In short
Tom Gosney’s recovery story and how a backyard brick pizza oven became Gosney, a $100M+ outdoor pizza oven company; includes product design, crowdfunding, manufacturing, pricing, and scaling.
Guest backgrounds
Tom Gosney is the founder of Gosney. He describes undiagnosed ADHD/dyslexia, low self-esteem, and starting drugs/alcohol at 13–14. At 21 he entered rehab in South Africa and later rebuilt his identity through cooking and community. Nathan Chan hosts.
Key claims
The “product” is the behavior shift around the oven—people stop bringing alcohol and start bringing toppings. Entrepreneurship during recovery “saved my life.” Crowdfunding and category creation proved demand for portable/wood-fired-style pizza ovens. Scaling globally created complexity that nearly hurt the business.
Notable examples
Building a DIY brick oven in his garden with friends; first official oven for a restaurant (Larder House). Kickstarter/Rockbox crowdfunding: $1.2M in first month. Gosney Dome launch: ~27,000 signups; ~$8.5M in first four hours; website crashed; “death threats” from buyers who couldn’t purchase; design retooling weeks before production (silicon body/personality). Manufacturing: early China trips via intermediaries in Yongkang; later rebuilt supply chain with experienced COO and advisors. Pricing: initially discounted from imposter syndrome; confidence grew after delivering quality/experience and selling out quickly.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOIntroduction to Tom Gosney
0:59 to 2:15
Tom shares about hitting rock bottom and the impact of cooking on his recovery.
“You hit rock bottom with addiction at a young age.”
Tom's Journey Through Addiction
2:18 to 3:16
Tom describes his challenges with addiction and the turning point in his life.
“If you're loving these episodes, leaving a quick review is honestly the best way to support us.”
Finding Purpose in Cooking
3:24 to 4:28
Tom discusses how cooking helped him build community and find purpose.
“Like I had a really interesting set of younger years.”
Creating the Backyard Pizza Oven
4:30 to 5:54
Tom explains the motivation behind building his own pizza oven and its significance.
“You know, lots of people talk about addiction being awful and obviously it destroys lives.”
The Transformation Through Pizza
6:00 to 7:24
Tom reflects on the shift in social dynamics around the pizza oven and his recovery.
The Impact of the Attack
7:26 to 9:00
Tom recounts a life-altering attack that prompted him to seek help for his addiction.
“It was such a simple thing, but my life had been reverted back to the really simple things.”
The Surrender to Change
9:04 to 14:00
Tom shares the pivotal moment of surrendering to his mother and entering rehab.
“looking for community and I was trying to find that thing.”
Turning Point: A Moment of Clarity
14:00 to 15:01
The speaker shares a pivotal moment of realization and recovery from addiction.
“that much longer if I'd continued the way I was.”
Beginning of the Pizza Oven Journey
15:02 to 16:30
The evolution from hand-built ovens for restaurants to consumer products.
“And thank you for being so open and honest, man.”
First Sales and Marketing Lessons
16:31 to 19:36
Insights into the challenges of making initial sales and learning marketing.
“So tell me about that first sale, that first oven you built and how'd you get that sale, man?”
Show all 26 chapters
Launch of Rockbox: Crowdfunding Success
19:37 to 20:58
The journey of launching the Rockbox oven and its crowdfunding success.
“And I just woke up every morning not thinking about alcohol, thinking about how to acquire a customer, what's the next product that I could build.”
Innovative Marketing Strategies
20:59 to 22:36
Using creative marketing strategies to gain traction for new products.
“So that crowdfunding campaign did 1.2 million in its first month.”
Redesigning for Success
22:37 to 25:51
The impact of redesigning the product just before launch for better appeal.
“And we we just seeded that like we were doing SEO.”
Scaling with New Products
25:52 to 28:01
Discussion on launching new products and handling rapid success.
“So we did one in 2016 where I took like the best interviews and put them into like this cool coffee table book.”
The Launch and Demand for the Dome
28:01 to 34:09
Discover the innovative marketing strategy behind the successful launch of the pizza oven and the overwhelming consumer demand it generated.
“But it was also it held all of these incredible attributes that make a true Neapolitan oven work.”
Navigating Manufacturing Challenges
34:50 to 42:08
Understand the complexities of sourcing manufacturing in China and the journey to finding the right partners and scaling production.
“Inexperience we were with going out and meeting the suppliers.”
Navigating Early Challenges and Growth
42:08 to 44:23
Learn how early financial struggles shaped the company's growth strategy.
“I think, yeah, no, like, no, I don't, you know, we weren't.”
Overcoming Imposter Syndrome in Pricing
44:27 to 48:29
Discover how the founder overcame fears of pricing and built confidence in product value.
“So I'd love to know how you worked through that because I think that's common for many founders.”
Building a Community Around the Brand
48:30 to 52:17
Understand the importance of community engagement in brand loyalty and growth.
“And I think those moments, right, they're quite unusual for brands to have moments like that.”
From Personal Struggles to Entrepreneurial Success
52:18 to 56:00
Hear about the founder's personal journey and how it shaped the brand's vision.
“You know, when there's this incredible loyalty and people build, yeah, people build their livelihoods around becoming a pizza chef.”
From Materialism to Purpose
56:00 to 58:22
Learn how the speaker's journey shifted from material desires to a mission-driven approach.
“And then as soon as you actually start making some waves and some moves, kind of all of that stuff drops away.”
Navigating Leadership Changes
58:22 to 1:02:14
Discover the challenges and learnings from stepping back and then returning to a leadership role.
“Like so many questions running through my mind.”
A Lesson in Self-Belief
1:02:14 to 1:06:00
Understand the importance of self-belief and learning from past experiences in business.
“I've got no university degrees in business, no MBAs, no nothing.”
Reflecting on Past Encounters
1:06:00 to 1:09:46
Hear a personal story about confronting past judgments and finding motivation in success.
“You've got to tell us about that, someone that didn't believe in you back then.”
Future Ambitions and Global Plans
1:09:46 to 1:10:04
Explore the strategies and aspirations for expanding into global markets.
Building a Global Brand Strategy
1:10:04 to 1:12:09
Learn about the strategies and ambitions behind building a global brand in the cooking industry.
“I want to generate truly magical experiences for consumers with new methods of cooking that feel really emotional to me.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Hey founder fam, before we jump in, I want to take a quick moment to talk about our sponsor OmniSend, the email marketing and SMS platform built specifically for e-commerce founders. We've been recommending OmniSend to founder students and members of our platform for a while now because it just works. So whether you're launching your first store or you're scaling it to seven figures, it really helps you automate your marketing and get results. And did you know, on average, OmniSend customers make$79 for every$1 they spend, which is an insanely good return on investment. And if you're already on another platform, here's the thing.
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1:11Tom Gozney:Coming back and being in the real world was really challenging. I was so scared of social isolation, of telling my friends they couldn't drink around me. So I would say they could come and bring beers and wine and all of that stuff. but actually I was just crushed on the inside. After a couple of weeks of lighting this oven and everyone pitching in and opening their own dough and cooking their own pizza, people stopped bringing beers and wine and started bringing toppings. It just naturally shifted. We're selling the shift in human behavior that happens around the oven and that's really the product that I love and fell in love with that I'm building.
1:40Tom Gozney:Tom Gosney turned this simple idea into a business, generating over$100 million in revenue and he did it without the experience. Bro, the demand was crazy. eight and a half million US dollars in the first four hours. I had no idea if a supplier was good, if they were bad. I had no idea how to maintain quality. It was chaos, man. I had something like three death threats from people that weren't able to purchase. And I'm like, bro, if someone gives me a death threat over a pizza oven, like we're onto something here.
2:10Tom Gozney:Hear the stories, learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Founder Podcast with Nathan Chan.
