Therabody can look like an overnight success: more than 6.5 million Theragun massage devices sold and the number one brand in its category. But Dr. Jason Wersland spent eight years and five prototypes earning the right to sell even one. It started in 2007, when a motorcycle crash left him with a nine-millimeter disc bulge, no insurance, and a problem he couldn’t fix on anyone else’s schedule. The first Theragun was a jigsaw wrapped in a dish towel. Getting it into elite training rooms took a slow, one-to-one grind that looked nothing like a viral launch. Here, Jason breaks down how he built credibility for an unproven product—from his garage to Real Madrid—and the partnership that finally turned a personal mission into a company.
On the motorcycle crash that started everything:
I lived in Venice, and my chiropractic school was in Hollywood, so every morning I’d zip up the 10 and the 110 to get there. That October morning it was cold—which it never is in LA—so for once I grabbed my Kevlar gloves and jacket before I took off. I only tell people that detail because it ended up mattering.
I was splitting traffic right where the 10 and the 110 split. A delivery truck was hiding everything in front of me, they let a car through, and it came out of nowhere. I T-boned a Volkswagen going about 50, 55 miles an hour. I woke up on the freeway, sat up, grabbed my helmet, and felt that it was broken. My arm was cut open—I could feel the blood running into my hands.
I didn’t have insurance, so when the ambulance pulled up, I said, “I’m not getting in that.” I talked a tow truck driver into giving me a ride toward school, but dispatch made him dump me out on Figueroa and 9th. I had $84 to my name. I pulled out $20, jumped in a taxi, and watched the meter tick up to exactly 20 right at my off-ramp. The driver kicked me out. I ended up jumping a fence to make my test. That day I got stitches in my arm and learned I had a nine-millimeter disc bulge in my neck. That’s what triggered all of this.
On discovering pain relief by accident:
By that December, the inflammation had gotten so bad that I finally understood what it’s like to be a patient. I’d treated a lot of patients, but I’d never been one. Flying back from Utah, I fell asleep with my head dropped, and when the plane landed it felt like someone was stabbing me in the neck. They had to wheel me off in a wheelchair.
That’s when it hit me: I’m dependent on someone else’s time to treat me. I knew exactly what I needed—warmth, a massage, something to soothe the muscle. But I’d have to wait for someone else to give it to me, and that didn’t make sense.
So I’m in my practice one day waiting for my chiropractor buddy to treat me, sitting next to a vibrating traction table. We use vibration to get the body to relax so it can’t guard. I looked at it and thought, “I wonder if that’ll help my shoulder.” I flipped it on, rested my arm on it, and the pain went away. Thirty seconds later it came back.
That’s accommodation. Your body tunes out your earrings or your ring because they’re not a threat. I was accommodating to the vibration. So the question became: How do I find something my body can’t accommodate to—something that keeps distracting the pain?
On building the first Theragun from a jigsaw at 3 a.m.:
Pain travels to the brain at about 50 miles an hour. When you put something on your skin—hot, cold, pokey, some texture—that signal travels at almost 300 miles an hour. It’s called the pain gate theory. The problem with the table was that vibration never leaves the body; it stays connected. I needed something that could come on and off the skin.
So one morning at 3 a.m. I went out to the garage and grabbed a Makita jigsaw. I took a long blade, rolled the end up with pliers, wrapped it in a dish towel, and wrapped the dish towel in electrical tape. It’s all I had. I tested it on myself, and it was amazing.
The rough, sharp edges hitting my skin stimulated my nervous system in a way that took the pain away. I kept thinking, “How has no one thought of this?” I couldn’t believe I was the first. But I started asking around—medical sales reps, people in the business—and nobody knew what I was talking about.
On treating the injury instead of chasing the pain:
What mattered most about that first version is that it got me better. I had a goal to actually heal, and I used this thing to keep myself out of pain between treatments. So when I went in to get treated, we were treating the injury—not the pain.
That’s a big part of our brand now. A lot of the time you chase the pain, but you’re not actually helping the body heal. I didn’t want to just feel OK for an afternoon. I wanted the injury to resolve, and staying out of pain in between is what made that possible.
On the one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many path:
Getting people at the top of their game to take a chance on a guy showing up with a terrifying-looking piece of tech did not happen overnight. From 2008 to 2016, I made five different versions—iterating, tweaking, getting it into therapists’ hands, taking their feedback, changing it again.
