Growth Mavericks

In this episode of Growth Mavericks, Adam Callinan sits down with Maria Boustead, founder of Po Campo, to unpack one of the most honest startup journeys you’ll hear.
Maria didn’t raise venture capital. She didn’t scale overnight. And for years, it didn’t look like it was “working.”
But she kept going.
From building prototypes with stapled fabric and Home Depot parts to landing major retail accounts like REI, Maria shares the real story behind building a consumer brand the hard way.
This is a masterclass in patience, resilience, and staying in the game long enough to win.
If you’re building something and wondering if it’s worth it — this episode is for you.

🔑 KEY TAKEAWAYS

  •  Why “overnight success” can take over a decade 
  •  The truth about product-market fit (and how long it really takes) 
  •  How to start a company without quitting your job 
  •  Why bootstrapping builds stronger businesses 
  •  The pros and cons of raising venture capital 
  •  How Maria scaled Po Campo into major retailers like REI 
  •  Why timing matters just as much as execution 
  •  The importance of staying in the game long enough to win 

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS

00:00 – Intro
 01:00 – The Po Campo origin story
 05:30 – Building the first prototype
 10:00 – Finding manufacturers (the unconventional way)
 15:00 – Early struggles and slow growth
 22:00 – Why wholesale didn’t work at first
 30:00 – The pricing problem
 38:00 – When to quit your job (and when not to)
 45:00 – The turning point after 10+ years
 52:00 – COVID, e-bikes, and market timing
 58:00 – Why VC funding isn’t always the answer
 01:05:00 – Lessons on resilience and longevity

🔗 LINKS & RESOURCES

Creators and Guests

Host
Adam Callinan
Adam Callinan is the founder of Pentane, a financial and advertising command center that empowers brands to drive predictable revenue and intentional profit. Previously, Adam co-founded BottleKeeper, a bootstrapped consumer brand that scaled to $8M in sales within three years – without employees – and was later acquired in 2021 as an eight-figure business with a team of four, marking Adam's second successful exit.

What is Growth Mavericks?

This podcast dives deep into the tactical moves that drive business success, as well as the mental and physical resilience required to sustain it.

Hosted by Adam Callinan, a seasoned entrepreneur with multiple exits, an avid outdoorsman, and an family man with crystal-clear priorities, each episode unpacks real-world challenges, actionable insights, and the mental and physical disciplines that fuel long-term personal and professional growth.

Whether you’re scaling a startup or refining your mindset, disrupting your default is how business and life strike a balance.

Maria Boustead (03:22.083)
Yes, I have a very classic origin story where I started the business to solve my own problem first and felt like other people could benefit from the solution. I was an avid city cyclist and I wanted a better way to carry things on my bike. With a backpack, you get all sweaty. A normal shoulder bag falls down your arms, bounces on your knees, annoying and distracting. And then bags that are designed to go on your bike come more from like bike touring or

bike packing, super utilitarian and not really meant to be taken off the bike and use like a normal bag. Yes, they have handles and straps, but it's obviously like a bicycle bag that you're lugging around with you. And I really wanted something that I could put on my bike for my work commutes and then use as my normal bag throughout the day, whether I was going to the office, to meetings, out to lunch, out with a friend after work, you know, whatever. And not finding anything with that kind of versatility. My background is industrial design.

into product design and I had worked at a bag company as my first job out of school. So I knew how bags kind of came together and I was like, this is a perfect kind of industrial design problem. I remember the vision and this is still kind of the standard we hold it up to for most of our styles is that you wouldn't know it was a bike bag off the bike. You know, that it really would be two different types of bags. And then thinking about people I was seeing on the streets biking, this was 2008 when I had

this idea, it was more and more people kind of doing what we call like everyday cycling, know, like biking in their normal clothes. You would have the roadies and their spandex and kind of like the super urban gritty dudes, messenger bike guys, but I felt like there's a lot more people like me that were just enjoying biking, kind of living a sustainable lifestyle, you know, getting around by bike and not really seeing one kind of that crossover product that would help you integrate.

biking into your daily life into a brand that would be more about just kind of like the joy of city riding and so I had been kind of wanting to do my own thing and that felt like the perfect concept to launch Pocampo with.

Adam Callinan (05:37.55)
What city were you in in 2008? Chicago. Okay.

Maria Boustead (05:40.094)
Chicago. Yeah, I'm from Chicago originally. That's where I started Po Campo.

Now Chicago has some nice bike lanes and stuff. That was very early on for kind of a bike lane concept. One thing that made Chicago very bikeable, I mean, still this way, is that it's one, very flat, and two, it's on the grid system. So if there's like a busy street, one block over is a residential street that's going exactly the same way. So it's easy to kind of like find a pretty safe way to get around. And because it's flat, this was before e-bikes, you know, it was easy to bike without it being too much of a hard

hope.

Adam Callinan (06:17.762)
Yeah, that makes sense. Chicago is perfectly flat for that. How did you get from that very first concept? Like, you walk me through, like did prototyping, did you like sew one up in your living room or did you hire a designer as if with your design background?

Maria Boustead (06:31.333)
How do you like the beginning?

Yeah, so let's say like I had the concept in like September of 2008. Let's say I don't remember exactly, but it was kind of summer fall-ish. And then we launched the next spring, like maybe April, May, maybe May, because I remember us doing stuff around bike month. So like the time between those two, like I'm now like, wow, we actually did that pretty fast. First thing I did was I recruited a co-founder and I remember putting together this presentation and it was like,

very huge vision. We were, went to industrial design school together, we worked at the same company. I felt at that time we were very different and that I'm like, I like to say I paint with a big brush, but she's very good at little details. So we joined forces, we kind of like talked about what we wanted to do, we made a little focus group with friends, kind of came up with a rough idea. The first concept we, she just made out of

fabric and it was stapled, glued. We used hardware from Home Depot, but really just to kind of like test the concept with people. And once we felt good about that idea, the next challenge was how to make them. Neither of us wanted to be a bag manufacturer, nor did we have the equipment to do it. it was like, how are going to make them? We don't want to make a thousand, you know, because we're just kind of testing this idea out. We were in Chicago, which

is a large city, it seemed like there should be somebody in Chicago that can make these for us. And I remember like going through Google, maybe even the Yellow Pages then, and the only bag people we could find were just like very basic like cotton totes that you would get for free at a grocery store or something. And our design was much more kind of handbag.

