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Podcast Summary: The Side Hustle Show - Episode 649
Episode Title 649: This Firefighter’s Side Hustle Grew to $1M in Sales
Episode Overview In this episode of The Side Hustle Show, host Nick Loper interviews Mike Ettenberg, a former firefighter who turned his frustration with unreliable sunglasses into a successful business, Frontline Optics, which specializes in durable sunglasses for first responders. Despite having no formal business experience, Mike shares his journey of growing his side hustle to over $1 million in sales.
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Key Highlights
Mike Ettenberg's Journey
- Background: Mike spent 10 years as a firefighter, frequently dealing with the loss or damage of expensive sunglasses on the job.
- Inspiration: Frustrated with the lack of durable options for first responders, Mike decided to create sunglasses tailored for their needs.
- Business Model: Frontline Optics offers durable sunglasses with a no-questions-asked replacement policy, catering specifically to first responders.
Starting the Side Hustle
- Initial Investment: Mike began with $5,000, purchasing 300 pairs of sunglasses and setting up a Shopify store.
- Marketing Strategy:
- Initially relied on organic marketing through social media.
- Used hashtags relevant to first responders to attract initial customers.
Customer Acquisition
- Micro-Influencers:
- Engaged micro-influencers (under 20,000 followers) by gifting sunglasses and leveraging their networks to build brand awareness.
- Sent out over 1,000 free pairs to influencers, which significantly boosted visibility and sales.
Learning and Growth
- Ad Strategy: Transitioned from traffic ads to purchase ads on Meta (Facebook/Instagram), learning to leverage the platform's capabilities for targeted marketing.
- Content Creation: Developed engaging video content, including personal stories that resonate with first responders, leading to viral success.
Challenges and Successes
- Marketing Mistakes: Experienced setbacks during Black Friday due to emotional decision-making rather than data-driven strategies.
- Retention Strategies: Focused on customer service, including personalized video messages to thank customers upon purchase, enhancing customer loyalty.
Future Plans
- Expansion: Aiming to achieve NZZ 87 Plus certification for sunglasses to market them as personal protective equipment (PPE) for first responders, enabling access to government contracts and broader sales channels.
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Key Concepts and Strategies
Niche Market Focus
- Emphasizing the importance of targeting a specific niche can differentiate a product in a crowded marketplace. In this case, targeting first responders allowed Mike to tailor his marketing and product features directly to his audience's needs.
Micro-Influencer Marketing
- Collaborating with micro-influencers is a cost-effective way to reach a specific audience and gain authentic endorsements, proving successful in driving sales and brand recognition.
Data-Driven Marketing
- Early mistakes in marketing strategies highlighted the need for data-driven decisions, especially in digital ad spending. Understanding the metrics behind customer acquisition costs is crucial for sustainable growth.
Personalization in Customer Service
- Adding a personal touch to customer interactions, such as sending thank-you videos, fosters a strong connection and loyalty, leading to repeat customers and positive word-of-mouth referrals.
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Conclusion Mike Ettenberg's story illustrates the power of turning personal frustrations into a successful business venture. His journey emphasizes the significance of understanding one's market, leveraging modern marketing techniques, and maintaining a customer-centric approach. As he continues to grow Frontline Optics, his insights into the entrepreneurial process offer valuable lessons for aspiring side hustlers.
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Listener Bonus For those interested in exploring niche business ideas, a list of 25 e-commerce niche ideas is available for download at the show notes link in the episode description.
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Recommendations for Further Listening
- Episode 589 with Lou Rice: Discusses innovative marketing strategies for a novel product.
- Skincare Brand Episode: Explores subscription-based e-commerce models and marketing tactics.
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This summary encapsulates the essential discussions, strategies, and lessons shared in the episode, providing both new and seasoned entrepreneurs insights into building and scaling a side hustle effectively.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Let's be real. Nobody starts a business for the joy of calculating tax withholdings. That's where our partner Gusto comes in to take the stress out of payroll, benefits, and HR, so you can focus on why you started your business in the first place. Gusto is online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses. It's all-in-one, remote-friendly, and incredibly easy to use. So that means you can pay, hire, onboard, and support your team from anywhere. I'm talking about automatic payroll tax filing, simple direct deposits, health benefits, commuter benefits, workers' comp, 401k, you name it.