The whole goal was to hand it to someone and have them get the experience without me. Early on, me plus the gun was the experience, and people associated it with me. But I discovered the thing on myself—I wasn’t having anyone else treat me — so I knew you could do this on your own. I just had to get it into the hands of people who could use it and help me talk about it.
Looking back, there was a clear pattern. It started one to one: me with an athlete, me with a physio, me with a trainer. Then it became one to many: me standing in front of a whole group of therapists or athletes. Then it slowly became many to many: now there are trainers in Rome and Serbia doing this without me ever being in the room. That was always the goal.
On earning a place in elite training rooms:
We ended up with professional soccer player, Cristiano Ronaldo, but it wasn’t overnight. You don’t get to walk into Real Madrid’s training room if you’re not legit. By that point I had enough of the science, enough of the product, and the pricing was finally right with our original G1 version. That’s what got me into rooms that are vetted.
It was the 10,000-hour rule, for sure. I treated everyone, everywhere, as much as I could, and I gathered as much information as I could about what the product was actually doing to the body—enough to validate the claims I was making. Then we kept developing from there.
On the rejections that stung in the early days:
Being first in a category means a lot of white space, but it also means a lot of convincing—and plenty of detractors. I was at the UCLA track working with Paralympians for the Brazil Olympics, and a couple of US track athletes wandered over to my table. I started treating them, and their coach came over: “What are you doing? Don’t treat any of my athletes.” I said, “What?”
He’d let me work on the Paralympians—there was Blake, a double amputee who sprints on his prosthetics—but not his guys. Those moments were tough. I kept thinking, “What are they not seeing?”
Another time I was in a tennis training room at Indian Wells. It’s all curtains, no walls, super quiet—you can hear people whispering, and nobody wants anyone seeing what’s being worked on. I shut the curtain, turned on my two Theraguns, and it was like I was jackhammering cement. A guy ripped the curtain open: “What are you doing? You can’t do that in here. You have to go outside.” So I set my table up in the parking lot and treated the athlete out there.
On knowing Ben Nazarian was the right partner:
I knew through experience—bad experience. I had three business partners before my co-founder and Therabody’s current CEO, Ben [Nazarian], and they all kind of hosed me. The first was a friend who didn’t do what he said he was doing, so I had to buy the company back from him. The next one was skimming me on shipping costs getting Theraguns from China to the US; when I confronted her, it went badly, and I had to buy my company back again. Then I got halfway into a deal with a couple of NFL players, and something about it just didn’t feel right.
I really feel like Theragun had angels watching over it. Through a weird coincidence, I met someone who worked for Ben, went to see him, and when he walked into his conference room, I knew him. It was like running into a cousin. The more we talked, the more we got along, and he already knew what to ask. My experience had taught me what the wrong thing looks like—and this wasn’t that.
We did a handshake deal. We didn’t sign any documents until three months later. That was the moment I knew it was a business. Ben came in and managed the money and gave it real structure. We see the world through completely different lenses, but we had the same goal, and that was fuel to the fire.
On why the right person matters more than money:
Money’s not hard to find. People will line up to give you money if you have a great idea—I know that from experience. The hard part is finding the right person: the one who knows what you’re trying to build and shares the same traits you do.
When it comes right down to it, what is this person going to choose? Do they have character? Can they tell the truth, or are they avoidant? Most of the day-to-day stuff doesn’t matter. It’s the moments that matter—like sitting in front of a manufacturer when you have to be really clear about something, and you don’t want someone scooting around the issue. You want someone who’ll tell them the truth and stick to it until it’s seen through.
My mom used to do this thing when I bought a car. She’d get in the passenger seat and say, “Yep, this is the car,” or “Nope, it’s not.” There’s a feeling, and if you ignore it, you’re going to run into problems.
Ben and I had what we called a “no hole policy”—no backstabbing, no talking behind each other’s backs, just radical honesty. We’ve had heated debates; we go at each other like brothers. But it always ends with, “I love you.” “I love you, too. Let’s make this happen.” It’s like a marriage. And I never wanted to be CEO, not for a minute. I’m a chiropractor. I know how to build a practice and help people. To scale something like that—that was Ben’s magic, not mine.
Hear the rest of Jason’s conversation on Shopify Masters, including why he believes every founder needs people to call them delusional, how repeated trainer feedback led to the Wave Roller, and the one grounding hour he protects every morning.