Maria Boustead (08:25.057)
and we were really feeling like we running into a wall with it. I was like, I know it exists here somewhere. And I asked a friend who's Korean American and she had worked for Fossil doing bags and had like recently been laid off.

Could you help us? Yeah, I know you know what we're looking for. You got some time. And she talked to her mom who said, talk to the mechanic. He knows everyone in the Korean American community. She went to get her oil changed. She asked them, he's like, yeah, Mr. And Mrs. Lee. They used to make luggage for two me. They're in my church. she, I know, it's so random. And then so she arranged for us to meet Mr. And Mrs. Lee.

brought their son to be a translator. We showed them like our drawings, our rough prototype. They made rough samples for us just like in black that we use to do some more user testing doing our design process that we were taught. We made some more refinements to the design, sourced some more fabrics. They made our first like sales samples, which I took around to bike stores literally like knocking on doors as going in.

with like the samples and some rough pricing and we were elated that we got into 12 bike stores that first spring. It was so exciting and then we had to find a real factory so that we wouldn't be making them all one at a time and the Lees introduced us to a small cut and sew factory from another Korean woman. did her bread and butter was doing

like pager cases or for Motorola or like very simple folio kind of things. But she had everything set up. She had a bunch of sores and cutters and really kind of held our hand to figuring out how to do it. We had to source every little bit and bob, including the adhesive, which she used to like put things together ourselves.

Adam Callinan (10:15.791)
All right.

Maria Boustead (10:38.277)
which was a big headache, but we did it and we were able to launch. I think we had to make 100. We had two styles. We had to make 100 of each. We made 33 of each because there was three colors in each of them and we started with that.

Adam Callinan (10:56.963)
That is an incredible founding story and series of fortuitous events, which is often how these things were.

Maria Boustead (11:03.403)
I know, you have to ask.

Adam Callinan (11:05.805)
Yeah. Let's go back to the very beginning of that. And we're not going to spend all our time in this rabbit hole, but there is an important rabbit hole there at the beginning that that you mentioned. That's a big pain point for a lot of idea people, early stage founders, people that solve, you know, start companies exactly like you did exactly like I have where you have a problem. You solved your own problem. Suddenly we have

You know, we think maybe other people have the same problem and it turns out they do. they, you know, maybe we can sell this thing to those other people you went. And first you said that you recruited a co-founder. How did you, can we talk through that? This is a huge pain point for people trying to do it on their own. Often think that they need to go find a co-founder and don't know where to look.

Maria Boustead (11:52.169)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, and actually, I said Pogampo's 17 years old now. She only stayed there for two years. And so I would say, well, we're still really good friends and we did compliment each other.

It wasn't the best relationship, so maybe I can say what I learned from that. I knew I wanted to do it with someone to share the work. And I've always thought of front of the house, back of the house, like in a restaurant, you have some people who are just more looking out at making the customers happy and telling the story and all of that. then you have.

people who don't really want to interface with the customers that much but are more obsessed with like making a good product. And I just knew myself that I was more of liking to tell the story so I knew I wanted somebody who was more about making a good product and because I knew her pretty well I knew she was that way. And we got along really well, we worked really well together and that's true. You know I think one thing I underappreciated is how small design

is in a consumer products company. You know, we were kind of taught in design school, good design sells itself. Like you're kind of the genius, you make this good thing and they're like, and my work here is done, you know? And so by having two designers that kind of work differently, I felt like we had a good foundation and in many ways we did definitely to get the product launched and feel part of what we had. Where it wasn't as such a good fit is the entrepreneur life is really crazy.

you know, and I was, and very risky, you know, and I, where we decided we were both unhappy is like an opportunity would come that would make me super excited, like, you know, interest from a larger retailer, REI, like I did a press release, we were in like retailer and industry news and REI called us after like two months in the market. I was like, my God.

Maria Boustead (13:57.209)
did it, you know? That same thing that made me so excited, like it really scared her, you know, because all of a sudden it would be a much bigger investment that we would have to be making with our own money. Just everything felt like the stakes got so high so fast and we realized after kind of like trying to meet each other in the middle, you know, for two years, neither of us were really happy. Like I was like, if I'm spending all this time, I want to like do it, you know? And even with trying to do it like 50%, it would still be

on her comfort zone. So we decided to split. Now I appreciate that is like, think something to look forward with co-founders is that they're comfortable with that kind of startup world where it is, it does take a lot of investment of your own money and your own time. It could go down the toilet to be comfortable with that or comfortable enough with it. And at least you're on the kind of the same wavelength there because that was

a big point of conflict between us in the beginning that, you know, we just ended up both not being very happy. I still really believe in like the front of the house, back of the house thing. And I also like the E-Myth is one of my favorite books. had a trio. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, but kind of like the one person who's the visionary, the one person who's kind of the manager, you know, that just makes sure the systems are in place. And then the one person who's obsessed with the product quality. I think that is a really good trio without

Adam Callinan (15:14.763)
I am.

Maria Boustead (15:26.983)
one of those, something's gonna fall apart. It is, I think, hard to, you know, I never replaced her. There was times where I, it was very lonely and I wanted someone else, but I did kind of like choose my advisors to kind of play those roles to kind of fake a starting team or co-founder so that you do have a different perspective and feels like you can then lean into your strength, knowing the other things are more or less taken care of.

