This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Side hustle school, listers, community, awesome people of the world. Welcome back to a brand new week. I'm excited to bring you a whole bunch of great stories. My name is Chris Guillebeau. I'm the host of the show.
If you are listening in real time all week long, I will be in Canada, Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal, and Toronto. I look forward to seeing a bunch of folks from those great cities. If you're not in those great cities, well, I will keep bringing you the show every day. Now, right before recording this episode, I went to do a little filming. I was actually filming a remote TV interview.
I always get nervous before I go to these interviews because usually happens really quick. There's this whole hurry up and wait thing, and all this preparation that goes into a very, very short interview or segment. You don't really get a chance to tell stories or go into much detail. You're just hoping as the guest to say something that's somewhat useful, that you come off sounding intelligent, but also so that anyone who watches it actually gets something out of it. I mean, that's always my goal, and I don't know if they'll use this because this was a pre-recorded interview, so later they go back and chop it up and take what they want.
But at the very end, they said something like, "Do you have any concluding thoughts?" or "What's the most important thing you want to leave people with?" I was like, "You know what? The most important thing is if you're out there and you're watching this segment, or if you're listening to this podcast, for example, and you're excited by this concept of starting a side hustle for yourself, but you feel like it's inaccessible to you, or maybe you've tried before and it hasn't worked out. I just want you to know that you're not alone, and this desire that you have to create more freedom for yourself, a lot of people have this desire. We're all on this journey together. If something hasn't worked out before, you're just going to have to use that as a learning experience and go on to the next thing.
Of course, every day on the show here, I'm hoping to bring you more ideas, more inspiration that can, of course, lead you to action. With that in mind, today's story is about a guy who creates a six-figure side hustle on startup costs of just $200. He eventually makes this his full-time work, but remember, as always, he started this project without quitting his job and on those very low startup costs. So remember the dream, keep your eyes on the prize. There's something out there for you to, and I'll tell you this guy's whole story in just a moment.
Long business meetings are rarely a breeding ground for good ideas. If you work in an office, you may already know that. And in fact, sometimes they can get in the way of good work. But for Stefan Pretty, one of those meetings is where he was struck with the idea for his side hustle. Sitting in a client meeting at his digital marketing agency, Stefan was working with a company who wanted to sell juice-clean subscription boxes, but they needed to do it on a bootstrapper's budget.
Now, creating this kind of subscription site, especially one that's sending out physical products, typically requires a fair amount of coding, design, and a number of tools being brought together under one roof, which is, of course, something hard to achieve on a bootstrapper's budget. Stefan wanted to help his client, so he went off in search of more affordable plug-and-play solutions, and what he found was that there was no such system out there. Even though subscription boxes were growing in popularity and demand, we featured several of them on the show in the past couple months. Nobody had created a platform that made it easy to set up. So he thought, "Well, maybe I'm the person to make that all-in-one solution for subscription boxes." Stefan was a marketer who had web development skills, so he thought he would give it a try.
He named his new idea and brand Subly and got to work in his spare time. He would spend entire evenings and weekends locked away in his bedroom, sometimes enlisting the free help of friends and colleagues, and he built the entire website himself. Although this was time-intensive and sometimes exhausting, this investment allowed Stefan to build his entire business for less than $200, which is great in any case, but truly fantastic for something that requires this kind of coding and integration. Stefan admits that he spent the first year creating Subly being unsure of his goal. He knew the service had to exist, but he didn't know when exactly or what the finished service would look like.
So he began to find out who his audience was through marketing the service, through getting feedback, and then using it to shape the tool to those people's needs. And the main focus for getting the word out about Subly has been content marketing. Content marketing is basically writing blog posts and articles, as well as finding backlinks and the right keywords to get their site to rank in Google. But Stefan's first real-paying customers came when he got featured on Product Hunt, a site that brings the latest and best tools to its readers every day, which gave him a big push in the right direction. Subly starts from $29 a month for the launch package and also takes a percentage of the transaction fees.
This gives you a custom domain, a website designer and builder, email and community support, as well as the option to refer friends to make an extra 5%. As you upgrade your membership, you can add integrations like ShipStation, Stripe, Referral Candy and Zapier, various tools that allow you to do different things. The price is based on multiple factors, from the cost of servers to the level of customization that a customer needs. And one of Stefan's favorite aspects of this project is that it's allowed many people to start their own side hustle on the cheap and then test it with an audience, potentially grow their income without a big investment of capital, which is, of course, a core value of side hustle school. And so far, it seems to be working.
Subly has now grown to five figures of income per month, more than six figures annually, and it's growing its member base month by month. Remember, this is recurring revenue in the sense that customers are paying month after month, so it's very predictable. Stefan can look to the next month and have a pretty good idea that he's going to make at least this much money, and maybe more. Subly is growing its member base month by month, and Stefan was recently able to leave his digital marketing agency and focus full-time on what is now not just a hustle, but actually a full-time business. Looking to the future, Stefan wants to continue to grow subly and keep up with current trends in the marketplace.
He's focusing on the next three months, planning for the next six, and dreaming about what may be around in a year's time. This side hustle success plan is worth your attention, and it might even be worth subscribing to. Awesome success. I love hearing stories of low startup costs that turn into real income, $200 investment, a lot of work, of course, but the payoff has been well worth it. Now, listen, I'm often saying that if you're not a web developer, don't try to become one, but let's flip it a little bit.
What if you are a web developer or a programmer or a coder, or you do have some technical skills? Well, naturally, you want to put those skills to good use, but what's the best advice for you? What I've seen a lot is that people who are good at coding or the technical aspects of making these kinds of complex projects, which is something I know very little about, definitely not my strength. If they have any weakness, it's that sometimes they don't think enough about problems, which is another important side hustle principle. And when you're trying to decide what kind of side hustle to start, like you can see in this story and so many others, it's often very helpful to match a proposed solution to a problem that you encounter.
Now, listen, if you're a web developer, you don't have to look far to find problems. There are so many inefficiencies out there. There are so many things that could be done better. You probably encounter them every day. In fact, most users encounter them every day.
So if you're sophisticated enough to have the knowledge of something that could be made better or something that's missing, like what we heard in Stefan's story, that's what you should focus on. But one more caveat, you should focus on solutions that people will pay for because not everything that's a problem is naturally matched with a profitable solution. So that's why this story is so great because subscription boxes are on the rise. We know there's lots of side hustlers out there and other people that want to bootstrap their business. And if you're a startup and you've got unlimited money and gourmet catered lunch every day, then you can build your own platform.
But if you're like the rest of us, well, you don't want to spend a lot of money. You are looking for a plug and play solution. And that's what this guy was able to make. So I think it's a great example to kick off our week, don't spend a ton of money, use the skills you already have, and solve somebody's problem. All three of those principles featured very prominently in this story.
I hope you liked this one. As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/289. We will link up Subly as well as some previous episodes that focused on subscription boxes. One of my favorites is Candy Japan, this guy who's an expat and lives in Japan, and every month, or in fact, I think twice a month for him, he's sending a box of delicious and wacky Japanese candy to people in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world.
I forget what episode number that was, but if you come to the show notes, we will link it up, sidehustleschool.com/289. Thank you, as always, for listening. Much more is on the way. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]
