This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey there, what's up? Welcome back. This is Chris Guillebeau, your host of "Side Hustle School," and we're kicking off an all-new week. I'm so excited. This is episode 422.
How about that? And for those who are listening in real time, we're actually gonna relaunch the "Side Hustle Society" tomorrow. Real-time listeners, that is the 27th of February in the year 2018. But hey, if you're listening later, that's totally okay. It's been great to see a lot of our listeners and members now engaging in that community, sharing their ideas, offering feedback and advice.
If you'd like to be part of it or at least learn more about it, just go to sidehustleschool.com/society. I'll tell you more about that as the week goes along, but also I've got a story for you. That's the point of the show. And today's story is about a California professional who's suffering from an autoimmune disease. As she recovers, she ends up creating two businesses in the process, one of which is now seeing sales of $30,000 a month.
That is $30,000 a month, not a year. She does all of this without investors, without Kickstarter, and primarily by building trust with her audience, being helpful before selling anything and consistently telling an authentic story. I will bring you this authentic story of our own in just a moment. Quick little shout out to our sponsor. [Music]
Since her days on the playground in elementary school, Mary Shinuda never felt truly healthy, but her teachers and countless health professionals couldn't pinpoint the source of her discomfort.
She was constantly up to date with the latest in medications, but nothing ever seemed to work. Nothing liberated her from what felt like a lifetime of suffering. She was pricked and prodded to no avail. And by the time she was an adult, she'd had so many blood samples drawn that she speculated she was actually keeping a small town of vampires alive somewhere. This course continued through college.
And when Mary turned 23, her health fell to an all-time low. Despite her obvious illness, her diagnosis remained a mystery to many skeptical health professionals. Frustrated and tired of finding herself visiting hospitals for yet more expensive tests, Mary realized she needed to take matters into her own hands. At age 25, after conducting several tests on her own, she realized she might actually be suffering from celiac disease, a rare autoimmune condition that caused her body to remain malnourished when she consumed gluten. Celiac disease can be a tricky illness to diagnose because some of its symptoms are similar to those of other diseases.
So it made sense that it had evaded discovery before this point. Mary researched how to fight and overcome her symptoms. While many doctors recommend various medications, she wanted to see if she could curb her symptoms naturally by taking a harder look at what she eats. She learned that if she adopted a paleo diet and eliminated processed foods, she might actually be able to cure her ailments. Within months of learning how to cook gluten-free paleo meals for herself, Mary's sickness began to feel like a thing of the past.
The aches, the inflamed skin, nausea, joint pain, even depression, it all significantly diminished or even slowly disappeared. Thrilled that she was finally being able to feel like a normal human again, she decided to document her journey online. She shared her recipes, her habits, all the things she was doing that was getting her back in shape. Steve Martin once said, "Be so good, they can't ignore you." And that's exactly what Mary did. And she didn't just share her successes, by the way.
She shared her failures and struggles, too. Before she knew it, Mary was developing a significant following on social media. Her audience loved that she wasn't just the kind of person who showed off and posted nice selfies, but she also shared real life, what was really going on. And that built trust between her and them. She willingly shared the knowledge she was accumulating and she never asked anything of people.
And that's what Mary credits with how freely people shared her materials with others. They recognize that she was doing what she did for the love of the process. Now, somewhere along the way, her story reached the ears of well-known personalities and athletes who began requesting her cooking and health coaching. That's when she started her first side hustle, branding herself the paleo chef. Mary enjoyed her corporate job in San Francisco, but over time she realized she had a greater calling than growing tech companies.
She wanted to teach people to eat healthy food. So she eventually left that tech job to cook and consult full-time, but she didn't just stop there. See, Mary wasn't a fan of the many nutrient gels, powders, and sugar bars she had tried during her personal health renaissance. Since she was already getting comfortable in the kitchen, she began to experiment with her own performance food. After a few weeks of testing, she landed on a fudge-like recipe that would please her clients' bellies and their diets.
