The Hustle - 👣 Slide into a $11.2B opportunity

Happy Trends Tuesday!

I’m in power walking mode this week, measuring the beautiful Lisbon with my own two feet. 

And if you've been here, you know it ain't easy to scale this hilly city. So I'm kicking myself for not bringing a pair of recovery slides on the trip...

You know, those cushion-y ones that make you feel like walking on a cloud?  

I could really use a pair... Source: Treelinereview

They’re actually all the rage right now, which spells opportunity for entrepreneurs like you. We'll get into it today. 

In today's email…

• The $11.2B business of recovery footwear
• How The Milk Road grew from 0 to 250k subscribers within a year
• What we’re surfin’, from a $88m pilates business to divorced dad energy

Let's dive in!

🥇 GOLDEN PITCH DECK TEMPLATES

Imagine pulling up on potential investors without one of these pitch-perfect pitch decks. Nope... that would be highly unbefitting of a sensible entrepreneur like you.

🚀 WHERE TO BUILD NEXT

These shoes are made for healin'

Few feelings are as relaxing as kicking off your shoes after an intense workout, and letting your feet loose. 

The next best thing might be slipping into a pair of cozy slides that make you feel like walking on a cloud. ☁️

Recovery slides, the kind of footwear that provides comfort and support to your hooves, is becoming mainstream. 

Source: Google Trends, six-month rolling average

“Hoka recovery slide” has 13k searches/mo. globally, per Ahrefs. Oofos, another leading brand in this space, made $84.5m in sales last year and attracted investment from pro athletes. 

And you just know the 2024 Olympians are wearing them, too.

Here are three rapid-fire ideas to cash in on the $11.2B recovery footwear business: 

👉 Recovery product bundles

A pair of comfy slides might do the trick short-term, but foot recovery can be an ongoing process for those who are chronically on their feet. 

You can curate and sell “recovery footwear bundles” for an all-around rejuvenating experience. 

Interest in foot recovery-related keywords are high: 

• Compression socks: 309k searches/mo. globally
• Reflexology: 137k (These $10 socks with acupressure points sold 2k+ units last month)
• Foot massager: 123k (very easy to rank)
• Foot bath: 14k (also easy to rank)

Compression socks are supposed to help with circulation and nerve flow. Source: Google Trends, six-month rolling average

Market your bundle focusing on the joint health, blood flow, and stress relief angle. 

Or, throw in some cute but low-budget items like foot bath bombs, massage gadgets, or stickers and shoe charms (like Crocs’ Jibbitz). Put’em all in a foot soaking tub to make a great gift. 

👉 Foot recovery content

As Americans get sportier, there’ll be a growing demand for educational content on recovery techniques and best practices.

There are opportunities to start a newsletter or YouTube channel on this topic. You can niche down further based on different needs, like foot care guidance for:

• Trail runners (r/trailrunning has 403k subscribers)
• Dancers
• Cyclists
• Workers who are constantly on their feet 
• Those with foot injuries or diabetes

Or, create mobile apps that provide foot care advice, exercises, and easy access to podiatrists (foot doctors). Market to active users of fitness tracking apps like Strava. 

👉 Recovery footwear rental service

Provide a variety of comfortable, stylish recovery slides, and target events like weddings, award shows, conferences and galas where guests often endure hours of foot pain (those high heels can be merciless).  

For those who feel icky sharing open-toed shoes with others, you can offer on-site cleaning or disinfection services for an additional fee. 

Trading high heels for recovery slides. Source: Tumblr

📜 FROM THE ARCHIVE

Zero to 250k subscribers in under a year: growth lessons from The Milk Road

If you follow our buddy Shaan Puri at all, you know his crypto newsletter, The Milk Road, was acquired for several million dollars less than a year after launching (Incredible!). 

The guy who helped grow their list to 250k subscribers, Matt McGarry, gave us an inside look on how they pulled it off. 

A deceptively simple start. Source: X (Shaan’s acquisition announcement post)

📋 Campaign Structure

Of the ~250k subscribers they landed, ~80% came from paid marketing, with the bulk from Facebook and TikTok ads.

Here’s how they structured Facebook campaigns:

• Ran “Conversion Campaigns,” where Facebook measures ad effectiveness based on how many people fill out a form. (Conversion Campaigns were recently updated to “Leads” Campaigns) 
  
  
• Broad Audience: Targeted people ages 21-45, leaning on Facebook’s algorithm to do most of the filtering and matching for them.

• Celebrities/Publications: They also targeted the audience of crypto-related tech/business influencers, like Elon Musk and Gary Vee, and popular publications.

Traffic was funneled straight to their standard Beehiiv landing page.

“Basically the entire time we just used that landing page,” Matt told us. “We made some changes with the copy, but we didn’t build a lot of fancy landing pages or do A/B testing. That worked very well.”

They’ve got a fancy new website now, but the Wayback Machine shows that as late as December 5, 2022, their homepage was still a simple Beehiiv landing page. Source: Archive.org

🎨 Ad Creative

Four types of ad creative kicked ass, according to Matt: 

1. Memes
2. TikTok/UGC style videos
3. Informal Banners
4. Testimonials

We’ll break down each in turn. As we do, notice how the different ads all convey the same three things: What The Milk Road writes about, social proof, and the fact that it’s free.

1. Memes: More art than science, you can find meme templates on imgFlip to use for your own brand.

2. TikTok/UGC style videos: Paid micro-influencers and creators on UpWork for 20-30 second vertical videos, with a hook in the first five seconds (typically $80-$100/video).

Matt’s basic rules for great videos:

• Have a hook in the first five seconds
• Show how the newsletter solves a specific problem the reader has
• Show social proof
• Strong call to action
• If the newsletter is free, say that

You can see all their current ads here. 

3. (Very) informal banners: “Literally just like, write some good copy in your iPhone notes app, take a screenshot of that, and use that as an ad,” Matt said.

The point is just to create something that doesn’t look like a typical ad. Something that will grab attention through its informality.

You can also:

• Use Notion
• Put text on a black or white background in Canva
• Write it on a legal pad

4. Testimonials: The team would ask readers to tweet about the newsletter, then screenshot those tweets and use them as ad creative. That's it. 

💳 Budget

Finally, a word on budget: You don’t need much.

Shaan and Ben were ready to spend well into the six-figures on acquisition. But Matt said that $30 per day is enough to get you started.

All Facebook ads go through something called a “learning phase,” where the algorithm tests and optimizes the audience to see who is best to target.

To graduate from the learning phase, your ads need ~50 conversions per week. If you budget $3-$4 per conversion, that’s ~$150-$200 in ad spend. 

So $30 per day, seven days a week will get you your 50 required conversions.

It should actually get you more than that, Matt said, because the typical conversion cost for a free newsletter subscriber is well below $4 – closer to $1.50 if you have your landing page on-point.

Final note: Shaan's great. His "5 Tweet Tuesday" emails bring a cry-laugh to my face. He recently launched a blogging project called Good Friday, where he emails back and forth with cool folks and publishes the whole thing. Bold move — but a delicious read, always. 

🗂️ OPEN TABS

⏳ Time, managed: How to make time for your side hustle, today

🪝 From X: A guide to writing hooks that defy the "short attention span"

🧘‍♀️ Flex: How Solidcore’s founder started a $88m pilates business 

👨🏻 Huh: What is "divorced dad energy," and why is Silicon Valley giving it off?