Today, the company offers small and medium size of Grypmats, all made of the same non-slip rubber, that cost $29.99 to $44.99, and Burden is focused on expanding the lineup beyond military applications. Burden continues to own the remaining 70% of the company. He also gained funding there from Mark Cuban, Lori Greiner and Richard Branson, a guest shark on the episode, who invested $360,000 for a 30% stake in the business, valuing Grypmat at $1.2 million. In 2017, he raised $113,000 on Kickstarter, and then got on the hit television show Shark Tank, raising the company’s visibility dramatically. “I was couch-surfing,” he says, with a laugh. “He said, ‘I sell things to automotive, and if you’re okay with it I’d like to be a distributor and I’ll sell everything you have left,’” Burden recalls.īuoyed by that success, Burden went home, and sold his house, raising a total of $17,000 (after repaying his mortgage) to fund the nascent business. Then a guy with a display across the hall asked if it would work for automotive. “I crashed people’s after parties, and just starting selling Grypmats at the after parties,” he says. Anxious about failure, he decided he needed to do more. The first day, he sold just 13 from a makeshift booth made out of a garage door with a bedsheet over it. “Going to the show, I couldn’t see out of the passenger window, I had so many Grypmats,” he says. He loaded up a trailer with more than 600 Grypmats that he intended to sell there. In 2016, he went to his first trade show, the EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, an annual gathering of aircraft enthusiasts. It was a smart idea, but took Burden three years of prototyping – while simultaneously continuing to work as a mechanic and going to college – to develop a product.
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