From Platform Bans to Building a 7-Figure Optics Empire

Most entrepreneurs who get repeatedly banned by Facebook and Google would give up. Paul Rinaldi decided to build something ban-proof instead.

This Hampton member spent over a decade getting crushed by the typical online marketing rollercoaster—successful affiliate campaigns killed overnight, ad accounts banned without warning, and platforms constantly changing the rules. Instead of accepting defeat, he channeled his firearm and optics expertise into Freedom Gorilla, an e-commerce brand that's now doing mid seven figures annually.

Paul's breakthrough came not from cracking another advertising algorithm, but from creating educational content that actually helps customers understand confusing products. What started as a hail mary Reddit post that violated pricing rules and got him banned has evolved into a sustainable business built on SEO, YouTube education, and genuine customer service.

In our exclusive Hampton interview, Paul reveals:

• How a $6,000 day from one "rule-breaking" Reddit post changed everything
• Why he turned confusing optics into educational content that drives organic traffic
• The Trump tariff crisis that nearly derailed his entire business model
• How he's scaling from 7 to 8 figures while maintaining 20-30% margins

For founders who've been burned by platform dependencies, Paul's story offers a blueprint for building something more sustainable.

Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?

My name is Paul Rinaldi, and the business I started is Freedom Gorilla. Freedom Gorilla is an e-commerce brand that sells optics and optic accessories. 

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

Back in 2009, I got into internet marketing and affiliate marketing. That was the first time I saw people making serious money on the internet. Everybody was selling this dream to "go live on the beach and make 30K a month."

I got hooked and did everything I could—tried to learn different things, ran my own campaigns, Facebook ads, you name it. I was always trying to make money online, and I did have some success in affiliate marketing. But it was this constant cycle: I'd get some success, then something would happen. My ads would get banned, or Google would ban me. I always had this struggle.

In 2012, I had an event staffing company which I ran totally through the internet. That turned into a startup, and we got into 500 Startups. But then we had some co-founder issues and went our separate ways.

I came back to Pennsylvania because I had basically exhausted all my funds. I worked for a digital marketing agency, honed my skills a little bit, then went to a corporate job for more stability. I gave my heart and soul to that, but then realized they weren't going to reciprocate. I wasn't going to hit my dreams or get the promotions I wanted.

That’s when I went to my business partner (who’s been a long-term colleague and friend) and said we have to do something together.

I actually had a dropshipping site back in 2016 in the firearms space. I was running ads on Google, but eventually Google banned all those ads, so it got so difficult I just gave up on it. I did that for like two years with moderate success, then took a break from entrepreneurship.

I kicked it back up again when I told my business partner we needed to do something to hit our goals. That's how we started Freedom Gorilla.

Take us through the process of building and launching the first version of your product.

We actually started out selling whistles. I wasn't trying to get back into the firearm space necessarily, but I knew we needed a product. We were originally supposed to be this outdoor camping/survival brand, and these whistles were going to be our first entry into the market. We used them because they were cheap and we could put our logo on them. We got them from China for like $600-700 for the first order.

Our goal was to go viral on TikTok. We spent like a solid six months on TikTok making videos. We didn't know anything about videos—we had to learn editing, shooting, all that stuff. We made all these videos, tried different angles, even tried some influencer stuff. We made some sales here and there, but nothing major.

At that point we had a discussion about doing something else. Maybe making a pivot.

I realized that I had all these wholesale accounts from firearms companies that I was dropshipping from years earlier. Maybe they might have some products available that we could sell on Amazon. We ponied up ~$5K and bought some products from the wholesaler. We did research on Amazon and narrowed it down to a flashlight, a pair of sunglasses, and this one optic.

We got them and went to put them on Amazon, but Amazon told us we couldn't sell them because we needed to be approved by the brand. I had dabbled in Amazon before, but that wasn’t a rule and it was another block in the road.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

After failing to get the product on Amazon, we put one of the optics on our website and went to Reddit. There's this gun deals subreddit where you can post deals for various accessories.

I posted that on there, and I violated MAP pricing—so I sold it for cheaper than the brand would allow us. But we sold a bunch of them and made like six grand that day. That was our “Holy crap we’re on to something” moment.

