All right, Casey, what's your story? I used to not look at my bank account because I didn't want to know how much was in there. That's the position that I was in. This is Casey, a normal guy who had never started a business in his life. But one day, that all changed. We had emptied our savings accounts. We made the decision to move in with my mom and I quit the restaurant. That moment changed my life forever. Then, after a few months of work, the idea was ready. So we get the inventory, we get the website launch, hit go, and guess what happened? Nothing. Nobody came, nobody bought one. But in his darkest moments, Casey experienced a miracle. The next day, we did three or four X-tales. And I remember dancing in my living room, right? Like, this is it! This is the moment! But what goes up must come down. We didn't know what the heck we were doing. We had no money for marketing. I said, well, emailing people's free. And from that moment, everything changed. This is a story of how Casey Holiday went from working a restaurant to selling over $100 million worth of silicone wedding rings from his mom's living room. Welcome to Starter Story. Casey grew up like most normal kids. He wasn't building businesses. He was playing sports and chasing his dreams. One of those dreams was to move to LA and become an actor. But those plans all changed when he met his eventual business partner, Ted. He also managed a restaurant in Beverly Hills at the time. And he said, why don't you come work at the restaurant? So I then started working at this restaurant in Beverly Hills, and Ted managed the place, and I bartended and waited tables. A few months later, both Casey and Ted get married. And one day, while they're busing tables at the restaurant, they realize they're both experiencing the same problem. It's like, hey, man, you married, awesome. Congratulations. Like, are you wearing a ring? And I was like, yeah, I'm wearing one, but it's been a pain. Every time I go work out, I go play golf, I do whatever I take it off. And I'm a super forgetful person. I was excited to wear one, but I was always losing it. And it also didn't make sense. You don't wear a Rolex to the gym. You don't wear dress shoes to run a triathlon. Like, people have very specific accessories for very specific things that they're doing. And then both of us said, well, let's just see if anything else exists. Like, this must be out there. And I remember Ted going, I'm just going to go buy one. And him coming back and going, it doesn't exist. Like, it's not out there. I couldn't find anything. So Ted and I are there, and the light bulb goes off for me of, like, what if we did this? Despite having no business experience and trying to make it as actors, the boys were excited to start building their own thing. Something that had more potential than clocking in and out at the restaurant. They decided to give this business thing a shot. It was this really cool agreement between two dudes of, I don't have a kid. I don't have as much life overhead as you do. I have time and energy and effort, but you have savings. And can we just handshake deal that we're both going to put what we have into this? With what our life can afford at this time? Yeah, let's do that. And so my goal was to replace a $2,000 a month income at the restaurant. We didn't call it finding product market fit. We didn't call it bootstrapping. In our minds, it was a couple of broke dudes trying to figure out ways to get people to wear and buy our product. And I think there's something really interesting where when you are starting anything, you have an idea for a business, you don't really know what you don't know. You know you don't know things, but you actually don't know what it is. And the best way to learn what you don't know is to talk to people that know what you don't. And so when I think about Starter Story and why I fell in love with it, it is a library of inspiration, practical advice, stories that you can learn from and apply to your own situation. So whether you're looking for a product that you want to be inspired to try and launch yourself, or you just want to find about rat entrepreneurs that started where you are so you can see yourselves in them, I think Starter Story solves all of those problems. So if you want to check out Starter Story and learn from people just a couple steps ahead of you, head to the first link in the description. But let's get back to the story. Casey and Ted are excited and they even come up with a name for their brand, Kalo. I'm one of the co-founders of Kalo, so I'm the president of Kalo currently. But there's a small problem. They still have no idea where to even start. And Ted had this idea of, well, he was like, I have a friend who has a manufacturer in town. What if we crashed the meeting at this fancy hotel in LA? I was like, sure, man, let's go for it. We got nothing to lose. So sure enough, we did. We showed up. We had bought a couple of rings from, I think, the local marshals as just an example of, you know, metal rings. Sat down with the manufacturer and said, can you just make these out of silicone? And he said, yeah, sure, why not? Ted had very little in his savings and I had even less. We combined them and said, let's just put everything we have toward buying this first batch of inventory. I used to not look at my bank account because I didn't want to know how much was in there. I just wanted to trust the fact that my rent check wasn't going to bounce. That's the position that I was in. And Ted, Ted had a kid at the