When I started AmmoSquared 10 years ago, I had no idea how big it could get. I was just putting an idea into the world like I had done nearly a dozen times before, all without success. This is my story of grit, tough choices, and a little bit of luck.
Today, there is no doubt that AmmoSquared has found its niche: this year, we’ll reach $22m in revenue from 100k+ customers. We have 20 million rounds of ammunition stored across two climate-controlled warehouses, one in Idaho, the other in Texas. It is no longer just me, Danielle, and our three daughters pitching in; we also have a dedicated team of 32 employees around the country.
A lot has changed over the past ten years! It has been a long and interesting journey to get here…
The Beginning
To steal from Ray Liotta’s character Henry Hill in Goodfellas: “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster an entrepreneur.” Unlike Henry, for me it was never about money, ego, or influence; instead, it was always about freedom. I knew I wanted to be my own boss. I knew if I tried (and failed) enough times, SOMETHING would eventually catch on.
Like the famous Steve Jobs quote, I wanted to “put a dent in the universe,” and I knew I had to come up with something unique to do that. I couldn’t start a “me too” business. I also knew I had to add value to people’s lives. If you aren’t adding value, you don’t have a business. Period.
Before starting AmmoSquared, I had attempted nearly a dozen businesses by my mid-thirties. I learned a lot with each new venture. My wife and I even “bet the farm” on one and lost everything, including bankruptcy and foreclosure. That was a rough time for us. Every time a business idea failed to take off, I looked for what I could learn from it.
I’ve never publicly listed these out, but this is my “swing and a miss” business venture list:
- California Info Sys – My first business, I started when I was 16, working in the camera department at Longs Drug Store in Cupertino. I got signed up with data brokers to resell information searches. I put an ad in the paper (this is 1993, so pre-internet!) I got only one customer – for a marital status search!
- OK-To-Play – This was more of an invention idea. It was a temperature-sensitive sticker that could be placed on playground equipment so parents and kids could see at a glance if the structure was hot or not.
- Fractional Retreats – Fractional vacation home ownership. Like timeshares, but up to 13 owners per property. Wrote a book about the concept. Got wiped out in the housing crash when all financing options dried up. Learned not to risk it all when you don’t have customers!
- Tallowtree Press – Self-publishing company started to publish another book: “How Tall is the Easter Bunny: 51 Questions your kids ask that you have no idea how to answer”. This was a fun book because I had small children.
- Project Coffee Can – Community lending idea based on a shared savings model where everyone puts in a small amount every month, but the total could be borrowed at zero interest.
- Emerziv – Idea for an “immersive” storytelling concept where you would get texts, phone calls, and emails as if you were dropped into a real-life murder mystery. I had voice actors pretending to be police and autoresponders set up to feed the story out over days and weeks.
- Crowd Equity IQ – Blog site for equity crowdfunding news.
- CrowdTel – Also equity crowdfunding related. A website that leverages the expertise of industry professionals to help crowdfund investors select quality investments. I won 3rd in a Boise business plan competition with this one.
- The Gun Boutique – Reseller of concealed carry purses and bags. Originally designed to be an MLM model to cater to women buyers. Danielle was the face of the company, and I did the logistics and marketing.
- Firearm Training Reviews – Site to aggregate firearms training options around the country, along with AARs and testimonials from students. Trainers could pay to be shown first in the search rankings.
Finally, in 2015, I started AmmoSquared using a basic WordPress site, an e-commerce/subscription plugin, and lots of MS Excel (an ungodly amount of Excel!). It didn’t catch on right away, but once it started rolling, I knew we had something special.
An Unexpected Success
I can honestly say that AmmoSquared was an unexpected success. After putting in a bunch of resources for past businesses and falling short, I knew not to go “all in” until something started to show promise.
So on September 11, 2015, fresh from a recent Obama-era ammo shortage, I launched AmmoSquared as an “ammo banking” concept. I had just four caliber options back then: 9mm, 45 ACP, 223/556, and 7.62 NATO. We allowed people to buy small amounts of ammo, store it until needed, and have it delivered when they wanted it.