We got banned from the Reddit subreddit because they said we were astroturfing. I was logged in with one account and posted, but was answering comments with another account on my phone. The moderators were super petty about it.

But we got a lot of good feedback. After that, we started getting traffic from Google to our site for that optic.

We looked more into that brand and doubled down—let's put more of the optics on there, all the different kinds. We fleshed out the website and started getting more traffic.

As I was doing research, I realized these optics are very confusing. You don't know which one fits on which gun, they all look the same but are different. What's the difference between all of them?

I decided to make a video just explaining the optics to the end user. I put it on YouTube and it started doing pretty well. People were really engaging and letting us know the content was helpful. I even made a cheat sheet on the website with tables and ways to shop by the color of the optic or the reticle. I tried to make it an easier experience for people to find and understand these products.

People were really liking our customer service, shipping times, and support. At this point we had organic traffic, YouTube traffic, and customer reviews continuously happening. We felt that was maybe a foundation for the company.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

From when we started getting momentum, a lot of what's taken my time and attention—and my business partner's—is managing the business. Going from being the two guys that do everything to hiring vendors, employees, and building systems that people can use, implementing the right tools.

I like to call it building the foundation. I look at the company like an oak tree. I want a big, solid oak tree. Maybe it takes us time to get to that point where we're ready for complete takeoff, but I want everything to be stable because I don't want tons of growth that we can't handle.

Up until this point, there's been a lot of leveling everyone up and morphing into different roles and tools.

We really want to automate growth and content. Some stuff's challenging, like finding customer service people, especially because we need expertise. We need to give people correct information.

We also have our fulfillment center and a brick and mortar retail shop. Being able to have those operate at the quality and service levels we want has taken a lot of our time and attention.

Did you ever have an "oh shit" moment where you thought it wouldn't work?

My past history of entrepreneurship has made me very paranoid. I'm always looking at how we can get killed, basically. Everything I do revolves around wanting to grow but also making sure we have longevity.

For the most part, everything has been relatively good. I do get concerned with Google and their updates. We updated our website last year, and it was the first time we had a full year at this newer scale. We updated in April, Google did an update in April, and apparently there's a slow season in our industry that we didn't experience until last year. It all happened in April.

We saw this dip with SEO and were like, "Wait, that's weird if all this stuff happened at the same time." I think it was partly our website update, but that was concerning.

The most recent thing has been the tariffs. It’s honestly the worst thing that ever happened to this business. 

You can't just pull the rug out of the entire system. It's not my fault this is the way the system is and that we figured out how to work it and leverage it. Now you're going to change it?

Tariffs are really bad because all the products come from China, all the manufacturers are from China. We had to buy more inventory, so we had to reduce our cash reserves. It wasn't just us—we asked the biggest companies in the space, and all of them were like, "Nope, we don't know what's going to happen. We can't even tell you what we're doing."

We hedged our bets the best we could. I'm not assuming we're out of the woods yet because they're still talking about maybe 55% tariffs, which would still be an increase.

That was the biggest shakeup we've experienced. It didn't really do anything to us (yet), but seeing that unfold was the most real moment where it's like, "Well, shit, our entire business is kind of reliant on China. What are we supposed to do?"

Where do you see untapped opportunity in the market? What business do you wish someone else would build that would make your job easier?

Our biggest challenges are accounting, customer service, and content creation.

Accounting has been challenging because once I started doing it for e-commerce, I realized it's a different animal. I have cost of goods sold fluctuations, different vendors, different sources and ways I'm getting invoices, and sales tax in each state where I hit nexuses.

I feel like there should be something I could just sign up for where they're like, "Yeah, we'll handle all your accounting and tell you how to be smart about all this stuff." But there's no software solution for that. I want a cloud-based vendor that could be my smart accountant person doing all this stuff and telling us how we're managing our payments.

Customer service is another one. We use a company now called Talent Pop. I really like what they're doing because they're looking at all your tickets, creating SOPs, finding agents, training them, helping set up Gorgias, and managing these customer service people. Our struggle was finding the right person and training them - we had no time to do that.

