College Side Hustle Makes $12k in 2 Weeks on Amazon – Then $250M+

Features of this Side Hustle Spotlight Q&A Tweet Tate Stock, 33, co-founder and CEO of Salt Lake City, Utah. Stock launched the wellness company in 2015 with his wife Hannah, behind the “simple and effective” tools for pain relief and recovery. Tate used his savings to build a prototype of the Chirp Wheel, with sales of $150,000 in the first year. Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

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What was your day job or primary occupation when you started your job?
I founded Chirp when I was a full-time college student. During the summer, I sold pest control door-to-door to make ends meet. I did a pretty good job of staying afloat and didn’t take a salary from Chirp for the first three years. Looking back, I’m not quite sure how my wife Hannah and I managed it – we relied largely on love and potatoes.

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When did you start your side and where did you get the inspiration from?
I started side hustles in August 2015 – a month before my wedding and with a semester left in college. I was supposed to be out for an internship, but actually I was washing clothes at my aunt’s house when I saw a yoga wheel in her living room. I’ve never done yoga in my life, but I grew up on a farm and I’m naturally curious…I thought the product looked interesting, so I looked it up online. As soon as I started typing “yoga wheel” into Amazon, the search bar automatically finished the phrase for me – I only got “yoga W.” That moment clicked. If Amazon’s algorithm was predicting it, it meant people were searching for it — yet no one was actually selling it to them. She was the spark.

What were the first steps you took to get your cause off the ground?
Once I found out people were searching for these yoga wheels online, I went out and bought $400 worth of sewer pipe and $50 worth of yoga mats and made as many as I could. I cut pipe on a table in my friend’s mom’s barn, glued on yoga-mat padding, and made about 100 wheels by hand. I listed them on Amazon and made $12,000 in the first two weeks. It was the best money and best margins a college kid could get, and to me, it was more valuable than any internship. So, we joined the race, and the yoga industry was our track.

Are there any free or paid resources that have been particularly helpful to you in getting this business up and running?
At first, our best resource was other college kids who were looking for internships. We had about a dozen guys who were helping make and sell Chirp Wheels, but after their three-month internship was up and they came to talk about a more permanent role, I could only offer $7.25 an hour (Utah’s minimum wage at the time), and most weren’t that interested anymore. We soon learned that hustle and bustle can also be a resource. Everyone wore ten hats, and that’s how we survived those early years.

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“Doing things the hard way often forces you to understand your product and your customers better than anyone else.”

If you could go back in your business journey and change one process or approach, what would it be, and how do you wish you had done it differently?
I wish we would have found a manufacturing partner soon. We made yoga wheels by hand for the first three years, and it was a lot of work…but I didn’t have the money for the minimum order quantity required for a factory. So ordering as much sewer pipe and yoga mats as we needed and making the product in the garage was really the only way we could finance things. No regrets – this was the hardest way to do it. Looking back, I would still recommend that other founders create the first version themselves. It taught me that doing things the hard way often forces you to understand your product and your customers better than anyone else.

When it comes to this specific business, what is something that you have found particularly challenging and/or surprising that people who get into this type of work should be prepared for, but perhaps aren’t?
It was extremely challenging to get outsiders to trust us. Banks turned us down, family members often doubted us, and other successful people who could have provided guidance often had their own things to worry about. So it was really just me, my wife and the early employees who were really dedicated and gave everything to keep the business going. At a certain point, I just realized that trust had to come from us first, then from the customers who kept purchasing. That’s when we knew we had something real.

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Can you remember a specific example when something went horribly wrong – how did you fix it?
We didn’t charge sales tax to our customers in 2020, a year in which Chirp grew 400%. Because of that, we went to each state and entered into voluntary disclosure agreements. The only way to fix the problem ethically was to pay the tax from our own profits, which cost us about $6 million. Ouch. That reality was really challenging to accept, but it reinforced our value of doing business the right way regardless of the circumstances. Because of this we emerged clean, reliable and strong.

How long did it take you to see consistent monthly revenue? How much did Side Hustle make?
We saw consistent monthly revenues from the beginning, because we were supplying the natural demand in the market. After selling in the yoga market for several years, we found that Chirp Wheels were perfect for stretching your back, and many customers were using them to find relief from back pain. The real success came when we stopped calling it a yoga wheel and started acknowledging what customers were already using it for, which was pain relief. In the first two and a half years, we generated $180,000 in revenue. Then, without changing the product – just the message – we achieved $4 million in revenue over the next six months and have since grown to more than $250 million in lifetime sales. It’s remarkable how profoundly the right messaging changed everything.

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What do growth and revenues look like now?
We have another breakout year in 2025. Our team is leading the way through innovation – approximately one third of our company’s employees are dedicated to research and development. World-class marketing coupled with a focus on solving real pain for real people has led to growth of over 300% this year.

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“Your customers are your best teachers.”

What is your best specific, actionable business advice?
Launch an incomplete product. And don’t get lost in the romance of building a business. At the end of the day, you have to provide something that sells (meaning it actually provides value to someone). Get passionate about that, not just your logo, your perfect packaging or even making sure you’ve trademarked everything. Your customers are your best teachers. Talk to them, listen to them and they will tell you where to go next.

Features of this Side Hustle Spotlight Q&A Tweet Tate Stock, 33, co-founder and CEO of Salt Lake City, Utah. Stock launched the wellness company in 2015 with his wife Hannah, behind the “simple and effective” tools for pain relief and recovery. Tate used his savings to build a prototype of the Chirp Wheel, with sales of $150,000 in the first year. Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

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