The actual “ammo bank” idea didn’t immediately catch on. I had one customer putting $5 a month away for 45 ACP, but nothing else for the first 6 months. I finally updated our messaging to focus more on the subscription aspect of the service. That is when we finally started getting traction.
That was March of 2016. Here was our website header at that time:
Using the Internet Wayback site, I found some of the specific language we used back then, and it hasn’t changed much:
Our goal was (and still is): “To provide gun owners with a simple, cost-effective way to accumulate ammunition – regardless of the political climate or market conditions.”
In 2016, AmmoSquared grew quickly from one customer to around 600 active customers by the end of the year. Unfortunately, that is also where we stayed for two years…
Plateau of Discomfort
I can look back at my metrics and see we ended 2016 with 621 active customers and then bounced around to a low of 485 customers before finally closing out two years later with 641 active customers – net gain of exactly 20 in two years. Ouch.
It was during this time that I was working full-time in my corporate job while trying to grow AmmoSquared in my off hours – including nights, weekends, and lunch breaks. Danielle was handling customer service while homeschooling our three daughters. Our lack of growth after the initial boost was painful.
We would ship once a month over a weekend and the first week of the month. Here is a typical month’s worth of ammo going out:
All of the boxes were uniform back then because we would ship in the same-sized black spray-painted “logo’d” box:
Notice the vacuum-sealed bags? When we started, customers would buy $5 worth of ammo, and we would ship in $5 increments – so that meant we would actually break open factory boxes and ship $5 worth of ammo. Crazy. It was tedious and time-consuming. We only did it for about 6 months until we changed the process to accumulating fractional rounds and shipping full factory boxes, something we still use today.
Those two years from 2016 to 2018 were both exciting and HARD. We had some traction, which was great, but we were doing all the work ourselves and didn’t have enough money to hire anyone. Plus, we just couldn’t figure out how to grow the company beyond 600 active customers.
In the summer of 2017, I made the most difficult and best decision I would ever make…
Inflection Point
At the time, we were living in and working out of a nice 3,300 sf house on 5 acres in Star, Idaho. It was out in the country and very peaceful. I was able to afford this, and Danielle could stay home, because I had a good corporate job making Bay Area wages thanks to my 13-month stint in San Francisco (that is another story).
The problem was that I felt stuck. I couldn’t quit my corporate job and didn’t have any more time to grow AmmoSquared – which I desperately wanted to focus on. I knew something needed to give. So, during a walk on my lunch break, I had a flash of inspiration. A solution came to me like a lightning bolt. I came home that night and unilaterally declared that we would sell the house and downsize.
If you are married, you probably know how well “unilateral” decisions go… From my perspective, it was a logical move because we had about $100k worth of equity in the house that we could use to pay off debt. We could also buy a smaller home and lease warehouse space for less than our mortgage of $2200.
Danielle and I still talk about this moment. It was a defining moment in our lives, our marriage, and the history of AmmoSquared.
She didn’t want to sell our house but understood what I was trying to do. We didn’t fight about it, we just talked it out. Looking back now, we know that personal sacrifice set the stage for me to eventually quit my corporate job so I could focus on growing AmmoSquared.
It was quite literally an inflection point in the history of the company. AmmoSquared might be on my list of “swings and misses” if we had made a different decision.
So two years after starting AmmoSquared, we sold our house and moved into a tiny 1,300sf home in Nampa that was built in 1905. Oh, and it only had one bathroom versus the three we had in our big house in Star. (I just wanted to point out that I had teenage daughters at this point, so the sacrifice was real!)
We also leased our first commercial space – a 1400sf warehouse. Having an actual warehouse was a huge step for us. This made inventory storage and monthly shipping so much easier. We could also receive freight shipments more easily, which we were getting more frequently as we grew.
“So long, thanks for all the fish!”
I still balanced working full-time in corporate land with working nights, weekends, and lunch breaks on our business. After selling our home and getting our finances in order, I was finally able to quit my job a year later in September 2018 – three years after starting AmmoSquared.
