INTERVIEW | Make Money by Thinking Like an Entrepreneur

Summary

Podcast Summary: Travis Makes Money

Episode: "INTERVIEW | Make Money by Thinking Like an Entrepreneur"

Date: July 6, 2026

Host: Travis Chappell
Featured Guests: Tom Szaky (TerraCycle), Eric Huberman (Hawke Media), Brian Keller (Rora)

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Episode Overview

This episode spotlights entrepreneurial mindsets and journeys, featuring a compelling compilation of recent interviews with Tom Szaky of TerraCycle, Eric Huberman of Hawke Media, and Brian Keller of Rora. Each guest shares unique stories of business pivoting, scaling, and succeeding in highly competitive or unconventional spaces. Travis curates these stories to distill practical wisdom and inspiration for listeners looking to grow their income and think more entrepreneurially—no matter their starting point.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Pivot: Reinventing a Business for Growth

Guest: Tom Szaky, TerraCycle
Timestamps: [03:00] – [08:21]

• Origin Story and Obstacles:

  • Tom began with a fertilizer business that turned waste (worm poop) into commercial fertilizer, selling it through major retailers.
  • Cash flow challenges due to seasonal product demand and delayed retail payments forced creative financing and operational adjustments.
    • "Fertilizer is exceptionally seasonal... we had to use the capital to bridge that gap." — Tom [03:00]

• Unexpected Costs and Industry Realities:

  • Retail sales involved unanticipated costs—demoing products, discounts, chargebacks.
  • Quote: "...if you're selling to a store, you're never going to get paid what the PO says at the beginning." — Tom [03:31]

• The Critical Pivot:

  • Despite early revenue growth, Tom questioned whether TerraCycle should remain a fertilizer business.
  • Decision: Shut down the original business line and entirely pivot to a broader waste management and recycling model—while still growing revenue.
    • "Within one year, shut the whole worm poop business down and changed the company to effectively what we are today... had you seen our revenue growth, you would have never noticed." — Tom [03:25]

• Innovative Waste Collection Strategies:

  • Originated the "Bottle Brigade" program: schools collected bottles for small payments, ensuring a clean supply of raw material.
  • Expanded this model across other recyclable streams.

• Deeper Industry Insight:

  • Tom's core realization: what gets recycled is dictated by profit, not by what is technically recyclable.
    • "All recycling in the world is carried out by for-profit garbage companies... there's no law anywhere that says they must recycle anything." — Tom [06:33]
    • "The reason aluminum cans are recyclable or cardboard boxes are recyclable is because they're profitable..." — Tom, with agreement from Travis [07:05]

• The Upstream Model:

  • Shifted focus from finished goods (products) to recycling services funded by brands and retailers wanting to sponsor waste solutions for specific materials.

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2. Early Pricing & Value Perception in Service Businesses

Guest: Eric Huberman, Hawke Media
Timestamps: [12:36] – [16:53]

• Learning to Price Based on Client Value:

  • Eric tells a story of confidently pricing consulting services: "25 grand... I'm gonna shoot my shot." [12:38]
  • Discusses not underpricing oneself, as higher price often equates to higher perceived value for the client.
    • "Counterintuitively, he probably would not have valued it if you only charged him 800 bucks for it." — Travis [13:22]
    • "What’s the difference between a $350/hour lawyer and a $1,000/hour lawyer? Confidence." — Eric [13:28]

• Transition from Founder to Consultant:

  • Sold his own e-comm brand, then consulted (for top dollar) to the acquiring business.
  • Quickly recognized a gap: most agencies were underperforming or inaccessible to non-corporate clients.