Adam Callinan (15:57.613)
Yeah, so it's more of like a supplementary structure where you can supplement the needs with outside people that are only spending maybe a little bit of time on specific issues. makes sense. We functioned really similar at Bottlekeeper, my cousin Matt and I, I was very much the front of the house. I mean, we literally had like this Chinese wall in between responsibilities. was anything that a customer would see or touch. like the website and the technology and the branding and the...

Maria Boustead (16:08.002)
Yeah. Yeah.

Maria Boustead (16:17.487)
This one.

Adam Callinan (16:22.753)
images and the emails and all the marketing stuff. And he was the backend of the house, know, really the manufacturing, the inventory, the finance piece. And it worked really well. guess the ups, what we had was that he was very entrepreneurial. So we were, you know, we were both sort of collectively comfortable in that risk space. That being said, we looked at it entirely differently, which is good. Like there's a, there's an important balance there where I was super aggressive and like wanted to run with my hair on fire all the time. And he was very

Maria Boustead (16:42.97)
right.

Adam Callinan (16:51.575)
very entrepreneurial and very open to risk, but very conservative about it. And that worked out really well because we disagreed on a lot. But generally speaking, the in-between that we ended up on was the right place to be.

Maria Boustead (16:54.479)
Mm-hmm.

Maria Boustead (17:03.013)
Yeah, right, right, right. Yeah. And I feel that sometimes with my team now is I'm still just like, I'm comfortable with starting before the whole thing is built, you know, so that you can, it's easier to adjust. Our more conservative people will be like, no, we need to get like at least the chassis together. So if this does take off, we don't seem like we're idiots, you know? So I do feel like there's a push and pull with that still.

Adam Callinan (17:26.381)
Yeah. And there's the balance, right? Either of them are right or wrong. There's a balance of risk and reward and time to market and time, the amount of time it's gonna take. that's interesting. So you get, if we fast forward back, you get, the Lee family connects you to a manufacturer. Is that manufacturer domestic or are they in Korea?

Maria Boustead (17:50.373)
Yeah, they were in Chicago.

Adam Callinan (17:52.857)
Amazing.

Maria Boustead (17:53.093)
Yeah, so for the first couple of years we manufactured in Chicago and we did all our own sourcing of materials. mean, it's like a whole other story on its own, figuring out where to get everything from when the manufacturing of soft goods is largely overseas, had moved away. I mean, we were still importing things from Asia, but just like the zipper pulls, you know, and then trying to find things domestically, but often not being able to. But anyway, we would put a lot together for the

For the first couple of years we made it with them with...

the, our accounts, everybody was like, understood the pain point was in our competition and bike stores was and still largely is just like very basic black bags. So they understood like wanting some differentiation and understood the kind of the customer we going after the problem we were solving. The average like handlebar bag was maybe like $30. We were selling ours at first for 80. I think

at $80 actually felt like a good price for this like really nicely designed almost handbag style bag made in the U.S. with like top grade leather and everything like I felt like the price was good. But.

Adam Callinan (19:07.567)
Yeah, that seems incredibly inexpensive for making the US, like made in Chicago down the street. That's cool. Yeah.

Maria Boustead (19:13.773)
Yeah, I know. And then our larger bag, I think, was a hundred and...

40 or something, I'm not quite sure around there. But we were like three to four times the price of the competitive products or kind of the basic stuff and there wasn't much in between. And so we heard a lot like, I get so much attention, but there's so much sticker shock. Everybody's like, maybe I'll come back for a birthday or something, which you never want to hear. And I did have, this was in how I built this with Burton that I went around a month later to like see how everybody's doing and get my

reorders which is part of our business plan and ended up like taking back most of what we sold because it wasn't moving or it was just like dirty you because like the bike shop guys would be like touching it so you know and I was like oh we can't have that not completely but definitely did not get reorders you know and with online shopping wasn't quite

where it is now, where we started in store. We just had a WordPress website that was really just kind of like about us and some pictures of things and a list of the stores we were in. So we weren't really selling online. I remember we found like a widget. It was like a pop-up that you could sell on and we used that in the beginning for a couple years. like, in 2009 we launched it like that. Okay.

Adam Callinan (20:35.929)
So this would have been 2010-ish.

Maria Boustead (20:42.597)
And I remember, okay, so the first year, you know, we hit our minimums, it was out, we weren't getting reorders, but we were hearing it was too expensive. And actually how we had designed the bags was very labor intensive, a certain iconic detail. So next year we redesigned the bags to simplify the construction. We were able to bring the price down a little bit, like maybe $20 on each, but then it still kind of felt like it was an expensive bag for what you were getting, you because it also seemed like

simpler bag so next year kind of having a similar situation you know we're selling in some stuff maybe we're trying some things online or on Etsy which takes us to them but still like kind of barely moving our moq of 100 units you know so year three trying again and this time you know i was like everybody keeps saying they love them but the price is too high

Are they still saying that to be nice? Cause it's not, you know, it's just kind of a critique. That's not anybody's fault. Or is that really the problem? So we started the spring with basically removing our whole margin just to be like, if the price was half as much roughly, like could we sell them? And they did sell. It was so exciting. Like we, in April we did like our test. We got reorders from stores for their first time. started, I'm like, okay, so it definitely.

is the price. And then working with our factory, there is just no way we could strip out half of the cost, you know, like we were already trying to do it as affordably as possible. We did not want to make it just like a simple tote bag. I that wasn't the concept for it.