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1:15What's up? What's up? Nick Loper here. Welcome to the side hustle show because your nine to five may make you a living, but your five to nine makes you alive. How does somebody with no business experience watch a successful side hustle? We'll stick around in this episode to find out. Today's guest was working as a firefighter, but it's tough work and his sunglasses kept breaking or getting scratched up. And he said, hey, like a lot of entrepreneurs, there's got to 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.
1:50Mike Ettenberg, welcome to the Side Hustle Show. Hey, how's it going? Thanks for having me. 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 glasses. Like maybe that was the alternative, but like, hey, there's got to be better, a better way than trashing these$200 Oakleys. 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.
2:23So 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 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.
3:03Figured there had to be a better way to make them. I knew they couldn't be too terribly difficult to manufacture so started looking and making them myself and you know that was about a little over three years ago now and now this is what I do. Okay. So I love this method of coming up with ideas from saying that 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 got to be a better way, right? But then it gets a little fuzzy because it's like, well, do I find manufacturers?
3:35It'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? 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.
4:09And so I figured I was going to 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. That's what you're going to see wearing them because that's where I came from. And that's the market that we focus on. Yeah, it's a niche within a niche. We're going to do durable, scratch-resistant product, and we're going to hone in on this specific use case or the specific user base.
4:44Exactly. Exactly. And 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 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. Okay. So we come up with the idea, what happens next? Is it trying to find a manufacturer that is making similar sunglasses?
5:15Just, hey, could we make these a little tougher? Like what, where do you even go? 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 volumes are just too small. I started this thing with$5 ,000. Again, this was a side hustle. At the time that I started it, I was actually listening to this show, which is kind of fun, full circle to be here now with you. Love it. But yeah, I just started looking 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 what is, you know, the optical industry.
6:06Is this through, not through Alibaba, this is just like, I'm going through pages, finding somebody who will accept a smaller minimum order? 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, I kind of threw my hands up and said, I got to go a different route and kind of Google just the traditional search is how I found my manufacturer. Okay. That's a great tip to like go to page 234, like see if you can find somebody who is smaller, hungrier for business, willing to work with you.
6:43So$5 ,000, this is initial inventory. How many glasses does that get you? I don't even know a concept. So I bought 300 pairs of sunglasses to start. And then with that, I also 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. It was$5 ,000, 300 pairs of sunglasses, and then the foundation that everyone needs to kind of get the ball rolling. Got it. Have you ever messed around with Shopify before? You said, I don't have any business experience. It's like, what's the learning curve like trying to set this stuff up?
7:14It's pretty plug and play, but there's obviously aspects of it that 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. And clearly there's some validation from what Warby Parker has done in, I guess, prescription glasses, what obviously Gooder has done in kind of direct-to-consumer sunglasses.
7:56So there's some validation. People are willing to order this stuff online. It's just a matter of getting in front of them. Absolutely. 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? Build it and they will not come, right? 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 it doesn't really feel all that great, you know, because you kind of expect it. You recognize every name on the order report.
8:27Yeah, 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, uh, is familiar with. 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 I was like, that means strangers are listening in. What if they hate it? What if they think it sucks? What if they leave a bad review?
8:55Like all of a sudden it's like, yeah, I wanted this to happen, but it's also super, uh, kind of nerve wracking too. Yeah. You get vulnerable at that moment. Do you know how they found you? Was this a word of mouth referral? Was this a Facebook ad? It was all organic at that point. We were just doing a lot of organic posting. So 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 school method that maybe still works to an extent, but not quite how it did back in the early days, but I was able to kind of ride the coattails of that path, you could say, towards my first customer.
9:36Okay. 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. 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 get one, you keep 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 10 and it just keeps going. Are you handling fulfillment out of your garage, out of your spare bedroom?
