David Applegate ran a sporting goods company called Wrestling Mart — the world's largest supplier of high school and Olympic wrestling gear. He grew it 40% a year for a decade.
Then COVID hit. The last industry you want to be in during a pandemic is the one where people roll around in each other's sweat. Sales dropped 80% overnight.
So he took something he'd always been curious about — public trade data sets — and threw together a tool one weekend. It was ugly. He shared it anyway.
The response was immediate and brutal.
"This is the worst product I've ever seen."
Then something strange happened. The people calling it terrible started sending eight-page Word documents listing everything wrong with it. On their Fridays. Voluntarily.
When people write eight-page documents about how bad your product is, they need it to work
That's the signal most companies miss. They hear criticism and retreat. Applegate heard criticism and leaned in. He made Import Yeti one percent better every day. No massive overhauls. No pivot decks. Just relentless incremental improvement, guided by the people who cared enough to yell at him.
Today, Import Yeti is a profitable company with eight employees and seven-figure annual recurring revenue. Sourcing professionals, product managers, and supply chain teams use it to make smarter decisions about where their products come from — all built on public government shipping records.
Eight people. Profitable. No venture capital. Applegate built a real business by staying close to the problem and never outrunning the people telling him what to fix.
If you're running a growing company right now, that's the part worth studying. Not the tech stack. The discipline of listening to the people who are angry enough to help you.
The detonation pattern
During our conversation, I mentioned something I'd seen when I was running Tariff Tracker last year. One person would sign up. Within hours, I'd see five more from the same company — finance, product, the president, a junior PM.
Applegate sees the exact same thing at Import Yeti. One user finds it. Three hours later, their manager and the CEO are on the platform.
When a product touches a pain point that spans multiple roles in an organization, it doesn't spread through marketing. It spreads through internal urgency. Someone discovers it, realizes the implications, and drags their team in.
The first one gets one user. The second one gets the whole leadership team in a single afternoon.
If your product isn't spreading within the organizations that adopt it, you might be solving a problem that only one person in the company owns. The products that detonate are the ones where the pain exists at every level of the org chart.
Simple things simple. Complex things complex.
The free tier gives you ninety percent of what you need. Search a company, see who's shipping what, understand the basic supply chain picture. It works. It's useful. Most people never need more.
The premium tier handles what Applegate calls "the hairy problems." Power queries across the full dataset — product descriptions, materials, supplier countries, complex boolean searches that let you answer questions like: who's shipping cycling gear made with spandex from countries other than China?
His framing: "Let's keep the simple one simple and the complex one complex. Let people do the simple things when they want and the complex things when they want."
Most companies get this wrong in one of two ways. They load features into the free tier to impress people, making it confusing. Or they strip it so bare it's useless, killing trust before it starts. Applegate found the line: free should be genuinely useful. Premium should solve problems free users don't even know they have yet.
That line is worth finding in any business that offers tiers, packages, or levels of service. When your free experience actually works, your premium experience sells itself.
What this conversation cost me
I built Tariff Tracker last year with the same instinct Applegate had — public government data, a real pain point, people willing to pay attention. I got 400 signups. I saw the detonation pattern firsthand. Multiple roles from the same company, signing up within hours of each other.
Then I shut it down.
Not because it didn't work. Because I couldn't sustain it alone while running Rise Above Partners. Trump's tariff announcements would generate 30,000 articles in a day, and my system was built to process 150. The architecture broke before the business did.
Listening to Applegate describe his first few years — ugly product, brutal feedback, one percent better every day — I heard the playbook I skipped. I jumped from "people want this" to "I need to monetize this" without spending enough time in the middle, where the product gets good enough to survive contact with reality.
That's the lesson I'm taking from this conversation. Not a framework. Not a strategy. A correction. Applegate lived in that gap for years. I left too early.
Rise Above exists because I'm better at building go-to-market systems for other companies than I was at being patient with my own product. That's an honest thing to say. It's also the reason I know what the gap looks like from the inside — and why I take it seriously when a client is standing in it.
The mug
At the end of our call, Applegate offered to ship me one of their custom coffee mugs. Then he showed me the bottom.
Printed on it: the HS code for the mug and the manufacturer they used to make it — found through their own platform.
When the product you sell is the thing that sourced the mug you're drinking from, that's not marketing. That's conviction.