He Spent Every Dollar of His Pre-Sales Building the Product. Then Shark Tank Sent $100,000 a Day, and Ring Was Born.

Jamie Siminoff could not hear his own doorbell. His garage workshop sat in the back of the house, off an alleyway, and the signal from the little wireless chime never reached it. People came to the door and he never knew. He had just bought an iPhone, he looked for a doorbell that rang a phone, found nothing, and decided to build one himself.

“It wasn’t like an aha moment,” he says. “I really just built it to scratch my own itch.” That fix for a problem in his own garage became Ring, which Amazon acquired in 2018. Nagle’s intro puts the deal at “around a billion dollars,” and Siminoff later says Amazon “put $1.15 billion in trust” into him. What sits between the garage and the deal is more interesting than either number: a business that spent its customers’ pre-sale money before it had a product, a television appearance that arrived just in time, and a founder who says he spent years terrified that someone else would win the category he had created.

A kid who was always working

Siminoff grew up in Chester, New Jersey, about an hour west of New York City, in what he calls upper-middle-class comfort. His parents covered food and shelter but not the extras. If he wanted a better BMX bike, he had to pay for the parts himself, so he worked from a young age: cleaning up old buildings in his father’s industrial parks, landscaping for a local company (he says he was “the bottom of the totem pole,” pulling weeds while watching the men on the mowers), and parking cars as a valet at a hotel. At weddings, he says, he ran faster than everyone else and lapped the other valets because the tips went to whoever brought back the most cars.

He ended up at Babson College almost by accident. Entrepreneurship, he notes, was barely an understood word when he graduated high school in the mid-1990s. He picked Babson because a classmate he drove to school mentioned it, not knowing it was a school built around entrepreneurship. “It was an entrepreneurial move to go there,” he says, “I just didn’t know it.”

He graduated in 1999, won a business-plan competition on his way out, and landed in the dot-com boom, when, as he tells it, money was being “shot around” and people wanted business plans. He started writing them for a living and took a junior finance job in New York, then called his new boss on the Sunday before his first day to say he wasn’t coming. The boss told him life was about managing regrets, and that he would probably regret this one. Siminoff says he didn’t, though he admits that for a while, when his own ventures weren’t working, he wondered.

The businesses that capped out

The business plans led to international work, and that led to a stint building voice-over-IP networks in developing countries. Siminoff says he found himself in places like Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Congo, “like a snowball rolling down a hill.” The lesson he took from it was practical: he learned how networks and video move around the world. “Ring is a giant voice-over-IP video network,” he says. “It’s probably the largest video platform in the world for that.”

Then came a run of companies that didn’t scale. Phone Tag turned voicemail into text, a good idea, he says, aimed at a market in decline: “It’s very hard to take value out of a declining market no matter how big the declining market is.” Unsubscribe.com cleaned gray mail out of inboxes. “I think it’s still probably the best product I’ve ever built with the worst business attached,” he says. Nobody wanted to pay for it.

He also pinpoints the trap of raising money for a single thesis. Investors, he says, put you on railroad tracks, and it is very hard to pivot once you have taken their money. So he went back to his garage and started a lab with a looser pitch: roughly five ideas, get each one out, put more wood behind whatever gets traction, and kill the rest. His hypothesis didn’t fully hold, he says, because the first one that scaled pulled him in completely. It was the doorbell.

Why he almost didn’t launch it

Siminoff didn’t believe the doorbell was the big idea. His wife liked it, but he had other projects. What pushed it out the door was a side project: he wanted to launch a Kickstarter-style platform for hardware after Kickstarter stopped hosting hardware companies, and he needed a product to launch it with. He listed everything the lab was working on to a friend running a conference in Paris, and when he reached the doorbell, the friend said that’s the one. Siminoff says he wasn’t sure people would understand why it was valuable; it was 2012, and smartphones weren’t in everyone’s pocket.

He calls what he first shipped a “Mr. Potato Head” of soldered parts. The company, then called DoorBot, ran pre-sales for a little over a year while trying to build the thing. That created the problem he describes candidly: all the money from pre-orders went into building the product, which left nothing to pay for the units customers had already bought. “It’s certainly not advice,” he says. “If you did the same thing ten times, probably seven of them wouldn’t work out.” The only thing that got them out of the hole, he says, was Shark Tank.

The Michael Phelps of Shark Tank

The path to the show started at a lunch, where a friend of a friend suggested he apply. Siminoff emailed a producer from the table, and the producer called him on the drive home. They filmed in September 2013 and it aired that November, at the start of the holiday season.

He prepared like an athlete. “I am going to be the Michael Phelps of Shark Tank,” he says he told himself. He describes meeting the other contestants at a hotel the night before, most of them relaxed about it, while he had spent two months training, with roughly 300 practice questions, neighbors over for mock tanks, and every past episode watched. He also says the company had started manufacturing without the money to pay the factory. When the episode aired, he says, orders came in at about $100,000 a day. He wired the money to the factory, the factory released the product, and DoorBot started shipping. “What a lucky break,” he says. “I worked hard, but if we had not had the money come in from Shark Tank, we would definitely have been short on paying for the units that had been pre-sold.”

