Fueled by desperation and utterly penniless, this man’s daring invention skyrocketed to a booming $1 billion legacy.
Turned down by celebrity investors on the popular tv series Shark Tank, he pushed forward until he got a lucky break on another television show
Their hands are calloused, their posture bent from hours of scooping and hauling.
It’s not glamorous work at all. In fact the job itself is repetitive—shovel, lift, dump, repeat. It’s physical, sweaty work. And it stinks too.
Let’s be perfectly honest … shoveling horse manure is grunt work. And there’s lots of sh*t to shovel too.
Did you know that a 1,000 pound horse can poop out up to 50 pounds of manure in a single day?
Shoveling manure isn’t just about cleaning out stalls. Farmers love manure for composting because it increases soil fertility. It also makes for an inexpensive fertilizer for plants.
As for the pay … it’s not much. You might earn $10 to $15 an hour.
That’s just about what Jamie Siminoff earned each time he shoveled manure.
It was one of his part-time jobs during the summer.
But that wasn’t his only side hustle.
During high school, he sold tee-shirts to his classmates.
When he wasn’t selling something or shoveling manure in a barn, he was learning how to operate machinery.
His father David was a partner in a forging factory that made steel pipes for oil refineries.
Jamie doesn’t mind admitting he “basically grew up” in his dad’s factory. He started working there in the sixth grade and basically did everything he could to make a few extra bucks.
His first stint in the factory was working as the weed whacker guy, making sure the land surrounding the building was well kept. From that position, he worked his way up to being a forklift operator.
You could say he was a “jack of all trades.”
But what Jamie particularly liked doing was putting things together. He was always tinkering in the garage, either taking engines, televisions and equipment apart or rebuilding them.
Little did he know those early days of tinkering would turn the home security industry upside down.
Shopping to Our Fingers Delight
If there’s one thing Americans love to do … it’s shopping. But these days it’s all about shopping online.
And it’s big business too.
Just four years ago, global e-commerce (online) sales were estimated at $4.1 trillion in 2020, according to several different industry reports. However by 2024, this figure had climbed to approximately $6.1 trillion, reflecting a growth of 48% over four years—or roughly 12% on average annually.
And we’re just getting started. Projections for 2025 suggest global e-commerce sales will reach around $6.5 to $7 trillion, pushing the five-year growth from 2020 to 2025 closer to 58-70%.
Here in the U.S., the numbers have doubled. In 2019, e-commerce sales totaled $571 billion, per U.S. Commerce Department data. By 2024, this number more than doubled to $1.192 trillion—a jump of about 109% over five years.
That’s a lot of shopping, which also means that’s a lot of packages being delivered to someone’s home.
Just how many packages are we talking about?
On average, a UPS or FedEx driver can deliver as many as 75 to 125 packages a day. As for Amazon drivers, they can deliver around 250-300 packages per day, making roughly 200 stops.
Even the United States Postal Service makes packages deliveries, but just not as many as the other companies. A USPS driver might deliver 23 packages a day.
Of course during the holidays, the numbers for all these drivers shoot up big time.
And what’s in those packages being delivered?
Just about anything and everything from clothes and shoes, electronics and other tech gadgets, household goods, beauty products and even food.
Heck I just placed an online order for an Easter Meal Kit. It comes complete with ham, mac and cheese, mashed potatoes, string beans, and rolls. It’s enough to feed eight adults, which is perfect for my little family get together. All I have to do is heat it up. (I don’t mind confessing I’m not much of a cook so whenever I can get a little help with pre-made dishes, I’m all in).
But what happens if you’re not home to get those deliveries. Or suppose you are working in your garage and don’t hear the delivery person.
That was Jamie Siminoff’s experience.
He kept missing important deliveries while he was in his garage tinkering because he couldn’t hear the delivery man ringing the door bell.
It made him so frustrated … that he started searching for a solution.
Cuts, Bruises, and Bullies
When I say Jamie was tinkering in his family’s garage, I mean he was tinkering away. And he’s got a few scars to prove it.
You see he had access to every kind of nut and bolt, screw driver, wrench, hammers, epoxies … even explosives like gunpowder and firecrackers. Scars on his arm show the results of homemade knives and toy airplanes. A pyrite burn on his thumb came from an Anarchist Cookbook recipe download.
Jamie’s knack for gadgetry made him stand out from other kids, especially during his high school years. But he stood out in the wrong way.
In truth he was often bullied.
So Jamie pleaded with his parents to send to him a nearby private school, Morristown-Beard School.
But this meant he’d have to go from getting C’s on his report card to earning A’s. And that’s exactly what he did. During the final semester of his freshman year of high school, he earned straight A’s. That was enough to convince his parents private school was the right choice.
Jamie fit in nicely. No more bullying, just lots of learning and studying. In fact Jamie worked so hard that he eventually applied to Babson College, a private business school. And he was accepted.
Here he thrived. For example Jamie won Babson’s business planning contest and then made money drafting real business briefs. He took one of those briefs further, starting an online calling service in Bulgaria with a tech-savvy partner.
When the partner quit, Jamie pored over a technical manual at Barnes & Noble to resurrect the service. He not only succeeded, but also found the right time to merge with a bigger firm amid rising competition in 2001. He later sold his stake for more than $1 million.
His second start-up, which he started in 2005 was called PhoneTag (later known as SimulScribe). It was an outsourced service that transcribed voicemails into text, something he thought was lacking back then.
Just four years later, he sold that business to Ditech Networks for $17 million. This figure reflects the total sale price of the company, though it’s unclear how much Siminoff personally netted after accounting for such things like taxes, operational costs, or potential splits with co-founders or investors.
