Recovery has moved from the edge of wellness culture into everyday infrastructure. Saunas, cold plunges, and mobile thermal studios are no longer curiosities. They are becoming local rituals, community services, and serious businesses.
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cold water is like blowing up dude like wim hof is exploding and there's very few manufacturers out there honestly like you look at it now it's like this industry is gonna continue to grow i mean having cold water at your house is an incredible resource you have people like tony robbins now joe rogan has one like any entrepreneur who has to me any sense is going to be getting in cold water every morning like it's just a no-brainer once you try it today on the channel i am interviewing michael and ryan the co-founders of the cold punch when cobot hit back in march of 2020 they both had to close their businesses now instead of feeling sorry for themselves they actually started a cold plunge business and in the last 12 months they've sold over 3. 5 million dollars worth of them have customers like rich roll aubry marcus tony hawk and me so how did they go from nearly bankrupt to almost 500 000 a month we're gonna find out in today's video let's dive in what were you guys doing before you started the cold plunge and how did you come up with the idea so uh both of us are float therapy sensory deprivation tank center owners uh i have two here in the sacramento region and then kovid 19 hit the planet and that was a big for us being in california shut the businesses down you know mike was in a very similar situation and i'm in the bay area i have three locations so even more so in the bay area we were closed for even longer yeah but our kind of jump our leap from the nine to five was probably i was like seven years ago six or something like
seven years ago six or something like that so we'd already kind of made that leap had things going on and then got this break right like my first true vacation i'd gone to burning man stuff like that off the grid but to have like our stores literally closed for months was devastating but also after after getting over the emotional like holy like this is terrifying like getting into the space of like okay what opportunity is here right um i started looking into cold plunges and everything was 9000 and up and started building prototypes with my dad in arizona and that's kind of the origin of everything one one thing that's interesting is like how limitation kind of actually creates creativity creativity but we're like we need more money we need more time we need a co-founder so uh mike how did you actually identify the idea so yeah i just started basically looking what's out there and then i had someone who came to burning man with uh cole plunge the morosco folks uh who were making cold plunges i had a call with them and actually they actually invited me down to arizona to see what they were doing and went with my dad and it was quickly like these guys are selling these things and they have their own unique design it's very different than what we do i think what's interesting just to kind of highlight for the audience that's out there is just like what do you already have some understanding or advantage in and then what is it yourself that has some discrepancy in the market how did
some discrepancy in the market how did you actually go to you know prototyping specifically and validating your first sale are your first few sales yeah so the first two i emailed my reboot my float spot customer list and was just like hey i made one here it is like if anyone wants me to wait make one for them they're three thousand bucks and i had two two customers say yeah like i'd love one so i built those two and then ryan came on board and then we just did a limited run of 20. we were i was just building him out of my garage at that point he had the couple sales come through reboot i was like cool i'll leverage capital floats email list have really good trust with our customer base so that was kind of our thoughts like let's just it's northern california we don't have to do freight shipping we can build them out of the garage we'll run 20 and we can learn about the unit we'll know exactly where the unit's at we can go build hand deliver them to all these customers and actually have this like hands-on approach to see where it's going so we did that we sold 20 and then you know website was live what one big thing early on was we completely owned the search phrase cold plunge so his buddy knows tech did the google thing where you can kind of see you know who's owning the search term cold plunge it's like no one was there it's like a barren wasteland so we did the coldplunge. com whole site said cole plunge all over it and like literally in a month we were like first page of
a month we were like first page of google um we didn't even run google ads until like this year in january so people our organic seo is nuts for cold plunge so that was huge and then once we fired up google ads again we only have a few competitors and our price is half i did want you guys to walk me through you know in the last 12 months you sold three and a half million dollars of cold pups can you guys walk me through uh some of the the marketing strategy maybe some stuff that people wouldn't expect some of the stuff they would expect to be able to accomplish that you know we we understood the power of the internet if you can connect with 10 people or people of the influencer space it's going to seem like the whole world's doing this so we identified 10 people or even more maybe 20 people that we fit our values were into this they walked the walk they liked cold therapy all the things and we're like if we can get them a unit and get it out to their world like we are exponential like we're gonna look like a thing so that was out of the gate we did a lot of um you know trade for them representing the brand and we'd go on the tour and we would ship get the units in their house and we'd be uh get the picture with them and so it was this kind of um it made us look i think a lot bigger than we were out of the gate and it just built this kind of like whoa these guys are everywhere when in reality it was 10 to 20 people that we had chosen and said let's go after them we did some podcast ads like with some of the people who got the the free units like aubry marcus has just been
aubry marcus has just been incredible with how many you know discount codes have gone through with him and he he was the first one we did in early november in austin and then he introduced us to more people and then they every time we dropped one off we'd have them uh you know do the next one like hey like who do you think would like one of these that you want to gift to and like we kind of get up the chain and all of a sudden we're like at tony hawk's house you know what i mean so it's like the reason why tony hawk was down to get a cold tub from us is because his good buddy jason ellis just got one and he trusts jason and jason's like dude this thing's incredible like i gotta get you one you know if we hit up tony you just get a brick wall so you just kind of keep going up the friend chain you show up you're yourself you're a real person you're cool with them they're cool with you they're getting a free tub you're just you're not like asking like demanding that they share in a certain amount of times either just like dude share it however you want to share it so we're being cool with them and they kind of can you maybe walk through because i think a lot of people including ourselves at appsumo are like hey we want to work with certain influencers to help promote our products at the end of the day so what was your approach to aubrey and then what was this one to one thing you guys did the original approach was fascinating i'm in my sauna i'm on instagram and he's doing a live getting in his cold plunge test freezer chest freezer yes and i literally comment from our account like hey can we upgrade your chest freezer to one of our cold
