This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Greetings friends and listeners. A reminder right at the top of the episode here, by the way, this is Chris Guillebeau. I want to know about your projects. I heard about a really cool one today. You'll hear about it too.
And I have very much enjoyed the first month of our year of interaction. All year long in 2020, we're doing listener questions, updates, following people along throughout the course of their projects, looking at where their ideas come from, how they execute on those ideas, what happens along the way, and what they could do better, because of course we could all do better. Now we're going to be ramping up as we go along with more questions. The new Throwback Thursday/Where Are They Now series, which we've done two of so far, more coming up, and something special I'm saving for April, when I'll begin an all-new tour throughout the US and Canada. Now today's listener started a pen-to-paper initiative to connect people through snail mail.
It's starting well, but how can it scale? How can you grow something that is a manual process, at least requires a manual process, and, here's the kicker, is a pay-what-you-will pricing model the best option? I really love that part of the question in particular. I'm going to spend some time on it and give you a real opinion. All right, stay tuned.
Here's a shout-out to our sponsor, and then we will dive right in. [Music]
So I love the personalization and artistry of this project. It really is beautiful. I want to encourage you to check it out. Heylux.co is her website.
I'll mention that again at the end. It's also very cool that Nikki tracks the number and destinations of these handwritten notes on that website. You can see all the different cities and towns that they've gone to. Oh, and I had never heard the verb calligraph before, which I understand what calligraphy is, but I'd never heard it used as a verb like that. So I learned something new every day just by working on the show.
So thank you, Nikki, for that. Okay, let's look at these questions. She's got three of them here. I'm going to focus on the second two. First one is about target audience.
And broadly speaking here, I think it's anyone who wants to give a creative gift or cultivate a relationship, or maybe anyone who's into minimalism or spending less time online, that kind of thing. So it's in the whole world of handmade yet low-priced art, which is typically purchased for someone else. So I'm sure we could get more specific, but in this case, I'm not sure it's really the critical issue. So that's why I want to focus on these other two things. So how can it scale?
Well, I'm not sure it can, at least not in this format. And I think that's okay. Maybe the way it scales is through some sort of transfer process where this project kind of remains static, but Nikki creates other products that aren't all hand-drawn while continuing to offer these personalized ones. Or she keeps this as a project where she promotes it and gets attention for it while growing her main service, which looks like spot calligraphy. So you can hire her to do wedding invitations and other more traditional uses of calligraphy.
So in other words, maybe it's not this project itself that scales, but the attention she gets from it leads to something else or transfers in that way. Okay, so last but not least, let's talk about this for a bit. Pay what you will, or pay what you choose. I forgot how she phrased it. Long story short, I don't think it's a good idea.
And I think pay what you will is good sometimes as an experiment or a limited time offer. Like next week, everything is gonna be pay what you will. And then for the remaining 51 weeks of the year, we're going back to our regular pricing. And in thinking about this, I was reminded of a story of a number of years ago, I started a project. This was called "The Travel Hacking Cartel." I had a membership site for people interested in learning about frequent flyer miles.
And when I first started this, I don't know, 10 years ago or something, just about, I had a conversation with Brian Clark. And Brian is the founder of copyblogger.com, many other projects. He's been very successful and he's just very, very smart. So I remember sitting with him in Dallas, Texas and telling him about this project. And I was really excited because he liked the idea and his opinion mattered a lot to me.
And he was like, no, this is actually pretty good idea. And you've got the benefit correct. And it just sounds solid. And I was like, oh, great. Well, let me tell you what else.
I wanna do this creative pricing model called pay what you will, basically, where everybody comes and they decide for themselves how they value the service. And I remember that he kind of paused and was like, that's a terrible idea, actually. And at first I was so disappointed because I was like, oh, I thought that was like a great idea. I thought that was one of the best features of it. And he was like, no, not at all.
And so we had maybe a 25 minute conversation and there's still the lessons of that experience, that conversation in a few seconds. It's like, first of all, when you choose this model, you are undervaluing your service and you're gonna encourage other people to do the same because whatever price you think your service or product should be, nobody's gonna come along and pay you more than that. Pretty much everyone is going to pay less, first of all. And second, it kind of suggests that you haven't really thought through what the price should be. So you're letting the customer decide.
That then creates kind of an unfair burden on them. It really creates a lot of confusion on their part because they don't know what they should pay. So often what happens in these situations is you provide some examples, which I can see Nikki has done, so that's good. But when I look at the website, it's like choose between any of these dollar amounts, $7, $5, or $3. But seven, five, and three, those are all pretty similar prices.
And also a cheap store-bought card these days, if you go to the store and buy a greeting card, it costs at least $3 to $5, right? And this is personalized calligraphy. What was that verb again? Calligraph, Nikki calligraphs it. And it includes the paper, envelope, and postage.
So I think $10 should be the minimum. That's still a very accessible price. And also these worries are somewhat opposed to one another. Like you want it to scale, but you also want it to remain accessible. So in short, I don't think pay what you will is the right model most of the time, including for this project.
And I think it scales not on its own, but as more of a compliment to Nikki's other products and services. And at least for now, she has services in terms of offering that calligraphy, those wedding invitations, et cetera. Maybe she will develop some products as well. Thank you, Nikki, again, for the great question and wonderful example. Listeners, go check it out at halux.co.
That is halux, H-E-Y-L-U-X.co. Or follow her @NickyMalick on Instagram. N-I-K-I-M-A-L-E-K. If you've got a question, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. We'll be featuring them throughout the year, along with updates.
More is coming up and tomorrow we'll talk about how to avoid mistakes in the idea phase. Be sure you're subscribed. It is completely free. My name is Chris Guillebeau and this is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
from the Onward Project.
