They Wanted $5,000 for a Sauna — I Built One for $150 — “I Called Saunas a Scam” (Pt.2)

Back when I was struggling with chronic health issues and tight finances, I wasn’t about to drop $5,000 on a sauna I wasn’t sure would help. So I built my own — from scratch — using heat lamps, wood, and whatever I could afford.

This is Part 2 of my story. I reached out to sauna companies and got ignored. I wasted months researching, moved into a bigger place just to fit a sauna, and kept testing until I finally found what actually worked. I don’t recommend doing it the way I did… but I wouldn’t change it either.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re stuck or spinning your wheels, maybe this will help you shortcut what took me years.

Read the transcript here >

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Transcript

Please, for the love of God, don’t put a makeshift sauna in your shower. Go to saunacourses.com and pay $14.95. I put together an exhaustive 30-lesson course that’ll show you how to build your own little heat lamp sauna for $200, $250. We make it available to everybody.

It’s inexpensive. You won’t find a solution that works better for less money. It’s super cheap. If you can’t afford it, email me.

I spent a week in my garage. I bought tools, bought wood, bought everything. I built a sauna stand out of wood and put rocks in the bottom of it so it wouldn’t tip over. Like, I made this thing.

It’s like a piece of furniture. And I would try that before I would spend the $5,000 on a sauna. In hindsight, I mean, even us just talking about this, I should probably push people more to spend the money than I do. Because now that I’m, like, remembering all this in my mind, that was a lot of time.

That was a lot of effort. That was a lot of energy for me to make each one of those iterations. And really, all it was for is for my convincer, for me to understand, like, okay, there’s merit to this. There’s going to be an improvement.

But it was still short-sighted because I was thinking about the $5,000 for a sauna as like, this is so expensive, or if I did this, this, and this, it’s still less than $5,000. I wasn’t thinking about it, like, as an investment into the future health of myself. Even if the thing only lasts 10 or 15 years and breaks, or maybe it never breaks, whatever, but try to establish some timeline to that and then divide that by the $5,000.

The biggest thing that I learned is that sometimes it’s not really about the money or cost savings. It’s about the time. Because the time when I was building this stuff, like, I was still suffering. I wasn’t doing well.

I wouldn’t change it because that’s what gave me the motivation to do it.

I would have never built this stupid stuff in my garage, you know, if I wasn’t like, something inside of me was like, you should pursue this and at least try it. Just don’t spend all your money to get what these people are saying. Because the lady that I had as a functional medicine doctor, she was, she was great.

I hesitate to go along with her sauna suggestions now because I was very green back then. But she was, the reason that I did those heat lamp things in the shower is because she was trying to get me to buy something called a sauna space. And a sauna space is that thing that I have upstairs.

I mean, I have one now, but for years I didn’t. It’s that thing where there’s four bulbs in an octagon, a diamond pattern, and there’s a canvas tent and the canvas tent’s real short. You got to duck down in there. And then you sit on a stool that swivels like this.

And the reason why is because the diamond thing with the heat doesn’t move. It works, but the price of it, dude, the price, the cheapest one is like $3,000. And now they have some that are like four or $5,000. And all it is, is a little dowel things with a canvas tent and four of those heat lamp bulbs with a heat shroud.

These people were telling me all this stuff and I was like, I don’t think she was trying to take me for a ride. I think she genuinely believed that that was the best thing that people should be using. But in my mind, I’m looking at this thing going, there’s nothing to it.

The damn thing should be like 800 bucks and they’d still be making 400 bucks. Like it’s, there’s like, but it gave me the idea. I was like, okay, she wants me to use these stupid bulb things. I’m going to go build this myself and I’m going to do it for like 150 bucks and I’m going to try it.

If it works and I get some benefit out of it, then I’ll spend the money. My first iteration was kind of a failure. So there was many, many iterations of that. Don’t trust me.

Try everything yourself because I don’t push people. I think I am reflecting on this. I think I should because what’s worse, they hate me, but they get health benefit in their life. How are they, where are they going to be at 10 years from now?

You know, like if what’s the worst thing that could happen, I push somebody into something, they use a credit card, they buy.

piece of equipment. It improves their life, yet they hate that they have this payment or whatever or they spent this money. But ten years from now what’s what’s worse? Never doing it or spending $6,500 on a $5,000 purchase because they didn’t have the cash.

Put out a credit card they had to pay $1,500 in interest over time, you know, over however many years. My viewpoint on this stuff is changing a little bit, which might make me a little more aggressive. Like when people call into the live stream and they say, oh I don’t know about this, I don’t know about that.

What I really should tell them is what I should have had somebody to tell me. I can tell based on what you’re saying is happening, this will probably help you. And even if it doesn’t, you’re better off trying this than the other option that you’re telling me about.

