← The Side Hustle Show
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- [00:00]
Nick Loper
You probably already know that Airbnb can help you earn some extra cash when you're not using your home. Maybe you're traveling for work, you're taking an extended vacation, or you're just snowboarding someplace warmer. But here's where it gets interesting. You don't have to do all the work yourself. You can tap into Airbnb's co host network. This is a team of local pros who handle the nitty gritty so you can focus on what matters most. Think of it like outsourcing for your side Hustle. These professional co hosts help with everything from creating a killer listing that stands out to guest communication and even on the ground support. You provide the space, they handle the details, and you get paid. Personally, I'm a fan of income streams that don't require constant oversight. When I'm traveling for work, I'm at a conference or a mastermind, or if I'm on vacation, I'm trying to be present with my family. Here's a way to add an extra income stream without having to be glued to my phone the whole time. When you're ready to get started, see how much your space could be worth. And get connected with an awesome co host@airbnb.com host. From side Hustle to a million dollars in sales. What's up? What's up? Nick Loper here. Welcome to the side Hustle show. Because your 9 to 5 may make you a living, but your 5 to 9 makes you alive. How does somebody with no business experience launch a successful side Hustle? Well, stick around in this episode to find out. Today's guest was working as a firefighter, but it's tough work. And the sunglasses kept breaking and getting scratched up. And he said, hey, like a lot of entrepreneurs, there's gotta be a better way, right? And that's what started him down this path. Starting as a side Hustle a few years ago to recently eclipsing a million dollars in lifetime sales and still growing like crazy. From frontline-optics.com Mike Ettenberg. Welcome to the side Hustle Show. Hey.
- [01:46]
Mike Ettenberg
Hey, how's it going? Thanks for having me.
- [01:48]
Nick Loper
You bet. I'm excited for this one. I want to kind of get the origin story here of, like, why this product needed to exist in the world. There was nothing else. I'm picturing, like, you know, scientist lab safety glass. Like, maybe that was the alternative, but, like, hey, there's gotta be better, a better way than trashing these $200 Oakley's.
- [02:05]
Mike Ettenberg
Exactly. So, yeah, I was a big sunglasses guy. Anybody who's worked in an industry in which your uniform is picked out for you knows that like style and uniform don't really go hand in hand together. So one of the few things that we do have is like a wristwatch and our sunglasses. So for me I took sunglasses, started collecting them, but they're expensive, right? And then going to work. Generally on your day to day adventures, you can take good care of your stuff. But when a 911 call comes in, you know, things happen fast. There's no time to like securely put your sunglasses away so that they don't get scratched. You just, you just go to work and when the job is done, you come back, you pick up the pieces. And I was consistently finding my sunglasses had been scratched or broken or engineer's bag fell on them one time. And so I was just going through them 200 bucks, 200 bucks, 200 bucks every single time. Figured there had to be a better way make them. I knew they couldn't be too terribly difficult to, to manufacture, so started looking to making them myself. And you know, that was about a little over three years ago now. And now this is what I do.
- [03:08]
Nick Loper
Okay. So I love this method of coming up with ideas from saying like kind of the personal pain point, you know, scratch your own itch kind of thing. Like look, you know, look at your own, Tim Ferriss would say, look at your own credit card statements, where are you spending a bunch of money? And like, ah, there's gotta be a better way, right? But then it gets a little fuzzy because it's like, well, do I find manufacturers? It's kind of, it's kind of hard to imagine that a durable scratch resistant product doesn't already exist, but is that what you found?
- [03:35]
Mike Ettenberg
So it's not that they didn't necessarily exist, but there wasn't anything that was really marketed directly towards first responders. There was a lot of military stuff, there was a lot, you know, in those other areas, but a lot of them were still very expensive. And ultimately, you know, there wasn't anything that was really focused on like a first responder. And so that was what I found as I, as I kind of went through is, is there was no one speaking directly to my market, no one that was building glasses focused directly on my market. And so I figured I was going to, you know, fill that void and I was going to make sunglasses that were directly marketed towards first responders. Now for all of you who are not first responders, it's not like you are not allowed to wear them but if you go on our website or see any of our marketing materials, you'll see that it's always law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, you know, that's what you're going to see wearing them. Because that's where I came from. And you know, that's the market that we focus on.
- [04:25]
Nick Loper
Yeah, it's a niche within a niche. Like we're going to do durable, scratch resistant product and we're going to, you know, hone in on this specific use case or this specific user base.
- [04:36]
Mike Ettenberg
Exactly, exactly. And we, you know, we know what the day in the life of a first responder is, so we can kind of tailor to that. We also back all of our sunglasses with this no questions asked replacement program. So if you lose them, you break them, anything happens, we'll replace it one time, no questions asked again with the idea that no matter, matter what you do, eventually these things are going to break because the job's going to catch up to them. So we're going to, you know, kind of help cover that cost when it happens.
- [05:00]
Nick Loper
Okay, so we come up with the idea what happens next. Is it trying to find a manufacturer that is making similar sunglasses? Just, hey, could we make these a little tougher? Like what, where do you even go?
- [05:12]
Mike Ettenberg
Pretty much I went to Google, right. And I started googling and finding things and what you'll find, especially when you're starting out is a lot of these big manufacturers, they don't want to work with you, you know, because your, your volumes are just too small. I started this thing with $5,000. Again, this was, this was a side hustle at the time that I started it too. I was actually listening to this show, which is kind of fun, full circle to be here now with you.
- [05:37]
Nick Loper
Love it.
- [05:37]
Mike Ettenberg
But yeah, I just started looking at, into everything, contacting manufacturers and I just had to go kind of further and further and further down the Google list, you could say, until I finally found a smaller factory that understood what I was trying to do, wanted to kind of grow with me and then, you know, help to educate me and hold my hand through, you know, the education of, of what is the, you know, the optical industry.
- [05:59]
Nick Loper
Is this through, not through Alibaba. This is just like I'm going through pages finding somebody who will accept a smaller minimum order.
- [06:05]
Mike Ettenberg
Correct. Yeah. I stayed away from Alibaba. Alibaba is, you know, you can find gems on there, but for the most part, like a lot of those are third party sourcing at the beginning. I did pick a few samples from there and the Stuff that came back was just so bad that I, you know, I kind of threw my hands up and said I gotta go a different route and kind of Google just the traditional search is how I found my manufacturer.
- [06:28]
Nick Loper
Okay, that's a great tip to like, go to page 2, 3, 4. Like, see if you can find somebody who is, you know, smaller, hungrier for business willing to work with you. So $5,000. This is initial inventory. How many glasses does that get you? Like, I don't even know a concept.
- [06:42]
Mike Ettenberg
So I bought 300 pairs of sunglasses to start. And then with that, I also, you know, got my Shopify store filed for a trademark and had a very small budget left over for marketing. But yeah, that was my initial investment, was $5,000. 300 pairs of sunglasses and then the, the foundation that everyone needs to kind of get the ball rolling.