2:24Hey, I have a quick ask. If you're loving these episodes, leaving a quick review is honestly the best way to support us. It helps the show grow and means we can keep bringing you the founder stories and insights you tune in for. Please share it with a friend. Thank you so much. Now let's get into it. Well, Tom, welcome to the show. You're the founder of Gosney, an incredible brand. I've experienced this product myself and with my family. Best pizza ovens, portable pizza ovens ever. You can cook a pizza in three minutes. It's crazy. Like even the packaging, like wow, what an amazing company. And you've started this thing from nothing.
3:03You've built a global brand. You hit rock bottom with addiction at a young age. And out of your recovery came a simple brick oven out of your garden. So this brand is now valued at over$100 million. What was the moment in your recovery when you realized a backyard pizza oven could become your lifeline and eventually a business?
3:23Tom Gozney:Yeah, well, firstly, man, it's great to be here. I'm a fan of you and what you've built. So like back at you. Do you know what, bro? Like I had a really interesting set of younger years. I think, you know, I'm undiagnosed, but sort of self-diagnosed, ADHD, dyslexic, went to school and, you know, really, really struggled in a classroom to concentrate and just not overly academic, very practical. And so really struggled in school to, I guess the hardest thing from school was feeling like I wasn't like the other kids, you know, feeling like I didn't fit in. and you know when I was when I was in school it was a long time ago so there was less awareness to ADHD and dyslexia and stuff like that and I think growing up like without really feeling like I knew my place or I knew my purpose or I knew what I was good at I had low self-esteem from school um you know I was kind of lost and fell into addiction quite young the age of 13 or 14 started using drugs and going out and leading a lifestyle that quite honestly at the time, man, it felt like I'd found my home.
4:39Tom Gozney:You know, lots of people talk about addiction being awful and obviously it destroys lives. And for me in the early stages, it was like, it was like home. It was like comfort to me. I felt lost as an individual. And so when I found drugs and that lifestyle, I found like I could attach a persona, you know, like it became my persona and it gave me a place to be where I felt valued. And so fast forward on, you know, and we can go a little deeper into it if you'd like, but at the age of 21, I ended up in a rehabilitation centre in South Africa. I spent just shy of a year in rehab. And that was a, you know, that was a bold, and even if I do say so myself, it was a courageous move as a 21 year old, you know, to decide that you're going to quit using substances and drinking for the rest of your life.
5:29Tom Gozney:You know, that's no mean feat. And I did it. So I spent I spent the time in rehab. But I think the thing that was really fascinating for me when I came out was I was like my entire persona for the last eight years of my life was built around being the person that was getting wasted and going out and partying all the time and doing all of those things. So it was like coming out of rehab and getting back onto the south coast of England. It was like, who actually am I? you know and that was excuse me that was the hardest part of the journey by a country mile like the idea of like going into rehab and facing into it 50 of it is like making the decision to go and then you do the work in there you think rehab or I thought rehab was going to be the hardest part but actually you're within four walls coming back and being in the real world was when it was like really challenging and that's when it really puts you to the test and so I found cooking as a way of building community before I built a pizza oven and it was a way that I could feed my friends it was a way that I could bring people around a table and it was a way that I could socialize without drugs and alcohol being at the center of it so I first found food and like sort of meditative like it kind of gave me meditation prepping food and feeding people and it was love and it was community and it was building the table and it just felt it felt so natural and organic and I felt like I could escape my problems when I was doing that and um one evening I decided that we were going to make pizzas and I made some dough and I had three friends around my girlfriend at the time uh who's now my wife Laura and my friend Owen and Lee and I kind of gave them their dough balls and it was like the fun it was you know it was one of those moments it's such a simple moment but it had such a lasting impact on me it was like you know when you get those times when you laugh with your mates and you truly like gutturally laugh and the outside world disappears and I was at such a vulnerable stage in my recovery where the world was scary going out walking to the shop and walking past the liquor section of the shop that was a scary outing for me back then I was just like on high alert consistently like how do I not drink how do I not use how do I stay safe all of these things so my life was my central nervous system is on high alert and I think in that moment where we all opened our own dough and you're like stretching your dough and people are ripping holes in it and it's not circular and it was the shape of Italy and you're kind of taking the mickey out of each other but then you top your own pizzas you're truly laughing and like creating together and that was really really special for me and then we cooked the other we cooked the pizzas in the conventional oven in the kitchen they came out soggy and a bit rubbish but it wasn't even really about the eating it was about the making and that was it that evening I was like there was something fascinating in that journey of just making pizzas together.
8:15Tom Gozney:It was such a simple thing, but my life had been reverted back to the really simple things. And I was finding myself again. And so I loved the process of doing that. And I said to Laura, my girlfriend, I was like, I want to get, I want to buy a pizza oven for the garden. And I went online and I looked at them and you could only really buy Italian imports that were like three, 4 ,000 pounds. And you had to build a base and all of that stuff. And she was like, you're an idiot. We've got no money. Like what you're talking about. I was like looking for what my career was going to be. And Laura had just come out of university.
8:46Tom Gozney:And the next day I started digging foundations in the garden and I built my own brick oven. And, you know, fundamentally, it completely changed my life, not only in. It was such an interesting time for me, man, because I was looking for purpose and I was looking for community and I was trying to find that thing. And when I lit the oven, something magical happened for me like firstly like lighting a fire and cooking food next to a wood fire was there was something so primal about it and I kind of could lose myself for hours just staring into the fire and building food and feeding people so there was just something really really magnetic about it and then the real change happened for me I was so scared of social isolation of telling my friends they couldn't drink around me so I would say they could come and bring beers and wine and all of that stuff.
9:39Tom Gozney:But actually, I was just crushed on the inside. I was like, you know, really, really like the sort of thought of building a life of abstinence so early on was so hard. But I didn't have the courage to necessarily tell my friends that I didn't want them to drink around me. But when we lit the oven, it changed. It changed the behavior around the product. And that's I say this a lot now, but I think that's the product that we're selling. We're not selling hardware. We're not even selling the pizza. we're selling the the shift in human behavior that happens around the oven and that's really the product that I love and fell in love with them that I'm building and what happened was after a couple of weeks of lighting this oven and everyone pitching in and opening their own dough and cooking their own pizza people stopped bringing beers and wine and started bringing toppings and I was just it just naturally shifted and it was like it was like this moment that was just happened it was kind of like intervention I needed it so badly at that time and I really felt like I'd found something that the world didn't really know about and that was kind of the discovery that I had with the first oven yeah that's wild so I'm curious why did you decide to stop I guess my life was spiraling out of control um my addiction got progressively worse the older I got and I think when I got to the age of about 19, I was like, I got in trouble with the law.
11:09Tom Gozney:And I was, I kind of felt like I was at a crossroads. I felt like if I continued going the way that I was, like I have a chemical reaction with alcohol. I just turn into a different person when I drink. And I think it takes me to places that I don't necessarily want to go. And I think firstly, it was, it hadn't been fun for a long time. It was debaucherous. It was disruptive. It was, well, I was just out of control. I was out of control. And I think seeing the suffering that I put my family through was, you know, it was difficult. And then, you know, when I was in it, you drink and use drugs to get away from the guilt and shame.
11:48Tom Gozney:And you drink when you're happy and you drink when you're sad and you just use drugs all the time when you're drinking. So it was this perpetuating cycle that I just couldn't break and one evening in my hometown I was out with my girlfriend I had an argument with my girlfriend I can't remember why probably over my drinking and um I went to walk home alone and I got I got attacked by a group of guys I got attacked by about eight guys and and they cracked my skull and they kicked all my bottom teeth out and just absolutely just kicked the living shit out of me and I picked my teeth up and put them in my pocket as the ambulance picked me up picked them up off the ground and and it was just you know I nearly died and it was just exceptionally traumatic and I think after that that was a turning point for me and it was like I knew my life was going in a certain direction and I guess inside I always felt even though I had low self esteem low self-worth I always knew that I had more that I was capable of more that my life wasn't it wasn't written to be about drug and alcohol addiction I kind of felt just within my being that I had more and that I wanted to go on a journey and I you know like obviously now being a parent and knowing what I put my parents through um you know I felt like I had to build bridges and I felt like I needed to I needed to drive a change for everyone that was in my life and getting beaten up in the way that I did was a rock bottom for me it was a light bulb moment it was a turning point it gave me it traumatized me I couldn't go outside without alcohol without vodka in my pockets I was scared to not have alcohol on me it was like a numbing I was traumatized from being attacked.
