College Side Hustle made $12K on Amazon in two weeks, then $250M+
By Amanda Breen | Published: 2025-10-30 18:45:00 | Source: Entrepreneur
Key takeaways
- Tate Stock and his wife, Hannah, launched the wellness company Chirp in 2015.
- Over the past decade, the equity firm has grown its business beyond $250 million in lifetime sales.
Features of this Side Hustle Spotlight Q&A chirp Co-founder and CEO Tate Stock, 33, in Salt Lake City, Utah. Stock launched a wellness company that produces “simple and effective” tools for pain relief and recovery with his wife, Hannah, in 2015. Tate used his savings to build the prototype Chirp Wheel, which generated $150,000 in sales in the first year. Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
What was your day job or primary career when you started your side hustle?
I founded Chirp when I was a full-time college student. During the summer, I sold pest control products door to door to make ends meet. I did well enough to survive, and for the first three years, I didn’t get a paycheck from Chirp. Looking back, I’m not quite sure how my wife Hannah and I coped with this, as we were pretty much living on love and potatoes.
RELATED: These 31-Year-Old Friends Started a Side Project to Solve Their Workout Struggle — and They’re on Track to Do $10 Million in Annual Revenue This Year
When did you start your side project, and where did you find the inspiration for it?
I started the side hustle in August 2015, a month before my wedding, and with one semester left in college. I was supposed to go out for an internship, but I was actually at my aunt’s house doing laundry when I noticed a yoga wheel in her living room. I’ve never done yoga in my life, but I grew up on a farm and have a natural curiosity…I thought the product looked interesting, so I looked it up online. When I started typing “yoga wheel” into Amazon, the search bar automatically finished the phrase for me — I only landed on “yoga w.” That moment clicked. If Amazon’s algorithm was predicting it, it means people were looking for it, but no one was actually selling it. That was the spark.
What were some of the first steps you took to get your side off the ground?
Once I found out that people were looking 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 products as I could. I cut the tube on a table saw in my friend’s mom’s barn, glued it to yoga mat padding and made about 100 wheels by hand. I listed it on Amazon and made $12,000 in the first two weeks. It was the best money and profit margins a college kid could get, and to me, it was more valuable than any internship. So, we were off to the races, and the yoga industry was our path.
Are there any free or paid resources that have been particularly helpful to you in starting and running this business?
Initially, our best source was other college students looking for internships. We had more than a dozen associates helping make and sell Chirp Wheels, but after their three-month training period ended, and they came in talking about a more permanent role, all I could offer was $7.25 an hour (minimum wage in Utah at the time), and most of them weren’t interested anymore. We quickly learned that noise and chaos can also be a source of frustration. Everyone wore ten hats, and that’s how we survived those early years.
RELATED: Siblings’ Delicious Side Hustle Becomes a ‘Highly Rewarding’ Business and Expects $500,000 in Revenue
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 hope we can find a manufacturing partner soon. We made the yoga wheels by hand for the first three years, which was a lot of work… but I didn’t have the money for the minimum order quantities that the factory would likely require. So ordering as much sewer pipe and yoga mat as we needed and building the product in the garage was really the only way to finance things. No regrets, it was the hardest way to do it. Looking back, I still recommend that other founders build the first version themselves. She 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 particular work, what is something that you have found particularly difficult and/or surprising that people who engage in this type of work should be prepared for, but probably aren’t?
It was very difficult to get strangers to believe in us. Banks refused to accept us, our family members often doubted us, and other successful people who could provide guidance and guidance often had their own things to worry about. So it was me, my wife and the first employees who were really dedicated and gave everything to keep the business going. At a certain point, I just realized that the faith had to come from us first, and then from the customers who kept buying. That’s when we knew we had something real.
RELATED: She landed her $4,000-a-month side gig at Home Depot: ‘Not bad for a niche product’
Can you remember a specific case where something went wrong – how did you fix it?
We did not charge sales tax to our customers in 2020, a year in which Chirp grew 400%. That’s why we went to every state and entered into voluntary disclosure agreements. The only way to fix the problem ethically was to pay the tax out of our own profits, which cost us about $6 million. Oh. Accepting this reality was really difficult, but it reinforced our value in doing business the right way, regardless of the circumstances. We emerged clean, credible and stronger because of it.
How long did it take until you were able to see consistent monthly revenue? How much do side hustles earn?
We have seen consistent monthly revenues since the beginning, as we have been meeting natural market demand. After selling in the yoga market for several years, we found that Chirp Wheels were perfect for stretching your back, and many customers were simply using them to relieve back pain. The real breakthrough came when we stopped calling it a yoga wheel and started recognizing what customers were actually 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 messaging — we generated $4 million in revenue over the next six months, and have since reached over $250 million in lifetime sales. It’s remarkable how profoundly the right messages can change everything.
RELATED: I Turned a Side Project into a $20K/Month Part-Time Work Without a College Degree
What do growth and revenues look like now?
We’ve had another breakout year in 2025. Our team continues to grow through innovation – around a third of our company headcount is dedicated to research and development. This focus on solving real pain for real people, combined with global marketing, has led to over 300% growth this year.
RELATED: This mom’s ‘annoying’ side hustle started in her garage — and now makes $5 million a year
Your clients are your best mentors.
What is your best specific and actionable business advice?
Launching imperfect products. And don’t get lost in the romance of starting a business. At the end of the day, you’ll need to offer something that sells (meaning that provides actual value to someone). Be passionate about it, not your logo, perfect packaging, or even making sure everything is trademarked. Your clients are your best mentors. Talk to them, listen to them, and they will show you where to go next.
Key takeaways
- Tate Stock and his wife, Hannah, launched the wellness company Chirp in 2015.
- Over the past decade, the equity firm has grown its business beyond $250 million in lifetime sales.
Features of this Side Hustle Spotlight Q&A chirp Co-founder and CEO Tate Stock, 33, in Salt Lake City, Utah. Stock launched a wellness company that produces “simple and effective” tools for pain relief and recovery with his wife, Hannah, in 2015. Tate used his savings to build the prototype Chirp Wheel, which generated $150,000 in sales in the first year. Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
The rest of this article is locked.
Join the entrepreneur+ Today to arrive.
(Tags for translation) Amazon
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