It was a very happy day for me, but I also knew I had a lot of work to do if we were going to survive without the outside support of a job.
Here is a line from my journal on that day:
“It has been a long road to get to today. I have officially walked away from my corporate job so I can work full-time on my business. I’m 41 years old and I have an open road ahead of me… It feels like I have an incredible moment in my life right now – one I don’t, will not, want to waste.”
Working full-time on AmmoSquared was the first part of a dream realized – to be my own boss. Now I had to make sure the company kept growing and was able to provide for us, because at this point, I still wasn’t drawing a salary. We were living off credit cards and a $40k “home improvement loan”. This was a true “make or break” moment for me. I had given myself one year of “runway”. I was throwing the dice and “betting the farm” again. But I learned my lessons and believed I could make this time work out for us.
Daymond John has a book called The Power of Broke, which talks about how when you don’t have money, you’re forced to be resourceful, creative, and scrappy. “Money can make you lazy. Hunger makes you hustle.” We were living this daily and placing a big bet on ourselves and the future of AmmoSquared.
The Technology Hurdle
Over the next year, we finally broke our plateau and grew active customers by over 60%, breaking through 1,000 for the first time in December 2019. Working on the business full-time was good for growth, but we still needed help. At that time, I was running all of the business operations in Excel and WordPress. I had about eight different multi-step operations to get ammo added to customer accounts and take it out when they shipped. It was a nightmare. We knew we needed better technology to run everything, but didn’t know where to turn. We couldn’t afford custom software, and neither of us had the skills to build what we needed.
Now that I was working on the business full-time, we decided that Danielle would go to a coding bootcamp to learn those skills. (She was always the math and science nerd – I’m more of the writing and business nerd.) So in the summer of 2019, she attended a three-month coding bootcamp full-time. I held down the fort, did customer service, and made sure our three girls didn’t kill each other.
Luckily, she never needed to use those skills because that summer we met Chris Corriveau, a customer who reached out when he saw a bug on the website:
“Hey just wanted to report a bug/issue with your php code. Seems like the WooCommerce form that should be there is not rendering. I attached a screenshot… I know a bit about this, let me know if I can help at all.”
The timing for Chris reaching out couldn’t have been better. He was a former Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Head of Product. He had the technology experience that we lacked. He was, in a way, our technology “white knight”. We talked at length about our vision for AmmoSquared and the opportunity – Chris was on board. We decided to re-form AmmoSquared as a Delaware C Corporation and raise some capital so we could build the technology backend we needed to take us into the future. A very normal thing for a burgeoning startup company, but I didn’t realize exactly how difficult this would be for an “evil” ammunition company!
Challenges Raising Capital
In order to move forward and build the service we wanted, we needed capital. With Chris on board there were some quick fixes he could do for us but due to the complexity of what we were doing with ammunition: treating it like a physical asset that can be bought via an autobuy, stored until needed, shipped automatically or on demand, sold when the price changed and exchanged for other calibers, there was nothing “off the shelf” that we could use.
We needed to “roll our own,” and that took money.
We started off talking to angel groups and family offices. We tried a number of different approaches to bring in investors. At this point, the company was making around $26k a month in Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), so it was certainly not “pre-revenue” like so many other startups are when trying to raise a seed round. We at least had an operational business model – and REAL customers.
It didn’t matter. We got shot down by investor after investor. We learned a new term during this frustrating time period: “SHAFT”. Not as in we were getting the shaft (we were). Apparently, to investors and banks, we fell under SHAFT guidelines and were basically untouchable.
SHAFT stands for:
Sex (adult content / pornography / escort services)
Hate (hate groups / extremist content)
Alcohol
Firearms
Tobacco Products
It is a little-known fact that many perfectly legal companies like ours can’t get capital or use common financial tools like Stripe, Square, or PayPal because we sell firearms and/or ammunition. That was news to us and made our lives more difficult. We couldn’t even get a working capital loan from a bank, and most investors were off the table.