your chest freezer to one of our cold plungers smiley face and he literally like two minutes later comments like absolutely like hit me up so i hit up rich rolls podcast and that was actually one that hit up just through an email inquiry hey we're interested trying to learn about podcasts didn't know anything about it it was way too way more than what we could afford but struck up a relationship with his team fast forward two months we're down at rich's house setting him up um you know and then from there is just we asked who who do you want to give this to obviously the jason ellis tony hawk those are the big ones aubrey his whole network now has a unit in some capacity and we've done this isn't we haven't just done trade we've done ads for podcasts or kind of just gotten within the network to see what we can do see what other deals can be struck up good for you guys man i'm super happy for you guys and it's funny it reminds me of my days i used to throw conferences everyone wants to be a speaker no one wants to be an attendee it's like everyone wants the free cold plunge who wants to pay up but at the same time the you know that it is you know the this approach is working can you guys share maybe a little bit more behind the scenes of how your growth has looked uh germany commented changing warehouses challenges of growth with shipping employees and revenue growth like the you know maybe the behind the scenes a little bit on the 12 months yeah i mean started in the garage it was challenging especially for ryan because ryan was trying to help me build cult plunges and ryan is just not handy
not handy and uh had some breakdowns yeah on the garage it was a 10 it was that was probably my most difficult time in the company coming on it was like so outside my skill set i'm cutting pvc pipe for mike and we're tripping over units and i was just it's a big insecurity for me it goes back long years of working with tools and all that stuff so that we were in the garage then one of the 20 units that we bought we're delivering to his house i knew he owns bike shops i kind of we i knew we needed to get out of the garage and so he was like well i got a back spot on my bike shop you guys can move into so within a week we moved our operation to the bagworth's bike shop which was not what we thought we had our own little warehouse it was actually just these dummy walls with like an opening so people are buying bikes just looking back at us like you guys build bathtubs back here and then we signed a lease on a warehouse about a three two twenty five three thousand square foot warehouse thought that was going to be home for a little while that's when we started employees were being hired and we were kind of growing then within two and a half months there we were like what do we we gotta get out of here um and luckily our our the commercial facility we were in had the main tenant unit available it was just like out our door every day and we were just like how do we get in there and it just you know two doors down so the move was fairly i mean it's been comically like the growth's been feels very large and it's been comically in flow i was curious the the role responsibility so mike is the handy dude
responsibility so mike is the handy dude ryan how did it because i think that's a common issue like i have my business partner he's the quiet tech genius that tells me what to do i'm the loud like seems like i know what i'm doing but really i'm just listening to him uh and so i'm curious how you guys have balanced uh co-founders and business partners it's a really good it's kind of been the dance my i mean first off mike and i are friends above all else we've got to know each other like the last six years been through a lot of awesome times and like challenging times together um so i think for me knowing mike i know who he is as a man and we our values are the same like we're very clear on what's important to us in life what we you know find important and so that was always clear and then the skill sets we did a charity campaign about three years ago through our float centers called float for maps where we raised we've got a bunch of float centers around the country to raise money for maps's stage three trials for mdma so we wanted something that was really important to us and so we came together on that so we got to learn how each other worked there we ran these brick and mortars by ourself and that's been like oh i actually really like this and so we're really vocal into what we do and don't like and then we try and that's been our hiring process like okay neither of us really like this and okay we need to find someone to do this um so that's been and that's involved we'll learn a lot more about what we do and don't like there's things at certain levels at certain positions that here's what you should be doing but you're like well i still enjoy that
well i still enjoy that and then i think it's like you know how do you spend a lot of the day in the area you enjoy and the area the company really needs and so it's great that you guys are you know identifying which pieces those are for everyone watching that wants to start their own business what do you think they can learn from your story just do it right like that's like number one problems come up you're never gonna foresee so you can't think it through but the key was just like finding a good product market fit and then just jumping and might i mean i've never had a co-founder so that dynamic's been awesome for us because i was probably a little hesitant to jump our product into the market when we did and mike was very much like we're good let's go and if we didn't move with that speed we wouldn't have capitalized on what's happening right now and we just knew but to the point of my we were gonna figure it out if there was an issue we would make everyone right into the process so to your point it was literally just do it and it's never gonna be perfect to launch like that that's like the everyone every founder always says that it was kind of our my first time in a product world to actually face that be like all right it's never gonna be perfect will you learn by doing it i love it if you like this startup story you are going to love the story of how justin mares who used to actually work at appsumo started a hundred million dollar bone broth company with just a hundred dollars you can see it right up here and uncle noah wants to make sure you are subscribed to the channel if you have not subscribed yet i love you and i'll see you out there
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13 minute conversation 3 core levers: breath, temperature, attention 1 repeatable practice: return to equilibrium
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