The third piece is finding a good growth/content person overseas who really understands how to make good content but is affordable.

What platform/tools are absolutely crucial for your business?

We use Shopify. We have Klaviyo.

We have Gorgias, which has been a big improvement for phone, tickets, text, and website chat.

We started using Nuclino, which is kind of like Notion. Google Sheets—we have a bunch of Google Sheets all over the place. I'm not going to say that's a good thing, but it's reality.

We use Tax Cloud for our state sales tax, which has been good for the most part. And Google Analytics. We don't really have a lot of other complex tools at the moment.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. I read this college while I was doing all my stuff. That was just fuel to the fire when it came out. It was totally mind-changing.

The Millionaire Fast Lane by MJ DeMarco was another huge one. I come from a very blue-collar area, so him explaining that you need to sell products and can't keep working hourly forever really shifted my perspective. He talked about producers and consumers, and that was transformative.

Any book from Ryan Holiday is good. Sometimes even the name helps reframe things. Like Ego is the Enemy—just the name of that book, understanding that concept, is very important.

The curveball one is Reality Transurfing. I've always been trying to tie together metaphysics and business. Reality Transurfing is all about manifestation but extremely scientific. The guy's a quantum physicist, and his whole pitch is that he figured out manifestation from a quantum physics level and explains how it works. As I listened to that, he said some stuff that made sense, and I'd tell my business partner about it.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

You have to commit to whatever you're doing. 100% committed. That was the biggest thing that changed for me. With this one, we were just like, "Look, this is gonna work, no matter what."

Be careful with your business model. Someone at 500 Startups told me that he and his brother tried all these different things, and he said the only time he ever found success was when they chose a proven business model.

I would say commit to what you're doing, choose a proven business model these days, and stay focused. When we did TikTok, that really helped us train our focus. Paraphrasing, but that Bruce Lee quote about not trying a thousand different kicks, but trying the same kick a thousand times... Staying focused in a narrow lane and trying to perfect that lane has been extremely helpful for us.

Can you share a specific example of how being part of the Hampton community has helped you achieve a goal or tackle a challenge?

I leverage Hampton all the time for vendor recommendations. It’s been very helpful.

Even just being able to browse the Slack channels or ask questions and see how people talk and what they're focused on—being part of just that levels you up in its own way.

Even just joining Hampton made a difference. I'm not really a big titles guy, but I know that to join, you have to be a co-founder/CEO. I started thinking, "You know what? Yeah, I am basically the CEO of this company." I started thinking more like a CEO and realized I should have people do these things that maybe I'm currently doing.

The encouragement I got has been really helpful. When I first came on and did my intro, some people reached out and I had great conversations right away.

I joined Hampton because I had an experience with 500 Startups where I met other founders, and some went on to be extremely successful. Here I am in northeast Pennsylvania, and we've gone to networking events, but it's local business people. Nobody's really doing the same thing we're doing here.

The quality of people I've seen has definitely met my expectations. I did join E-commerce Fuel as well because someone told me about that at a trade show, but I'm out of that group because it wasn't really for me. I didn't like their format—it looked like a forum. The way Slack works on Hampton is huge, and I can get more out of it. Hampton could almost become a full-time job if you wanted to spend the time on it.

I just reserved my spot for the Foundations Retreat. My resolution this year were about getting in better shape and doing more cool shit. I watched the Foundations retreat video before, and even in the beginning, people from Hampton were like, "Yeah, this has totally been worth it." I asked in my core group, and had someone I really trust recommend it.

It's kind of like the same justification for joining Hampton—if I glean one little nugget from this thing, it'll be worth it. Even if it was the worst thing I ever experienced, I would learn not to go to that thing anymore. I just figured it's most likely gonna be beneficial. I feel like I owe it to my company to do it.

Where can we go to learn more?

You can check out our website at freedomgorilla.com and our YouTube channel, which is Freedom Gorilla. You can see the brand and what we're about, and see me and my business partner Mark talking about optics and the way that we do it.

You can also follow up with me on LinkedIn or hit me up on Slack if you join Hampton and want to connect—I'm always responsive on there.