YouSaid · the spoken record

Jamie Siminoff

lines on the record: 142
first: 2020-06-22
most recent: 2020-06-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Because at the time the ratings on Shark Tank were massive. I mean, it's still a big show, but it was a massive show at the time. So look at it as a 12 minute commercial on ABC for your company, what's the value of that for a guy in a garage is infinite. It's priceless. And so I wanted to be the best shark tank person of all time, which I really took it seriously. I mean, I trained and I had neighbors over there.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I really did, I took Shark Tank seriously. And what I mean seriously, I had 300 questions that I thought that they would do. I watched every single Shark Tank episode multiple times that had been on to that point.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's just like a fake front of a home to put the doorbell on just to have it sort of sit there, you know, so they had something in the picture to make it look nice.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we're in Los Angeles, luckily. How do you build a set? Well, it turns out like you just asked someone because everyone builds sets here because that's what they do in Los Angeles. And so Dr. Wood, who is a set builder, came over and built a set.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The funny thing is they tell you they're like, oh, we think this is what would look cool. And I'm like, great. You just tell me and you can build it kind of thing. Like you're a show. And they're like, no, you build it. Okay.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From that call though, now it's like the fear of I don't want to be someone who becomes a joke. And so I took Shark Tank as seriously as any execution of any piece of our business. I built the set in my backyard.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, no shit, I should go on Shark Tank. How do I get on Shark Tank? And he said, oh, a producer contacted another friend of mine. They're looking for... Things more like your stuff, like a product, like something more electronic, like a little more complex this season, I'll send you the email you can email the person. Now, he didn't even know the person. I blind email that person from the table saying like, hey, here's my company, getdorbot.com. Would love to go on Shark Tank. And I'm driving back from the lunch. The producer calls me and said, this is the greatest thing. We got to have you on Shark Tank. And I was like, yeah, now.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I have a friend of a friend who's trying to start some sort of startup business and said, could you go out to lunch with my buddy? He's trying to start this business and would love to sort of get some feedback from you. And I'll never forget, I remember driving to this lunch being like, here I am a guy who's going bankrupt in his garage for a doorbell. And I'm going to give him this rich, like his family's very, very well-known. And I'm going to give him advice. I should be focusing and I'm like thinking to myself, this is why Jamie, you always lose because you can't focus. Like this is why. I remember almost like yelling at myself on the way to this lunch. And I get to the lunch and the guy's super nice and talking the whole time and like all about his business. And literally like we're just done. And he said like, what are you working on? I said, oh, this doorbell thing. And he said, you should go on Shark Tank. And here I am thinking, it must be nice to be like wealthy because that's how you think. Like, oh, you should go on Shark Tank.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, so it's a lot of things. I mean, one is it was very hard to see that a Wi Fi doorbell was meaningful in any way. How is this going to do something that's enough to pay back a venture capitalist? Hardware is hard. Are you able to build this thing? I couldn't show them a working prototype because I didn't have one. The deck was fairly stacked against us. I think the only way I raised the money was just by hustle in terms of like, I think I just wore people down. And at this point, I really didn't have it. I didn't really have the option to not fight because I was so into this that if it ended, I was going to be in serious trouble financially myself. So I was really like going and hustling and just doing it and executing. On the other side, though, like at home, you know, when no one was looking, like, yeah, I was like crying inside. Like, I really thought I destroyed everything for this.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we did. So I kicked some money in that I had and sort of got again a little over my sort of head in it. And then we raised, we started raising money in 2013. We raised a million dollars, which was one of the most difficult raises of money I've ever had to do in my life.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pretty much, yeah. I mean, most people were highly to fairly negative about the product ever working. And there was people that staked their reputation on saying they will never be able to get this thing to work at scale.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, until we bring in that, you'd talk to someone who would say that, and you just like hang up and then call the next one. Like you just kind of kept calling people”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have been amazing if there was one that stuck out. It was like everything was, it was, you know, if you were a skier, it's like everything you looked at was a cliff. Like there was just no easy part of the run. Doing audio like this was hard. The video was very hard. I never had been to China to find a manufacturer. I had to go find someone to do that. It used apps. You had to have a big back-end video processing system. Each one of those in itself was a company that would have been hard to do. And so it was, we took on a task that was, I'd say, as close to impossible as you can get, I think.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Working out of the garage, yeah. And hiring consultants to do something, is it because we had, like you said, I mean, we really did have like very little Expertise in the things that we would need.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And to make matters even worse, we decided because my house didn't have a working doorbell on it. So we decided that we're going to make a battery operated one so it could go on any home.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was the problem was it was so easy to get into trying to build this kind of like all of a sudden I was all in. Like I didn't realize that I was doing it, but all of a sudden I realized like I had all of my money. Like all of a sudden like everything was in this thing in some way. It just kept eating up cash.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it turns out you're right. We did not. Again, looking back, I don't understand how we ever got a product out. You know, we were so underfunded. I mean, $250,000 at the time sounded like a lot of money.