Selling a startup feels elusive to many. For Aaron Spivak, the answer blends relentless execution with an unconventional mindset. Raised in a working-class immigrant family in Toronto, Spivak built his entrepreneurial instincts early—long before co-founding Hush Blankets, the sleep-tech startup that was acquired by Sleep Country Canada for $48 million CAD (~ $35 million USD) in just four years.
In this Q&A, Spivak breaks down how he developed his entrepreneurial muscle working with his family and launching companies across different industries. Ultimately, Spivak and his cofounder Lior Ohayon built and scaled Hush Blankets in an extremely competitive consumer climate, and used visioning and manifestation as a tactical operating system. This founder story offers a rare, inside look at how entrepreneurs can engineer their own paths to a high-value acquisition.1
For more inspiring stories on successful founder exits, explore how Anne Mahlum, the founder of Solidcore sold her company for $100 million.
You come from a working class immigrant family. Tell me about life growing up and your first taste of entrepreneurship.
I come from a humble background, born and raised in Toronto, Ontario, family of 5 boys, immigrant parents. My dad drove a big long-haul truck for 28 years, and my mom cleaned houses to make ends meet. I watched my parents do whatever they could to earn money. And at 14 or 15, I started a party bus business catering to the prom industry. It was my first taste of solving a problem and I really loved it. At one point we did 90% of the proms in Toronto!
And then at 18 years old, in 2011, my brothers and I started Revitasize, a cold press juice business, in large part to help support our family’s economic situation.
This was before cold pressed juice was in Whole Foods, and the healthiest thing to eat was Subway, which many of us know now is not so healthy. So my brothers and I would do 24 hour shifts – we’d sleep in air mattresses in the back of the store (which was our mom’s basement) and we’d juice throughout the night and then sell during the day. After a few years, we had opened up 8 locations, had an online store selling juice, and had 40 employees.
So after scaling your juice company, Revitasize, how did Hush Blankets get started?
I was 23 and had dropped out of school. I was waking up at 5am opening up the stores and running this juice company. I felt out of step with my peers, who were in college, going to class, partying – normal 21-22 year old stuff. A friend connected me to my future co-founder Lior Ohayon who had a similar story in that he started business young.
We started working together, trying to solve the problem of people suffering from insomnia, stress and anxiety. Lior had previously volunteered at a summer camp for special needs children and they had a sensory room with a weighted device, and so when we got together, we delved into the science of a hug and deep touch pressure stimulation. We saw that over 300K people were going to Google and searching for weighted blankets. So, we spent 6 months developing the first blanket.
We both still worked full-time, but we committed to working on Hush between the hours of 5pm to 1am to see it through. Eventually, we developed one sample as a pre-order and in the first month we did $30K, then $60K, $120K, and $300K CAD. It was a lightbulb moment, people really needed this product.
What were some of the challenges you faced scaling Hush?
So, we delivered on those pre-orders. But then heading into our first summer. No one was buying. We learned that it is a very seasonal business. And actually, Lior wanted to close the business. But we decided to conduct some market research with 500 of our customers. And the feedback received was that our customers loved the blanket. They would say, “It washes so well….I have the best sleep…but it’s way too hot in the summer.” And in addition, we had a bunch of people copying us. So we had tons of competitors. We knew we needed to innovate the product – to create a blanket that had all the benefits of the weighted blanket, but kept you cold, somehow.
We launched a kickstarter to do a crowdfunding campaign to develop our own fabric, and raised $1.5 million CAD. From that fabric we created pillows, sheets, mattresses and took the business from a $700K CAD business in our first year to a $10 million CAD business.
We actually went on Dragon’s Den – Canada’s version of Shark Tank, and had a bidding war among all six Dragons and did ultimately land a deal with Jim Treliving and Lane Merrifield.
What gave you the confidence to start business across vastly different industries?
Sometimes changing and jumping into a new business is an advantage. It takes a bit of ignorance to be honest. And I enjoy the ignorance of not knowing the challenges– and pain awaiting. My mother also instilled an unwavering level of confidence in me. She had zero doubts in any of the projects or businesses I pursued. So I always had the mentality, why not me? Every entrepreneur has to be a little delusional. It is a delusion so strong that everyone in your circle starts to believe it.
You’ve talked about manifestation and journaling and visioning out the future in great detail. How did you manifest the Hush sale?
I’ve been obsessed with journaling since I was 17 or 18. I write every single day. It helps with loneliness.