• Founding Hawke Media:

  • Inspired by the lack of high-performance, approachable agencies, Eric developed Hawke on the principle of scalable, a la carte marketing—bringing big company expertise to growing brands.
    • "A la carte, super flexible, nimble, cost-effective marketing. But bringing that Fortune 500 horsepower to the masses has been the North Star." — Eric [16:53]
  • Early consulting fees allowed him to reinvest in building a team and scaling up.
    • "Before I started hiring a team, I got to about 35 grand a month. So I had 32 grand a month to spend...I used that to start hiring people." — Eric [16:47]

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3. Entering and Winning in a Crowded Market

Guest: Brian Keller, Rora
Timestamps: [18:19] – [24:49]

• Identifying the Opportunity:

  • The inspiration: his daughter's eczema clearing up after using filtered water, sparking a deep dive into water filtration technology and market gaps.
  • Saw that most water filtration products relied on dealer/distributor channels, neglecting direct-to-consumer (DTC) potential.
    • "There's a pretty big white space here to build the Dyson of water filtration." — Brian [18:34]
  • Designed product to meet strict criteria (fit, ease, filtration quality, aesthetics) with user experience as a primary focus.
    • "If we can make it beautiful and look really nice... that creates conversation, which leads to more organic awareness." — Brian [20:27]

• Product Development & DTC Strategy:

  • Product design considered not just functionality, but how it looked and felt on a consumer’s countertop, fueling word-of-mouth growth.

• Financial Planning Before and During R&D:

  • Took two and a half years to launch; partnered with an experienced co-founder for investor outreach.

  • Emphasized careful cash forecasting, R&D and certification costs, and strategic pre-launch marketing.

    • "We raised a good amount of capital before we launched... designing something from scratch that's stainless steel... is expensive." — Brian [22:06]
    • "We hit our forecast within, you know, within like a couple percentage points from what we forecasted two or three years ago." — Brian [22:06]

  • Ran pre-launch ads to build an email list and test lead costs and messaging before product was ready.

    • "We had about 25,000 people already on our email list before we launched the product. And so, you know, day one, when we started selling, you know, we were doing $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 a day for those first couple days." — Brian [24:19]

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• Tom Szaky on Waste Supply Chains and Pivoting:
  "We were shrinking the idea of us selling finished goods in exchange for building services that recycled things that people wanted to see." [08:21]

• Eric Huberman on Value and Confidence:
  "What’s the difference between a $350/hour lawyer and a $1,000/hour lawyer? Confidence." — [13:28]
  "Pretty quick I'm making more money than I know what to do with... my lifestyle didn't change at all. I was still living off about three grand a month." — [16:00]

• Brian Keller on Product Design and Scaling DTC:
  "If we can make it beautiful and look really nice, then people would be comfortable having it out on the counter. And then that creates conversation..." — [20:27]
  "We had about 25,000 people already on our email list before we launched the product." — [24:19]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [03:00] — Tom Szaky’s pivot from fertilizer to global recycling services
• [06:33] — Deep dive: what actually drives industry recycling
• [12:38] — Eric Huberman on pricing value and consulting origin story
• [16:53] — Hawke Media's mission and scaling strategy
• [18:34] — Brian Keller finding the white space in water filtration and product development insights
• [22:06] — R&D, fundraising, and DTC launch strategies at Rora
• [24:19] — Launch day results and growth tactics

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Themes & Takeaways

• Entrepreneurship is about smart pivots, not just creation. All three guests redefined, redirected, or restructured their companies when faced with adversity or market clarity.
• Confidence and value alignment matter: Understanding and communicating your value—from consulting rates to product pricing—is critical for business growth.
• Market entry is possible even in crowded fields with the right product, strategic marketing, compelling story, and laser focus on consumer experience.
• Plan your growth before launch: Building a demand engine and community before you ever have product in hand can supercharge early momentum.

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This episode offers an inspiring, real-world look at entrepreneurial thinking for listeners ready to break from convention and pursue financial freedom through business.

Transcript

[Travis]

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[Brian Keller]

What were you raising capital for?

