Concept to Creation, Chapter 7: The 26 Hour Road Trip

When I left off, we had 100+ pre-orders and a decision to make.

Those orders were promises, and the only way to keep them was to place our first real production run. We had a deadline in the second week of April to get it done. What we needed now was the money to get it started.

The first piece came from family.

Zachariah Carcanague and my grandparents stepped in and loaned us enough to cover the deposit on the order. I do not say that lightly. There is a particular weight to taking money from people who love you and believe in you, because now the thing you are building is carrying their faith too, not just a stranger's twenty dollars. That loan gave us the one thing we needed most. It gave us the ability to actually put money down and get the order moving.

But we did not want to just wire a deposit and hope. This was the first real production run of the product our name was going on. We wanted to see it. We wanted to stand in front of the line that was going to make the thing a hundred strangers had already paid for.

So we got in the car and drove from New Jersey to Texas to visit Lance Orso and Steven Salmon.

Twenty-six hours, straight through. If you have never done a drive like that, it does something to you. The country gets flat and then it gets huge, the gas station coffee stops tasting like anything, and somewhere around hour eighteen the whole thing starts to feel less like a road trip and more like a pilgrimage. We were not driving to a vacation. We were driving to the place that was going to turn our idea into inventory.

Then Zachariah Carcanague, Ryan Wilkinson and I walked into the manufacturer and saw the line.

I am not sure I can fully explain what that did to us. For a year and a half this had lived in pitch decks and spreadsheets and late-night calls. Now it was machinery. Real equipment, real people, a real process that was going to produce the exact thing we had been describing to judges and strangers for months. You spend so long asking people to imagine what you are building. Standing there, we did not have to imagine anymore. It existed, or it was about to.

And then we submitted the deposit.

That was the moment it stopped being a plan. The money my grandparents trusted us with went down on the order, the line was set to run, and the promises we made to those first hundred customers had a real path to being kept.

The deposit was the start of the bill, though, not the end of it. We still owed the rest of the order, and the rest was real money. Which is exactly where April came in.

April was shaping up to be the biggest month we had ever had. Four pitch competitions, back to back. One of them was the Values and Ventures Competition at TCU Neeley School of Business, right there in Texas, and we had made it in. So the plan wrote itself. Finish at the manufacturer, get back in the car, and drive straight to the competitions that could carry us the rest of the way.

So that is where I will leave it. We pulled out of the manufacturer's lot with a deposit down, a production line spinning up, and a real shot at closing out the order in front of us. Next stop was TCU, and the biggest month of our story so far.

More of the story soon.

Braeden, +Pouch