You Don’t Need A Great Idea To Get Rich… You Need A Problem To Solve | Dr. Jason Wersland

Jason’s massage-gun idea came directly from severe pain after a 2007 motorcycle accident. He said he T-boned a car while lane-splitting in Los Angeles, went over the vehicle, landed on the freeway, was unconscious for several minutes, and later found that the treatment options available through his own chiropractic clinic gave him no durable solution.

The first breakthrough came from an ordinary vibrating treatment table in his clinic. Resting his painful arm on the running table made the pain disappear for roughly 30 seconds; when it returned, he began thinking about why continuous vibration stopped working and whether a device moving back and forth could keep stimulating the nervous system without the body simply accommodating to it.

He built the first massage-gun prototype in his garage in February 2008. Jason had grown up around a farm and tools, so when he could not find what he needed commercially, he tried to build it himself.

Jason explicitly distinguishes inventing the massage gun from inventing percussive therapy itself. He said forms of percussive treatment had existed for decades, including equipment dating back to the 1950s and manual percussion used in respiratory care; his claim is that he created the modern gun-based implementation, not the underlying therapeutic concept.

A patient with injuries similar to Jason’s convinced him the prototype had value beyond his own recovery. The patient was a bus driver injured in a head-on collision and had limited treatment visits; Jason brought his improvised Makita-jigsaw device into the clinic, used it through phases of pain relief, tension relief and rehabilitation, and watched the patient improve.

The patient’s reaction became the moment Jason decided he had to pursue the product seriously. Near the end of treatment, Jason found him using the device and was told, “this thing saved my life and I know it saved yours so you got to do something about this.” Jason dates that turning point to late 2008.

Jason began manufacturing extremely primitively and with little money. Around February or March 2009, he wanted to buy roughly $19.99 Kawasaki jigsaws but needed a $2,500 credit-card guarantee to open an account; unable to cover it himself, he borrowed his brother’s card, ordered 250 jigsaws to his house, bought bolts at Home Depot and foam balls at Toys “R” Us, and assembled the devices himself.

His expectations grew gradually from side income to a potentially substantial business. At first, “big” meant a few hundred dollars a month, then perhaps a few thousand; he eventually reached the point where he had a real packaged product while still viewing chiropractic as his primary profession.

The early target market was chiropractors and physical therapists, but athletes changed his view of the opportunity. He was selling roughly one device a day to practitioners, while athletes at Unbreakable Performance would rapidly empty the inventory in his car, sometimes buying several at once. That behavior showed him the product had a large performance-and-recovery market beyond clinical treatment.

Direct product experience was the strongest early validation. Jason repeatedly saw people react strongly after trying the device and immediately ask whether friends could try it; this convinced him that explaining and demonstrating what the product actually did mattered more than simply making it look attractive.

His father, brother and friends repeatedly doubted the business. His father told him people would not buy it, his brother called the idea foolish, and friends were still telling him to quit after roughly six years. Jason later reduced his entrepreneurial mentality to “consistency, persistence, and delusion”—continuing despite people close to him believing he was wrong.

Jason went through three business partners before reaching the partnership that ultimately helped scale the company. He describes those relationships almost like breakups, with each person contributing something useful while also creating painful ownership or trust problems.

His first partner contributed the early “Theragun”-style naming idea but was later bought out after Jason concluded he had been dishonest. Jason then brought in his brother and a woman with manufacturing connections in China; she helped connect him with people who could engineer the device to his specifications, but he said dishonesty again forced him to regain control of the company.

Money alone proved insufficient when Jason later worked with two NFL players. He said they had capital but lacked the operational structure and capabilities required to scale the business; after roughly eight years working on the product, Jason believed he finally understood the kind of partner he actually needed.

A chance introduction led Jason to Ben Nazarian, who became his business partner and seed investor. People around Jason pushed him to prepare a conventional pitch deck and pro forma, and he spent months trying to build them despite having little experience with that style of business presentation.

Instead of relying on the pitch deck, Jason insisted that his first real meeting with Ben revolve around treating him. Gatekeepers warned him against it, but Jason believed demonstrating the experience was his strongest skill and that pretending to be a conventional financier-facing founder would be inauthentic. He secured a 15-minute meeting at Ben’s Beverly Hills office and brought his treatment table.

The treatment converted the meeting almost immediately into a business relationship. Afterward, Ben asked Jason what he wanted to accomplish; Jason said he wanted the product in as many hands as possible before imitators confused the market, and Ben asked him to return at 8 a.m. the following morning.

