Taking on and beating the giants | 2 Commas by Josh Comrie

We literally bootstrapped it.

We didn't have any investors.

Uh, you know, there's money on credit cards.

I'm still cutting hair.

Business partner's still doing his corporate gig.

So everything went into this.

So looking back, everything mattered.

There wasn't spare cash, and it was m- it wasn't so much in labor because it was sweat equity for both of us.

But it was, uh, it was packaging.

Big runs now we had to start buying.

We had to understand what planning, you know, planning around that stuff would mean.

Um, so fast-forward, so we managed to get, we had some good data, good presentations, again, really thanks to AJ's, um, background.

Um, we got a meeting with Woolworths Australia.

So we flew over there.

We stayed in a [laughs] I think I slept in the bath 'cause he snored so much.

We had a one-bedroom place, and we were, I, the, my...

It's burnt into my brain, uh, us in Oxford Street at a cafe in the morning, full suits, doing our presentation to each other, like, and traffic and buses and trucks.

And you know Oxford Street, it's crazy, right?

Mm-hmm.

And so we're just rehearsing and rehearsing and rehearsing, and we get in this meeting and, and I was so nervous.

[laughs]

I just ran through the, my, pretty much all my stuff too fast.

And when we got out, AJ was like, "It was good, but you probably talked a bit quick."

[laughs]

So anyway, the guy was interested, but he, uh, the buyer said, "Okay, yeah, your data looks good." Um, and then the sheep sha- joke started, you know, [laughs] "How many sheep have you tried this on?" I'm like, "Oh, yeah, great joke, great joke." And so he said, um, "You've got..." I think we had eight units in a tray, and we didn't, we hadn't factored the shelf depth over there was smaller than what they had here.