So it seems just inevitable that we would have to move our production overseas. And our factory owner actually helped us with that. She had a relationship with a factory in China. And so she kind of like worked as our agent in a way and took the, show them the designs and everything, got the samples made. And since then we didn't look back. Now I will say that first factory was not the right fit for us. But having the more affordable

Maria Boustead (22:59.303)
pricing did feel like it opened a lot of doors for us. I remember going to a trade show and we were in like the new exhibitors for the outdoor retailer show. Yeah, we got purchase orders from REI, Title IX, these catalog companies. I don't even know if they're around anymore, but I was like, oh my God, here we go. Yeah. It was kind of funny because it was before we even had the international factory like ready, locked and loaded. I was like, again, just like, let me just see if this works.

That was probably in August and I'm like, okay, we got orders for these things and now we have to make them and ship them in March. Here we go.

Adam Callinan (23:38.711)
Yeah, you have to say yes to all of that. Like you just figure it out. This is the, build the plane while you fly it. Welcome to our ship. Yeah.

Maria Boustead (23:40.387)
Yes.

Maria Boustead (23:43.777)
I know. I mean, I always feel like if you have an order from a big retailer, surely you can find somebody to make it for you. You know, that was my philosophy.

Adam Callinan (23:49.839)
You've figured it out. So when that's, it's such an interesting.

like place and time because three years later or four years later, you could have absolutely started it completely direct to consumer. And I only say that from the context of we did that. Like we were in 2013 on a WordPress site with like WooCommerce plugged into it as a shopping thing, building a hundred percent direct to consumer business that didn't have wholesale distribution until 2018 intentionally, like it was restricted intentionally. So when you...

Maria Boustead (24:16.782)
Right.

Adam Callinan (24:29.677)
you know, you first go into that wholesale environment as kind of the launch plan and you get the commitments and they, sell the product and you bring it back because it, or they try to sell the product that doesn't sell, or at least most, some percent of it doesn't sell and you bring it back and you then go down the, you know, the next two year long, it sounds like, you know, rabbit hole of trying to figure out how to get the product less expensive, proving out that the price point is actually a challenge. Like how are you,

funding the business, were you funding it out of, I mean, three years, that's is what normally it takes. Like people listening to this need to understand this is what normally happens. The headlines that you read in the magazines about some company that started last week and now it's making a billion dollars are garbage. That's not how this works at all. It normally happens like this. It takes years to figure it out. So how did you, yeah, how did you as a business, you know, make it through that period?

Maria Boustead (25:26.841)
Well, we both kept our day jobs first.

so this was definitely nights, weekends, and lunch hours, kind of a job task. One nice thing about soft goods is the, and it's a little bit early to entry, which is why there's so many, so many options for it. all you need is a sewing machine, you know, like, you don't need to pay for custom tooling or expensive mechanical engineers or any, or commit to like a 10,000 piece thing to amortize your capital.

cost, know, like you really can just you can need fabric and sewing machine. So and you can make small quantities, you know, so our minimum was 100. And I think that's pretty common for the US. And if you cancel 100 of something, you got a problem, know, so.

Adam Callinan (26:19.631)
Yeah, maybe can move on to the next one.

Maria Boustead (26:21.413)
Yeah, it's not gonna work. If you cancel 100 or something in like a year or your main season, then you've got a bigger problem. I think that really helped it. So we each put in money, maybe 10,000, maybe less. I can't remember. And then, but it maybe was about that. 5,000 each to 10. It felt like a lot, honestly, it felt like a lot of money to us at the time.

But now knowing how much money I've spent on from Campo, it feels like really that much, but it did feel like a lot of money at that time, a little scary amount. And we did take out a small business loan at one point for maybe another 10,000. But that was the capital. So we were really trying to do things very efficiently. You know, we were designers, so the expense of product design, we did, obviously.

We definitely didn't do any advertising. So one, I think, benefit with the wholesale model is...

the especially then brands weren't really expected to do advertising or promotion. I mean, that's what you have the retailer for is they get it. They're the ones that put it in front of the customer, not you, you know. So just knocking on the doors, calling the stores. That was kind of it for that. And doing a trade show once a year, maybe, you know, so that felt like you could see the payoff in that right away, you know.

But it is, you you're kind of, you grow very slowly because you are limited by what you can afford to do, you know, and it's hard to kind of suck away money to pay for the next round of inventory if it's more than what you just paid for, you know, so that took me a long time to learn that, to set aside money to pay for growth. Yeah.

Adam Callinan (28:22.786)
There's two really important points in there, at least from my perspective that I think are worth mentioning. One is that you don't have to quit your day job. This is a thing that, again, entrepreneurs tend to struggle with. And I don't know who started saying this, but they need to stop saying it. that you either, have to go all in on something or else. Like it'll never work unless you fully commit to it. And I think that is...

the most diabolical way to get people to ruin their lives, jumping in on something because it can take three years to get it to work, right?

Maria Boustead (28:56.697)
You know, honestly, Adam, I don't feel like it started to work until two years ago. I do think, and I think we, me and my co-founder appreciated the time it would take to figure out the right fit. Just understanding the product process, you know, like the first time you make something and then you put it in front of customers.

Adam Callinan (29:00.975)
Okay.

Maria Boustead (29:21.373)
it's not going to be right, you know? As much as hard as you try to like get it right, it just never is. And I have this like, you know, of course we tested everything, but like my maiden voyage with my new bag and it fell off my bike. my God, that was just like,

It didn't fall off, but it fell to the side. And I was like, you know, oh no. And our handlebar bag had these cute magnets at the top, but if you went over a bump a certain way, it opened and everything in the bag went flying out. And so that was round one. And so I think we anticipated that and wanted to give ourselves kind of the space to be able to fine tune and continue to improve and wait until we were closer to be like,

like this is the product, it's a good product, know, people are buying it before quitting. It was when we started to move to Asia, my colleague or my co-founder was less interested in that. You know, I think she really liked the real Chicago bread made in Chicago that we could go down to the factory, like bike to the factory if we want. I think that was a lot of the appeal of the business to her was that it was kind of more like homespun feeling.

