Jay Spilled Coffee in His Lap & Turned It Into a Crazy Simple Million Dollar Product

Thomas Edison famously said, “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” Indeed.

Sometimes the best business ideas are hiding in plain sight.

Jay Sorensen was not looking to become an inventor. In fact, in the early 1990s, things weren't going particularly well. Jay lived in Portland, Oregon, where his family had owned a service station. That business was now gone, and Jay was trying to make a living selling real estate.

It wasn't working. Indeed, as he says, he was on the verge of going broke.

This is not a story about a guy with a grand vision and a brilliant business plan who knew where he was going.

Jay had none of that.

He was simply a guy trying to make a living.

And then one morning he bought a cup of coffee. It was 1991. Jay pulled into a Coffee People drive-through and ordered. Back then, hot coffee often came in a paper cup wrapped with a napkin to protect your hand.

Jay was driving his old Ford pickup when the cup slipped and hot coffee spilled into his lap.

Ouch!

And then came the thought that entrepreneurs have probably been having for a few thousand years:

“There has to be a better way.”

The Better Way

Jay began experimenting.

He played around with paper at his kitchen table. He considered creating a better insulated cup, but that would be expensive. Eventually he landed on something almost absurdly simple: a piece of textured cardboard that could slide around an ordinary paper cup.

A jacket for your java.

The Java Jacket!

But as is usually the case with entrepreneurship, the idea is the easy part. Execution is the difficult part.

The Difficult Part

Jay decided to go after the biggest prize he could think of: Starbucks. That they were just up the highway a couple of hours didn’t hurt. Jay got himself in the door and, in fact, the two sides talked for months, but couldn't reach a deal.

So Jay and his wife, Colleen, kept going.

They invested their own money, got a patent, had sleeves manufactured, and started selling them themselves. One of their first customers was, fittingly, Coffee People, the very company whose hot coffee spawned Jay’s Eureka moment.

Then Jay took Java Jacket to a coffee industry trade show.

Ka-Boom! His booth was almost immediately mobbed.

The coffee shop owners at the show inherently understood what Jay had understood sitting in that truck: They had a problem and this little piece of cardboard could solve it.

But Jay still had another big decision to make. He could sell the invention or license it to someone bigger. Or he and Colleen could do the hard work of building Java Jacket themselves.

He and Colleen decided to build Java Jacket themselves.

That bet worked.

By 1996, Java Jacket had more than 2,000 accounts around the country. A few years later, the company was doing millions of dollars in business. Eventually, Java Jacket sleeves would number in the hundreds of millions.

All because a struggling real estate agent spilled coffee in his lap and followed his entrepreneurial muse.

The Takeaway

Great business ideas don't usually announce themselves as great business ideas. Sometimes they show up as an annoyance, an inconvenience, a complaint, or a hot cup of coffee where a hot cup of coffee definitely shouldn't be.

Sometimes tThe entrepreneurial trick is noticing the problem everyone else has learned to live with and asking the simplest question in business: Why does it have to be this way?

The ice cream shop that makes money when it's cold

28 Wishes sells ice cream in Los Angeles. Below 70°F, sales fall about 20%. The weather is out of their hands. Rent isn't.

So the owners started putting about $20 a day into Kalshi weather markets, taking the cold side. The days that keep customers away now pay something back.

This is hedging. Big companies have done it for decades, buying protection against bad weather, fuel spikes and rising rates. It used to take a broker, a trading desk, and an order size no corner shop could meet.

Kalshi opens it up. Contracts on weather, fuel prices, inflation, tariffs and regulation, starting at a few dollars. Take a position on the outcome that would hurt you. If it hits, the payout softens it. If it doesn't, the contract expires and the good month was the point.

See how other owners are doing it at Kalshi.com/hedging

Steal This Strategy

✍️ Write!: Ready to have your own money-making newsletter? Let Steve show you how. His inexpensive, hands-on guide can help you launch your own newsletter tonight, in under an hour (yes, really!) Get Steve’s newsletter guide

📰 Invent: Idea to Invention by Patricia Nolan-Brown. A very accessible guide to turning everyday annoyances into real products, including prototyping, patents, licensing, finding buyers, and getting an invention to market.

📰 Read: Smithsonian: How the Coffee Cup Sleeve Was Invented. The deeper Java Jacket story, including Jay’s first failed idea, his first sale out of his car trunk, and the trade show where he sold 100 cases in 30 minutes.

About Steve

Steve Strauss is often called “The Voice of Small Business.” A best-selling author of The Small Business Bible (and 17 other books), Inc.’s small business columnist, a lawyer (non-practicing), and an entrepreneur. He sold his last venture, TheSelfEmployed.com to Mark Cuban & Zen Business. Need a ghostwriter or a newsletter for your business? Contact Steve!