[Tom Sackey]

So we, because we were dealing with, you know, trying to sell to, you know, big retailers at the time. And fertilizer is exceptionally seasonal, right. So you get all your orders about this time of the year Q4, you sell in the spring. And then there's, you know, sort of a break, if you will. So we had to use the capital to bridge that gap. We wanted to buy things like filling equipment. We had to do studies on the efficacy of the fertilizer, like, all those different. And then also funding all the mistakes we made.

[Travis]

And were you blown away also by the payment terms of retail distributors?

[Tom Sackey]

Yeah. So we learned quite a bit. And especially, like, if you're selling to a store, you're never going to get paid what you. What the. What the PO says at the beginning. You know, you're going to have all these chargebacks and discounts, and then you got to go down. I mean, I spent so many days at Walmarts and Home Depot demoing product. Right. You never truly think about all those costs. And I would say it's, you know, after five years of doing it right, and we grew, you know, 5 million is a nice little revenue number when you're 23. We did a big reflection at that time. You know, we really thought to ourselves, like, is, are we a fertilizer business? Because I never created TerraCycle with the intention of being a fertilizer business. It was, how do we solve this crazy anomaly of waste? And we realized that, you know, we needed to pivot. And we effectively, within one year, shut the whole worm poop business down and changed the company to effectively what we are today. And the crazy part is we were able to do that and grow revenue. So, like, had you seen our revenue growth, you would have never noticed. The company went through a foundational metamorphosis.

[Eric Huberman]

Wow.

[Tom Sackey]

We had to change half our staff. We had to. I mean, everything shifted. And instead of focusing on the output like, the product is the business hero. We upstreamed it and focused on the garbage as the business hero, right? So instead of, hey, we want to make a, you know, let's say a bird feeder, what type of garbage can we make it out from? We said, well, hey, juice pouches are not recyclable, or cigarette butts are not recyclable. How do we create a supply chain to solve. Cigarette butts or juice pouches are now hundreds and hundreds of different waste streams.

[Travis]

How are you able to do that without dropping revenue in that. Like, it sounds like a. Like, it sounds like a long process to learn how to build a supply chain to reuse some of these things.

[Tom Sackey]

We lucked into it, right? So we had to get in the worm poop days, used soda bottles. Like, we had to get those. And you couldn't really get them from a recycling center easily, because out of a recycling center, they would have already been driven over with vehicles. They would have been, like, really deformed and just not nice on a shelf later. And so we need to get it right from the collectors. And so we created a thing that we called the bottle brigade, where we went to schools. And we said, hey, guys, can you collect soda bottles from us? We'll pick them up for you, and we'll pay you 2 cents a bottle as a thank you. And that became a really good source of quality waste, if you will. Like, these bottles were not deformed, very easy to, you know, to fill, and then put the worm poop in and all that. And that became a really great way to collect waste. And then as we expanded into other products, we started setting up these brigades, if you will, for other waste streams. And they worked very well. Think, like, yogurt cups to use as planting pots and so on and so forth. And when we went into the pivot, we realized that we have this great asset of how we get waste. We're really good at getting pure. Like, if I needed to just get, you know, just energy bars or just eyeglasses, I could get that. Like, it was functioning. So we went to. You know, I'd say we took first a big academic step backward. We took this big sort of academic journey on what really drives recyclability. Because in my eyes, and I think this is for most folks, you'll. You know, one would say a cardboard box is recyclable because it can be. And a toothbrush is not recyclable because it's cannot be. And as we dug into it, we realized that it's, it's nothing. It has nothing to do with the truth. The, the reality is all recycling in the world is carried out by for profit garbage companies. And believe it or not, there's no law anywhere that says they must recycle anything they collect. So you're like, local recycler could take your blue box, throw it out in front of your face and you'd have no recourse. Right. It doesn't mean it's broken, it just means what they're recycling is not something that's mandated, but instead what they can make money on.

[Eric Huberman]

Sure.

[Tom Sackey]

And the reason so aluminum cans are recyclable or cardboard boxes are recyclable is

[Travis]

because they're profitable, because they can monetize getting.