So knowing that we wouldn't be able to work with them, think that was who she would work with the most. I think that kind of lost some interest. Moving overseas, the MOQ went from 100 to 1,000, which was way too high.

but she wasn't willing to take that leap. was more than happy to, you know, so we could kind of see it like fraying. And then when I went to that trade show and I got all those orders, I was like, okay, here we go. And so that's when I quit my job. Feeling like...

Adam Callinan (31:08.601)
Mm-hmm.

Maria Boustead (31:11.393)
I wanted some daytime hours to devote to it. It was, especially being like the face of it, it was just too hard to try to like cram everything in during a lunch hour. I felt guilty with my employer, because I really loved the company I was working with and I loved my job there, but feeling like I was kind of like stealing time more than I should have, you know, so it wasn't fair to them either.

And also feeling like a lot of the work was really similar. So I to work on these projects during the day at my job, and it was kind of like the same kind of projects at night. And it just felt like my brain was need a little bit more of a balance. My...

my escape job and I feel like everybody has one. I'd love to hear yours like when you're like screw this I'm just going to do this instead. Mine was always working in a fancy French restaurant because with my other job we did a lot of business travel and we would go to nice restaurants and I was like dang these servers make a lot of money in tips you know and so that was always going to be my escape and so that's what I did. I got a job waiting tables at that year's like restaurant of the year was this French bistro

and I was like, my gosh, this is perfect. The restaurant opens at five. I'm only gonna work four days a week. I didn't make nearly as much as my old job, but I made enough for my part of my household contribution part, you know? And that was kind of how I did my off-ramp was I worked there for maybe six months.

eight months. And it was good in that I had money coming in still. Pocampo wasn't paying me. It was many years still for it to pay me as much as that French restaurant job. But it gave me kind of my off ramp where I felt like I was still making money. That wasn't Pocampo, but I could cover what I needed. It was different enough where I felt like I could totally use a different type part of my brain. I found it energizing.

Maria Boustead (33:15.367)
Thank

in a way, and it taught me some really killer life skills that were so helpful for Pro Campo at that time. I don't know if you've waited tables much, but the one that I still feel like I'm using is like, you go out, you check your section at six o'clock, one table's there, no problem. You go, you get their glass of wine, you come back, your whole section is now full. And like that you need to be in all these different places at once, like it's not possible.

to like stay calm.

batch tasks. You know, I still do this all the time, batch my tasks and then work with my colleagues to help each other out. This was a restaurant where you pool tips, which I love. So it was like everybody was into like making sure every customer had a wonderful experience. So if it's like I had a big table, I had all these like wine orders. I see a colleague going, here's the list. Can you get these? sure. I got it for you. You know, you know, so I think between like not not getting panicky, overwhelmed when like everything is

happening at once, learning how to batch tasks, learning how to delegate, working as a team. It was so helpful to do that in a totally different world from what my normal world was. And I really liked being on my feet. The time flew by. I felt like I got a lot of exercise. I didn't have to work in other fitness or anything. And it was just a really good balance. Eventually it felt like I was staying up too

Maria Boustead (34:48.847)
late, you know, was still like, then like sleeping into 10, still kind of back to where I had like maybe four hours of like work time during the day. And so when we got into season, I was like, it's actually these two jobs aren't working that well together, but I was able to start to bring in some money. I started, I transitioned out of that and just to poke and pull and then doing like freelance projects.

Adam Callinan (35:13.739)
Yeah, I mean, the managing chaos while remaining calm is good for everything. It's good for managing children. It's good for managing relationships. It certainly is important in entrepreneurship and startups and building, because it's just.

Maria Boustead (35:21.444)
Yeah.

What a way.

Maria Boustead (35:32.549)
Hey, yes. And you know, I loved, I mean, I think this is so fun in the kitchen. It is just, I mean.

Fortunately, that kitchen wasn't as like bad as some of the kitchens you hear about but it is totally a shit show in there, you know, like, know, and You're you know, you're put on your face you go out and I felt like another thing Was learning how to spin when something goes wrong to be like a good thing to the customer I feel like I do that all the time now too, know, like okay what happened was the chicken fell on the floor or like they ran out of this and they made it or whatever, you know, but then you're like you

the chef came in and wanted to make this change. my god, the chef did that? of course I'll wait another 20 minutes, you know? So yeah, I just feel like that was really good skill too.

Adam Callinan (36:19.727)
Yeah, I mean, and it's, sounds like a really great way to create that, that in between an off ramp and again, going back to this is, is kind of why it, I believe it to be so dangerous to just quit your income and dedicate to this thing that's entirely unproven because even though, you know, you didn't, you didn't pay yourself for a number of years in bottle keeper, we didn't pay ourselves for the first two years either. Most of the time that's what happens unless you go raise a boatload of money and that creates all sorts of other issues with

because there are not constraints in that business. There's so much value in the constraints that exist in starting up and self-funding as much as you can and using loans and like bootstrapping along the way. But don't quit your job. Figure out how to supplement your income until you get to the point that the concepts have been proven, until you get that purchase order, until you get that REI experience, until you are selling enough product to a customer.

Maria Boustead (36:52.314)
Right.

Adam Callinan (37:17.763)
base online, that there's some consistency to it because it just e-risks. Like all of entrepreneurship is largely, we're trying to create these asymmetric outcomes. It's like minimize the risk, maximize the upside. And quitting your job before you've proven out a concept is the opposite of that. You're maximizing the risk and minimizing the upside.

Maria Boustead (37:36.109)
Yeah, totally. And what you just said about consistency in revenue is such a huge thing. And I think it does take a long time before you get there, you know.

