This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Today's story is titled Game of Cones. Two women make architecturally inspired ice cream. Inuvo cream wave of ice cream debuts at Coachella and everyone freaks out. I guess you could also say always bet on ice cream or at least never bet against it. What are some classic things that go together?
Gin and tonic, peaches and cream, milk and cookies, peanut butter and chocolate, Netflix and chill. And now architecture and ice cream. Wait, what? What are we talking about? Well, we are telling the story of Game of Cones.
Two women who make architecturally inspired ice cream after one of them is insulted by her University of California design professor. This ice cream goes on to debut at Coachella. There's a lot going on in this story. We'll try to make sense of it all. It causes a minor sensation there at the Coachella festival and years later it becomes a multi-million dollar business.
Now I'll actually have an update at the very end of this story about what happened after all that. But first let's try to get through it. Let's talk about how this business idea came to be, what the founders learned along the way, some different things they did to make it successful and what you side hustlers might take from the story. What can you take as a point of inspiration leading to your own action in starting growing, pursuing a side hustle idea, whatever the case may be. I'm gonna bring you the detailed story, lots of fun facts, et cetera, right after this quick shout out to our sponsor.
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Like many good things, Natasha Case's side hustle started by accident. While she was studying architecture at University of California at Berkeley, she was tasked with designing a student housing model. Once she presented it, her professor described the project as basically a box cake, like it was a bad thing. Since everyone likes cake, she decided to take her next project even further and actually baked it for her class. This light bulb moment of combining food and architecture would return to her later.
After college, she started a job as a Walt Disney Imagineer and began baking cookies and making ice cream for her coworkers. She enjoyed creating ice cream sandwich combinations that were a play on famous architectural concepts like minimalism, you get it? It's like minimalism except better. And these ice cream sandwich combinations were a hit. Natasha had always wanted to find a way to bring design to a wider audience, especially architectural design, and seeing the sugar-crazed ecstasy written on her colleagues' faces as they consumed her creations, she realized she might've found the perfect way to bring this love of architecture to the masses through design and dessert.
Now, what started as a fun hobby might've stayed that way until her girlfriend, now wife, Freya, saw the business potential in what Natasha was doing. Freya started asking about numbers and figures. The couple went to Whole Foods. They wrote down how much ice cream products cost and started to work out the feasibility behind starting their own hustle. While standing in the aisles, they noticed that ice cream products hadn't changed for a long time.
They didn't see many brands with character and there was nothing that spoke to them as women or as millennials. Freya says this helped motivate them to design and introduce a product that represented the frozen zeitgeist of the times. Hey, that sounds good to me. Two weeks later, they co-founded Cool House. Cool House spelled H-A-U-S at the end with the goal of restoring the diminished glory of ice cream sandwiches.
Natasha and Freya both had full-time jobs, so they spent the weekends at farmer's markets selling those treats and building their customer base. This allowed them to test products and scale slowly without making a large financial investment in the business right off the bat. Now that said, they loved their weekly spot at the market, but when the opportunity to sell their sandwiches at Coachella presented itself, they jumped. A few Craigslist searches and $2,500 later, they bought an old postal van, one without a working engine, and had it towed out to the California desert. It was a sink or swim event for them.
It involved people lining up at 7 a.m. They got 5,000 social media followers in one afternoon. It gave them the feeling they were onto something, especially as the posts and mentions started to flood their feed, including a write-up in the New York Times that helped them expand the business. Now, it's been a few years since that write-up. Natasha and Freya have since built Cool House into a multi-million dollar ice cream empire without investing a lot of capital.
What have they learned along the way? Two key lessons. Number one, they focused on the free aspects of what it would take to build a company. They knew that financing a business would be hard, so they concentrated on finding resources and getting advice from places like blogs, events, and people who were devoted to building businesses. Number two, Natasha's other launch or die trying tip for starting a hustle is to remember the importance of branding.
She emphasizes branding as one of the major factors behind their business shifting from barely profitable to, oh my God, we have real money coming in. Their brand's storytelling is a major part of what turned their side hustle into a big success. Current lineup includes pre-packed pints emblazoned with names like Sunday Funday and Midnight Munchies. And all of this came to be from a $3,000 investment that included all ingredients and that Craigslist ban. Since its inception, Cool House went from school project to farmer's markets to Coachella, later to partnerships with Whole Foods and a projected $12 million in annual revenue.
Natasha and Freya continued to work on flavors and more expansion through stores and retail partnerships. All of this from a school project and one creative business idea. [Music]
You can find Cool House on Instagram. Cool House, H-A-U-S, C-O-O-L-H-A-U-S to be specific. I did notice in working on some updates for the story that Cool House has actually been acquired.
So they actually built this business, scaled the business and then sold the business. I'm not exactly sure what Natasha and Freya are doing now if they are with the new company or if they've moved on to something else, but whatever it is, it sounds like they have had a big success. And then also I think like in just looking at the story some more, the biggest change happened for Cool House. Once they switched away from selling at those local markets to thinking, how can we go bigger, become more of a brand, put the emphasis on that. And then of course the Coachella experience which led to store partnerships, whole foods, et cetera, much later, so it was all about iterating as they went from idea to hobby to small business, to bigger business and then eventually, as I said, to acquisition.
Listeners, I hope you take something from this story. I hope it guides you in your search to create an income generating project. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. The show comes out every day, of course. Side Hustle School, seven days a week, 3,333 episodes now available for free, download or streaming at the website, sidehustleschool.com.
New episodes drop every day wherever you get your shows. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
