Henrik, founder of AirHelp, turned crude wooden phone booths from Flexport into a sleek Swedish-design company that hit $50 million in annual sales. The business collapsed despite the revenue because of broken unit economics and wasteful spending. A cleaner version of the idea could actually work.
phone booths and companies. Could you quickly tell this story? Because I think it's kind of inspiring. It started at Flexport. We never had enough conference rooms. I got these carpenters on Craigslist to make a couple of phone booths out of just like wood. They were terrible, not enough ventilation. So you'd come out of this thing just dripping in sweat. People were in there nonstop. I was like, if the product's this bad and yet everybody wants to use it, there's like something here. My friend Henrik, who's the founder of AirHelp, really ran with this idea. He built it into a company. So we made like these really nice Swedish design. The intellectual property was we put 3 fans in that. So it was doing like $50 million in sales. 50? Yeah, we're selling thousands of them and somehow we couldn't make money. Just the unit economics wrong or the overhead? Yeah, people on the team spending money on BS. I'm a little pissed about it. Dude, you're selling $50 million, you should make $10 million in profit at least. Right. I think the founder had ambition to be like billion-dollar unicorn company instead of like, let's sell this thing to Staples for $50 million and like be happy. Somebody should reboot this idea. Do it without the mismanagement.