- [07:00]
Nick Loper
Got it. Have you ever messed around with Shopify before? He said, I don't have any business experience. It's like, what's the learning curve like trying to set this stuff up?
- [07:07]
Mike Ettenberg
It's pretty plug and play, but there's obviously aspects of it that are, are challenging. I relied a lot on Fiverr to get started. Just inexpensive tasks, but you have to know what you're trying to do. Thankfully I did. I had kind of a vision of what I wanted things to look like and I had examples. So by going on there, I was able to kind of say, hey, I want this to look like this and really map out exactly what I was trying to accomplish. It wasn't that difficult. Overall, as you really dive into it, that's when the details start to focus.
- [07:38]
Nick Loper
And clearly there's some validation from what Warby Parker has done in, I guess, prescription glasses, what obviously Goodr has done in kind of direct to consumer sunglasses. So there's some validation people are willing to order this stuff online. It's just a matter of getting in front of them.
- [07:53]
Mike Ettenberg
Absolutely.
- [07:54]
Nick Loper
So build it and they will come. Maybe not. So build it and then, you know, try and spread the word. What happens on the marketing side.
- [08:01]
Mike Ettenberg
Build it and they will not come. Right. My first year took us a really long time to kind of get any traction. Obviously family, they'll buy the first batch just to support you and friends will support you, but doesn't really feel all that great, you know, because you kind of expect it.
- [08:17]
Nick Loper
You recognize every name on the order report.
- [08:19]
Mike Ettenberg
Yeah, exactly. But that first order that comes in from a name that you have no idea who this is, you know, like you truly acquired your first customer is a pretty special Moment that I'm sure everybody who's gone into business is, is familiar with.
- [08:32]
Nick Loper
Yeah, it's really exciting. It's really vulnerable too. I remember like even on, in the example of the podcast, like the first like 50 download day and it was, I think I have exceeded my own circle of influence at this point. And now it's like that means strangers are listening in. You know, what if they hate it? What if they think it sucks? What if they leave a bad review? Like all of a sudden it's like, yeah, I wanted this to happen, but it's also super kind of nerve wracking too.
- [08:53]
Mike Ettenberg
Yeah, you get vulnerable at that moment.
- [08:56]
Nick Loper
Do you know how they found you? Was this, you know, a word of mouth referral? Was this a Facebook ad?
- [09:01]
Mike Ettenberg
It was all organic at that point. We were just doing a lot of like organic posting. So that, that would have been how they found us. I hadn't even been running ads yet, so it was still very, you know, like, I'm going to take a picture, I'm going to put it up, I'm going to use hashtags, you know, the old, the old school method that maybe still works to an extent, but not, not quite how it did back in the, in the early days. But I was able to kind of ride the coattails of that path, you could say, towards my first customer.
- [09:28]
Nick Loper
Okay. And targeting hashtags specific to this niche, I don't know what those would be. You know, hashtag first responder, hashtag firefighter, stuff like that.
- [09:37]
Mike Ettenberg
Exactly. So, yeah, that was pretty much what I did. I didn't have any kind of like post purchase surveys set up at that point to figure out how people, you know, found me, which I learned later the value of. But yeah, you know, you, you get one, you know, rinse and repeat, do the same thing, figure out what's working, what doesn't change it. And the next thing you know there's two and then there's three and then there's, you know, 10 and it just keeps going.
- [10:00]
Nick Loper
Are you handling fulfillment out of your garage, out of your spare bedroom at this point? Like, one advantage of sunglasses is that they're super small, lightweight, easy to ship, stuff like that.
- [10:09]
Mike Ettenberg
I am not thankfully handling any of the fulfillment anymore, but for those first orders. The first orders, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. I had a corner. We have a pretty funny video. My wife, my son and myself are all in here packaging orders. I worked initially as a firefighter, and at that time I was still working as a firefighter. So especially as the business started to Pick up, you know, orders would pile up, and so I would come home and then it was like, cool. We've got, you know, these 10 or 15 orders that we need to ship out because it's been three days since they've ordered it. Right. So it's. It's got to happen now. We turned it in this family thing where we would all set up a little assembly line and build out these orders, and my son would take them to the post office with me. You know, he loved going and handing the. The person at the counter all of the glasses to get scanned in. Was fun time.
- [10:52]
Nick Loper
Yeah, that's exciting. That's really cool. How did you figure out pricing? Or is this, like, based on what other sunglasses are charging? You know, how to figure out how much to charge for these?
- [11:02]
Mike Ettenberg
You know, you look at your competitors in this space and kind of mimic those price points, and then you figure it out from there. When we first started, we were, you know, very inexpensive, but the quality of the components at that time also were not. Not as high quality, just due to the fact that we didn't have the capital to be able to put, like, a premium quality product together when we were testing to see if this was validated. And then as we continued to grow, you know, we. We put money into upgrading components and making them more durable and stronger and better lenses and all those things. And with it, you know, it's now, you know, obviously a much more premium product than it was when we first started.
- [11:37]
Nick Loper
Looks like you're around 80 bucks a pair now.
- [11:39]
Mike Ettenberg
Yeah, exactly.
- [11:40]
Nick Loper
What did it start at?
- [11:41]
Mike Ettenberg
They started at 42, so when I first started, they were never like $20 throwaways, and I didn't want to be playing in that space. I was trying to build something that, you know, people would understand was a little bit better than what you're going to get at the gas station or 7 11. But we weren't quite at that premium level at that time, and now we've definitely grown in the quality of the components to be at that level.
- [12:02]
Nick Loper
Okay. Yeah, so still not as much as, like, a designer pair or, you know, those $200 Oakleys, but it's. It's no longer just like a straight commodity. Like you said. Gas station pair.
- [12:11]
Mike Ettenberg
Exactly. They're nice enough that you'll try and take care of them, but not so excessively priced that you're going to be scared to let something happen to them if, you know, if the job asks that of you.
