From $1 Weed Kits to a $10 Million Exit: The Daily High Club Story

Editor's note: This article is adapted from a public podcast interview with Harrison Bomb, founder of Daily High Club. All quotes are his from that conversation.

In 2015, Harrison Bomb was working customer service at a print company, and it was "sucking my soul out." He'd spent his college years fixing iPhones — about 2,000 of them — and making $30,000 to $70,000 a year as a student. But the iPhone business was hitting a dead end. So he took the customer service job, "and I'll figure out what I want to do next."

The answer came from an unlikely trio of inspirations: Dollar Shave Club, a mattress company, and a Reddit AMA. "I saw all three of those kind of killing it," he says. Dollar Shave Club — bought for a billion dollars selling razors and cream by mail — was the template. "Applying that concept to weed, I was like, this is it."

The $1 kit and the shipping hack

The original product was audacious: a $1 box containing rolling papers, tips, hempwick, and a pack of matches with a joke on it that changed every month. The economics were the fun part.

"I would fold the tips over so the whole thing was pretty flat, and then I'd ship it like regular paper mail in an envelope. It cost me like 50 cents to ship it." The customer paid $1 plus $2 shipping. "You're taking a buck fifty home on shipping. Shipping was your bread and butter."

About one in a hundred envelopes came back with a note like "we know what you're doing." "Everybody was like, 'F' you, just send it again.'"

The pivot

The $1 kit was a door-opener, not a business. "After the cost of customer service and paying employees and packing it, even with the dollar of profit left over, we weren't really making anything." But it got his foot in the door — "people are like, whoa, I can buy something associated with weed for a dollar" — and he realized the real money was in bongs.

He built the brand the old-fashioned way. "At first no one was responding to anything. I was literally handwriting letters to Snoop Dogg." He worked his way up the influencer ladder — a review here, a collab there — until Daily High Club products were on every channel in the weed-tube era. One collab piece with a major creator went into the subscription box: "There's probably like 40,000 bongs out there with his name on it." In total, the company sold over a million bongs.

The SEO long game

Ask him how they became the first result for the most obvious keyword in the industry, and it's a masterclass in patience: "Type in the word bong on Google and we were number one. Also number one for bongs, dab rig, and dab rigs."

"Just the long game of SEO, and we played it clean. No black hat. Just getting a lot of articles and PR and good social presence and celebrities and people mentioning us."

The exit

The pandemic was the company's biggest year — "everyone's at home, they've got nothing to do. The business basically doubled overnight," even as their China factory got shut down for sneaking oxygen in to keep the glass furnaces running. Then a consolidation wave hit: a public company bought three of his five biggest competitors and combined them.

"I'm the biggest, but now I'm not the biggest anymore. We never really made money, so I don't think I can beat them — I might as well join them." In 2021, Daily High Club was acquired for a reported $10 million. He owned 75%.

Then the honest part: "I've really only made money one day in my life." The headline number isn't the story. "I got a lot of it in stock. The stock didn't do amazing. I definitely got well into seven figures — life-changing money — but not exactly what people think. I didn't play all of the cards as well as I could have."

His one regret is timing, not the decision. "I could have sold in 2018 and cut out three years of work and gotten three times more. But I could have sold a year later and gotten nothing. You can never time it exactly."

The honest check

These are his numbers and recollections from a public interview — the $10 million figure is the widely reported acquisition price, while his actual net take was, by his own account, "well into seven figures" after stock and taxes. The $1-kit shipping economics and the SEO strategy are his account of how the business ran, presented here as he told it.

What any cannabis business can steal from this

• Fix the unit economics first. He knew the kit itself lost money; the margin lived in shipping. Find where your real margin is before you scale the volume.
• A loss leader can still open doors. The $1 kit was never the business — it was the introduction that made bong sales possible.
• SEO is a long game you can win clean. Years of articles, PR, and earned mentions made Daily High Club the answer for "bong." There's no shortcut, and that's why it worked.
• Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Influencers were the engine, but the durable asset was the brand and the rankings — things nobody could take away.
• Exit timing is luck, but preparation isn't. He was ready when the call came; the wire was the result of years of compounding, not one decision.

The company sold, the non-compete ran, and he spent two and a half years traveling — 68 countries, 45 in 2023 alone. Now he's consulting, doing comedy, and thinking about running for Santa Monica city council. "I've only really made money one day in my life," he says. But that one day was the payoff of about 2,000 iPhone screens and a million bongs.

This article is for educational purposes only and is not investment or legal advice.