This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Oh, hey there, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. Got a good story for you today. It's about rock and roll.
Well, actually it's about a musical mashup, a musical mashup featuring rock and roll music. Now here's a fun fact for you. Musical mashups, if you're not familiar, first came to prominence in the 1980s, mostly through sampling of older soul and R&B music added to hip hop tracks. These efforts were called remixes, blends, or even collages. But today we're gonna call them mashups, and this story is all about how to turn it up to 11, where a series of rock and roll mashups provides passive income for a New York DJ.
I'm also gonna share with you a bit about this concept of finding white space. What does it mean to find white space when you're looking for a Sawdustle? Well, you're gonna hear about it in today's story, and then I'll share a bit more in the commentary section. I'll have that right after this quick shout out to our sponsor. [Music]
As a guy whose day job was supplying sales support and PR services to organizations around the globe, Rafe Gomez has mastered the powers of persuasion.
But even he was surprised when Rock Mix, his side gig of making mashup recordings of classic rock songs, blossomed from contests to syndication on radio stations all over the world. Rock Mix was born of a collaboration between Rafe and John Mullen, a former New York City radio executive. Rafe's years of experience as a top rated mix show DJ on a New York station, prompted John to suggest producing mashups of classic rock hits, and then inviting show listeners to guess which bands were in the mix. That concept gained momentum on American radio stations, and when Mullen suggested Rafe try international syndication, the volume of success was turned up to 11. His syndicator now sells recorded show packages to stations in countries like Finland, Sweden, Mexico, Russia, and many more.
Rafe's background in live events where he would mash recorded rock tracks enhanced by his live disc spin, gave him the chops to produce the shows. Rock Mix offers both hosted shows where Rafe introduces the show and then names the tracks, the completion of sets, and shows for non-English speaking areas where the hosting duties are handled locally. It wasn't that hard to get this going. Rafe spent around $1,000 for a computer upgrade with DJ and audio production software, as well as a lot of music downloads. But aside from the occasional purchase of music to add to his library, his expenses are fixed.
With a monthly profit of between $2,000 and $4,000, you might say the walls were shaking, the earth was quaking, and Rock Mix shook him all night long. Now it does take some time to produce new shows. Each 15-minute segment takes about five hours to put together, which by the way, is a lot like side hustle school. But the older shows are still out there circulating and selling to new stations, all the while he continues to produce new shows spending about 10 hours a week on production. Since Rafe enjoys the music and the work, he doesn't see any downside.
He says every penny of profit is a gift. His syndicator handles all the details of contract links and frequency of airings of the shows with the affiliate stations. For example, they could air a multi-hour show once a week and a five-minute show once per weekday. Rafe's income is based on the licensing fee the syndicator establishes with the affiliates. Rafe helps to create the ad, marketing, and PR materials, but the syndicator handles the sales.
Now for those looking to follow in his footsteps, Rafe says, "For those about to rock, we salute you." But he also feels like Rock Mix is a one-of-a-kind product and that there's only room for one iteration of it on the market. However, he does see a lesson in his story, how it came to be successful and how it can be applied to any industry. He says the success lies in the white space. What is the white space? It's the gaps that the market is overlooking or ignoring.
Research what people in the field are doing and find that white space and then be able to explain the monetary benefits of what you're offering can provide to prospective customers. We talk about this a lot on the show in different ways. I'm gonna come back to it in the commentary section, but I don't think we've ever used that word white space before. So again, that's the gaps that the market is overlooking or ignoring. Now Rafe's work life has crossed diverse paths.
Years ago, he built himself as the retirement coach. He wrote an audio book on interview strategies for job hunting prospects that continues to sell on iTunes, Audible, and Amazon. His sales and PR job still engages him 40 hours a week, so he's not planning on launching a jazz mix or a hip hop mix or any other genre. He's happy where he is now, earning that passive income from Rock Mix, seeing and hearing his show go out to affiliate stations everywhere. So for now, he plans to keep doing his thing all while rocking in the free world.
All right, so let's focus on this concept of white space. Like I said, we've talked about it in different ways, but I don't think I've used that word. Here is the best definition of it that I could find online. It does have some jargon in it, so we're gonna break it down a bit. But the definition is white space is where unmet and unarticulated needs are uncovered to create innovation opportunities.
Like I said, some jargon hang tight. It is where products and services don't exist based on the present understanding of values. Okay, so often these definitions I find need to be kind of explained because they could be said much more simply. Basically, the idea is that there's all kinds of things you could do to make money, and there's all kinds of markets out there. Every day on the show, I'm demonstrating a different market, perhaps something you've heard of before or familiar with, or perhaps something completely new.
And often the way that someone has been able to be successful is they have found this little pocket. They have found this thing that nobody's done before, at least not in this way, or they have otherwise thought creatively and then take an action on those thoughts. Okay, so here's a couple of other examples just from recent episodes. I just looked through the past 10 episodes and found at least three examples. So episode 471, "Fo Tax Dermi Turns Heads on Home Decor." You guys, I am still so excited about this story.
I wish I had known about it when I wrote the side hustle book. I'm gonna put it in my new presentation that I take with me whenever I'm traveling. If you haven't heard that episode, go back and listen to it. But if not, the short version is, it's this little business called Near and Deer, which is all about producing faux or artificial deer heads. These deer heads are for mounting in people's homes.
At least it started with deer heads, now it expanded to include lots of other decorations. And this is obviously something that nobody had ever thought of before, at least nobody had ever taken action on, not to the degree that this couple did. And then just a couple of days later, episode 474, an engineer turns a home energy problem into a 15-year multi-million dollar side hustle. The situation there, I don't know all the technical details, but basically, this guy was working with addicts, and he discovered a pretty simple way to cut down the draft that a lot of addicts experience and therefore save homeowners on their energy bills. Again, I don't know all the details of how it works, but the point is, he found this white space, he found this thing nobody had done before, and it may not have been the most exciting thing in the world, doesn't sound as exciting as artificial deer heads or rock and roll syndication, but it has a pretty compelling benefit, a really easy to understand selling proposition.
Hey, if you buy this thing and install it, you're gonna save however much it is on your energy bill every year. Okay, great, for a lot of homeowners, they're gonna say, "Perfect, sign me up." Or even if we look at yesterday's episode, 481, I mean, this is kind of ridiculous, but the Aussie man, the Australian guy who eats nothing but potatoes for 365 days and then creates a coaching business, essentially, helping people with food addiction issues and helping people who are kind of replicating the same thing that he did, I mean, I don't think anybody would've ever thought of that, right? Like that's something that's completely out of the blue, or out of the ground, I guess, but you know what I mean. So maybe your challenge or your lesson for today is, just like this guy in today's story said, "Nobody can go out and do exactly what he's done "because he's already done it," but what can you come across in your daily life, in your work, through your field of expertise, through a topic or an industry or a field of interest that you have particular knowledge of? What kind of white space can you find?
What can you then do about it? How can you go from inspiration to action? Because, of course, that's what it's all about. That's my challenge for you today to be thinking about those things, and if you'd like to see the show notes for today's episode, of course, and I've linked up this rock mix thing, anything else that I mentioned, those are at sidehustleschool.com/482. That is for episode 482, and of course, much more is on the way.
Thanks for joining me today. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]