He is also clear that the outcome wasn’t clean. He calls it luck to get on the show, and says the business itself kept hitting walls. He thinks that’s closer to normal than the overnight-success stories business schools tend to study: “The norm is that these things are just brutal.” Nagle, for his part, calls it the largest company ever to appear on Shark Tank, and Siminoff doesn’t dispute it.

From DoorBot to Ring in under ten months

Siminoff has always put his email address on every box, and he says direct customer emails gave him more truth than any survey. One theme: people didn’t like the name. A doorbot at the front door felt, in his words, like a “punch in the face” on the part of the house people consider special. The company needed a new version of the product, so it needed a new brand.

While pitching angel investors on the change, one venture investor from Upfront Ventures noticed Siminoff kept using the word “ring” and asked why he didn’t just call the company that. That night he found the domain was for sale. He says he had no money, so he negotiated directly with the owner, who had a broker. He describes an initial agreement at $750,000 that he couldn’t pay, then a counteroffer of $1 million on a payment plan, with $175,000 up front and the rest over two years. “I basically rent-to-owned it,” he says. His point: “Brand does matter. What you call something matters.”

From launching DoorBot to launching Ring took about nine and a half months, and he says everything changed: the brand, the product, the app, the way video was processed on the back end. The response to Shark Tank had convinced him a real business was coming, and that changed the stress. It had been easier when nobody cared.

The fear that drove Ring

Siminoff is unusually direct about what motivated him. “I was very sure there was going to be a billion-dollar business in doorbells five years from when Shark Tank aired,” he says. “I was extremely nervous it was not going to be me.” He worried he would be remembered as the guy who invented the video doorbell but didn’t build the company. “That’s what drove me. It drove me crazy, and it fired me up.” He credits that insecurity, in part, for Ring’s success.

The mission, he says, came from his wife, who told him the doorbell made her feel safer at home. “Making neighborhoods safer” became the company’s purpose. Externally, he held it back at first, on the theory that a small company making enormous claims loses trust. It wasn’t until Richard Branson invested in 2015 and agreed to be a public voice for the idea that Ring said it out loud. Siminoff’s reasoning: if Richard Branson says a doorbell can make your home safer, people will believe it. That mission, he adds, explains the later products, like the alarm, floodlight cameras, and the Neighbors app, because Ring was never just a doorbell company.

Growing so fast it almost broke

Siminoff says the numbers looking back sound like a dream, but living inside the growth felt like the opposite. He describes cash flow “getting destroyed” as the company bought hundreds of millions of dollars of product ahead of sales and paid for it through factoring. Executives he hired for a company of one size were suddenly running one three times as large. “It was like trying to hold on to a rocket ship from the outside,” he says. It “almost blew up on multiple occasions.” The nature of it, he says, is that if the growth flywheel had slowed at all, “you were going to be a piece of dust in a second.”

(The transcript’s revenue figures for these years were garbled in the auto-transcription, so they are omitted here rather than guessed.)

Selling to Amazon, then coming back

When Amazon came calling, Siminoff says he wanted to go bigger, not cash out. He had told everyone the goal wasn’t to make money, it was to have impact, and he says Amazon could fund the mission after years of being underfunded at every step. Looking back eight years later, he says his products are better, the company has put out more of them, and most of his team stayed for years. He says he wanted to deliver for the buyer: “They put $1.15 billion in trust into me. I really wanted to show Jeff and the team that I could deliver back.” He adds that he thinks Ring is one of Amazon’s better acquisitions, though that is his own assessment.

Afterward he became the first person Shark Tank had taken from contestant to guest shark, a moment he describes as mind-blowing: sitting in the shark chair as an entrepreneur walked in and thinking, “What is going on here?”

He also burned out. He left Ring, partly because he felt he’d tapped out on the big invention he could build around it before the current wave of AI. Then AI arrived, and he went back to the company and told them how frustrated he was that he couldn’t build what he now imagined. “To give them credit, they said, why don’t you come back and do it?” He points to Firewatch as one of the things he is proudest of: when a big fire hits, Ring cameras help build a more accurate fire map with AI for the people fighting it. He says customers opt in, and privacy is maintained.

His advice

Asked to wrap with one lesson, Siminoff talks about odds. “Find something that you like and that will help people,” he says, “because if you can find that intersection, it’s worth doing, even if you don’t succeed. Because the reality is most of us are not going to succeed. The statistics are correct.” If you built something that could help the world and it failed, he says, at least you tried something better than nothing. If you did it only for money and failed, “that’s just failure.”

Listen to the full conversation with Jamie Siminoff on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ring-jamie-siminoff/id1507576153?i=1000790438041