10:11One advantage of sunglasses is that they're super small, lightweight, easy to ship, stuff like that. 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, orders would pile up. And so I would come home, and then it was like, cool, we've got these 10 or 15 orders that we need to ship out because it's been three days since they've ordered it.
10:45So it's got to happen now. and we turned it into this family thing where we'd 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 person at the counter all of the glasses to get scanned in. It was a fun time. 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? 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.
11:16When we first started, we were very inexpensive, but the quality of the components at that time also were not as high quality just due to the fact that we didn't have the capital to be able to put a premium quality product together when we were testing to see if this was validated. And then as we continued to grow, we put money into upgrading components and making them more durable and stronger and better lenses and all those things. And with it, it's now obviously a much more premium product than it was when we first started. Looks like you're around 80 bucks a pair now. Yeah, exactly. What did it start at?
11:48They 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 people would understand was a little bit better than what you're going to get at the gas station or 7-Eleven. 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. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So still not as much as like a designer pair or, you know, those$200 Oakleys, but it's no longer just like a straight commodity, like you said, gas station pair. Exactly.
12:19They'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. 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. There are less than 100 days left in 2025, which means less than 100 days left to hit those goals that you set or to refocus your energy on what really matters. If you've got some catching up to do and maybe you've been procrastinating on taking that next step, our sponsor Indeed can help you find the best candidates for the role you need to fill and find them fast.
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14:43That's Q-U-O dot com slash sidehustle. Look at them getting that three-letter domain. Q-U-O dot com slash sidehustle. And if you've got existing numbers with another service, Quo will port them over at no extra charge. Quo, no missed calls, no missed customers. 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 more buyers? Find like what we call lead fountains. Like, how do I get in front of lots of customers?
15:18Like, what's kind of that evergreen source? Is it going to be social? It's going to be through partnerships. What was it? What did you find worked early on? 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?
15:47And 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.
16:19And 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 go into traditional marketing. Is there a sweet spot of like follower count or accounts? I'm trying to think like what qualifies as a micro influencer here? We try and stay at somebody below like the 20 ,000 mark. And we find a lot of success in like the three to 5 ,000 follower range. Because at that point, they're like excited that a brand is reaching out to them. Exactly. So they're just getting to that point where a brand would want them to have this stuff.
16:52So 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 the name of doing that unless you're, you know, got millions of followers. So 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. That's like, are there firefighter influencers on TikTok? Yeah, there's thousands.
17:26Really? 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 the stuff in the early days it's 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 and just kind of continued to to grow the user base, I guess you could say.
17:59And do you have an estimate of how many free pairs you sent out to kind of build a goodwill amongst this crowd of micro influencers? At this point, I would say over a thousand that we've sent. Wow. And then there's some that, they provided with a professional photographer quality photo, and we'll circle back with them again to work with them again, since they're putting out like quality content that we can repurpose and use on our site and in marketing, if they give permission. There's a lot. We We generally try and find about 10 to 20 a month to send a pair to, to kind of keep that dream moving.
18:32No, 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. Exactly. 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 going to, it's going to cast as wide a net as possible. 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 shout 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.
19:22And by a high volume, I mean like five to 10 per, again, they're smaller influencers, but five to 10 a month from that person. And 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. We'll 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? 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 and figures out like the commission payout and all this stuff?
19:56Yeah, 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, it's something that we have a virtual assistant that's handling. It just makes sense to kind of keep it in her workload.
20:31All right. So the ambassador program is cranking now. What else is going on on the marketing? I love this. 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 anything else that has been firing on the marketing side? Now, Meta is really where we're at. But I'll take it a few steps back since we're kind of going through that normal progression. So I started to advertise on Meta, had no idea how to run it. I didn't know what a hook was. I was just 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.
21:08They 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. These were all foreign concepts to me. So this is helpful. So Facebook or Meta has lots of different targeting options or goal options. 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 are the click happy people on our platform. It's like we get you traffic.
21:41But 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. 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're trying to get traffic, you'll get traffic. If you're trying to get sales, you'll at sales, but they cost 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.
