LISTEN BEFORE
YOU PRINT. JASON HUBER

Jason Huber’s first business lesson came from a T-shirt that nobody wanted to buy. At NES’s first guest-speaker meeting, he used that mistake to show how a founder can learn from customers, work honestly with a co-founder, and test an idea before betting money on it.

The Warped Tour mistake.

Before Jason and his brother spent a decade running a screen-printing company, they wanted to create their own apparel line. Jason arranged to sell shirts at the Vans Warped Tour. He had roughly 1,200 printed, made it to the show, and looked out at the crowd. Almost everyone was wearing black. He had not printed his designs on black shirts.

People liked the art but kept asking for a color he did not have. After six days, Jason said he came home with about 800 unsold shirts and a personal loan to repay. He had designed for his own taste rather than what that audience actually wore. The setback pushed him and his brother toward screen printing as a service, which became their business for the next ten years.

Jason later realized he could have learned the color lesson without printing a single shirt. At a mall near his home, a bench sat between Hot Topic and Vans—two stores frequented by the same kind of audience. Watching shoppers there, then asking staff which designs sold, would have given him useful evidence before making inventory. Today, he said, a founder could add preorders or simple preference tests to see whether interest turns into demand.

Have the hard co-founder conversation early.

Jason described the practical questions he and his brother put on the table: How much money could each afford to lose? How much time would each commit? Who would own which responsibilities? Before exploring an idea, they made a list of what they knew and what they did not know, then looked for ways to close those gaps.

Roles and capacity can change as life and the business change. When one brother had young children and less sleep, the other adjusted his hours; later the balance shifted. Jason’s point was not that every partnership needs identical schedules. It needs explicit expectations and regular check-ins. Conversations about uneven work or money become much harder when everyone avoids them.

Find someone already trying to solve the problem.

A person saying “that sounds annoying” is not yet proof of a customer. Jason described three signs he looks for: the person has the problem, knows they have it, and is actively trying to solve it. That last sign matters. It shows the pain is strong enough to motivate action.

He urged members to find the first person who truly needs a solution, learn everything possible from them, and use that profile to find the next customers. Ask how they deal with the problem today. Listen for the time, money, or frustration it costs them. Do not assume that a large audience exists just because an idea sounds relatable.

Be scrappy, but learn deliberately.

Jason’s business began before easy website builders and today’s social platforms. If he were starting the apparel line now, he said he would build an audience before launch and use preorders to test designs. He sees AI as useful for the business work around a product—research, accounting, marketing ideas, and content plans—while still relying on human judgment for the craft and for understanding customers.

He also talked about physical products, where distribution can look messy at first. A founder may need to learn local rules, start with a small market, and borrow underused capacity rather than buy equipment immediately. The first workable version of a business rarely looks like its eventual scale.

Then we tested ideas in the room.

After the talk, members formed teams and got a few minutes to work through a startup scenario before giving a short pitch. The prompts included an app with downloads but little weekly use, a laundry service that attracted interest without payment, a study tool whose users did not stay, and a protein bar customers felt was too expensive.

Teams had to identify the real problem, choose a question to ask customers, and suggest a test. The laundry-service pitches, for example, questioned whether the right customers were being reached and whether the service solved a painful enough problem to earn payment. Jason praised the selected group’s engagement and the way its members shared the pitch rather than leaving it to one speaker.

The exercise brought his Warped Tour story back into focus. A clever idea can fail for a small reason its creator never noticed. Talk to people, watch what they already do, and test the most important assumption while it is still cheap to change.