What It's About
Three friends create a morning routine journal and sell it to the world.
Business Model
Skills Required
Complexity
Profit Potential
Words of Wisdom
Habits have always played a huge role in Ari’s life—he wakes up early, reads regularly, meditates daily, exercises, and maintains a healthy eating regimen. As such, it totally makes sense that Ari took these good habits and created a side hustle helping others making the most of their mornings.
I cannot stress this enough—start with something that you know. Too many unknown variables can needlessly complicate a side hustle. Start with something familiar until you're more comfortable with the process!
Fun Fact
Ari and his friends also offer a free PDF of the first week of the Morning Sidekick journal in order to get people signed up for their newsletter, and they created step-by-step action guides for their articles—fillable PDFs people can download after giving them their email address. Then they’d market the journal to the folks on the email list to help achieve consistent sales.
Notes from Chris
Episode 206
Habits have always played a huge role in Ari’s life. He wakes up early, reads regularly, meditates daily, exercises, and maintains a healthy eating regimen. While he was in his second year of law school, a friend approached him and another friend about creating an app to help people develop healthy lifestyle habits, and he was stoked about the idea. The three went to dinner that night to run through ideas, and met a few times over the next month to start fleshing out ideas about an app they wanted to call “Every Damn Day.” They created a free accountability partner email chain called Partners In Grind, where they’d match people with similar habits up to hold each other accountable. To do this, they created a landing page with a form where people could sign up, select a habit they wanted to work on, and share their geographic location. They reached out to websites related to self-help and offered to guest blog, and in the articles, he’d mention Partners in Grind. As a result of the marketing and media coverage, they had hundreds of signups within a few hours. Partners in Grind died out, however, when they learned through user interviews that email wasn’t the right way to connect people. People wanted to be matched with others for accountability but found that email was a difficult way to connect, and it was hard for partners to stay consistent. Next, they decided to create Morning Sidekick, a journal to help people wake up earlier and build a morning routine, which was the habit that the majority of their users were interested in developing. They launched a Kickstarter for the journal and promoted it to their email list. They also reached out to various YouTube channels and podcasts related to habits that they’d mentioned in the journal to help them get the word out. They made $20,000 with their Kickstarter campaign and worked on consistent sales for the journal to raise more money to fund the app. So far they’ve sold almost 4,000 units of the Morning Sidekick Journal, which run for $33.99 on their website. Through sales from the growing website and newsletter, they’re able to consistently make $6,500 in net profit a month on the journal. They’re also working on a Nutrition Sidekick journal while developing an app called Our Habit Nest.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
- Habit Nest: Get more healthy lifestyle hacking tips on Ari and his friends' website
- Kickstarter | The Sidekick Journal: Check out the Kickstarter campaign that Ari launched in order to get the funds for his Sidekick Journal
- Autopilot: The visual marketing automation and customer journey software that Ari and his friends used to run their email newsletter
- Zapier: The service Ari and his friends used to integrate their newsletter with their Shopify store, Slack, and other services and applications
- Partners in Grind: The free accountability partner email chain Ari created that helped them match users with similar habits up to hold each other accountable
- Quora: The website that Ari used to promote his new Sidekick Journal while answering questions that others had about productivity best practices
- HARO: The website that Ari and his friends used to connect with journalists in order to provide great habits related content for their blog
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- Engineer Creates "Inertia Project" for Women: How a former engineer loses in Las Vegas and redesigns the trajectory of her life, creating an impressive hustle along the way
- Graphic Designer Turns Side Hustle into $80k Project: A longing for expression and self-love pushes one woman into a successful side hustle helping others live more fulfilling lives through the practice of breathwork
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