[Tom Sackey]

Yeah, yeah. But if I was going to recycle just things I'm looking at in your screen, like your eyeglasses, which we do. You know, we recycle almost 100 million pairs of glasses a year now. It costs more to collect and process eyeglasses than the plastic and the metal in those glasses are worth. Same with your hat, your T shirt, your microphone. I mean, the sound protection behind you, like everything, you know, 95% of stuff is like that. And so we realized that the answer was here. We need to go to, you know, companies who care about a certain waste stream, like a producer or, you know, like, let's say a Nespresso who cares about coffee capsules or a staples retailer that cares about, say, something they're attached to, like pens. And if they pay whatever it really costs us to collect and process that stuff, we can set up a supply chain to go do that. And we were getting pretty good at how do we turn waste into new things. And so to answer your question, that started growing really nicely, which then made it made it possible to wind down the worm poop business as that grew. And if you zoomed out, you would have just seen the company go from 5 million to 7 million to 10 million, not realizing that we effectively completely transformed what we started with.

[Travis]

You were just intentionally shrinking the core SKU and while adding other SKUs that were potentially more profitable.

[Tom Sackey]

Yeah. And think of it like we were, we were shrinking the idea of us selling finished goods in exchange for building services that recycled things that people wanted to see.

[Travis]

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[Tom Sackey]

recycled.

[Travis]

It's like, were you just kind of like, sure, I'll do it.

[Eric Huberman]

25 grand. The guy, he wouldn't stop telling me about how much money and profit he was making and he owned the whole business and he just like pulling up in nice cars, all of it. And I was like, it, I'm gonna shoot my shot. Yeah, I know. I was trying to gauge like how much I could get. Yeah, yeah. And I think I nailed the number. I think if I had said 50k laughed me out of the room.

[Travis]

Sure, sure. Yeah, exactly. But that, that's kind of the whole point though, right? Is you cannot bring your preconceived notions of what value means to somebody else. You can shoot yourself in the foot over and over again doing that type of stuff because you could have easily been like, ah, you know, I guess, eight, ten hours of work at a

[Eric Huberman]

hundred dollars an hour.

[Travis]

Sure, $800. You know what I mean?

[Eric Huberman]

Yeah.

[Travis]

Counterintuitively, he probably would not have valued it if you only charged him 800 bucks for it.

[Eric Huberman]

Totally. Exactly. And that's, that's, and that's something I did learn early. On if one of my first advisors told me that like he talked me. The lawyer thing, it's like, you know what the difference between $350 an hour Lawyer and a thousand dollars an hour confidence. It's. And. And to his credit, I have some incredible 300 an hour internees and I have some incredible 1500 an hour internees. Would I put. I would say the 1500 is probably in the right situation. Better. But I don't like for a lot of things, you know, I wouldn't use him for M and A. Yeah, litigation. He's great, dude.

[Travis]

So. So you had a activewear brand, E commerce company. Is this sort of like where you cut your teeth learning digital marketing that ended up becoming Hawk Media or.

[Eric Huberman]

Or what?

[Travis]

Like bridge the gap for me between like early twenties to founding Hawk Media?

[Eric Huberman]

Yeah, I mean, it was right then, actually. So I did that deal, funny enough. And then I started and I was building my own activewear brand. I ended up selling that. And. And then I. That guy. Actually, this is a. I don't know if I've told the story. So that person ended up buying the activewear brand, then asked to hire me, which I was.

[Travis]

Wait, the guy that bought the business?

[Eric Huberman]

The guy, that business model then went by your company. So he bought it and I don't think I've told this. And then he asked me to work for him and I said no, but I'll consult. We went back and forth on price, but again, I knew who I was dealing with. So I ended up making per hour four times as much as I was currently making. But I only worked part time. And it was like, now I have

[Travis]

working for the same company.

