When the family's front yard became cluttered with the remnants of surfboard production in 1953, his father moved him off the property by buying him a lot on Pacific Coast Highway in nearby Dana Point for $1,500.

[2] Alter‘s hobby became a business and in discussing the future with friends as a young man "Hobie" declared that he wanted to make a living without having to wear hard-soled shoes or work east of California's Pacific Coast Highway by “making people a toy and giving them a game to play with it.”[4] A couple of years later, Alter opened up Orange County's first surf shop in Dana Point, California.

Several famous surfers surfed for the Hobie Team, including Joey Cabell, Phil Edwards, Corky Carroll, Gary Propper, Mickey Munoz, Joyce Hoffman and Yancy Spencer.

Then came the high-volume production shapers like Ralph Parker and Terry Martin, guys who have shaped hundreds of thousands of surfboards over the years.

Other Hobie shapers included Dewey Weber, Mickey Munoz, Corky Carroll, Don Hansen.

[2] After experimenting with foam for a couple of years, Alter made a breakthrough in 1958, finally achieving the right skin hardness for shapeability with the right core density for strength.

He decided to set up a separate foam-blowing operation in nearby Laguna Canyon and recruited one of his glassers, Gordon "Grubby" Clark, to make polyurethane surfboard blanks.

Alter made the Guinness Book of World Records in 1964, surfing the wake of a motorboat 26 miles from Long Beach to Catalina Island.