Rocket Scientist Launches Out-Of-This-World Tutoring Business

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

[Music]

What's up, friends, listeners, community. Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau in today's story, which by the way, we have a story every single day. It's a story about someone who makes extra money for themselves, creates an asset for themselves even, not just working a second job, without quitting their day job. Like they do their day job and then they do something else for themselves.

So today's story, a rocket scientist launches an out of this world tutoring platform. Now, like any good rocket scientist, she's also starting to plan ahead and systemize, create systems, create processes, et cetera, to where she can reach more people and be more efficient. Now, even so, even without having a lot of systems or scale, you can still earn at least $500 a month on the side just by tutoring. If you have a skill in a specific subject, now you'll hear all about all of that in this astronomical, low gravity, full throttle story. And as a side note, speaking of rocket scientists, I want to give a shout out to my mom, Pat Guillebeau.

She is also a NASA engineer. She has been a NASA engineer or has worked as a contractor for various government agencies in the aerospace industry for more than 30 years, I believe. Quite a while, she'll be retiring soon. And we actually have a side hustle idea for her that the family came up with during our recent Christmas visit. So one day, perhaps you'll hear about the Thanksgiving spreadsheet hustle.

That's going to be my mom's side hustle when she retires from NASA, or maybe we'll see what she does. But for now, rocket scientist launches out of this world tutoring business is coming right up. Stay tuned. [Music]

Tai East Lage loves numbers. Born in Brazil, but living in Florida since childhood, she's been tutoring struggling students in math from the age of 14.

Neighborhood parents were quick to hire her once they discovered her command of the subject. Her trigonometry teacher recognized her talent and asked if he could share her phone number with students who were having difficulty. Soon, her tutoring hustle was earning her $100 a week as a high school student. In college, she kept it up, printing flyers and posting them around campus. She even tutored her hair stylist in exchange for free haircuts.

Fast forward a few years and Tai East graduated with a degree in aerospace engineering. She secured her dream job as a mechanical operations engineer at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. She'd become a first-class rocket scientist. Despite her demanding job, she was still fueled with an insatiable desire to help others. She kept tutoring the neighborhood kids, but now at a higher rate because after all she was a rocket scientist.

As she did her tutoring work on the side, she would sometimes film and email a quick how-to video to her students to help with their homework. She noticed she was making the same videos several times. If her group of students all had the same questions, perhaps others did too. So what if she made more videos? She invested in an iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil.

This let her record her writing while doing a voiceover explaining her work. It was a much improved process. It allowed her to offer more virtual one-on-one sessions. She's able to connect to her MacBook and then live stream what she's writing to her shared screen with the student, eliminating the need to write stuff down, then hold the paper up to the camera, which sometimes resulted in challenges like having the words appear in a mirrored image. Hard to read.

In September 2018, a tutoring hustle was in full throttle working in tandem with her job. She called it 3-2-1 tutoring, you know, like a rocket launch, and she tried to make her lessons fun. In fact, you could say they're like reading a book about anti-gravity, impossible to put down. Startup costs were less than $100 for her website and domain, and then the iPad Pro, which wasn't cheap, you know, it's an Apple product, it costs like $1,000. She charges $50 an hour for middle or high school math, and $80 to $100 an hour for SAT or ACT test prep.

She recently hired two tutors that work under the 3-2-1 tutoring umbrella. They keep most of the money, but she takes a 10% cut. So far, so good, but now she needs to go to the next level by putting her lessons on YouTube. On her new YouTube channel, she'll share quick math tips and study techniques with students around the world. It's a work in progress.

She hopes to have five to eight videos uploaded by the end of February, so she can have an official launch. When she's not sending rockets into space, Thais says she'd eventually like to create an online course. Her other future plans include hiring more tutors so she can expand her reach to infinity and beyond. [Music]

All right, 3-2-1, lift off. Congratulations to Thais.

And this episode reminded me of one from long ago that I really, really liked. If you're interested in tutoring, would highly recommend you check it out. It's episode 111, "111." This is the story of James Ashton Hurst, an organic chemist who earns six figures blogging for pre-med students. And he actually got his start doing tutoring, ended up transitioning to something different that has worked really, really well for him. So you can check out that transformation story and see what he did.

Again, episode 111. You can always find any episode I mentioned by going to satasilschool.com/111. I do think it will be key for her to finish those videos and get them up. No guarantee that it's gonna help her scale, but that is probably the path to scaling or to reaching more people or toward growing the business, which I think it's also remarkable that she has time to do this while she's being a rocket scientist, but it seems that she manages her time well. So good for her.

And listeners, as always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Hope you enjoy these stories. I hope they inspire you to go and do something for yourself. Today's show notes are at satasilschool.com/769. That's for episode 769.

I'll be back again tomorrow. Much more is on the way. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Sidusil School." [Music]

From the "Onward Project."