Carpe Libri! Budding Book Club Baron Brings in $6,400/Month

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

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Welcome to Sardisle School. This is Chris Guillebeau. Have you ever joined a book club? Well, book clubs can be a lot of fun. I say that as an author.

If you ever wanna read my book in your book club, that would be cool. If you're more into the Oprah book of the month or the romance novel of the month or whatever it is, totally cool. The point is book clubs are fun, but what if you could make money from running a book club? That's right. In today's story, a UK-based consultant builds a better reading habit by starting a book club that grows to 350 members.

Now, these members are not just people who kind of raise their hand and say, "Oh, I want to be a member." They're actually paying for this membership. Now, you'll understand more when you hear the story, but here's a hint. It's not just about the books. It's also about community. It is about a shared experience of bringing together people and kind of bonding over ideas and discussing different ideas, and that can be valuable.

So wherever there is value, there is the potential to make money. So without further ado, Carpe Libri. I believe that means Seize the Books. I'm gonna tell you about this budding book club baron who brings in $6,400 a month right after this quick thank you to our sponsor. [Music]

Ben King is a UK based business consultant and coach.

He works with startups, individuals, and families, helping them to lead extraordinary careers and make an impact in the world. However, despite all the time Ben spends helping others, he was in need of a bit of help himself. He had a problem, an affliction. He found himself in the throes of the worst habit imaginable. Despite his best efforts, he couldn't seem to break it.

What was this problem, this affliction, this habit? Well, the Japanese have a special word for it, shundoku. What is shundoku? It is the constant act of buying books, but never reading them. Specifically, it's letting books pile up in one's room so much that the owner never gets a chance to read through all of them.

Have you ever had that problem? I have sometimes suffered from it myself. And it's true, Ben King had it bad and that's not good. As he put it one click on Amazon and there it was on my Kindle. He wanted to read more life-changing books, not just by them and cultivate his practice of self-improvement.

He just couldn't seem to find a way to get past page 100 or sometimes even page 10 of any of the books he was buying. His pile of unfinished books was out of control. What to do? Ben wrestled with this question while on vacation in Bali. It was there that he met someone who suffered from the same problem.

This person was also named Ben. He was also from London. And the two Bens got to talking and decided to pick up a book, set a date and then meet up later to discuss it over a cocktail. When they're reading rendezvous arrived, Ben and Ben, along with 12 other people who all found out about it through word of mouth. I don't think any of the others were named Ben, all attended their first meetup.

Returning to London, the two Bens resolved to pick a book and meet up once a month to talk about it. And once again, they decided to invite others along the way. Now this was April, 2015. The two Bens decided to test their hypothesis. Would people want to accelerate their nonfiction reading habit and be willing to invest about $19 a month to do it?

They agreed that if they got 15 people to sign up in month one, they'd continue. Well, the next month they celebrated with another meetup on a rooftop of Virgin HQ in London. This time, 24 people came and 24 people actually paid. They called it the Rebel Book Club. Fast forward three and a half years later to November, 2018, the side hustle has acquired 350 members and is earning $6,400 a month.

Startup costs were cheap. It cost $13 for a domain name and that was about it, a $13 startup. Ben Keane said it's easier to solve your problem when you invite others to join in. Since starting Rebel Book Club, his own reading habit has accelerated by 600%. He read 50 books last year and he's a father of three children all under five years old.

He says that keeping the business model simple and staying focused on the value they're trying to bring to members is key. They also took it one month at a time. They decided if their concept didn't grow or if it became too time consuming or stressful, they just stopped. However, because it's grown organically every month, 44 months in a row now, and hasn't taken much time to maintain, they're still going. After year one, they had 104 members with little effort, all word of mouth with $0 spent on marketing and also zero pounds or zero euros, just no money, that's the point.

The meetups take place in co-working spaces like WeWork, Virgin or Airbnb, sometimes even a London park. They've hustled all these venues for free through their work relationships, friends and members. Members vote from a choice of three bucks each month. And Ben said rather than talking about whether they like the book or not, Rebel Book Club discusses what the book can lead to and how it can be applied to your life. And just as a side note, I think that's really smart because I try to read a lot of books and it's not so much about whether I like or dislike a book, especially a nonfiction book.

I think there's always something you can learn. Even if you disagree with a lot of the message of the book, there's still something you can take away from it. So what's next for Rebel Book Club? Well, the two bins are making some changes. For the first time ever, they're now putting in more than two hours a week on it.

As much as they believe in the power of in-person meetups, they're also considering some virtual options. This is partly because one of the bins, Ben Keane, recently moved his family to the Thai island of Koh Lanta. With all of his love for remote work and adventures, you could say it was bound to happen. He's got the spine for it. And since the move, he's had many Skype calls with his Rebel cohort to keep the pages turning.

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So this story represents something that we haven't talked about in a while. It's a pretty common model, the model of a membership site. I just want to use the economics here to show you how valuable and sustainable this really can be, this kind of model. So in their case, they have 350 members. And these members are not paying a ton of money per member, but it really adds up.

So it can be in this case, as I said, a very sustainable business. It seems like it's just continuing to grow. Also, what if your club or membership program is higher priced? So these guys are doing $19 a month, or I think it's 15 pounds since a lot of their customers are in the UK. That sounds about the right price for this kind of service, but what if your service or your membership site costs $39 a month?

For example, you could create the same monthly earning potential with half the number of members. Or if it's a more business focused membership site, or something that has even higher value, well, it could cost $97 a month. I mean, I pay for some memberships that cost more than that. There's all kinds of different ways to play around with the spreadsheet and say, "Oh, if I had X number of members at this price, this would be my monthly recurring revenue." And just to be clear, be aware that it's not so simple as saying like, "I would like to have 350 members," or, "Hey, I would like to double my price, so therefore, I'm gonna make twice as much money." Obviously, you have to have the right value proposition. Obviously, you have to have your offer in front of the right people.

That offer has to convert and so on. Still, the point is if you can get something that converts and then you can do a reasonably good job of keeping people in the program, then it's wonderful to be able to look and say, "Okay, well, next month I have X number of people in my program, so I'm gonna make X dollars." It takes a lot of variance out of the income equation that a lot of people experience when they first start a business for the first time. So it's definitely not a model that will work for everyone, but for a lot of people and a lot of ideas, that's definitely something worth considering. All right, this was episode 699. I'm so excited that we have come almost all the way to episode 700.

Thank you so much for being part of this. I can't wait to bring you tomorrow's episode and the episode after that. So much more is on the way. The show notes for today are at sidehustleschool.com/699. Every episode number preceded by sidehustleschool.com.

That's how you can get to all of our notes. You can download the episode itself. You can see all the links to anything that I mentioned in the episode. If I had a book club, I would invite you to it, but I don't, so I'll just tell you about Ben's. Go and join his, the two Ben's, I guess, Ben apostrophe S or Ben S apostrophe.

It's always hard to figure that out. With that, I will side off now. Once again, my name is Chris Guillebeau, and this is Side Hustle School. [Music]