22:11But 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 so you, you know, and it gives you this little pat on the back feeling if you're doing something right. Yeah, that's kind of fun. It's like, come on, Shopify, I appreciate you You were giving me a pat on the back about the traffic stats, but how about the sales? 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 I didn't have great quality stuff.
22:43I 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 I found TikTok. So it was kind of funny. I was going for one of my morning runs at work. And as I was running, we were in Coronado. There was this house that was overlooking like a boat dock area. And there were 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 do these guys do, right? And so finally, one day I had to ask. Yeah, to afford this waterfront house, yeah.
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23:22Yeah, I had to ask. And so I stopped and I was like, you know, what are you guys into? and they're like, oh, like we have a marketing agency. Like we do online ads. So of course I started telling them what I was doing and they told me like, you got to 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 a double down on TikTok. I'm like, yeah, yeah. And I go and run, come back another day. And they're like, you know, triple down on TikTok.
23:51So I'm finally like, Like, all right, like, I'm going to go back. I'm going to make a TikTok 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.
24:21And that thing just took off. And like that was in May of 2022. And the company basically exploded from that point forward. Wow, that's great. You know, that's the power of one viral video or one thing. And that's really funny that these kids were like convincing you to do it. 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.
24:55And that was the beginning of this business turning into, you know, a real thing and not just this side project I was doing on my off time. Yeah, I'm looking at the TikTok account now, over 3000 followers, not huge by TikTok standards, but you know, a healthy following and some of these videos do have hundreds of thousands of views. We've done pretty well on there. It was interesting. So in 2022, what you could do is you could run an ad and 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.
25:33So 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'd 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 and changed their algorithm.
26:08And then that approach didn't work anymore. And once that happened, we pretty much left the TikTok platform because we found success on meta that was more consistent and kind of been all in on meta since. Okay. Yeah. Well, the getting's good 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? We're driving 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.
26:42So there's definitely opportunity there for the right products. And I think the right price point, I think if you're in like the 30 or so dollar range and you get those impulsive buyers. Yeah, more impulse buy price point. It makes sense. 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. 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.
27:13I've got some people for you. I'll send your way. 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, you know, the slow-mo. No, they're falling. So that makes sense. 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 ads. and the still image ads have had much more stability than the videos.
27:54Videos 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. 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 know, you know, you statistically need about seven 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.
28:29Yeah, you have the initial awareness and then on to, you know, interest, attraction, desire. I don't know what the acronym was, but it's something like something like that where, OK, 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 a cost for sale or like cost of acquisition? How do you think about that in terms of return on ad spend through Meta? 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.
29:03So 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. Is the good season, the Q4, like holiday season? No way. Q4 is terrible for us, which is interesting. Well, it's wintertime. Who's buying sunglasses in the middle of winter? 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, 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?
29:42So we see like a huge spike in demand when it's like nice sunny weather outside, whereas when it's like gloomy, sales obviously still come in, but it costs almost double to acquire those customers. 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. A lot of side hustlers suffer from what if-itis. What if it doesn't work? What if I don't have the skills? What if I pick the wrong path? But one thing 100 % of our amazing guests have in common is they took their shot.
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32:19You mentioned maybe retargeting or maybe email marketing. Like what else is happening there? 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 is 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.
32:52The 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. Okay. Is there a pretty good take rate on that 15 % offer? We get 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. Yeah.
33:26Can you explain what a 2 % lookalike is? So a 2 % lookalike, so we stack everything together. So we run a lookalike audience on Instagram engagers. We run a lookalike audience on Facebook engagers. We run a lookalike audience on purchases. And then we've also taken our email list and loaded that in to meta and used that as well. So we basically stack 2 % lookalike on all of those things. And the type of creative that works with... What's the 2 % refer to? It's basically like how broad. You can do anywhere from like a 1 % to a 10 % audience lookalike. And the smaller it is, the more like niche it is, but the audience level is smaller.