That’s probably not gonna do anything. So if somebody would have done that for me, yeah it was a blessing that no one did because then I’ve created all this stuff that helps a load of people and that makes me feel really really good. So I wouldn’t change it.

However, somebody could have shaved a year, a solid year off my, not only my learning curve, but my own health habits. In my mind at the time, everything was frustrating, even the people that were trying to help me because I couldn’t get anywhere with spinning my wheels. I was getting a little better, but we weren’t getting to the root of what was going on.

This went on for months, so I was like hesitant about the… I mean this was years ago, I haven’t been in a situation like this in a long time. I kind of forgot what it was really like until you asked me. I’m spending all this money with her and she’s making recommendations and I’m finding people on the internet that talk about the benefits of saunas and infrared specifically and to do this and to buy that and I’m such a skeptic, I don’t do anything.

I just keep researching and I keep downloading information into my mind, but I’m not actually taking action, right? And so meanwhile, I’m spending all this money with her. Well, maybe I wouldn’t have to spend so much money with her if I would have done everything that she said.

Maybe if I would have believed in it myself or at least taken a leap of faith and tried it, maybe I should have gone to rent sessions earlier. So months went by, I built a couple of iterations of my own.

of the shower heat lamp thing, which I don’t recommend anybody do because you electrocute yourself, you turn the water on accident. I mean, I know what I’m doing. I’ve been building stuff my whole life. That’s why I’ve never talked about this or put pictures up of it because I don’t want people to do that.

Nobody knows that this is how it all started because I was so anti all of it. I was like, yeah, I think these people are way out in left field. I think they’re idiots. I don’t trust any of this.

So what we were getting at is once I built something that I actually thought worked or once I rented sessions and I actually thought I got benefit, then I was convinced that I should spend the money. But then this whole process started all over again. Because then I would research.

I wasted five months. Once I decided I was gonna buy one of these wooden ones in the house. So I lived in a studio apartment at the time. I didn’t have space for it.

I was like, okay, I gotta move. Well, that was dumb. Somebody would have been around that could really help me. I didn’t have to move.

I could have done something there. But in my mind, I was like, oh no, gotta move. Gotta have a space for this. Gotta do that.

Gotta do blah, blah, blah. So I moved across town. Got a gigantic place for just me. This was the beginning of more home office.

Spent three times the rent just to have the space to be able to do this. But I was convinced it was gonna help me. And then I wasted five months researching. I remember distinctively, it was five months.

I would talk to people. I’d call cloud companies. Try this, I’d buy that. I was like, all right, I’m gonna buy a Costco sauna and take it back, but I don’t like it.

And actually, some of the companies use this against me to this day. I already had a web presence, but I wasn’t known for anything health related. I already had a YouTube channel. It was more of a lifestyle thing.

I was teaching people about web development, lead gen. So here’s what happened. I was like, I’m gonna craft perfect email. And what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna go get the sales email of every sauna company that I would like to have a sauna from and I’m gonna send them the same email and CC all of them together.

Because it so in business marketing this works really really well if you want to have if you want to get web clients and you have a presence in a particular area for a particular service which I was very very good at. Instead of cold calling people and being like, “Hey do you want to sign up for my monthly package of web services?” No, no, no.

What I would do is I would go and build a legion website first. I would make sure that when they searched their area that they saw it. So then what I would do is I would craft an email, and I would find each one of the competitors for that area, and I would put a link to this website, and I would put something unique on there to where they would see, if they saw this email and they saw the website, they knew that I owned it, it was connected. I’d put picture myself or something.

So then I would basically say, “Hey I’m Matt, I’ve been doing whatever web marketing in Central Florida for X amount of years, I do this this in this industry, I’m known for this, here’s some of my videos and my material, here’s my agency, here’s our clientele, here’s our past work. However I recently developed this web property as a project” basically say I’m looking for somebody to take over this position.

And so what I would do is, in the subject line, I would make it real catchy, and I would CC all of their competitors on the same email so they create the urgency themselves. I don’t do it; this is the ancient technique. Yeah, it’s no different than sales: what do you think realtors do when you have five people do a showing at the same time to buy a house?

So this is what I don’t do with the saunas. If I did this stuff with the saunas, more companies would reach out and like try to offer me sponsorships or try to pay me for stuff or give me stuff, or instead of just doing saunas, I could do everything else. I’m just not pushy with it because I’m it’s near and dear to my heart, I’m passionate, and I resonate with the people. Nobody gave me anything really, no one gave me anything.

So to this day here’s what they all do: they say, “You emailed us in 2000 and whatever, and now we didn’t give you a sauna, shame.” That’s what they think this is about, what they said. All right, that’s why you shouldn’t trust man. Yeah, don’t trust me, try everything yourself.