This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hello there, what's up? Welcome back. My name is Chris Guillebeau. If you're listening in real time and you've been in the US, I hope you had a good Thanksgiving yesterday. If you're not in the US, I hope you had a chance to eat some pie anyway, because pie is a good universal thing.
It's not too late if you didn't get a chance to yesterday. Go out this weekend, get yourself some pie. Here on the show, I've got a good story for you today. It's about an environmentalist couple who sells online courses in beekeeping. They also have courses in organic gardening and permaculture related topics.
And content-wise, this is kind of a throwback to our beekeeper episode, number 104, "Show Me The Honey." Houston beekeeper buzzes to $4,000 a month. And that was more than 200 episodes ago, but I think I almost get more feedback about that episode than so many others. It's probably in our top 10, which speaking of, we should do a top 10 list before the end of the year. That would be cool. And in terms of approach, like how this couple we're gonna talk about today makes money, there's almost a natural comparison to some other episodes we've done about the platform Udemy.
Now Udemy is this online platform where you can go and watch all kinds of courses from just about any topic you could imagine, all kinds of technical topics, how to learn various programming languages, but also all kinds of other stuff. So a couple of weeks ago, we talked about Jessica Brody, who is an author and uses Udemy to create a series of writing courses and make something like $20,000 a year extra from it. My most famous example of Udemy is Teresa Greenway, who creates all these courses on sourdough bread and made $85,000 last year. Now today's couple doesn't actually use Udemy at all. That's why I wanna do a bit of a comparison because they've chosen to do this entirely by themselves, total DIY model.
And when you're gonna create an online course, this decision over whether to use an existing platform like Udemy or one of the others, or do it yourself, like today's couple we'll talk about, that's a pretty important decision. And there's some key pros and cons to each approach. So after the story, I'll come back and tell you a bit more about why you might choose one approach over the other. That story is coming up in just a moment. [Music]
Today's story comes from Chris Badgett in Belfast, Maine.
By day, Chris is the CEO for a company that makes WordPress plugins. Interestingly enough, that company was a side hustler before it became his full-time job. Naturally, he needed a new side hustle, so the new one is Organic Life Guru, a website offering online courses in organic gardening and permaculture from the world's top organic growing experts. He wanted to do something that aligned with his values and he liked the idea of starting a membership site. Chris has a degree in sustainable development and describes himself as an environmentalist.
He runs this hustle with his wife, Samantha, an organic farmer. Chris works on the website and the marketing, and Samantha is responsible for course content, instructor relationships, and customer support. OLG, which unfortunately doesn't stand for Original Landscape Gangster, it's actually just Organic Life Guru, offers courses in topics ranging from beekeeping, permaculture design, organic gardening, food forest design for cities and suburbs, organic soil building, and how to grow a medicinal food forest. All kinds of fun stuff there, and the nine courses in total, ranging cost from $20 to $225. They offer anywhere from two hours of content to about 20 hours.
Chris and Samantha aren't the only ones doing the teaching for these courses. They go out and recruit teachers they think would be a good fit. They got their first teacher by presenting the idea in person. Once they had the first one, they could leverage that trust factor to get more. They've slowed down a bit, but when they were ramping up, they would add a new course every couple of months.
To capture the video, one of them would show up on site with a $300 video camera. At first, they did all the filming themselves, but eventually they started hiring a freelance videographer. Made life a bit easier. The teachers use software called ScreenFlow to create screen-sharing slideshows. There's no scripting because Organic Life Guru is essentially digitizing an existing workshop or class, for the most part.
So the teacher already knows what they're gonna present on. They're just capturing it in digital form. Chris and Samantha will then edit the videos themselves using ScreenFlow or iMovie, and as they went along, they also started outsourcing some of their editing to a freelance editor in Ireland who uses Final Cut Pro. However, it shakes out after editing it down and structuring it into an online course, OLG allows the expert to review it to make sure they're happy with the finished product. The market for learning about permaculture and gardening is still mostly offline.