34:10And so you can kind of play in a range there. And we've just found that the 2 % seems to be the sweet spot for our brand. This would be like more specific, more targeted rather than less? It's looking at the things that are similar about all the people in that profile and finding a cold audience that has those same key variables. Which is an incredible capability. Like, I love the ability to do this. 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. Yeah, upload your customer list and say, find me more people like these people and they can do it.
34:49Exactly. And the, you know, the ad copy or the style that seems to work well with them is like founder, founder videos, founder images. So that resonates with that group. Whereas the firefighter interest has firefighter style images, videos, and law enforcement, same thing. Okay. Is this you on camera modeling? 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.
35:27So it works. Okay. Yeah, for sure. And yeah, people connect with that and say, yeah, I want to support this guy. 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. And are you still running these yourself? Or did you hire the kids from the patio in Coronado? No, no. Well, I do everything on meta myself.
35:59And then I hired someone for Google because Google's an interesting animal that someday I would love to really learn. But it's a lot more complex on the surface. And so it was worth it to get a specialist. For Google ads or for SEO? For ads. Yeah. Did you expect to have to become a meta ads expert in the fire 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. Then we're going to retarget those people who were most engaged. Now it's a conversion campaign. And that brings down our cost of acquisition.
36:36It's like you're speaking a completely different language than I imagine you were three years ago. 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 marketing would have been something that really would have fired me up. I just, you know, I never knew. I didn't try, right? But I miss the fire service for sure. But this is definitely, I could talk about marketing for hours. It 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.
37:10And it's just, it's so fun. 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 the sponsored listings. And then it looks like we're ranked third organically. So something is working. Lots of happy five-star reviews on here. 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.
37:42Yeah, outranking Oakley at this point. So let's keep it up. Keep it going. anything specific that you did on the seo side yeah i mean i've got the basics of seo down but it's an area that i i lack in you know i don't speak the seo language and that's you know that's an area that in 2025 that's i'm going to be looking to learn more about so i can better implement and better position the the company for some some more organic growth are you selling on amazon at all 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.
38:20You 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. Yeah. 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. Yeah. One advantage that you have is that you have the traction in the email list in 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, I'm going to take advantage of Amazon's traffic and customer base.
39:15And 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. 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 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.
39:43And if they don't see it, 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've lost them. So I think having some exposure with maybe a limited product line on Amazon is probably smart for us. But the idea would be obviously to keep the majority of the traffic coming to the website. 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 are going to serve up alternatives because they want to make the conversion.
40:17But if the branding is strong enough, it's like, I know, no, no, I guess I'll go order directly through their site because that that was the thing that I wanted. So I imagine 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. That's our hope. You know, it's hard to see it, right? That's one of those things you 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.
40:46All right, so sales are cranking now. You've got the 3PL, the third-party logistics, handling the fulfillment, the shipping, so you're not running to the post or running back home and having the family, because I imagine the order volume is a little bit higher today 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. 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.
41:21And 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. This is a trade show for the glasses industry. Correct. Okay. Love it. 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.
41:56And the two of us are going to have this time. It'll be a work slash 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. Oh, 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 then 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.
42:29And 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. Well, really good that you had, 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.
43:08Hey, I need you. I need you in the office. I need you here by eight o 'clock 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've built this thing up to the point where you're like, Hey, I think there's a, there's an opportunity. Here's the writing on the wall that we can go and we can go and do this.
43:34We can, we can pay ourselves. We can cut our own paycheck with the, with sunglasses sales. Yeah. That was the start of it. We started to kind of think about it. And with 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 and became a full-time sunglasses mogul, I guess you could say. 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 my time a little bit. So the fire service and particularly being a paramedic is something that's very, very important to me.
44:03So 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. Nice, nice. By choice, yes. Yeah, sunglasses are the main one. So 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 my customers. So I use this app called Bonjuro, 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. Oh, my gosh. How many of these are you doing a day? There's got to be dozens.
44:36It's like about 50 to 60 a day. Oh, my gosh. Okay. You know, but 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 yeah this is the old example of do things that don't scale right and some would argue that they they do scale because it'll increase your ltv on a customer right yeah how do we turn a one-time order into hopefully a customer for life 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.
