We made our first sale 11 years ago. One product, a one-page website, and a free
By Devon Wilson · October 1, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
We made our first sale 11 years ago. One product, a one-page website, and a free Shopify buy button. Since then we’ve sold over 1M pads across North America and Europe.
Here are the 10 biggest things I have learned since:
1. Protect your cap table from day one.
Ownership is precious. Don’t gift or sell shares unless absolutely necessary. Equity is far more expensive than debt. The decisions you make in the early days when everything feels uncertain will follow you for the life of the company.
2. Slow organic growth works. Embrace it.
The lessons get learned, and the foundation gets built properly. We were never the fastest-growing company, but we were always moving forward. We’ve also watched “hyper scalers” blow up spectacularly.
3. File your IP early and broadly.
Patents, trademarks, copyrights. Do it before you think you need it. By the time you are fighting knockoffs and counterfeits, you’ll wish you had started two years earlier. IP is an asset.
4. Build the supply chain before you need it.
Don’t wait until you’re out of stock and losing customers to diversify your manufacturers. Redundancy feels unnecessary until it doesn’t. We learned this the hard way. Our underdeveloped supply chain harmed our growth rate early and nearly killed us during COVID.
5. Hire ahead of where you are, not where you have been.
We held on to the startup mentality longer than we should have. The right senior (or even intermediate) people pay for themselves many times over. The cost of waiting is higher than the cost of hiring.
6. Master one channel before adding another.
Every new sales channel is effectively its own business. We grew fast by adding channels quickly and paid for it in complexity, cash flow pressure, and operational stress. Depth before breadth.
7. Know your customer better than anyone else in the room.
Every product we launched at the direct request of our customers has worked. The one time we built something outside of that for a potential partner in an industry we knew nothing about, it flopped. The customer is the compass.
8. The unglamorous work is the work.
Supply chain, inventory forecasting, cash flow management, customer service systems. None of it is exciting to talk about. All of it determines whether you are still standing in year 11.
9. Product is (almost) everything.
We survived things that would have killed most brands. Our growth is now compounding without massive ad spend because we obsessed over building a 10X product and never stopped investing in R&D. Ad spend can generate trials. Only a great product generates loyalty.
10. It has to be more than just making money.
We are a family company working to reclaim a legacy that was taken from us. That purpose kept us going and stopped us from quitting more times than I can count. Money is a great outcome, but the challenges never stop, and it can take a decade to materialize. You need a bigger reason.
3,924 days in. We are just getting going.