What Works for Startups Like Yours?

Ooni is a hardware brand that manufactures portable, wood-fired outdoor pizza ovens. Founded in 2012 by Kristian Tapaninaho after he struggled to achieve authentic Neapolitan-style pizza at home, the company raised $26,000 on Kickstarter for its first prototype. The business has grown to $250 million in value, accelerated by the home baking boom during COVID, and is now sold in 90 countries.

First customers: Kickstarter campaign

Anthony Wood launched Roku in 2008 as a $99 hardware device that connected TVs to the internet with a simple, accessible remote interface. Despite initial skepticism from investors and media executives, Roku grew into an expansive media company that creates and distributes content to over 65 million accounts worldwide, fundamentally changing how people consume television.

Sonos was founded in 2002 by John MacFarlane to create wireless home audio systems at a time when streaming and the iPod were brand new. The team engineered high-quality wireless sound systems and integrated them with mobile technology, eventually adding support for voice assistants like Siri and Alexa. Today, Sonos is an established player in the music hardware market with projected annual sales exceeding $1.5 billion.

Spinbrush was an electric toothbrush startup founded by John Osher that became the top-selling toothbrush in the U.S. through innovative design (fixed + oscillating bristles), aggressive pricing ($5 vs. $80 competitors), and packaging innovation (Try Me feature). The company achieved a $475M acquisition by Procter & Gamble after demonstrating category-defining product-market fit and managing inventory discipline that included scrapping 400,000 defective units.

First customers: Toys R Us partnership that provided a lifeline during entrepreneurial terror phase

Brad Baxter left a successful career in the automotive industry to build Litter-Robot, an automated self-cleaning litter box product under his company Whisker. Despite initial skepticism from his family, the product achieved remarkable commercial success, reaching approximately $300 million in annual sales.

Hexclad is a hardware cookware company founded by Danny Winer that leverages a novel non-stick technology discovered at an overseas trade show. The company addresses pain points in the traditional non-stick market—poor high-heat performance and durability—and grew to a $500 million valuation in just under a decade.

Vizio, founded by William Wang after his previous business failure and a near-fatal plane crash, revolutionized TV manufacturing by cutting out middlemen and offering internet-connected televisions at aggressive prices. The company became one of the top-selling TV brands in the US through direct-to-consumer distribution. In 2024, Vizio was acquired by Walmart for $2.3 billion.

David Friedberg founded Canna (formerly The Production Board), a molecular beverage printer that allows consumers to create any beverage at home by combining water with flavor cartridges containing chemically-extracted compounds. The device launched pre-orders at $499 for the first 10,000 units, charging per drink consumed (25-50% cheaper than retail) with auto-shipped cartridges. The three-year R&D effort involved analyzing thousands of beverages via GCMS to prove that all drinks are 99% water and only 1% flavor compounds, enabling a long-tail beverage marketplace similar to YouTube or TikTok.

iRobot was founded by Colin Angle with a vision to advance robotic technology, spending over a decade building military and toy products before the Roomba robot vacuum created an entirely new consumer category. The Roomba became a cultural icon with tens of millions of units sold, but the company eventually hit a wall when a $1.7 billion acquisition deal with Amazon fell through, leading to stagnation and decline.

First customers: Military contracts for bomb-detecting robots, followed by toy contracts with Hasbro