Animator Re-Animates His Income Selling Graphic Kits

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

If you have a technical job that requires you to spend a lot of time doing the same thing or the same series of tasks over and over, might there be some way of speeding up that process? Especially if we're talking about programming or design or accounting or other computer work, writing macros or designing templates may help you work smarter and be more efficient. You know what? It might also help you pay off your mortgage. In today's story, when a Los Angeles-based animator looks to pay off his mortgage quicker, he creates toolkits for other animators to get things in motion.

Last year on the site, he made $38,000 from selling these toolkits. This was with practically $0 in startup costs. How did he do it and what does he attribute the success to? Or to what does he attribute the success? I might say.

All that is coming up in the story, animator reanimates his income selling graphic kits. Stay tuned. Peter Quinn is a proud resident of Los Angeles. While the cost of living is high, the weather and job opportunities more than make up for it. Luckily for him, he was able to snag one of those opportunities a couple years ago.

He's currently the director of motion design, animation, and photography at Dollar Shave Club. He gets to make funny promotional videos for ads on Facebook and Instagram every day. He also animates anything else the company needs. Before this role, Peter worked in a range of different animation and design roles for companies, agencies, and sometimes freelance. By his own admission, his job is pretty cool.

But like any job, it has its downsides. Much of Peter's work is repetitive. He doesn't have a lot of autonomy over what he works on, when he works on it, or even how it looks. In fact, often an animation will need to be repeated over and over again in different videos. This can be tedious or even demotivating for designers.

Over the years, Peter learned to be as efficient as possible. A big part of it was using predefined animations in Adobe After Effects, a popular software program for animators. These effects are loaded up whenever they're needed and can save him minutes or even hours per video. As he added more and more predefined animations to his repertoire, his workflow sped up significantly. Eventually, Peter even created a huge inventory of effects that replicated the user interfaces on movies like Minority Report and Iron Man.

After a couple of years, he'd built up hundreds of time-saving animations. Around the same time, he made the biggest financial commitment of his life. He took out a mortgage to buy a home. Staring into a 30-year financial commitment terrified him. He decided to explore ways he could make money on the side, with the goal of paying down that mortgage faster and getting his freedom back a little sooner.

He instantly thought of his animation toolkit. He figured since it was so useful to him, there must be other animators out there who could benefit from it. So with the help of a programmer, he packaged up all the animations into a software plugin for Adobe After Effects. He was already familiar with the site Aescripts.com, a marketplace for people to buy and sell custom After Effects software products. Aescripts had a built-in audience, so it was a no-brainer to try and sell his kit there.

In order to stand out from the crowd, Peter made a humorous video. That was what he was good at, after all. In it, he mocked the mundane parts about animating and poked fun at himself. He hoped people browsing the site would enjoy the video and be enticed to purchase. He called his product pack PQFooeyToys.

Aside from his time, which he'd already spent on the job, his startup costs were practically zero. Within days, Peter had made his first sale of many. He puts the initial success down to making that humorous video. He likes to say, "Funny is money," and it definitely was in this case. The video made his product stand out from all the others, which then led to more sales.

And also, the more popular his toolkit became, the more Aescripts plugged it on their site and in their own marketing. Now, it might have been easy to stop there, but Peter went back to the drawing board instead. Once again, he looked at the requirements of his day job to get another product idea. He realized he spent a lot of time looking for and creating textures, something all animators need. For example, if you're going to animate wood, a designer doesn't have to draw every pixel.

Instead, they apply a texture file to the animation, which then adds the effect for them. But finding good textures was difficult, and it was almost always expensive. Peter saw another opportunity, and so he began designing his second product. Using a high-quality camera, he spent months taking pictures of different types of textures — concrete, timber, cardboard, anything that looked interesting. By the end, he had 160 unique texture files.

He packaged them up into his next product, PQ Grit Kit. Then he followed the same playbook and launch strategy, and it too was a hit. In fact, PQ Grit Kit quickly outsold PQ Fui Kit. Both products have now been for sale for nearly two years and continue to sell well. Peter keeps up demand by ensuring he continues to market them.

For that, he's tried running Facebook ads with more funny videos. He also runs promos and contests on Twitter, offering giveaways. His 10,000 followers receive coupons for sharing his products with their own audience. All these strategies have done incredibly well for Peter so far. In 2018, he made $34,000 selling his kits.

For 2019, that number is already at $40,000. PQ Grit Kit has sold over 1,500 copies and PQ Fui Toys over 1,200. For now, Peter is still working his day job. He's just plowing all this additional income into paying off his mortgage. He believes he can pay the whole thing off in as little as eight years instead of 30.

So this story reminds me of one we did a long time ago. I talk about it from time to time. The guy who is selling spreadsheet templates, this guy was actually in India, ends up making a very good living. I think he works for Microsoft and eventually quits that job to go all in spreadsheet templates for people who work with spreadsheets, complex formulas, and so on all day. This kind of stuff, if you can automate this process, create these macros or templates or however this animation thing works, it can save people a lot of time.

It makes their work lives much easier, which therefore makes their lives easier in general and is therefore highly valuable. So if you work in a technical field or anything like this, where there are these kind of repeated processes, tasks that you have to go through all the time, could there be something like this? Is there a way that you could become more efficient for yourself and then offer that same efficiency for others? For a price, of course, for a product or a service that you put together just like Peter has done. And by the way, it doesn't have to be exactly like this as well.

I also think of this guy, Gabe, from this business called SI Certs, episode 311, 311, former construction inspector earns $200,000 helping students pass exams. So it's not directly related to making templates, but it is essentially about helping people be more efficient and effective at their work. So we're going to link up both those episodes in the show notes page. That page is going to be at sidehustleschool.com/1039, episode 1039. Thanks so much for listening.

I hope you enjoyed it. Much more is coming up. Be sure you're subscribed. My name is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. From the Onward Project.