Johhny Goodman - CEO of cpap.com
As a young man in 1999, Johnny and his father had a vision to make CPAP therapy simple and affordable for everyone. Since then, he has dedicated most of his life to serving the millions of Americans living with sleep apnea. As CEO of cpap.com, Johnny has seen our company grow from a tiny business working from the back of a pickup truck into the go-to resource for those needing guidance and encouragement during their sleep apnea journey.
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When I was growing up in Houston, my father would most often come through the door smiling and with his shirt soaked through in sweat.
In those days, traditional "CPAP through insurance" companies delivered machines to patient homes and his brown '78 Ford truck didn't have air conditioning.
At dinner, we would ask him how many "setups" he did that day. He would tell us about the people he had met that day and talk through his plans to grow and improve the business.
One day, my father came through the door waving a Wall Street Journal article on this new Ebay website. He said he searched for CPAP and saw products selling for more than it cost him to buy them. He wanted to list them but he didn't know how to upload the pictures.
I worked as a cashier at the grocery store and a dirty towel cleaner at a tennis center. I didn't know much about computers, but I did know how to upload pictures.
We made a deal then: I would list the items, he would ship them, and if they sold, we would split the profits.
A week later, our first auction ended and we made a profit. Oh what a nice dinner we had that night! We started listing as much as we could, as fast as we could.
We set up a Hotmail email account to process orders. Customers started emailing us asking for a full price list of items available. We built one in email form but it didn't work very well.
We needed a website.
I was promoted from product listing guy to web developer. We registered cpap-pro.net and I started spending weekends reading tutorial websites on HTML.
The first results were pretty rough:
I took computer science classes in high school and started working on CPAP software and websites with my friends.
Orders were coming in and my father was hand-writing invoices to include with shipments. He wasn't thrilled with this.
In time, my friends and I graduated high school and moved on to college. Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Spring breaks became times when we would set up in my parent's living room for a week and build an addition to the website or order processing tools.
We were just kids, so we were pretty proud that we could write software that grown-ups would use in "real" business.
We gave these projects silly names like "Madcow" and "Stringbean" because we thought it was hilarious to hear these names used in grown-ups' business meetings.
It still is.
At the end of a week-long project—sleep-deprived and exhausted—we would tour my father through the project.
He would slowly click through asking questions as he went. He would get excited as he realized that the tool meant he would not have to fill out invoices by hand anymore. One time he exclaimed "this dog will hunt!" and every time after that, those words from him made a hard slog worth it.
I took an Introduction To Computer Science course in college. I emailed a professor asking where I could learn more about selling products online. He told me that the internet was for research and shouldn't be used to sell things. I figured that since I already had a business, and since I had the chance, I'd go learn the secret of life.
I switched majors to Philosophy. Part of the Philosophy degree requirement is three years of a foreign language. My roommate at the time was taking German and that sounded good to me.
Learning German is hard. I struggled. My roommate took his time out to tutor me. I was in my professor's office often, too.
About this time, we noticed that CPAP.com was registered and a website was hosted there, but it wasn't very developed. The owner of the website was registered in Germany. I went to my professor and asked for help writing a purchase offer in German.
We made our best offer, sent it off, and held our breath.
The owner replied that he had received many offers, but ours was the first in German. He knew it was serious as a result, and he would sell.
We closed a few weeks later and have run our business on CPAP.com ever since.
