Shaun had been growing chilies for 13 years before he tried to sell his first bottle. When he finally made 20 bottles of hot sauce in 2019, he thought they'd take months to sell. They sold out in 20 minutes.

That was the moment the ChilliChump YouTube channel, which had started in 2006 as a simple passion project about growing chilies, became something more. Today, Shaun and his wife Caroline run a thriving hot sauce business from an acre of land in Lincolnshire, England, complete with three greenhouses and a polytunnel. He can produce up to 1,000 bottles in a day when needed, and his small-batch releases regularly sell out within a weekend.

I was excited to catch up with him to chat a bit about his journey.





Shaun has intentionally kept his operation at a scale where he can touch every bottle. No co-packers. No supermarket deals. No paid advertising. Just one person sharing his passion for growing chilies and making sauce, building a business that prizes freedom over growth for growth's sake.

Growing passion into profit

Shaun's journey began far from the UK.

He grew up on a farm in South Africa, where he developed a deep connection to growing things with his own hands. After moving to England, he found himself missing that connection to the soil.

"I love farm life and I have very fond memories of it," he explains. "When I came over to the UK from South Africa, I'd gone away from that quite a lot. So I wanted to get back to it."

He chose chilies specifically because they offered the perfect challenge for his climate. "What plant can I grow that's going to give me the most challenge in the UK in this cold climate, something that's going to keep my interest?" he wondered.

"I didn't realize there were tens of thousands of varieties out there and hundreds of species. It definitely was a good choice."

That was 2006. For over a decade, Shaun grew chilies as a passionate hobby, experimenting with varieties, developing recipes, and documenting his journey on YouTube.

He started sharing recipes online. People watched. They commented. And then they started asking if they could buy his sauces.

By 2019, the demand had become impossible to ignore. With encouragement from his wife Caroline, who had been supporting his chili-growing adventures from the beginning, Shaun decided to test the waters.

"I made 20 bottles of hot sauce. I wasn't growing nearly as much as I'm growing right now, so I didn't have a lot of chilies. I thought, man, I'm going to be stuck with this for a good few months," Shaun recalls. "I let the video out. I put a link to buy these sauces. And as I released the video, I got in the car because I was driving up to Birmingham to visit with family. And my phone just went nuts."

By the time he arrived an hour and a half later, all 20 bottles were gone.

"It sold out within about 20 minutes. There's an idea here. This is something that has given me some clue as to where I should be going with this."



Scaling without losing the soul

From that tiny plastic greenhouse in his backyard to his current operation represents massive growth, and a literal move. In 2021, Shaun and Caroline made the leap to Lincolnshire, to a property with enough land to support the kind of operation Shaun had been dreaming about since his farm days in Africa.

"I grew up on a farm, and have always missed farm living. I lived in London for many years when I first arrived in England. I have been gradually moving further and further from London over time. I wanted more space to do more farm things! Including growing many more chillies," Shaun explains.

The Lincolnshire property gave them the space for three greenhouses and a polytunnel on roughly an acre of land. But even with this expansion, Shaun has been deliberate about what kind of growth he pursues.

"I'm not motivated by money. I'm motivated by freedom," he says plainly. "And where I am in my business, I would say it's full-time. But if anything, growing the team, the only reason I'd want to do that is to enable more freedom in what I'm doing. I'm not looking to be the biggest chili hot sauce maker in the world or the biggest chili seed vendor in the world."

This philosophy guides every business decision. Supermarkets have approached him. He's declined. Co-packers could help him scale production. He's not interested.

"If I had to double my business, there's no way I could keep up with that volume on my own. I'd have to use a co-packer. I'd have to outsource. I'd have to bring someone else in. And I get offered all the time. Supermarkets want me to stock my sauces in theirs. But again, it's just not viable. It's not something I want to do."

Instead, he's focused on maintaining the personal connection. "My USP is that you get to have a part of my passion. I'm sharing my passion with you. Whether that is sharing it online on YouTube or whether it's the bottle of hot sauce that you hold in your hand across the world, that you know that I've handled, I've made, I've bottled, I put the label on, everything was done with these hands and you get to go and experience that. That's awesome."

Today, he keeps several core sauces in stock year-round and does special limited releases that typically range from 600 to 1,000 bottles. These small batches sell out within a weekend when announced in his YouTube videos, which serve as his only marketing channel.

His personal favorite? A peri-peri sauce based on his mother's recipe that he doesn't even sell. He's shared the recipe publicly for anyone to make. But for wings lovers, his year-round staple is Blazing Buffalo Extreme, "a hotter, flavor-forward Buffalo-style sauce" that he's also shared the recipe for in his recipe book and online.

"A sauce doesn't have to be my taste, but it has to be balanced," he explains. "Salt, acid, sweet, garlic: everything needs to work in harmony."

Automating the repetitive, preserving the craft

Behind the artisanal sauce-making is a tech-savvy entrepreneur with an IT background. Shaun's approach to business operations is ruthlessly efficient: automate anything repetitive so he can focus on what matters.

"If you do a task more than once in a day, automate it," he says. "That's kind of it."

He's put this philosophy into practice throughout his greenhouses, using Arduino microcontrollers, Raspberry Pi computers, and ESP32 chips to automate drip irrigation, air circulation, heating and cooling systems.

This automation mindset extends to his business operations. As a UK-based seller shipping globally (especially to the US and EU), Shaun faces complex tax and payment challenges that would consume hours if handled manually. This is where SendOwl comes in.

