This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Greetings, what's up? Welcome back. This is Side Hustle School. I am Chris Guillebeau. And let me tell you about the most wonderful thing you could ever experience in your life.
Imagine that it's a Friday night and you're just sitting around at home. Maybe you've had a nice blue apron meal. Maybe you picked up something to eat on the way back from work. Whatever the case may be, you're sitting there and you realize that something is missing from your life. Something deeply important.
It's not purpose. It's not a reason to get up in the morning. You're missing homemade cookies. But then, less than an hour after you become aware of this deep, profound absence in your life, there's a knock on your door. And a friendly delivery man or delivery woman is standing there with a smile, handing you a warm box of homemade cookies.
It sounds magical, doesn't it? Well, let me tell you, this magical world is in fact reality, at least if you live in Portland, Oregon. It's all the result of a husband and wife team who followed a sweet, buttery dream into the dark. There are stories coming up right after this. [Music]
Julia Baldwin and her husband, Richard, both grew up in Oregon, but they spent the better part of a decade living in Philadelphia and New York City, where you could always get anything delivered at any time of night, and there was always someplace open to find a snack.
When they moved back west, they realized that aside from pizza, their hometown of Portland, Oregon, didn't really have much available for delivery at all. And one night, as the ultimate origin story goes, they were relaxing at home and really wanted cookies, but they were too tired to make them themselves. Look, we've all been there, and that's when the idea started. What if there was a way to make delicious cookies and bring them to people's doorsteps? They talked about this brilliant idea for more than a year before starting to really work on it.
At the time, Richard was coaching some college students on the basics of entrepreneurship. He suggested that one of them look into what it would take to create a late night cookie business. That student ended up not wanting to do anything with the idea, but Richard and Julia just kept thinking about it themselves. Finally, they decided to take their own advice and do some market research to see if it was an idea that could work. Well, this is pretty simple.
They prepared a survey that went out to students at the colleges where they both happened to work for their day jobs. And in what was perhaps the least unexpected survey response ever, approximately 100% of the students said that would be awesome. This gave Julia and Richard the confidence they needed to figure out how to make it happen. And so they did. They already knew how to bake cookies, so they learned how to bake a lot of cookies.
They learned how to package them. They learned what to price them at. They created a very simple website, afterdarkcookies.com, and they got to work. The first weekend that After Dark Cookies was open for business, two things happened that showed Julia and Richard they were onto something. Their very first order was actually a gift order.
There was a couple in Colorado who had friends in Portland. One of them had just had surgery, and their friends wanted to get something nice delivered to them. They had googled Portland dessert delivery, and After Dark Cookies came up. Julia was in the kitchen baking while Richard went out to deliver the order. He knocked on the door, but nobody answered.
It turned out that the lucky recipient had already gone to bed for the night. Richard called their friends in Colorado who said to just leave the cookies by the door. So he did that, but it didn't feel quite right to just do that and move on. So later that evening, he emailed the recipients, got their email address from those friends in Colorado, and he said he wanted to re-deliver them again the next night at no charge. They were ecstatic, they accepted the offer, and the next night they got their cookies hot out of the oven.
They were thrilled, of course, as anyone would be. Now that same weekend, another customer was so excited that she asked to give Richard a hug. Richard and Julia said they'd both worked a lot of different jobs in restaurants and retail, all kinds of other stuff, but they'd never seen a reaction quite like that before. And that was the moment they thought, "Hey, there really might be something to this." A few weeks later, Julia recently took a phone order from a mother in Florida who wanted to send cookies to her son for his 29th birthday. When Julia asked what message the mother wanted to include on the box, she started to cry when crafting the note.
Once again, it showed Julia and Richard, even though they knew that cookies were awesome, and having them brought to your house on a Friday night is amazing, they had no idea they could create such a positive impact on people. Those kinds of experiences, the hugs from customers, the far away orders to loved ones, has given them the fuel to keep going. They now work on after dark cookies every single day, in addition to their day jobs, and three nights a week, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, Richard runs around town, late into the night, delivering these amazing packages of chocolate chip goodness. Now, to be fair, even though the cookie kingdom is delicious, it's also a ton of work. They have the full-time jobs.
They're also doing this as a couple. And Julia mentioned that this is good in some ways, but challenging in others. Since the business is growing so quickly, it's hard to turn off and have a normal, non-cookie life. Still, overall, they're very glad to be following their snickerdoodle passion. Can you change the world through cookies?
It seems like Julia and Richard are doing exactly that, but even if not, we're still talking about delicious, homemade cookies brought to your doorstep. As I said, pretty much the best thing ever. [Music]
Hey, so in all of that awesomeness about cookies, I just wanna make sure you don't miss the fact that this is a profitable endeavor. Since starting, Julia and Richard have made five figures in income. They're likely on the path to six figures or more at some point.
So far, they've been reinvesting the profit into the business, trying out some new marketing efforts, and doing some things that may cost more now, but they believe will save them money in the long run. So they are taking this very seriously, as any cookie delivery business should do, if you happen to live in Portland, Oregon, or if you ever get the chance to visit, I encourage you to check out afterdarkcookies.com. Unfortunately, I'm not compensated in cookies or anything else. I'm just a loyal customer myself who discovered them one night when I had my own crisis of sitting around and saying, where in the world could I find a delicious homemade cookie? And then discovering that such a thing actually existed right in my hometown.
I do wonder if the cookies are priced a bit too low. It's something like two or three dollars a cookie. And these are like full-sized, very large cookies, delivered homemade, warm in a box. I mean, there's a lot of value there. So I think they're kind of using like a drug dealer model, where eventually it will get more expensive.
But too late for me, I'm already hooked. I would pay whatever. Now as for you, wherever you are in the world, I realize first of all, this episode has probably made you very hungry. If you don't live in my hometown, maybe you need to start a cookie delivery service. And if not that, hopefully you'll start something else.
As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. Don't let your cookie crumble. If you don't take action on your ideas, they'll just end up half-baked. If you want to see the show notes for today's episode, just come over to sidehustleschool.com/116. That's 1-1-6.
I hope you enjoyed this delicious story. I'm Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
