Hall of fame — no. 7
ButcherBox
Est. 2015Mike Salguero sold the boxes before he had any way to ship them.
▶ BUTCHERBOX · 2015
BUTCHERBOX · 2026 ◀Drag the handle — ButcherBox, 2015 → 2026.
“We went out to raise $25K and in day one, we almost doubled our goal.”— Mike Salguero, The Product Market Fit Show
The ugly part. No inventory, no warehouse, no supply chain — just a Kickstarter page promising grass-fed meat at your door. He'd already raised $30M and failed at a previous company; this time he put up $10,000 of his own and let pre-orders fund the rest.
What they shipped anyway. The campaign almost doubled its $25,000 goal on day one and closed at more than $210,000 from 1,155 backers — the most-funded food project Kickstarter had seen out of Massachusetts. Only then did he build the fulfilment behind it.
Now. A bootstrapped meat-subscription business that's grown past $550M in revenue, with no venture capital.