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I call them gadget collectors. The issue is, and I think why a lot of companies have this sort of false positive where they look like they're going to be huge companies early on because their growth is just like astronomical. And then all of a sudden, they just go to zero because you can't live on gadget collectors. You need to do something more meaningful than that because long term, the gadget collector market is just not that big.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The customers understand why this is important to them. That was when I was like, we can do this. That was really the wow, they get it.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, if you now fast forward back to where pre-selling, part of why I didn't want to put it out there and didn't think it was that big is I didn't think other people would have the same, I didn't think they'd understand how it would make them feel. And so I thought it would be very hard to market that to say, hey, is this going to make you feel safer in your home, not just be a gadget? And when we started pre-selling it, I remember there was this one woman and she said, I bought it because the neighbor's house was robbed and they rang the doorbell. And if someone rings the doorbell now, I can answer it and I could act like I'm home. And I was like, so if there was an aha moment in this whole thing, it was that where I was like, oh my, holy shit.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Still, yeah, she's again very fortunate. She, you know, part of how we lived was, you know, or I would say part of how we lived was on her salary. Yeah, so she definitely was keeping us going. And she said because it makes me feel safer at home, it makes me feel like we have gates”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, my wife, Aaron. And so Aaron said, like, it's the best thing you've ever invented. And at the time, I really did, I didn't like her saying that because I almost felt like it put down the other things I was doing.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, when you're three guys in a garage, you call something door by. And my wife, when I was building this thing and putting it on and showing her, she said to me it's the best thing you've ever invented”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it was Christie Street, and oh, like our first thing on Christie Street is Doorbot, this Wi Fi doorbell. So we definitely needed something that for people to go to the marketplace. And so that was like the first thing. So we threw our own product on as the first product.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. And everything was broken the night before on the site, and nothing worked, and the credit card thing. I mean, you know, it's like any normal thing. Like it was just like everything was a mess in behind the scenes. And then we launched it.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, basically And so on the call with him, and I'm like, we're going to launch this thing. And here's some ideas I have of products to put on. We needed obviously like to launch a platform like this. You need to have something on it like that people can go to. And so we had a bunch of ideas, Snapgard and all these things. And I went through the list with him. And like I'd thrown on the list the doorbell. He's French guy. He's like, absolutely the doorbell is like that is the thing people will love. And I'm like, really? He's like, yeah. He's like, you have to do the doorbell. And I'm like, okay, I'll do the doorbell.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they did all these restrictions. And so there were some things they let you do, but basically a product like this would not have fit into their terms of service. But again, as I'm in this inventor lab, I said, oh, wow, here's an opportunity. We should launch a Kickstarter for hardware. And I called it Christie Street, which is, so here we are, the labs called Edison Jr. that we did. Christie Street is the street that Edison's lab was on in New Jersey. And I thought Christie Street was going to be the big things. It's a platform and it's a marketplace and this whole, you know, it could be huge. And so I convinced a friend of mine who has, he had a conference in Paris called Lowb, and I convinced him to let me launch Christy Street at Leweb, which was like a huge thing for me to be able to get that kind of an audience for Christie Street.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so at the time you have Kickstarter and IndieGogo was just kind of getting going and Kickstarter was the big one on this pre-buy crowdsource kind of thing and Kickstarter kicked off all the hardware people at this point. So this is 2012.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it wasn't like I hated it and thought it was something stupid. I just think I was so myop, because it was fixing my problem. And so the funny thing was as I'm building this doorbell, because the doorbell is for my home, not for Edison Jr., in terms of my thinking at this time, that I'm fixing a problem for me. I wasn't actually, wasn't one of my ideas on a piece of paper. And so I did it on nights and weekends because I didn't want to take time as a fiduciary away from the work I was supposed to be doing in the garage for Edison Jr. So it's just that's like how little I sort of thought of the idea.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I started playing around in 2011, like, you know, like literally just like hacking around with it. And it was basically like 2012, I had like a real working model. And when I say real working model, I mean, still very, very rough, but like something that actually you could see it work and kind of get an idea of what this was like.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we had a 3D printer. We had, I took a Wi Fi camera, like an off-the-shelf Wi-Fi camera, off-the-shelf button. I was just like hacking stuff up. To just try to build this. And again, the funniest part is going back to that time, I had raised a little bit of money for, it was called Edison Jr. was the lab, like my garage lab. I called it Edison Jr.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. And so there was nothing like for me to have to do this, and I just like anything when you're naive, which naive is such a great thing sometimes. I just was like, I'll just build it. And so I just sat down at the bench and got the soldering iron out and started to break things open and put them together.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A wireless version did not exist. I mean, you're talking like expensive meaning, like probably installing like a video intercom, you know, that was like a states have that. And so it's probably like, you know, thousands of dollars. This was not a”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. And then I thought like, I mean, you have the, so now I'm starting to invent. It's like I have the phone, Wi-Fi cameras were starting to come out. So it's like, why not have a camera that, you know, you could talk then also that would go to your phone. So it's like, oh, now this is like, I'll take the intercom and I'll take the doorbell concept and the fact that I have this phone with me that's on Wi-Fi and I'll put it all together. And that was I started building this. Gigantic thing that I was trying to strap on my front door.