Colin Grussing…RootSuit and 52businesses

Colin Grussing is nationally recognized as an entrepreneurial whiz with appearances on NBC’s Shark Tank, Fox and Friends and Fox Business News.   He has launched 5 successful startups and has made several strategic real estate investments.

Colin Grussing has earned a mechanical engineering degree from Yale.  And selling his green man suits online ignited his passion for the entrepreneurship. So Colin is a successful, self-starting expert in bootstrapping startups.

Following the success of BeGreenMan.com, Colin founded 52 Businesses to start a business each week for a year.  His goal was to demonstrate the boostrapping startup process to prove the accessibility of entrepreneurship.

Colin Grussing is seen regularly hanging out on Bob (a.k.a. the 52 Businesses Operations Bus) speaking at Tech or Entrepreneurial conferences and universities and contributing to industry publications such as PolicyMic and theSilicon Bayou News.

 

Invention Stories Podcast Episode 41 Recap

Colin Grussing shares that he was born in Los Angeles, California to parents who were artists.  Their family spent six months selling their art while driving across America and wound up in Lafayette, Louisiana.  Colin has an engineering mindset who as a youth, enjoyed pulling apart his grandmothers television to see how it worked.  Unfortunately, he was unable to put it back together.

 

Colin was attending Yale when Hurricane Katrina hit and shares how New Orleans has changes for the better, however more work needs to be done.  He shared why he choose Yale, how it felt like a small college, and had a great option for taking classes.  Colin has always been a confident person so the challenges of attending this ivy league school didn’t intimidate him.

 

BeGreenMan.com and the Root Suit

 

Colin Grussing shares the story behind BeGreenMan.com and the Root Suit.  He tried to find a green man spandex suit to purchase for a friend and didn’t find one.  Colin shares how he built the first website and how he managed to reach the top of the google results for green suit.  He started creating other root suit options and as of today, has sold over 60,000 units.

 

Colin decided on a manufacture by entering Spandex Body Suit Manufactures on Alibaba.  He shares some of the problems and tips for communicating better with overseas manufactures.  Initially, he had the Root Suits manufactured in the US, but determined the best factories with the best prices are in China.

I asked him why he didn’t patent the Root Suit.  Colin believes in being first to market rather than spending the time and money on the patent.  This allows him to spend more time on other ideas.

 

Shark Tank

Colin was a contestants whose episode was interrupted by a commercial which he believes gaves his Root Suit even more exposure.  He share how a friend encouraged him to watch Shark Tank and really like it.  So he reached out to become a contestant and they invited him.

 

52businesses

 

Colin would have friends ask his advice on how to start a business.  His advice was not to quit your day job until you validate it.  He believes he could validate any business within 5 days.  Colin is a brainstormer and when an idea for a business comes to him, he writes it down.  He has stored over 300 businesses on his list and has them ranked best to worst.  When Colin first thought about starting a business a week for 52 week, he thought he would use only his own ideas.  The more he thought about it, the more it made sense to help other people start theirs.

Below is the list of 52businesses he started.

We would like to thank Colin Grussing for allowing us to interview him on the Invention Stories Podcast.  We invite you to listen,