Finally, after getting turned down by enough investors, we decided to look at equity crowdfunding and raise money from small investors – especially our customers. Even that was difficult, and we got turned down by three crowdfunding portals until we were finally approved by Wefunder. You can still find our original crowdfunding campaign. We raised $300k from mostly small investors and another $100k from large investors for a total of $400k from 600+ investors.
Our campaign closed in April 2020 – just as the world was going into COVID-19 lockdowns, supply shortages, and uncertainty. Luckily for us, this was exactly why AmmoSquared existed in the first place and was the first real stress test of our business model.
Business Model Stress Test: COVID-19
While many companies were shutting down, we were experiencing a boom like we had never seen. During July and August of 2020, we added nearly 1,000 new customers each month. Keep in mind, when we closed the books in 2019, we only had 1,028 active customers, total. So in two months, we tripled our customer base.
How?
As you probably already know, the global pandemic and “fiery but mostly peaceful” summer of love brought many new gun owners into the fold. There was also a massive shortage of ammunition due to increased demand and reduced supply from lockdowns and a lack of raw materials.
This was the exact situation our company was built for: an unexpected, sudden ammunition shortage.
When they couldn’t find ammo anywhere online or locally, our customers simply logged into their account and hit the “ship” button. They got their accumulated ammo shipped as designed, and their friends were left wondering how they got so lucky.
They weren’t lucky – they had just thought ahead and built up an ammo supply at AmmoSquared.
So when our customers’ friends heard about this, they started signing up in droves. We had to add a waitlist from September 2020 until February 2021 because we couldn’t absorb the massive number of new customers.
We hadn’t built new software at this point yet – I was still doing everything on spreadsheets! Oh, those were some interesting times! I never want to hear or say the words “drag error” again. (This is when I didn’t drag the linked data far enough down the sheet, and would miss allocations or shipments. Yikes!)
First Employees, New Building, and AmmoSquared 2.0
It is always a big moment in an entrepreneur’s life when you have enough stability, income, and work to justify hiring your first employees. The pandemic accelerated our growth, and that September, we added three new employees to help with shipping and customer service.
At the same time, we moved into a brand new 7,500 sf warehouse that was 4x the size we were in before. It looked massive back then, and we wondered if we would ever fill it up. (BTW: This is exactly how I feel about our new warehouse in Texas right now, which is, incidentally, 4x the size of our Nampa location!)
It was a bittersweet time because there was so much chaos and uncertainty around the world, yet we were doing better than we had ever before. It reminds me of that saying, a little bit cliché now, but how the Chinese word for crisis (危机 / wēijī) is made of the characters for danger (危) and opportunity (机). We were growing rapidly only because of the chaos around us at the time.
The following spring brought the launch of what we internally call the “AmmoSquared 2.0” platform. The web app that Chris and his team of contractors had been working on for months. Sure, it was a little buggy, but it was SO MUCH better than the WordPress and Excel that we had been working with. With so many new customers and inventory to track, I often felt like I would die a death from a thousand spreadsheets! I’ve often joked that one day I’m going to print out those spreadsheet workbooks and frame them so people can see where we started.
The Grind
From this point in our history, we basically “grinded it out” as a team for a couple of years. We were small, bouncing from 6-7 people and only progressing to 10 by the end of 2023. Each year, we would grow our customer base, make improvements, try new things, and grow a little more.
We’d try different marketing campaigns, offer new features, work with new contractors, but nothing really seemed to catch on like we wanted. Some months we would grow by 1 or 2% but then get knocked back by a half or three-quarters of a percent the next month. It was slow, steady growth, but looking back, it really felt like a grind!
This is where many entrepreneurs lose interest and end up chasing shiny objects to the detriment of their company. They “soft quit” because the company isn’t growing as fast as they would like, and they lose focus.
In our case, we grew revenues by nearly 300% in 2021, but only 30% in 2022, and a paltry 3% in 2023. It went from exciting to boring. I wasn’t immune to the shiny object syndrome and pursued personal activities, such as working on my private pilot’s license, that took my focus away from growing the business.