Even as the business was growing like I think year one we did like 27,000 maybe year two 80,000, know, like it was not huge amounts of money But it still felt like we weren't selling through our moq. We weren't getting their reorders You know, and once that starts to happen where there does feel like some predictability in the revenue

It does change the calculation so much and it feels less risky, you know, because each time you're like, hopefully this we can sell these things, you know? Yeah.

Adam Callinan (38:17.666)
It is inherently less risky. It does change the calculation. It offsets that risk imbalance that is important. That's what we need to be seeking out. So you said that you don't feel like it has really been working until like the last two years. What changed? Let's talk about that.

Maria Boustead (38:34.917)
Yeah, you know, I'm like we've got some product market fit and it does feel different. It really does.

Adam Callinan (38:44.766)
That's amazing. So what changed? mean, it's you're 15 or maybe 17 years in.

Maria Boustead (38:47.799)
Well, that's okay. I'll tell this quickly. So we started in 2009. I'll say for that first 10 years, it was really slow going. Yes, more people were biking, but it felt like a lot of the conversations we would be having with people would first like try to convince them to bike in Chicago and then convince them to like carry their groceries or their lap. You know, it was just like a lot of convincing we had to do. Not people, the people who were like looking for us got them quick, you know, but it

was, felt like the market, was too early, I guess, market, was too early for the market. And during that time, I still believed in it, but we diversified our product line to do other kinds of functional stylish bags for that same consumer. So we did like yoga bags, weekender bags, diaper bags at one point. And we did grow with that, but it became like, all of those are, because we're still largely wholesale then all those are like different trade shows, you know? And so.

we were growing and I had a small team we were all feeling like fried and at the same time the biking stuff which is what started the whole thing was kind of like just on the back burner you know so when bike share started to hit this was like 2015 2016 like New York Chicago everywhere that really dropped down the barrier barrier for people to try biking and that really felt like a moment for us to just go back to the beginning so

but we slimmed down our line, got rid of almost everything else, cut all those relationships with all those other stores. Like I said, I had two employees. I was feeling like they were both kind of fried. And so we split. One went to grad school, one wanted to double down on their acting career. I moved to New York and it was like reboot, you know? And just really focusing on the bicycle products and really perfecting them.

getting the supply chain that we're making in Asia, like really working on through that. My vision was always like, it got more more popular, more people would leave their cars, get in the bike lane. There would be a soft goods brand that really represented this major consumer shifts, like how you think about Lululemon for yoga or Burton for snowboarding or for skateboarding, know, and I wanted Pokanpulje be that. So that was kind of always my vision. In 2018, 2019 was the big micro mobility boom with the e-scooters and

Maria Boustead (41:17.319)
so much in e-bikes, mostly scooters, so much VC money was now just being like pumped into this category. Yeah, totally.

Adam Callinan (41:26.041)
That was like the bird scooter days. They went from like obscurity to a billion dollar evaluation in a week.

Maria Boustead (41:32.261)
Yeah. I mean, it was crazy. Like these companies would just like drop 10,000 scooters in a city and be like, have fun everyone. It was like a lot of chaos, but it was like transformed how people were getting around in those places. And part of that, um, was for lobby part of the company, companies hired lobbyists to lobby for better infrastructure. So it would be safe. Cause obviously if it's not safe, fewer people are going to do it. Um, and that would make it better for, you know, normal biking too. So it really felt.

Adam Callinan (41:38.337)
Yeah, good luck.

Maria Boustead (42:02.215)
like a shift where a lot of energy and excitement was coming in. So that's when I decided to raise my first friends and family around. And I raised about half a million dollars. It took me a couple of years, trying 19 through 21. But with that first month, first kind of chunk of money, I hired my first marketing person. And we together refreshed the brand and the product, did some research. made

less Percy and more kind of like outdoor.

bag, you know, and relaunched everything in the beginning of 2020, March 9th, 2020. And then COVID happened, which at first was scary for everyone, but then the bike boom happened. And so like, we just like took off. so for like that first 10 years, I kind of felt like I had just been like building out my boat, you know, and then like, I just happened to put up my sail at just the right moment where it was like, poof, you're off. We've been growing awesome since then. And with eBay,

bikes continuing to grow. do think of that's the horse we're hitching our wagon to because weight doesn't matter anymore on an e-bike. So people are like wanting to carry things with them. Even people who've been biking forever, their shift to an e-bike feels like a new chapter in their biking life. And so they're evaluating brands that maybe they weren't thinking about before and poke ampoules on and off the bike thing just works so well with that lifestyle. So, I think the, makes I feel like it took until the last two

years was like the market got to where the product made sense was the main one. But then also the team I have now is really solid, you know, so like the market happened, but then Pocampo also felt perfectly ready for it. But it just has been working really well. I'm glad I stuck it out so long. There's many times where I was like this wasn't happening. I just always knew it would.

Adam Callinan (43:56.749)
Yeah. man, this is

This is like, that story is like my mantra, is like where I spend so much time and why I do this podcast and.

Like this is, this literally is like the perfect exact example of why, and we're gonna, we'll get into this, like everybody listen, the amount of time that it took for Maria to get to the front and start up in 2008, 2009 to the point where that true like first real inflection point where things went from like, we're doing it, we're still kind of figuring out to like, holy cow, we're on rocket ship, like hang on.

that amount of time, yeah, like, holy cow, that it can take that long. Maybe it takes two, I mean, for Bottle Keeper, took us about two years for that to happen. But like the whole point of this podcast is to help people understand things that they can do and need to do in their lives in order to be able to survive the ups and downs and the...

Maria Boustead (44:43.365)
14 years roughly.

Maria Boustead (44:52.997)
I don't know.