[Eric Huberman]

Yeah, well. But he was having me basically integrate E Commerce across his. He had a portfolio of brands. He owned Bowie, Total Fitness and a bunch of other brands.

[Travis]

And so gotcha. Okay.

[Eric Huberman]

I was doing that, working for him from 7am to 2pm three days a week. Because I said, I'll work. He's like, you'll work for me full time. Like I work one day a week. He's like, you'll work three. Like, all right, three part time. And he was in east la. I didn't want to go out there, so I went. I woke up early and just did the commute, you know, beat the traffic and then came home before traffic and took calls back and forth. But it wasn't because I was lazy. It's because I felt like it was a waste of time. So then I started consulting and advising for a bunch of other brands while I was doing that. And again, he alone was paying me because I was working halftime, but at four times the rate, I was making double what I had ever made before. And then I was going in consulting for a bunch of others. So pretty quick I'm making more money than I know what to do with. And I started. And then that's when I really realized that came from like I was advising for all these companies, trying to, including him, help him hire a Facebook agency, you know, email agency, a web design company. Like I was just being a fractional CMO and found that 99% of agencies are full of shit. And the few that are any good won't work with even a mid market brand. They only work with the Fortune 2000. And so I was like, all right, well how is there not an agency that's the best at what they do and easy to work with? And that became our mission. And 12 and a half years later, 250 people later, here we are. And it worked. And I started hiring from then and back to the point I was making that kind of money. My lifestyle didn't change at all. So I was still living like, I was still living off about three grand a month. And so I was gonna ask about that. Yeah, yeah. And you know, before I started hiring a team, I got to about 35 grand a month. So I had 32 grand a month to spend is how I did look at it. And so I used that to start hiring people to get a small office, all that. That's how I started building.

[Travis]

And what was the first iteration of this agency? Cause I know it's evolved a lot over the years.

[Eric Huberman]

Not, I mean, the mission's been the mission. So like how we do it, what we service, that kind of thing, like that's evolved, but like, you know, and operationally it obviously evolves a lot. We've talked before we started recording about M and A. Like there's a lot of ways we now go to achieve that mission. But the North Star has still been the North Star of this, you know, a la carte, super flexible, nimble, cost effective marketing. But bringing that sort of Fortune 500 marketing horsepower to the masses has been the North Star in his state.

[Travis]

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[Tom Sackey]

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[Travis]

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[Brian Keller]

Huge.

[Travis]

Yet there's also all these other people competing for attention in the space. Did that come into your awareness at all? Did you think about any of that at all when you started these things? Or in your mind, is it like, hey, if we just build the best thing possible, things are going to work out?

[Brian Keller]

Yeah, you know, after we'd sold the business, we were working for the parent company and I had a daughter and, you know, she had really bad eczema. We were trying to figure out what the issue was. And after trying a lot of different things and after getting a filtered shower head and her skin clearing up in a couple of days, it was like, okay, well, if this is affecting her skin this much, what about the water that we're mixing with her formula? It's the only thing she's consuming. And so I went online to try to find a good water filter, and it was really difficult to understand what actually would work. And there's a lot of marketing claims being made, not a lot of data and science to back it up. And so I was talking to Charlie, my current co founder, and we kind of came to the realization that there's a pretty big white space here to build the Dyson of water filtration. And as we were looking at these different companies online, I was like, you know, there's. How are they selling this product? Because it doesn't seem like they're driving a lot of sales through direct to consumer and realize that the majority are selling through dealers, distributors, and retail. And so that leaves a pretty big opportunity for somebody to come in and build a great product that can sell it direct to consumer, because then you have the margin to be able to go market and advertise and really build a brand. And. And so, you know, we kind of looked at the different constraints and what we were trying to build, and it was like, okay, we want to build something that can sit on people's Countertops, it's got to be under 18 inches so that it can fit under a cabinet. It's got to be, you know, have a spout height that's more than six and a half inches. You can fit any pine quests underneath. And it's got to have, you know, better filtration technology. And it's got to be super simple and easy for people to use and so.

