After Leaving the Marine Corps, She Spent $20 to Start a Side Hustle. Now Her Business Makes $3M a Month: ‘People Absolutely Loved It.’

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Key Takeaways

• Pollack made an ice cream sandwich from scratch and added it to a restaurant’s menu.

• People wanted more — and with just $20 and no business plan, Nightingale’s journey began.

• Now, Nightingale is available in retailers nationwide and brings in millions of dollars a month.

This Side Hustle Spotlight Q&A features Hannah Pollack, 40, co-founder with her husband Xavier Meers of Nightingale Ice Cream Sandwiches. Pollack, a Marine Corps veteran, started the dessert brand as a side hustle while she and her husband were working as chefs in 2016. She transitioned to focus on the business full-time later that same year.

Nightingale’s Cookie Monster ice cream sandwiches 12-pack sold out in Costco in just two days during its last rotation, and the business sees $3 million a month. Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

What was your day job or primary occupation when you started your side hustle?
I was a chef. Before that, I was a Marine, and after I got out of the Marine Corps, I went to culinary school because I had loved food and cooking my entire life. I wanted to spend my life doing something I was genuinely passionate about.

I loved being a chef. I loved the pressure and the intensity of working on a line. I loved creating something from nothing and the feeling of putting food in front of someone and watching them enjoy it. There is something incredibly rewarding about creating a product with your hands.

I also think being both a Marine and a chef prepared me for entrepreneurship in ways I didn’t realize at the time. Both taught me how to work hard, how to function under pressure and, most importantly, how to keep going when things get difficult.

Starting Nightingale as a side hustle in 2016

When did you start your side hustle, and where did you find the inspiration for it?
We started Nightingale as a side hustle in 2016. At the time, my husband, Xavier, and I were both chefs. I made an ice cream sandwich as a dessert for our restaurant menu because we wanted to take something classic and nostalgic and turn it into something elevated.

We made everything from scratch — the cookies, the ice cream, all of it — and people absolutely loved it. They started asking if they could buy more to take home.

We didn’t start with a business plan to build a national ice cream company. We made a dessert that people loved, paid attention to their reaction and kept following the opportunity in front of us.

Investing $20 to get the side hustle off the ground

What were some of the first steps you took to get your side hustle off the ground? How much money did it take to launch?
We did everything ourselves. And I mean everything. We just hustled and grinded and figured out how to make the side hustle work. I would wake up at 4 in the morning and make ice cream sandwiches before going to my full-time chef job. Xavier would come pick them up and make deliveries between his lunch and dinner shifts. Then I would finish my dinner shift, go back and make more ice cream sandwiches, sleep for a few hours and do it all over again.

We started the side hustle with $20. We used that $20 to buy enough ingredients to make 20 ice cream sandwiches. Then we sold those, used the money to buy more ingredients and made more. We kept repeating that process. Eventually, we used the money we made to buy our first small piece of equipment. Then the next one. Then the next one. We truly started from nothing and built the business one ice cream sandwich at a time.

Ask questions and pay attention to what’s on the shelves

Are there any free or paid resources that have been especially helpful for you in starting and running this business?
The most valuable resource for me has been other people.

I ask a lot of questions. I find people who have experience in an area I don’t understand, and I ask them to help me understand it. As the business has grown, I’ve learned how important it is to bring in people who are smarter than me in their specific areas of expertise.

I also learn by paying attention. Walk the stores. Look at what is on the shelves. Study the brands that are doing well. Talk to customers. Talk to buyers. Ask questions. Listen to your employees. There is an incredible amount of free business education available to you if you are curious enough to look for it.

As we’ve grown from side hustle to full-time business, investing in experienced people and advisors has been one of the best uses of our money. You don’t have to know everything, and you definitely shouldn’t try to do everything yourself forever.

Trust your instincts, but don’t hesitate to ask for help

If you could go back in your business journey and change one process or approach to save you time, energy or just a headache, what would it be, and how do you wish you’d done it differently?
I would have believed in myself more, and I would have brought experienced people into the business earlier. For a long time, I thought I had to figure everything out myself. I didn’t come from a business background. I was a chef. I had never run a manufacturing company, managed national retailers or built a business of this size. I assumed that everyone else knew more than I did.

What I eventually realized is that nobody knows your business the way you do. Experience is incredibly valuable, and I absolutely believe in surrounding yourself with great people, but I wish I had trusted my own instincts more along the way.

