This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Side Hustle School listeners, welcome back. I'm Chris Guillebeau. Moving forward, up pace with episode 101. Now, you may be familiar with subscription boxes. In fact, you may even be subscribed to one. And if you're not, subscription boxes are kind of
a newish trend, mostly in the past five years or so, where you pay a monthly fee. And every month, usually or every so often, sometimes every quarter, you get a box in the mail. And that box consists of all sorts of random things, depending on what you signed up for. The most common subscription boxes relate to clothing and fashion. There's a socks of the month club, lots of beauty products, cosmetics, razors, etc. But there are plenty of other kinds too. There's an iPhone case of the
month subscription box. There's a mystery subscription box for dogs, which presumably you have to pay for yourself, since your dog doesn't have a credit card. There are all kinds of crazy things out there. I don't think we've actually talked about this model here on the show before. Now, today I want to tell you about an interesting and successful subscription box service run by one person that delivers candy from Japan. This is a pretty cool thing. I think
you'll like it too. It's coming right up. When you go to Japan for the first time, there's a cultural experience you don't want to miss. I'm not talking about Mount Fuji or the Tokyo Tower. I'm talking about visiting 7-Eleven. 7-Eleven in Japan is not just where you go for a
slurpee. It's an immersive cultural experience. And not just inside 7-Eleven, but outside and all over the streets of Tokyo and other cities, the vending machines are amazing. You can get everything from rice balls to sake, household supplies, cosmetics. Someone needs to start a museum of Japanese vending. But if you can't make it there next week, there's another way
to experience this magical land, and it's all because someone decided to try something fun. In 2011, Bimou Sepponen moved to Japan from his native Finland. He wanted to sell items online for extra cash, and before long he hit on a great idea. Why not sell Japanese candy to people outside of Japan? Not only was it a great idea, he also chose a smart model for this hustle. You can
probably guess what it is. Instead of one-off sales, Bimou set it up as a subscription box offer. For $29 a month, shipping included, he would send people two boxes full of interesting and unconventional sweets that could only be found in Japan. If you think he'd run out of candy options after a while, well, it's not a bad assumption, but you probably haven't been to Japan because the options really are non-stop. There are something like 45 different KitKat flavors. Just to give you an example, my personal favorite is Green Tea KitKat, which is a lot better
than it sounds. And just as the candy is ever renewing, so too are his subscriptions. They didn't arrive all at once. They came over time, slow and steady, until he grew to more than 300 people, paying that $29 a month. And in addition to subscriptions, Bimou also offers gift purchases of a single month or even a whole year. This has been a fantastic boost to his ongoing monthly
subscribers, and he now sees income of around $15,000 a month. To get to this point, he's tried a lot of different things to market his candy Japan service. Some have worked well, others haven't, but one of his most successful marketing attempts came from a post he made on Reddit. Now, Reddit is not usually the kind of place you can go to promote your products, but in this case, it was a natural fit. He stumbled upon a post where someone was asking the question, "What is the most ridiculous thing available on the internet for $25 shipped?" He simply replied and said, "Well, my subscription box of candy from Japan is just $4 more than that." It's pretty ridiculous. Reddit can be a tremendous source of traffic if an article or a post becomes
popular, and that one did. Just that day alone, he received 2,000 visits from that thread and more than 30 new subscriptions. And here you can see the beauty of the subscription model as well, because 30 subscriptions at $29 is $870, which is great, but it's not just $870. That's the monthly revenue from those subscriptions. So obviously, not everyone is going to continue indefinitely, but for every 30 subscribers who do continue for a year, that's $10,000 in revenue.
So that reply to a Reddit post was pretty valuable. Bemu's hustle, Candy Japan, has seen some ups and downs as it's grown. He had a few other cases of unexpected marketing success, like a BuzzFeed article that wrote about him. He's also had challenges with credit card fraud. He now accepts only PayPal to reduce his risk, and also the currency variation between the Japanese yen and the US dollars that he prices in.
Still, overall, he's going strong. He's got that secure subscriber base with a significant number of gift subscriptions purchased every month. And after shipping thousands of boxes of Japanese candy, he still hasn't run out of options and supplies. So as I said, the subscription box model is almost limitless these days. I don't think they're all profitable, but if you can imagine it, you can probably get it in a subscription box.
And this business model can be tough, because it's all about reaching that initial point of profitability where you have enough subscribers that makes it worth it. So I would encourage you, if you're thinking of starting something like this, spend as much time thinking about how you're going to get those first 50 to 100 customers as you do thinking about what goes in your box, and how you curate it, and how you're going to brand it. Because this model can only be successful once you have that base. But if you get it, then that's fantastic, because then you're in a place to grow with the knowledge that a certain amount of money is coming in every month. And of course, you have to source a lot of products for others people. And I saw that Bemu has at least one
significant competitor called Tokyo Treat. I don't know much about them. I just saw them online, but it looked like they had a lot of followers too. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. It just shows that a lot of people are interested in candy from Japan. So there's definitely room for
more than one person or company in any market. I hope that gives you something to think about today. Remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. If you want to see the show notes for today's episode, maybe order some candy from Japan, or just see more of what it looks like. The visuals are pretty cool. Just come check out
sidehustleschool.com/101. And if you want to leave a comment or question for the show, give me a call on the new Hustle Hotline 8449 Hustle. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. I'll be back tomorrow.
