Colorado Artist Quits Job, Goes Back to Work, Then Quits Again

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

As we begin today, a quick note at the top of the episode. Our newsletter service is doing a 30-day email challenge. The challenge is to grow your own email list. And as part of the challenge, you'll actually get a free 30-day account. You can try it out, see how it works, and begin to get people on your mailing list.

Having people on your list is critical. I think it's actually more important than your social media profiles. So that's why I like this 30-day challenge they're doing. Again, it's completely free. I'll also be providing some guidance of my own for anyone who joins up.

So if you want to do that, just go to sidehustleschool.com/challenge. That's sidehustleschool.com/challenge. C-H-A-L-L-E-N-G-E. And in today's story, when a freelancer realizes he's not quite ready for full-on self-employment, he goes back to work. Then he discovers something unusual.

Having a full-time job takes the pressure off of making regular sales from his side hustle. It actually gives him more freedom to experiment and create. Now, since we first started side hustle school, what, approximately 810 days ago, I've heard from a lot of people in that situation. It all goes to show there is another way. You don't have to quit your job.

You don't have to walk away tomorrow. You can build freedom in your life, wherever you are. Also in this story, a 365-day personal goal to create a new design every day, 365 days in a row, grows into a business that now earns $11,000 per month. This Colorado artist quits his job a second time, after it was working, not before, and is now focused on the next stage of growth. So there's the intro.

Here's a quick message from our sponsor, and then stay tuned for the story. Colorado native Jimmy Bryant has been designing and creating art his whole life. When he wasn't working his 9-5 job, you could find him sketching or creating new designs on his computer. His passion for designing unique styles consumed most of his free time. While working in a construction job in California, he began taking on various freelance projects to fuel his hobby.

After doing this off and on for many years, he decided it was time to take the leap and launch himself as a full-time freelancer with his brand Atomic Child Designs. He moved back to Colorado and began listing his designs with various sites like Minty's and Redbubble. On these sites, he was able to get his designs out there and find initial clients. He also landed several gigs designing t-shirts and promotional items for bands. However, life as a freelancer didn't last long.

Jimmy had left his previous job with little money saved and learned early on that he wasn't prepared for this lifestyle. He decided to go back to working for a company so he could have a steady paycheck once again. He found a job as an art director for an apparel design firm. While there, he continued to make his own art on the side. He still loved doing it and wasn't ready to give up on his dream.

Having a full-time job actually took the pressure off of making regular sales from his side hustle and allowed him more freedom to experiment. Part of his experimenting happened on Instagram. He started a 365-day challenge where he began posting one new design per day for an entire year. During this challenge, he picked up more and more followers. People were eager to see what he was going to design next.

The followers provided accountability to continue creating and expanding his skills. When he began the challenge, he had just over 500 followers. Today, he's up to 659 original designs and almost 14,000 followers. At the same time, sales and clients continued to grow. After much consistency and persistence, he was averaging about $11,000 a month, making more money from his side hustle than his day job.

That's when he knew this was the right time to leave his art director role. Since he had already made the leap into freelancing once, making this second jump wasn't so scary. He was able to go back and fix the mistakes he made the first time around and be more prepared to walk away from the paycheck. Jimmy attributes much of his success to Instagram and local merchandising events and markets. Instagram itself has brought in nearly a thousand sales.

Accordingly, for anyone wanting to get into product and apparel design, he recommends growing your following first through networking and platforms like Instagram. He suggests being consistent with your posts, responding to each person who comments or engages online, posting stories that show you it works so people can see you're a real human being, and creating unique designs that draw followers in. He also recommends you start small. Pick one product design to gauge how people respond. If you can get customers in with smaller purchase items, such as stickers or hats, you can then bring them into your audience and sell them higher priced items like t-shirts and hoodies.

Through networking and online exposure, Jimmy has had the opportunity to sell his designs on Nordstrom.com and create merchandise for bands like The Grateful Dead and Accounting Crows. Also, starting later this year, you'll find some of his designs in stock at REI. It's been quite the journey for Atomic Child Design, from freelance to full-time to part-time and now back to his main hustle. In his words, the best experience is realizing you can make a living off your designs by designing for yourself and not being tied to client work. It's given me the freedom in my life that I dreamed of for so long.

So this is the side hustle school way. Take the leap when it's the right time. Don't just take the leap right away. Don't just, you know, leap and the net will appear. Build yourself a safety net.

Take the time wherever you are in your career and job right now and ask yourself what does that safety net look like? How could I create a structure so that if I do want to quit my job, I can do that? And then from there, the choice is up to you. You've got options. You've got that freedom that you've created.

It can be really scary to leave behind a steady paycheck, so that's why I don't recommend anybody do that until it's the right time. You'll feel much better about yourself and you'll feel more confident, as we saw in this story, when it's the right time to take that leap. Now also business-wise, Jimmy has three different online stores. One for prints, one for apparel, and one for everything else. I was taking a look at this and it looks like two of them are print-on-demand, where he doesn't actually have to stock the inventory.

They handle everything for him. But those platforms also take a lot of commission and they don't bring in a lot of sales. Most of his sales are coming from in-person events and his own online store. So the own online store takes a lot more work. He's got to handle the inventory, the shipping, et cetera, but there's a lot more money coming from it.

So pros and cons to everything. Print-on-demand can be really easy work because you're just listing up your item and somebody else takes care of all the fulfillment, everything else. But it's not always, or maybe even not often, easy money. Still, always worth an experiment, always worth trying and seeing different platforms, different fulfillment services, what works best for you. You may be surprised.

Plus, even if it's not a lot of money, it's still money. And money is good, especially diversifying your income sources, all the kind of stuff that we talk about here on the program. All right, listeners, wherever you are in the world, I hope you do one thing today to get yourself closer to that same kind of confidence and security, that same kind of self-reliance that Jimmy has built for himself. Even if it's a small step, just take that small step. You won't regret it.

Then take another one tomorrow and another one the day after that. Our show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/811. If you want to check out that 30-day e-mail challenge that I mentioned at the top of the episode, that is at sidehustleschool.com/challenge. Thanks so much. I'll be back again tomorrow, and I hope you will join me once more.

My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side-of-School." From the Onward Project.