Choir Teacher Turns Music Workbooks Into Noteworthy Hustle

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

[Music]

Hello there, Side Hustle School Friends, listeners and community, welcome back. My name is Chris Guillebeau. If you are listening in real time, this is episode 430. Well, actually, now that I think about it, this is episode 430, whether you're listening in real time or not. But what I was going to say is, if you are listening in real time, today is the last day of the Side Hustle Society price savings invitation.

All week long, we've been running a special offer where you could join our online community and training program, Side Hustle Society, at a special price, and that price savings goes away tomorrow. If you've been on the fence, this is the time to come off the fence. And either way, come and take a look at sidehustleschool.com/society. If it's a good fit, I would love to have you in the program. If not, that's totally fine.

There's absolutely no pressure, and I am thrilled and privileged to produce this show for you every day. It's not going anywhere. And in other news, it also happens to be National Oreo Day. So we can all come together and celebrate the invention of the Oreo cookie. The Oreo was first sold on March 6th, 1912, to a grocer in Hoboken, New Jersey.

And of course, they continue to be sold to this day. All right, so what's happening with Side Hustle School? Well, today I have a story that features another teacher. Teachers are resourceful, you guys. They come up with all kinds of stuff.

And in this case, it's a music teacher who spends about $50 to create a side hustle that now earns $20,000 a year for her consistently. She's been doing that for at least three years now. And she also creates a better experience for students and a cost savings for schools and teachers. So basically it's a win-win-win. It's a story that I think illustrates several of the principles of the side hustle movement, not just working part-time or working harder, but making something that people can pay for over and over so that you can earn money while you're doing other things.

And if you can make the world a better place at the same time, well, fantastic. Anyway, that story is coming up in just a moment. Quick little shout out to our sponsor first. [Music]

If you had music class in first or second grade, you might remember the workbooks that you sight-read from. Or even if you did have music class, you might not remember them because they were boring, unoriginal, and unknown to most students, strangely expensive.

But Erin Lowell, a school choir teacher in the state of Maine, knew how expensive they were. And it was a point of discord for her. The cheaply printed books were $4 a piece, and for a school with 150 students, that meant it would cost $600 to give each student their own workbook. Or actually, because the music program didn't have $600 a year to spend on workbooks alone, they would loan students the workbooks, tell them not to write in them, and then collect them back for the next year. Erin knew there had to be another way, and she couldn't stand using those same boring books one more time.

So she got to work using a musical notation program called Finale, and a simple word processor. Erin created her own set of sight-reading exercises on her own time. To her surprise, it wasn't that much trouble. Once she had a few dozen lessons lined up for the upcoming year, she pitched an idea to her school. The pitch was, if they would provide the materials and let her use the binding machine, she would do the work every year before school started to put them together.

Her school agreed to give her the $100 needed for the materials, and the following year was a musical success. The kids were learning faster, they were paying better attention, and other teachers around town were starting to notice. After making more workbooks and selling them to a handful of teachers, one of Erin's principals suggested that she sell them online as ebooks. She had already proven that the workbooks were effective, and she knew that her customers would come back year after year. It seemed like a no-brainer.

Erin also already had all the music reading files from the Finale program, and she exported audio files to go with each exercise. She then set up a WordPress site with a simple PayPal button, put all the content in a big folder, and launched the practiceroom.net for less than $50. And then, in a stunning event, Erin made her first online sale the very next day. She couldn't believe it. To be clear, it wasn't a large order, and the orders also didn't start streaming in all the time.

In fact, sales came slow enough that Erin didn't really track her growth for the next year, but she was earning just enough money to keep her motivated to create new content during free time and over the summer break. And then she made another change. She decided to transition her ebook series into an online membership model. This change was a long time coming. Her customers loved the content, but dealing with the hundreds of individual files was a bit of a nightmare.

They'd been requesting a way to do the lessons and keep track of progress online for more than a year. So using a bare-bones WordPress plugin called Wishlist Member, Erin made it happen. She charged $60 annually for an individual membership and $150 for music teachers, her main customers who could then add an unlimited number of student accounts. So when you break down the math, this pricing model works well for teachers. If a music teacher has 75 students, that $150 annual fee comes out to just $2 per student.

Compared to traditional workbook prices, it's a steal, and each student gets their own account to work on. It was also a little scary because Erin wasn't just selling a product anymore. She now felt beholden to her customers for a full year, and she didn't want to let them down. But the transition paid off. Erin doesn't remember exactly when it happened, but within a couple months, she was bringing in $500 a month with the membership model.

The next year, her monthly average was just over $800 a month with virtually no marketing. And for the past several years, Erin has brought in about $20,000 annually, minus about $100 a month on website expenses. The income is mostly passive other than answering emails from time to time, but Erin does continue to experiment and add new content once in a while. According to her, teachers are a wealth of valuable information that can be turned into a side hustle. Whether it's a series of creative math exercises, engaging history lessons, or wacky science experiments, she believes teachers should take their original lessons and try packaging them in some way.

She says teachers are famous for not valuing their own worth. They don't realize what they have to offer. Speaking of worth and value, Erin is also preparing to raise her prices for the first time. The membership will still be affordable, but hopefully she'll make more money. And for her, most of the income she's earned has gone straight into her retirement account.

It wasn't just a prelude. For this choir teacher, making her own music workbooks has been an extremely noteworthy endeavor. Awesome, well, teachers are in fact resourceful. I love in particular how Erin transitioned to the membersite model instead of just doing the single product sales. Her idea was initially successful because she had identified a gap in the marketplace, these boring traditional and overpriced music workbooks, but then she took it to the next level by creating that membership site, which allows her to get paid more and get paid consistently.

So well done, congrats to Erin. And this episode also reminds me a bit of Nerd Summer Camp, which we talked about in episode 299, where three teachers team up to create a summer experience for kids who aren't interested in sports. And it was a similar process in identifying something that was missing, and then actually working with the school system to make sure that they could get paid rather than all the money going to that school system. You might wanna check that one out if you haven't heard it before. Again, that's episode 299.

And I hope you enjoyed this one. Don't forget, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Today's show notes, including links to Erin's site, are at sidehustleschool.com/430. That's four three zero. If you got a comment for the show or a question, give me a call on the Hustle Hotline 8449 Hustle.

That is 844-948-7853. Thank you for listening. I'll be back tomorrow with another story. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.