This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Greetings, what's up? Welcome, this is Side Hustle School. I'm Chris Guillebeau, day 102. We are marching onward with the goal of helping you create an income generating project, all without quitting your day job. Now, if you are like 75% of people, you probably have a camera in your pocket.
Maybe this camera is on your desk right now, or next to you on the treadmill, or mounted in your car. But wherever it is, most of us use our phones to take pictures these days. And some of us, not me, but maybe you, are actually good at it. Well, today's story is all about a woman who published a photo every single day for seven years in a row. And one of those photos led to something very special.
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Today's story comes from Cielo de la Paz in the San Francisco Bay area. By day, she's a user experience design director. But her side hustle, in addition to photography itself, is teaching bloggers and small business owners how to create videos using their smartphones. Cielo says her side hustle fell in her lap. She was taking photos and videos with her iPhone for fun.
And one day, while photographing the California sunrise, she dropped her lens cap on the ground. When she stooped to pick it up, she saw a cute little ladybug. So she filmed it with her phone. Around that time, Apple found a different photo of Cielo's on Flickr. And they featured it as part of their Shot on iPhone billboard campaign.
Now that was pretty awesome by itself, but then they asked her if she had any videos she'd done. And she showed them that clip she'd taken from her surprise encounter with the ladybug. They liked it so much, they decided to use it worldwide as a commercial. Cielo got a lot of attention from this video. The experience led to the media calling her an expert iPhoneographer, leading to a whole series of interesting opportunities.
One of them came from the online marketing platform, Skillshare, which asked her to create a class related to the iPhone, and she decided to try it. For this class, she split what she knew into logical steps, finding gear, figuring out how to use the camera app to shoot good video, understanding what types of shots make for the best video, and so on. She says the hardest part about creating the curriculum was that she just learned a few of the things she'd taught. So she was essentially staying one step ahead of her students. But she thinks that actually helped her teach it better.
Skillshare has a trending list of courses. So to market the class, Cielo wrote to her friends on Facebook and Instagram. She asked them to sign up so that her class would go to the top of the trending list and become visible to more users. And to push things even further, she held a contest for students to win an Ollo clip lens. An Ollo clip is a special lens you can clip to your phone to take better photos, and she actually received that product for free from Ollo clip.
They had seen her famous video, and not only were they willing to donate the product, they were also willing to help judge the competition. Cielo made $600 in her first month of teaching. She was pleasantly surprised. She thought she'd make about 100 bucks, maybe 200. She used the extra money for more equipment, including a set of LED lights.
She'd had her eye on for a while. She also went out to a fancy and well-deserved celebratory dinner. Cielo now has two classes and has been able to make about $500 a month on average. Her short-term goal is to get those earnings to $1,000 a month. She's also gonna host full classes on her own site and put many classes on Skillshare to tease people over.
Right now she has about 3,000 students and will be promoting her new classes more through guest posts on blogs, features in larger publications, and another giveaway, this time of a special iPhronographer kit. To figure out what to teach next, Cielo surveyed her existing students and asked them what they want to learn. And with that feedback in mind, she plans to create courses about making videos on your phone for social media, how to create a promo video for Kickstarter, and how to conduct a video interview. She likes projects that push her to use and expand her skills, and she's happy that she's found a new way to make them profitable. [Music]
So congrats to Cielo.
A while back I did an extended episode about starter platforms, looking at sites like Skillshare and many others, where you can get some quick experience, create a profile, and begin experimenting pretty quickly. If you haven't listened to that, or the other two extended cuts, they're more in-depth episodes. You can find them at sidehustleschool.com/extended. Now Cielo is following what is usually a good path with these kinds of platforms. She got started there because it's quick and easy, lots of advantages, but then she's also building her own site and now developing courses that she'll host herself.
And in this way, she'll probably end up making more money, and also won't be completely dependent on another company's platform. So it's always good when you're seeing an initial success, you definitely take that reward, you have that celebration dinner, but then you also look ahead and you ask yourself, "Okay, what's the next step? "I've got this figured out now. "What am I gonna do next? "How will I either grow this project "or start my next project?" "How can I apply what I've learned "to create an even better success?" Can you make money doing something you love?
Well, that's what Site of Social School is all about. Every day, it's a different story of someone doing exactly that. As always, remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. If you would like to learn about Skillshare either as a user taking classes or as a potential instructor, come check out today's notes there at sidehustleschool.com/102 and to leave a comment or question for the show, give me a call on the new Hustle Hotline at 8449 Hustle. My online photos are nothing like Cielo's and so many other talented photographers, but if you'd like to follow me on Instagram, my account is 193 countries, 193 countries.
I'm Chris Guillebeau, this is Site of Social School. Much more is on the way. [Music]