13:44Tom Gozney:I was scared to go out. And my drinking and my drug taking just spiraled out, completely out of control. I was in so much pain with my mouth, my teeth. And so I was drinking to the point where, you know, my life probably wouldn't last that much longer if I'd continued the way I was. So it was a really, it was a really good moment for me and I know it's odd to say but like I'm really grateful for that moment because I don't know like what would have happened if I didn't have that moment so it's kind of rare to be appreciative for someone kicking the shit out of you but I kind of am you know and I went to my mum who's just been the most supportive person in my entire journey she was lost with my addiction just as much as as I was and had no idea what to do and I kind of waved a white flag to her and I was like mom, I'm done.
14:37Tom Gozney:I'm, you know, I'm, it's, it's done. I'm over. I'm like surrendering. I want to go to rehab. And, you know, I think she'd probably been waiting for about five or six years for me to wave a white flag and say that I was ready. And within, I would say a week of me saying that to my mom, um, I was on a plane to South Africa and my life changed forever. Yeah. Wow. What an incredible story. And thank you for being so open and honest, man. I really feel a lot just hearing you tell this whole story with such detail. It feels like I'm there with you. So I want to now fast forward to the business side.
15:19So you came up with this idea effectively for creating pizza ovens outside and you started producing them for commercial kitchens before any consumer product existed, correct?
15:34Tom Gozney:Well, no, we actually, I made, the first ever product I made was a small consumer product, but quite quickly went into restaurant ovens. But the restaurant ovens were the things that we really got traction with early on. So they were like the beginning, the momentum in the beginning of the story. The first thing I did was I spent, after building my first oven, I was like then hand building brick ovens. And so technically I was building them for restaurants and things like that. So we did start in the commercial space and I was building brick ovens by hand. And then I saw an opportunity to develop an oven that I could share with more people.
16:13Tom Gozney:Like, how do I make it accessible? And that was probably in 2010, 2011. We launched a brand called the Stone Bake Oven Company. I got a five grand loan from my mum. I made a fiberglass mold. I'd spent six months researching the materials that went into making a pizza oven. I designed my own material composition and then I found a factory to cast my molds for me and that was like that was the beginning of the first consumer brand that we'd done but I'd already been building brick ovens I guess I realized once I was building brick ovens for restaurants and pubs and stuff like that they took 10 days to build they cost thousands of pounds to produce and you know there was no scalability to it so we went into the consumer and then I actually went back into the professional ovens a little bit later.
16:58Got you. So tell me about that first sale, that first oven you built and how'd you get that sale, man? Do you know what, man?
17:07Tom Gozney:It was so, it was, it was funny. So there was, there was a few moments, like I think the first ever hand-built brick oven that I built was actually, I was living in a town called Southbourne on the South coast of England. And there was a guy that was building a restaurant called the Larder House, a guy called James Fowler. and he's still going today and the oven's still in there today and i remember i was i built my own brand on a leaflet it was called the stone bake oven company and it was the oh man the branding was horrific and it was like these you know it was back in the day we used paint and it was like an odd little olive and like word art and i mate i knew nothing about what i was doing and i was leaflet dropping everywhere and i think james james heard that i was building hand-built brick ovens and he was opening this restaurant at the larder house and he kind of took a chance on me to build him an oven and we did and that was like the first in the journey of building the hand-built brick ovens and then we got a few more and then I was starting to build them for friends and loved ones and that's when the penny dropped like I've got to build this into a business and I've got to innovate and so James at the larder house was the first official oven that we ever built but the first ovens that I sold under the company for products that I'd actually designed that I didn't build myself came slightly later and I always remember man it was funny like I got a five grand loan from my mum I spent two grand two thousand pounds on a fiberglass mold and then I spent the other two and a half thousand pounds on a website and I remember the countdown to put in the website live and we put it live and we made no sales and I was like I was just so green back then I was like well as soon as we put a website live sales are just gonna come and then we turned it live and like for two months we didn't have any sales and I'm like had to learn about marketing and SEO and connecting with consumers and understand the proposition of the oven and so that was the journey that we went on then I remember the first e-com sales that we made and it was just like it was the most mind-blowing thing and I was absolutely fucking hooked on it you know once we built a website built a brand I started learning about you know as I said how to build SEO and we were writing articles and putting inbound links into the website.
19:18Tom Gozney:And then when we started to get consumers visiting the website, it was like, I was obsessed with fishing as a young kid and the idea of going out and, you know, getting all your tackling, going to the right spots, getting the right bait. And it was kind of like that for me. It was like fishing. And, you know, it was something that was so productive. And I think finding entrepreneurialism and business in the early parts of my recovery undoubtedly has saved my life. And I just woke up every morning not thinking about alcohol, thinking about how to acquire a customer, what's the next product that I could build.
19:51Tom Gozney:And so the journey was fascinating, but I was so green when I started, Ben. So the consumer, the first version was the Rockbox, which was a crowdfunding campaign right in 2016 correct yeah so we'd we'd actually built a brand called the stone bake oven company rockbox was the first product that got global scale so i had a brand called the stone bake oven company before that and that was like a small uk-based brand and i'd got a lot of the learning there but then we launched i had a vision to launch a product that was even more accessible so we built the first ovens but we couldn't ship them internationally they were still heavy they were hard to install obviously we were the first people to actually make a product that was easier to install but then i came up with this idea that like what if i could have a product that was able to be shipped anywhere in europe for 20 pounds and fit in fit into a box and that was where the idea for rockbox came yeah so so that's when you really start to go on the i guess the quest to build out a global scale company and a consumable product which everyone can share and it's accessible, right?
20:58That's correct. Yeah. Okay. So that crowdfunding campaign did 1.2 million in its first month. Yeah.
21:07Tom Gozney:Mate, do you know what? It was an amazing feat. I think we had no budget. We were hustling. We did a Kickstarter campaign. I actually entered into this competition called Pitch to Rich. I see Richard Branson on the wall behind you there. and it was the first year he ever did it. He did this competition called Pitch to Rich and you entered in and you pitched your idea and it was really fascinating, man. We didn't win. I think we got through to the semifinals or something, but we kind of like built this campaign. I maybe had like four employees, something like that at the time because we'd got a commercial oven business going at that point as well.
21:41Tom Gozney:And we didn't win, but Richard Branson emailed me after the campaign, said, guys, you had a solid contribution. You guys were amazing to be part of it. You know, thank you for participating. And I just sent him a message back. And I was like, you may have a private island, Richard, but you're a nobody unless you've got one of our ovens on it. And so he then linked me up to his chef on the island. He sent me an email back just saying, make it happen. This is Chris Kenny. He's the head chef on the island. And so we had these commercial ovens and we organized to put a commercial oven in on NECA. And I think where we'd had that interaction with Richard, we'd organized to put an oven on the island.
22:25Tom Gozney:I then, you know, when in the build up to launching Rockbox, I kind of built this headline. The pizza oven brand is after Richard Branson's dough, D-O-U-G-H. And it was that was kind of the spin. And we we just seeded that like we were doing SEO. You know, we wrote the little article and we chucked it out and one of the national papers picked it up. and I remember opening the paper one day and we had a double page spread in the paper with a picture of Rockbox and like loads of information about it and I think we started to harness some momentum and that was in the countdown to going live onto Kickstarter and so when we launched it we'd already got a bit of pent up demand and it was something that didn't really exist back then man like portable pizza ovens weren't a thing you know we truly you know we truly ideated and built this high quality product and forged a new category Yeah, so it's so crazy because there's another part of this story that we haven't tackled yet.
