This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. Thank you for tuning in. Welcome as well to our new season, 2022. Super excited about all that is to come this year.
And also welcome as well to Throwback Thursday, our weekly segment where we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them. I really enjoy working on these updates 'cause we get to hear from people directly. We hear from Side Hustlers and hear how they've grown their business, what's gone well, what hasn't gone well, what they're struggling with and what's next. Okay, so last week we heard from the young founder of a Florida tutoring business that now has 25 staff tutors. And she does this while working full-time as an aerospace engineer.
So it is a proper side hustle that's actually scaling while she's sending people into space. So pretty cool there. Today in our latest feature, we're gonna hear from Mike Lee, the co-founder of Soul CBD. After a successful boxing career, Mike hung up his gloves to enter the small business arena. In his words, which you're gonna hear in just a moment, he's glad to pursue a passion that doesn't involve getting beat up.
Always a benefit there, nice bonus. So let's hear that update directly from him. I'll come back at the end with a quick wrap up. Ladies and gentlemen, in this corner, Mike Lee. [Music]
My name is Mike Lee.
I'm currently located in Los Angeles, California. The name of my side hustle, now main hustle is Soul CBD. And I was featured on episode 780. Soul CBD is a health and wellness company that helps people with anxiety, sleep and pain. We have a whole line of products from tinctures to gummies to capsules that help people with those pain points.
About three years ago, my sister and I co-founded the company. It really came out of our own necessity to find an all natural solution to pain and really anxiety. I was a professional athlete for 10 years prior to this. And through that had experienced a lot of pain. And at one point in my career, I was actually diagnosed with an autoimmune disease.
So I was on eight different medications about five years ago. And I just knew that number nine wasn't the answer. So that pain really caused me to dive into learning about the human body and all natural solutions to all these ailments. And so I ended up slowly but surely weaning off all the medication through many different modalities, many different techniques and strategies. And CBD became a staple in my life.
So for me, I wanted to share this with the world, this incredible plant that had been around for thousands of years and unfortunately demonized in our current culture. And so I wanted to help show people that there's ways to benefit from all natural solutions to anxiety, sleep and pain. My day job prior to that was I used to get punched in the face for a living. I was a professional boxer for about 10 years. I got signed right out of college, had a long career, fought for many titles.
My last fight I fought for a world title at the MGM Grand. So I'm very grateful for that long career with a lot of wins and some losses and even more grateful now that I get to pursue a passion that doesn't involve me getting beat up. A lot has happened since I've last been on the show. I have since retired from the sport and I've taken on Soul CBD as CEO full-time. We have hired a lot more people.
We've done a complete redesign and rebrand of the website, the labeling, the packaging. We've also come out with our best-selling product right now which is Gummy. So we started initially as a tincture and a capsule product-focused company but we decided to enter into Gummy's and adding CBD and other cannabinoids and other healthy ingredients in there. And so it's been really cool to see the affinity for that product line. And now Gummy's is one of our best sellers and really a great way to introduce people to CBD.
I think anytime we're growing like this, there's a lot of growing pains. So there's a ton of challenges that come along with that. One of the main ones that we're currently working on is attribution, really understanding the ROAS, the return on ad spend of all of our paid platforms and where they're coming from. I think anytime you're a direct consumer brand, you have Facebook, Instagram, Google, influencers, affiliates, there's all these different verticals where revenue is coming from and having proper attribution is very difficult in a world of codes and links and everything being thrown around. So for us, it's really identifying that attribution and understanding which channels are truly performing and which channels aren't and moving ad dollars around to really answer those types of issues.
My number one advice for people that wanna follow my footsteps of at least of being an entrepreneur is to be passionate. I learned that first and foremost as a professional athlete and actually me losing passion for the sport is why I ended up retiring. Similar to sports and entrepreneurship, your competitors are constantly working and if you're not extremely passionate about this idea, this new venture, this side hustle that you're doing, don't even embark on it point blank because the person who is passionate about it may not be smarter, they may not have as many resources, they may not have as much talent, but if they're willing to outwork you, nine out of 10, they will win. And honestly, that's how I became one of the best in the world was not even so much my physical talent, it was, I outworked everybody and once I started to lose the passion for the sport, that's when I started to lose. So for me, that's one of the biggest advice that I give is that you need to be passionate because if it feels like a job, rarely will succeed because you won't be willing to go above and beyond to put in what's necessary to stand out.
[Music]
Awesome, thanks so much, Mike. Really appreciate those updates. I totally agree about being passionate. I think you can't just follow any passion, but when you find the right passion that you are excited about that also has value to others, I mean, that is the magic formula. So that's great.
I also liked hearing about the ROAS metric, the return on ad spend. So that is something important, especially when you are, well, spending ads because as Mike was explaining, this whole problem of attribution, it's a real thing for an e-commerce company because you have these different sales channels and it's not as simple as you might think, being able to track each individual sale and understand, okay, I'm spending a couple of thousand dollars here, maybe I'm spending more money on this other thing, how do I know where the attribution is? How do I know where the sales are actually coming from? So an important thing to pay attention to. Listeners, check out Mike's website, MySoulCBD.com.
MySoulCBD, let's give him some positive ROAS, which shouldn't be hard because no one pays for placement here. So he's actually spending zero dollars. So if we send him one sale, he's got positive ROAS. Nice. Let me know what you think and who you'd like to see featured from our archives of more than a thousand stories, sidehustleschool.com/questions for any questions, feedback, ideas, anything you're working on and our show notes for today, sidehustleschool.com/1839.
As I said, I'm excited about this year. I will be cheering you on. I hope you move forward with your ideas and I hope you'll join me again tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You are listening to "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the "Onward Project."
