729: $500,000 in Hamster Ball Sales? How a College Student Brought a New Product to Life

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1:15Take a product that already exists. It's already got some level of validation, some level of proven demand, and then improve upon it in some meaningful way. Today's guest did just that in the small pet space, starting as a side project in college, and the business is growing really fast. From happyhabitats.net, Ethan Haber, welcome to the Side Hustle Show. Nick, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here, and I'm excited to talk with you about my business. This is a really cool story. Stick around. We're talking about how to identify gaps in the market, how to bring your idea to life, and how to get it in front of your target customers so they can buy.

1:54So Ethan, you just landed this huge deal, maybe the biggest in the history of the company. Huge order from this big box retailer. It's going to be in 1 ,500 stores nationwide, which is really, really cool. But it didn't start that way. Take me back a few years. You're on the quad and inspiration strikes for your first product. Sure. So you must have done your homework. You know me pretty well. My sophomore year of college at Wake Forest University, Mooksy and I were hanging out on the quad one day. He's in his hamster ball and I'm just chasing him in circles. And I turn and I see a woman walking her dog.

2:26And I have this thought, why can't I walk my hamster? And that was the idea that metaphorically and literally got the ball rolling. Nice, nice. So the main product is this kind of new and improved hamster ball. Yeah, we have two utility patents under our name. Our main item is the Rome. It's a heavily improved upon small pet exercise ball. It has, you know, major innovations for the item that haven't come about since its launch in the 70s. And then our other item that's currently on store shelves is the Halo. And the Halo is this orange ring that you can snap the hamster ball into. And now I can carry it around while the hamster runs so I can take my pet for a walk, kind of guide them around the world.

3:02Okay. Then we have a new item, Burrow Bricks, which is launching with this major retail partner you opened with. The Burrow Bricks are three by three clear plastic squares you can snap together to create hides, mazes, and permanent enclosures for your small animal. Think of it like Legos meets hamster habitats. Yeah, see-through Legos. So what happens next? So you say, like, why can't I take my hamster for a walk? But then there's a long road and sometimes an expensive road in product development and manufacturing to actually bring something to life here. I like to say that we failed upwards because everything that could go wrong, you know, did go wrong, but we're still here and we're making it happen.

3:38So I was studying entrepreneurship in college and I signed up for this incubator startup lab at my university and they provided, you know, preliminary funding, helped me create my LLC. I pitched my idea for this hamster ball, this safer hamster ball, the Rome, to a design firm in Edgewater, New Jersey. They're known as P9 Design. They do consumer goods for major household brands, Honeywell, Swell, Vixo. So OXO, et cetera. There's something in your house that this design firm has made and I pitched them my idea. Okay. And we did a little homework. We discovered it was innovation in a stagnant space that was also niche, which is kind of, you know, right where you want to be.

4:16And today, P9 Design is a one third equity owner of my business alongside me and my father, and they put in Swequity. So that's one of the main ways we were able to grow to where we are with this. It was this amazing design firm that we're partnered with. Okay. So instead of saying, I'm going to design this myself. I'm going to find a freelance product designer on Upwork or someplace. I'm going to go to a proven one of the best in the business, but it comes at a cost. And that's the cost of giving up some ownership in the company. Yeah. Most entrepreneurs, by the time they sell their business, which I'm not there yet, mind you, they only own 7 % of the business when that transaction happens.

4:51So giving up equity for valuable partnership is a common thing, but dollars are things you need now, but equity is what grows. So that's what you want to hold on to as much as possible. Sure. What do you think made them willing to take a shot on you? Because I imagine they got Fortune 500 companies kind of knocking on their door. They've got these existing clients and they're like, this college kid just sent us a cold email. But I guess we could roll the dice and see what happens. I think that's why they were willing to take a shot on me because I was something different and they were just putting up man hours.

5:20And if they have, you know, 30 plus employees and they're working on, you know, 50 to 100 different projects at a time, it would just start off with them having one person do an hour here, an hour there. But now it's grown to the point where we have three or four people who I talk with weekly, and we have constant deliverables that we need done. And it's very exciting for everyone involved. Okay. You mentioned the patent protection on the product improvements. At what stage does that come into play? Is that in this design phase? Patents take forever to get issued. We issued the provisional patents.

5:51We incorporated in October 2019. We issued our provisional patents to the United States Patent and Attorney Office, I think in 2021. And then both of our utility patents were issued in 2025, one in February and one in November. So you can see how the timeline kind of stretches out. It takes a long time to get that protection. Do you think that's important to have as a product entrepreneur? If you're creating a physical product, for sure. There's two types of patents. There's design patents and utility patents. And design patents are form and utility patents are function. So So there are instances where you would prefer to have a design patent.

