This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Welcome to Throwback Thursday slash Where Are They Now, where we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved considerably since we first featured them. So far in these features, we have had a New York City musician with a blog teaching jazz, that becomes a multiple six-figure business, and a former tech employee who sources satin pillowcases from China, and also ends up growing a very significant side hustle turned full-time income. Well, today in our latest feature, we'll hear from a guy I got to hang out with in Boston a while back. His name is Chris as well, and he's really interesting, because what he's doing now at the age of 48, I believe, is exactly what he wanted to do when he was 10. At that young age, he was attracted to games of all kinds, and scavenger hunts in particular.
He now runs a company, which was started as a side gig, of course, that produces these hunts all across Boston, and now other cities in the Northeast, as well as Chicago and Miami, maybe some other destinations as well. He has evolved as he's gone along, and he's still going strong. But it's been a while since we featured Chris, so what's happened since? Let's hear directly from him, and I'll be back at the end to wrap us up. [Music]
My name is Chris Damianakos, based out of Boston, and I was part of episode 128.
My side hustle is "Cash Hunt," and I'm a game producer, where we produce premium scavenger hunts based out of Boston, but we have spread the game into other cities within New England, as well as the Northeast. What are games involved? To our scavenger hunt experiences, where we take the group, could be as small as eight players, right up to 200 players, depending on the type of event, where they would be obviously broken into teams. We provide them with all the practical materials that they'll need in order to play, a game booklet that contains all our challenges. Kind of looks a lot like an old comic book.
They're game bags, devices, and regardless of the devices we provide, each team on the Apple iTouch for all their photo and video challenges, the team tags, that they'll be wearing throughout the two hours of the competition. They will have their team name on it, pens, and additional game props. So basically what it is, it's a city scavenger hunt, where the city is the game board, and we really kind of expose a lot of different things in the area, such as public art, historic, contemporary, that team members would need to do a variety of challenges. So the challenges basically are five in total. There's a multi-item photo scavenger hunt.
There is a multi-item video scavenger hunt, where the teams would have to perform a variety of different types of videos from like a 10-second public aerobics class demonstration with members of the public, a 10-second mannequin challenge. Then we call musical snort, because the team wants to sing us a melody of a song for like 10 seconds, just by snorting it out. As well as trivia based on locations in and around the area, things that we have physically hidden in the area, such as tokens and points that the teams try to find as many as they can and return them back to us, as well as some additional cryptic challenges. So the game, per se, can never be completed again. It's a two-hour event, doesn't get played in sequence, so they can do any portion of the game within those two hours.
And the objective at the end of two hours is the team with the most points at the end will win our annual cash hunt medals that we hand out to our winners. So it's not your typical scavenger hunt by, no means necessary, it's just a variety of crazy, zany challenges within that two-hour experience. Ever since I was, I'd say 11, 12 years old, I've always have done certain games. At the beginning, when I was 11, 12 years old, I created choose your own adventure text games on a computer, and then that turned into later in my teams, creating two-on-two basketball tournaments, racquetball tournaments, I started my own billiards league, did a little scavenger hunt at that time, and then I'm a big fan of pop culture and games and quite frankly, competition. And later on about, I'd say about 20, 21 years ago, we just did a fun scavenger hunt for family and friends that intertwine all those different types of mediums.
So like, you know, inspiration came from film noir, comic books, you know, board games, the city in general, and mashed it up to a two-hour, actually at that time, a three to four-hour game that actually people had to jump into their cars and go around and do all these little challenges. Not just very gorilla, at that time it was Polaroid cameras, you know, it was just very rough of, you know, we just kind of threw it together and a very good friend of ours played it and just saw the potential in the game. And quite frankly said this would be a great, ironically, kind of a side hustle of sorts. Or in that case, at that time, a side business. Didn't really believe in it, to be quite frank.
And, but, you know, took his word and kind of reworked it, reshaped it, you know, took about a good six, seven months and put an ad in the newspaper at that time. And we got our first, at that time, wedding party. You know, we did the game, you know, really, really green at that point. But it was a success, you know, and then it kind of spilled into our first corporate game, which at the time was singular wireless, whichever we've known as AT&T. But the key thing about it is, you know, the side hustle started off as, you know, it didn't, you know, go gangbusters at the beginning.
You know, we started off with five games the first year, then it went to 10, the following, and then it just started to grow by kind of like an intervals of like five to 10 games. But it was the review sites, primarily TripAdvisor, you know, in around 2010, when those review sites really came into play, that reviews actually started coming in without our even, I wasn't ever even aware of it 'cause I didn't even know what TripAdvisor was. And then that made it into, you know, it jumped the gun. The phone started ringing quite often. And now we do roughly about, I'd say about, depending on weather permitting, 'cause all our games are outdoors, I'd say between 270 to 290 games a year.
So that's how it all, so it kind of started off as a fluke, just kind of like a fun thing to do for family and friends, and then it kind of spawned into a little side hustle. Didn't drop my day job, but then, you know, I noticed that the side hustle basically, you know, shadowed my actual occupation, which was at that point, an event coordinator, and then it became a business. As far as income, we're pretty much, you know, still in the six-figure category, roughly in and around, somewhat similar to when we were a couple years back, I'd say about 150 to 170,000 a year. You know, depending, again, it's really kind of based on weather because there could be scenarios that we've got big games and it could be a rainstorm, and unfortunately we lose it. So that's what we always tend to maintain, 'cause we do these 12 months out of the year.
The scenario of where we are now, I mean, the one thing that, you know, I'm a firm believer in and I've always been the factor of constantly being a student. So we're constantly learning. The one thing that we always try to do is reinvent our product each and every year because based on repeat business, we never want clients that have played the game to come back and find it predictable and know what takes place. We always try to change it around. And with that being said, now what we are pursuing is involving a game that includes, you know, as far as your smartphone, it's a smartphone scavenger hunt.
