This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Side Hustle School listeners, welcome back. My name is Chris Guillebeau. Quick announcement first for everyone who's been following the show very closely. You guys are awesome, thank you so much. If you pay close attention, you may notice that this episode is going out on Saturday, which is usually our weekly recap day.
We're gonna make a small shift to where Sunday will now be the weekly recap day, so that we can begin with a new week on Monday. Nothing else is changing, and if you are a binge downloader who listens to several episodes at a time, you might not even notice at all. However you listen to Side Hustle School, the goal is to bring you great stories and actionable tips so that you will not only be inspired, but you will learn lessons you can apply to your own hustle. And if you haven't started working on your hustle yet, or you just found the show, it's definitely not too late. We're building this together in real time throughout the whole year.
A shout out as well to everyone listening in Canada. Today we are talking about hockey, and obviously lots of other people like hockey too, but when I think of hockey, I think of Canada. And you might think that starting a blog these days that makes money, and a topic no one else has really covered, is almost impossible. There's so many blogs, there's so many websites about every imaginable topic, but as you've heard in other stories, and as you'll hear today, there's still all kinds of interests and all kinds of opportunities. And this story is all about a school administrator who creates a digital magazine for hockey goaltenders.
[Music]
Today's story comes from David Hutchison. By day, David is a school administrator, what's known as the assistant head of school external at Aspen Grove School in the Naimo, British Columbia. Back in the late 1970s, when he was in sixth grade himself, young David's entrepreneurial journey began when he sold pictures of NHL goalie masks to classmates. He was indeed a goalie fan from a young age, and that early experience inspired a side hustle 30 years later when he created "In Goal" magazine, what is now the most read website and digital magazine for hockey goaltenders? Now at this point, you might be asking yourself, well, how big of a group are hockey goaltenders and fans?
Are we talking like a dozen people, maybe 50, 100? Well, apparently the group is big enough because David now has tens of thousands of subscribers, mostly in the US and Canada, but also worldwide. But let's go back a few years to when David was running a boarding house at a boarding school where he doubled up as the computer science teacher. Some of his students came back to the dorm one night, telling him all about the entrepreneurship teacher who had just told him they could make money online. David was skeptical, but he wanted to learn more about it so he could speak their language.
Looking at blogs and websites, he was surprised to see there was little or nothing on hockey goaltenders, that area of great interest to him. And so over the next few months, he stitched together a WordPress blog modeled after a rowing site he frequented. He began with daily news updates. There is apparently a lot of daily news in the hockey goaltending world, but because it was so overwhelming, those updates became too much to handle, and they also didn't seem to grab people's interest enough. So he continued to experiment, trying lots of different things to see what people liked, posting mask images, doing interviews with coaches, and so on.
During the Vancouver Olympics in 2010, interest in hockey ramped up even more, not just in Canada, but also in the US and elsewhere. And at that time, a partner came on board who reached out after seeing a Google News alert he had set up for goaltending. This partner, Kevin, had access to many pro players, and he asked if they could work together. Kevin began sending David stories that were perfect for end goal, but not of interest to the mainstream media. I told you there was a big enough group of hockey goaltenders and fans.
End goal now has 40,000 subscribers, and the site continues to grow. End goal magazine earns money through ads from companies, affiliate sales for things like training programs, and some work with goaltending coaches. David and Kevin are considering moving the site to a paid subscription model, but they're trying to figure out how to balance that with their advertising model. They want the revenue from paid subscriptions, which would be reliable and potentially a lot more than what they're seeing now, but they also don't want to lose the readership that advertisers expect. So they're trying to figure out a way to support both models.
For now, the two partners mostly reinvest their profits, attending camps, visiting pros, and top coaches. For them, the project is profitable, but it's less about money and more about getting close to the game they love and enjoying new experiences. Being able to photograph NHL games, meeting the players and coaches on the ice, getting to test all the latest gear, and even David having his nine-year-old son be able to interact with top professionals. So yes, there really are a lot of hockey goaltenders and goaltender fans out there. So I had a little exercise for you today.
Let's say that you're gonna start a blog and your interest is hockey or crochet or birdwatching or video games, whatever the topic, you know there's a large global community with the same interest. But you also may know by now, just like David found, it's probably better to focus on some specific aspect or angle of that hobby or field rather than trying to cover everything. That's why a magazine that's all about goaltending in hockey is so much better than just a magazine about hockey. 'Cause even five to 10 years ago, there already were a lot of blogs and resources about the sport of hockey in general. But David wisely followed up on his observation that none of them focused exclusively on goaltenders and goaltending.
So here's what helps. Write down your interest, that topic, that field, whatever it is, and draw a circle around it. So let's say it's video games. So you write video games down, you draw a circle around it, then start drawing lines off to the side with related topics that are more specific. So if we started with video games, we might write down classic video games, arcade games, modern mobile games, online multiplayer games.
And even those are pretty big genres. You can probably get even more specific. You can also take a different approach and start looking at categories, sports games, role-playing games, et cetera. Probably some other characteristics you could choose to focus on, like games from a certain studio or company, underappreciated games throughout the years, games that are really hard but worth it. It could be anything.
So then what you do at some point is maybe you start to combine a couple of these topics and characteristics and see how they might work together. Imagine you grew up playing role-playing games and you really liked the ones from the early to mid 1990s, which was kind of a classic period for those games. What about ones that are lesser known or in your view underappreciated? Like if that was something you were interested in, that would be so much more specific than just video games or even just role-playing games or even just games from the early '90s. And even though this is a very focused topic, I guarantee there's a big audience of people who would very much relate to something like that.
So this is your exercise, your activity. If you're not familiar with video games, you don't like hockey, those are just examples. The point is there are a lot of ways to stand out by focusing on something interesting and relevant to a certain community. And when you do that, when you become that authority in that topic, there are all kinds of options and avenues you can pursue for an actual business model. And this kind of thing probably won't be an overnight success.
It is the kind of thing that you invest in over time. That's why it's so important to choose the right topic in the first place so that it is something you care about and are willing to invest your time and energy in it. And of course, there are lots of other ways to do this too, but this is one pathway to success. And I offer it to you today as an option, if nothing else, at least to get you thinking. And in the long term, of course, I don't want you to just think about it.
I want you to apply it in some way. I want this to be helpful and good for you as you invest in yourself. So remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. Come say hi in social media. I am @chrisguillebeau.
You can read my blog at chrisguillebeau.com. You can find notes for every episode of the show at sidehustleschool.com. And if you are a hockey goaltender, well, you probably already know about David's resource in "Gull Magazine." You're probably one of those 40,000 subscribers. But just in case you weren't familiar with it, now you know where to go. You are a rock star. This is "Side Hustle School."
I'm Chris Guillebeau. I'll be back tomorrow. [Music]
