This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Hey there, what's up? This is Chris Guillebeau here on Side Hustle School. Every day on this show, I tell you a different story of someone who starts an income-generating project without quitting their day job. I believe that everyone needs a side hustle, and if you listen to the show and take action on what you learn, it might not be long before I'm telling your story. Now, I know we have a lot of photographers who listen to the show way back when we started on episode nine.
I told you the story of a guy I called the Craigslist wedding photographer who learned how to shoot weddings by posting an ad on Craigslist. Still has his day job working for the state of California, and he does one wedding a month for something like $3,500. So that's pretty cool, but what if you're a photographer and you don't wanna do weddings? Well, the story I'm gonna tell you today is a pretty fun approach. It's about a guy who combines his love for art and science fiction to create a side hustle specializing in the performance art known as cosplay and iconic stories like "Star Wars" and "Harry Potter." I'll tell you all about it in just a moment.
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By his own account, 28-year-old ATM technician Daniel Grove is a total nerd. As a kid, he loved space movies and futuristic TV shows. Even when he grew up, he sought out all things sci-fi and fantasy, anything that pushed his imagination and stretched what he thought was possible. If you got him started talking about "Star Wars," for example, he might not stop. And as he was growing up, he also started taking photos with the family camera, a bulky three megapixel Sony.
Daniel quickly found that he had an eye for composition, and he also discovered that by playing around with his images in Photoshop, he could add his own artistic element to them. So as he got older, his photography became an expression of the way he saw the world. His first ever paid photography shoot came in high school for a friend, and that friend paid him $20 for his services. Then Daniel took her to lunch, which costs $14. So in the end, it wasn't a highly profitable day.
He made exactly $6, but then he went to college. At that point, he had invested in a better camera, and he felt his quality was high enough to where he could charge a bit more than $6. So he created Daniel Grove Photography. He began by taking any job that people would offer, and he's still fairly flexible. But over time, he's come to specialize in combining his love of photography and that love of science fiction and fantasy to let his inner nerd shine through the images.
In fact, he's become known for his cosplay and Star Wars themed shoots. If you haven't heard of cosplay before, it combines the words costume and play. It is a performance art where people dress up as their favorite characters from books, movies, and classic stories like "Harry Potter," "Star Wars," "Red Riding Hood," many others. Daniel takes photographs at cosplay events, then spends hours editing them. He uses a popular freeware program called Blender, where he designs computer-generated models to incorporate lightsabers, magical energy fields, starships, and other special effects.
He's even done a Star Wars themed wedding shoot. Now this trend of adults dressing up to play make believe has become less taboo over the past decade or so, and as Daniel sees it, more and more people have some geek in them, or perhaps they have some geek that they're now willing to acknowledge. This is something that Daniel likes to do, but it's also profitable. That's why it's a side hustle. In 2014, he made about $6,000.
In 2015, it was $16,000. 2016 was right around $20,000, and we'll see what happens next, but it's probably fair to say that Daniel has come a long way from that $6 commission, and most of his costs in this business involve his time. That nice camera he has cost about $2,000, but he doesn't buy a lot of other gear on an ongoing basis, so his regular expenses are almost non-existent. He uses online services and free programs for online storage. He manages his own website.
He relies on word-of-mouth referrals instead of advertising, but again, as I said, he does invest a lot of time in it. He says for every hour of shooting, he spends about one to three hours editing, and when he comes home from work, he usually spends a couple of hours maintaining the business. One struggle has been deciding how to value his work. In response to this challenge, and in true geek fashion, Daniel has designed a mathematical formula in Microsoft Excel that considers various parameters, including the hours for photography and editing, also the cost of gas, depending on how far he has to drive for the gig, and various other factors. This project has brought a lot of freedom to his life.
He's put his profits toward a down payment on a house, and whenever he's encountered surprise expenses like medical bills or car repairs, he says it's no longer a big hit to his budget. Daniel hopes to keep growing this hustle while maintaining a balance between photography for work and photography he does just for himself. Now, I mentioned that Daniel is an ATM technician. That's his day job, and as part of that, he has to drive all over the state to fix ATMs. While he's doing that, he spends his time listening to podcasts, including "Side Hustle School," "Thanks, Daniel, you're awesome," and he's also able to scope out unique locations for shoots.
So he says this allows him to get a free education while he's doing his day job, and it helps him to push his photography further by finding non-traditional locations and opportunities he wouldn't have spotted otherwise. That is, indeed, a real-life superpower. [Music]
Well, I thought that was a fun story, and as Daniel noted, that world of geekiness, it's gone from being kind of a niche tribal identity to being much more of a mainstream interest or pursuit. When I was a kid, I loved to play video games, and some of my friends played games, but I didn't know a lot of adults that did. And it was interesting as my generation grew up.
These days, it's totally normal for people of all ages to play games. In fact, I remember reading a few years ago when the multi-billion dollar video game industry surpassed that of the movie industry. That was almost a benchmark or a matric or some kind of moment in time that signified this shift. And so something like cosplay, it's also a world within a world like that. It's not nearly as big as something like Star Wars itself.
You may not have heard of it before. I had heard of it before researching this episode, but I didn't really know a lot about it. So it's definitely not huge or mainstream, but it has enough true fans that it's also definitely not small. So these kinds of opportunities, they are right for someone with the right talent and appreciation for the genre to start a profitable project. In fact, with Daniel, I mentioned his net income for a couple of years, but since beginning the project and focusing on cosplay and fantasy, he's made a total of $47,000.
Now that's not surprising to me at all. I think he can probably go on to do a lot more. I could envision events, some kind of crowdfunding campaign, much more social media popularity, and all sorts of extensions, not just for Daniel, but for anyone kind of operating in this world. And again, he could just be a good photographer. He could make money doing weddings or something else, but this specific focus is what makes his work more and more valuable because it's interesting.
Now, speaking of interesting, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope it made you think. Whether you like cosplay or not, I hope you're working on your own side hustle. I've been hearing a lot of reader stories recently. I'm gonna do some kind of compilation at some point.
Some of the people who are listening to the show who have already launched their project or have made a lot of progress. And if you're just joining us or if you're still in the idea phase, that's awesome too. We're all on a journey, but hopefully there is actually a destination. If you'd like to see Daniel's work, learn about cosplay, just come over to sidehustleschool.com/119. That's 119.
And if you'd like to leave a comment or question for the show, give me a call on the Hustle Hotline at 8449 Hustle. I'm Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School, and I'll see you tomorrow. [Music]