Adam Callinan (45:08.173)
chewing on glass and like all the things that go with being an entrepreneur to remain in the game long enough for that thing to happen. Like it's the key.

Maria Boustead (45:17.175)
Yes, and I think there are some entrepreneurs that are willing to really suffer for a quick, hopefully, payoff. The next two to five years of my life are just gonna be awful because I'm gonna be working all the time, have these VCs breathing down my neck.

But hopefully it'll emerge on the other side, a hundred millionaire or something, you know? That's never...

I've just never had that feeling of wanting my life to suck for two to five years. And I think it is, and I don't always bring this up, don't want it to, I hope it doesn't sound like I'm playing a sickness card, but I was diagnosed with MS when I was in my early 20s. And I've been blessed where it's been an extremely mild case. But earlier on, there were two times where like I couldn't use the left side of my body.

and it happens fast. Like you're like, god, a tear is happening, you know? So I think I always kind of had this feeling like I might wake up someday and not be able to walk again. I feel like I don't think that's going to happen. Everybody, I'm doing great. But that's just part of the reality of having a disease like that. And

So the idea of like, here I am healthy, but I'm going to intentionally submit to a crappy life for two to five years to be able to what exactly at the end? like it's never been something to think about. Okay. That's not to say that pokempo has been all sunshine and rainbows. I do feel like it sucks. Honestly, a lot of the time I have to be like, be careful.

Maria Boustead (47:11.239)
I talk to you on some days because if I talk to like an aspiring founder on a bad day, I'll be like, don't do it. You'll regret it for rest of your life. But I think like the, I do.

I like I have my dream life right now, you know, and that I'm proud of the stuff we're putting out there. It helps me bike more. It helps our customers bike more. Biking gives you a feeling of freedom and strength and joy that we can all benefit from every day. And so I'm proud to help people do that, you know? And while there's a lot of stress with cash flows still,

and blah, blah, tariffs or whatever. I mean, that never goes away. I do feel like by this time, I definitely have like my sea legs, you know, and it's less like of an existential crisis and more like, okay, we've been through something like this before. This is how we're going to address it. And so that we can still kind of have fun, you know? Oh, can I show you something?

Adam Callinan (48:15.727)
Absolutely.

Maria Boustead (48:25.263)
We made a board game. It's called Terror Rift. This is for internal use only. What you do is, so the, this is just an example of trying to have fun during those shitty times. So I happen to have it right now. Okay, so what we did was our team member who was on supply chain had to deal with the terror.

Adam Callinan (48:27.479)
Amazing.

Adam Callinan (48:40.877)
Yeah

Maria Boustead (48:52.963)
terror of terror of situation the most, you know, like once we kind of like decided on the plan, she had to kind of execute it and deal with all of it. And we always felt bad for her. So me and my head of sales, who's a hilarious person and very creative, we would joke about how like you feel like you have this like weight around your neck. And wouldn't it be funny if there was like a board game where you're like playing risk, you know, and moving your boats across the ocean. And then when you get to your

your warehouse that's when you see your terror freight and it could like set you whatever. I'm like oh my god that's totally how it is. Okay so we invented this board game it's actually pretty fun but it is like that so you start it in Vietnam which is where our factory is you go across the ocean as you go you oh I'm sorry in the beginning of the game and you can cut this part out. I almost like want to show you because we're very proud of it.

Adam Callinan (49:39.439)
you

Adam Callinan (49:45.133)
No, this is great. love it.

Maria Boustead (49:52.485)
roll the dice, pay the duty. Who will be the first to import their Pocampo bags? And at what price? Because that's how it feels. You choose your player. They're all like Pocampo team players. You get your lingering sense of doom necklace. You choose your tariff rate from the pile. You put it in your necklace. And then as you go through this route, you're just rolling a die. If you land on the Grim Reaper,

Adam Callinan (50:01.455)
dynamic and changing constant.

Maria Boustead (50:22.489)
here you have to take a poker chip which we call the weight of the world in the game and add it to your necklace so you just feel like it's crushing you as you move through the game or you land on a slack space and then you pull a card which either something good or bad but like it's totally something that has happened in slack like what or could happen you know like into port two days late tariff rate went up 10 percent or you know like go back to your spaces

Adam Callinan (50:51.267)
you

Maria Boustead (50:52.359)
or like, you know, whatever. So some good, some bad, you but you move through it. And then when you get to the port, it's customs hell. That's where you like open up your card and see what you have. And then you have to roll the die and like move back a multiple, depending on what your card says. Like go back three times, whatever that is. And then you can like go through the report. You can lose your weights and get to the warehouse to end the game. Anyway, this is a, it's very fun. Yeah. And an example of like how

Adam Callinan (51:17.561)
That is amazing. Yeah.

Maria Boustead (51:22.299)
handful handles, the ups and downs without like knowing we can get through but we can get through together and still try to have fun. I guess that's what what made me think of it was the whole like white knuckling the three to five years until you can get acquired. Just not interested in it and when I was trying to raise

So I did, I called my friend and family around my pre-seed and I did try to raise a in 23 and 24, ultimately unsuccessful. But I was talking with one of my colleagues who had worked at venture-backed DTC, fast-growing DTC firms before. And I was kind of like, I don't know, this is taking a lot of energy. A lot of friends who had raised money were like, like kind of second, wishing they could go back and un-raise it.

just because of all the pressure it put on them and they're like, do you really need it? You know, yes, you're not growing super fast, but right now, you know, you can do it how you want. I think it's just the, for me, raising the money the first time really helped me psychologically. I was in such a bootstrapper scarcity mindset for so long, you know, like

The bank account is under $1,000 most of the time. If I'm going to do an advertising, any kind of marketing campaign, I need to be like 90 % sure I'll see some return within 30 days or I'm out of business. So like looking just so...

you know, six feet ahead, never being able to kind of like bring my eyes up and look at the horizon and just feeling so cautious to like trying to keep the wheels on. But then when I raised that money and then there was like hundreds of thousands of dollars there and I got some other people and we could actually be like, bring our eyes up and be like, this is where we want to go in five years. What should the first step be and have being able to try some different things. And if it didn't work out, didn't mean the business was

Maria Boustead (53:29.735)
over, we could like learn from it and do it a little bit better the second time. It was such a game changer for me. I'm glad I didn't, that didn't happen right away because I did, was able to learn a lot in the bootstrapping years. But, Pell Campo definitely would not be here now if I did not have that money to kind of like free me up. And I think when I saw that money go back down, I started to feel like, oh no, here I go back to the bootstrapper ways where everything is just like counting the dollars and stress, stress, stress.