23:22And it's you raise 1.2 million, but then you switched up and redesigned the whole product weeks before production when you were going to deliver. Like what happened, man?
23:34Tom Gozney:Bro, do you know, we had, so like I originally told the product and we designed it and it was this, it was a steel perforated unit. And I remember I was still learning about consumers and there was something really fascinating for me. I felt like we got this product designed, but it kind of looked it looked like a commercial kitchen product. And I was just like, do you know what? We're introducing sort of 450 degrees C fire into people's back gardens. People don't usually cook in this high heat, you know, and using a live fire can be quite intimidating. so I remember I was really really stressed out about the design of the product and I woke up one morning and I went downstairs and I threw on I think it was a Netflix documentary or a YouTube documentary about Steve Jobs when he was opening the first Apple store and he walked into the store like a day before opening and the flow of the store was wrong and he had people queuing down the road waiting to go into the Apple store and he just he refused to open and he like pushed the opening back, sent everybody home.
24:38Tom Gozney:And I just remember it was like this moment for me that I was like, shit, I have to stop this. This isn't right. We're not going to get the traction. And then I'd built this vision. We'd committed to suppliers. We'd got customers, you know, wanting the product. But I just had this vision in my mind of like converting the product and giving it a silicon body and giving it a sort of like round bum on the backside of it. And it gave it a real personality it made it feel accessible and fun and like a product that was easy to use and I really wanted from a consumer centricity perspective I really wanted to get a product that was that like this was a new thing for people to try and understand you know a portable stone pizza oven was odd and so I wanted it to feel accessible I wanted it to have a personality and I wanted to do it in different color ways so we had like a lime green version and a slate gray version and And that was really just to make it feel fun and accessible.
25:34Tom Gozney:And we pulled the anchors on the tooling. We retooled it with the silicon. We designed it within a month. We switched the design around, managed to get it manufactured and then get it to consumers, albeit with a little bit of a delay. But the product just hit. It was an absolute hit. Everybody loved it. Yeah. So we've done a crowdfunding campaign. I did one early days founder. Similar. Look, actually a little bit before you. So we did one in 2016 where I took like the best interviews and put them into like this cool coffee table book. And I call it the Entrepreneurship Bible. And we raised a couple hundred thousand dollars and there was a delay.
26:17And I was the same as you, man, like super green always. I don't know what I'm doing. The book was$40 Australian dollars and I charged$40 for shipping it because it was really heavy. and that's just what it costs to ship it to people. So that's what I charge people. Where I should have really just made it$60 and$20 shipping. And we would have probably raised half a million bucks, like at least. Kickstarter doesn't show you, back then, they didn't show you the conversion rate of the page. But it would have been shocking, man, right? Yeah, yeah. And we had a few delays and people were like, people are not happy, man.
26:53They get feisty. Like, hey, I paid for this product. Where is it? And, dude, we were only like maybe a month late. Like people really had that, like where is it, where is it, where is it? Even though I was keeping people updated, all that kind of stuff. And you had a similar story happen to you when you launched the Dome in 2021. Yeah. So it was$10 million you guys made. You sold out the product. Website crashed. How have you been able to handle that?
27:26Tom Gozney:Bro, it was crazy. So after Rockbox, we launched Rockbox, we continued. And then I had this vision. We had a brand called the Stone Bake Oven Company. Rockbox was an individual brand. And then we had Gosney Professional Ovens. And I just had this vision that I wanted to build a product that looked like Apple and a 300-year-old Neapolitan oven had a baby. That was kind of like the vision, right? It was like this hyper modern product that made wood fired cooking accessible, but it felt like it was rooted in the ancient culture from Naples of where it originated. Right. And so the oven felt modern, disruptive, clean, bold.
28:06Tom Gozney:But it was also it held all of these incredible attributes that make a true Neapolitan oven work. So we had a rolling flame. It was gas fired as well as wood. But we simulated the gas fly, the gas flame to make it work like wood. So I built this product and I remember we had, again, we had a very limited marketing budget for launching it. And I built this, I built this mechanism on Instagram, right? So I went out to like 30 different influencers, people that I just networked with on social. And I basically said to them, like, would you post this at a synchronized moment for us? And I'll give you an oven in return.
28:48Tom Gozney:And that was kind of, and it was, we didn't even have the ovens to give right then. We were still in the process of tooling and making them all and all of those things. So they agreed to it. And it was October 2020. We did this synchronized launch of this piece of artwork. And it was just a picture of the dome. And this was, I think the dome has been a category builder. There's not a product in the world that looked like it, that did what it did. It kind of bought, I always say like, we've never reinvented. invented we haven't invented a pizza oven like that's not what we've done we've taken a centuries old practice we've kind of modernized it and allowed it to become within reach for a lot of consumers so artisanal pizza in the garden wasn't really possible before that and we've created a product built with like professional standards that allow consumers or people just have fun and make great pizza and that was always the goal was to bring people together and so we did this synchronized launch and the product just looked dope man it was so sick it was like this cgi with it was like an animated with a flame burning inside it and it just said i'm on the list right and so it posted 30 different influencers posted exactly the same time and then if a consumer found the list it was like on gosney's instagram and they signed up they got sent the artwork and they got sent a caption and if they posted it they got entered into winner dome the first ever dome off the production line and when we did that it kind of just took over and i think we had something like 27 000 people sign up within the first few weeks to buy a dome and so we had like great demand for it but you're always like well not hardly anyone on that list is going to convert right you know like it's new it's unproven blah blah blah blah so then we counted down to We're actually launching the product where we were taking money from consumers and we kind of put it in buckets.
30:41Tom Gozney:We had a certain amount of stock and the first people on the list to purchase would get the oven shipped to them first. And then, you know, and bro, the demand was crazy. Like we launched it. We turned it on. We ended up doing something like eight and a half million US dollars in the first four hours. And on the website, it kind of broke the website. It was throwing people out the car. It was using the stock that we'd allocated. So people that were at the beginning of the list were then getting thrown out the car and then saying it was, you know, it was an April launch. Fundamentally, I launched, I don't know why, but I launched it on my wife's birthday.
31:16Tom Gozney:I thought it would be a fun thing to do on her birthday. And actually, like none of us got sleep for three days because we had something like 5 ,000 complaints from people that couldn't purchase it. And it was wild, bro. it was one of the biggest achievements for the business and it was one of my biggest oversights that we like truly didn't understand the demand that we would generate and we would harness and so and not only that with the technical issues that we had with the website where it threw people out the car and then you know they were pissed like they'd been waiting they were first on the list and then you know they'd entered back in and it was a september delivery time you know because we and then by the time we launched in april by the time we sold the inventory that would take Because to Christmas to make, I was just like, guys, we've got to turn the sales off.
32:00Tom Gozney:We can't have consumers waiting over nine months for a product. Like, that's criminal. And so we got a lot of heat for that. But we were sort of sideswiped with the demand that we had. And then we got making and we delivered all the products and we did all of those things. But I guess at that point in time, that was another inflection point for the brand where I knew I had something. You know, we generated something really special. You know, I had something like three death threats from people that weren't able to purchase. And I'm like, bro, if someone gives me a death threat over a pizza oven, like we're onto something here.
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32:31Tom Gozney:If it makes someone that emotional, you know, I feel like we've done our job as a design firm to bring something that can essentially generate some consumer demand and we can build a brand around. And that was kind of the beginning of the Gosney journey of building Gosney when we amalgamated all the brands into one. Yeah. And as I shared at the start of this, I have a Gosney and I get the whole Apple feel like the unboxing experience. And now hearing you talk through it, I'm just in awe of what you've created, Tom. And the question that keeps coming back to me is how did you work out the manufacturing and the design?
