Art School Graduate Becomes Pencil King

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

[Music]

What's up and welcome to the remixed version of Side Hustle School. We're calling it the year of interaction. Now what you're gonna hear throughout the year is a lot of questions from our listeners, as well as updates on their projects, perhaps some other features as well. Well, we've got a classroom feature that I'll tell you about in a couple of days. But for any long time listeners who are wondering about the stories, well, we've got those too.

So twice a week now, we're gonna do a case study, a detailed story of somebody out there who has a day job, yet finds a way to start an income generating project. You always deconstruct that process and look at how they got their idea, how they made it happen, what challenges they encountered along the way. And then ultimately, what is the final outcome? Not just what happened, but how did it affect their life? So if you're new, I hope you enjoy these stories because we're really trying to feature just regular people out there like you and me who found a way to be successful, often by doing something quite different.

And there are many examples of this in the archives, but let's move forward. So in today's story, an artist goes from a small Manitoba village to generating six figures running educational websites while living in China. I tell you my friends, anything is possible. We're gonna jump into this story, dive into all the details right after this shout out to our sponsor. [Music]

Mitch Baller knew early on he was going to stray from the beaten path.

After all, when you grew up in a tiny village in Manitoba, Canada, that beaten path doesn't lead to many places. He now teaches people how to draw through online courses under the moniker, The Pencil King. Of course, stories of royalty always begin with once upon a time. When he finished art school way back in 2002, Mitch didn't go to his own graduation. Instead, he hopped on a plane to China.

He taught English to support himself, but he quickly figured out that instead of giving private lessons, he could teach kids in groups, add a discount to them, but more overall money for him, cutting his work week down to just eight hours. That gave him plenty of time to pursue his other interests, Tai Chi and 3D art. Improving his art skills in the off time meant that Mitch soon landed a job as an artist for a Chinese studio, one that supplied art for big video game companies such as EA and Activision. And then during a holiday trip back to Canada, Mitch asked himself a fateful question. How can I make money in my sleep?

Back in China, Mitch had to balance his day job with his burgeoning side hustle. He would wake up at 5.30 a.m. every weekday, working until 8.30 when he had to leave for that job. Even though he was a paid artist, he was nervous about putting his work out there under his name. To him, there were so many other talented artists all over the internet.

Fortunately, he had conditioned himself to create regularly whenever he had more time with his English teaching schedule. So to keep himself accountable in the face of imposter syndrome, which by the way, side note, we're gonna talk about imposter syndrome very soon on the program, stay tuned. So to keep himself accountable, he set a goal to make new art every day and share video lessons with anyone who wanted to watch at his new website, drawingcoach.com. His setup was bare bones. He balanced a tripod between his desk and a window and sat below it, reaching up to draw.

Any additional startup costs were simple materials purchased in runs to the art supply store for less than $50. Now, interestingly, Mitch didn't charge for these lessons. They were the content that was going to bring in advertising money. Now this made Google Mitch's first customer, technically, because their ads were the first ones he tried putting on his website. It also meant that SEO or search engine optimization was Mitch's second daily hustle priority.

After working on new content, of course, he was learning as much as he could about this so he could understand how to make his site rank on search engines. Then he started writing his own articles because it's easier for Google's robots to read text than watch videos. Earnings were small at first. Drawing coach made about $30 a month in those early days, but after ranking for keywords and pumping out content consistently, the numbers increased. Mitch spent about five years off and on growing drawing coach by putting out his quality content and lessons before quitting his job.

At that point, he was making enough money to sustain a digital nomad lifestyle in Southeast Asia. Plus, he had an idea for his next site, pencilkings.com. Pencilkings.com, you heard it here first. When a drawing coach was a website with basic lessons that relied on advertising revenue, Pencilkings was an entirely different model. For this new site, Mitch teamed up with other artists to offer courses covering topics like anatomy, Photoshop, caricature art, and more.

The site charges a flat monthly fee for access to all its courses. You might think that sounds great, but where would the Pencilkings customers come from? Well, I'm glad you asked because Mitch had a great referral network already set up to build those subscribers. It was a simple funnel that would convert some of the traffic from drawing coach into customers for his new site. While some of the links and ads on that first site still pointed to other companies, a few well-placed ads for Pencilkings sent thousands of new visitors each month.

This established the new site as a sort of logical next step in a young artist's journey. Mitch also used some of those same tactics he'd already learned focusing on SEO. And after growing Pencilkings, he added a third project. This one was called Evolve Artist. Replicating his success converting students from drawing coach to Pencilkings, he uses Evolve Artist as a way to teach the business and fundamentals of art.

For this one, he partnered with another well-known artist to create the lessons, freeing up time for him to focus on strategy. Instead of focusing on just one site at a time, Mitch keeps all three running for one simple reason. They all generate income. All together, the sites bring in more than six figures a year in annual profit. And while Mitch believes in investing back in the business, he takes enough to support himself and save for retirement.

Plus he gets to work with fellow artists every day. The Pencilkings reign appears to cure and Mitch is living the dream. [Music]

Congratulations, Mitch. Thank you so much for letting us share your story and just well done all the way around. I always love following the progression of someone's thinking and work, beginning with that desire to see more of the world and then learning how to hack the whole language lesson thing by teaching groups of people instead of just individual lessons and then everything that came after that.

Now we always ask everybody, what has been the best part of this experience thus far? And additionally, how is having a side hustle benefit at you? So I really like the answer we got back from Mitch. Listen to this. He said, well, it might sound weird, but as an artist, a lot of it is about proving yourself, proving that you can do it.

And with entrepreneurship, it can be similar. There's this element of proving, not just to other people, but also to yourself. And the best part for me has been the self discovery and growth that's happened over the years, as well as the people I've been fortunate to meet. He also talked about how, because he's gained these skills of how to generate traffic and make sales, even though he works in the art market, he believes he can apply those skills in other markets if he had to. And that confidence allows him to take more risks.

All right, that's my encouragement for you today. It actually comes from Mitch. It's his encouragement for you, but I hope you enjoyed it. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/1099.

Tomorrow in true spinal tap fashion, we will turn the episode clock to 1100. And I also believe the best is yet to come. Thank you so much. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

From the "Onward Project."