Popsmith’s $600,000 Lifeline and Four Sellouts After Oprah

By Grace Kim

Popsmith sold out every popper within weeks of reaching Oprah’s 2024 “Favorite Things” list, then sold out three more times over the next five months, Business Insider reported. CEO Tal Moore said he had earlier sold $600,000 worth of his personal stock to keep the high-end stovetop popcorn popper company alive.

What does the risk of entrepreneurship look like?

Business Insider contrasts a regular job—paycheck, benefits, stability and predictability—with entrepreneurship’s risk, uncertainty and possible large payoff without guarantees.

Moore was blunter: “You have to be insane to be an entrepreneur,” he told Business Insider. “Because there’s so much risk. There’s so much turbulence.”

Moore and his business partner nearly ran out of money while building the product. Moore said: “I ended up selling $600,000 worth of my personal stock to keep us afloat.” Moore said the strain was personal because friends and family had also invested.

“They bet on me. They bet on my brand,” Moore said. “If you lose your own money, that’s one thing. But there was just no f---ing way that I was going to lose my friends’ and family’s money.”

Takeaway: Moore’s survival strategy started with personal capital and outside obligations, not painless funding.

How did low-cost Hail Marys save Popsmith?

With two weeks of cash runway left, Moore said he had to win attention and move product without spending much money. He added: “At this point, I had to throw some Hail Marys.”

Moore called his first idea “harebrained”: send poppers directly to the CEOs of Williams-Sonoma and Crate & Barrel. He said he had designed the product for those retailers but couldn’t get their attention.

Moore bought the highest-quality paper he could find at Kinko’s, handwrote notes to both CEOs and “blind-shipped” poppers to them. He recalled: “I know my popper will sell on their shelves. I just have to get it in their hands.”

Within two months, buying teams from both companies contacted him, Moore said. The outreach created a retail channel without a conventional launch budget.

Takeaway: Cheap, targeted distribution gave Popsmith a route through a cash squeeze that heavy spending could not solve.

What did Oprah’s list change?

Moore had no idea how to enter Oprah’s annual “Favorite Things” selection process. “It’s just like a total black box,” he said.

He found an opening on LinkedIn after a junior editor at Oprah Daily posted about popcorn. Moore sent a cold message; she replied, requested a popper and eventually helped get the product in front of Oprah.

An Oprah Daily editor told Moore that the team considers about 15,000 products each year before Oprah makes her final selections. Popsmith made the 2024 cut.

Business Insider reported that Popsmith sold out every popper within weeks of the announcement. The company sold out three more times over the next five months.

Moore described the pull as more than a product cycle: “There’s a pressure and a will to win,” he said. “There’s an endless drive that just never goes away. I wake up hungry, and I will not stop.”

Takeaway: Oprah’s visibility converted a well-positioned retail product into four sellout runs.

Why did Kyle Ray keep going?

Ray took a different route. He said a high-school teacher predicted he would end up working at McDonald’s. Ray used the prediction as fuel and set out to disprove it.

Ray never finished college. He turned a window-cleaning side hustle, started with $100, into Geek Window Cleaning. Business Insider reported that the six-figure company now serves hundreds of clients across multiple Texas cities.

Ray said he had doubts “all the time” about whether the business would work. His response was: “I’m going to make this work,” he decided. “I’m just going to figure it out.”

He treats entrepreneurship as a highway without an off-ramp and no Plan B at the next exit. “If there is no exit, then there’s just one path,” he said. “And you just have to get through it.”

Ray does not promise success. He said many businesses will fail and founders must accept looking foolish, take risks and move to the next idea when necessary. Fear of failure and other people’s judgment, he said, are the larger obstacles.

“If Geek fails now, I’m going to look stupid, but it’s like, ‘Okay, cool. What’s next?’ Like, I don’t care,” he said.

“And the earlier you can develop that carelessness — the ‘I don’t care if I look stupid’ or ‘I can fall flat on my face. I am still going to go for it’ — I think if you get to that point, anybody can go out and be an entrepreneur.”

Takeaway: Ray’s advantage is not certainty; it is a decision to keep moving after failure becomes visible.

How can founders build that mindset?

Ray says the mindset can be learned, like swinging a tennis racket or ballroom dancing. It takes time, consistent work and patience. He recommends three practices.

1. Start with books. They cost little or nothing at a library. Ray recommends Inner Excellence and Can’t Hurt Me. Moore reads biographies of Warren Buffett, Richard Branson and John D. Rockefeller.

2. Find a high-level model. Choose someone already doing what you want at a high level, then ask what they do differently and what may be holding you back. Ray asks: “What are you doing that I’m not? What am I doing that’s preventing me from breaking through?”

3. Join a mastermind or hire a coach. Ray has multiple coaches. “When there’s something I don’t know, or I need to learn, I start to look for coaches,” he said.

   “It’s like a wormhole, right? If you can find somebody that knows something about where you want to be, they can help you collapse time and just jump forward to that spot.”

Takeaway: Ray turns uncertainty into specific inputs—reading, models and expert guidance—rather than waiting for confidence.

The next test for both founders is whether that operating discipline can turn survival into durable growth.