This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Enjoy an ice cold beverage and a mug made from ice. No, this is not a promotional message. It's not a message from our sponsor. It's the introduction to the episode. We're gonna take a little visit to an outdoor sauna in the midst of a Minnesota winter where a mug made from ice was inspired.
It has since gone on to sell over 4,000 units. It's called the nice mug. The nice mug, the frozen tundra of a Minnesota winter. Its owner is in negotiations to bring it to national hockey league fans. And it's all because one man wanted a cold beer in a sauna.
This hearty Viking, who's also a manager for a food company. That's really what it is. That's his day job. Brings his invention to life. He funds it with a crowdfunding campaign and is now taking this life changing beverage holder to the masses.
This was a fun one to work on a few years ago. Gonna bring you a couple updates along the way. Hold on to your self-actualization. First, you need your nice mug. All right, details coming up.
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Many of the most influential inventions came about accidentally. The Post-it note, super glue, even the chocolate chip cookie. Well, now you can add another one to that accidental invention, Hall of Fame, the nice mug. One especially chilly Minnesota winter night. Glenn Auerbach was trudging through the snow to his backyard sauna when he realized one of the water containers he used to dump cold water over his head had been left outside.
It was full of water from a sauna a couple of days prior. And for all intents and purposes, it looked frozen solid. Sitting on his sauna bench, Glenn dumped out the chunk of ice and noticed that the center was miraculously unfrozen. He poured out the liquid in the center and what remained was a perfectly formed drinking vessel. Never one to miss an opportunity for a cold beer and a hot sauna, he and a friend poured a frothy beer into the mug made out of ice and took turns sipping.
After they finished that first beer, they naturally started on another. A ways into that second beer, Glenn noticed that while the mug melted down a bit, it held its shape well and never leaked. Best of all, that beer tasted fantastic. After that night, Glenn started leaving more water containers outside to freeze, hoping to replicate the first mug, but he realized he couldn't quite catch the perfect freezing point. Either the mug was too thin or it came out frozen solid like a hockey puck.
So he decided to ramp up his experiments. Following a long period of trial and error, reusing potato salad containers from the grocery store, combined with hockey tape to create rudimentary molds, he finally found the perfect combination. It consisted of two deli containers, one inside the other that would make the vessel and then a lid that kept everything in place. The result was a nice mug. That's what he called it, a nice mug with the emphasis on I-C-E.
Now, while he had a name for his new invention, he didn't have a plan for it. Glenn had a job he enjoyed. He worked as a territory manager for one of the largest food companies in the world. For the past 20 years, they'd been good to him. They'd put food on his table.
They kept him flush in deli containers. But now he was looking ahead and had a bunch of side hustle ideas. He figured if he could grow nice mug and make it profitable, he could do this with any of his other brilliant ideas. It was perhaps the perfect practice run. He met up with a friend or a friend of a friend who was a plastic injection molding engineer.
Always good to have a friend like that, right? Although the materials needed to make the product were relatively inexpensive, the tooling needed to make the mugs en masse would need to be sourced from China. And that tooling cost $15,000. But winter was coming. It was the perfect time to get nice mug into the hands of people in time for peak sauna season.
So to cover the cost of production, he turned to Kickstarter and set a goal of $15,000. Leading up to the launch, a friend made a logo for the brand. They created a video highlighting his beloved creation. And by the end of the campaign, he'd brought in over $25,000, 10,000 more than he'd hoped for. So next he put in the order for the tooling, informed a partnership with a local manufacturer who would use that tooling to produce the mugs.
And of course, he celebrated with a beer filled nice mug and a relaxing sauna session. Now, when it came to pricing, Glenn opted to set his prices using a 3X to 4X pricing model. So basically took into account a fraction of what the tooling cost, the packaging required to ship the product, the shipping prices themselves, website maintenance and so on. And all those considerations went into the rate he chose, which was 20 bucks, $20. He also took into account that the nice mug was not a one and done kind of product.
It is of course reusable. Now this product was a hit and it was also unique. Since starting, he sold over 4,000 units. It brings in anywhere from 2,000 to $5,000 a month in sales. He also continues to store, pack and ship everything right out of his house.
He's just bootstrapping. He's doing it all on the DIY ethos. So there's still a lot of hands-on work being done. And one day those profit margins will be closer to 50% once they start handing off fulfillment and shipping to other companies. But for now, he's just still trying it out.
So what's next? Well, moving forward, Glenn is focused on finding a product champion who will take on the brand. He spent $100 on dry ice and insulated packaging to ship a batch of ready-made nice mugs to the NHL. At some point, he could see sports fans cheering on their favorite hockey team with a nice mug full of frothy beer. Outside of the sauna, Glenn thinks there could be no better application.
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In addition to running the nice mug business, Glenn has a resource blog called "Sauna Times." You wanna learn about all the latest news in sauna? He doesn't actually monetize that blog. It's just kind of a passion project. He also has a podcast called "Sauna Talk." When we first made our episode, he was heading to Finland for 12 days, taking 17 saunas and interviewing five of the top seven people in the world of sauna for the podcast. And I guess it's not shocking that, you know, five of the top seven people in the world of sauna, I don't even know how you would measure that, but that's what he says, are all in Finland.
So good for him, love the passion, love the project. Listeners, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Maybe there's something you can make as well. Might not be a beer mug made of ice, but there's something else you can make and get out to the world. I hope you will do that.
I hope you will take steps toward it today. There's something you can do. And of course, continue to listen. Episodes are always free. Resources, notes pages, complete archive of the show available at sidehustleschool.com.
That's all for now. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