By the end of 2023, I knew something had to change because we couldn’t afford another flat year. In fact, due to our poor financial performance, the entire team took pay cuts and/or reduced hours earlier in 2023 to help us get through.
I knew exactly what had to change… me.
Catalyst for Growth
Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I sat down with a journal and did some deep thinking on what the company needed to grow. As you may know, I’m big on introspection and journaling. That Thanksgiving break, I realized that I needed to find a peer group of other CEO’s that I could talk to and gain wisdom from. I joined Vistage in January, and after just my first meeting with other successful business leaders, I knew exactly what course of action I needed to turn my company around.
It sounds silly now, but the reason for our slow growth was that we simply weren’t advertising enough. We were spending too little money on the wrong things. We were being ineffective and hoping “word of mouth” would grow the company. To my defense, word of mouth and a handful of influencers are what grew us during the pandemic. It just wasn’t enough to get the momentum going that we needed.
In addition to increasing our marketing budget by 10x, we refocused our messaging and product features. During the plateau of ‘22 and ‘23, we got in the habit of throwing everything but the kitchen sink out there to see what stuck. That had the effect of muddying the brand waters. People would hear us described as an “ammo subscription”, an “ammo 401k”, or an “ammo bank account”. We waffled back and forth on exactly how to describe AmmoSquared.
We offered magazines, gunsmithing tools, and cleaning kits for a while. We also had over 500 different ammo SKUs – every caliber in the book and many you probably never heard of.
We lacked consistency and focus.
Just like how you won’t see results from exercising if you aren’t consistent and focused, we didn’t see great results either. Once we nailed the messaging, trimmed some of the product fat, and explored new marketing channels, it was like a combination lock was released, and we started growing exponentially.
A Rocket Ship
The past two years have seen incredible growth for AmmoSquared. We started 2024 with just 10 employees and now have 32. This year, we opened a second warehouse in Texas that is 4x the size of our current warehouse in Nampa. Revenues doubled last year and are on track to double again this year. A 400% increase in two years. Last year, we were ranked the 10th fastest growing company in Idaho, and made the Inc. 5,000 list this year.
All this would be less impressive if we were a venture-backed AI startup, but we’re not. We’re a technology company in the firearms industry – one of only a handful. We’re pushing the boundaries of what can be done with ammunition and creating a whole new category while we do it. We also face headwinds from financial institutions and other companies that simply blacklist us because of the product we sell.
As we pass our 10th birthday, I’m reminded of the hurdles we’ve had to overcome and the number of companies that would have fallen at this point. It is estimated that only 1 in 10 companies pioneering a new product or business model survives to their 10th birthday. We’re one of those survivors.
We survived because we kept grinding it out and evolving our business. We never changed the core reason AmmoSquared was started, but we threw a lot of pasta at the wall to see what would stick! We were helped by pandemic chaos and small investor customers who believed in us when the big boys snubbed us.
It was that persistence that made the difference. Danielle said it to me recently that looking back, “You can see when we thought things couldn’t get any harder, or we couldn’t do it much longer, they suddenly changed for the better”. We just had to persist through those lows and plateaus to experience the highs.
Here’s the thing: we may be celebrating our 10th year, including: $20m+ in revenue and 20 million rounds stored, but we’re still just getting started.
Our mission is to store 1 billion rounds of ammunition by 2035 in a network of climate-controlled warehouses across the country so we never have to experience another ammunition shortage. We are, quite literally, building an ammunition safety net for America. We can’t protect our families, community, or country without firearms, and firearms are no good without ammunition.
Today, AmmoSquared is at the forefront of America’s Freedom Culture and a cornerstone of the Civilian Defense Industry. We’re building a community of readiness-focused gun owners who are willing to defend ourselves from tyranny in whatever form it takes.
It is crazy to think that all this started with an idea, a webpage, and garage racks filled with cases of ammo.
Here’s to the next 10 years – and 1 billion rounds of ammunition!
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