33:10Like you have no experience, no background here. Like putting all the pieces together, like breaking molds. How many times? How many times did you go to China? Like were you fucking around on Alibaba? Like talk us through that piece, man, because that must be so intimidating. And then we've got to talk about the funding side, right? Because like it's a big product. You know, like for our Gosney dude, it's a three-person lift to put the oven. like like like shipping all that kind of stuff so like let but let's start with the design how did you actually let's start with just the gosney obviously you've worked your way up but like with gosney in the dome like how did you work that manufacturing piece out how many times do
33:55Tom Gozney:you have to go to china so we went we went a few times and it was like it was honestly it was like nothing i'd ever experienced and i looking back now with how real quick before we jump in i want to shout out one of our sponsors zero i've used zero from day one of founder 13 years now and it's still how we run the business today it's cloud accounting software built for founders exactly like us and it automates all the admin that i used to do when i first started founder invoicing chasing payments expenses all the accounting it really helps me get paid faster and keep an eye on cash flow. So Founder listeners get a crazy 95 % off for the first six months.
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34:55Tom Gozney:Inexperience we were with going out and meeting the suppliers. I had no idea if a supplier was good, if they were bad. All of them would say yes, that they would make it. I had no idea how to maintain quality. It was chaos, man. I remember we had a trip booked. We flew into Shanghai, and then we were on a bus or a coach that took us out into the middle of nowhere. It was a city called Yongkang, and it was one of the most surreal experiences of my life. They didn't really have hotels there. We ended up staying in this crazy rundown place. There was no restaurants, no food. It was just, you know, like it's a cultural shock going out to manufacturing parts of China.
35:39Tom Gozney:And, you know, we were just keen. We were bobbing and weaving and networking. And then we ended up finding a, we found a sort of like intermediary company that would actually manage the manufacturing for us. And we kind of did the trip. We met loads of suppliers and we found this company that would help us get connected to manufacturers. And so we actually employed them to work with us. But what was really interesting was we had no idea what stuff cost. We had no idea how it worked. So essentially we got we weren't getting any cost efficiencies out of China. You know, we were going to a middleman that was going to multiple suppliers.
36:18Tom Gozney:They were assembling it. Everyone was stacking their margins on the top of it. So we had a really uneconomical product in the first place. And I think, you know, going to the big manufacturers out the gate before you've got something proven is hard to do. You go to the big manufacturers that are making the big grills and they all want volume. So it was just it was a really, really interesting journey. There's actually some really good intermediary companies now out there for people that are looking to manufacture initially. And there's, you know, there's some really good companies. And I think as you get scale and as we got scale, we realized that the economics of the product weren't where they needed to be.
36:58Tom Gozney:You know, and as we got a little bit volume through and we were like, which was essentially from the outset of the launch of the dome, we were like, right, how do we scale this up and how do we build this out? And I think that's when I went on a journey after we launched the dome. I then went on a journey to find the right people to get around me. And we'd got a board that was based on the south coast of England. And I actually went out to find people that had gone on a similar journey and that we could lean on their experience and bring in some people that could help us build the business that had done it before.
37:28Tom Gozney:So we went actually through networking and various different things. I found a couple of advisors that ended up coming onto the board that were from America that had actually built in the outdoor grilling space before. And they helped us build a team. and we essentially went out and completely rebuilt our supply chain. We got a very experienced, great COO that joined the business. He already knew people in China. He knew the factories, but we needed to get that volume, right? Like we couldn't have done that out the gate. If we were just a company with a vision to make this new version of a product and we were going to manufacturers, is they just probably wouldn't have dealt with us until we'd got that validated volume.
38:15Tom Gozney:So I think there is a journey that you need to go on as you scale up. It was a really bumpy journey for us. And I think, you know, we've kind of built the business to be scaled now, but it took some time to get there. Did you have to raise any money to fund production? Yeah, we did. So in answer to your other question about how we design products of that nature, I think, you know, we had, when we designed the dome, we had two designers in the business. We had a guy called Ryan, big up Ryan Breeze, still with us today. He heads up our industrial design and MPI. And one of the first ever employees that we had in the business, a guy called Patrick, who was a naval architect who I found in Limington.
38:55Tom Gozney:He bought an oven from me in the very early days. And I remember delivering it around to his house because I delivered every oven in the beginning. And I carried it into his garden and he showed me this thing called CAD. And I was like, bro, what is this? This is crazy. and I was designing ovens on blank pieces of paper and taking them to a pattern mold maker and then he started doing stuff in CAD for me and Patrick just became fabric of our design and then we had Ryan who was in industrial design with us and we used an agency to help us bring together all the manufacturing data packs and stuff like that but it was challenging bro and we had problems with the first dome like we had issues with it being assembled it was cracking stones And so we had to replace a load of ovens.
39:39Tom Gozney:And, you know, we had our teething problems, man. It's so funny when you when you look at brands from the outside and you see them doing well, you never see the stuff that goes on internally and like the challenges that you've got to overcome. I think one of the core challenges for me, man, like. I never really I never really had in the early days, never really had anyone that I could lean on that had done it before. And so we kind of made all of our mistakes. But I was just always so hungry to win and build it and build the best products. You know, we'd so we kind of have it. I haven't gone into it too much in this, but we built commercial ovens for the UK market.
40:18Tom Gozney:And we became the market leader in commercial ovens in the earlier on days. And all of the time and energy that Patrick and I put into designing these incredible restaurant ovens, we kind of use that engineering and took it into the dome. so like being an English guy and selling to chefs from Naples that were in England and they're like trying to sell a an English guy's oven to a Neapolitan pizza chef that are using third gen ovens they're like bro who are you so I had to we had to make an oven that worked incredibly well it had to work better than everything else out there it had to be more beautiful and that that was kind of the design journey that we went on with the commercial oven business and then we We just cascaded that knowledge into the smaller consumer products.
41:01Tom Gozney:We essentially found great people around us to help us from a freelance perspective. But, you know, we also struggled. We never raised a large amount of money. You know, we kind of bootstrapped as we went. But when we got to the Dome, I think by the time we got to 2017, when we were launching, when we were starting to design the Dome, that was when we took our first investor. and that was a really good move for us to put some capital into the business to help us realize some of the possibilities. But that's been a journey as well, raising capital. It's quite a minefield when you don't know what you're doing.
41:40Yeah, 100%. And I want to tackle that, but I'm also mindful, man. Dude, we could go in so many directions. I could talk to you all day about this business. This is awesome. I've got to ask about the economic side. Like, so obviously you've been able to raise money, build it, but like the economics, right? So like in the first early days of the consumer product with the dome, like, were you very profitable?
42:08Tom Gozney:I think, yeah, no, like, no, I don't, you know, we weren't. I think before we professionalized the company, we had really, really poor margins from the Far East, right? Like, especially in the early days with Rockbox, like, we didn't have enough margin to go into retail, you know. And, like, we were a direct-to-consumer brand. And we were like, do we need to go into retail? Should we go into retail? And I think it took us, we had to go on a journey. And I think as we grew the business, the business did make profit, but we were always reinvesting EBITDA into growth. And so we were always innovating new products or trying to open new markets.
42:49And I think one of the things that really caught me by surprise when we launched on Kickstarter,
42:54Tom Gozney:we launched into Australia, the whole of Europe, America, and that created complexity that I never thought would exist. You know, I just thought, great, we can get sales from all over the world. And then you're dealing with import duties and tax and all of those things. And like, geez, man, I was so inexperienced when we were building it from the grassroots and the ground up that it was just, it was just, you know, like that ambition to go and build a global brand. You kind of like be careful what you wish for, man. Like it nearly sunk us a few times. And I think we didn't necessarily have the capital behind us.
43:30Tom Gozney:But like, no, we weren't profitable and we haven't, we haven't, you know, we've, we've chosen to like in the early days, we weren't profitable. We were reinvesting everything in. We could have been profitable, but we wouldn't have grown in the same way that we had. And now we've got the right unit economics, right, in our products. We've, like, professionalized our supply chain. We've got great global logistics infrastructure and distribution infrastructure. So we are, you know, we have the right level of economics in the business now to remain profitable. But still, like, choosing to grow. We're an ambitious business, so we want to continue to grow, innovate new products, bring new categories to market.
