Beating Billion-Dollar Companies From His Basement

Michael Jensen never wanted to work with salt. In fact, he hated it.

As a kid, his dad used to bring home eight 40-pound bags of water softener salt and make him carry them down to the basement. That was the worst part of his week. So when his dad suggested starting a salt delivery business, his answer was clear: absolutely not.

But that painful chore planted a seed. And years later, it became the foundation for EZSalt—now scaling fast, with real traction in a space that billion-dollar competitors couldn’t crack.

“The pain of something is directly related to how much people will pay to avoid it,” Michael says. “That’s one of the most true principles in business.”

EZSalt didn’t start with a pitch deck. It started with door knocking.

After returning home from his LDS mission, Michael was laser-focused on turning the salt delivery idea into something real. Within 11 days, he and his brother were rolling pallets of salt through neighborhoods and offering same-day service. They’d knock on both sides of the street, sell on the spot, and carry the bags directly to each customer’s brine tank.

It was fast, scrappy, and profitable—but not scalable.

“Everyone would run out of salt at different times,” he says. “So we’d be in a neighborhood on Monday, and then back again on Wednesday for someone else. It killed our margins.”

That’s when the lightbulb moment hit. What if you could know when someone’s salt was getting low—before they ran out? What if the system could trigger delivery automatically?

Michael went looking for a sensor that could do that. There wasn’t one. So he built it.

He spent the next six years prototyping EZSalt: a laser-based IoT sensor that sits inside a water softener’s brine tank, monitors the salt level, and triggers automatic alerts—or even deliveries. It sounds simple, but it required building the entire tech stack: hardware, software, the routing and logistics backend, and the customer delivery network.

“We built every piece of it ourselves,” he says. “And we did it with almost no outside capital.”

For most of those years, Michael was working full-time jobs to fund the business—selling cars, doing door-to-door sales, working at Podium and Vivint. But every dollar earned was reinvested into building a better prototype.

They released the first version on Amazon for $100. It was clunky and hacked together from plastic with an ultrasonic sensor, but people bought it. Then came version two. Then three. All while collecting feedback from over 2,000 users across the country.

“We had customers who loved it, customers who hated it,” he says. “And we listened to every one of them.”

What they ended up with wasn’t just a sensor—it was a full platform. Water softener companies can now install EZSalt’s sensors across their customer base and manage them through a backend dashboard. They can monitor levels in real time, schedule deliveries efficiently, and generate recurring revenue by running a salt delivery service on top of the platform.

“We’re helping them build a new line of business,” Michael says. “Recurring revenue on a product they already support.”

The business was fully bootstrapped until 2024, when a single angel investor put in $50,000 to fund the tooling for their commercial-grade enclosure. That’s when everything changed.

“Once we had the right product and the right story, the market took off,” he says. “We’d already done the hard part—proving it works.”

EZSalt is now growing at 300% month-over-month, with plans to scale across the U.S. They’ve already beaten billion-dollar players who tried and failed to build their own sensors. And they’re doing it by actually understanding the end users—because they were the end users.

The opportunity is massive. There are an estimated 18 million water softeners in U.S. homes, and nearly 7 million of them belong to homeowners over 60—people who are more than happy to avoid hauling salt down to the basement.

“We want a sensor in every softener,” Michael says. “And we want salt delivery to be available in every major city. We’ve already built the infrastructure to make that possible.”

The business model is equally smart. Whether customers subscribe to EZSalt directly or work through a local delivery partner, the platform collects a $5 monthly fee per unit. With 1.8 million users, that’s a $100M ARR business.

And because their software costs are low and hardware costs are dropping, they’re getting close to the ultimate goal: making salt delivery cost the same as buying and hauling it yourself.

When that happens, it’s game over.

“If it costs the same to have someone else do it—and our sensor knows when you’re running low—why would you ever do it yourself again?”

Michael isn’t in this to raise a quick round or land a flashy acquisition. He’s building to win.

“We’re not going to stop until this becomes the standard,” he says. “We’re going to keep innovating and listening to our customers until every softener has a sensor.”

He may have hated salt as a kid. But now? He’s built the smartest salt business in the country—starting from his basement.

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