But even with these successes under his belt, Jamie was unsatisfied. He had bigger ambitions. He was on a mission to create a company that would have a meaningful impact to its customers.
I Can’t Hear You
Jamie being obsessed with finding that one company, had created a list of 300 ideas. He figured if hired two of his best buddies, they could get started on the list with the notion that one would be the big breakthrough.
Of course they would need some additional supplies to build some of the gadgets on the list, which meant placing lots of orders online. Then those orders got delivered to his house. Except since he was in the garage he couldn’t hear the delivery man ring the door bell.
That sparked Jamie’s one good idea … what if he built a new kind of doorbell that was connected to the internet via Wi-FI on his smartphone. This would allow him to continue to work in his garage and at the same time hear the doorbell.
Jamie called his new invention, DoorBot. Now not only could he hear the doorbell, but also using the camera on his phone, he could see the delivery person … and could even speak to them.
Buying more supplies and working alongside his friends, they refined DoorBot by adding a motion detector. It was the perfect combination of convenience and home security.
But what this the big break through Jamie had been seeking? To be honest, he wasn’t sure but his wife encouraged him to “get out there and sell it.”
Not All Sharks Bite
She was right to do that because his company managed to sell roughly $1 million worth of DoorBots. But it also got him some local publicity.
Enough that one of his friends suggested he send in an application to appear on the very popular television show, Shark Tank. Jamie agreed to do it even though he was a bit skeptical of getting chosen because 40,000 other entrepreneurs had also applied.
One of Jamie’s friends knew one of the producers of the show and that person told him the show was looking for small businesses with five or six people and maybe a million or two in sales.
Jamie’s business was a perfect fit. So sent a letter to the producer explaining how DoorBot worked and the safety it provided customers. A few days later, he received a reply email that read, “We want you on the show.”
This was exactly what Jamie need to help get his new DoorBet into hundreds of homes, and hopefully get the backing of a high profile investor. That would give him a jolt of cash he needed to expand his newly formed business.
With so much at stake, he wasn’t going to leave a single detail overlooked.
Jamie took the last remaining $20,000 of his savings and built a set that would make his product stand out. In November 2013, Jamie made his debut appearance on Shark Tank, where he pitched his invention to the “sharks.”
He valued his company a $7 million and was seeking $700,000 for 10% equity. Hoping to hear yes, Jamie was crushed when the “sharks” just couldn’t see long term growth for DoorBot. Mark Cuban, for instance, quickly opted out, stating he didn’t see a clear path for the company’s progression, suggesting he doubted it could grow beyond its current state into a significantly larger enterprise.
Others, like Daymond John, Barbara Corcoran, and Lori Greiner, also passed, likely due to a combination of the high valuation ($7 million) and skepticism about the product’s market fit or profitability at that stage.
Kevin O’Leary was the only Shark to make an offer, but it was a deal Siminoff couldn’t accept: a $700,000 loan with a 10% commission on every sale until the loan was repaid, plus a 7% royalty on all future sales and a 5% equity stake.
This structure would have heavily favored O’Leary, extracting significant ongoing revenue and control from the company, which Siminoff saw as misaligned with his vision for DoorBot’s future. He declined, walking away without a deal.
He drove home feeling like a failure. He wasn’t sure of his next move.
Jumping for Joy On Live TV
At this point, Jamie was pretty much broke. He had used so much money creating DoorBot that he had very little money in his savings. And no cash flowing into his business.
But here’s the thing. Sometimes opportunity comes when you least expect it. While Jamie didn’t get any offers from the celebrity investors, he did get a lot of publicity from being on the show. The product’s appearance boosted its visibility, leading to five million in additional sales.
And that visibility lead him to the folks at QVC, who were eager for him to show is product on their network. In 2016, Jamie made his first appearance on the show, touting his invention as a simple way to make neighborhoods safer through increased surveillance.
Jamie spent over 100 hours on QVC, describing his product in a way customers could relate to and understand. He also changed the name from DoorBot to Ring Camera. All those hours were worth it because he managed to generate $22.6 million in sales.
His appearance on QVC also caught the attention of an unlikely bunch of investors, including basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal and Virgin Group cofounder Sir Richard Branson.
Turns out that Shaquille had bought a ring camera in 2016. The basketball star lived in a gate-less home in Atlanta, and the camera within the doorbell allowed him to see the kids who approached his home. So when he got a chance to be a par to Jamie’s enterprise, he was all in. He invested $1 million of his own money but also agreed to be a spokesperson for Ring Camera.
Sir Richard Branson was so impressed that he put up $28 million, along with a 5% stake in the company.
Now he had the funds he needed to expand Ring Camera’s customer base. But the biggest deal in Jamie’s life was coming his way. In a surprise twist in 2018, Amazon bought Ring Camera for $1 billion.
Finally, Jamie had his big breakthrough. And to top if off, Jamie took a role as Vice President with Amazon overseeing their smart home and connectivity products.
In a recent interview about his catapult to success he said, “I was just a kid who grew up in New Jersey who worked in his garage and built a doorbell. And all of a sudden I’m on TV with Shaq.”
While exact sales of Ring Camera are publicly unavailable, experts estimate that last year alone over 1.7 million have been sold.
Jamie turned a simple frustration into a solution that millions now rely on, proving that the seeds of greatness can grow from the most unglamorous beginnings. His story isn’t just about inventing a product; it’s about inventing himself, one gritty step at a time.
Amazing Quotes by Amazing People
“Almost every significant breakthrough is the result of a courageous break with traditional ways of thinking.” - Stephen R. Covey