YouSaid · the spoken record

Mike Salguero

lines on the record: 126
first: 2022-10-03
most recent: 2022-10-03
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

“And so we were doing these elimination diets. Then I started buying meat from farmers. And I meet a farmer in a parking lot and he gives me like a trash bag full of meat”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this was like the Tim Ferris four-hour work week. I'm going to live in Argentina and look at my laptop, see my numbers.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't believe that is the right way to rate the quality. And if you look at other places in the world, that's not how quality is rated.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so in this country, if you think about the rating system for beef, it's choice prime select. Those are like the three types of beef. Get, and all that is when you cut open the carcass and you look at the rib eye, it's how much marbling is in the rib eye. And so the entire rating system in this country is based on how much fat could you put into that animal.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. The only challenge is that with grass-fed beef, it's less fatty. So the argument that people who love beef made and continue to make is that the fat in meat is what gives it flavor, and that's why Kobe beef or wagy beef is so delicious, because they eat a lot of, they're given a lot of corn.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So we're following these elimination diets. We're online going to Daniel Walker's website or whole 30 or Mark's Daily Apple or any of these other ones. And so the first thing that happened was I realized it was remarkably hard to find Grassfed Beef or it was prohibitively expensive. And so the idea behind the company, I had a very modest plan. My plan was to start a hobby business while I went and figured out what was next. And the idea behind the company was I wonder if there's a lot of other people who want grass-fed beef and can't find it. I should try to like bring grass-fed beef to the masses, try to get people to have a good, reliable source of grass-fed beef.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think, by the way, I think they said this because, and again, I'm not a doctor here, but the idea is that meat or beef that is raised with antibiotics and steroids and stuff, that has an impact on our bodies when we eat it. That was a lot of what people were writing.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I knew I wanted to remain an entrepreneur. I knew I didn't want to go get a job. But I also was deeply insecure about that failure and about how was I going to pick up the pieces and start over. But fortunately, I didn't have much time to think about it because what ended up happening was while I was at Custom Made, my wife and I were trying a whole bunch of different diets. She has an autoimmune disease, Hashimoto's, which is a thyroid condition And a lot of the stuff we were reading online was suggesting, hey, if you eat like an anti-inflammatory diet, that can help with your autoimmune disease.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How is your confidence as a leader? I mean, were you thinking, yeah, okay, this didn't work. I'm going to start my next thing? Or were you thinking, God, maybe I'm not cut out for this, this entrepreneurial stuff?”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the website remained. So, what ended up happening is Seth and four other people remained at custom made and essentially bought it out of bankruptcy. And he has done the miraculous job of pivoting it to a jewelry site. So it's custommaid.com. It's a custom jewelry. And they do everything themselves. So there's no back and forth with a maker. You're going back and forth with a designer who is an employee of custom aid. And the model actually works amazingly well. You can get a custom engagement ring for cheaper than you can get it in a store and you get to actually say exactly what you want done. So the dream that we always had. Is actually starting to come to fruition.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was good. I'm really proud of the fact that we were able to remain best friends through all the ups and downs. We had a good relationship. I mean, we would get on the phone and scream at each other and it was obviously very tense, but we both just maintained a huge amount of respect for each other and a huge amount of love for each other.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The people were so foreign to me. It was like, it just felt so hostile and it felt so, because I had left all the people who helped me get there in the jungle, there was no one left. It just became a place that I felt very unwelcome. And that feeling is just a horrendous feeling. I gave that thing everything. I mean, I sacrificed my health, I sacrificed my time, I would work there almost every Saturday. And it just didn't work. And it's hard when you're in failure to not take it personally, to not be like, this is my fault. Like I'm doing something wrong here. But so often it's really the business itself is like, does the business want to be a business or not be a business? And like so often it's not up to us. If I could talk to my scared self back then, just be like a failed venture is not a failed entrepreneur.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm by my nature a very hopeful person. And so I was definitely able to remain hopeful that the next change we were going to make was going to work. The hardest part for me was actually losing the culture. I remember around that time basically sitting in my car not being able to walk into the office.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You were seeing on top of $29 million that you'd raised, and essentially. This message that you're getting back from your investor saying you're not doing a good enough job. But you knew that no matter what you did, the people you were serving, the artisans, it just wasn't the right fit.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The board said, We think we need to get a real CEO in here. It's like, okay. And Seth called me one night and he said, I feel like it's the fourth quarter, and I haven't been the starting quarterback, and I want to be the starting quarterback. And I had just my daughter Marley, was just born. Obviously things weren't working out with the board. And I wasn't like I had any great ideas. So I was like, yeah, go for it. And so Seth took over as the CE”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We started hiring not for culture, but for experience, for resume. And over the course of the next two or three years, we went from overhauling our technology team, our design team, our product team, our marketing team. And then when there was no one left, it was like, Must be a leadership problem. We got to do something about Mike and Seth.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Custom aid, that bus was funded by Google and funded by first round capital, and what we did is we hopped on that bus and we looked at a great deal of the hackers who helped us get on that bus. And we said, you guys don't know how to drive. We left him in the jungle.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Essentially everybody. Because, you know, like from the VC's perspective, there wasn't a question about whether the marketplace was the right concept. Like that's what they invested in. It was really a question of, well, we must have the wrong team to go activate that. So like let's go figure out who that person is. And so we believed that, right? We were like, well, if Google says that's true, that's got to be true. And, you know, I have this analogy of, I heard it somewhere, it's not mine, but when you start a company, it's like you're hacking through the jungle with machetes. And you're just like, you just need people who are willing to stay up and hack and try to find a path. And eventually you find a path, and that path leads you to a dirt road and there's a bus on the road.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's amazing. Come on in, see everything And, you know, right after we raise this money, Google's position was that our team was not good.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, they were definitely getting into our business. I mean, so Google was like, hey, if you want, we can bring our technologist over and he can talk with your technology team. And hey, if you want, we can have a user experience person come over.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They had to hustle Actually, most of the people who did incredibly well were not necessarily the best artisan, just amazing at sales.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Big issue with the model was very few of the people who posted a project something they wanted would actually transact on that project. And what you're doing is you're essentially taxing all of these makers who have to like say, hey, I'm Joe and I would love to work on this and put themselves out there and they only have the capacity to do that a little bit. So there were a number of people who were quite successful. We have lots of maker stories of people who did incredibly well.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We tried a number of different things like we built a whole concierge team, so kind of take the pressure off the maker and we would do the back and forth, tried a number of different things to make it work. I mean, we pushed that boulder up the hill for years trying to make it work. But the reality is that the whole premise was wrong. We just went on that premise because that's the only way we could get funded.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bet on projects and to get rejected a lot and to put a lot of work into like, here's a sketch, and I can do this for $2,000. And then the customer just doesn't go anywhere. Getting something custom is an incredibly intimate back and forth conversation that can be dozens of back and forth communications before anything actually happens. And we tried to put ourselves into the middle of that. And it just didn't work. And despite that, we're out like, well, let's just raise more money. Maybe we can make it work.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From the mak But the reality is that the model didn't work. I used to call this the trade show phenomenon. Like, if you go to a furniture show or a trade show and there's like all these booths, most of the makers are sitting in the back. Like doing something, or they're not out there selling. And you think about the psyche of a woodwork. And now we're asking them to put themselves out there to sell their expertise.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So the charter of that money was to build out a marketplace where we were going to no longer worry about subscription fees, free to join, and then we were going to take a 10% cut of the transaction.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are now venture backed business, having raised a few million dollars. But presumably your business model had to change because you couldn't just charge an annual subscription fee, even if it was 50 bucks or 80 bucks. Like now you had to figure out other ways of making money. So what did you start to think about doing?”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we attracted first round capital into the round, and then first round capital and Google Ventures led our first institutional VC-backed $1.9 million. My co-founder Seth announced that we closed it at my rehearsal dinner for my wedding. And it was very exciting. It was amazing.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because once you are the sort of the middleman and you are controlling the relationship between the artisan and the end user, there's all kinds of things that could happen. You could take a cut, you could, you're basically the platform to get, and of course that model would be huge, Airbnb, Uber, et cetera, et cetera.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I'm in this meeting, and I'm like, pull up the job board. And we pull up the job board. I'm like, all we need to do is stand in between these transactions and we can be the largest marketplace for custom stuff. As soon as I said the word marketplace, everything changed. This is 2011 Airbnb had just kind of started, and people got excited about the concept of being a marketplace for custom stuff. And the venture capital came fast.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. And so we would say, hey, let's go to the job board and look at Albany, look at these jobs. If you had a membership, you could bid on these jobs.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So There was a moment when we were in Polaris, Polaris Ventures, and we had launched this feature called the job board. And the way the job board worked was we actually launched it so that we could sell members. Because one of the questions we would get when we're calling these potential woodworkers is like, well, how do I know that there are any jobs on there? And we created this thing called the job board where somebody could say like, oh, I'm looking for this in this area.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Especially when you're going to venture capitalists who are like, you know, they just want bigger bets than a woodworker listing service. So we were just on the road trying to sell, and everybody said no. I mean, it was like, no, no, no. Like listing service, no way.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Subscription revenue And yeah, we needed more money. So we went out to a couple of venture places, but nobody was interested in talking with us. And so we did another round and raised an additional $600,000.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you eventually do wind up fixing the SEO and revamping the website. You also managed to raise another round of funding, I think, in 2010. At that point, how was the business actually doing? Were you actually, was there cash flow coming in based around this model?”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We didn't tile the pages to each other like they were in the original site. And so over the course of a few months, these makers are calling in. They're being like, first of all, I can't use the site. I can't upload photos in the back end. I can't log in, blah, blah, blah. And all the business has dried up. I'm not making any more money. And so we are frantically trying to fix the website while at the same time working to sign up more and more people onto the website that was in dire need of fixing.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. We brought on the original team we brought on was mostly paid in equity. And then we had a couple people who kind of helped us build. But what we launched was a total disaster, a total disaster.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so our list or our forecast was we could get about 45,000, there were 45,000 custom woodworkers in the United States. And then we knew with a domain name like Custom Made, we could move into other verticals, whether that's jewelry or glass or ceramics or other things. And so the first thing we did is we built a website. And while I've been a tech entrepreneur now for 15 or 16 years, I knew nothing about building a website.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, literally our investment thesis was like, well, you could give it to us and maybe we'll make you money, or you can leave it in the market and lose 30%.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He did Meanwhile, the economy is collapsing, and Seth and I are running around Boston. With a logo on a Blackberry trying to raise money for this idea of a woodworker listing service, you know, 5,000, 10,000, 25,000 dollar slugs at a time.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we put down a $5,000 deposit and we wanted 90 days of due diligence. The 90 days of due diligence was really to go find the money because we didn't have enough money to actually buy that website.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everything's unra And so I ended up getting laid off at the real estate office. And must have been a week later, this guy, Ted, actually, wrote me back and said, I'd be interested, let's talk. And so Seth and I put our heads together and we send him an offer for $140,000, which was four times revenues”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reached out to this guy, Ted, and I said, Hey, if you're ever interested in selling, we'd be interested in buying. I didn't hear anything from him Meanwhile, this is 2008 and the real estate market has.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so you thought, wow, there's just opportunity here. All we need to do is just get more people listing their services, and we can actually make a lot more money. You presume you approach the guy who owns the site, and what? What'd you say?”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was the idea. The number one thing was People need to be able to manage their own profiles. I mean, it's 2008, for God's sakes, people should be able to log in and manage their own content without having to email a webmaster.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In other words, you take this like geocities quality website, you update it into something that looks a little nicer, you charge people more to advertise their services, and you got a nice cash flow business.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, with an amazing SEO footprint, just tons and tons of customers going to the website because when you would type in custom bookshelf into Google, customaid.com came up first. And so, the investment thesis was actually like a real estate investment thesis. We called it a shack in Manhattan. It's like this place gets tons of foot traffic. And all we need to do is rehab the shack and jack up the rents. And we'll have a nice little cash-flowing business on our hands.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so custommaid.com when we purchased it started in 1996 by a woodworker, Ted Wheatenkraus. And it was a listing service for other woodworkers. But this is built in 1996, and so the website actually, if you as a woodworker wanted to update your content, you had to email Ted, who was the webmaster, to put up photos for you or to help you manage your profile.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. So, yeah, this is 2007. Seth has moved into an apartment and decides that he wants to get a fancy coffee table, and he wants to custom make his coffee table. And so he's doing his research and he's on this website custommade.com. And that ends up getting this beautiful coffee table from a woodworker in Maryland. And he's talking to the woodworker, and the woodworker's like, I get all my business from this website custom made. It's amazing. And I pay $35 a year for my membership. And a light bulb goes off on Seth's head, and Seth calls me and he says, hey, we should buy this website, custommade.com. You know, this guy gets all of his business and he's paying $35 a year.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. We were looking for something to buy. We were looking for a business to start, like anything. I mean, we tried, we looked at a number of different things and nothing panned out Until we stumbled across custommade.com.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT