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The Side Hustle Show
729: $500,000 in Hamster Ball Sales? How a College Student Brought a New Product to Life
00:39:46
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- [00:00]
Nick Loper
If you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're hoping people find your listing or
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Alex
you're waiting for them to walk in.
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Nick Loper
Whatnot lipsthat this is the live shopping platform that's exploding right now. On Whatnot, you go live and you sell directly to real people in real time. They see what you've got, they ask questions, and they buy. And what's crazy is whatnot buyers spend more than an hour a day in the app. So whether it's beauty products, collectibles, thrift store finds, electronics, even cookies, sellers are building real thriving businesses on whatnot. I've seen the rankings, I've seen the revenue numbers. And the number of sellers making over a million dollars on Whatnot has doubled in the last year. Now's the time to give it a try for yourself. For a limited time, Whatnot will match your first $150 sold in the first month. Visit whatnot.com sell to start selling.
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Alex
That's w h a t
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Nick Loper
whatnot.com sell
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Alex
half a million dollars in hamster balls. What's up? What's up? Nick Loper here. Welcome to the side Hustle show. It's the entrepreneurship podcast you can actually apply. And so here's the high level strategy. And you've probably heard this before. Take a product that already exists. It's already got some level of validation, some level of proven demand, and then improve upon it in some meaningful way. Today's guest did just that in the small pet space, starting as a side project in college. And the business is growing really fast. From happy habitats.net Ethan Haber. Welcome to the side Hustle Show.
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Ethan Haber
Nick. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here and I'm excited to talk with you about my business.
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Alex
This is a really cool story. Stick around. We're talking about how to identify gaps in the market, how to bring your idea to life and and how to get it in front of your target customers so they can buy. So, Ethan, you just landed this huge deal, maybe the biggest in the history of the company. Huge order from this big box retailer. It's going to be in 1500 stores nationwide, which is really, really cool. But it didn't start that way. Take me back a few years. You're on the quad and inspiration strikes for your first product.
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Ethan Haber
Sure. So you must have done your homework. You know me pretty well. My sophomore year at college at Wake Forest University, Mooksi and I were hanging out on the quad one day. He's in his Hamster ball. And I'm just chasing him in circles. And I turn and I see a woman walking her dog. And I have this thought, why can't I walk my hamster? And that was the idea that metaphorically and literally got the ball rolling.
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Alex
Nice, nice. So the main product is this kind of new and improved hamster ball.
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Ethan Haber
Yeah, we have two utility patents under our name. Our main item is the Roam. It's a heavily improved upon small pet exercise ball. It has, you know, major innovations for the item that haven't come about since its launch in the 70s. And then our other item that's currently on store shelves is the halo. And the halo is this orange ring that you can snap the hamster ball into. And now I can carry it around while the hamster runs so I can take my pet for a walk, kind of guide them around the world.
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Alex
Okay.
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Ethan Haber
Then we have a new item, Burrow Bricks, which is launching with this major retail partner you opened with. The Burrow bricks are three by three clear plastic squares you can snap together to create hides, mazes and permanent enclosures for your small animal. Think of it like Legos meets hamster habitats.
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Alex
Yeah, see through Legos. So what happens next? So you say like, why can't I take my hamster for a walk? But then there's a long road and sometimes an expensive road in product development and manufacturing to actually bring something to life here.
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Ethan Haber
I like to say that we failed upwards because everything that could go wrong, you know, did go wrong. But we're still here and we're making it happen. So I was studying entrepreneurship in college and I signed up for this incubator startup lab at my university and, and they provided, you know, preliminary funding, helped me create my llc. I pitched my idea for this hamster ball, this safer hamster ball to Roam to a design firm in, in Edgewater, New Jersey. They're known as P9 Design. They do consumer goods for major household brands. Honeywell, Swell, Vixo, oxo, et cetera. There's something in your house that this design firm has made. And I pitched them my idea.
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Alex
Okay.
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Ethan Haber
And we did a little homework. We discovered it was innovation in a stagnant space that was also niche, which is kind of, you know, right where you want to be today. P9 Design is a 1/3 equity owner of my business alongside me and my father. And they put in sweqity. So that's one of the main ways we were able to grow to where we are with this. It was this amazing design firm that we're Partnered with.
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Alex
Okay, so instead of saying I'm going to design this myself, I'm going to find a freelance product designer on Upwork or someplace. I'm going to go to a proven one of the best in the business. But it comes at a cost. And that's the cost of giving up some ownership in the company.
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Ethan Haber
Yeah, Most entrepreneurs, by the time they sell their business, which I'm not there yet, mind you, they only own 7% of the business when that transaction happens. So giving up equity for valuable partnership is a common thing. But dollars are things you need now, but equity is what grows. So that's what you want to hold on to as much as possible.
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Alex
Sure. What do you think made them willing to take a shot on you? Because I imagine they got Fortune 500 companies kind of knocking on their door. These got these existing clients and they're like this college kid just sent us a cold email. But I guess we could roll the dice and see what happens.
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Ethan Haber
I think that's why willing to take a shot on me because I was something different. And they were just putting up man hours. And if they have, you know, 30 plus employees and they're working on, you know, 50 to 100 different projects at a time, it would just start off with them doing it at one, having one person do an hour here, an hour there. But now it's grown to the point where we have three or four people who I talk with weekly and we have constant deliverables that we need done and it's very exciting for everyone involved.
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Alex
Okay, you mentioned the patent protection on the product improvements. At what stage does that come into play? Is that in this design phase, patents
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Ethan Haber
take forever to get issued. We issued the provisional patents. We incorporated in October 2019. We issued our provisional patents to the United States Patent and Attorney Office, I think in 2021. And then both of our utility patents were issued in 2025, one in February and one in November. So you can see how the timeline kind of stretches out. Yeah, it takes a long time to get that protection.
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Alex
Do you think that's important to have as a product entrepreneur?
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Ethan Haber
If you're creating a physical product, for sure, there's two types of patents. There's design patents and utility patents. Patents are form and utility patents are function. So there are instances where you would prefer to have a design patent. But generally speaking, a utility patent is your bread and butter. And if you're able to capture a significant market share of a niche space and you're eating into your competitors profit margins, all of a sudden Your utility patent becomes very attractive because if they buy you, then they're going to be the only ones who can make your item.
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Alex
Oh, okay. Because there's some level of we've innovated and now you can't copy us because it's theoretically protected.
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Ethan Haber
Yeah. So if, if you create this new innovation that only you can make and it takes hold of the market, that becomes extremely attractive to anyone in the space.
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Alex
Got it. Okay. So partnering with a design firm applying for these patents, understanding it's going to be some years down the road before they ever get approved. But provisional patent application, then you could say patent pending. What happens after that in terms of finding a manufacturing partner?
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Ethan Haber
So we manufacture in Mexico, and I'm pretty sure that we met our manufacturing partner through a connection that a speake at my entrepreneurship incubator knew. So it was like a third hand connection that I was able to make the introduction to. And now we're pumping out hamster balls with them monthly.
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Alex
What was the minimum order here when
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Ethan Haber
we started running Hamster balls in 2021? We did one 5,000 unit run and now we're doing orders bimonthly. So we, we send the order, you know, month one, they make it month two, and then it cycles. And I just had 10,000 hamster balls made in the last three weeks. And I have to put in another order for more because the product is growing exponen on Amazon.
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Alex
Isn't that funny how it starts to scale? It's like this huge leap of faith to plunk down the original 5,000 unit order, which I don't know what's like the unit cost or how much was that first production run.
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Ethan Haber
I wouldn't want to disclose the financials, but it definitely is a big leap of faith.
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Alex
Yeah, talk to me about the existing competition because on the one hand, this is where your product, it can be legitimately labeled new and improved. And there's some validation where a basic hamster ball has been around for decades. And so there's some level of proven demand, but the question mark is like, would people pay for a premium, newer, better version of that?
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Ethan Haber
That was a question that we, you know, believe the answer was yes. It took a while for us to confirm. The answer is yes. We started selling Hamster balls in 2021. Now, early 2026, late 2025 is where we finally saw our belief actualized. The main competition, there's only 2 or 3 manufacturers of small pet exercise balls in North America and pumping out, you know, millions of hamster balls a year. There's 25 million small pets owned in the world. Six plus million in the United States. And these are pets that only have a life cycle of two to three years. So you can imagine the amount of small pet exercise equipment that gets moved.
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Alex
Yeah. Were you neck deep in that total addressable market research before you jumped in? You say, like, okay, there's 6 million in the U.S. like, okay, if they buy a ball every two years, like, I don't know what, what the math looks like or the research looked like
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Ethan Haber
behind that, a lot of research went into and appa, The American Pet Products association is where I got a lot of my information from, giving that it's a niche space and 90% of the pet market is dog. If you want to learn some facts on small animal purchasing patterns, you got to kind of do your homework and dig pretty deep. No, small pet is something that has remained a small but sizable niche in the pet space. It's. It's here to stick around. It's growing, and I'm very grateful to be part of that space.
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Alex
Are you doing the math, like, early on, like, in this kind of ideation phase, like, okay, there's 6 million hamsters in the U.S. if I can capture 1%, if I can capture 10%, like, oh, that's half a million units a year at this price, you know, are you, are you doing some of that calculation early on? And maybe that's part of the, part of the pitch to the design firm. Like, look at the size of the opportunity here.
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Ethan Haber
Yeah, that is part of the pitch. And you're dead on the money because it's a niche space and there's only two or three competitors that haven't innovated in, you know, decades. While it is very much an uphill battle, you can see the real opportunity of if I'm able to capture even a small portion of the market share, there is sizable opportun opportunity.
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Alex
Got it. Okay, so you land 5,000 units. And now comes the fun part of like, well, how do I find these small pet owners and convince them to buy my thing instead of the other stuff that they've been buying for decades? What happens first on kind of the marketing and promotion side?
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Ethan Haber
So the first thing was our molds to actually manufacture the products. You know, we. We manufacture in Mexico, but the molds are made in China, and you have to ship the molds from China to Mexico. When we ship those molds, like I said, we incorporated in 2019. It was right when Covid hit. And then all of a sudden our mold make the products are stuck on a boat right outside the port of Los Angeles for nine plus months, waiting to port.
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Alex
Oh my gosh, so frustrating. And you're sitting there like, okay, well, I can, I guess work on the website. I can work on some potential retail partnerships down the road. But it's just kind of sitting there like in this waiting game, this holding period.
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Ethan Haber
Yeah. Where we have no inventory, we have all this invested capital into the molds, you know, which are not cheap to create, and then all of a sudden they're stuck for months waiting to arrive at the factory. So we did garner this momentum when we first had the molds made, and then that kind of fizzled out by the time we were able to actually get them to the factory.
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Alex
Yeah.
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Ethan Haber
But we were able to run our first run. And then here's another thing that happens. The first packaging partner my business worked with switched the packaging out on us on our first run. So it was like this nice corrugate box, colored, thick, secure. And they switched it out to some paperboard that they said in their tests had the same durability. And I had a pallet shipped to me and every single unit was damaged.
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Alex
Oh gosh.
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Ethan Haber
Because they switched the packaging from what we, you know, had created to be safe and secure. So then that was another thing that went wrong.
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Alex
What happens in that case is that just like a shipping insurance claim or. But, but it sets back your timeline.
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Ethan Haber
It sets back the timeline. We're able to recoup some of it on shipping, insurance, everything that's still at the factory. You know, we kind of just have to trash and redo in terms of packaging, the product itself is fine.
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Alex
Yeah.
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Ethan Haber
And I wish it was a situation where we could just say, hey, we're not going to pay because they didn't deliver what we bought, but our factory fronted the payment. So then if we didn't pay, we're screwing over our factory, not the packager. And the factory is not who screwed us over. It's the packager. So it would have soured our relationship early on. So that was another thing we just had to, you know, bite the bullet on. But we finally have the product. We have it in the right package. We get this retailer in the southeast of the United States, pet supermarket. They have 200 plus stores. They're a very nice local chain. We get them to take a chance on us and they're the, the first ones who stock our products in their store. And that was what allowed us to proof of concept and open conversations with other vendors.
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Nick Loper
After all those headaches and setbacks.
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Alex
Ethan has finally got his product on the shelves of a major regional pet products retailer. But it's not all sunshine and rainbows from there. Coming up, we're talking social media drama, pricing and profit margins and how to make your product stand out on the shelf. All that and more coming up right after this.
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Nick Loper
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- [15:36]
Alex
Okay? So before going dtc, before going through your own Shopify store, before going through Amazon even, it's retail partnerships.
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Ethan Haber
From the very beginning, it was retail partnerships. And we tried dtc, but we couldn't get DTC to stick early on. We now have it at a place where our business is 60% DTC, 40% wholesale. But we spent a long time exploring every avenue of selling off of our site, doing it off of Meta TikTok, and it did not work. Social media, everyone has an opinion and it's often negative. And the small pet space specifically is one where everyone has something to say. And it's very easy for someone to come out and say, hamster balls are bad, because the hamster ball is a divisive, you know, item in the small pet space, which is what my business sought to fix. We took all those pain points that exist on the item and mitigated them and removed them entirely. So we advertised that we have this safer ball and. But then you just have like thousands of comments on TikTok where people say, no, that's bad.
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Alex
Really? I had no idea. This is just the state of the Internet. Everything is super polarized and contentious. But apparently hamster balls aren't even immune from that.
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Ethan Haber
Yeah. So if you look at our reviews on Amazon, Walmart, Chewy. If you look at the amount of units we're moving, if you look at the customer feedback, you will see that the people who actually engage with the product and get their hands on it love it and recognize the quality of the item. But on social media, it's very quick for someone to just see a hamster ball and say, no, that's bad. But it's like we added seatbelts to the car.
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Nick Loper
Okay.
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Alex
That was the whole point. We're trying to improve upon what's out there. Okay, what was the pitch like to Pet Supermarket? This first store that says, yeah, we'll take a chance and stock this because it's not a small item. Like, they're gonna have to dedicate some shelf space to this. And it's kind of part of that retail calculus of, well, how much, how many do we think we could sell? And all that.
- [17:17]
Ethan Haber
I had a deck that I shared with them and went through, you know, the cost, the retail, the minimum order number, marketing, co ops, all that nitty gritty. And I know that they recognized it was innovation in the space and they loved the new item because these stores are hungry for new Pet products. They don't want to just keep selling the same things over and over. Because if you have innovation, that's how you're going to get people into your store when everything is going to transferring to, you know, more and more online. So they were eager to take a chance on us, do a test order. And we were very grateful for that opportunity.
- [17:48]
Alex
Is there a way to think about pricing to a retail partner or, you know, on a wholesale basis? My manufacturing costs were 5. I want to sell it for 20, and they're going to sell it for 40. Like how do you think about that value stack or that ladder?
- [18:01]
Ethan Haber
This was another thing that went wrong. We didn't know going into it. But in the pet space specifically, you want your manufacturing cost to be 1 5th or 1/6th of the final retail costs. So if I. If it cost me $2 to make, I would want it to retail for 10 to $12. And that's how you're able to, you know, everyone's able to eat between you, the distributor and the retailer. So my business has only been able to go direct because we didn't bake in margin for distribution when we designed our first products. And to kind of, you know, extrapolate on that a little bit, our first item, we decided to design it within a budget. So let's say we had $5 we could allocate to the item. We added all these extra bells and whistles, like really premium things. We have 10 plus magnets in the halo, and that was for legs to hang on the sides when it could have just as easily been velcro or snaps. But we felt that the magnets were premium and they were within the budget that we allocated the manufacturing cost to be all of a sudden Covid hits cost of manufacturer goes up, you know, 100%. And now this item that cost us $5 to make costs us $10 to make, and we can't afford to sell it. So what we ended up doing is removing the magnets. And now the legs just exist in the standing position on the product.
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Alex
Okay, Kind of roll with the punches. There doesn't have to be as over
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Ethan Haber
it once was, so it still accomplishes the same goal. We were able to kind of dig ourselves out of that corner there. But this new product, burrowbricks, which we're launching, we're really excited about because we shifted the mindset of designing within a budget to creating a premium product as cheaply as possible. So we have everything we want in the item. We sacrifice nothing. But we didn't Add any extra frills in order to create the item at a cost where we can, you know, then give it along to the consumer at a price that they can pay for it.
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Alex
Got it, got it. Okay. So the first retailer puts it on the shelf, they test it out, and then what happens after that? I mean, is it a home run out of the gate or they're like, I don't know. And then you're kind of back to the drawing board and trying to find other partners now that you kind of have a toehold in the Southeast.
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Ethan Haber
So we started with a color retail box for the Halo, which is the ring and the ball. And it wasn't moving on shelves. And our belief that it wasn't moving was because it was a static image of this dynamic product that hasn't really ever existed before. And the consumer wasn't readily understanding what the item was. Just from the box with the product inside. It wasn't really moving. At Pet Supermarket, we ended up picking up another small retailer in the Midwest, Feeders Pet supply. They have 60 plus stores. They're also a very great chain that we're grateful to have partnered with. Between Pet Supermarket and Feeders, we were able to prove the concept of our item, but the sales weren't very strong because of the packaging. So now we've redone the packaging again to this point where we have our product in a clear clamshell and there's a little hole that you can like get your fingers in and touch the product so the customer is actually able to engage with it on the shelves. And now it's moving much better. And similarly with the standalone exercise ball, we have it in a box that it protrudes from. So the face of the box, the ball sticks out, you can touch it, you can see the ergonomics of what makes it better. The patented ventilation pattern, the two step locking mechanism on the lid.
- [21:08]
Alex
Yeah, this is like a crash course in retail and merchandising. You're right, it's kind of, it's very a tactile thing and you want to be able to imagine your pet in it and like to touch and feel it. And yeah, I've seen some of the newer packaging and you're right. Like, oh, I could see why in comparison to the old one, I can see why this one sells much better.
- [21:26]
Ethan Haber
Yeah, you want to give the customer something that they can engage with on the retail shelf in a tactile real time experience.
- [21:33]
Alex
Are your products more expensive than the existing old school hamster balls?
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Ethan Haber
Our hamster ball The Rome sells $20 in store and $25 on online marketplaces. So it is more expensive. And that is because of the innovation that's gone into it. It's. It's much safer than the alternatives. And to kind of dive into that, the, the things that we got our patent on, traditional small pet exercise balls, the ventilation holes are large enough that the animal's paws can get stuck. And what that results in is injury or death. So what we did is we created this 2 millimeter paw protection ventilation pattern. So we have a plethora of very small holes that your hamster's paw won't get stuck in, but it provides the same, if not more, airflow to the animal. And then in addition to that, we have a two step locking mechanism on the lid. Traditional balls just have a quarter turn. It's a friction fit. And they're made of cheap plastic that warps over time. And as a consumer, I've actually seen my hamster, you know, press its hand against the ball to ply the plastic and have the lid pop off. And then all of a sudden it's trying to run under my fridge. That's like a real pain point that exists with hamster balls. Before my invention, what we added is a two step locking mechanism. So it has the regular quarter turn, but then it also has this bar you can push forward into place, and all of a sudden the lid is locked on so your pet is safe inside.
- [22:55]
Alex
Yeah. Premium pricing to justify a premium product.
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Ethan Haber
Yeah. There's a lot of thought that went into this little plastic hamster ball.
- [23:03]
Alex
Yeah. Do you ever see the movie Bolt?
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Ethan Haber
Yeah.
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Alex
Yeah. It's like my. This is probably a top five movie for me. Just because Rhino is. He's probably the all time best Disney sidekick.
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Ethan Haber
Yeah.
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Alex
Okay then. So we're doing the retail partnerships, you're doing trade shows, you're doing social media. But it's like there's a lot of. There's a firestorm. Social media is like, tread carefully. But for every hater you get, that kind of fuels the algorithm in a way. So has that driven sales or interest? Or is it just like, I don't want to deal with this?
- [23:30]
Ethan Haber
Social media hasn't driven sales. It has driven interest. It's gotten people to kind of know who our brand is, know who we are in a greater capacity. We have a TikTok account with 10,000 plus followers. We have a few viral videos, and that's been great for, you know, top of the funnel. But in terms of where we actually are able to Put our ad spend and convert to sales. It almost all goes to Amazon.
- [23:51]
Alex
Okay.
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Ethan Haber
Like instead of, you know, pushing videos or posts on social media, we're pushing keywords and SEO on platform and that's where we're seeing the results.
- [24:00]
Alex
Yeah. At what point do you start selling on Amazon? Is this right away?
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Ethan Haber
We started selling on Amazon maybe eight months, a year after we first launched and got those retail partnerships and even then that was another uphill battle. We are on our second marketplace partner. The first partner we had, we were spending $3 to make a dollar and they were blaming it on the price of our item. They didn't really understand the pet space. Our current partner, Marknology is a, is a phenomenal partner for marketplace accounts. They currently manage our Walmart, Amazon and Chewy and they themselves have an, have an in house pet brand. So they've really been able to take us to scale and grow and now Instead of spending $3 to make $1, we're spending $1 to make $3. It's the exact inverse of our prior situation.
- [24:49]
Alex
Yeah, that's the dream. If you can profitably spend money, do that all day long. For sure, it sounds like, look, we don't know the Amazon space. We're going to partner with a service provider, an agency that does. And so they're running the ad spend. They're running because Amazon, yes, it's a search engine, yes, it's you know, keyword driven. But especially for a new brand starting out new product, it's almost pay to play where it's like I gotta prove to the algorithm that it's real, that it has sales momentum, that has positive feedback. Before I ever hope to drive organic sales.
- [25:19]
Ethan Haber
It is very much that and it's also a full time job. Kudos to any founder that is able to handle it themselves. But in my experience when you have to wear so many hats and you have so many fires to put out out, you can't dedicate a hundred percent of your time to Amazon. So if you can bring a marketplace partner on, and our marketplace partner took a lower retainer rate in exchange for commission because they believed in the item. Which is one of the reasons we're able to make it work. But it is just not something in my experience that you can do on your own unless you're, you know, very familiar with the space.
- [25:49]
Alex
Yeah. So is that common where it's going to be ad spend plus a commission on, on sales?
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Ethan Haber
It depends on the deal you create with your, your partner. So most people will, will be happy to Just take a flat rate because then they no matter what. But in my experience, you'd like to have your affiliate have some skin in the game. So if they get 5%, 7%, 10% of the sale, then they're incentivized to sell as much as possible as opposed to, you know, if you're paying them a flat rate, then they just, you know, they're not, they're not incentivized to exceed expectations.
- [26:18]
Alex
Sure, sure, they've got some skin in the game. Downside to Amazon, well, maybe it kind of works out similarly to the retail stores. It's like, well because of the Amazon storage fees and the platform fees and the ad spend, maybe margin wise is similar. I'll just sell it wholesale to this guy and let him deal with moving it or marketing it.
- [26:36]
Ethan Haber
Yeah, we have relationships where we make less from wholesale than we do with Amazon, but at the same time we have relationships where we make more from wholesale than we do with Amazon. I mean, Amazon rakes you over the coals to take every nickel and dime they can along the way. You know, they have storage fees, they have shipping fees, they have the affiliate fee. You pay them 15% of your sale period, just to be on the site. And then if you want to have a prime one day shipping badge, you have to do FBA which is fulfilled by Amazon as opposed to FBM which is fulfilled by merchant. So they are very smart in the way that they tug the leash to take as much as they can from you but keep you engaged enough to keep going.
- [27:14]
Alex
Do you worry about providing Amazon with all this marketplace data around the product and customer behavior? Do you worry about the Amazon Basics version coming out of this next year and kind of undercutting you?
- [27:27]
Ethan Haber
No, because we have utility patents and we could send them a cease and desist if we didn't have intellectual property protection. I might be a little more worried. Okay, and, but we're also the only ones who can sell our product on marketplace. We don't allow like we don't work with any vendors who would be buying it from us wholesale to then relist it on Amazon and undercut our price. We work with brick and mortar stores who are allowed to sell it on their site. So Pet Supermarket feeders, Pet Supply had the listings on their site, but those don't aren't cross competes with marketplaces like Amazon has to in order to have the prime badge. It has to have the best price. So if Amazon has it as 25, but pet supermarket has it on their, you know, business site at 20, it's not gonna remove the prime badge.
- [28:12]
Alex
Got it.
- [28:13]
Ethan Haber
But if Amazon has it at 25 and Chewy has it at 22, it will remove the prime badge.
- [28:17]
Alex
Okay. Because Chewy is also selling through. Like, they could own the buy button.
- [28:21]
Ethan Haber
Yeah, Chewy's a marketplace, so. So ebay, Amazon, Walmart, Chewy. Somewhere where anyone can list the product and price it at whatever they want. It needs. Amazon needs to have the best price in order for your listing to, you know, convert.
- [28:34]
Alex
Okay. So these ones are prime eligible. So they're sitting in the Amazon warehouse, fulfilled by Amazon somewhere. This was awesome because, I mean, these things are flying off the shelves. 500 sold in the last month. Really cool to see. And this was 400 plus just a couple days ago when I was prepping for the episode. So there. It's moving, moving. It's accelerating.
- [28:53]
Ethan Haber
Yeah. The growth has been exponential. And. And behind the scenes, even I can tell you, I'll log into my Amazon fulfillment app right now and tell you that in the last 30 days, I'll give you a real time number. 671 units sold. So we're right, we're going to see that badge go up again very soon, which we're, you know, so jazzed about.
- [29:11]
Alex
That's really cool. Now, if you meet somebody on the street and you start talking about small pets and they want to buy from you, what's your preference? Is it that they go to Amazon to, like, boost that, you know, higher in the algorithm? Is it that they go direct to happyhabitats.net and you make the full sale margin? Do you tell them to go to the nearest store? What's the preferred path?
- [29:34]
Ethan Haber
If I had a preference, I'd say go to the site because that's where we'll make the most money. But being a realist, as long as they purchase the product, period, I am content.
- [29:43]
Alex
I don't care. Yeah, we'll take what we can get. Cool. More with Ethan in just a moment,
- [29:47]
Nick Loper
including his Dream 100 outreach strategy and how a cold message landed him a mentorship with one of the most powerful people in the pet industry.
- [29:56]
Alex
All that and more coming up right after this.
- [29:59]
Nick Loper
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- [32:12]
Alex
that I had written down. I think I saw an interview that you were doing in front of a booth. Like, is that to get in front of just other retailers as a potential partner?
- [32:22]
Ethan Haber
The majority of trade shows we do are vendor facing, so it's industry only. And then additionally you have these consumer facing shows. I've done local shows where like families will bring their kids. Done them in San Francisco, I've done them in Pittsburgh, I've done them in New Jersey, I've done them in New York.
- [32:37]
Alex
Okay.
- [32:38]
Ethan Haber
And that's just a great place to go and engage with your customer and show off the product and just meet everyday people who are interested in your brand.
- [32:45]
Alex
Yeah. Are the trade shows probably the best way to get in front of the potential stores that you want to stock your thing? It's like getting that FaceTime and they can meet you and they can see the thing versus, you know, lobbing off a cold call or a cold email into the Ethereum.
- [33:00]
Ethan Haber
Yeah, but it's a combination of both. When you're at a trade show, you know, the, the, the hot commodity people, the, the, the one that everyone wants to dance with at the dance, are so busy, so you need to get their attention before the show.
- [33:12]
Nick Loper
Okay.
- [33:12]
Ethan Haber
And I do that through a combination of emails, phone calls, and LinkedIn messages. And you set up meetings in advance of the trade show so that, and you remind them a few days before the show so that they stop by your booth and you can show them what's what. We have also had a plethora of legitimate contacts derived from just, you know, organic people passing by our booth. But if you really want to maximize your trade show time, you have to do outreach three months before the show, up until the day before the show.
- [33:38]
Alex
If I'm thinking on trying to reverse engineer this for another product, like I'm looking at, well, here's my Dream 100 list of potential partner stores and I'm looking like on LinkedIn for titles that say director of merchandising or you know, buyer type of titles. Like, is that who you're looking for?
- [33:53]
Ethan Haber
Yeah, I have a very dialed in list of relevant people for my space that I engage with a few times a year and update whenever there's a movement. But if you're just starting out, you can buy a list from a database and that'll get you the jumping off point you need. You can also curate your own using CRM software. So you can go on LinkedIn, look up the relevant people in this space, and then source their phone number and email. And then all of a sudden you have this list that you can reach out to.
- [34:22]
Alex
Got it. Is Walmart materially different from Amazon or is it similar? Like I got to send in my product now to Walmart? Or do you ship direct like. Or is there a third party logistics? Like there's lots of different places where you can buy this thing. I'm curious how it all works behind the scenes.
- [34:35]
Ethan Haber
Yeah, Walmart has a lot of nuance that separates it from Amazon because they have Walmart 1P and Walmart 3P, which is first party and third party. So they have Walmart.com and Walmart Marketplace. And if I sell to them on Walmart.com, they're buying it wholesale and then flipping it and they own the product and they can set the price at whatever they want, which they have done before and undercut our pricing on Amazon, which removed our prime button. So I haven't had great experience with Walmart.com, so we, but then there's also Walmart Marketplace where you own your product, you sell it off of their site. And Walmart Marketplace is where we have had success. And the reason I continue to engage with Walmart.com is there's that avenue for in store opportunity through their first party owned items.
- [35:15]
Alex
Okay. Yeah, it'd be cool to get on the shelves of the world's largest, you know, brick and mortar retail.
- [35:21]
Ethan Haber
Yeah, there's 5,000 Walmarts in, you know, the United States and Amazon does have a few like sold by Amazon brick and mortar places. But Amazon is definitely where a lot of the E. Com comes from. But Walmart would be a great partner in the sense that you could get a very large physical retail shelf presence.
- [35:38]
Nick Loper
Yeah.
- [35:39]
Alex
Do you see the direct to consumer like from your own brand like this from so many people who are kind of like now they're trying to wean off of the Amazon fire hose in a way and it's like, like I, I like it, I want to get while the getting's good, but also I'm nervous about it. So I want to, you know, be able to control more sales and get customer data and all the stuff that comes with running your own store.
- [35:59]
Ethan Haber
Like I said before, our sales are 60% direct to consumer, 40% wholesale. And of that 60% that's direct to consumer, 1% if any is off of our site directly. So, so, and that's just the nature of my specific niche business. I mean if you can get people to your site and it can get and it can convert, that's phenomenal. But Amazon is somewhat, is a proven marketplace where people go and are ready to purchase as opposed to my site which, you know, Joe Schmo might go to and has never seen before. They will be much more hesitant to purchase. Even if you're making less money per sale, you can get a lot more sales if you invest in marketplace partner. So that's kind of just where you have to do the cost benefit and look at your own business and see what works for you.
- [36:44]
Alex
Yep. Go where the cash is already flowing, get in front of customers where they're already buying the stuff that makes sense Anything you swear by on the tools or tech side to run this business.
- [36:55]
Ethan Haber
CRM software. Specifically, I use Apollo, which is a free to use software. Anyone can create an account and that will, you know, source people's personal email, their business email and phone number from LinkedIn and that's it. That is a very powerful tool to connect with people. I've made a lot of fruitful connections through that software.
- [37:14]
Alex
Okay, cool. Where does your time go on a daily basis? Because it doesn't sound like you're, you know, shipping these out of a spare bedroom or out of your garage anymore. You've got an agency in place to kind of manage the different marketplaces. What's a day in the life of like the pet product CEO here?
- [37:32]
Ethan Haber
It's all over the place. I would say it's half sales, 30% back end stuff. You know, vendor partnerships, setting up the product on the back end of the Walmart or Amazon, onboard, onboarding with a vendor partner, you know, filling out their forms, getting EDI set up, which stands for Electronic Data Interchange. And that's something I had no idea about before I started my business. But EDI is this huge thing where it's kind of like this, like one platform where all these businesses are able to, you know, send and receive invoices. And it's something you kind of need in place if you want to sell to any store that has a footprint.
- [38:08]
Alex
Yeah. And you've got product moving all over the. All over the country, all over the world.
- [38:12]
Ethan Haber
My day to day is, you know, a little bit of everything. It's production, it's sales, it's marketing, it's doing podcast interviews, doing podcast interviews. There's never a dull moment.
- [38:24]
Alex
What's surprised you the most along the way?
- [38:26]
Ethan Haber
That everyone is accessible. I am being mentored by the founder of Petsmart because I sent him a LinkedIn message. And that is an extremely fruitful relationship that I'm very generous to have. He recently put out a book called Pet Project about how he created petsmart and also petsense, which is another, you know, substantial pet chain that got bought out by tractor supply company. I have a few pages in his book because of the connection, so I'm very grateful to have known him and I would never would have been able to connect with him had I not just reached out on a whim.
- [38:57]
Alex
Wow. So tell me about this outreach cold email, like, hey, I want to create this product.
- [39:01]
Ethan Haber
Jim Dougherty, I just sent him a LinkedIn connect. You get 300 characters. I wrote a little message about how I was seeking mentorship, and I'd be grateful to have a conversation with him. And a week or two later, a call showed up on my phone. I didn't recognize the number. I picked up and he said, hi, this is Jim Dougherty, the founder of Petsmart. I'm calling back based off your LinkedIn message.
- [39:19]
Alex
Wow, that's really cool.
- [39:21]
Ethan Haber
Anyone who is a successful entrepreneur has at one point been in your shoes. If you're working your way up the ladder, and more often than not, you'd be surprised how willing they are to share their experience with you.
- [39:32]
Alex
Yeah, I suppose if you don't ask, the answer is always no. And people are just a message away for sure. Well, what's next for you? We've got the new product coming out, the big retail partnership. What's got you excited for the rest of this year?
- [39:45]
Ethan Haber
The thing I'm most excited for, just as a person, is to get my product in this big box store, go to it as a consumer, buy it off the shelf with 30 bucks of cash in my wallet and bring it home. That's going to feel pretty good to me. We're really excited about getting that product out into the world. We're excited about, about moving it. And, you know, Q3, Q4, this holiday season is something we're really, you know, looking forward to. Our sales right now in, you know, Q1 of 2026 are actually more than they were in Q4 of 2025. So, yeah, the growth is. We've really, you know, in my experience, hit that tipping point where I'm so excited to see what the rest of the year brings.
- [40:21]
Alex
Now we just need more people to have hamsters and you'll be off to the races. Grow the size of the pot here.
- [40:26]
Ethan Haber
Yeah.
- [40:26]
Alex
Well, this has been super cool. HappyHabitats.net is where you can find Ethan and his products. Alex, let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for side Hustle Nation.
- [40:36]
Ethan Haber
My number one tip, just to reiterate, is that everyone is accessible and it's better to beg forgiveness than ask permission. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take, and 80% of effort is just showing up. You know, I just threw a lot of adages at you that you've heard dozens of times, but they exist for a reason. In my experience, they're all true. And hustle makes muscle. If you don't put in the effort, you won't see results.
- [40:57]
Alex
That's so true. A couple takeaways for me before we wrap. Number one is to think evolution, not necessarily revolution. Like taking an existing product with some proven demand and just making these little safety tweaks, you know, improving upon it in some lower risk way. And then maybe you can command some premium pricing because of those improvements. And then second thing is to think buy buttons. To think, well, where are my customers already doing business? How can I put my buy button in front of them, make it easy for them to do business with me, go where the cash is already flowing? In the case of this business, well, it's all these pet stores, it's all these online marketplaces where people are shopping for pet products. I think that makes total sense. If you are wondering what to listen to next, I want to invite you to take the quick quiz at Hustle Show. How it works is you answer a few short multiple choice questions. You can do it right from your phone and it's going to suggest a playlist of 8 to 10 of our greatest hits episodes. Based on your answers you can add to your device. You can learn what works. You can go make some more money this year Hustle show for that. And go do yourself a favor, watch the movie Bolt if you haven't. It's it's an absolute classic. Big thanks to Ethan for sharing his insight. Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. You can hit up Sidehustlenation.com deals for all the latest offers from our advertisers 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 to somebody who needs to hear the story story. 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. Hustle on the.