time. He was a bit older than I was. He was risking more than I was initially to get started, but we had emptied our savings accounts. Casey is three months into his marriage and realizes he's dead broke. He's not sure if you'll even be able to make his own rent. So my wife and I, we made the decision to move in with my mom to focus on being able to build the company. I would still commute five days a week to work in the restaurant. I would take the 7 a.m. shift and my wife worked there too. She would have the 11 a.m. shift. She would sleep in our little red fiat in the back lot of the restaurant in the morning until her shift started. Bless her. So our homes became our offices. Our dining room tables became where we developed our website. At his garage became our inventory management location. Despite all the personal and financial troubles Casey and Ted were going through, there still was a light at the end of the tunnel. These rings were the ticket to their freedom. And after months of working and waiting, the first batch of inventory finally arrived. The rings were sitting in the garage and the boxes were stacked to the ceiling, lined along Ted's garage. When I opened up one of these boxes, so excited to see the first Kalo ring that had been manufactured to realize the product quality was awful. Each ring was unsellable. So you had just emptied all of your savings accounts, put all of this time, energy, effort into getting these rings. The first batch of rings shows up and they're unsellable. But we need to make them sellable because we don't have any money left to buy more. Casey and Ted realized they just made the biggest financial mistake of their lives. They just thrown tens of thousands of dollars down the toilet and emptied their bank accounts. Now they had two options, shut down the company or find a way to fix the product. What happened is a ring could show up. It would be uneven edges. It just was nobody wanted to wear that. And I remember stumbling like going through my mom's bathroom and finding this tiny little pair of scissors that I didn't even know existed in the world. Turns out it was a pair of eyebrow scissors. And so I remember rushing out to my wife, grabbing a tiny little ring and putting my fingers in these little scissors and just twisting this ring around while I just sort of trimmed the edges of it. And sure enough, there was a ring that was sellable. They found a solution and the goal was now clear. Hand trim 50,000 half inch silicone rings with eyebrow scissors. But the days ahead were anything but exciting. My wife and I watched all six seasons of loss while laying in bed trimming rings. It was completely immersed in our life. And I remember I'd wake up in the middle of the night and grab a drink of water and I would step over piles of rings because we had no place to put them and they were just laid out. And we would have ring shavings all over our house stuck to our cat on our tables in our cushions in our bed. Like you'd get out of bed in the morning and you'd have like shavings like stuck. Whether you're off to the big match, get in. Enjoying a trip to the coast to catch up with friends. Or exploring some incredible history with your family. With up to a third off most rail travel, a rail card can help you save on train journeys all around Great Britain. Find the one for you at railcard.co.uk. Teas and seas apply. To your back as you were just trimming rings in bed, that was our life and then up in LA it was the same for Ted. The mission was finished and after getting a couple thousand rings ready to go, it was time to conquer the next challenge, finding customers. The thinking was the only thing that's stopping us from selling a ton of these rings is a website. I remember toiling over whether or not we were going to buy a $99 theme. I remember stressing out so much about whether or not we could afford this $99 theme or if we should just go with the baseline model that Shopify gives you out the box. So Ted and I had spent months. We finally built this thing. We put the effort in, we put the time in and the money. I remember just hitting publish. Website is live. Ted and I are fired up texting each other and then about noon the next day it was like the text message tone changed. We're launched too. Any visitors? Like is anybody coming to this thing? Have you told anyone bro? Have you, hey bro, have you told anyone? Turns out people won't magically find the website you've built. So with close to zero dollars in their pockets and over 50,000 rings sitting in their garage, Casey and Ted needed to figure out a way to put Kalo out there without spending a penny on ads. I thought who are people of influence? This is before influencers who are people of influence that I could send my product to that would maybe supercharge our growth or get more exposure for us. And one of them was Andy Dalton and Andy Dalton was the quarterback of the Cincinnati Bengals at the time. And I'd gone to TCU and I was good buddies with his wife there. I thought, well, I'm going to send Jordan, his wife, a Facebook message. Hey, congratulations on getting married. We just started this company. I thought Andy might like one. Would he be interesting? Could I send it to you as a wedding gift? Sure enough, a couple months later, she responded and said, hey, Andy would love to give one a shot. And I remember like dancing in my living room, right? Like, this is it. This is the moment. So I sent it to him and I got a thanks and that was about it. Nothing else really happened. Fast