Resistance Is Futile! Brooklyn Fitness Fanatics Sell “No Days Off” Exercise Bands

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

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How can you take something that is pretty basic and create some sort of added value around it? How can you take something as simple as a rubber band and sell it for profit? Welcome to Side Hustle School, my name is Chris Guillebeau. Now this scenario is exactly what the two guys in today's story do. A love of fitness and fashion inspires a real estate broker and his workout buddy to sell resistance bands in custom colors.

Long ago when I trained for my first marathon, I did not train well. Didn't really pay attention to anything besides running. And as a result, I had an IT band injury. Your IT band runs along the side of your leg from about your hip down to your knee. And it's a common problem for runners, cyclists, other athletes as well.

If you don't pay attention to it, if you don't do the right stretching and strengthening, then you're gonna get hurt, just like I did. One of the things that eventually made it better was working out with some resistance bands, just doing some really basic strengthening exercises. Now I haven't done that in a while, but I haven't thought about it much until I worked on today's episode. Calling it resistance is futile. Brooklyn Fitness Fanatics sell no days off exercise bands.

So how do you take something that is basic, like a rubber band, and create a successful side hustle around it? Well, stay tuned and I will tell you all about it. [Music]

Steve Clare has been a real estate broker in Brooklyn for close to a decade. Running around to dozens of properties means that he's putting in quite a workout on a daily basis. So naturally fitness ranks high on his list of priorities.

But when you're as busy as Steve is, you get in a workout wherever you can, and you find ways to maximize your efforts without much fuss. And that's where our story begins. In 2017, Steve and his workout buddy Max were training for the Brooklyn Marathon. This meant that a large chunk of their weeks were spent pounding the pavement. But as any good runner knows, building up your distance just by running is a rookie mistake.

Marathon runners also need to switch up their diet, sleep habits, and consider the role of strength training. This will not only target the muscles needed to keep you going the distance, it's also great at correcting any muscle imbalances and improving your running form. So when you're the kind of guy who's always on the go like Steve, resistance bands are your best friends. They're far more portable than a home gym, and you can bust them out in the office, on your commute, or pretty much anywhere you can find a two to three foot radius. They're also good to use following a run.

Steve and Max got in the habit of wrapping the resistance bands around their wrists, bringing their post run workouts with them on the go. They just had one complaint. They wanted more color options to choose from. Who wouldn't? Since they clearly weren't busy enough with working full time jobs and engaging in rigorous pre-marathon training, they decided to source them themselves and try to sell them.

Their goal was to produce and sell high grade latex rubber resistance bands that could double as a wristband and come in a multitude of snazzy colors. They called their side hustle NDO band for no days off band, because when the gym is right there on your wrist, there's really no excuse. Steve and Max believed this was an idea that could go the distance, so they hit the ground running. Their first step was to find a manufacturer willing to create their bands in every color of the rainbow. After a few days of searching on Alibaba, Steve was able to find a few suppliers that seemed to have what he was looking for.

But as with buying anything online, he knew it was in his best interest to be cautious. To put his own unique twist on a battle of the bands, Steve approached five different manufacturers telling them he was prepared to place an order of 5,000 bands. This encouraged those suppliers to deliver their samples for free. One manufacturer stood out among the pack because they were willing to provide him with any Pantone color that he wanted. This was ideal for a number of reasons, but particularly because it was his long-term goal to get NDO brand into corporations by providing custom colors and branding.

Although he thought he had a winner, he waited to test them all out before making a final decision. It turned out that his intuition was spot on. A friend built a website and another friend designed a logo. Steve then experimented with posting on Instagram and two sales came in out of the blue. They weren't from strangers.

One of them was an old friend and another was a coworker. Still, they purchased their resistance bands after seeing NDO band tagged in a picture on Steve's Instagram page without realizing it was actually his company. According to Steve, this just goes to show that social proof is huge. Following that first small success, Steve spent a small amount of money on Facebook ads. It brought in around 50 visitors per day to the site, but unfortunately it generated very few sales.