Adam Callinan (53:41.102)
Yeah.

Maria Boustead (53:59.767)
And so when investors were like, why are you raising the money? Like, think the truth for me was that I just feel like I can run a better business when there's money in the bank. But that's not a reason to raise money. I know that, you know. But, and you know, could hire other people that could maybe make things happen faster and faster is fun to a certain extent. But anyway, I talked with her and I was like, so what is it like to be a part of a like

Adam Callinan (54:14.67)
you

Adam Callinan (54:23.993)
Yeah, to an extent.

Maria Boustead (54:29.511)
VC funded team and I thought it would be kind of like fun because you could just like do whatever you wanted to do you know and have the budget and she like paused and she's like I guess I would describe it as soul crushing and I was like that's the opposite phrase that I was expecting.

Adam Callinan (54:46.831)
You

Maria Boustead (54:51.693)
And she said it, like she called it, still crushing just because of the pressure, you know? She's like, yeah, you can do whatever, but like the numbers you're expected to hit are so huge, you know, that you're like, you know, like every 10 minutes are like, I need to get, you know, an extra 10,000 every 10 minutes and I don't know how am gonna hit my number this month, you know? And that was a real wake up call for me, cause I don't want anybody to look back.

Adam Callinan (54:55.492)
Yeah.

Maria Boustead (55:16.043)
at their time at Pocampo and describe it as soul crushing. know, my goal is that Pocampo is your best job your whole life. I know it's probably won't be your only job, but I really wanted to be like, man, my time at Pocampo was awesome. You know, I worked with great people. made great products. It was exciting, you know? And so I think that really like to help me like focus what I want to do for the customers, but also for the people I'm working with. so being able to devote some office time to be doing some fun things and just

Adam Callinan (55:19.309)
you

Adam Callinan (55:45.519)
What is this?

Maria Boustead (55:45.927)
like, remembering these times together, think is totally worth it.

Adam Callinan (55:49.391)
Yeah, there, mean, there's again, there's so much trapped in there. Who you take money from, who you take money from, it matters. Like the traditional fund model has timelines on it and those may not align with your timelines. And that's really, really important to understand if you're going into that thing. And that's where the soul crushing part of that comes is needing to meet a timeline that is not yours anymore.

Maria Boustead (56:10.949)
I know. I mean, like the timeline sounds great. Yeah. Oh yeah. If we can do this for three years and then I never have to work again or I make all this money that I could do something else really cool. Like that sounds awesome. You know, I actually think part of the reason I didn't raise money is that people knew I wasn't up for it. And I don't think I realized it until I stopped and started talking with other people. I was like, because I enjoy my, I want to enjoy my life too much. mean, it's true. I like it is just as you know.

Adam Callinan (56:27.533)
Yeah.

Adam Callinan (56:39.043)
Yeah, you only get one of them. Like as far as we know as of now, you only get one of them, might as well spend it doing things you like.

Maria Boustead (56:41.452)
you ready?

Maria Boustead (56:47.929)
Yeah, totally.

Adam Callinan (56:49.711)
Well, this has been epic. I really appreciate your openness and honesty and finding all the fun rabbit holes to go down. Where do you want people to find you and PoCampo?

Maria Boustead (57:01.451)
for me, you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm relatively active on there. So it's just Maria Bosted Pocampo.

I do this thing with LinkedIn requests where I like to do 15 minute, 20 minute calls before confirming a connection. So if you hear about this from this podcast, put in the note that that's where you heard it. The reason is, is I think it's a much more powerful networking tool if you actually know the people you're talking, you're connected with. And a lot of the times it's like just obviously,

It's just, you know, cold calling, map marketing. You know, I just ignore those. But periodically, like maybe 10 % or 20 % of the time, it's like this person has a lot of shared connections or they're in an industry that I'm in, or they're doing a job that sounds kind of interesting to me. And I would like to know this person. I started to do this, um, like in November, almost everybody has agreed to the meeting. Like I just sent them my calendly link and it's actually been awesome. I totally recommend it to everybody listening to this. I feel like you're at like a networking event.

Adam Callinan (57:39.981)
Yeah, of course.

Maria Boustead (58:07.631)
where it's like, tell me a little bit about how you got here. I'll tell that like, how can we work together if anything, and then have a nice day. Like it's enough, but I feel connected with all these extra people from around the world because of it. yeah, so I like LinkedIn for that. And then PoCampo is just at pocampo.com or on Instagram, pocampobags.

Adam Callinan (58:27.383)
Epic, we'll make sure that there are links to all that. And that's brilliant on LinkedIn. I feel like that's like a forcing function that automatically selects out, you know, like for in my case, most of the LinkedIn attention or I got a letter like just somebody trying to sell me something. That's awesome, well done. Well, thank you again, Maria. This was really, fun. I appreciate your time.

Maria Boustead (58:40.514)
Yeah.

Maria Boustead (58:47.181)
Yeah, yeah, I'm free to I look forward to listening to that episode.

Adam Callinan (58:52.335)
That'll be fun. Thanks.