This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey there, what's up? Welcome back. This is Chris Guillebeau for "Side Hustle School." You know, every day on the show, I'm telling you a story. Someone who starts a hustle without quitting their day job. And sometimes the story relates more to strategy.
Sometimes it relates more to tactics. Sometimes a bit of both. But in both strategy and tactics, a generally accepted truth is that what worked before, or what worked at one time, doesn't necessarily work now. And what's working now might not necessarily work in the future. This is especially true in the fast moving world of online business.
Things are changing all the time. And that's why being adaptable is one of the most important skills you can develop, no matter what industry you're in. That's what today's story illustrates. It's about how you adapt, or at least it's about how one side hustler adapted and made a big shift from selling online products like eBooks and working with affiliates, which was a common model for a long period of time, and still is for some people. But shifting from that to pursuing corporate partnerships and sponsorships through his blog.
So I'll tell you how he did that, and also talk a little bit about what I've noticed myself in some recent shifts. All of that coming up right after this. [Music]
Preston Lee hustled through his early life, selling drawings and paintings, even once pursuing a teenage snow cone stand empire. As an adult though, he fell into the working world. After graduation, he applied for jobs and got one that required him to travel about 40 minutes by train twice a day.
He also became a new dad. So all of a sudden, time was much more limited. All he had to himself were those train rides. But Preston always liked to look on the bright side, and he realized that in limiting his time so much, he was forced to improve his efficiency and effectiveness. He'd started a blog as a student, and it made a small amount of money.
So he started paying closer attention to the kind of content he was writing for this blog. The blog is called Millow, and it began with Preston just posting his thoughts on the design industry. He quickly realized he enjoyed writing about freelancing and small business much more, and his audience also connected with it much more, perhaps because he was more passionate about it. So he decided to make a change and focus entirely on the business of design. He used his train time to write, and he focused on only delivering content that really made a difference.
No fluff, no filler. It also forced him to focus on fast track product creation, which allowed him to further narrow his subject matter to promote sales of his first product, which was an ebook. He made this switch from blog to business because he was in a tight space financially. By then, he and his wife had had a second child and were living paycheck to paycheck. He had also done some bad math at some point and ended up putting a down payment on a car that costs much more than it should have.
When he realized his mistake, he was horrified. Preston had always done his best to stay ahead of money, have an emergency fund, and be conservative with spending. The new struggle was real, but it also motivated him to start building some flexibility into his income. He realized that at his day job, or really any day job, you get paid the same amount whether you hustle extra or not, but when you own a business, or at least some kind of project that brings you income, the more you hustle, the more revenue you can generate. That realization was extremely liberating, knowing that he could build the income he needed despite his employer's inability to give him a raise or a bonus.
Suddenly, he felt in control of his own destiny. Over the next year, he created more tools and resources for freelancers and built the business to about $50,000 in net income. Pretty great for something he did two hours a day. He still didn't have any more free time since he continued to work the day job, but he also noticed that the business model he had chosen was starting to shift. What he was doing before wasn't working nearly as much.
In those two hours a day, over the course of about three years, he had cycled through a number of products, eBooks, membership sites, coaching, even physical products, but sales for pretty much all of them were on the decline. He'd also recruited a group of affiliates to help promote his products, but he found them to be a big hassle related to the return he received. Since everything else was on the decline, he decided to change tactics once again, this time to explore the world of sponsorship, where his blog and business would partner with companies to create content they wanted to pay for. For example, he recently signed a deal with FreshBooks to create a podcast they would sponsor. He also worked with Shutterstock, CreativeLive, Skillshare, and several other well-known companies.
Many of the sponsorships actually came from cold emails. Preston finds companies that align well with his mission, companies that are trying to talk to the same people he is through the millow blog. He then emails someone at the company, introduces himself, and asks about their interest in partnership. It doesn't always work out, of course, but in 2016, after shifting tactics, Preston booked around $75,000 from these new sponsorships, and the year ended with $82,000 in net income from the overall revamped blog and focus. Preston now has a full year's worth of salary saved up thanks to income from his side hustle.
He's rebuilt that emergency fund, he's paid off that car, and he says if he got fired tomorrow, which he won't because he's a very good employee, he wouldn't be worried for a second. [Music]
So as I said, this is a story of adaptation and the ability to be flexible, as well as the willingness to shift tactics, is a hugely underestimated skill. Especially in the world of online business, what happens so frequently is you find something that works, and you think, oh, this is great, I've got it figured out, I'm a genius, and maybe you are a genius, but things change. Maybe you hadn't really figured out everything, you had just figured out this kind of moment in time. And so when that happens, the question is, what's the next moment in time?
What are you gonna do next? Are you gonna try to stay where you are and expect everyone to accommodate you? It doesn't usually work out super well. Or are you gonna accept reality, look on the bright side like Preston did, and find a way to adapt, find a way to do something different. Momentum really is key to these things.
And so when Preston first shifted to focus his blog much more on freelancing, he gained a lot of momentum. And he was able to develop those products which brought him to $50,000 a year, working less than two hours a day. And that was great for a while, but then he noticed this decline coming. And so very wisely, he looked around and said, what else could I do? And he realized that there were these companies who are trying to speak to the same people that he was already speaking to through his blog.
And so far has been able to make even more money by adapting this new model. Now, I like this story myself personally, because I've also seen a lot of changes in online business and how people communicate and engage. When I started writing my blog in 2008, blogging wasn't really new then, it had been around a while. But at least when I started, it still felt very fresh. It still didn't seem that hard to build an audience.
I wasn't the only one writing about alternative work and travel, but it wasn't a huge crowded field. Now, if we fast forward a few years, I feel that that has completely shifted. And so the wrong way to succeed would be to look to a time in the past and say, well, that's what worked then. If I do that same thing, I'll have the same result. Maybe you will, but most likely you won't.
So I've tried to be adaptable. I feel like I could actually be a lot more adaptable and more flexible. So I enjoy learning from stories like Preston's. But this podcast and focusing on this for all of 2017 is a big adaptation for me. I knew I wanted to do something with a new medium, but when I first started thinking about it, I also had some resistance to it.
I had both simultaneous excitement and resistance. It was exciting because it was new and fresh. I felt the resistance because it was unfamiliar. And fortunately I decided to push through and here we are now. So whether you take the lesson from Preston's story or my experience, or maybe just some things you've observed or experienced yourself, I hope you go away today thinking about how you can adapt and how you can grow and how you can change for the better.
It's not just about keeping up with something because you're an original, hopefully you're creating something, but I do think it's about being cognizant of how you can best serve people and often related how you can be the most successful in whatever side hustle you start. So I hope that's helpful. As always, remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. I love making this show for you. I hope you enjoy it.
If you'd like to learn more about Preston's blog and business and anything else I discussed today, just come over to sidehustleschool.com/125. That's for episode 125. I'll be back tomorrow, of course. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]