6:24But generally speaking, a utility patent is your bread and butter. And if you're able to capture a significant market share of a niche space and you're eating into your competitors' profit margins, all of a sudden your utility patent becomes very attractive because if they buy you, then they're going to be the only ones who can make your item. Oh, OK, because there's some level of we've innovated and now you can't copy us because it's theoretically protected. Yeah. So if you create this new innovation that only you can make and it takes hold of the market, that becomes extremely attractive to anyone in the space.

6:58Got it. OK, so partnering with the design firm, applying for these patents, understanding it's going to be some years down the road before they ever get approved, but provisional patent application, you can say patent pending. What happens after that in terms of finding a manufacturing partner? So we manufacture in Mexico, and I'm pretty sure that we met our manufacturing partner through a connection that a speaker at my entrepreneurship incubator knew. So it was like a third hand connection that I was able to make the introduction to. And now we're pumping out hamster balls with them monthly.

7:30What was the minimum order here? When we started running hamster balls in 2021, we did one 5 ,000 unit run and now we're doing orders bimonthly. So we send the order, you know, month one, they make it month two, and then it cycles. And I just had 10 ,000 hamster balls made in the last three weeks. And I have to put in another order for more because the product is growing exponentially on Amazon. Isn't that funny how it starts to scale? It's like this huge leap of faith to plunk down the original 5 ,000 unit order, which I don't know, what's like the unit cost? or how much was that first production run?

8:03I wouldn't want to disclose the financials, but it definitely is a big leap of faith. Yeah. Talk to me about the existing competition because on the one hand, this is where your products, it can be legitimately labeled new and improved. And there's some validation where a basic hamster ball has been around for decades. And so there's some level of proven demand, but the question mark is like, would people pay for a premium, newer, better version of that? And that was the question that we, you know, believe the answer was yes. It took a while for us to confirm the answer is yes. We started selling hamster balls in 2021.

8:38Now, early 2026, late 2025 is where we finally saw our belief actualized. The main competition, there's only two or three manufacturers of small pet exercise balls in North America, and they're pumping out, you know, millions of hamster balls a year. There's 25 million small pets owned in the world, six plus million in the United States. And these are pets that only have a life cycle of two to three years. So you can imagine the amount of small pet exercise equipment that gets moved. Yeah. Were you neck deep in that total addressable market research before you jumped in? You say like, okay, there's 6 million in the US.

9:13Like, okay, if they buy a ball every two years, like, I don't know what the math looks like or the research looks like behind that. A lot of research went into it. And APA, the American Pet Products Association is where I got a lot of my information from. Given that it's a niche space and 90 % of the pet market is dog, if you want to learn some facts on small animal purchasing patterns, you got to kind of do your homework and dig pretty deep. Now, small pet is something that has remained a small but sizable niche in the pet space. It's here to stick around, it's growing, and I'm very grateful to be part of that space.

9:49Are you doing the math like early on, like in this kind of ideation phase, like, okay, there's 6 million hamsters in the US, if I can capture 1%, if I can capture 10%, like, oh, that's half a million units a year at this price. You know, are you doing some of that calculation early on? And maybe that's part of the pitch to the design firm. Like, look at the size of the opportunity here. Yeah, that is part of the pitch. And you're dead on the money. Because it's a niche space, there's only two or three competitors that haven't innovated in, you know, decades. While it is very much an uphill battle, you can see the real opportunity of if I'm able to capture even a small portion of the market share, there is sizable opportunity.

10:26Got it. Okay. So you land 5000 units. And now comes the fun part of like, well, how do I find these small pet owners and convince them to buy my thing instead of the other stuff that they've been buying for decades? What happens first on kind of the marketing promotion side? So the first thing was our molds to actually manufacture the products, you know, we manufacture in Mexico, but the molds are made in China and you have to ship the molds from China to Mexico. When we ship those molds, like I said, we incorporated in 2019. It was right when COVID hit. And then all of a sudden our molds to make the products are stuck on a boat right outside the port of Los Angeles for nine plus months waiting to port.

11:03Oh my gosh. So frustrating. And you're sitting there like, okay, well, I can, I guess, work on the website. I can work on some potential retail partnerships down the road, but it's just kind of sitting there like in this waiting game, this holding period. Yeah, where we have no inventory, we have all this invested capital into the molds, which are not cheap to create. And then all of a sudden they're stuck for months waiting to arrive at the factory. So we did garner this momentum when we first had the molds made. And then that kind of fizzled out by the time we were able to actually get them to the factory.

