163. Meet Curt, Bootstrapping on Credit Cards feat. Curt Nichols, Founder & CEO at Glade Optics

Hi, my name is Curt Nichols. I'm the founder of Glade Optics. We sell ski goggles, ski helmets, sunglasses, and a smattering of other outdoor related accessories. We've been in business since about 2017. I bootstrapped the brand myself and grew the business to be big enough to eventually get on the radar of some larger institutional investors in the category. With that capital and with the traction we were seeing we're able to really grow the business to where it is today, which is a high seven figure business and known as the premier product within the ski goggle category. Let's talk about our fundraising journey a little bit. It started in 2017. I was working 9 to 5 at a market research consultancy business, and I was doing Glade on the side, nights and weekends. The way that I financed the business in the early days was really using credit card debt. This is something that I don't know if you could totally get away with anymore, but it was the only funding I had access to at the time. I was an unknown commodity. I was 24 years old. There was no chance I was going to be able to put together a pitch deck, pitching a highly seasonal consumer business to someone like a traditional venture capitalist. I use what resources I had available to me. At the time it was credit cards. I had 0 dependents. I wasn't married. I didn't own a home. I think my total savings account at the time was 5 or 10 grand. It was totally low risk for me with regard to if it all went south, I had nothing to lose. That was certainly a part of the founding story that often gets left out is if you start something when you're young and relatively unencumbered by other parts of your life that sort of just happen naturally, it's a much easier way to go about things. But I was able to do sort of the bare minimum and create a minimum viable product, both from a physical product standpoint as well as sort of a digital experience standpoint to get it off the ground. I built a website, I started prototyping products really all using that debt. It was very, very lean in the early days. I was certainly not making any money. You know, call it 5 grand at a time on the credit card through Facebook ads, I would get seven or eight thousand dollars back in revenue. And then I would use that to buy more inventory. So that was really the story of the first few seasons. It was really bare bones. It was sort of from an emotional standpoint, it was very stressful. There was always this lingering doubt in my mind of, you know, hey, if this goes south, have I put myself in a really challenging financial position personally? But, part of that is that for a long time, my back was really against the wall. It forced me to be fairly scrappy, fairly lean, fairly innovative in how I was acquiring customers.