Jason and Ben then spent roughly 19 hours building the business plan together. They worked from 8 a.m. Saturday until about 3 a.m. Sunday, mapping the business across the walls, discussing customers, scaling and distribution. When Ben suggested perhaps selling 2,000 units, Jason argued that the underlying pain market made the opportunity far larger than sports alone.

That session also established Jason himself as a core part of the brand. Jason initially believed people only cared about the device, but Ben and the team argued that customers needed to understand the accident, invention and founder story; Jason later came to see that personal story as central to the company’s identity.

The motorcycle crash affected Jason psychologically much later than it affected him physically. He said the pain did not fully appear for about two months and that he initially responded by simply pushing forward; around 2011 or 2012 he finally had a breakdown in his apartment and confronted how easily he could have died, noting that the crash had even broken his helmet.

Jason said his brother’s drowning in 2018 was the worst experience of his life. Comparing that loss with surviving his own crash reinforced his tendency to focus on what came from adversity rather than wishing the accident away. Asked whether he would choose good health and no Theragun instead, he said he would keep his life as it happened.

Jason and his brother eventually repaired their relationship despite their business conflict. He credits his brother with making important introductions during the bootstrapping period and says those connections helped him reach later stages of the company, even though his brother ultimately followed his own ambition to become a pilot.

The move from Theragun to a broader wellness company grew out of patterns Jason saw while traveling internationally with his wife. While developing distribution in places including Poland, Russia, Australia and Scandinavia, he visited locker rooms across several sports and noticed recovery equipment was fragmented across many brands and locations.

Equinox helped push the company beyond massage guns by asking for rollers. Jason initially questioned why the company should make a roller when he considered Theragun superior, but repeated demand convinced the team to create a roller series. Shortly afterward COVID arrived, and the company also acquired a business making recovery boots whose founder Jason already knew from locker rooms.

The growing product range made the Theragun name too narrow, yet the company did not want to destroy the equity already attached to it. Jason said the company spent a little over $400,000 on outside agencies trying to solve the renaming problem, rejected their work, then gathered an internal group with Ben, locked themselves in a room with pizza, and developed the broader Therabody identity themselves.

Science became the company’s gatekeeper for product expansion. Jason said they would not launch a product without protocols, validated science and evidence that it worked, because one weak product could damage the credibility earned by several strong ones.

Jason views patents as both protection and business value, but says he learned that lesson too late. He regretted not filing earlier, noted that prospective investors such as Ben immediately asked about patents, and said even basic patent work cost him roughly $12,000 in the early period—more than he was making at the time.

He described patent protection as expensive not merely to obtain but to defend. Once a product succeeds, competitors may cross into protected territory deliberately or accidentally, forcing cease-and-desist letters and other enforcement; Jason therefore sees intellectual property as part of controlling the product’s identity and market narrative.

Jason said an attorney had advised him that inventors without immediate filing money should at least create dated documentation of their ideas. He described emailing detailed concepts to oneself or otherwise creating a timestamped record that could later help establish when an idea existed; he presented this as something he wished he had done earlier, not as the patent filing itself.

The technical core of the device, as Jason explains it, is frequency, amplitude and torque. He described one model as operating at 40 hertz—40 impacts per second—with about half an inch of amplitude, while the motor must retain enough torque that applying pressure does not destroy those operating characteristics.

Ergonomics were treated as part of the engineering, not decoration. Jason specifically wanted the device balanced well enough to rest on one finger so practitioners would not have to create leverage with their wrists while treating patient after patient.

An existing patent covering a broad frequency range complicated Theragun’s own protection. Jason said another patent covered approximately 30–120 hertz and expired around 2009, which opened space for the company’s 40-hertz implementation; his larger point was that prior-art searches and the status of older patents materially shape what an inventor can protect.

Copycats became a major issue around 2018–2020. Jason said Alibaba was producing visually similar devices without the underlying engineering, inexpensive lookalikes appeared in retailers such as TJ Maxx, and in some weeks the company encountered roughly 500 Amazon sellers offering imitation versions manufactured in China.

Jason’s concern about knockoffs was as much about damaged consumer perception as lost sales. A visually similar device without the same performance could give buyers a bad experience that they then associated with the entire category or with Theragun itself, reinforcing his desire to establish the genuine product and its story quickly.

Large companies also produced competing massage guns, while Therabody used its patents to generate royalties in some cases. Jason named Samsung and HoMedics among companies that made devices and said manufacturers sometimes copied patented attachments, leading to royalty arrangements—including one case involving substantial sales in Israel.

A host’s experience illustrated the difference Jason was trying to protect. As a cash-strapped college student, he bought his father a roughly $40 massage gun from Sports Clips for Christmas; his father barely used it, but later obtained a Theragun and continued using that instead, which the host offered as evidence that small product-quality differences mattered more than superficial similarity.

