never be filled. Like, I don't want to just like, like a lot of these like, like VC back companies will like over 20 years go out of business. And they just like kind of like, like, they like squeak out of business. I wanted to like be like a, it's sort of like a, you know, massive explosion if we were going to go out of business. I wanted to like blow a hole in the ground. And so I'm like, we have like basically a million dollars left. We're selling. So like we're not like, we're not just ripping through cash. So we're selling some product. And so I'm like, if it's like a million dollars, I'm like, I want to jump to the next level. And I'm like, I think we should, and a friend, this company, GodRX, had just launched. It was my, I'm at soccer with my son with and the son of one of the founders of GodRX is there. We're talking. And again, we're both super small companies. Like this is not, you know, and he's telling me, oh, yeah, we just went on doing TV. And like, this is the results we're having. And it's like, unbelievable. I'm like, so I tell my wife, I'm like, at the end of the soccer game, I'm like, I'm going to the office. We're going to do TV. And she's just like, I don't even know what you're talking about. I'm like, I'll see you later. And that was like a Saturday. Like, I came home like, you know, like, I didn't like come home. I'm like, I'm like figuring out how to do TV. And so I do, I go to the board and I'm like, I want to basically spend, you know, we're going to blow a million dollars on TV.
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.
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