At the same time, I wish I had brought experienced people in sooner. Those two things can exist together: Trust yourself, but don’t think you have to know everything yourself.

Don’t underestimate how much it takes to build a business

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?
How much it actually takes to get a business off the ground.

Having a great product is just the beginning. You can make the best ice cream sandwich in the world, but then you have to sell it. You have to understand finance. Marketing. Production. Food safety. Quality. Packaging. Distribution. Logistics. People. Equipment. Retailers. Margins.

There are so many different aspects of building a business, and at the beginning, you have to learn enough about all of them to keep moving forward.

I think that surprises a lot of people. They start a business because they are really good at making something, and then suddenly realize that making the thing is only one small part of running the business.

A Walmart disaster story serves as a lesson in resilience

Can you recall a specific instance when something went very wrong — how did you fix it?
One of my favorite disaster stories was our first big order for Walmart.

Walmart was our first really big retailer, and we had created a smaller version of our ice cream sandwich called Chomp. Our first order was a full truckload, which at the time felt absolutely enormous to us.

We had made everything. It was packed. We were ready to ship. Then someone asked, “Where is the date on the case?”

I had misunderstood our food safety consultant and put the date on every individual wrapper inside the box — but not on the outside case.

The order couldn’t ship.

We had to unpack every single case. We found a scanner gun and had one overnighted to us, and we manually scanned every single box by hand. We sent our staff home around 10 that night, and Xavier and I stayed.

At one point, I was literally lying face down on the floor thinking, “How am I going to get through this?”

But we figured it out. We fixed it. We stayed all night, got the order finished and sent it out.

That story has always stayed with me because sometimes things go wrong, and sometimes it is absolutely your fault. You can be upset. You can lie face down on the floor for a minute. But you don’t get to stop there. You figure out what needs to happen next, and you keep going.

From $50k in annual sales to $3m revenue months

How long did it take you to see consistent monthly revenue?
It took us about six months to start seeing consistent monthly revenue.

Our first year, we did about $50,000 in sales. At the time, that felt huge. We had started with $20 and just kept reinvesting every dollar back into the business.

There wasn’t some giant check or big investment that suddenly turned us into a company. It was $20 becoming 20 ice cream sandwiches, those sandwiches becoming more ingredients, and eventually those sales becoming equipment, employees and a real business.

What does growth and revenue look like now?
Our growth has come in clear milestones. In 2024, we celebrated our first $1 million month. In 2025, we reached our first $2 million month. And now, in 2026, we’re seeing our first $3 million months — with no signs of slowing down. It’s a reflection of years of investing in our product, our people and building a brand that consumers genuinely connect with. Sometimes I must remind myself where we started because the scale of the business today is so different. We went from Xavier delivering ice cream sandwiches between lunch and dinner service and me making them at 4 in the morning to a company with an incredible team, our own production facility and products sold by major retailers across the country.

But at the core, we are still doing the same thing we were doing in 2016: trying to make the best ice cream sandwich we possibly can.

Growing a business with the help of a strong team

What do you enjoy most about running this business?
The people. Without question. I get to work every day with an amazing team of people, and that is the part of this business I love the most.

Watching people grow, take on new challenges, become leaders and accomplish things they didn’t know they were capable of is incredibly rewarding to me. I’m so proud of the product we make and the company we’ve built, but I’m most proud of the people who built it with us.

There are people on our team who have been part of this journey for years. They have grown as the company has grown, and I genuinely feel lucky that I get to work with them every day.

Learn how to filter and make the best choice for your business

What is your best piece of specific, actionable business advice?
Seek out as much perspective as you can — but learn how to filter it.

Talk to people who know more than you. Ask questions. Listen to different opinions. Learn from people who have already made the mistakes you are trying to avoid. I have been incredibly fortunate to have mentors and advisors whose experience and perspective have helped shape Nightingale and made me a better leader.

But one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that even great advice has to be considered in the context of your own business. What worked for someone else — at their stage, with their product, their resources and their goals — may not be the right answer for you.

So gather the information. Ask the hard questions. Listen carefully, especially when people challenge your thinking. Then take responsibility for digesting all of it and making the best decision for your business.

The goal isn’t to ignore advice; it’s to become better at using it. The strongest leaders I know are open enough to learn from others and confident enough to understand that, ultimately, they are responsible for the path they choose.

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