Jason attributes Therabody’s product strength to combining his ideas with strong engineering and scientific execution. He described an engineer who could take experiential requests—what a device should feel like or accomplish—and turn them into mechanical solutions and CAD drawings, making the partnership between intuition and engineering central to innovation.

He obsessed over small physical details because the product interacts directly with the body. He wanted attachments to feel like skin, carefully differentiated softness and impact characteristics, and designed the grip and balance so the user felt in control; his stated goal was to reproduce for customers the striking sense of relief he felt with the earliest prototype.

The company institutionalized criticism into product development. On the first Thursday of each month, engineers and designers would put current ideas on a wall and deliberately attack them—price, packaging, size and other weaknesses—then send the engineering team back to solve the objections rather than protecting ideas from criticism.

Therabody typically has roughly 20–30 products under development rather than betting on one idea at a time. Discoveries made for one project can unlock several others; Jason used a special self-adhering Velcro solution as an example of one small materials breakthrough becoming useful across about seven concepts.

Some products remain in development for years because the technology is not yet good enough. Jason said a neck device had been under development for about two years because motors were too noisy when positioned near the ears.

Jason disclosed that he was developing a wearable shoulder-therapy device aimed at everyday readiness rather than only post-operative immobilization. His example was someone who had surgery 20 years earlier but wanted to warm up the shoulder before playing basketball with a child; he said fabric, materials and manufacturing limitations were still creating obstacles.

Athletes are used as product-development partners, not only endorsers. Jason said Aaron Rodgers is an investor in the company and has watched the product-development process throughout his career; athletes can propose needs, test prototypes and provide detailed feedback that is difficult to obtain through abstract market research.

The company is willing to stop products when testing does not support the intended benefit. Jason described concepts tested through USC and IMG that did not produce the result the company wanted, saying there was no point stretching the claims merely because the product had already been developed.

Therabody had recently launched a palm-cooling device. Jason described the concept as cooling the palms to cool circulating blood and help manage body heat, and said bringing that product from an early idea to something viable had been technically difficult.

High-profile partnerships were primarily intended to transmit the product story through credible users. Jason said Cristiano Ronaldo generated enormous attention when he posted about the product, while Aaron Rodgers and partnerships such as Red Bull Racing worked because the recovery products were helping the actual athlete or driver rather than merely placing a logo around them.

Jason argues that buying a celebrity partnership without funding its amplification wastes much of its value. Whatever the company spent securing Ronaldo, he said it also needed substantial additional advertising to tell people about the relationship, create media, and repeatedly distribute the resulting assets rather than letting the endorsement exist “in a vacuum.”

His wife played a major role in the company’s early public-relations strategy. Jason said she repeatedly pushed him into interviews he initially considered pointless—including with writers he did not think matched the athletic customer—and he later concluded she had been right because telling his story to media materially expanded awareness.

Therabody actively taught journalists how to describe a category consumers did not yet understand. Jason said his wife would meet media teams, explain “percussive therapy,” demonstrate what it did and supply language and links they could use in articles; publishers could earn through the resulting clicks while Therabody gained clearer, more useful coverage.

The company sometimes built campaigns around ordinary people inside elite organizations rather than only the stars. Jason recalled a Manchester United kit man with hip problems trying the device, standing up feeling dramatically better, and inspiring a story focused on him rather than Ronaldo; the point was to show what the product actually did for a person.

The Ronaldo partnership required significant production work beyond signing the athlete. Jason mentioned traveling to Zurich to shoot a commercial, capturing enough material for future use, and then releasing those assets gradually—another example of partnerships requiring a media system around them rather than functioning automatically.

Jason considers media attention and deliberate “seeding” non-negotiable parts of launching a modern brand. His view is that founders must understand who is talking about the product, give the right people firsthand exposure, and plant enough informed stories and experiences that awareness compounds rather than relying on isolated advertising.

His closing advice was to “do hard things” and deliberately seek difficult challenges. That echoes his earlier belief that the hardest path and the right path often overlap, and that significant outcomes tend to sit on the far side of discomfort.

He also urged younger people to find their “ikigai”—the intersection of what they enjoy, what they are good at, what benefits the world and what can make money. Jason stressed that this purpose is discovered over time rather than instantly and often requires enough courage to continue when other people insist a chosen path will never become financially viable.

Jason said he ultimately wants to be remembered for helping people understand themselves better. Asked directly about legacy, his answer was not the company or the massage gun: he said he wanted people to feel that they knew themselves better after meeting him.