- [12:21]
Nick Loper
More with Mike in just a moment, including his micro influencer Strategy that generated a lot of sales and a lot of goodwill right after this. If saving more and spending less is one of your top goals for 2025, you're going to want to hear this. When I switched to premium wireless with our sponsor, Mint Mobile, it added hundreds of dollars a year back to my bottom line. Why is that? Well, because Mint Mobile lets you maximize your savings with plans starting at 15 bucks a month when you purchase a three month plan. Even better, all their plans come with high speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and bring your existing phone number and all your existing contacts. They make it super easy to get this new customer offer and your new three month unlimited wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month. Go to mintmobile.com side hustle that's mintmobile.com Sidehustle cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.com Sidehustleen $45 upfront payment required, equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only speeds slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details. All right, it's sponsor time now. I could read you a script about Gusto's payroll and benefits, but instead I wanted to share some reviews and feedback from real Gusto customers. The first one says, with Gusto, I think of payroll as a 32nd job. The website is so friendly and a joy to use now. Anything that makes payroll a joy, you don't hear that every day. Amy from Utah says they do our medical, dental, vision and life insurance. It's like going to the spa and we've got great options and rates even though we're a super small team. What about customer service? Here's what Amneet says about Gusto's support team. Whenever something comes up, I reach out and literally 24 hours later they tell us what to do or assure us that they've already handled it for us. That's what happens when you combine smart technology and friendly humans. And really, that's just a small sample of the positive feedback that Gusto has earned over the years. Right now, side Hustle show listeners get three months free when you go to Gusto.com Sidehustle yes, that's three months of payroll, benefits, admin and more. Totally free again. Gusto.com Sidehustle all right, so you start to ship out a few pairs. I love getting the family involved. And this is all still through kind of organic social, trying to build up a presence and a following. But at a certain point you're like, well, how do we find, find more buyers? Find like what we call lead fountains. Like, how do I get in front of lots of customers? Like, what's kind of the. That evergreen source? Is it going to be social? Is it going to be through partnerships? What was it? What did you find Worked early on?
- [15:03]
Mike Ettenberg
So early on, when we didn't have a lot of budget, it was a lot of like micro influencer marketing. We would reach out to them. There was no monetary component at all. It was just simply, hey, you know, I'm Mike, this is my company. You know, I'm a first responder and I would love to get you this product in your hands. If you like it, share it with your audience. If you don't like it, you got yourself a free pair of sunglasses. Do we have a deal? And a lot of people took it because why not, right? It's a free pair of sunglasses. And once they got them, they liked them. They saw the quality, they saw the uniqueness of it. They liked the story. Additionally, we have a charitable component. So a portion of every sale goes back to our first responders children's foundation. And that's an organization that supports kind of the families left behind by someone who's critically injured or killed in the line of duty. So, you know, we're taking care of our own. And all of that kind of resonated. And so that message started to be shared amongst their networks and that would get a few more people in the door and a few more people in the door. And then the word of mouth advertising started to kind of grow from there and gave us enough budget to to go into traditional marketing.
- [16:07]
Nick Loper
Is there a sweet spot of like follower count or accounts? I'm trying to think like what qualifies as a micro influencer here.
- [16:14]
Mike Ettenberg
We try and stay at somebody below like the 20,000 and we find a lot of success like the 3 to 5,000 follower range.
- [16:22]
Nick Loper
Because at that point they're like excited that a brand is reaching out to them.
- [16:25]
Mike Ettenberg
Exactly. So they're just getting to that point where a brand would want them to have this stuff. So they're excited, whereas the further on they go, they start to get more comfortable with the fact that they get people reaching out to them. You'll get a lot of people who will get your glasses and then just not reply and. Or they'll come back to you with a I charge this amount of money for a shout out. And we're not really in, in the name of, of doing that unless you're, you know, I've got millions of followers, so.
- [16:52]
Nick Loper
Got it. Yeah. And did you find there were 50 of these people, A hundred of these people? Like, I'm not in that space. It's like, are there Firefighter influencers on TikTok?
- [17:03]
Mike Ettenberg
Yeah, there's thousands.
- [17:04]
Nick Loper
Really?
- [17:05]
Mike Ettenberg
And then as you find one, the algorithm will, you know, recommend you to another. And so you just kind of keep on, keep on going, follow hashtags, you'll find them. But there's, there's a lot, and a lot of our content that we've gotten. If you go, you know, on our social media and look like a lot of this stuff in the early days is just those are all influencers who. We traded a pair of sunglasses for a shout out and a photo. And then we got multiple people's faces on our site which showed it in different, you know, law enforcement, ems, fire environments and just kind of continue to, to grow the user base, I guess you could say.
- [17:37]
Nick Loper
Do you have an estimate of how many free pairs you sent out to kind of build goodwill amongst this crowd of micro influencers?
- [17:44]
Mike Ettenberg
At this point, I would say over a thousand that we've sent.
- [17:47]
Nick Loper
Wow.
- [17:48]
Mike Ettenberg
And then there's some that, you know, they provided with a professional photographer quality photo and we'll circle back with them again to work with them again since they're, they're putting out like quality content that we can repurpose and use on our site and in, you know, in marketing, if they give permission, there's a lot. We generally try and find about 10 to 20amonth to send a pair to, to kind of keep that dream moving.
- [18:10]
Nick Loper
No, I guess that's true. It's, it's not a static thing. Like, you know, there's always new accounts being created, new people getting into the space.
- [18:16]
Mike Ettenberg
Exactly.
- [18:17]
Nick Loper
Love this. Over a thousand free pairs, like really showing some dedication to this strategy. And then is there any way to track, you know, oh, this guy performed, but this one didn't like, you know, we're just going to cast as wide a net as possible.
- [18:29]
Mike Ettenberg
You always got to track the data. Right. Generally our approach with people is we start out reaching out to them as an influencer for, you know, a photo and a shad out to their audience. And then after about a week or two, we generally follow up a second time and we ask them how they like the glasses and if they really like them, we introduce them to an ambassador program where they can earn a commission based off of their sales, and that gets them a discount code. And with that, we usually see one to two months of sales, like a high volume of sales generated. And by a high volume, I mean like 5 to 10 PER. There's again, they're smaller influencers, but 5 to 10amonth from that person and they have, you know, they have a discount code. So we can track all of that as well. But yeah, we will put them on a spreadsheet after they get sent. It will follow up and then we'll notate. Did they give us a story? Did they give us a post? Did they send us something? Did they want to become an ambassador so we can kind of see the progression?
- [19:23]
Nick Loper
Got it. Okay. And that goes directly to your Shopify store. Is an ambassador program something you got to manage in house, or is there like a Shopify app that helps it figures out, like, the. The commission payout and all this stuff?
- [19:34]
Mike Ettenberg
Yeah, we have an app called uppromote. And uppromote is free. I always like free. Right. So I don't want to have to pay if I don't have to. The downside is you have to manually pay out your ambassadors every month, but it'll collect it all for you. It'll tell you how much. And then you basically just go into PayPal and we send them their payment and then we click it off that the payment's been paid outside the platform. They have a paid portion where they do that automatically for you and take your hands off entirely. But for us, you know, it's something that we have a virtual assistant that's handling. It just makes sense to kind of keep it in her workload.
- [20:09]
Nick Loper
All right, so the ambassador program is cranking now. What else is going on on the marketing? I love this. Just we're going to get in front of all these people who talk to our target audience already. I think it's a really smart way to do it. But any. Anything else that has been firing on the marketing side.