Her aim was to provide instant sustained energy that also improved focus and memory. So each ingredient was deliberately chosen with those goals in mind. She called it fat fudge, P-H-A-T. And fat stands for pretty hot and tempting, fat fudge. Her social media network buzzed over her new creation.
And despite the fact that she shared the recipe for free online, she received dozens of requests for a viable product in Squeeze Packet Forum. She didn't know much about creating a package-free product, but she put down $600 in gear and ingredients and began sharing her progress with her followers. She talked about recipe experiments, prototyping the Squeeze Packet, learning California's strict food laws, how to source the ingredients, basically everything. Transparency became a key part of Mary's business personality. In August of 2016, Mary went live on Instagram and Periscope and announced the first retail sale of her original fat fudge.
Within the hour, she had sold 50 12-packs. Naturally, she got back to cooking, and the next week she did it again, selling out in less than an hour. Then she did it again and again the next week and again and so on, until her supply sold out in record time, one sale sold out in one second. That's right, one second. During this early stage, Mary was bringing in around $7,000 in sales a month and doing all the cooking and packaging herself.
But she knew she was ready to scale and scale big. And she wanted to do it her own way. So listen to this. She estimated it would take a minimum of $40 to $50,000 to place an order with a reputable food manufacturer. She'd done a lot of research, talked to lots of manufacturers on the phone.
And to get that $40 to $50,000, she didn't want a loan. She didn't want investors. And she also didn't want to host a Kickstarter Indiegogo campaign. She says, "I wanted to do this using real demand in the form of orders." So that's what she did. She essentially created her own campaign independent of any other network and within 30 days of allowing customers to place pre-orders on a simple Shopify store, Fat Fudge had raised nearly $90,000 from 2,000 orders to put toward that initial manufacturing run.
That was more than a year ago and Mary is still learning and sharing her successes and failures through social media. She believes her openness about her process, profits and personality has played a significant role in developing her loyal and excited following. Speaking of transparency, she's had her struggles. There was this one time a manufacturer tried to cover up some spoiled ingredients by mixing them into a large batch and hoping she wouldn't notice. Surprise, she noticed.
But she's optimistic about the path ahead. Soon there will be a brand new website, new variations on her original Fat Fudge and more than 30 retail partners, including Whole Foods. But most importantly to Mary, more than 6,000 people have purchased Fat Fudge and many of them report feeling healthier and happier. It all started from that persistent autoimmune disease and her willingness to pursue her own recovery. Well, there is a lot to take away from this story and Mary's success, her challenges, her overcoming her challenges, her willingness to be transparent.
My favorite part actually is the no investors, no Kickstarter strategy. And almost every story we feature has no outside investors, like that is the side hustle school way. But in the world of making products like Fat Fudge or anything that requires these significant costs, it's common to reach out to funders to scale up. And in her case, Mary was already connected to lots of those funders and founders and people who could make connections for her. So in other words, if she wanted to go that route, she could have, but she deliberately chose not to.
And then also with the Kickstarter thing, like I don't think there's anything wrong with crowdfunding, like we talk about that a lot in the show, a lot of our other stories have used that model. But I also totally understand and respect her philosophy of saying, you know, basically, you know what, if this is gonna work, it's gonna work as a product, it's gonna work with real orders without resorting to any kind of gimmicks or just anything that isn't sustainable. Because even if your crowdfunding campaign isn't a gimmick, by nature, a campaign is a campaign. It's not something that goes on forever. It's not sustainable.
So I love how she's found her own way. She pursued that independence and now she's seeing these huge results, $30,000 a month in sales. So those results speak for themselves, of course. I would encourage you to check out that Fat Fudge yourself, check out what Mary's doing. You can follow her social media, learn from these lessons that she shares along the way.
We're gonna link all that stuff up for you, of course. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/422. I hope you take something away from this episode. I hope you learn something that gives you some inspiration and also gives you a bit of a push forward, right? Because inspiration is good, but inspiration with action, that's the better way to go.
Thank you for listening today. I look forward to sharing more with you all week and next week as well, and then more weeks to come. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
