Gene from Karma Sauce in Rochester, New York shares what happens to your business when your sauce is featured on Hot Ones on YouTube, how he got started making hot sauce, and what it's like to grow all the peppers that go into your hot sauce.

I started with a desire to find or create a hot sauce that was flavorful and spicy for my conch and conch fritters that I prepared and cooked for my customers. I could not find the flavor I was looking for, so I started to experiment with flavor and peppers.

I've always been a hot sauce and spicy food lover, but I could never quite find just the "right" sauce for my tastes, so I started making my own for myself and family. After a while I started to get offers from strangers to buy my sauces so I started a small business from that.

I have a love and passion for all things culinary, food is my lover and my friend. That being said, I cook quite a bit. At least twice a day, everyday. When I moved to Decatur, Georgia from Monterey, California that passion was put into overdrive.

We are a husband, wife and kids team working towards growing our home nursery business into a self-sustaining hot pepper paste food manufacturer located in Hillsboro, Oregon. Chamorro by marriage, we started our small online business by growing and selling live Guam boonie pepper plants, which are very hard to come by in the mainland.

It all started in 2009 when I was trying to make the perfect hot wings with something other than Frank’s Red Hot. After countless trips to my local hot sauce store, my obsession with wings changed to hot sauce.

Howler Monkey Sauce is a hot sauce company out of Jacksonville Beach, Florida. Like many hot sauce makers, they got their inspiration from a hot sauce they loved and tried to imitate its qualities and bring their own spice to it.

I got started in hot sauce by necessity. I've always loved spicy foods and becoming a homeowner I decided to grow hot peppers since they weren't readily available at the store. After an impulse purchase of some red savina and bhut jolokia seedlings at a nursery, come September I suddenly had several pounds of super hot peppers to work with.