Devin Marty

🎉🎉🎉

🥳🥳🥳

For about a year and a half, there was a hallway in my house that was barely a hallway.

It was mostly our early SANWEAR earbuds. Boxes and boxes of them. My house had become a warehouse and, alongside my other work, I became a one-man fulfillment team for the entire world. I’d work with our team in Asia at night, US hours during the day, pack orders whenever I could, and then drive everything over to FedEx to ship them.

This was, apparently, how you ran a startup.

Today SAN is four years old. And four years later, I still think about that hallway.
SAN started as a community project.

Somewhere along the way, DL and I took this thing we had all started together and figured out how to turn it into a company.

We knew we had a great product pretty early on, but we knew considerably less about everything else that comes with it.

There were probably three points over these four years where we got extremely close to the edge. Each time I remember thinking, “How the heck are we going to make this work?” 

Somehow, we kept finding another way through.

For years I was working Asia hours and US hours at the same time. I barely slept. I didn’t have much of a social life.

There were absolutely periods where I pushed myself further than was healthy, and I don’t think that’s something worth glorifying. But when you’re building something that feels like your baby, you convince yourself that you just need to dig deep and push another mile.

Eventually, one of those miles took me across the world to where I now live. 

Luckily, SAN has friends everywhere.

Every member of our community (special shoutout to The 33) and every member of our team, past and present, has been part of building SAN.

I’m incredibly proud of what this small team has pulled off. One of my favorite things is when people see SAN and ask how many people work on our brand, social, and content. I’ve heard thirty. It’s six. Six people who are incredibly good at what they do and care deeply about what we’re making.

The next chapter for SAN is very different from the last one. We have the strongest product roadmap we’ve ever had, expanding internationally into different marketplaces and stores.

I think we’re finally getting close to seeing what happens when a lot more people get the chance to experience what we’ve built. But to get there, there is still a lot we have to learn and a lot we have to get right.

Which brings me back to that hallway. At the time, I wanted those boxes gone. I wanted a warehouse. I definitely wanted fewer trips to FedEx. But now I look back at that hallway pretty fondly. Every box that we had to carry down that hallway meant somebody, somewhere, had decided to give SAN a chance. 

Four years later, we’re still carrying boxes; we just have a lot more people carrying them with us now.

And somewhere in all of this, DL and his family became family to me too. For years, dinner might have been something I ate in front of a computer between calls. Now, I get to sit down and have dinner with the family.

And I don’t need to go to FedEx anymore. That’s progress.

Happy four years, SAN.

This was quite difficult to make, but it is so rewarding to hold.

I hope you all enjoy BattleFlex!

Big days ahead… 15th is the 4-year anniversary of SAN.

Always exciting to look back on what’s been built with people who built it.