Comfort Neck

Most of what I was reading in school was written for people who already ran companies — CEOs, CMOs, heads of strategy. It was clean, it made logical sense, and almost none of it told you what to actually do on a Tuesday with no budget and no team. Nobody hires a 20-year-old as a CMO. So I decided to test the theory the only honest way I could: start a real company and see which parts survived contact with reality.

The Thesis

The idea came from a summer working for Red Bull. Red Bull didn’t invent an energy drink — it found a product people already loved in another market (a Thai tonic) and brought it somewhere it didn’t exist yet. That reframed how I looked at products: what do people somewhere else swear by that simply isn’t available here?

I found a car-comfort product that was common abroad and basically absent in the US. I bought prototypes in different sizes and colors, tested them on real people, and watched something click — in person, the difference was obvious and immediate. That was enough of a signal to build a real business around it.

What I Built

I had to learn the actual work, not the theory of it:

• Build. I taught myself Shopify end-to-end — storefront, checkout, shipping, the whole stack. I learned the hard way which apps and add-ons were worth paying for and which were built for enterprises and made no sense at my stage. (A recurring lesson: the “best” tool is rarely the right tool for where you actually are.)
• Demand. I learned to generate traffic — local SEO, and running my own Facebook and Google ads. I took the free courses the tools themselves offered, watched everything I could, and paid experts to teach me directly. And it worked: I was making money online, often while sitting in class.
• Sell. Free samples taught me a sharp lesson — giving product away mostly attracted people who wanted free things, not buyers. Direct selling converted. So I went out and did it: I pitched local dealerships and their GMs, then found a much better-fit segment in chiropractors and physical shops, left samples, collected testimonials from doctors, and closed accounts in person.
• Operate. Sourcing from overseas manufacturers, 250+ SKUs, accounting, banking, hiring. I recruited and managed interns and freelancers, learned how to interview and evaluate people, and — most importantly — learned to build systems so the business didn’t depend on me doing everything. That’s how it grew to a team of around 25.

What Happened

Comfort Neck was never a venture-scale business — it made modest revenue and I wound it down when I graduated. But that was never the point. It was a complete lap around the track: source a product, build the store, generate demand, sell it in person and online, manage a team, and keep the books. I’d validated an entire e-commerce lifecycle with my own money before I had a diploma.

What I Learned

The gap between “logically true in a book” and “actually works with real people” is enormous — and it only closes by doing the work and measuring what happens. The chiropractor pivot didn’t come from a framework; it came from watching who actually bought. The add-on decisions didn’t come from a review site; they came from wasting money and course-correcting.

That instinct — trust the evidence in front of you over the theory in the deck — is the same one I’ve applied at every scale since, from a bank’s growth pipeline to an enterprise experimentation program. It started here.