- [20:24]
Mike Ettenberg
Now meta is really where we're at. But I'll take it a few steps back since we're. We're kind of going through that normal progression. So I started to advertise on Meta. Had no idea how to. To run an. I didn't know what a hook was. You know, I was just like putting pictures out there and I was running traffic ads. And for anyone who's been doing this, we all know that traffic ads get you exactly that. They get you traffic to your site, but they do not get you any sales. In addition, I was not yet smart enough to be capturing people's emails. I was a firefighter by trade, but I didn't know all of these little tricks to make sure that I can remarket and grow a list. You know, these were all foreign concepts to me.
- [21:02]
Nick Loper
So no, no, this is helpful. So Facebook or Meta has lots of different targeting options or like goal option. How are we going to optimize your campaign? And if you, you're saying if you optimize for traffic, they kind of inherently know who, who are the click happy people. On our, on our platform, it's like we get you traffic, but we don't know, we don't know what happens after that. They may not click on anything on your site, they may not buy anything, but we can, we can get you affordable clicks.
- [21:27]
Mike Ettenberg
Exactly, exactly. So they know, right? Like they've got so much data on their users that they know exactly what they're sending. So if you're, if you trying to get traffic, you'll get traffic. If you're trying to get sales, you'll get sales, but they cost, you know, a different amount to be put in front of the person who's ready to purchase is significantly more expensive to be put in front of the person who will click the link and never do anything from there. But it was still fun to see the traffic numbers going up. And Shopify gives you these little metrics that tell you like, oh, you're in the 10% of all stores that start at the same time and see you, you know, and it gives you this little pat on the back feeling of you're doing something right.
- [22:03]
Nick Loper
Yeah, that's kind of, kind of fun. It's like, come on Shopify, I appreciate you, you know, giving me a pat on the back about the traffic stats, but how about the sales?
- [22:10]
Mike Ettenberg
Like, right, so yeah, again, I didn't necessarily know what I was doing, was running those traffic ads. Started to run some purchase ads, but you know, I didn't have great quality stuff. I was taking photos. I was throwing them on Canva and creating a quick template and trying to put an ad together. I was still learning. And then, you know, I, I found TikTok. So it was kind of funny. I was, I was going for one of my morning runs at work and as I was running, we, we were in Coronado. There was this house that was overlooking like a boat dock area and there were these, these young kids, I'll call them, that were constantly there on their laptops on the back patio and I would run by them and I always Wondered, you know, what, what do these guys do? Right? And so finally one day I had to ask.
- [22:58]
Nick Loper
Yeah. To, to afford this waterfront house.
- [23:00]
Mike Ettenberg
Yeah, yeah, I had to ask. So I stopped and I was like, what, you know, what are you guys into? And they're like, oh, like we have a marketing agency. Like we, we do online ads. So of course I started telling them what I was doing and they told me like, you gotta go all in on TikTok. And I'm like, I'm still not on that platform yet. I don't know, you know, how I feel about it, but okay. And then the next time I went on a run and I saw them out there like, are you on TikTok yet? Right. You need to double down on Tick tock. I'm like, yeah, yeah. And I go and run, come back another day, and they're like, you know, triple down on. So I'm finally like, all right, like, I'm gonna go back, I'm gonna make a. A tick Tock ad. And I did. It wasn't great, but again, I hadn't figured out this concept of a hook. I just like, all of a sudden there was just sunglasses and music in the background. It wasn't, you know, there's nothing to capture anyone's attention. And so I decided to make a video. And the start of the video is a picture of the sunglasses falling out of the fire engine in slow motion. And I voiced over it, stop beating up your expensive sunglasses on the job. And then it went to the different sunglasses stuff and that thing just took off. And like, that was in May of 2022. And the company basically exploded from that point forward.
- [24:08]
Nick Loper
Wow, that's great. You know, that's the power of one viral video or one, one thing. And that's really funny that these, these kids were like convincing you to do it.
- [24:16]
Mike Ettenberg
I understood the power of a hook at that point. And then I started to, you know, I took that same ad and I moved it over to the meta platform and it performed just as well, if not better, more consistently, I guess you could say, on meta, and gave me the budget to test other things and to develop, you know, professional looking ads. And that was the beginning of, of this business turning into, you know, a real thing and not just this side project I was doing on my off time.
- [24:41]
Nick Loper
Yeah, I'm looking at the TikTok account now. Over 3,000 followers. Not huge by TikTok standards, but, you know, a healthy following. And some of these videos do have hundreds of thousands of views.
- [24:52]
Mike Ettenberg
We've done Pretty well on there was interesting. So in, in 2022, what you could do is you could run an ad and it was like, it was almost like a shotgun effect that TikTok would do where they would blast it out to this huge group of people at a very small cost per click. So conversion rate was low, but the amount you were spending was like nothing. So you were able to make a lot of money off of this thing. And then as time would go on, its algorithm would try and niche down as to who your audience was and the ad would stop performing once it did that. But you could literally turn the ad off and duplicate it and it would just start again at that shotgun approach and it would like narrow itself down. So it was like once every one to two weeks, you would turn the ad off and just refire the exact same ad again and you'd get another one to two weeks of use out of this same thing. And so I gained that system for a pretty long time until they kind of caught on. I changed their algorithm and then that approach didn't work anymore. And once that happened, we pretty much left, left the TikTok platform because we found success on Meta that was more consistent and kind of been all in on medicines.
- [25:57]
Nick Loper
Okay, yeah, get while the getting's good and, and figure out how it, how it all works. You played around with TikTok shop or is it still like we're driving all the traffic back to our own Shopify store?
- [26:07]
Mike Ettenberg
We drive it back to our own Shopify store. We've dabbled and tried. I haven't been able to find much success on TikTok Shop, but I do have friends that are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year through a TikTok shop only. So there's definitely opportunity there for the right products and I think the right price point. I think if you're in like the thirty or so dollar range and you get those impulsive buyers.
- [26:30]
Nick Loper
Yeah, more impulse buy price point. That makes sense.
- [26:32]
Mike Ettenberg
Exactly. But once we kind of got into that, you know, that $80 range, people have to think a little harder about making that purchase. And so the impulse is kind of removed, which I think is what TikTok shop's all about.
- [26:43]
Nick Loper
All right, well, if you know anybody, send them my way because that's something we haven't covered yet on the show. It might be interesting to always these up and coming up and came platforms.
- [26:51]
Mike Ettenberg
I've got some people for you. I'll send, I'll send your way.
- [26:53]
Nick Loper
Okay, beautiful. So now the focus is on Meta. This is going to be more consistent. This is Facebook and Instagram, just a huge, huge audience and all the data points in the world on how to best target these people and running the same kind of ad. And I appreciate you painting the visual of, like, the slow mo. No, they're falling, so that makes sense.
