Fulbright Scholar Earns $2k/Month Selling CBD Oil

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Hello and greetings. Welcome to Side Hustle School. This is your host, Chris Guillebeau. Times are changing in the world of legal cannabis. Now this may not be normal where you live, but where I live in Portland, Oregon, there are something like 300 legal cannabis dispensaries.

And anyone who's of legal age can walk into these places and buy all sorts of products. From loose cannabis flour to marijuana ice cream. To all sorts of oils and creams, lotions, other edible products. Pretty much anything you could dream of in the world of marijuana. And today we're gonna look at something that is somewhat related, but also somewhat different.

This is the hemp industry. Now hemp is non-psychoactive and probably shouldn't be illegal anywhere. In fact, right now I think it's legal in 44 of 50 states. But even so, it sometimes has a weird reputation. It often gets grouped with other forms of cannabis.

And the person we'll look at today has studied hemp for most of her life, including on a Fulbright scholarship as part of a master's degree. And she's now making money from that in various ways, along with educating the public about it. I'll bring you this complete hempy story right after this quick shout out. [Music]

It's only been in the last couple of years that Annie Rouse has launched her hemp side hustle, but it's also been a long time coming. When she was growing up in Kentucky, a hemp hotspot, her dad was the videographer who filmed a publicity stunt that actor Woody Harrelson orchestrated back in 1996.

Harrelson planted four hemp seeds in an attempt to draw attention to the fact that industrial hemp and marijuana were still controlled under the same law, despite the fact that hemp is completely non-psychoactive. He was arrested, then ultimately acquitted during a one-day jury trial. This event left a lasting impression on Annie. In college, she began researching Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962, who in his war against marijuana didn't differentiate between the psychoactive drug and the non-psychoactive industrial hemp plant. The more she learned about this history, the more she wanted to educate the public about how industrial hemp has been incorrectly grouped with marijuana.

She's been educating on the individual level ever since, but in the back of her mind, she's always had the idea that she needed to share this story with a larger audience. After finishing college, Annie went to grad school for international environmental policy. She also got an MBA, and while she was doing all that, she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study the life cycle of industrial hemp in Alberta, Canada. During her studies, she started a simple WordPress site called Think Hempy Thoughts, where she chronicled what she was learning. Very quickly became an outlet for her philosophy of living consciously and sustainably.

After finishing grad school, Annie returned to Kentucky to put herself at the epicenter of hemp in the United States. Before it was outlawed, Kentucky used to be the leading producer of hemp in the US, and while she was finishing school, Congress had passed the 2014 Farm Bill, which allowed educational institutions to grow hemp. Kentucky began planning research fields right away. Annie was in the right place at the right time, but she felt overwhelmed with all of her options. Plus, even with the passing of that Farm Bill, there were still legal issues that made it challenging for her to see a clear way to make money in the industry.

While she was thinking about various side hustle ideas, she got a job at a local TV station so that she could pay her bills and continue to think about what she really wanted to do. Then she began to think about all the different ways she could make money related to hemp. She liked the idea of having a food truck that would sell hemp products. But the food market seemed oversaturated. She knew the margins were low in that kind of business, and she would also need a fair amount of capital to get going.

Then she thought she could use what she had learned about industrial hemp to redesign a better football helmet, since hemp fibers are so good at absorbing impact. But once again, she'd need some capital. She'd also need to bring in an engineer to help. So she kept thinking. And the brainstorming went on like this for a while.

In the back of her mind, she knew she wanted her business to be about more than just hemp. She wanted to combine that with environmental awareness. But she was stuck on how to monetize such a thing. Her next idea was to create a certification system that would serve both suppliers and consumers. This certification system would verify product, track the entire life cycle of hemp production.

And she thought it was a great idea since there wasn't an existing verification process. Still, as she talked to suppliers, she encountered resistance. So she decided to take a different approach. Around this time, she had been diagnosed with Lyme disease and had begun using CBD for herself. Now CBD, if you're not familiar, stands for cannabidiol.

It's a cannabis compound that has significant medical benefits, but doesn't make people feel high. In fact, it can actually counteract the psychoactive effects of other parts of the plant. CBD is great for reducing inflammation. There's a lot of athletes using it now. And when Annie started using a particular brand, she quickly saw positive results.

When she ran out of that brand, she tried a different one, but didn't reap the same benefits. She ended up trying over a dozen different brands of CBD and realized how incredibly inconsistent the results were since there were no standards in the industry. Armed with that personal insight, Annie made some tweaks to her verification system, narrowing her focus to just CBD, not the whole hemp industry, and very shortly after got her first certification client. Her verification system gives brands a third-party seal of approval that communicates to consumers that the CBD is high-quality and uncontaminated. And thanks to her relationships with the suppliers, Annie now has products to sell herself.

In the beginning of 2017, Annie set up a new online marketplace on that Think Hempie Thoughts website. And after a couple months, she was making more than $1,000 each month. By mid-year, she was bringing in $2,000 to $3,000 a month. Annie also began going to fairs and markets around Kentucky to sell the verified products and to educate people about hemp. On a good day, she can sell as much as $2,000 in product, but she's learned those customers don't turn into repeat buyers.

So she's focusing more on her online presence, which has the potential to draw in more customers as well as repeat customers. In the past couple months, she's focused on improving her SEO using the WordPress plugin Yoast. I've actually mentioned Yoast a couple of times. We use it on the Side Hustle School site. I will link it up in the show notes.

It helps you make your SEO much easier. Her efforts have begun to pay off. She's even made it to the first page of Google results for some specific hemp-related phrases. Annie has also started a nonprofit, Friends of Hemp. She's also been researching and writing a podcast series on the untold story of Henry Ansingler and the Cannabis Conspiracy.

That podcast is now in post-production and set to release in early 2018. With steady income coming in from the new marketplace hustle, Annie can fulfill her dream of educating people about hemp thanks to that podcast and nonprofit, all the while continuing to expand her empire and influence. [Music]

Great, well, congratulations to Annie. I actually realized in the research for this story, even though I live in a state where various forms of cannabis are legal, including both the psychoactive and non-psychoactive, I actually didn't know much about hemp. So this is a good example of something that people have a lot of misconceptions about.

Like everyone has heard about it, but not a lot of people know a ton about it. Obviously a significant group of people do, but I tend to think that the average person has at best a superficial knowledge about it. And whenever that's the case, there's room for all kinds of good side hustles for the people who are educated about it, who are evangelists for it in some way, and take the time to not only get that expertise for themselves, but also think about how to translate that expertise for other people. 'Cause it's not enough to just be an expert, you have to think about how you're gonna communicate a complex concept or a concept that has a lot of misconceptions. And it seems like Annie has been able to do that well.

I'm glad she's able to make money from it now. And this seems like the kind of project that can only continue to grow as more and more people use products like CBD as the legislation throughout the country and around the world catches up to the reality that not only are some of these products harmless, some of them actually have medical benefit for a lot of people. While those are all my hustling, hippie thoughts for the day, friends and listeners, remember inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Today's show notes, including links to everything I mentioned are at sidehustleschool.com/315. Thank you for listening.

The weekly recap is coming up tomorrow. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]