Validating a Side Hustle

Hi—Dan here. A few months ago Justin Mares explored The Four Kinds of Side Hustles with us, and it quickly became one of the top Superorganizers articles of the year. Today, he's back—sharing how he validated the idea for a side hustle that eventually became Kettle & Fire one of the most successful bone broth companies in the world.

It’s 2014. I’m sitting in my HR rep’s office, resigning my 6-figure job. Two weeks later I’ll be out of the workforce, officially unemployed.

My dad says I should be nervous. Everyone says I should be nervous. But I’m confident I can make this work. Why?

Because in the month before I officially quit my job, I had systematically tested—and proven—demand for the idea that would become Kettle & Fire: a shelf-stable, organic bone broth company that now does well north of 8 figures a year in revenue. In the years since I quit my job, I’ve raised ~$20M to expand Kettle & Fire, and gotten the brand into 10K+ retail stores.

I did this without any experience in the industry, and, in the beginning, without a product. I did this with the expectation that the company would be a small business that would maybe make six figures in annual profit.

Without any experience in the industry, and without a product, I was able to turn an idea into a side gig into a highly profitable company. I’m going to show you exactly how I tested and validated that idea.

FINDING THE IDEA

Since roughly 2010, I’ve been what I’d call 90% paleo: I usually eat according to a very strict diet (no grains or sugar, minimally processed foods) but have the occasional cheat day.

Never quite this bad

By 2014, I’d been hearing a lot of buzz about bone broth from friends at my Crossfit gym. I’d read about the many benefits of bone broth for skin, gut, and joint health, and was excited to try it.

The problem was… I couldn’t find it anywhere. Making it yourself requires a slow cooker and 20+ hours per batch, not to mention time and money to source grass-fed bones. The only stuff I could find online was frozen and had super high minimum order sizes. I didn’t have the time or the money for these options and figured there had to be others out there like me.

Thus the idea was born for the 1st shelf-stable bone broth. One that could become a nice little side business, and I could help people improve people’s health—and my own—at the same time. Win win!

Now all I had to do was test the idea.

TESTING THE IDEA

Typically, the next step after having what you think is a great idea is to create a product and introduce it to the market for beta tests. If I’d gone that route, it would have gone something like this:

Try to figure out how to make it.
Find a supplier of grass-fed bones.
Figure out how to make small batches.
Start selling at farmer’s markets.
And so on.

But I had a different idea. I wasn’t that worried about whether I’d be able to make the product or find suppliers. But what I really wanted to know was whether it would be worth the effort.

So the first questions I asked were:

How many people want this product?
Will they spend enough on the product that I can build a meaningful business?

Both of these questions are critical when testing and validating an idea. If you don’t have enough potential customers, obviously that’s not going to work. And if you have a customer segment that wants something but not enough to pay for it, that’s not a business either—you have to identify whether this is a pain point that enough people are willing to spend money to solve.

Question #1: How many people want this product?

To answer question 1, I looked at places where lots of paleo people hung out. Community sites like PaleoHacks and blogs like Mark’s Daily Apple all mentioned bone broth and its health benefits, while Google Trends showed some decent (and quickly growing) interest.

Plus, just by being a member of the community, I knew that it was something that many Paleo people were talking about.

On top of that, I took a look in the Google AdWords Keyword Tool and saw that several thousand people per month were searching for a product that nobody was selling… bone broth.