- [27:16]
Mike Ettenberg
So, yeah, we moved everything over to meta. We started to use that ad. We kind of created some new versions of it, and then we started to test just still image. Image ads. And the still image ads have had much more stability than the videos. Videos are kind of fun, but they seem to fade out quicker. You know, if you see the video once and then you see it a second time, you're much more likely to just click past it because you already know what's going to happen. Whereas an image kind of burns a picture in someone's mind, I guess you could say.
- [27:46]
Nick Loper
Yeah.
- [27:47]
Mike Ettenberg
And if they see it again, it's again, top of mind. All the information that you wanted presented to them is instantly back at the front of their mind. And it's another one of those touch points that you statistically need about 7 to get your sale. So still ads have been our new bread and butter. And what we've done to take us up to that seven figure point.
- [28:07]
Nick Loper
Yeah, you have the initial awareness and then onto interest, attraction, desire. I don't know what the acronym was, but something like that. Where, okay, first I got to know you exist, and then I got to be, why should I care? Why do I need this in my life? Like, okay, now I'm ready to trust you enough to do business with you and go buy the thing. Is there a metric for, like, cost per sale or, like, cost of acquisition? How do you think about that in terms of return on ad spend through meta?
- [28:34]
Mike Ettenberg
Yeah, so it varies for us depending on the time of year. And again, we're only three, you know, a little over three years in. So we're still learning some of these curves. For the most part, you're looking at. During the good season, it costs about $15 to acquire a customer.
- [28:48]
Nick Loper
There's the good season. The, like, Q4, like holiday season, or is that, like.
- [28:52]
Mike Ettenberg
No way. Q4 is terrible for us, which is. Is interesting.
- [28:56]
Nick Loper
Well, it's wintertime. Who's buying sunglasses in the middle of winter?
- [28:58]
Mike Ettenberg
Exactly. But so for us, we really see the uptick starts to happen around April, and it goes through around September. So from like, April to September and spring and summer months, okay, everyone's getting ready for their, you know, starting to get sunny out. They want to get their sun outfits together. Start thinking about sunglasses. You know, getting ready to go on vacation. Got to get a new set of sunglasses for your new vacation, right? So we see like a huge spike in demand when it's like nice sunn weather outside, whereas when it's like gloomy. Sales obviously still come in, but it costs almost double to acquire those customers.
- [29:31]
Nick Loper
Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, there's some seasonality to the business for sure. More on Mike's meta strategy in just a moment. Plus the surprising personal touch he includes with every order right after this Creating really great retail experiences is tough, especially if you've got multiple stores, teams of staff, fulfillment centers, separate workflows. It's a lot to deal with, but with Shopify Point of Sale, you can do it all without complexity. Shopify's Point of Sale system is a unified command center for your retail business, both online and in store. One thing that's really cool about Shopify POS is you can keep customers coming back with personalized experiences and collect that all important first party data to give your marketing teams a competitive edge. Even if that marketing team is just you. Now how about some data to back that up? Businesses on Shopify POS see real results, including a 22% better total cost of ownership and benefits equivalent to an 8.9% uplift in sales. Want more? Check out shopify.com sidehustle that's all lowercase and learn how to create the best retail experiences without complexity. Again, that's@shopify.com Sidehustle you hear that? That's the sound of your marketing working. And as an entrepreneur, you know that every call is an opportunity, but if you miss it, potential customers don't wait. They just call the next business on their list. With our sponsor OpenPhone, you'll never let another customer's call go unanswered. OpenPhone is the number one modern business phone system that helps you separate your personal life from your growing business. For just 15 bucks a month, you get complete transparency and visibility into everything happening with your business phone. OpenPhone works through an app on your phone or computer and integrates with HubSpot and hundreds of other systems. One of my favorite features is their AI powered call transcripts and summaries so you can streamline client communication and get a summary of every phone call with action items right when you hang up. That means no more note taking, no more forgotten to DOS. And right now Openphone is offering side hustle show listeners 20% off your first six months. When you go to openphone.com sidehustle that's O P E N P H o N E for 20% off 6 months openphone.com sidehustle and if you have existing numbers with another service, OpenPhone will port them over at no extra charge on the targeting side, just kind of letting Meta's algorithm do its thing. You mentioned maybe retargeting or maybe email marketing. Like what else is happening there?
- [32:09]
Mike Ettenberg
Our current approach right now is we have top of the funnel ads and our top of the funnel ads, it's still a conversion campaign when you go into Meta, but the conversion event we're looking for is website visitors. So it's not traffic. You know, they're trying to send you better quality traffic through this point. And what we see is we track through Google and we can see if somebody's actually spending a good amount of time and clicking around on our website versus like arriving and bouncing. And so we do that with interest targeting. The three that are working for us right now are a stack of law enforcement interests, a stack of firefighter interests, and then a 2% lookalike audience. And we have different style top of funnel ads for each of those. But the point of them is to get them to the site and then they get hit with a pop up for 15% off their first order and to sign up for our email newsletter.
- [32:59]
Nick Loper
Okay, is there a pretty good take rate on that 15% offer?
- [33:02]
Mike Ettenberg
We had about 4% conversion rate on those that are signing up for our email. So still playing with it, trying to get a little bit better, but they do convert.
- [33:11]
Nick Loper
Yeah. Can you explain what a 2% lookalike is?
- [33:13]
Mike Ettenberg
So a 2% lookalike, so we stack everything together. So we, we run a look like audience on Instagram Engagers, we run a look like audience on Facebook Engagers, we run a lookalike audience on purchases. And then we've also taken our, our email list and loaded that in to Meta and use that as well. So we basically stack 2% lookalike on all of those things and the type of creative that works with what's, what's.
- [33:42]
Nick Loper
The 2% refer to.
- [33:43]
Mike Ettenberg
It's basically like how broad you can do anywhere from like a 1% to a 10% audience look alike. And the, the smaller it is, the more like niche it is, but the audience level is smaller and so you can kind of play in a range there. And we've just found that the 2% seems to be the, the sweet spot for our brand.
- [34:03]
Nick Loper
This would be like more, more specific, more targeted rather than less.
- [34:07]
Mike Ettenberg
It's Looking at the things that are similar about all the people in that profile and finding a cold audience that.
- [34:14]
Nick Loper
Has those same key variables, which is a incredible capability. Like, I love the ability to do this.
- [34:21]
Mike Ettenberg
Yeah, this is full blown meta. The magic of meta is there. You know, they just know so much about our customers. Probably know more about me than I know about me.
- [34:29]
Nick Loper
Yeah. Upload your customer list and say, find me more people like these people and they can do it.
- [34:34]
Mike Ettenberg
Exactly. And the, you know, the ad copy or the, the style that seems to work well with them is like founder, founder videos, founder images. So through that resonates with that group. Whereas the firefighter interest has firefighter style images, videos and law enforcement, same thing.