45:13They're quick. Do people write you back? What's the reaction that you get on those? People are pretty ecstatic. So the ones who write back, they're all kind of blown away by the customer service. Yeah. You're like, wait, but the founder of the company just sent me a personal video message? That's really cool. Exactly. That doesn't happen, right? And that's what we do, right? We're trying to shake things up and do things a little differently and make people feel important because they are, right? My business wouldn't survive if there weren't people who are 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.
45:46You 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 the glasses, doing little videos of the glasses, preparing things for our graphics people 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 the duration of the day. But it always starts with my thank yous.
46:17How do you keep coming up with new content ideas after three years of doing this? How many different pictures of sunglasses can you take? That's what I worry about, but you've managed to be a pretty prolific content creator. 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 into 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.
46:49It'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 got to be testing always. You never know what's going to work, what the algorithm's going to like. 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.
47:18Yeah, it's scary. You mentioned the initial traffic campaign was kind of 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? Yeah. The most recent one would be this recent Black Friday. Everyone gets caught up in this concept that Black Friday, Cyber Monday is the Super Bowl season of sales. You hear these stories that there's companies that do 90 % of their sales in those four days or just a month in November. even though looking at our sales history we always have this dip in like october november i decided that this year i was going to go all in on ads for black friday cyber monday and um 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 and we spent a lot of money to kind of get there so um that was just essentially acting off of emotion instead of acting off of the math and the data.
48:28And the data and the math all told me not to do it, but I had to try it anyway. 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 learn a lesson and they don't do that particular thing again. We're doing the same thing, right? I'm a toddler when it comes to business. So the The only way I'm going to 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.
49:01Yeah, 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 month one. Exactly. It's all about that lifetime value, right? Yeah. What's next? What's next for you in frontline? What are you excited about these days? 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 NZZ 87 Plus certified.
49:33And 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, having these sunglasses issued as a piece of PPE, essentially. So a 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 make for a good fit. How hard is it to get this certification?
50:08That sounds like a great path forward. I'm not going to say that it's simple, but it's not incredibly difficult. The hardest part about it 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 ,000 to$5 ,000. So the process to get there can be expensive, but the upside is dramatic. Okay. Well, we've got an episode on landing government contracts. I'll have to send that one to you after the fact.
50:41because it's like, hey, this is the largest customer in the world. You know, they print the money. Let's go after this, guys. Absolutely. Please send it. Well, very cool. Frontline-optics.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. Mindset is key 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 learning opportunity.
51:17So 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 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 would be the biggest thing you could do is make sure you have a good, solid mindset. Yeah, this is something that comes up more often than you'd like to think.
51:53You 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's 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.
52:20But with every, with every setback comes this opportunity and mindset. But it really 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 of 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.
52:50I like the idea of targeting uniform jobs. This is the one area of personalization of style that I can get. What other jobs are out there wearing uniforms that you might be able 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 lifetime value minus cost of acquisition equals profitability. And so what's our customer going to be worth?
53:22you 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 ecommerce 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 of e-commerce recommendations for you.
53:57I 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 in 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 every month you're gonna need to renew your skincare tube or bottle whatever it was and so that was a 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-com examples to get those juices flowing for you.
54:47But 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 slash 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, to fire off that text message. Hey, maybe we should start our own sunglasses, Brad. 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.
55:15Hustle on.
From the publisher
Mike Ettenberg spent 10 years as a firefighter, but was constantly losing or breaking his sunglasses on calls.
Frustrated, he decided to take matters into his own hands.
Frontline Optics makes durable sunglasses for first responders with a no-questions-asked replacement policy.
Despite having "no business experience," the Side Hustle Show listener took Frontline from side hustle to full-time venture, selling over $1M worth of sunglasses along the way.
Tune in to episode 649 to learn:
How Mike found his first customers
The "microinfluencer" strategy that generated consistent sales
When he felt comfortable quitting his firefighting day job
His plans for the future
Full Show Notes: This Firefighter's Side Hustle Grew to $1M in Sales
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