He feels that there's a formula for mastering Facebook ads that he just hasn't quite discovered yet. The first big jump in sales and brand awareness came when Steve received an email from an editor at PopSugar. She had stumbled on his Instagram post and wanted to be the first to write about the product. Naturally, Steve and his colleague Max were thrilled. Once the PopSugar article went live in January 2018, their website traffic went up to around 500 visitors a day for almost a solid week and the site had about 80 sales over the course of a single weekend.

Talk about a sprint. That was when they felt that people were finally starting to notice the brand. Bringing in more friends to form a larger team, Steve started to explore other ways to grow the hustle. After some serious brainstorming, they decided to launch what they called NDO Band Fit Camp. It's an hour's worth of high intensity interval training using resistance bands with a healthy branch catered at the end of the session.

Naturally, we were curious about how much Steve has invested and how much he's made so far. The total startup costs were about $8,000, which may sound like a big amount, but Steve believed it was important to invest in himself and to give this idea the best possible odds of success. That investment has paid off. Within just a few months, they were making about $1,200 a month before launching the boot camps. Those sessions are now bringing in an additional $1,500 each month.

What excites them the most is that both of these revenue streams are growing from month to month. Now, Steve has some advice for anybody out there who wants to start a similar site hustle. First, do your research and don't rush to go with a supplier just because it's easy. It's crucial to get a reliable supplier that ships high quality product every time. Second, and this is really good, never reinvent the wheel.

There's usually a proven method, strategy, or practice for everything. So follow that strategy before trying to create your own way. This will save you time, money, headaches, and sleepless nights. The NBO band team is now looking to expand into corporate wellness. They want to provide lunchtime sessions for companies and NDO bands for employees.

At the same time, they're also developing smaller bands that focus on lower body workouts. They might even call it the NDO booty band. The most rewarding aspect for Steve is the experience of building his own brand from the bottom up. He's been able to combine fitness and fashion into a business. He's been able to see a lot of people, including many well-known influencers, adopt his movement.

In less than one year, the banded brand is profitable and growing. Resistance is futile. [Music]

Awesome, well, remember the product here is pretty simple. We're talking about rubber bands. Okay, and rubber bands really don't cost much at all.

All of the value here is in the brand itself, which is why it's so important to tell a good story. Now, I really liked that last bit of Steve's advice. You don't need to reinvent the wheel, at least not every part of the wheel. Okay, you just need to find one thing that's different. In this case, most resistance bands are kind of boring.

They found a way to create customized colors, every color in the rainbow, every Pantone color. The wristband thing is also pretty cool. You can just wear this around your wrist and it's always available. So that's what they have reinvented, but everything else they're following these standard practices, which work well in terms of sourcing the right manufacturer, in terms of setting up the website, in terms of figuring out e-commerce. You really don't need to reinvent the wheel of those things unless you want to waste a lot of time and be more inefficient, which of course you don't.

Now, in the spirit of positive growth, I have one constructive criticism for them. I was taking a look at their website, which I often do before I record the episode. And overall, the site is excellent. Like there are lots of good photos, but I often say that the most important page on your website, or at least the second most important, is your about page. Like what is the actual story?

Like what story are we telling? Who are the people behind this? I know personally, when I buy something, I always go to look for that. So in this case, the about page is not linked from the top header, but it is at the bottom. So I go down to the bottom, I click the link, and then the about page is extremely basic.

It almost looks like they wrote something placeholder on it and then forgot about it, meant to go back to it later, but never did. There are just two sentences on that page. And one of the sentences is ultimately no days off is what is most aptly characterizing what we live by, which is a really awkward sentence. It feels like the about page has taken a day off. So again, just some constructive feedback.

I'm glad that they're selling, and I hope that they can sell a lot more. In fact, this episode has inspired me. After I finished recording it, I'm gonna go to the gym myself and do some strengthening exercises. If you would like to learn more about the NDO band, just come check out the show notes at sidehustleschool.com/567. We're gonna link up their website and their Instagram.

As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. That's why I'm going to the gym right now. Thank you for listening all week. I'll be back tomorrow with the weekly recap. My name is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.

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