- [34:52]
Nick Loper
Okay, is this you on camera modeling.
- [34:54]
Mike Ettenberg
On the founder stuff? Yeah, there's, I've been on some different interviews and things like that. So. So yeah, it's, it's me, which I was not comfortable with for a very long time. But you know, when you put your face to a brand, it, it really does help to kind of build that trust that people are looking for. So it works okay.
- [35:13]
Nick Loper
Yeah, for sure. And yeah, people connect with that and say, yeah, I want to support this guy.
- [35:17]
Mike Ettenberg
So we have that running. Then we have a retargeting purchase one. So anybody over the last 90 days who's been to our website gets targeted again. But that one is a purchase campaign, so it's more expensive to get them to the site. But they've already been vetted because anybody in that list has already shown an interest in our products and then we retarget via Google.
- [35:37]
Nick Loper
And are you still running these yourself or did you hire the kids from the patio in Coronado?
- [35:41]
Mike Ettenberg
No, no, I, I do everything on meta myself. And then I hired someone for Google because Google's an interesting animal that someday I would love to really learn. But it's, it's a lot more complex on the surface. And so it was worth it to.
- [35:58]
Nick Loper
Get a specialist for Google Ads or for SEO.
- [36:00]
Mike Ettenberg
For ads. Yeah.
- [36:02]
Nick Loper
Did you expect to become. Have to become a meta ads expert here in the FHIR service just like, oh, now I know all about this retargeting and different types of layered campaigns, like, oh, we're going to start off with the traffic campaign and then we're going to retarget those people who were most engaged and now it's a conversion campaign and that brings down our cost of acquisition. It's like you're speaking a completely different language than I imagine you were three years ago.
- [36:25]
Mike Ettenberg
It's pretty funny. But what I've realized is that I love it. So if I had found myself in this career to start with, I think, you know, marketing would have been something that really would have like fired me up. I just, you know, I never, I never knew I didn't try. Right. But I missed the fire service for sure. But this is definitely. I could talk about marketing and for hours. It's just puts a smile on my face and to be around other people who are doing it and hearing, you know, what's working for them and you know, trying it out in your own ad account and it's just, it's so fun.
- [36:57]
Nick Loper
Well, you must be doing something right. So I googled, I imagine what would be a valuable keyword for you. Sunglasses for firefighters. I see frontline optics in these sponsored listings and then it looks like ranked third organically, something is working. Lots of happy five star reviews on here.
- [37:13]
Mike Ettenberg
Yeah, we're doing well. It's been a process, it's been a fun road. You know, we're just getting started really, if you think about how big the sunglasses industry is altogether. But we're definitely carving out our space as, you know, the go to brand for first responders.
- [37:27]
Nick Loper
Yeah. Outranking Oakley at this point. So let's keep it up, keep it going. Anything specific that you did on the SEO side?
- [37:35]
Mike Ettenberg
Yeah, I mean, I've got the basics of SEO down, but it's an area that I lack in, you know, I don't speak the SEO language and that's an area that in 2025 that I'm going to be looking to learn more about so I can better implement and better, better position the, the company for some, some more organic growth.
- [37:53]
Nick Loper
Are you selling on Amazon at all?
- [37:55]
Mike Ettenberg
I think that we may look into it now in 2025 with a couple of our model lines. But I enjoy the fact that I have complete control over like my customer experience, customer journey. You know, when you reach out to us, you get a human that is going to contact you. We put a lot of value in making sure, you know, the people come first. I really like what Zappos did and being such a, like customer service focused company.
- [38:19]
Nick Loper
Yeah.
- [38:19]
Mike Ettenberg
That, that's kind of the foundation for what I wanted to have happen here. It's my fellow brothers and sisters and that are first responders. I want to make sure that I take care of them. And so having like above and beyond customer service was important and if I go to these marketplaces, I don't have as much control of that.
- [38:37]
Nick Loper
Yeah, one advantage that you have is that you have the traction in the email list and the audience where, if you want it to launch on Amazon, you could absolutely provide that algorithm with its own little boost and drive your own sales and traffic and get rewarded for that versus so many people historically. The play is, I'm going to start on Amazon and I'm going to take advantage of Amazon's traffic and customer base and then I'm going to try to wean myself off it. I think it's so much harder to go that direction. Amazon customers are Amazon customers and they're happy to stay in there.
- [39:07]
Mike Ettenberg
Yeah, I haven't yet looked. I know there's tools that you can get to see if people are like, looking up your keywords. So I'd probably get one of those tools and see. But I'm, I'm pretty sure just based off of how much like direct traffic and Google traffic we get, that people see our ads and they go to other places to come to our website. So I wouldn't be surprised at all if people are jumping on Amazon and typing in frontline optics. And if they don't see it, it's, you know, that's where the question mark comes in. Do they then go find us somewhere else or do they then click on somebody else's product and I, you know, I've lost them. So I think having some exposure with maybe a limited product line on Amazon is, is probably smart for us, but the idea would be obviously, to keep the majority of the traffic coming to the website.
- [39:48]
Nick Loper
Yeah, that's funny because I've done the same thing. It's like, you know, some probably saw some ad or, you know, been targeted for something. Let me go see if it's available on Amazon. And if it's not, of course they're going to serve you up, your competitors, they're going to serve up alternatives because they want to make the conversion. But if the branding is strong enough, it's like, no, no, no, I guess I'll go order directly through their site, because that was the thing that I wanted. So I imagine. And if the marketing and branding and positioning has been strong enough, like, no, no, no, I'm going to go do business directly with Frontline.
- [40:17]
Mike Ettenberg
That's our hope. You know, it's, it's hard to. It's hard to see it. Right. That's one of those things you can't, can't necessarily track. You know, based off of how much growth we've had and our conversion rates and all of that, I feel like we're doing a pretty good Job of speaking to our audience and keeping them.
- [40:31]
Nick Loper
All right, so sales are cranking now. You've got the three Pl, the third party logistics, handling the fulfillment, the shipping. So you're not running through the poster or running, running back home and having the family because I imagine the order volume is a little today than it than it was the early days. At what point do you feel comfortable leaving the fire service and all that entails? Because it's like, well, if I stick it out for a few more years, I got this pension. It can be a hard gig to walk away from.
- [40:57]
Mike Ettenberg
It kind of happened out of necessity. So you know, we had found that success on TikTok. The company started to grow and it went from being kind of like a nothing to a six figure company overnight. And with that, you know, we started to go to trade shows and you know, opportunities were presenting themselves and I had taken vacation because this, it's called Vision Expo West. It's in Las Vegas. It came and my goal was to go there and I wanted to find a, like a high end lens provider and I wanted to find somebody who could do prescriptions.
- [41:27]
Nick Loper
This is a trade show for the glasses industry.
- [41:31]
Mike Ettenberg
Correct?
- [41:31]
Nick Loper
Okay, love it.
- [41:32]
Mike Ettenberg
In addition, it was like cool. Like I'm going to take my wife to Las Vegas, right? We haven't had time together. We've been with our kids. We're going to get people to watch our kids for us and the two of us are going to have this time. It'll be a work play like event for the two of us. And so we went there all work on that first two days and then the last day that we were there we went to go see the show o and we were hanging out together and I feel my phone start buzzing in my pocket and I look and it's fire department that's calling and they're calling to notify me that I'm, that I'm being forced to work the next day and that I need to basically get there. And it's like 10 o'clock at night right now I'm in Las Vegas. We flew there, right? There's no way I'm going to make it back in time. And I kind of notified them but it was that moment where I just kind of looked at my wife and I was like, we have this thing that is growing and it's not going to be able to grow to the point where I see it going if I keep having to answer this phone call, you know, and go back to work. Especially for one that's not providing us with any kind of balance. So at that point, you know, we kind of hit that moment where I was like, maybe, maybe the fire service isn't, isn't for us anymore. And you know, we start to go down this new venture and we did, we jumped off the cliff.
- [42:45]
Nick Loper
Well, really good that you had, you, you had lowered the height of the cliff. Which I think is maybe the most important thing is a lot of people would get that call or that text, hey, I need you, I need you in the office or I need you here by 8:00 tomorrow. And you have no control over your schedule, no control over your calendar. And it feels diminishing or almost, maybe humiliating is too strong. But it's like, it's just frustrating. Like, ah, you know, that's not what I was planning to do. And now I am not in control of my own time. And a lot of people, well, I don't have anything to fall back on. But you built this thing up to the point where you're like, hey, I think there's, there's an opportunity, here's the writing on the wall that we can go and, we can go and do this. We can pay ourselves, we can cut our own paycheck with sunglasses sales.
- [43:23]
Mike Ettenberg
Yeah, that was the start of it. We started to kind of think about it and within about 30 days we had decided that was what we were going to do and put in my notice. Yeah, left the fire department, became a full time sunglasses mogul, I guess you could say.
- [43:36]
Nick Loper
There you go. Full time sunglasses salesman. Where's your time going today? If there is such thing as a day in the life, I still split.
- [43:42]
Mike Ettenberg
My time a little bit. So the fire service and particularly being a paramedic is something that's very, very important to me. So I still teach and I teach at the local community college. I teach EMT and paramedic down there. That's my new side hustle, I guess you could say.
- [43:56]
Nick Loper
Nice. Nice. By choice. Yes.
- [43:58]
Mike Ettenberg
Yeah, Sunglasses are the main one. So generally I dedicate one day a week to teaching. And on the rest of them, I start off my day, I send a video message to all of my customers. So I use this app called Bonjouro and you can literally record yourself. And so I personally thank everybody who buys a pair of sunglasses from us with a video from me.
- [44:19]
Nick Loper
Oh my gosh. How many of these are you doing a day? There's gotta be dozens.
- [44:22]
Mike Ettenberg
It's like about, about 50 to 60 a day.
- [44:24]
Nick Loper
Oh my God. Okay.
- [44:26]
Mike Ettenberg
You know, but they're, you know, they're 15 seconds or so. It's a lot. But at the same time, I'm trying very hard to take an impersonal transaction and make it personal.
- [44:35]
Nick Loper
Yeah. This is the old example of do things that don't scale. Right.
- [44:39]
Mike Ettenberg
And some would argue that they, they do scale because it'll increase your LTV on a customer. Right?
- [44:45]
Nick Loper
Yeah. How do we turn a one time order into hopefully a customer for life?
- [44:48]
Mike Ettenberg
Exactly. And what's to say it doesn't scale? Because I can always hire somebody once it gets to the point where it's taking up hours of a day, whereas right now it's not. You know, they're quick.
- [44:59]
Nick Loper
Do people write you back? Like, what's the reaction that you get on those?
- [45:02]
Mike Ettenberg
People are pretty ecstatic. So the ones who write back are. They're all kind of blown away by the customer service.
- [45:08]
Nick Loper
Yeah. They're like, wait, but the founder of the company just sent me a personal video message. Like, that's really cool.
- [45:12]
Mike Ettenberg
Exactly. That doesn't happen. Right. And that's, that's, that's what we do. Right. We tr. We're trying to shake things up and do things a little differently and make people feel important because they are. Right. Like, my business wouldn't survive if there weren't people who were purchasing it. So I'm thankful for each and every one of those people who decides to, you know, take that gamble and buy from a company that they've never heard of before. You know, that's how I kind of start my day. I have a content day, so like on Fridays, I generally try and do all of my content. Whether I'm taking pictures of glasses, doing little videos of the glasses, preparing things for our graphics people to, to, to put sales together. That's kind of one of the days. And I guess what I should say is I try and chunk my days out with a particular task, so I'm not jumping from one thing to the next to the next. Over that day, I kind of put my mindset to a particular task and I just bang that out for, for the duration of the day. But it always starts with my thank yous.
- [46:03]
Nick Loper
How do you keep coming up with new content ideas after three years of doing this? How many different pictures of sunglasses can you take? It's, that's what I, I worry about. But you've managed to be a pretty prolific content creator.
- [46:15]
Mike Ettenberg
You just get different pictures of different people in different environments. You start looking into different markets. Like, what does a first responder do on their day off? And start kind of looking at the. Those spaces. You know, a lot of it is a rinse and repeat, but just a refresh. Right. So this worked, this angle worked, this headline worked. But we just need to freshen up the image or freshen up. It's a different time of year. Like right now, the gifting angle works really well. So a lot of those same graphics that worked in earlier, you change up the headline and it's like a gifting style headline and it'll start to deliver. Yeah, just play around with it. You gotta be testing always. You never know what, what's gonna work or what the algorithm's gonna like.
- [46:52]
Nick Loper
Yeah. Tweaking different headlines and images and angles and playing around with different split testing of the ads and ad copy and everything that goes into it. Trying to keep growing this thing. And it sounds like it's growing really well.
- [47:03]
Mike Ettenberg
Yeah, it's scary.
- [47:06]
Nick Loper
You mentioned the initial traffic campaign was kind of a. Just a donation to the Zuckerberg fund of like, well, great, thanks for getting me some visitors, but no customers. Anything else that stands out to you as a mistake or even a surprise, good or bad along the way?
- [47:22]
Mike Ettenberg
Yeah, you know, the most recent one would be like this recent Black Friday. Right. So everyone gets caught up in this concept that, you know, Black Friday, Cyber Monday is the super bowl season of sales. And you hear these stories that there's companies that do, you know, 90% of their sales in those four days, you know, or just a month, month in November. Even though looking at our sales history, we always have this dip in like October and November. I decided that this year I was going to go all in on ads for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And it was a big skinning the knees moment because it, it did not work. Now, we brought in a lot of new customers, we brought in a lot of people into the brand, but it was not profitable. And we spent a lot of money to kind of get there there. So that was just essentially acting off of emotion instead of acting off of the math and the data and the data and the math all told me not to do it, but I had to try it anyway. You know, that's a big one. But they're always going to happen. And it's okay because think about a little kid, right? A little kid touches a hot stove or falls and skins their knee from doing something and they, they learn a lesson and they don't. They don't do that particular thing. Again, we're doing the same thing. Right. I'm a. I'm a toddler when it comes to business. So the only way I'm going to learn, learn what to do or not to do is to experience it, feel the pain, and know that that wasn't something to do again and learn from it. And that's how we grow and we get better.
- [48:46]
Nick Loper
Yeah, you never know until you try, but it can be painful. And hopefully, you know, the company is young. Hopefully. People like the glasses, they tell five friends, right. Like, there's ways where maybe over the lifetime value, that customer may hopefully break even and become profitable on those ad costs, even if it wasn't, you know, in Monthly one.
- [49:03]
Mike Ettenberg
Exactly. It's all about that lifetime value, right?
- [49:06]
Nick Loper
Yeah. What's next? What's next for you in Frontline? What are you excited about these days?
- [49:09]
Mike Ettenberg
Just continuing to grow. You know, I want to grow. I want to expand the team. One of the things we're trying to do is get these things, what's called ANZ Z87+ certified. And so once they are certified from that level, they become true eye protection and not just sunglasses. And with that comes the ability to bid on, like, contracts. So you can bid on contracts with the military, you can bid on contracts for, you know, know, having these sunglasses issued as a piece of ppe, essentially. So new firefighter comes on board, they get their set of turnouts, they get their helmet, and they get an issued pair of protective eyewear that is from a, you know, first responder brand, supports first responder brands, and it just would, would make for a good fit.
- [49:51]
Nick Loper
How hard is it to get this certification? That sounds like a great path forward.
- [49:55]
Mike Ettenberg
I'm not going to say that it's simple, but it's not incredibly difficult. The, the hardest part about it is, is you make a mold that you think is going to work on paper, right. And then you put it through the test and it has a fail point. And then you have to go back to the drawing boards and do another mold. And each one of those molds can cost you anywhere from like 3 to $5,000. So the process to get there can be expensive, but the upside is dramatic.
- [50:20]
Nick Loper
So, okay, well, we've got an episode on landing government contracts. I'll have to send that one to you after the fact because it's like, hey, this is, this is the largest customer in, in the world. You know, they print the money. Let's go after this, guys.
- [50:31]
Mike Ettenberg
Absolutely. Please send it.
- [50:33]
Nick Loper
Well, very cool. Frontline optics dot com. That's where you can find Mike and grab a pair of those glasses yourself. If you are a first responder. Or just, you know, want a pair of durable sunglasses? Go check them out over there. Let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for side Hustle Nation.
- [50:48]
Mike Ettenberg
Mindset is key to, to everything. You always hear people talk about, you know, a glass being half empty, you know, or half full. If you look at the downside of things and kind of have this poor me mentality, you're never going to see, like, the silver lining of a, of a learning opportunity. So having that mindset, knowing that you need to try, that you're going to fail, but with each failure comes a teachable lesson that will make you successful in the future is. Is what's most important. So have that mindset. Be ready for these things to happen. Learn from them as they happen. Take the wins as wins, but then also don't get so excited about the wins. Look at them the same way and figure out, why did you win so that you can continue to win. So it's, you know, it's all in your mind that that would be the, the biggest thing you could do is make sure you, you have a good, solid mindset.
- [51:35]
Nick Loper
Yeah, this is something that comes up more often than you'd like to think, you know, you know, it's something we work on with the kids all the time. My son had a, they were riding high after their first basketball game. He's in third grade, so it's like pretty sloppy looking basketball to begin with. But they crushed in their first game, quadrupled the other team. Points game two, different story. They're on the receiving end of this shellacking, and it was this wake up call, like, well, yeah, you know, you can't dribble the ball to your shoulder. It's going to get stolen, you know, so this mindset, you don't lose, you learn, and hopefully you learn. And otherwise you did, you did lose some. But with every setback comes this opportunity. And mindset, it really is, is the key to appreciating that and not being down in the dumps. Woe is me. I'm an abject failure. It's never going to get better. Mike, this has been awesome. Really appreciate you joining me. A couple takeaways before we wrap. I really like this kind of example of product plus niche. Like, I think it'd be really tough to start just a broad sunglasses brand to use your example. But if we sell sunglasses, durable sunglasses for first responders, like, okay, now we got a niche. Now we can speak to this audience. I like the idea of targeting uniform jobs like, look, this is the one area of personalization of style that I can get. Like what other jobs are out there wearing uniforms that you might be able to to pivot and target to. I like that. I love the influencer outreach strategy. The micro influencers. We're going to send out a thousand free pairs and try and build up some goodwill within this community. We're going to recruit ambassadors for the brand. That was really cool. And then as with E commerce and really probably any brand, it's this game of you know, lifetime value minus cost of acquisition equals profitability. Right. And so what's our customer going to be worth? You know we don't know starting out, you know, hopefully it's more than a one time order and then how much does it cost to acquire that customer through either our own blood, sweat and tears organically or through paid acquisition channels. And it's a game that you found has been has been really exciting to learn and play. Your listener bonus for this episode is my list of 25 e commerce niche ideas to get your creative juices flowing. Download that for free at the show Notes for this episode. Just follow the show notes link in the episode description. It'll get you right over there. And if you like this one, you're wondering what to listen to next. I've got a recommendation for you. A couple e commerce recommendations for for you. I think we'll get a kick out of number 589 with Lou Rice. This is the story of a really novel idea like a little silicone strap that goes on the back of your Kindle device. And when we spoke Lou was selling the crap out of these things and a similar strategy targeting book influencers on TikTok. It was kind of how the initial traction game and then she went on Amazon after the fact but really simple product, great marketing behind it and some great results. And then we've got another one. I'll dig up the episode for you. But it was on a skincare brand and it was similar like paid acquisition. And then what was cool about that was like it was a recurring subscription survey. Hey every month you're going to need to renew your skincare tube or bottle or whatever it was. And so that was good. That was like Pretty Boy was the brand. So it's all like hey Pretty Boy kind of stuff. So really a couple other e comm examples to get those get those juices flowing for you. But big thanks to Mike for sharing his insight. Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. As always you can hit up Sidehustlenation.com deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share with a friend. Fire off that text message. Hey, maybe we should start our own sunglasses brand. Hey, check this out. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen and I'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show.