forward to a couple months from then. There's a show called Hard Knocks on HBO. The first episode aired 10 minutes of the episode was about Andy wearing a rubber wedding ring. And they interviewed him. In the interview, he was like, oh, I just think it's really cool. I can wear it no matter what it is that I'm doing. I can wear it out on the field and it represents the commitment that I've made to my wife, which is super important to me, but also represents what I do for a living, which is we could not have sent him a script that was a better way of articulating exactly what our positioning was as a company. The next day, I think we did. The next day, I think we did three or four X sales. We would line up the envelopes and put the labels on of the customers. And this was the first time that it went all the way into the end of the house and we had more orders. This was this moment for us of this is real and watching orders laid out all over my mom's house with trash bags of rings that we were yet to cut with eyebrow scissors littered everywhere. So it was very much this moment in time where there was validation. There wasn't uptick in sales. There was engagement and people were talking. But two days later, everybody goes back to living their lives. And it's what you do with that attention in between your next venture to try and get more attention or have another moment that ultimately matters the most. So this moment with Andy felt like affirmation, which was really cool. But it also was terrifying because you realize, oh, this thing could become something. And now I actually have to build it. I started to wear a Kalo ring several years ago. Kalo wedding rings. Kalo. Kalo ring. Kalo ring. Casey realizes that Kalo has outgrown being a side hustle at his mom's house. At this point, he's got to make a decision if he's ready to go all in and quit his job at the restaurant. So that was, I think, the inflection point of now we're going for this. So now we behave differently. And I was coming to Ted going, hey, I think I should quit working in this restaurant and go full time into Kalo. And he's like, we can't afford for you to go full time. He's right. And I was like, but I think we need to like there's something here. I think I'm going to do it. I'm going to take a risk. I'm going to go for it. He was like, OK, all right, fine. Go for it. And I quit the restaurant. That moment changed my life forever. Now it was make it or break it. Casey and Ted went all in and there was no going back. From that point on, it was a ruthless game of business. A big part of our early strategy at Kalo was the recognition that we were the first mover in the category. And that if we didn't go fast, somebody else with more money, better brand recognition, better operators, we're going to come in and crush us. Over the next six to eight months, we ended up with about 13 people in a 200 square foot office. When somebody would call our customer service line, nobody in the office could talk because everybody could hear everyone in the background when they called. And we moved to a new office. We were hiring on average about two to three people a month. And I remember sitting in every interview, building out systems, trying to figure out how they're all going to talk to each other. How are we actually going to grow this thing and operate at this capacity that we need to? How are we going to develop culture? All of these things that come along with scaling a company. Casey was figuring out how to build a real company and the results started to pay off. At that point, we're doing 30 million. We had close to 100 employees operating at a 20% profit margin. When you grow a company that size and you grow that fast, you realize how big the stakes are pretty quickly. You begin to learn that mistakes are costlier at that stage. But the success of it, I'm incredibly grateful for. And it was unexpected. It was never in our heads, we're going to be this big company. It was always focused on being better as a company, not bigger. And then it was, who are customers and how do we know them better than anyone? In business building, you can't build it without incredible people. And looking back on Kaila, that's what I appreciate the most were the people that I did it with. And even though we didn't do everything perfectly, we had a lot of success as a result of the team that we built in growing it. You should be able to communicate to anyone as an entrepreneur. This is the problem that I'm solving. Start there then to determine what the product is to solve that problem. And just like the rings, even if they're terrible, focus instead of making it perfect on getting it to customers. And then talking to as many of those customers as you possibly can about how to make it better. We are so concerned with other people's perception of us and our product and what we're doing that it paralyzes us. And so if you have this idea for a business and you want to start it and you're so concerned with, is it going to be successful? What are people going to think of me? Is it going to be done? It's really freeing to realize that people actually aren't thinking about you at all. All you need to do is go find people out there that have problems because everybody's got problems. And then help people through giving them your solution. You actually are being selfish by not solving the problem that you know people have. About building something? Come join thousands of founders inside Starter Story. All right. See you in the next one. Peace.
