Creative Illustrator Creates Creative Podcast for Creatives

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

[Music]

Hey, Side Hustle School listeners, welcome back. My name is Chris Guillebeau. It is my honor and privilege to bring you stories every day, true stories in fact, of people just like you starting a side hustle. By that I mean an income generating project, something you do apart from your day job, not just working another job. And by doing so, they're creating more freedom for their lives.

They're creating something that they believe in, something that gives them more options, more choice, more security, more confidence, all kinds of good things. Today I want to tell you about a guy who's a freelance illustrator and he starts a pep talk podcast, something that's not really that scripted. He's just kind of riffing on some ideas about creativity, but he really takes to the platform of podcasting, builds it out, finds a way to monetize it. And now he's actually making some pretty significant money from it. I'll tell you a bit about how he got this idea, how he made it happen.

And of course the specifics on what the outcome actually was. All of that is coming right up. [Music]

For Andy J. Miller, it wasn't the desire for more money or a quest to leave his job that prompted him to start a side hustle. Instead, it was standing in front of 50 members of his church group, giving his first public speech, which sparked a new passion within him.

Walking off the stage, Andy realized he'd felt a connection to the work he'd never noticed in his day job. Despite working as a freelance illustrator, creating art for the big brands he'd always dreamed of like Google, Converse, and Nickelodeon, it was something about talking to a small room of receptive ears that felt more empowering. Over the next few weeks, Andy explored how he could replicate this experience doing his current work. He even toyed with the idea of quitting illustration altogether, but instead he decided he would combine his old work and his new passion into an experiment. That experiment was to create a few episodes of a short podcast talking about creativity.

If he liked it, he'd carry on. If he didn't, he'd continue with his illustration work, safe in the knowledge that he'd at least tried. Grabbing his iPhone, Andy scribbled down some notes onto a piece of paper and then began talking into his voice memo app. He used those notes as a brief guideline, but mostly ad-libbed and improvised his way through the next 15 minutes. Before he knew it, he'd created his first podcast episode.

He gave the podcast a name, Creative Pep Talk, and uploaded the audio file to his computer. He used his computer's free audio editing software, GarageBand, to clean up the file. Then he went to freemusicarchive.org to find some music for a jingle. The next step was to upload the file to SoundCloud, and all of this, by the way, was free. Being an illustrator, naturally he created the artwork himself using the same Adobe software he uses for his day job.

That's for the little logo that shows up when you're looking at podcasts in a directory. And soon it was ready to launch to the few people in his network who wanted to listen. This scrappy setup allowed him to start the podcast for no money at all, a $0 startup. In fact, it would be a further 25 episodes of the show before Andy invested in his first microphone. From the beginning, he loved the project, and as he went along, he decided to keep going.

The episodes went from 15 minutes to an hour in length, and he eventually invested in an outside sound engineer to help him improve the audio quality. He also began to market Creative Pep Talk through Instagram. Andy creates a unique piece of artwork for each episode, then shares it with an updated link in his bio to help attract people to the post. This is interspersed with original artwork, stories, and general updates on what he's doing to engage his fans between episodes. He's managed to increase his following to over 20,000 people.

The first year of the podcast, Andy says he was just tweaking, listening to feedback, trying to figure out where his podcast fit into the market. He'd pay attention to see which episodes his listeners liked the most or which ones sparked a conversation on social media. Then he would adjust his programming accordingly. The process for creating Creative Pep Talk is, well, creative. Over the course of the week, Andy will jot down ideas and closely observe conversations he has with other creative friends.

He'll then take these points and expand on them, drawing on his own stories or ones he's heard elsewhere to give him a rough guide to follow. But Andy refuses to use a written script. He'd rather explore new ideas as they pop up and feel beholden to the words on the screen. All right, so this is Side Hustle School. Let's talk about the money, so it's not just a hobby.

Andy has been able to monetize his podcast in four different ways. The first has come through attracting sponsors. After his first year, he began to reach out to companies, brands, and product manufacturers that he was already using every day at work. Although his podcast was still small, he has highly engaged listeners, which meant that smaller brands were likely to get on board. Over time, he's found these smaller, more targeted sponsors to be a better fit than big companies, whose products only kind of fit the goals of his audience.

The second has been by creating products. His online shop boasts a wide range of products from pens, to posters, to coloring books, to coaching sessions, products and services essentially, all of which have been designed by Andy himself. These range from $10 to $100 each. The third has been donations from his listeners on Patreon. For either a $1 or $2 pledge, you can get access to exclusive content and personalized episodes.

This doesn't account for much of Andy's income, but it adds up. Finally, Andy has been able to use his podcasting powers to book speaking engagements. He can take the topics and ideas he speaks about on the show and deliver them to live audiences. He's already managed to line up 10 talks for the rest of the year, with hopefully more to come. All of this means that Andy earns up to $70,000 a year from his podcast, all while he continues his main work of illustrating for corporate clients.

Looking to the future, Andy wants to book more speaking engagements. He's gonna continue making the podcast, and he also hopes to author a book around the theme of, well, it's not shocking, creativity. [Music]

Well, as a fellow podcaster, I always love hearing stories of other people who have used this wonderful medium to build connection with people, share their ideas, and especially in this case, doing it in a sustainable manner, making up to $70,000 a year while he continues his main work. Now, obviously, this is not passive income, like he's putting a lot into this, but that's okay because this is his passion. He loves creativity.

He loves engaging with these creative ideas, speaking to other artists, writers, other people in different creative fields. So I think it's great that he's been able to do that and be rewarded in lots of different ways. Now, there's all kinds of reasons to do a podcast or write a blog or whatever else, but if you're interested in the business side of it, if you'd like to learn some more lessons about that, I'd refer you to a couple of resources. One of them we just talked about last week, episode 404. This was a profile of the Being Boss podcast.

I got a lot of comments about that. I might actually go back and do an extended cut on it at some point, just because so many people were interested. But for now, you can hear that episode at sidehustleschool.com/404. And then at some point last year, I did an extended cut myself about the lessons I've learned through podcasting in my first year. I think it was something like nine or 10 lessons, just various observations, including some things that really surprised me because this whole medium was new to me just over a year ago.

If you'd like, you can check that out at sidehustleschool.com/extended. That includes an index of all of our extended cuts. So just scroll down that page and look for the one about podcasting. And then last but not least, not to overwhelm you with all the links. But if you'd like to see the show notes for today's episode, check out Andy's show or see his Instagram, anything like that.

Those are at sidehustleschool.com/411. That's for episode 411. Hope you enjoyed this one. I hope you're doing well wherever you are in the world. Don't forget, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better.

I'll be back with you again tomorrow, or at least I hope you'll join me. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.