[Travis]

And a cool aesthetic.

[Brian Keller]

Yeah, we wanted to really build something from scratch. I think there's a lot of, you know, nespresso machine looking exactly out there.

[Travis]

And people don't want industrial grade a medical equipment that you sit on your countertop.

[Brian Keller]

Yeah. And if we can make it beautiful and, you know, look really nice, then people would be comfortable having it out on the counter. And then that creates conversation, which leads to more organic awareness and really spreading the word of what, you know, what we're doing, why they like the product. And then also, you know, we thought about how do we make this super simple and also fun to use. And you know, people enjoy pulling a tap handle. It's a good experience. We're like, okay, can we build that into this product? It'll also make it easier for kids to use, people with lower dexterity in their hands to use. And if we make it readily easy to use and look good, then people are going to drink more water and ultimately be healthier. And so those are some big aspects and focuses as we were building and designing that product.

[Travis]

Let's talk about the financial side for a second here, man. And feel free to, you know, tell me whatever you can tell me about this stuff when you are developing this type of product. You said earlier it took a couple of years to two and a half years to be able to get to the first iteration of the product. And this is from the time that you started even working on it. So now you have like ideation and then you have the work beginning and then you have a couple of years before you can even get a product to be able to sell and then start making some money. Are you self fund the whole thing? Do you. Is it something where you go like, hey, we need some outside capital for this. Based on our resume, I think we can raise that. And then in the meantime, like when you're building a company that literally can't make any money because there's no product available yet, what do you do? Personal finances and I guess like overall broad brush view on your financial plan during the R and D phase.

[Brian Keller]

Yeah, you know, it was tough. We had never raised money before, but luckily one of our third, our third co founder, Jordy, who's actually one of the hosts of the TBPN podcast, he had a lot of experience raising capital and so he was able to teach us a lot and be a really great thought partner on just kind of how to approach it and some good first initial connections. But, you know, we raised a good amount of capital before we launched because we needed that in order to, you know, go out and do the testing with, you know, the NSF and NSF accredited labs, which is definitely not cheap. And you know, also designing something from scratch that's stainless steel and you know, using that, you know, it's, it's expensive product. So, right, we knew we needed, you know, forecasted the amount of capital. We were working with an engineering and design firm as we were building this as well and then just laid out, you know, how we thought the business would go. And we actually hit our forecast within, you know, within like a couple percentage points from what we forecasted two or three years ago when we were initially laying out the business plan. But we knew ultimately that we were going to have to raise awareness of the overall problem. And so, you know, do a good amount of marketing and advertising before we even launched. And so we worked, you know, quite a long time and building the right UX and UI experience for the water report and really making sure that we could educate and use, use that data to educate people. And then, you know, started running some different ads and things like that just to, you know, find out what's in your water and knew that, okay, if I can get people to click and do that, enter their email for $2 a piece, then if I'm entering those people into the welcome flows and kind of getting them primed up, then if we can convert one out of a hundred of those, then we can hit our initial CAC goals and we can scale that. And so, you know, we slowly ramped up.

[Travis]

So you're running ads before you launch the product. Is that, that's what, that's what you're, this is the list that you're talking about right now. This is like. But let's build up an audience here of people who care about this. We get the leads in, we nurture them, and then when we launch, we'll have a test group to launch to, essentially.

[Brian Keller]

Yeah, correct. So we had about 25,000 people already on our email list before we launched the product. And so, you know, day one, when we started selling, you know, we were doing 30, 40, $50,000 a day for those first couple days, which then paid off for all of that initial, initial advertising. And they were really able to come, you know, out of the gate already spending a good amount of money and, and generating enough revenue to really keep the momentum building for the company.

[Travis]

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[Tom Sackey]

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[Travis]

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[Tom Sackey]

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[Travis]

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