I script the future out in great detail. Every single thing. I still do it. I describe perfect days, writing everything in the present tense. If you can feel the future, you can pretty much bring it to the present. Our reality is our thoughts. You have to rewire your brain. I would create voice notes, and play them in my ear. I would write fake reviews for myself, what people are going to say. People started to think I was crazy. That’s how I brought the future in.
It’s about creating a familiar feeling before it exists. The brain doesn’t know the difference between reality and your thoughts. So change your thoughts. Surround yourself with people who are the reflection of your future thoughts. And the likelihood that you become what you vision out, goes up significantly.
So, literally the day we started the company, we put our future buyer’s logo in our office. I would create fake emails from them saying, “we can’t wait to buy your company.” And everyday, Lior and I would say to each other, “we made it!” We would deconstruct all of the deals they had ever done, and we would work towards those metrics in terms of revenue and EBITDA. So we knew what we wanted. If we wanted to IPO, we would have optimized for revenue, and tried to have a low margin to capture market share, but I knew that they were buying on a multiple of EBITDA. And so we actually built the business to optimize for EBITDA and profit margin, versus topline growth. The second we reached our numbers, we started thinking about selling.
What was it like selling your startup Hush to Sleep Country Canada, which at the time was a publicly traded company?2
We were really popular in Canada, so every broker under the sun was pitching us. All the Amazon aggregators were coming after us. And all of these private equity firms – we thought they were going to kill the business – and I wanted Hush to be around for a really long time.
In November 2021, in our fourth year, we sold to Sleep Country – it’s like the Mattress Firm of Canada. It was the craziest 48 months of my entire life. That year we were on track to do $48 million CAD in revenue. And they valued us on a 9x multiple of EBITDA.
We stayed on as CEOs for two years and continued to run it. And the main objective was to execute the transition plan and continue to maximize EBITDA.
I underestimated what it meant to be part of a publicly traded company, and to have a public board. This is one of the largest Canadian retailers, and you have to report every quarter, so every 90 days you are judged. As an entrepreneur running a private company, you have a bad month, and you recover. But as a publicly traded company, you have to report on everything. And even when you do well, there’s pressure to keep it up. The first quarter was a big deal. And in the first reporting quarter Q1 2022, all consumer businesses were down. It was a tremendous amount of mental strain.
Your health started to decline and you hired a Navy Seal as a performance coach after your exit. Why?
Selling my business turned into one of my darkest moments. You lose the one thing you spent so much time building. It’s your identity. It’s your baby. And selling it was like taking the air out of a balloon. Post-acquisition, I was losing all my hair. I was 35 pounds lighter. So I hired a Navy Seal to live in my house for 90 days. I just asked him to “be himself.” He would wake up early, workout, and eat healthy. I would do what he did. And at the same time, he was building his business, so he wanted to be around me. That’s the power of being surrounded by people you want to become.
Share more about your new venture, The Founders Club.
So as I alluded to, after selling Hush, there was a void that I didn’t know how to fill. I started hosted dinners all over Canada. And meeting founders and likeminded individuals. There, I found my tribe – my community. I later moved to Miami, Florida and launched the Founders Club, which I like to think of as a modern-day YPO. We are now in year two of the business, and have grown tremendously – 1,000 members with an average age of 37 years old, and we are 36% female founders.
We host mastermind sessions with an ethos of equal parts giving and taking. So we ask everybody to share one thing they can give and one ask.
During one mastermind, a member asked for a way to get into Target. They had tried everything and nothing was working to get them on the shelves. Turns out the person beside them is best friends with the head buyer at Target and got them in three months later.
I heard another great testimonial the other day. Two members were in first class traveling together and struck up a conversation (one was wearing one of our Founders Club hats). One member runs a coffee chain with 25 locations in the middle of Canada, and needed a franchisor to buy him out. It turns out, the new member’s brother is a major franchisor out in New York. And so after the connection was made, email blasts went out about the opportunity, they have signed 100 new franchisees.
This just illustrates the magic of putting the right people into the right room. Watching people win is bringing me a ton of happiness. And this time, I am not optimizing for EBITDA – I don’t want to sell. I am pouring back everything into the business.
(1) Some quotes in this article have been paraphrased for clarity and conciseness while preserving their original meaning.
(2) Sleep Country was acquired by Fairfax Financial in September 2024 in a $1.7 billion take private transaction.
