Side Hustle Case study: How Miami University shaped Mad Rabbit’s trajectory
- Meeting & teaming up. Selom Agbitor and Oliver Zak met as first-year students living in adjacent residence halls and pledging the Delta Sigma Pi business fraternity. That friendship—and the shared ambition it revealed—became the nucleus of every venture that followed.
- A low-risk “sandbox.” They discovered that college is “the least risky time to start a business”; coursework, scholarships and no family obligations let them experiment, fail fast and iterate while still on track to graduate Transcripts Video Mad R….
- Peer-to-peer skill exchange. Miami’s maker culture meant classmates were running their own side hustles; Selom bartered marketing help for a friend’s bookkeeping, and both founders tapped campus mentors for e-commerce tips they never learned in class.
- Early venture capital links. Intros from the entrepreneurship faculty—Tim Holcomb in particular—put Mad Rabbit on the radar of Cincinnati and Silicon Valley investors, giving the young brand credibility it could not have earned alone.
Their entrepreneurial playbook
- Start small, learn fast. First came a dropship swimsuit store that required almost no cash but taught branding and customer service.
- Validate before you build. For Mad Rabbit they ran Facebook/Instagram ads to gauge demand, cancelled the first 20–40 orders, then cooked balm in Oliver’s apartment only after seeing real interest.
- Self-taught digital marketing. YouTube tutorials, Google searches and advice from entrepreneurial classmates replaced formal marketing courses.
- Play to strengths. Oliver took the outward-facing CEO role and long-term vision while Selom became the analytics-driven CMO; clear role boundaries avoided conflict and accelerated execution.
- Keep capital light. They used royalty-free images instead of costly photo shoots and stressed that hustle, not big money, got the company off the ground.
What Selom & Oliver mean by the “learning-lab” phase
Right after the idea for Mad Rabbit clicked (spring 2019, while they were still seniors at Miami), they treated the brand as an open-ended course project whose only grade was market feedback. They deliberately kept everything tiny, cheap and reversible so they could collect data, swap variables, and build confidence before committing real money.
Advice they give today’s students
- Use the college cushion. Launch something now—if it flops you still graduate with experience and a resume story
- Master time management. Juggling classes and a startup forced them to schedule study early in the week so they could “cook and ship” balm Thursday-Friday
- Ask questions & network relentlessly. Every mentor, peer or alum is a potential shortcut to knowledge or capital; don’t hesitate to reach out
- Leverage free resources first. Between open-source tutorials, royalty-free content and classmates’ talents, most early problems can be solved without spending cash
- Start by solving real pain. Whether it’s poor tattoo aftercare or another overlooked niche, test assumptions with quick, inexpensive experiments before investing heavily
Taken together, their Miami experience provided the network, safety net and testing ground that let two finance majors evolve into data-savvy consumer-brand founders—and their blueprint is eminently repeatable for any student willing to start, learn and iterate.
Examples they gave of “practice” businesses
| Business they tried. | A drop-shipping swimsuit store (women’s bathing suits) |
| Why they launched it. | Summer side-hustle while still at Miami U. |
| Skills they set out to master. | Setting up a Shopify site Running Facebook / Instagram ads Handling customer support & returns Growing an IG account from scratch |
| What happened | They flipped the store at the end of the summer for about $7k and walked away with real-world e-commerce know-how and a little seed capital |
| Business they tried | Mad Rabbit’s first tattoo-balm tests |
| Skills they set out to master | Formulating & manufacturing a physical product (Crock-Pot batches in their Oxford apartment) Pre-selling with paid ads to prove demand before investing in inventory Direct-to-consumer fulfilment and brand storytelling |
| What happened | Their ad-first test brought in orders within a week; the process validated product/market fit and taught them supply-chain basics that later scaled to national retail. shopify.com |
Bottom line:
Selom and Oliver used the swimsuit dropshipping venture to pick up low-cost, transferable digital-commerce skills, then applied—and greatly expanded—those skills in the “learning-lab” phase of Mad Rabbit itself, where they moved from pure marketing mechanics to product formulation, supply-chain, and brand building.