This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey, side hustle school listeners, welcome back. What's up, my name is Chris Guillebeau. I don't know if you have ever had the chance to go to trivia night, perhaps at a local bar or pub. Trivia nights or pub quizzes are popular worldwide, maybe more so in the British Commonwealth in the US, but even in the US, lots of places have quiz night. And going to one of these activities is a social gathering.
You can go by yourself, you can go with your friends. You usually end up forming some kind of small groups and having drinks. And then there is a pub quiz director who's reading out a bunch of trivia questions. There's usually several rounds a night and sometimes there are prizes, but mostly it's just a chance to kind of get together and have fun. Well, today we're going to look at a guy who is an expat living in Poland, and he's always enjoyed doing pub quiz, so eventually he starts doing his own.
And he starts doing it for just free beer, which is nice, but then he finds a way to make $20 an hour doing it, which is still better, of course, but not much to write home about. But then he goes from starter idea to next level idea when he realizes he has this fountain of knowledge, these 5,000 questions that he's developed over the years, and he thinks who else might be interested in acquiring all those questions. So I'll tell you how it works, but basically he goes from working for free to earning $20 an hour to earning something like $900 a month passively, which is, of course, the best of all three scenarios. So that story, how a quiz master creates a side hustle nobody can question, is coming right up after this quick thank you to our sponsor. [Music]
Over the past 10 years, pub quizzes have become a staple of expat life for a guy named John, also known as Mr. Know-It-All.
In his adopted Polish city of Krakow, John and a few of his fellow expat friends took it upon themselves to help write questions and host trivia night at their local bar. For them, it wasn't just some trivial task, it was a labor of love. As the years went by, John's friends began to do less work and deferred most of the weekly writing to him, but that wasn't a problem. His years of experience had given him a knack for writing questions and the work was enjoyable. Still, he could write the questions easily enough, but he was beginning to feel a financial strain.
Although he'd received free beer while doing the hosting, that wasn't enough of a benefit to cover the six hours he spent preparing each week. Meanwhile, the contestants paid to participate in the quiz, but that money went directly to the bar. John thought this was somewhat unfair, but he also saw an opportunity. If he could take his quiz night elsewhere, he could charge the entry fee and get paid for his time, all while bringing a lot of business to another bar. John reached out to a new bar in town and approached them with a simple pitch.
He said he would take one of their quietest week nights and bring more people to the bar, beginning with 40 regulars from his current slide. He would keep the entry fee for the quiz and the bar would keep whatever was spent on drinks. It was a good pitch and they agreed. Over the next four years, John grew the following of his quiz to between 200 and 400 regulars. There would sometimes be quiet nights, especially if the local football team was playing, but he could count on most of the regulars and the occasional group of tourists to be there to make up the numbers.
It helped that the new bar was in a better location in a much more visible area of Krakow. John managed to turn his initial unpaid quiz time into around $400 extra a month, which worked out to about $20 an hour for all the time he spent. That's not a bad hourly wage, especially in Poland, but one day John had an even better idea. That day he was saving his latest set of quiz questions to his Google Drive account and he realized he had over 5,000 questions he had compiled over the years. All of them had been written by him and had only ever been used once.
He thought surely there's some value here. There's gotta be a way to use these questions and generate some money from them. At first he thought maybe I'll start a new quiz night in an area where people had never heard these questions before, but after a few trial events he realized he didn't wanna spend more time away from his family, he just needed a new way to make money. That's when he decided he would try to sell the questions on Amazon. He had more than enough content to fill multiple books of questions and he knew that most of the quiz-based books out there weren't that great.
This was his opportunity to create something unique. Taking 500 of his favorite questions, the best of the best over the years, he uploaded them to Kindle Direct Publishing and formatted them through their own in-house tools. John wanted to attempt this project without spending any money at all, so he created his own book cover in the free software Canva. He published these books under the anonymous name Mr. Know-It-All and priced them at $10 each, which he thought was competitive.
To market the books, John enrolled in Amazon's Cost Per Customer program. This basically means that they favor his books in search results and therefore drive more sales, but they also take more of a commission when you do it that way. After publishing the second book of 500 more questions, John is now earning between 800 and $1,000 each month from the royalties. At least from a financial standpoint, this is a lot more efficient in hosting the events and he also likes knowing that other people around the world are using his questions. In fact, that's his advice to you.
If you wanna do something similar, he says you should find people who are interested in a small sub-genre of entertainment and then try to appeal to them. Don't worry about anybody else, spend all your time and effort trying to make those people happier. Looking ahead, John isn't sure how much longer his quiz night will survive. He's got a larger family now and more time constraints. He says if he had to give it up, he'd be disappointed, but he loves that his books will still be out there, bringing questions to trivia nights all over the world and of course earning that passive income.
With that in mind, he's got two more books planned for this year. So this is a great example of starter idea to next level idea, which is a concept I write about a lot in the Side Hustle book. It's something I encourage you to think about, not just how you can get paid a bit of extra money, but how you can create something that has the potential to work for you. And in this example, you can see a clear contrast between those two things. When he's hosting the quiz night, he's making $20 an hour, which is still great because he did it for free for a long time.
It was only when he thought, hey, the bar shouldn't be keeping all this money when I'm the one doing all the work that he made the transition to getting paid at all. But the real success comes when he takes his knowledge, like all that acquired knowledge for six hours a week writing these trivia questions, 5,000 questions, and then calls the best of them and puts them into this book for sale on Amazon. That's when he has the thing that's doing the work for him. So there's nothing wrong with working for an hourly wage. Like we all have to do that at some point in our lives, at least most of us do.
But if you've got your eyes on the prize, if you're really trying to create a side hustle that is gonna work for you, bring you security and income for the longterm, then you really wanna think about this distinction, between a starter idea and a next level idea. Now, by the way, last but not least, what makes for a good quiz question? This is something that we learned in the research for this story. According to John, there's no secret formula, but you can think of the most ideal question as one that makes people want to go out and check their phones for the answer, or possibly argue with you about whether it's true. One of his most recent examples is, how many toes do cats have?
Do you know the answer to that? I didn't, and apparently hardly anyone does. Well, I won't make you go and check your phone for it, the answer is 18. Cats have 18 toes, fun fact. I hope you enjoyed this episode.
You never know what you're gonna learn on side hustle school. Don't forget, my friends, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Today's show notes, and possibly some more quiz questions, are online at sidehustleschool.com/388, that's 388. I hope you think a bit today about what your next level idea could be, so that you have the chance to earn money each month of something you create. And every day on the show, I'll be giving you different examples and stories and perhaps ideas.
Thanks so much for listening. I hope you'll join me again tomorrow. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.