44:07Tom Gozney:So I've always been excited to build, man. I don't, you know, if I wanted to cash out and, you know, be really comfortable, I could have done that a while ago. But I love building the brand and I feel like it's at the beginning of our journey. So I've always reinvested our profits for growth. Yeah, and one thing I've got here in our research is that you've said early on that imposter syndrome led you to heavily discount your ovens out of fear that people wouldn't pay a premium. So I'd love to know how you worked through that because I think that's common for many founders. I used to have an e-com brand and we sold a bottle and I started it with my now ex.
44:55and I used to always push to increase prices, increase prices, increase prices. No, no, I wouldn't pay that. It's way too much for a bottle. And I think that's really common amongst founders that you're scared to increase your prices because you look at it of like what you would pay. So how did you push through that imposter syndrome and what were the tests that you did to give you the confidence that the price around the dome of a couple of grand would hold?
45:24Tom Gozney:Yeah, I think firstly, I was obsessed with generating a product that could add significant value to a consumer. I was, you know, like your reference of the unboxing experience, for example, and things like that. I was obsessed with delivering that value. I was just like, how are we going to be remarkable and how does our community build our brand for us? And that was something that was really fascinating to me. So I think in the really early days when you're starting out, I did discount a lot of ovens. You know, when we were in the Stone Bay Coven Company, I discounted them. But even with the dome, when we launched the dome, we launched it with, you know, we've been used to selling Rockbox at, you know,$499.
46:05Tom Gozney:And we'd stepped up into selling something that was$1 ,400. And I remember the board in the UK was saying, like, we have no idea if this is going to sell. Consumers aren't going to stretch to$1 ,500. And I was like, they will. and but even then the product was underpriced right we weren't we didn't have the right economics with it and i wasn't confident i think the thing that's built my confidence over time when you were so obsessive about building a brilliant product and you don't cut corners and you add value to a consumer and a consumer can receive your product they can open it it works they have a great first experience with it um it's reliable it's consistent and it adds value to their lives i think like that's when you can have the confidence because i don't think we're just selling a piece of hardware i think we're selling something much greater we're selling we're selling thousands of hours of design we're selling a thing that i think is an architectural object that elevates someone's space in their garden you know it's truly a design-led object that happens to function brilliantly as a pizza oven and i think i was always obsessed with nailing an aesthetic for the product that really elevated the space that it sat in and i really wanted that to be something and you know we skew 45 female which is unheard of in outdoor cooking And so I think I've always been unwavering on the values that we have about delivering a product that is, I don't like calling my own products beautiful because it makes me sound like I've got an ego about it.
47:31Tom Gozney:But I personally think our products are beautiful. And then delivering on the promises of quality, performance, and the experience that a consumer can get from it. And I think if you can deliver all of those things and the market feeds back to you and consumers tell you that they love it and you continue to sell them, I think you naturally can find the balance of where the right MSRP sits. But now I would always be confident to price for the value that a product is built for. You know, like what I tried to do in the beginning is build an exceptionally high quality product and price it from a mass consumer perspective.
48:11Tom Gozney:I like undercut the value in my obsessiveness as a designer because I was scared that people wouldn't adopt it. And I think as we've grown and as people have used and validated our products and they love our products, the markets helped remove that for me. But I would say the one thing that's been unwavering for me is I've never compromised on the core values that make a Gosney product a Gosney product, which is being obsessive around the consumer experience, the design of the product, the quality and the engineering. And I guess when you're selling out your product in four, five, eight hours and you're doing 10 million bucks, 8 million bucks or whatever the number was, surely that's got to build a bit of confidence that people want this.
49:01There's demand. You've got to price it for value.
49:04Tom Gozney:A hundred percent. And I think those moments, right, they're quite unusual for brands to have moments like that. but I think you know you feel like you're really onto something can you feel like god if I just follow my instinct which is I want to design remarkable products that add value to people's lives and I don't compromise on those qualities like you can because and you know if you can truly communicate that with the consumer as well like why you care about what you're building and I just design products yeah honestly I design products that I'm obsessed with that I want you My entire obsession is around designing something that I truly want to look at every day.
49:46Tom Gozney:I want to use every day. Something that adds tons of value to my life. And if I can be obsessive about that, I don't cut corners, don't compromise. Then we add something truly meaningful to the market. And it seems like consumers like it as well. That makes sense. So I've got a question around ads. So for years, brands like yours, you've got great economics, high AOV. You've got the – what do you call that thing? It's called a pizza peel or a paddle. Yeah. Pizza peel or paddle. Yeah, you've got these accessories so you can increase average order value. So I'd love to market a brand like yours on ads, right?
50:28Like cost-effective, you know, from cost to acquire a customer to AOV, like there's got to be some healthy margins. But as time has gone on, costs have risen. A lot of changes around how much creative you need to put out and privacy changes and targeting and all that kind of stuff. So I'm curious, when did you guys first feel that pain around ads and performance and how have you adapted on acquiring customers? And are you guys heavy ads or not really that much?
50:58Tom Gozney:Yeah, we are. No, we are quite heavy on ads. I mean, I think the strength of the products, like, you know what I would say? We have felt that pain and it's become less efficient. But the one thing that I think we've done really, really well to counteract that is the community that's built around our products. You know, I kind of say to the team, like, community are the overarching foundation of any brand, like from my perspective. And I think one of the things that we've done, because we design products that were so like high performing, they're off the basis of our commercial ovens. We've got probably in the region of 500 to 1000 people that have quit their jobs, bought our products and now started their own hospitality businesses like pop ups or farmers markets.
51:43Tom Gozney:And a lot of them have gone from our product into bricks and mortar. So we've truly created accessibility for people. So whilst, you know, ads, you know, we will always go on a journey where we're delivering ads to consumers and we understand what creative works and things like that. And I think the true merit in what we're building is actually by truly engaging with the community and get people to fall in love with our products. And I guess one of the most amazing things for me is seeing people take our product and actually build their entire livelihood around it. You know, that becomes the most compounding flywheel that you can't buy in an ad.
52:21Tom Gozney:You can't buy that. You know, when there's this incredible loyalty and people build, yeah, people build their livelihoods around becoming a pizza chef. And, you know, I've got lots of examples of people that have done that, that, you know, they were hating the hours that they're working as an Amazon delivery driver. And they never made a pizza in their lives, but they just saw someone do it in our content or on social. They bought one of our cheaper products. They started making dough. They fell in love with the process of doing it. And now, you know, one of our guys, Adam Atkins, peddling pizza, he was one of the really, really early people to adopt Rotbox and use it for that.
52:59Tom Gozney:He's got, I don't know, 500 ,000, 600 ,000 followers. He's like a globally renowned pizza chef now. And he was relatively unhappy as a delivery driver. Not that there's anything wrong with being a delivery driver, but he had time away from his kids. He didn't have enough hours. now he you know works three days a week is a father to his kids makes three or four times the money he was making before it's phenomenal to see that happen so i guess i default like i default to really truly understanding like how we can create richness in community and how we can harness community to help us build the brand because i think the brand becomes bigger than anything we could put spend behind when you build a movement like i said at the beginning of this If you can shape the way that people spend their time and even in the extreme cases who they become, you know, like that becomes something that becomes unstoppable.
53:51Tom Gozney:And I think that's something that's really inspired me on the journey as we continue to build. Yeah. And you have such an incredible vision for this brand, what you're building. Was it always like this? No, I think, do you know what? Like we never set out to say like we're going to go and change people's careers and who they've become. Like that was never something when we designed the product. I just knew that I wanted to have a product that was the best performing product in the world, you know, for what we design. I wanted it to be exceptional in the way that it worked. I wanted it to be beautiful and I wanted it to create incredible experiences for consumers.