However, with that being said, there are smartphone scavenger hunts out there, which, you know, it's all conducted by downloading an app. You know, you're playing a game that is scored in real time, but the difference with us is we're taking our practical materials from that old school scavenger hunt that we've been doing for almost 20 years and then merging it with the smartphone version. And the reason for that is the majority of the smartphone games are out there. They are only a smartphone. So basically, there is no game coordinator there.
You don't receive any materials or anything like that. It's just simply kind of, you know, it's a scheduled game in regards to the other scavenger hunt companies, which they do very well. But the key thing is that, you know, the game activates. There is, you know, two to three hours. They try to get as much done.
It's scored in real time and it concludes two hours later. So I would probably say study, self-educate yourself literally daily by, you know, not concentrating on, you know, one type of genre. And in regards to like, when I say genre, I think it's like, you know, one particular avenue. I think it's a better way to be sane. Don't concentrate just on marketing.
Don't concentrate on just management. Concentrate also on creative endeavors, creative individuals, find people that are inspirational in their own fields and then learn from them and just believe in yourself quite honestly that, like I mentioned prior, like however unique your idea is, you know, if someone says that's not practical, just you have to kind of move that out of the way and definitely move forward. But the important thing is that they have to educate themselves because in today's world, you know, marketing is moving really quickly. Technology is moving rather quickly. And we say this on a daily basis.
So if you're not educating yourself, you're going to be left behind. But with that being said, you know, you might stumble. It's healthy to stumble, but, you know, just be kind of just pick yourself up again and just continue on. And the other thing I would probably say is avoid any form of, you know, you see it more and more today, like, you know, like, you know, there's like programs, like, you know, funnel marketing and, you know, a lot of, you know, kind of get rich with, you know, ways of marketing and all that type of stuff. It's like, you know, these infomercials that are becoming more and more common these days, as far as like, you'll see it at the beginning of a YouTube video.
They have to stay away from that because there's always like some sort of package involved. They have to kind of create their own, you know, destiny and their own path and go that way instead of piggy banking on these really kind of questionable types of programs. We want to be very strategic in the factor of the locations because the locations that we want to host these games in have to be a walkable location just because, you know, our games are all on foot and they're kind of a mile radius from like the downtown city area. So we kind of want to expand. We want to also venture off into ways of altering our games.
So that way it gives, you know, our clients options, you know, you know, does this version, does that version, you know, so on and so forth and kind of grow with it, you know, I mean, we're in an interesting point now hitting 20 years. And like I mentioned, our purpose is to reinvent ourselves every year as best as we can, but also probably reinvented with some interesting interactive additional products. - Thank you so much, Chris. I really appreciate that update and those detailed comments along with lessons learned. And when I was working on this episode, I was like, man, you know, when you think about doing something you love and getting paid for it, isn't this the quintessential example, right?
You know, he's producing these games, these shared experiences, these interactive experiences that groups go on. And, you know, obviously people will pay to be entertained. The movie industry, the video game industry, these are multi, multi-billion dollar industries. So why wouldn't people pay for a group experience that's actually more rewarding, you know, than just going to a movie or doing something else that's passive? So to be clear, when I say, you know, doing something you love and getting paid for it, it's obviously a lot of work.
Like, it's a lot of work to put this together, but that's part of it. And my sense is that Chris loves the work, you know, and you have to, you have to love the work and the process. But when you do, if you're fortunate enough to find something that, you know, you love what you do, you love the process, then a big part of the reward is seeing the joy that spreads because of your efforts. So definitely many years of effort that have gone into building this business for Chris, but I think you can also tell that he enjoys it. And that again is the goal.
So a couple of things that he said that I really liked, he talked about how, you know, when you're trying to learn how to do all this stuff, don't concentrate just on marketing, don't concentrate just on management, focus also on creative endeavors, pay attention to creative individuals, find people that are inspirational in their own fields, not just yours, but their own fields, and then learn from them. You know, I think about that all the time, in particular working on this show. Last week we had an episode on this guy who's a construction worker and ends up, you know, creating these genuine leather notebooks. And, you know, now it's a business that's bringing in, I think six to $8,000 a month. Well, I have no background in construction.
I can't put together Ikea furniture, as I've mentioned before, I'm not handy at all. It's not my thing. So I'm never gonna go out and, you know, become a leather worker. Nevertheless, I'm still inspired by his story. I still think it's really interesting.
I'm curious about his process and what did he learn along the way and what worked and what didn't. So if you have that kind of curiosity, you can apply it in lots of different ways. And I think Chris has incorporated that throughout his business, the other Chris here, Chris Tambianakos. [Music]
Lastly, I like what he said about how, you know, if you've got this unique idea and somebody says it's not practical, you just have to kind of move that out of the way. And move forward with your idea.
You have to believe in yourself. You know, two things. You have to believe in yourself and you have to do the work. So I'm very grateful to Chris Tambianakos for sharing that update. We'll be doing these new segments throughout 2020.
So let me know what you think and who you'd like to see featured from our archives of more than 1,000 stories. This is our year of interaction. If you have a question, if you'd like to update us about your side hustle, or if you'd like to go on a scavenger hunt, just come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. About that last thing, we don't really have anything hidden for you there, but you know, if you look around the site, you might find something. Who knows?
We'll be featuring these things all throughout the year and highlights from listeners as they launch their projects. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/1132. 1-1-3-2. I'll be back tomorrow with a detailed case study in the form of a story that I think you'll like. My name is Chris Guillebeau and this is Side Hustle School.
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From the Onward Project.