11:33But we were able to run our first run. And then here's another thing that happens. The first packaging partner my business worked with switched the packaging out on us on our first run. So it was like this nice corrugate box, colored, thick, secure. And they switched it out to some paperboard that they said in their tests had the same durability. And I had a pallet shipped to me and every single unit was damaged because they switched the packaging from what we, you know, had created to be safe and secure. So then that was another thing that went wrong. What happens in that case? Is that just like a shipping insurance claim or but it sets back your timeline?

12:07It sets back the timeline. We were able to recoup some of it on shipping insurance. Everything that's still at the factory, you know, we kind of just have to trash and redo in terms of packaging. The product itself is fine. And I wish it was a situation where we could just say, hey, we're not going to pay because they didn't deliver what we bought. But our factory fronted the payment. So then if we didn't pay, we're screwing over our factory, not the packager. And the factory is not who screwed us over. It's the packager. So it would have soured our relationship early on. So that was another thing we just had to, you know, bite the bullet on.

12:39But we finally have the product. we have it in the right package. We get this retailer in the southeast of the United States pet supermarket. They have 200 plus stores. They're a very nice local chain. We get them to take a chance on us. And they're the first ones who stock our products in their store. And that was what allowed us to proof of concept and open conversations with other vendors. After all those headaches and setbacks, Ethan has finally got his product on the shelves of a major regional pet products retailer. But it's not all sunshine and rainbows from there. Coming up, we're talking social media drama, pricing and profit margins, and how to make your product stand out on the shelf.

13:15All that and more coming up right after this. In the next 60 seconds, 23 entrepreneurs are going to find their next team member on Indeed. I'm excited to partner with Indeed for this episode because when you need to find amazing candidates fast, you need the powerful matching technology and unmatched reach of our sponsor, Indeed. Stop struggling to get your job posts seen on other job sites and get the help you need fast. Plus, Indeed's sponsored jobs help you stand out and hire even faster. It'll make your post jump to the top of the page for your relevant candidates, and the proof is in the results.

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15:12Now's the time to get out of admin mode and into growth mode. Try Gusto today at gusto.com slash side hustle and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash side hustle. One more time, it's gusto.com slash side hustle. Okay, so before going DTC, before going through your own Shopify store, before going through Amazon even, it's retail partnerships from the very beginning. It was retail partnerships and we tried DTC, but we couldn't get DTC to stick early on. We now have it at a place where our business is 60 % DTC, 40 % wholesale.

15:50But we spent a long time exploring every avenue of selling off of our site, doing it off of meta TikTok, and it did not work. Social media, everyone has an opinion and it's often negative. And the small pet space specifically is one where everyone has something to say. And it's very easy for someone to come out and say hamster balls are bad because that hamster ball is a divisive item in the small pet space, which is what my business sought to fix. We took all those pain points that exist on the item and mitigated them or removed them entirely. So we advertise that we have this safer ball, but then you just have like thousands of comments on TikTok where people say, no, that's bad.

16:25Really, I had no idea. This is just the state of the Internet. Everything is super polarized and contentious, but apparently hamster balls aren't even immune from that. Yeah. So if you look at our reviews on Amazon, Walmart, Chewy, if you look at the amount of units we're moving, if you look at the customer feedback, you will see that the people who actually engage with the products and get their hands on it, love it and recognize the quality of the item. But on social media, it's very quick for someone to just see a hamster ball and say, no, that's bad. But it's like we added seatbelts to the car.

16:52Okay. That was the whole point. We're trying to improve upon what's out there. Okay. What was the pitch like to Pet Supermarket, this first store that says, yeah, we'll take a chance and stock this? Because it's not a small item. They're going to have to dedicate some shelf space to this. And it's kind of part of that retail calculus of, well, how many do we think we could sell and all that? I had a deck that I shared with them and went through, you know, the costs, the retail, the minimum order number, marketing co-ops, all that nitty gritty. And I know that they recognized it was innovation in the space and they loved the new item because these stores are hungry for new pet products.

17:29They don't want to just keep selling the same things over and over because if you have innovation, that's how you're going to get people into your store when everything is going to transferring to, you know, more and more online. So they were eager to take a chance on us, do a test order. And we were very grateful for that opportunity. Is there a way you think about pricing to a retail partner or, you know, on a wholesale basis? My manufacturing costs were five. I want to sell it for 20 and they're going to sell it for 40. Like, how do you think about that value stack or that ladder? This was another thing that went wrong.