But with his digital experience, Chris thought he could bring it online. These topics can be really hands-on, but some people want to take courses online for affordability, convenience, and to be able to go at their own pace. Chris found that some of the people purchasing the courses lived in remote locations. So they didn't have access to learning about this in another way. To get the videos to people, they use a hosting service called Vimeo Pro.
Now you've probably watched videos on Vimeo before. It's kind of like YouTube, but with a less commercial interface. A lot of artsy or business stuff ends up there. The basic service is free, but they have a pro service where you have some privacy settings so you can make sure the videos are only playable to people if you want to see them. So in this case, OLG has a WordPress system where people who've purchased the course can log in and get access to all those videos, but everyone else can't.
Chris and Samantha market their courses by offering some content for free in gardening and permaculture forums, also through their own email list that they've built up. And then they get interesting courses from the instructor's influence as well. Most of their website traffic is organic and based on searches. They don't pay for advertising, but they do have some affiliates which account for about 10% of sales. Chris admits that his pricing isn't very strategic.
When he started, he modeled it after what he saw similar courses going for in other course marketplaces. Instructors get paid a percentage of the money through PayPal each month, and the startup costs for this whole DIY project were just about $100. They already had their $300 video camera. They already had the iMovie software. As time went on, they did have travel expenses to meet up and film the instructors, but as time went on, they were also making money.
The profit now is roughly $1,000 to $3,000 a month, and it fluctuates based on whether they're doing a promotion or a new course launch. A course launch brings higher income. It also brings attention to some of the courses in the catalog, but it also requires more work. So Chris and Samantha, that OLG couple, they're able to structure their side hustle life around what's happening with the rest of their life. For them, it's the best of both worlds, and it also aligns with those values of teaching people about the earth.
[Music]
Cool, so here you see a whole DIY approach to the model of creating a course and offering it online. And this is exactly the kind of course that could be offered on Udemy or other platforms. That includes Skillshare, that includes Creative Live, probably some others that aren't coming to my mind at the moment. And these guys basically said, okay, we wanna create our course and offer it to the world, but we wanna control the whole process, and we wanna also keep more of the money. So those are the obvious benefits of doing it that way.
Of course, there's also a couple of downsides of doing that way as well. First one is that these platforms, the Udemies of the world, they make life pretty easy for people who are making their first online course, 'cause they have a very extensive process that they walk you through. There's still a learning curve, of course. It's still gonna take a fair amount of work, but there are a lot fewer things you have to think through to make it happen. So if you don't have the technical skill, if you don't wanna explore that whole world and figure everything out on your own, then going with an existing platform might be better.
But then even if you do have the skill, one of the best things about these platforms, at least when they work well, is that they have a tremendous audience of their own. So they're gonna bring a bunch of folks who are interested in permaculture or whatever it is that you're gonna teach. And presumably you don't have an existing relationship with most of those people, so it's really opening the door for you to reach a whole new audience. And even if your commission is lower, even if you make, say, you know, 15 bucks on a course instead of 40 bucks or 60 bucks or whatever it is, that might still be $15 that you wouldn't have made anywhere else. So as I said, pros and cons, if you're thinking about doing an online course, this is one of the decisions you have to make right in the beginning.
Also, I did like how Chris and Samantha have structured this project to where they're not the only ones teaching, but they're actually going out and recruiting these instructors. I think that's interesting because it does add a bunch of different dynamics to the whole thing. You're able to teach more subjects. You're able to leverage those people's influence. So it's almost like a portfolio model that they're using here.
They're creating this little portfolio of assets, $1,000 to $3,000 a month in net income. So it's not huge, but it's definitely significant. And it's also reached that point where they could essentially walk away and they would still be making some money every month, which is a great place to be in. I would love to help get you to that place at some point, if you're not there already. You can do that by listening to the show every day and then taking action.
I always say that inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. I mentioned a bunch of different resources in this episode. Actually, I have a list of like five other tools and software programs that I didn't mention. All those are going to be linked up on the show notes page at sidehustleschool.com/328. Go and check that out if you'd like to learn more.
I will be back tomorrow. This is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]