"Time is precious. I need to be able to do anything that's going to streamline what I do. SendOwl is one aspect of it. It frees up time for me," he explains.

The real complexity came with Brexit. Suddenly, the VAT rules for digital products and EU sales became a nightmare of bureaucracy.

"Selling to the US, no problem at all. Selling to Europe, highly complex," Shaun notes. "And then to add complexity to that, because of selling a digital product, if somebody in France wants to sign up for my platform and wants to pay for the higher tier and not use the free tier, then I can't do that without a highly complex situation if I was doing it on my own. Whereas with SendOwl, it's a whole different story because you guys are able to manage that for me."

This becomes even more critical as Shaun builds out his next venture: an IoT platform for greenhouse automation. The software allows growers to automate repetitive tasks like watering and monitoring through sensors and smart devices, exactly the kind of system Shaun has been building and using in his own greenhouses.

"That might end up giving me more freedom to make more content and not have to focus so much on selling a thousand bottles of hot sauce," he says. "If I can make fewer bottles of hot sauce, great."

The platform represents scalability in a way that physical products never could. "When you're talking about IoT, scaling the actual data that is getting moved around in an IoT platform, that is hugely challenging. But it's the scale that I can handle because I can deal with that. I know how to scale a platform. I know how to make it so that it can scale from one user to a thousand users without any issue."

And once again, SendOwl handles the payment and tax complexities that come with selling digital products internationally, allowing Shaun to focus on building great software rather than wrestling with VAT rules.

Learning to set boundaries

One of the biggest lessons Shaun has learned didn't come from business books or mentors. It came from burnout.

In the early days of his YouTube channel, he made himself hyper-available. Every comment got an immediate response. Every email was answered right away. It seemed like the right thing to do, and his audience loved it.

"A big mistake I made, especially in the early part of doing YouTube, is responding to messages and emails and comments as soon as I get them," he reflects. "Unfortunately, I still do it. You kind of set a precedent."

It wasn't sustainable. With thousands of comments, messages, and emails coming in daily, immediate responses became impossible. More importantly, they were eating into the time he needed to actually create content and run his business.

"I think it is something to learn. You don't have a responsibility to be available 24/7. This world where it is so hyper-connected right now, we kind of think, well, if a message pops up, if an alert pops up, I have to respond to it."

He's learned to walk a balance. He still values engaging with his audience (viewers are often surprised when a creator actually responds!), but he's setting better boundaries.

"On the flip side, I appreciate my audience. It's about balance. Everything in life is a balance. You know, even my hot sauces, everything has to be balanced for flavor. It's the same thing in life. You have to balance your time."

Another lesson: not all feedback deserves equal weight. "You can get a thousand awesome comments, people saying amazing things about your video. You just need that one person with a negative comment and that will sit with you for the rest of the week."

His advice now? "Don't let people affect you who you wouldn't take advice from. If my manager gave me critique, it would impact me hard because I had so much respect for them. But random people online? Why would that affect me?"

Finding a reset in the greenhouse

When things feel overwhelming, Shaun has two ways to decompress.

In summer, he takes slow walks through his greenhouses. "It's the most relaxing, most peaceful thing that I can do," he says. Winter brings a different kind of therapy: starting seeds in his heated shed, spending hours alone checking on his plants, tracking their progress.

"It's a lot of work. It can be lonely and all that. But there's a lot of work that goes into it. And when you start seeing your plants growing, when the sun starts coming out, when you get to go and see all that in the summertime, it's the most peaceful and relaxing thing in the world."

His other escape? Long rides on his BMW adventure motorcycle with his wife, Caroline, better known to the YouTube community as Mrs ChilliChump. They've toured 16 countries in a month, winding through the Alps, into Italy, through Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and France.







Caroline has been integral to the ChilliChump journey from the beginning. While Shaun handles the growing and recipe development, Caroline's support makes it all possible, from helping with the business operations to being his travel companion on both motorcycle adventures and trips back to Africa. "Her support and help is invaluable," Shaun notes on their website.

The motorcycle trips serve as crucial decompression for both of them. "It's the one time, well, there's a few times in my life when my mind stops working, as in stops working overtime. And that is one of them, when I'm on the motorbike, because I'm concentrating on the road. I can't think about anything else. I'm not thinking about work. I'm not thinking about chilies. I'm not thinking about anything. It's just so peaceful."

Caroline rides on the back, headphones in, listening to music. "She normally has her earphones in and she listens to music, bobbing her head on the back there. And again, not thinking about anything, just relaxing because she can't do anything: she's on the back of a bike."

Advice to his younger self

If Shaun could go back and talk to the version of himself who just sold those first 20 bottles, what would he say?

"Set boundaries earlier. Don't dwell on the one negative comment among a thousand positives. Keep your focus on people whose critique you truly respect."

"Don't let people affect you who you wouldn't take advice from," he repeats. "That's it."

Today, Shaun and Caroline continue to grow ChilliChump organically through YouTube videos and word of mouth. No paid ads. No venture capital. No pressure to scale beyond what they can handle with care and attention.

It's a reminder that not every business needs to chase hypergrowth. Sometimes the best path forward is the one that lets you keep doing what you love, in the way you love to do it, with the freedom to wake up and spend your day in a greenhouse: hands in the soil, watching chilies grow.

And when you need to handle the technical complexity of international payments, digital product delivery, and post-Brexit VAT regulations? That's what tools like SendOwl are for: taking care of the tedious so you can focus on the craft.

Learn more about ChilliChump at chillichump.com or subscribe to his YouTube channel at youtube.com/@ChilliChump.