This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Hey, hey, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. So glad you're tuning in today. I hope you are doing awesome wherever you are in the world.
Now this is our segment known as First $1,000. As you might surmise from the title, it's all about how someone made their first $1,000. Not their first 10,000 or $100,000, their first $1,000. We do this because some of our listeners are just trying to get started. And I believe that these early origin stories can be really empowering, empowering, impacting.
If you have not made $1,000 in working for yourself before, well, you need to get to that point because everything's gonna be much easier after that. I don't wanna say everything is always easy. Like you gotta work for it. I do believe in hard work, but there is something that happens just in terms of your own momentum, your own confidence, and even some logistics and things, you know, once you can get to this point. So with that in mind, today's feature comes from Kellan Klein.
And we first featured Kellan and his project, thesavicouple.com back on episode 1620. As you're gonna hear in this update, that blog is now a multiple six-figure business that he runs full-time with his wife, both Kellan and his wife, pretty savvy, but of course it didn't start out that way. And in fact, it took a while for them to get going, which is really interesting, right? Sometimes the most successful projects actually take a while to get going. That's something I have observed over the years.
So what about their first thousand dollars? How did they make that happen? What did it feel like? And what did they learn? So let's hear the story from Kellan and I'll come back at the end with a very quick wrap up.
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Hey, what's going on everyone? This is Kellan from the Savvy Couple. And today I wanna share our story on how we made our first thousand dollars from our business. So as 2016, my wife and I were buried in student loan debt. We were looking for a way to increase our income and everyone around us, our friends and family, kept asking us questions about personal finance, about budgeting, about living frugal, about paying off debt.
So we decided to start a personal finance blog so we could help everyone at the same time. And from that point on, we started our blog in 2016 of July that summer. And we continued to work on that night and day, weekends, holidays. We were so devoted and motivated to make it work, to start making money from it. We just did everything we possibly could to put in the work and get over the learning curve that blogging has and really created an entire business around it.
So we were pumping out three articles a week that we were personally writing. We would have guest posts come on and we were, like I said, we were really trying to just learn the ropes, get traffic to our blog and help people solve their problems at the end of the day is what we were trying to do. And on that ninth month, something miraculous happened. After nine months of absolutely hustling, working nights and weekends, like I said, publishing articles at work, when we probably shouldn't have been, editing articles, you know, working on our side hustle while we are at work. In the ninth month, we finally got our $50 sponsorship.
So a company came to us and said, "Hey, we'd like to sponsor an article on your blog and we're willing to pay you $50." And we were blown away. It was this huge, miraculous moment, this light bulb moment that we've talked to ourselves. Hey, we can do this. Like, we're making money now from our blog. So about two weeks later, I went to Brittany, my wife, and asked if I could quit my job and do it full time.
And she was gracious enough to say, "Okay, let's do this." She was tired of me quitting so many other jobs after college and said, "I know you need to work and do your own thing, so let's do this business." And let me do it full time. So that first day that I was a self-employed entrepreneur, I sat at the computer and worked for 16 hours. I think only getting up to go to the bathroom a couple of times and maybe a bite to eat. And it was a super unproductive day. But I like to share that because that's not how entrepreneurship always is.
But I was willing to put in the work. I was willing to eat peanut butter jelly sandwiches if that's what we need to do to reach it financially and take that leap of faith, which we did. Luckily, we had our finances in order by that time. We had a good nest egg saved up to allow me to take that risk after earning that $50 only. And as soon as I jumped into it full time, I really looked at, "Okay, what skills do I have?
How can I monetize other ways online?" And at that point, I said, "You know, I can freelance work. I'm trying to learn digital marketing. I'm trying to learn how content creation works online and how to run a blog. Why not get a freelance gig that is going to teach me that exact thing and also get paid to do so?" So I quickly found a digital marketing position. It was paying 15 bucks an hour.
It was only 10 hours a week, but it was doing exactly what I wanted to do and teaching me exactly what I needed to learn. And then on top of that, I did teach for VIP Kid, which is teaching English to Chinese students overseas. And I did that for three months and that paid $20 an hour. So at that point, I was making over $1,000 a month from freelancing and through our blog. But like I said, it was part freelancing and part our blog.
And right about that 12-month mark, our blog finally reached the point where we were at 25,000 page views per month, which is a huge milestone back in the day to get into Mediavine, which is kind of an exclusive premium ad network, which allows you to put ads on your site and start earning just off views. So we were able to do that on the 12th month. So this was one year into side hustling with our blog. And from that point on, things just kind of snowballed. I kind of realized that we don't really need the money right now.
So I stopped doing the freelance work. I went all in on just the blog to help that grow and become a long-term asset for us. So after that 12th month, we had our first $1,000 a month through Mediavine, through affiliate income. We had a $2,000 a month, a $3,000 a month. And then it quickly jumped up the year and a half to two year mark.
We were at $5,000 a month. And then on that third year, we hit a $10,000 a month. And that's when Brittany and I came back together and said, hey, let's figure out a way to allow you to quit your teaching job and join me full-time. So short story here, to make it short at least, is the last, it was June of 2018, I believe. We had a month that we made more money from our blog than Brittany made an entire year from her teaching salary.
So that was a clear sign that God wanted us to work on this full-time together. She quit her job and the rest is history. We now run a multiple six-figure personal finance brand called TheSavyCouple.com, which we love and enjoy, helping people fast-track their financial freedom and really create a dream life that they've always wanted to live, kind of like we have done. So that's our origin story. If there's anything that I want you to take away from it, is dive headfirst into what you want to achieve with your online business, with your business in general, and you will find those problems, you will make mistakes, and that's how you learn, that's how you become an expert.
So dive in, don't second-guess yourself, analysis paralysis. The best thing to do is to take action and not worry about perfection. [Music]
Remember how I sometimes say it's easier to go from $1,000 to $2,000 than it is to get your first $1,000? I mean, this is a real-life demonstration of it. Kellan explains it very well.
In their third year, they hit that $10,000 a month. It is now a multiple six-figure brand. It's not just a blog. It's a whole savvy couple empire that they are building. For me, I just love observing the trajectory of these things.
And when you find what works, you just keep working at it. You keep iterating. You keep paying attention to what people respond to, and inevitably, some projects or courses or launches or whatever you're doing, some of it works better than others, and so you just keep doing more of that. So well done, Kellan. 16 hours on the first day.
Also, I respect that, but I do want to say, I like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. So I don't think that's a hardship, just personally. Anyway, I'll leave you with Kellan's advice. Dive headfirst into what you want to achieve. Don't second-guess yourself.
Great advice. Thanks so much, Kellan, for telling us about your first $1,000. I hope our listeners found it encouraging. And in turn, I want to encourage you listeners to check out their website at thesabbicouple.com. They've got all kinds of resources there.
You can learn more about Kellan and his wife, but also learn more about savvy finances. So good stuff there. If you've got a question or an update for us about your side hustle, that would be sidehustleschool.com/questions. We've also got a show notes page, sidehustleschool.com/1878, with more links to everything discussed and so much more. I hope you will subscribe, follow, wherever you like to listen to podcasts.
Come back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the "Onward Project."
