In April 2014 Justin Mares sat in his HR rep's office and resigned from a six figure job in tech. He was not walking out on a hunch. Over the previous 30 days, while still employed, he had run a demand test that had already put real money in his PayPal account for a product that did not exist yet.

The idea came from his own kitchen. He had eaten close to a paleo diet since around 2010, and friends at his CrossFit gym kept talking about bone broth. He read about the claimed benefits for skin, gut and joints and wanted to try it. He could not find anyone selling it online, and with long work hours and no slow cooker he was not going to spend 20 hours simmering bones himself. His reasoning was simple: if sourcing grass fed bones was that annoying and the cook time was that long, other people were probably stuck in the same place.

Rather than start by figuring out how to make bone broth, he decided to answer two questions first. How many people want this, and will they pay enough for it to be a business worth running. For the first question he read where paleo people already gathered, PaleoHacks and Mark's Daily Apple, checked Google Trends, and pulled up the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Several thousand people a month were searching for a product nobody was selling. That was enough for him.

The second question needed money to change hands. He bought the domain bonebroths.com, named the company Bone Broths Co, which he later called an awful idea, and built a single landing page in Unbounce. He paid someone on Fiverr five dollars for a logo, mostly so the page did not look like a scam. He wrote the copy himself and added an FAQ built from questions paleo people were already asking in forums. Then he set a price: $29.99 for 16oz. He picked a number high enough that a purchase would mean something. If strangers would pay nearly thirty dollars for something they had never tasted or smelled, the demand was real.

The checkout was as crude as it sounds. Clicking "Order Now" sent visitors to a PayPal page asking them to send $29.99 to jwmares@gmail.com for "Beef Marrow Bone Broth". His own description of the flow: land on the site, click order, get asked to send money to a stranger's email address.

People did it anyway. He bought about $50 of Bing ads, which he preferred to AdWords because the clicks were cheaper, and orders started arriving. Around 30 percent of visitors from those cold ads clicked the order button. Over a two week test he took in nearly $500. Counting the ads, the logo and the domain, the whole exercise cost him under $100. That is the number worth correcting from how the story usually gets retold: the ad spend was roughly $50, and the sub-$100 figure is the total cost of the test, not the ad budget.

Then he did the part most people skip. He emailed every buyer, told them there was no product in stock, and offered either a full refund or 50 percent off with shipping in a few weeks. Most took the discount. Anyone who did not reply got refunded, because, in his words, he would never keep money he did not earn.

Getting from a validated page to a shipped carton took far longer than a few weeks. His brother Nick, who co-founded the company with him, called more than 500 potential manufacturing partners and struck out with all of them. He eventually cold emailed Mark Cuban to ask if he knew anyone. Someone on Cuban's team made an introduction to the manufacturer Kettle & Fire still works with today.

Bone Broths Co launched in August 2015. The domain had cost eight dollars and Justin later described the brand as the blandest thing they could have shipped. Seven months in, once it was clear people genuinely wanted the product, they rebranded to Kettle & Fire. The first eight months of sales were almost entirely online at $11.99 a box, pushed through paleo influencers and Thrive Market. Funding was a $20,000 loan from their parents plus everything Justin had. A Whole Foods buyer then reached out and brought them into 50 stores in the Rocky Mountain region, and they were in every Whole Foods in the country 18 months after founding.

About the dates in this record. The 14 day figure for first revenue is anchored on Justin's own account of a two week test run during his last 30 days of employment, which he places in April 2014. He never dates the first month above $10,000 in sales. The anchor used here is his Sumo post of 3 February 2016, in which he wrote that the business had done multiple six figures in the roughly four months since launching. That makes 673 days from the April 2014 test a ceiling rather than a precise date, since the real crossing almost certainly happened months earlier.

Worth noting that the brothers tell the origin differently. Nick has written that the decision to start came from a knee injury in high school and his own failed search for bone broth. Both accounts describe the same gap in the market.

Forbes reported in March 2025 that Kettle & Fire was doing more than $100 million in annual revenue, roughly double two years earlier. In August 2025 Justin marked ten years since launch on his newsletter: 100 plus employees, 20,000 plus stores, its own production facility, and a company that started as a side project meant to hit $10,000 a month.