Ryan Nelson: Duct Tape, Zip Ties and a $500K Raise - How He Built Refilled From a Post Gym Problem (Part 1)
About this episode
Ryan Nelson shares his journey of building Refilled from a gym-inspired idea to a successful hardware startup.
Refiled is three years old, and Ryan Nelson is taking on a category that hasn’t 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…
People in this episode
Guest: Ryan Nelson
Topics covered
- hardware startup
- entrepreneurship
- fundraising
- business challenges
- innovation
- transparency in business
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Google, Uber, Meta, Netflix, Atlassian, JP Morgan
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