This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hello and welcome. I'm Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. I'm coming to you today from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, home of the Liberty Bell, the National Constitution Center, and some of my favorite Amish bakeries at the Reading Terminal Market. Mmm. Those Amish bakeries are not a sponsor of Side Hustle School, but how I wish they were.
Tomorrow I'll be going on to Boston and then London from there. I'm having so much fun meeting listeners and readers. But hey, let's talk about today's story. It's a very successful one, one that illustrates how far the side hustle world can take you. Now yesterday's story was good too.
It was about a guy who makes $800 a month. Nothing wrong with that, that's totally respectable. But today's story started one year ago and has already brought in $350,000, no joke. And this should remind you, have you started your side hustle yet? We'll come back to that at the end, but first a quick shout out to today's non-Amish bakery sponsor.
[Music]
As a marketing consultant for startups, Sean Kim had the freedom to work from anywhere he wanted. He used this opportunity to temporarily move to a city he'd long dreamed of visiting, Buenos Aires, Argentina. While there, he explored every facet of Latin culture, made local friends, and started picking up Spanish. Though a few months wasn't enough to become fluent, Sean's intentional engagement with locals using Spanish rather than English allowed his language skills to reach a comfortable conversational level. Eventually though, it was time for him to say goodbye to the city he fell in love with and he returned to Canada.
When he was back, he resumed speaking only English and slowly felt the Spanish skills he'd learned in Buenos Aires slip away. Disappointed that he was forgetting a language he worked so hard to learn, Sean downloaded a popular language learning app. It was convenient and inexpensive, but after the one-on-one conversational education he'd received, it felt impersonal. He quickly realized it wasn't gonna help him refine his Spanish language skills because it lacked the dynamic of a real relationship. Frustrated, he called up his Spanish teacher from Argentina.
The two spoke in Spanish as friends catching up after a long time away. The difference was dramatic. Conversing with a native speaker caused Sean's brain to rebuild his Spanish very quickly. Around that time, a friend of Sean's had recently begun taking Spanish lessons with a private tutor he found on Craigslist. The two met for coffee at Starbucks every week, but Sean's friend wasn't really seeing the results he expected.
The lessons were kind of dull, the teacher didn't really establish a relationship with him, and it wasn't cheap. Sean's friend complained about his language learning woes one day, and suddenly it clicked. In an instant, Sean clearly saw the problem. Learning languages is difficult without having friendly native speakers as teachers. It's also expensive to hire personal tutors, and you have to find the right one.
He also saw the solution, or at least his solution. Relational learning from native speakers is the most effective and fun way to learn a language, and he knew how he could help others do it without breaking the bank. This insight led him to a phrase that would define his business. Languages are learned with humans, not algorithms. And with that, RIPE, R-Y-P-E, the language learning platform, was born.
With the problem and solution so clear, at least to him, it was time to see if his idea would go anywhere. So he put together a test. For less than $300, Sean built a website, a brief email autoresponder, and ran a few Facebook ads to see how people would respond. He designed his landing page to collect emails that would connect him with potential customers for a Skype or phone call. He also offered a free trial Spanish lesson for submitting your email address to the forum.
He made sure to highlight his new brand's values. Convenience, including 24/7 access to tutors from anywhere in the world, quality teachers, Sean would handpick every single one, and affordability. Each 30-minute lesson breaks down to about $5. He then sought more targeted traffic by posting valuable comments to questions on Quora. Quick side note, we've talked about Quora a couple of times, but if you're not familiar with it, I'll link it up in the show notes so you can check it out.
Most of the questions were about learning languages, and all of Sean's helpful answers ended with a quick link to write and the mention of a trial lesson. In 24 hours, he had over 50 people sign up for the free Spanish lesson. Then, to gauge just how interested they really were, he set up a calendar for them to schedule their own lessons. He figured that if they took the initiative to set dates and times through a simple system, he could easily automate the process for smooth scaling in the future. However, if they didn't want to go through the effort to schedule their lessons, Sean would know that the idea probably wouldn't go anywhere.
A few days later, Ripe had more than 200 signups and over 50 scheduled trial lessons. It was definitely working, and people were scheduling those lessons themselves. So now it was time to ramp up. Over 50 lessons were scheduled, but Sean didn't have commitments from a single teacher. Oops, he called up his friend and tutor from Argentina and explained his new idea.
She happily signed up and recruited a few of her tutor friends to help with the trial lesson as well. Sean's idea was that if those first customers liked the lesson, he would offer them a paid plan while the success was fresh on their minds. And he made two plans for Spanish. One was $95 a month for up to 30 minutes of lessons per day, or $175 a month for up to 60 minutes a day. Compared to finding a Craigslist tutor for $25 an hour, this pricing model would be a no-brainer if the lessons were fun and helpful.
10 days into launching Ripe, Sean had 200 email signups, over 30 successful trial Spanish lessons completed, and of those 30, eight signed up for the paid plan. The idea was validated. Sean attributes this early success to his willingness to build the business by hand. He didn't start by creating a complex email sequence or developing a scheduling system that could accommodate thousands of teachers. He knew he could upgrade plans, install new systems, and automate if things took off, but he wanted to be involved manually with each step of the journey.
It's been just over a year now since Ripe launched, and the business has helped over 100,000 people learn Spanish, English, French, German, Mandarin, and French. The success stories are piling up, the user base is growing, and get this, the business has generated over $350,000 in sales. More than anything, Sean believes Ripe's growth is a result of treating customers like family. And in fact, he's recently taken a step back from focusing on growth and is currently refining his language learning processes to give customers the best possible experience. In his words, we don't have to answer to investors or board members that solely want to push growth for the sake of growth, we answer to our customers.
We'll get back to growing revenue, but we want to make sure the product is exactly what we envision it to be. Our customers deserve that. Well, at $350,000 in sales in year one, they have certainly had a lot of growth. And presumably Sean's customer-first mindset will continue to help customers all over the world learn languages easily and affordably. And just like any good side hustle, he's creating even more freedom for himself along the way.
As a bonus, he's also become much more proficient in Spanish. [Music]
Well, I just love this story and the tremendous success that it represents. I like to highlight stories like this because a side hustle can go on to make a hundred thousand, $200,000, even more a year. It doesn't always work out that way. That's why I tell different kinds of stories.
Not everything that you try is gonna work. Some things will work better than others. But the point is when you begin to explore and experiment, you never really know. Maybe you could have a huge success too. I also admire Sean's independence, his stance on how they don't have to answer to investors or board members.
They answer to their customers. He's really intent on just building the best possible product and creating the best customer experience for people, which seems quite evident from all the people who are signing up. If you think about it, it's a perfect bridge between these two models. One is you download an app and you might be able to learn some vocabulary through it. You might learn some other things, but it is pretty impersonal.
And then the other solution of paying someone locally, meeting them at a coffee shop, that has benefits, but it also has costs as well. And one of the costs is financial. Like it costs a lot more to do it that way than to use Sean's system. That's probably a big reason why his system is resonating with people so much. Now, before I sign off, I wanna give a shout out to another friend.
His name is Benny Lewis. He's the author of a book called Fluent in Three Months. I've known Benny a long time since first meeting him in Thailand, maybe eight or nine years ago. He also has a language learning model that's helped a lot of folks. So I'll link up his book and blog in the show notes as well.
Speaking of show notes, you can find links to Ripe, to Quora, to that book I just mentioned, anything else I talked about, at sidehustleschool.com/270, that's two seven zero. As always my friends, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Are you working on your side hustle? I'm gonna be asking you that more often going forward, because now is the time for action. Thank you for listening.
I'll be back tomorrow. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]