54:30Tom Gozney:And what followed was amazing. I think from my perspective, when I started the company, I didn't really give a shit. You know, I didn't know that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I didn't know that I wanted to build a business. I came out of rehab. I was desperate to find purpose. I was I just wanted to wake up in the morning and not think about drugs and drink. That was kind of like I need to get something to stick my teeth into. And then as I started building the business, my long term ambition and goal was to build a business that could generate eight thousand pounds a month for me. I wanted to pay a mortgage and I wanted to be able to shop in a fancy grocery store to feed my friends.
55:09Tom Gozney:And that was like my that was like my lifelong ambition. and then I became obsessed with understanding consumer centricity and generating experiences for consumers and allowing fathers to reconnect with their teenage daughters that are usually glued to their iPhones but actually on pizza nights they socialize together and they make together and there was like it became something much bigger and I remember I was just like blown away when we broke a million in revenue and then it was like god one day we're going to be 10 million in revenue then it was 20 and then it was like then it was 50 then it was 100 and you know and it's beyond my wildest dreams of what we've built but the goalposts just moved because i love the build i love the build i love building community i love connecting with consumers i love ideating new products so you know we're 100 million of revenue north of 100 million of revenue today and you know the numbers just get bigger but like the passion is around the brand and how the brand can impact the world and I think that's what keeps me energized that's what keeps me motivated if it was just about money now it was about money in the early days like I was just you know I wanted to you know when I set out I also had something to prove I've been through adversity I was a drug addict I was told that I wouldn't amount to anything you know in the early days I wanted to go out and buy materialistic things and do all of those things to prove to the world that I was someone.
56:37Tom Gozney:And then as soon as you actually start making some waves and some moves, kind of all of that stuff drops away. And maybe that's just maturity. Maybe that's growing up and not being a kid anymore. But I still have my aspirations and my goals to buy things. And I like, you know, I want to have fun things in life that I can feel proud that I've worked hard for. But the mission and the vision is bigger than a monetary outcome now the reason the monetary outcome just keeps getting bigger is because i just don't want the journey to end and i think when you've got that outlook and you're passionate about designing products that truly add value to consumers you know you generally when you're passionate and you're not making building for p &l and a profit and an exit you don't take those shortcuts and you do do the right thing for the consumer and i just i'm always such a firm believer that if we are true to our vision, true to our mission, our purpose.
57:30Tom Gozney:We don't compromise our values. We always make products that are exceptional. We build the brand that really connects with consumers. We educate the consumer as to how they can elevate their experience with our products. As long as we invest in those things, we'll build a remarkable brand. We'll build a brand that consumers want to have a relationship with and revenue and all that stuff will just follow, right it just does and so I really love the idea of you know I'm not driven by an exit I'm I'm kind of now I think like I want to fulfill the brand's potential that's the journey that I'm on I want to see it become something beyond my wildest expectations of what it could be and you know like that's that's the sort of like that's the drive and the North Star for me now Yeah, and I can hear the passion in your voice.
58:21There's so much I want to unpack there, dude. Like so many questions running through my mind. And we have to work towards wrapping, man. But a couple of questions. First and foremost, you identified that you're a visionary and a designer and you brought on a professional CEO. And I've done this journey too and now you've come back into the business. um talk me through that process because i when i did it the business almost got destroyed i know that's not the case for you but but talk me through that process and and how you you knew that it was time for you to step back and focus on design and product but now you're back yeah i
59:09Tom Gozney:think fundamentally you know like i had ambitions i think talking about the point earlier about imposter syndrome, right? I was just like, when we launched the dome and we'd got all these milestones that had happened when I was running the company, I was like, we now have an opportunity to scale this into something much larger. And my view was like, I'm not remotely qualified to build a business like that. Like that was my view. I was just like, I need a professional, you know, how do you unlock America? You know, we're from England. It's like, how do you do that? it felt like there was a secret sauce that I and I didn't know what the I didn't know what the ingredients were and but that's how I felt but like what I learned was that's not necessarily true and I think bringing someone in you know like you did and I kind of often say this it was like walking my firstborn child down the aisle and saying please take good care of her and I think I think I was fully committed to that process and I fully committed to that process.
1:00:17Tom Gozney:You know, like we have someone that does psychometric evaluations for us that basically said, Tom, you're never going to be able to step away and not micromanage everything that a person does that comes in to run the business. And to be honest, man, I didn't, I did step away and I did give our former CMO autonomy to build the business. And I think fundamentally it boiled down to a lack of alignment with what our objectives were. And I think, you know, I'm not going to get into the details of the journey of doing it necessarily. You know, it's maybe not the right thing to do, but it was definitely a bumpy ride for me.
1:00:57Tom Gozney:It was, you know, our objectives and alignment didn't necessarily meet. And I think it was okay in the beginning because I'm like, well, this is just what you do. You hire a CEO and they take you on a journey and they build it for you. And like, I'm new to this. I'm the one that needs to get back in my box. And like, and I didn't listen to my internal instinct and I didn't speak up and I didn't stop things that I knew were right and knew were wrong for the business. And I kind of let things fly. And then, you know, we hit some really, really bumpy patches, you know, because we'd made some wrong choices.
1:01:28Tom Gozney:And I was just like, you know what? Like, we aren't aligned for the end goal that I want to go and build. I want to build a remarkable brand. It's got my name on it. I need to be proud every day that I get out of bed that we're building something that is an extension and expression of me and like what my vision was. And that's just not what we ended up building. So I fundamentally decided that it was time for me to get back in closer and take it on a journey that wasn't constrained by time or exit or any of those things. I'm like, I'm going to build a brand. I'm going to build something remarkable and I'm going to go on that journey.
1:02:01Tom Gozney:And I think it was a really, really interesting exercise for me. And I think the big thing that I learned from it was I felt like I wasn't qualified because I'd never done it before. I've got no university degrees in business, no MBAs, no nothing. Right. And I was like, I'm the least qualified person around the table. But, you know, when our board came back together and, you know, they would like, Tom, you're the only person that can have this seat. You know, they all wanted me back in it. And I think the journey that I learned was all the imposter syndrome shit is fucking bullshit. It's bullshit.
1:02:41Tom Gozney:Like no one, I live and breathe my brand. I get out of bed every single day. And apart from thinking about my children and my wife, I think about our products, our brand, our consumer every single fucking minute of the day. And I think no one is going to have the deeply enriched understanding of the business like I have it. And I may not have all the answers, but I surround myself with people that are truly brilliant and I listen to them. And so stepping back in, stepping away was a really, really great learning exercise for me. But it taught me that I am capable. I am, you know, I don't I don't need qualifications.
1:03:23Tom Gozney:I've got the vision. I've got the instinct. I know the products like the company, the team believe in me. And that was the biggest realisation, like to say fuck you to imposter syndrome. Like that was the biggest one for me. And I just, I'm grateful that I had that lesson. Yeah, I can really resonate with that because I'm the same with founder, first company, never done anything before, never saw what like running a business looks like, made all the mistakes in the book. And it's really intimidating when you have these prospective C-suite executives that have built massive businesses, haven't built their own, but they've grown others.
1:04:09And it's really intimidating because, you know, why aren't you doing this and why aren't you doing that? And, yeah, you think – and there definitely is something alluring that someone can come in and take away all the operations. Yeah. And, like, they can handle that. You know what I mean? And they're just going to grow it and you can just, like, do the fun stuff. Like, there's this game that you play in your mind. It's like, oh, that would be awesome. How good is that? And then you are building something bigger than yourself because it doesn't rely on you. Like, you see all these different things.
1:04:41So I can really resonate and really choosing yourself. Like Tom is Gosney, Gosney is Tom.
