Mike Silva

Mike Silva turned a game he and his brother made up on Thanksgiving in 1983 into a product that has sold more than 50,000 units.

Silva came on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast the week before college football started, which is exactly why Brad wanted him then. Brad had played QB54 already, called it ingenious, and then admitted he had forgotten to bring a set into the studio to show anybody. They spent a while on paper footballs at the lunch table before getting to the business. Silva is from New Jersey, which Brad claimed he could not hear in the accent at all.

The original game was two garbage cans and the CB antennas off his father's pickup truck. Throw the ball into the can for a touchdown, kick the extra point through the antennas. He and his brother Frank kept it to themselves for decades because they thought people would call it stupid. In 2015 they played it again in Georgia with Home Depot buckets, and Frank's neighbor asked what they were doing and then stayed three hours. Frank's idea was to build it out of a chair. Silva bought a folding chair at Modell's, pulled the fabric off the back, saw the frame sitting right there, and drove to Home Depot for parts. He sells it the way he built it. He walks NFL parking lots with goalposts sticking off the chairs, makes friends with the security guards, and when somebody makes eye contact he sets it down and asks for four people to play.

2021 put his back against the wall. A marketing company with 8,000 influencers told him the two or three thousand units he had would sell through in a month, so he bought six containers of inventory, more than $180,000 of product. The inventory came. The sales did not. He took a home equity line of credit out on his house, which is the part of a business that nobody sees from outside. His wife told him to go get them. He also had to learn to stop reading the comments, and it was Sergey Karolou, the marketing man who took the company from about a hundred thousand in sales in a year to over a million in five months, who pointed out that people talking about him was the whole point.

The lesson he passes down came from his father, a longshoreman on the docks, who told him at 13 that his friends would get cars from their parents and that he would have to buy his own. Silva pays his son and daughter $10 for every game sold at a tailgate. His son bought his own car. His daughter earned a $1,300 Les Paul and an amp. The part Silva keeps is the eight and nine hour drives to get there, the three of them with nothing to do but listen to music and pick where to eat off Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.