What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from NDHackers.com, and you are listening to the

IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet businesses,

and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How do they get to where they are today?

How do they make decisions, both at their companies and in their personal lives and what makes their businesses tick? Today I'm talking to JT. Marino, one of the two co-founders behind Tuft and Needle. J-T, thanks so much for coming on the show. How's it going? Thanks for having me. Tough the Needle is a direct-to-consumer mattress company, and I hope it's not too cliche to say that you guys have disrupted the mattress industry. You and your co-founder, Dei, started the company back in 2012. You grew it to over $100 million in revenue in under five years, and I'm sure that's even higher today. And somehow you did all of this without raising any money at all from investors. Did I get

all of that right? That's right. Yep. So your background is in software engineering. You got a degree

in computer science and you and your co-founder actually met while the two of you were working

at a tech startup in Silicon Valley. How does one go from software engineer to mattress tycoon?

Yeah, it's a little bit strange, and that's definitely part of the story.

We actually met in college when we were in school.

I was studying computer science and mathematics, and he was on the information science and cybersecurity,

College of IST.

And, yeah, we basically hit it off, recognized, you know,

we're like our personalities are a really good match.

We worked side by side on our, on our projects outside of school.

And in a matter of a few years, ended up back together after we graduated at a startup in Palo Alto

and in the time span in between had had our hands in several other startups.

But yeah, so when we were essentially building the next app as many other companies were in Silicon Valley at a company

and decided that, you know, we wanted to change it up and start something of our own.

And what we did was we outlined some criteria of what that company should be like because

we hadn't yet discovered what that idea would be. But we wrote out the rules of what that company should be like because we hadn't yet discovered what that idea would be,

but we wrote out the rules of what the idea and how the company would be built.

We need to abide by.

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