17:59We didn't know going into it, but in the pet space specifically, you want your manufacturing cost to be one fifth or one sixth of the final retail costs. So if it cost me$2 to make, I would want it to retail for$10 to$12. And that's how you're able to, you know, everyone's able to eat between you, the distributor and the retailer. So my business has only been able to go direct because we didn't bake in margin for distribution when we designed our first products. And to kind of, you know, extrapolate on that a little bit, our first item, we decided to design it within a budget. So let's say we had$5 we could allocate to the item.

18:36We added all these extra bells and whistles, like really premium things. We have 10 plus magnets in the halo, and that was for the legs to hang on the sides when it could have just as easily been Velcro or snaps. But we felt that the magnets were premium, and they were within the budget that we allocated the manufacturing cost to be. All of a sudden, COVID hits, cost of manufacture goes up, you know, 100%. And now this item that costs us$5 to make costs us$10 to make. and we can't afford to sell it. So what we ended up doing is removing the magnets and now the legs just exist in the standing position on the product.

19:09Okay, kind of roll with the punches there. Doesn't have to be as over-engineered as it once was. So it still accomplishes the same goal. We were able to kind of dig ourselves out of that corner there. But this new product, Burrowbricks, which we're launching, we're really excited about because we shifted the mindset of designing within a budget to creating a premium product as cheaply as possible. So we have everything we want in the item. We sacrificed nothing, but we didn't add any extra frills in order to create the item at a cost where we can, you know, then give it along to their consumer at a price that they can pay for it.

19:40Got it. Got it. Okay. So the first retailer puts it on the shelf. They test it out. And then what happens after that? I mean, is it a home run out of the gate or they're like, I don't know. And then you're kind of back to the drawing board and trying to find other partners now that you kind of have a toehold in the Southeast? So we started with a color retail box for the halo, which is the ring and the ball, and it wasn't moving on shelves. And our belief that it wasn't moving was because it was a static image of this dynamic product that hasn't really ever existed before. And the consumer wasn't readily understanding what the item was just from the box with the product inside.

20:18It wasn't really moving at pet supermarket. We ended up picking up another small retailer in the Midwest, Feeders Pet Supply. They have 60 plus stores. They're also a very great chain that we're grateful to have partnered with. Between Pet Supermarket and Feeders, we were able to prove the concept of our item, but the sales weren't very strong because of the packaging. So now we've redone the packaging again to this point where we have our product in a clear clamshell and there's a little hole that you can get your fingers in and touch the product. So the customer is actually able to engage with it on the shelves and now it's moving much better.

20:48And similarly with the standalone exercise ball, we have it in a box that it protrudes from. So the face of the box, the ball sticks out, you can touch it, you can see the ergonomics of what makes it better, the patented ventilation pattern, the two-step locking mechanism on the lid. Yeah, this is like a crash course in retail and merchandising. You're right, it's kind of, it's very a tactile thing and you want to be able to imagine your pet in it and like to touch and feel it. And yeah, I've seen some of the newer packaging and you're right. Like, oh, I could see why in comparison to the old one, I could see why this one sells much better.

21:22Yeah. You want to give the customer something that they can engage with on the retail shelf in a tactile real-time experience. Are your products more expensive than the existing old school hamster balls? Our hamster ball, the Rome, sells$20 in store and$25 on online marketplaces. So it is more expensive and that is because of the innovation that's gone into it, it's much safer than the alternatives. And to kind of dive into that, the things that we got our patent on, traditional small pet exercise balls, the ventilation holes are large enough that the animal's paws can get stuck. And what that results in is injury or death.

22:00So what we did is we created this two millimeter paw protection ventilation pattern. So we have a plethora of very small holes that your hamster's paw won't get stuck in, but it provides the same, if not more airflow to the animal. And then in addition to that, we have a two-step locking mechanism on the lid. Traditional balls just have a quarter turn. It's a friction fit. And they're made of cheap plastic that warps over time. And as a consumer, I've actually seen my hamster, you know, press its hand against the ball to ply the plastic and have the lid pop off. And then all of a sudden it's trying to run under my fridge.

22:35So that's like a real pain point that exists with hamster balls before my invention, what we added is a two-step locking mechanism. So it has the regular quarter turn, but then it also has this bar you can push forward into place and all of a sudden the lid is locked on. So your pet is safe inside. Yeah. Premium pricing to justify a premium product. Yeah. There's a lot of thought that went into this little plastic hamster ball. Yeah. Do you ever see the movie Bolt? Yeah. Yeah. It's like my, it's probably a top five movie for me just because Rhino is probably the all-time best Disney sidekick. Yeah.