How a Hillbilly in Nevada Bootstrapped a $140M ARR Manufacturing Company | Jim Belosic, SendCutSend
The Peel with Turner Novak
Turner Novak
4.6 • 11 Ratings
🗓️ 30 April 2026
⏱️ 92 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jim Belosic is the Co-founder and CEO of SendCutSend, a sheet metal manufacturing business he bootstrapped to a $140 million revenue run rate in eight years.
We talk building a manufacturing business in the US, creative ways he financed the company early on, using speed and trust to compete with overseas competitors, lessons from restaurants, and why you can’t run a factory from a spreadsheet.
Thank you to Numeral, Flex, and Amplitude for supporting this episode
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Timestamps:
(0:16) Automating sheet metal manufacturing
(5:59) Zero to $140 million ARR in 8 years
(7:58) Acquiring a $750k laser with $0
(13:38) Automating factories is like baking cookies
(15:17) Being legible to capital
(17:31) Unlocking custom, low order manufacturing with software
(20:00) Building more factories instead of selling the software
(24:50) Run your company like a lemonade stand
(28:30) Raising an angel round in 2021 as a safety net
(33:21) SendCutSend’s unique bottoms-up GTM
(38:24) Fun coupons
(40:12) Building a moat with speed and trust
45:55) How US factories can beat China
(47:40) Gaslight product launches
(52:05) Lessons from non-manufacturing businesses
(55:19) You can’t run a factory from a spreadsheet
(58:10) Using data in manufacturing
(59:50) Lessons from Factorio
(1:03:17) Unlocking a negative cash conversion cycle
(1:06:14) You need to resist automating everything
(1:13:51) Surviving COVID with six weeks of cash
(1:15:47) Solving the US skilled labor shortage
(1:26:17) Teaching kids about manufacturing
Referenced
SendCutSend: https://sendcutsend.com/
Careers at SendCutSend: https://sendcutsend.com/careers
Sandy Kory: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandykory
Horizon VC: https://www.horizon.vc/
Concrete Canoe Competitions: https://www.asce.org/communities/student-members/conferences/asce-concrete-canoe-competition
Follow Jim
Twitter: https://x.com/jimbelosic
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/belosic
Follow Turner
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Jim, welcome to the show. |
| 0:04.6 | Hey, thanks for having me. This is awesome. |
| 0:06.7 | So you're the founder and CEO of Senkutsen. |
| 0:09.6 | Some people might know about Senkut. |
| 0:11.9 | Send. I feel like it's kind of like, if you know, you know, type of situation. |
| 0:15.5 | So really quick for people who don't know, what is Senkut Sen. |
| 0:19.9 | We are a on-demand manufacturer so what |
| 0:24.2 | that means is people have an idea they design it in cad upload it to us and we make it and ship it to |
| 0:31.9 | their door so we specialize in like sheet metal fabrication cncining, stuff like that, metals mostly. |
| 0:39.0 | Just curious, why is that so important? |
| 0:41.1 | Because there's kind of like a lot of companies that maybe have existed that have kind of done this, |
| 0:45.0 | kind of like an older industry. |
| 0:46.3 | But you started a company semi recently. |
| 0:48.3 | You've grown really fast, gotten really big. |
| 0:50.7 | Why is that so important? |
| 0:52.7 | Yeah. |
| 0:53.7 | I mean, yeah, sheet metal and machining has been around for |
| 0:56.9 | forever. But it's traditionally like really hard to to get access to. If you're, well, like, like Reno, |
| 1:10.0 | Reno, for example, we're a pretty small town. |
| 1:13.0 | I think we're like half a million people, something like that. |
| 1:16.5 | But even though it's a small city, there's probably 10 sheet metal shops in town. |
| 1:23.1 | And they're all really busy, and they're busy doing long run work, |
... |
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