Jesse Pujji sold catalogs door-to-door, ran a snow-shoveling service, and launched The Shirt Guys for fraternities before a Spring Fling bottle campaign at Penn flopped spectacularly: 2,000 yardneck bottles produced, three sold. A decade of failures taught him the intuition needed to build real startups.
Do you remember those catalogs they used to sell you where you could go around door to door in your neighborhood and like sell shit? My brother and I would just go crazy selling those things door to door. Then we had like a snow shoveling business and like it's fucking backbreaking work. In college, I started a t-shirt business called The Shirt Guys and it literally made bulk apparel for sororities and fraternities. There's this huge thing at Penn called Spring Fling. And so we were like, oh man, this is like shooting fish in a barrel. Let's make stuff to sell. And so we made, you know, those yardneck bottles. We were like, look around at each other. We're like, hey guys, let's, let's put 2 G's into this. And we went to every major event around our campus. Do you know how much money we made? We sold 3 bottles out of 2,000. 3! The amount of stories I have like that where we screwed something up, where it didn't work out. I think you need 10 years of that stuff before you're going to start the thing that, that probably happens. And I think it's, I think it's an important call out.