1:04:50Tom Gozney:Yeah. And I just think, I do think though, like speaking the other side out of my mouth, it hasn't put me off putting a professional CEO into the business in the future. It's just given me a really sharp perspective on what that person needs to be. and I've gone through some of the learning of a lack of alignment and a lack of objectives, shared objectives, can really create tension and make it not work. So I'm back in the seat now. I'm, you know, building an incredible or have built an incredible team of people around me. And I'm, you know, that my plan is to continue doing that. But I think as we get bigger, I'm a founder.
1:05:27Tom Gozney:I love ideating products, talking to consumers, being out in the world, like running the operations, the business is not my strength and nor do I ever want to pretend it is. And so I truly understand what I'm good at. So it's not off the cards for me to go and, you know, find the right person at the right time, but it will be a journey that I go on and it will be from a place of like a much heightened level of experience of going on that journey the first time. Yeah, no, I totally understand. Totally get it. All All right, two last questions to do, then we've got to wrap. There's a story about you pulling up at a petrol station and running into your former teacher.
1:06:05You've got to tell us about that, someone that didn't believe in you back then. How did that feel, what was going through your head, and what did that tell you about how far you've come?
1:06:13Tom Gozney:Yeah, do you know what? Talking about a Lambo to the press has always haunted me ever since I talked about a Lambo. And I, you know, it was like when I left rehab when I was 21 years old, my goal was to buy a Lambo before I was 30. That was like my goal that got me, you know, like I said earlier in the interview, you know, materialistic things were important to me in the early days and and have become less so as I've grown. But, yeah, it was just one of those moments. It was one of those pinch yourself moments. Right. Like there was a specific person in my hometown that. just couldn't stand me just didn't like me always talked crap about me told me I'd amount to nothing you know and yeah it was it was one of those moments where I bought myself a Lamborghini when I was in my late 20s and had that moment where I pulled up a petrol pump next to him when I was a young kid in the car like that and you know like five years before that I was a fucking drug addict you know with half my teeth missing and so it was a moment for me you know not necessarily like that i wanted to have a half fuck you moment but it kind of like it was a little bit of that they're like i don't know must have felt good yeah it feels good man it feels good he was a dick he hated me he hated me even when i was nice and you know what i actually as part of my recovery process the 12 step is going out and making amends to people and you know like going and apologizing for the stuff you've done.
1:07:44Tom Gozney:And I did that in my recovery process. And this guy just didn't want to know. He was like, he was, you know, he was very close, didn't like me, whatever. And then that moment where you rock up in a Lambo next to him at the petrol station, it was like, you know, it was one of those moments that felt good. But yeah. You didn't speak to him? I said hi to him. He said hi to me. It was really civil. It was really nice. There was no like, ah, look what I've got. You know, it was none of that. It was just like, you know, it was just a moment. You know, he pulled up, I pulled up and then we kind of caught each other's eyes, stepped out.
1:08:14Tom Gozney:I said, hi, nice to see you. He just said, hi, Tom. And I kind of walked in and paid and that was it, you know. But it was like one of those full circle moments where you kind of remember where you came from, you know, like when you were back in those times. And it was just it was just a nice moment to reflect on how far I'd come. So I had a mentor that I just spent about three, four years with a mentor of mine that's a billionaire. And I always never forget one thing he told me about nice things. He said, Nathan, what a lot of people don't understand is you buy the cars, the watches, the house, whatever, the nice things, because you buy them at a certain point in time where you've accomplished something.
1:09:02And then when you look at that thing, not always, but a passing moment that will come by and you'll remember where you've come from and that reason that you bought it. That's what a lot of people don't understand.
1:09:16Tom Gozney:Do you know what? And that was the Lamborghini for me at 29 was that. It wasn't how much money I got. It was like I was at the depths of addiction and it was going from that. You know, that was the reminder. And every day that I got in that car, I fucking loved every second of it. It made me so motivated and, you know, I just felt so blessed. And just to be alive and to be healthy and to have, you know, the life that I've got now. But now, I've got a£20 Casio watch on, you know, like now it's like, yeah, you know, it's cool. That's what I think is cool now. All right, last question, man. This is awesome.
1:09:59we're gonna have to do a round two like this is incredible so last question you're in 100 million a year yeah what are the plans to build a global truly truly global brand you know obviously billion dollar a year ambitions um what how you plan to get there what's next yeah i think like
1:10:19Tom Gozney:we have done a brilliant job of building the brand globally i would say we've got breadth you know we've like like it feels like we're only getting started and i know every entrepreneur says that we've got breadth we're in australia europe america england but i think now it's about going deeper into markets we're not only are we launching new verticals like non-related pizza ovens that are coming that are not like any other products that exist in the market i don't want to design a product that will rival a Weber barbecue because we can, you know, and because we can make revenue. I want to generate truly magical experiences for consumers with new methods of cooking that feel really emotional to me.
1:11:06And so I've spent, it's been about five years on the
1:11:11Tom Gozney:next vertical that we're launching. And we've got a really exciting product coming there. But I want to continue to move into different verticals and then go much deeper into truly building out our communities. And I think one of the things that we are now focusing on doing is going much deeper into epicentre markets. So, you know, really, really starting to put time, energy, and focus into specific locations rather than just being a global brand. We're going much deeper to penetrate the market much further to get, you know, that momentum and adoption from a wider spread consumer perspective. Now is the time.
1:11:49Tom Gozney:I would say Gosney is built to 100 million of revenue. We've done a good job. Not enough consumers have even heard the word Gosney before. You know, we've got work to do. So now we need to be surgical in how we're growing to fund our growth and to build the brand into a household name. That's my goal. Incredible. Well, Tom, congratulations on all of your success thus far. This was an incredible, incredible conversation. Thank you again, man. Thanks, man. man it's so nice to be here thanks nathan hey founder fam thank you so much for tuning in today and if you enjoyed this episode please take the time to leave us a review and let us know what you think this podcast is a hundred percent free we work so hard to go out and find the most successful founders and entrepreneurs all around the globe so your feedback helps us grow improve and even bring on more incredible guests and insights so if you have a second please take a moment and leave us a review it really means a lot to me and the founder team it makes so much of a difference thank you again for listening and i'll catch you on the next episode
From the publisher
Tom Gozney hit rock bottom with addiction at 21 and spent nearly a year
in a South African rehab facility. What saved him back home wasn't a
business plan - it was a brick oven he dug into his garden, because
cooking pizza for his friends was the only way he could socialise
without alcohol at the centre of it. He noticed something: after a few
weeks, people stopped bringing beer and started bringing toppings. That
shift in behaviour became the entire thesis of the brand. Fifteen years
later, Gozney is valued at over $100 million, did $8.5 million in the
first four hours of its Dome launch, and forged the portable pizza oven
category from scratch.
In this interview, Tom breaks down why he redesigned a fully tooled
product weeks before shipping after watching a Steve Jobs documentary,
how a synchronised Instagram launch with 30 influencers generated 27,000
signups, and the imposter syndrome that made him underprice his own
ovens for years.
What you'll learn in this interview:
• Why he says he's selling a shift in human behaviour, not hardware or
pizza
• How he got his first oven sale by leaflet-dropping a restaurant with
genuinely terrible branding
• The £5K loan from his mum that funded the first fibreglass mould and
website
• Why he scrapped a fully tooled steel design weeks before shipping -
and retooled it in silicone in a month
• The Richard Branson exchange that put an oven on Necker Island and
fuelled the Rockbox launch
• The synchronised 30-influencer Instagram drop that drove 27,000
signups before a single unit shipped
• How the Dome launch did $8.5M in four hours, crashed the site, and
triggered death threats over a pizza oven
• Why going straight to big factories doesn't work before you've proven
volume - and how middlemen killed his early margins
• How he rebuilt his entire supply chain by recruiting a board and COO
who'd done it in outdoor grilling
• Why imposter syndrome made him underprice for years - and what finally
gave him conviction to charge premium
If you're building a physical product brand, wrestling with
manufacturing and margins you don't yet understand, or scared to price
for the value you've actually built, this conversation will
fundamentally change how you think about brand, product obsession, and
building something bigger than yourself.
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