How We Hit $450K/Month & Got Acquired
This is a follow up story for Eye Love. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 4 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
We are Drs. Jenna and Travis Zigler, and we are the founders of Eye Love and Heyedrate, which we started in 2015. Our main goal is to help 1,000,000 people suffering from dry, irritated eyes, and we’re well on our way to doing this through our line of eye health products.
Six years ago, we started Eye Love with the simple goal of giving us a little extra cash to go on eye care mission trips. Within a few years, Eye Love has become more than we ever could have imagined. Our main product is Heyedrate Lid and Lash Cleanser, which helps keep your eyelids clean and healthy. This hypochlorous acid cleanser is so important because excess bacteria on the eyelids often lead to dry, irritated eyes. Without healthy eyelids, you wouldn’t have comfortable eyes and clear vision.
Eye Love has grown immensely in the past few years, and we’re now regularly doing $400,000 per month. Eye Love was acquired on June 2, 2021, by Physician Recommended Nutriceuticals (PRN), and we can’t wait to see how the synergy is going to play out in the next few years. We’ll both be staying on to continue to run Eye Love with our current team for the next few years, and this is exactly what we wanted from a sale.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to! Has the business been growing?
I mentioned earlier that we sold our business in June of this year, and this would not have been possible without exploring new avenues of marketing and increasing our product offerings. In May of 2020, we acquired a business, MediViz, which sells similar products to ours but also gave us a few products that helped to round out our offerings.
More specifically, MediViz was a great buy for us because we knew the owner personally, teamed up with him, and were able to bring more products into our ecosystem while decreasing the amount of money they were spending on duplicate software and services. By bringing MediViz into Eye Love, it allowed us to grow incredibly well in 2020 despite everything going on in the world.
What we realized in 2020 was that getting from $0 to $1 million is the hardest part of the business. This is where you are learning how to sell, who to serve, and how to do it all. Going from $1 to $10 million is all about releasing more products, which is what we are focusing on now more than ever. Getting to $10 million is our 3-year goal.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
In the past few years, we’ve learned the importance of focusing on what we do best. We know Amazon through and through, yet we spent way too much time and money trying to build out our website. The minute we quit focusing on our website and focused back on Amazon, we began to see much higher sales off Amazon!
Look for how you can serve others, and your business is much more likely to take off than if you’re constantly focused on the money.
All eyes are on Amazon and the majority of people are buying there. The great thing is, many of these people would rather purchase directly from us so we’ve seen an increase in website traffic by simply growing our Amazon presence.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
We have plans to release a new eye cream and face moisturizer that contains no toxic preservatives like phenoxyethanol, which is in all “organic” face creams. It also doesn’t contain retinol which can be great for anti-aging, but it’s terrible for your eyelids as it causes the oil glands that lubricate your eyes to atrophy and die.
We are also going to release an eye drop with some pretty innovative features that aren’t on the market, such as aloe vera.
Finally, we have plans to release an eye makeup line that again avoids the toxic preservative phenoxyethanol along with other ocular surface irritants.
We are excited about this new opportunity to expand faster under the umbrella of a larger company. This means that more people suffering from dry, irritated eyes get to find relief by discovering us and our mission.
Our 5-year plan is to reach over 1,000,000 people and learn, love, and fail a ton along the way.
Have you read any good books in the last year?
We love to read and listen to podcasts! We’re always listening to the Capitalism.com podcast with Ryan Daniel Moran, which is an amazing wealth of knowledge that’s allowed us to scale our business into the mid-seven figures. He recently came out with a new book, 12 Months to $1 Million, which details exactly what we did to grow our business from zero to what it is today. We followed his exact formula and haven’t looked back since.
We also read Ready, Fire, Aim by Michael Masterson every single January. We do this because every time we read it, we find a new nugget of info to grow our business further.
Lastly, every single business owner should dive into Profit First by Mike Michalowicz. This book changed our lives and how we run our business, and we recommend it to every business owner we meet.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
We’ve said this before, but our biggest piece of advice is to stop chasing the money and focus on people. Look for how you can serve others, and your business is much more likely to take off than if you’re constantly focused on the money.
Also, sometimes you just have to make a decision. Pick one thing and run with it! Entrepreneurship is one decision after another and, oftentimes, the decisions aren’t easy. We all have a million things on our plate and there are a million different things you can focus on. However, sticking with a plan - such as whether to focus on Amazon or your website, who to sell to, etc - will allow you to serve that audience and see growth in your company. Of course, we all make bad decisions sometimes, but it’s often the case that we just need to focus to see results.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
Since we were just acquired, we’re not looking to hire anyone new right now. However, Eye Love has huge growth plans in the next three years, so we’re sure to be looking for more help soon!
Where can we go to learn more?
- Eye Love
- Facebook Group, Dry Eye Syndrome Support Community
- YouTube Channel, The Dry Eye Show
- The Dry Eye Show Blog
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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