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so that was like the greatest thing ever. Because if one of those reached to my garage, I'd probably be still trying to build gardening things for people's porches.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, as funny as I looked for a Wi Fi doorbell, so I didn't, it wasn't a, I'm going to invent a Wi Fi doorbell. Let me buy a Wi-Fi doorbell. And so I search for one.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, nothing had been working. And the one big pain point I had, which was a personal pain point, was every time a package was delivered or someone was at the front door to visit because now people are coming to my office, quote unquote, which is, again, my garage. I called it our two-car office, I called it quote. My phone didn't get signaled in the garage and the doorbells, those wireless ones, wouldn't reach to the garage just through they wouldn't go through all the walls or whatever. And the garage was like a little separate unit going to a back alley. And I couldn't hear it. So I didn't know when someone was at the front door. And that was the greatest position to put myself in looking back because that's what sort of started it all.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Looking back again, like you're kind of exposing, like, I don't think I'm a great sort of operational manager because, yeah, I don't think we really had a plan for that.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sawhorse, it was yes, that's exactly what it was. Really mayhem, I guess. Like we were just kind of like, I mean, there was ideas and then we were like, we're going to work on this. We're going to try to do this with Snapgard and we're going to try to do this with it. I mean, it was like.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Pokety Poke. We had Pop, the portable power, which was a big battery that you could sit on a table and charge all your phones. So”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This one, and we had like four or five other. I had a conference call idea called Pokety Poke that we call you when your conference call is about to start. I love that.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You could have tomatoes and parsley, and like you could, you know, you could have mint and all the different things on your sort of patio in your apartment. And my whole backyard was growing tables, trying to figure out how to grow on these almost like a saran wrap. And I mean, none of it ever worked, by the way, but we were trying all this stuff.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, I mean, I had, so at that point, I had him working on a thing called Snap Garden, which Snap Garden was this idea of building modular thin tiles that would go on your patio and that you could grow food or grass on or whatever with a centralized watering system. I love that idea.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like out of college kids, like, literally, employee number one, John Modestine, lived in Philadelphia, never, I always joke, never got west of the Mississippi. I literally flew the kid out here. And I bought him a bicycle and he would ride from his apartment to my garage to work on this stuff”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I kind of sat back, and again, this is by far the most important part of my life. And I realized that I was an inventor and not an entrepreneur. And by that, I mean entrepreneurs want to build a business. An inventor wants to. Literally invent a product or service to just get it out there And I decided from that, I'm just going to go to my garage, hire a couple kids, and we're just going to build, I had all these ideas that I've been writing down in my phone and the notes section. And I'm just going to start to play with these and try to not get on a railroad track. Play with them long enough to see what actually becomes something and has the ability to become something meaningful before.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So luckily on this one, I call it my entrepreneurial midlife crisis. I remember having this just like, you know, almost like this collapse of, I keep doing these things that I invent something, I get excited, I get into it. And I almost look at it as like railroad tracks. Like once you raise money for something, you turn a road into a railroad track. And what I mean by that is you can't turn. And so, like, unsubscribe, like, I realized pretty quickly it was bad, but I'd raised $2 million. So, like, I'm on a railroad track now, which is gonna burn up time. Same thing with phone tag. I wasn't passionate about voicemail. I thought it'd be fun to do. And then all of a sudden I'm in this thing where I'm like slogging every day.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, a lot of times there's people like me who are basically getting the money back to their investors or even getting half the money back to their investors. It's like in some ways, fortunately, I was able to get the full money back to investors both times.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“like Lifelock, like that kind of identity, sorry, identity protection space called trusted ID. And we had built a lot of tech around this and they thought it would be a great additional thing to add to their customers. So if they could add this as like another feature, you know, we have this, this, you know, credit card this and unsubscribe. And so for them, it was like we could just add this as another feature. It's great. And so I was able to, in essence, you know, dollar for dollar again, like this is, you know, this is if you're following the trend line here, this is not good, build business up, sell it, get investors their exact dollars back. Like this is not a, you know.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd raised 2 million venture capital, and if the best you can do, like if just the whole world was behind us was like 30 million in revenue. And that's when I realized this is just not going to end well”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly Yeah, it was like a per. The idea originally was like a per seat fee. If you take 50% of someone's email and clean it out, the amount of time times X number of employees, you can kind of figure out this return. And it just everyone agreed with that. They just didn't want to buy it. And so it just ended up being like a business that no one wanted to buy. Like everyone loved it. They individually liked the idea. They just wouldn't buy it. And so... I played out every which way I thought the business could go like we could be this, we could do this and I couldn't figure out how to make the company bigger than like $30 million in revenue in the next like three to five years.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT