(Part 2) Refiled is three years old, and Ryan Nelson is taking on a category that hasn’t really evolved in 50 years. Ryan is a Blue Mountains kid who spent a decade in SaaS, had an idea post gym and built the first prototype in his garage with duct tape and zip ties - and now counts Google, Uber, Meta, Netflix, Atlassian and JP Morgan among his clients.
In this episode Ryan gets brutally honest about what it actually takes to build a hardware startup from scratch - the $50K bet he made, working until 4AM in garages with his co-founder, losing equity in a previous business, pitching the wrong investors for six months, and why he tells his team exactly how much cash runway they have left.
If you've ever wondered what it looks like inside a fast-growing hardware startup before the shiny success story, this is it.
In This Episode We Cover:
The gym moment that sparked the idea for Refill - and why nothing like it existed despite a $900 billion global beverage industry
How he raised $500K off a duct-tape prototype that wasn't food grade, then $1.9M after building his first 10 machines in a garage
The radical transparency he leads with - including telling his team exactly how many months of runway they have left
Why he resisted the co-founder model for years (including being kicked out of his last business), and what finally changed his mind
His exact cold-calling philosophy for landing enterprise clients like Google and Atlassian
Why 'choose your hard' is the mantra he lives by - and what it means for anyone building something from nothing
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