This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Hey, hey, what's up? Welcome back. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You are listening to Side Hustle School, the only show in the universe that brings you a different story every day of how someone starts a side hustle, an income generating project without quitting their day job. I am thrilled to make this show for you and I'm so glad you're listening.
Now, I often mentioned that a side hustle should be fun. It's not a chore. At least it shouldn't be. It should be something you look forward to either at the end of your workday or early in the morning or whenever you're able to squeeze it in. And I think you'll like today's story because it's all about turning fun itself into a six-figure income.
It's the story of an epic scavenger hunt. It's not an overnight success. In fact, it took a lot of work and a number of years. But as you'll hear, it was not only a lot of fun, it was also meaningful and sustainable. That story right after this brief message.
Today's story comes from Boston, Massachusetts, where Chris Damianakos runs a scavenger hunt hustle called Cash Hunt. And to really understand Chris's journey, we have to go back to the late 1980s when he was a teenager and on a family trip to Greece. It was there that he first witnessed a scavenger hunt being put on by an Italian tour group. He loved the idea of playing a competitive game with other people, using the world as your game board. When Chris got back to the States, he designed his own very first scavenger hunt.
He had fun creating it and putting it on, and his friends loved it. In the movie version of Chris's story, he would have gone straight from there to creating his own company. Well, this is not a movie. Sardisville School is real life. So instead of doing that, Chris finished high school, continued on to college, and then after that, he did what most people do.
He got a series of what he called real jobs. He worked mostly in event management, and it was fine. He got to develop some of his skills, but he also says he never really felt fulfilled by those jobs. So a number of years later, he came back to this scavenger hunt idea that he had loved so much as a teenager. In his spare time as a passion project, he created an elaborate six hour long scavenger hunt for his friends and family once more.
Everyone enjoyed it. And one of the friends who also worked in marketing couldn't stop talking about how this could be not only fun, but also profitable for Chris. So he decided to try it. He spent a few months redesigning the hunt so that it could be played in two hours instead of six, because six hours is a pretty big commitment, and then he just had to find the right customers. Well, this was the dark ages more than a decade ago when social media was just getting off the ground.
So if you're from a younger generation, I don't mean to sidetrack the story. Just know that there are these things called newspapers that actually used to be printed. And there was a whole classified ad section in the newspaper that people actually read. I know it's crazy, but Chris decided to put his ads in the wedding party section to see if he could attract bachelorette and bachelor parties. It was interesting thinking and the plan worked out well since his first group scavenger hunt, his first paid client was a bachelor party.
He was simultaneously excited and petrified, but it all worked out. He charged them $30 a person with an eight person minimum. And before that year was up, he had repeated the experience four other times. His initial investment was very low. He had to pay for the materials for the game and those newspaper ads.
But aside from that, most of what he made was pure profit. And that first year he made a couple of thousand dollars. He also landed a corporate client, Singular Wireless. Singular asked him to customize the scavenger hunt for their employees. And so he did.
But he also created a blueprint to make customization for future corporate clients easier. Once he customized scavenger hunts for each company, he charged them more per person and also required a higher minimum number of participants. Over the next few years, Chris kept producing scavenger hunts and advertising in newspapers. And this was a side hustle, of course, he wasn't dependent on the income. So he put his focus into making the game as epic as possible.
The game grew to be fully interactive using the entire city of Boston as the board. Players start off with a comic book that has some initial challenges in it. Then they have to decide as a team how they're going to get the most points before the two hours are up. Sometimes challenges lead to point cards. Sometimes they lead to other challenges or QR codes that send them to a website for a puzzle.
At one point, he even created a prop that looks like a real newspaper that players have to use to complete the challenge. He said, I wanted to make it as much like one of those reality TV shows as possible so that people could have that experience for an afternoon. The whole project grew organically, and four years after starting, his annual side income from it was up to $30,000. Then something else happened. As the newspaper business declined, a new series of review sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp, were gaining momentum and reaching a huge number of users, while the people who had participated in Cash Hunt's Scavenger Hunt were big fans.
Almost without exception, they had a wonderful experience. So Chris began seeing excellent reviews pop up on those sites, which spread the word even further. As his reputation on those sites grew, so did the business. He finally decided to jump into Cash Hunt full-time, and it wasn't a decision he took lightly. He had seen his revenue increase, he had seen the inquiries, phone calls, emails increase, more interactions on social media, but he says even though the business was growing, it was still a leap of faith for me.
I wanted to be sure it would really work out. Once he decided to focus on Cash Hunt full-time, he naturally increased the number of games in the Boston area, he switched to Square to process credit card payments, and he stopped running newspaper ads in favor of Facebook ads. He had also begun running the event in different cities. Now, over the years, he had been approached by a few people who wanted to franchise Cash Hunt, and he always deferred, instead making his own one-day round trips to other cities himself to facilitate the game. But by last year, he was flying back and forth to Chicago so often, it was getting impractical.
He was once again approached by a couple different people about franchising, so now that he was going full-time, he decided to consider the idea. He flew to each city to meet with interested people, scoped out the area, and entered into collaborative partnerships with existing tour companies in five different cities. His decision to build the hustle slowly and then jump into it full-time has paid off well. As of 2017, he's making well over six figures, he now has one other full-time employee working with him in Boston, as well as facilitators in those five other cities, with more plans in the works to expand further, and he's still having fun doing it. Well, I really like this story.
I think a lot of people relate to this aspiration of maybe one day running a business or doing something that you believe in, taking a passion project, and eventually having it be your main thing. But as you probably know, a lot of the advice that you hear in popular culture is just go for it, follow your passion, take a leap, and maybe sometimes that's good advice, but I also think it's pretty cool what Chris did in this story. He did it for the love, he did it because he enjoyed it, he didn't put a lot of money into it, he put a lot of heart into it, and then he grew it slowly over the years until it finally was a good choice for him to leave his job and jump into it full-time. And at that point, even though he still felt afraid, like most of us would, at that point it was a very reasonable risk to take because he had this track record of success. And then just on the tactical side, those review sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp, for this kind of project, this kind of interactive experience, it's a team building experience, or a tourist experience if you're going to visit Boston or any particular city, those sites are really required strategies for this kind of project.
You can't really opt out of the process because those sites are going to create listings with your business's name or your experience's name or whatever it is, and people will review you anyway, so you might as well actively participate and encourage satisfied customers to leave reviews. And of course, if you actually do a good job, you are providing something that people enjoy just like Chris was doing, these sites will essentially be free marketing for you, since so many people end up on them when they're searching for things to do. I hope you enjoyed this story too. Before you go today, remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. Maybe you'll want to check out Cash Hunt the next time you're in Boston or one of these other cities to learn more about it and see the show notes for today's episode, just come to sidehustleschool.com/128.
By the way, on that website, you can also get a free Five Steps to Hustle course, which has recently been updated. Come and check it out, it's totally free, just like the show. We've got more great stories coming up tomorrow and every day after that. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.
