29-Year-Old’s Salty Side Hustle Hit $10 Million Last Year

This Side Hustle Spotlight Q&A features New York City-based entrepreneur Seth Goldstein, 29. Goldstein is co-founder with Steven Rofrano of Ancient Crunch, a company behind the chip brands MASA and Vandy, which launched in 2022. Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

^{Image Credit: Courtesy of Ancient Crunch}

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What was your day job or primary occupation when you started your side hustle?
I was a vice president at a private equity fund focused on fast-growing healthcare businesses.

When did you start your side hustle, and where did you find the inspiration for it?
My co-founder, Steven, made fun of me for eating Tostitos while we were hanging out in Miami. I didn’t know what a seed oil even was at the time, but that conversation snowballed into a side project, which became MASA Chips.

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What were some of the first steps you took to get your side hustle off the ground? How much money/investment did it take to launch?
Steven and I put in about $250,000 of our own money. I had saved a bit working in finance, and Steven had made some money (accidentally) timing the market perfectly on Florida real estate during Covid. We have raised about $14 million since then.

If you could go back in your business journey and change one process or approach, what would it be, and how do you wish you’d done it differently?
We have always known that happy customers make a strong business, but we didn’t appreciate how much “latent demand” there is. We are primarily an online business, and we didn’t think email marketing made any sense until we tried it. Subscriptions seemed weird for chips, and now they are half of our business. If we knew then what we know now, Ancient Crunch would be about five times bigger.

When it comes to this specific business, what is something you’ve found particularly challenging and/or surprising that people who get into this type of work should be prepared for, but likely aren’t?
Most consumer packaged goods businesses are really just marketing companies. They hire a factory, slap their sticker on the bag and sell it for a markup. Because we fry our chips in beef tallow, we couldn’t find a factory, so we built our own. Turns out, that’s fairly challenging. The other major dynamic is that you always need more money than you think. We have said we are done raising money countless times in the past three years.

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^{Image Credit: Courtesy of Ancient Crunch}

Can you recall a specific instance when something went very wrong? How did you fix it?
Just recently, we had the good fortune of Vandy Crisps (our potato chip line) selling too well. Due to our in-house manufacturing, this meant that we had to go out of stock for about three weeks. While this doesn’t sound like a huge deal, it is very frustrating for customers to wait longer than expected (especially in the age of Amazon), and in the meantime, we can’t go market to new customers because we don’t have the inventory to sell them. We started working longer hours, got new fryers and are now back on track.

How long did it take you to see consistent monthly revenue? How much did the side hustle earn?
We saw fairly consistent monthly revenue basically from day one. We were not profitable, but we had a product that people loved, and it sold pretty well right from the start. We were doing about $30,000 per month in the early days.

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What does growth and revenue look like now?
We are very focused on growth. Last year, we did just under $10 million in revenue. Next year, we plan to do about $250 million.

What does a typical day or week of work look like for you?
I work about 50 hours per week these days. I have calls in a block from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and am working through emails the rest of the time. When you own the business, your job is whatever the biggest fire is. Often, that has been fundraising. Some days, that’s signing celebrity deals. Other days, it’s optimizing landing page conversions while trying to convince the next retailer to put you on the shelf. Founders always wear a lot of hats.

^{Image Credit: Courtesy of Ancient Crunch}

What do you enjoy most about running this business?
It’s awesome seeing your product gain cultural standing. When we started, this was a side project that most of my friends politely told me was a waste of time. Now, we have something like 100,000 people eating our products every month, and we are a bestselling product at several major retailers, including Erewhon and Citarella.

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What is your best piece of specific, actionable business advice?
Make something that people want, then put it in front of 100 million people as fast as you can. Don’t start with, “I want to start a business.” Start with, “This thing should exist” or “This problem can be solved.”

This article is part of our ongoing Young Entrepreneur® series highlighting the stories, challenges and triumphs of being a young business owner.