Notes from Chris

Episode 294

More and more people are deciding to start side hustles every day. And, most of these people need a website. And not just any website—preferably one that looks good and that potential customers can navigate easily.

While this may sound like good news for web designers, it can often have the opposite effect for their clients. Clients with new businesses often have smaller budgets, which reduces their earnings, or, they opt to build parts of the websites themselves, which greatly restricts their creativity. So how can budding designers be more productive, profitable, and creative in today’s online world?

Well, side hustler Anja Merret in Berlin, Germany seems to have come up with a solution.

Anja has been listening to Side Hustle School for quite some time, and she noticed a trend in a lot of the stories we feature—more and more side hustlers are trying to keep startup costs low by using bootstrapping techniques including designing and building their own websites.

Working with the close-knit team at her day job, they came up with a solution— Divi Den. They would create all-in-one DIY User Interface kits—more commonly known as UI kits—that are highly customizable but require less time-intensive work up front. As Anja describes it, it’s kind of like a Lego kit for websites. They give you the “box” with all the pieces (e.g. - headers, footers, content blocks, etc.), a guidebook, some step-by-step instructional videos, and from there, it’s up to you to drop the pieces into place.

They did a soft launch in April that brought in a handful of sales and continued to do so for the next few months, but it was during their first big product launch in August that they ended up seeing the fruits of their labor. They sold 332 units kits for an impressive €10,142 ($11,989.42 USD).

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MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• Divi Den: Check out some of Anja and the team's UI kits, and keep an eye out for their new Pixie kit debut—pixie dust not included
• Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Animate CC, & Adobe Dreamweaver: Some of the programs that Anja and her team used to design their UI kits
• Divi Theme: Learn more about the visual page building Wordpress theme that Anja and her team kept in mind when creating their UI kits

SEE ALSO:

• 40,000 People Use This Web Developer's Side Hustle Every Day: How a San Francisco commuter became part of the original iPhone launch with a hustle that now helps more than 40,000 people every day
• Ohio IT Director Earns $31,000 Setting Up Wordpress Sites: How an Ohio IT director earned more than $31,000 empowering others by providing them with the tools and resources they needed to set up their own websites
• Charter Bus Employee Creates PR Service for Bloggers: How a digital marketer created something for himself, then decided to try selling it other people who had the same needs. He now makes more than $2,500 a month from this side project

Inspiration is good; inspiration combined with action is better. Now get back to work!

Yours in the revolution,

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