This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey, what's up, side hustle school, friends, listeners, community. Welcome, my name is Chris Guillebeau. Today is our Throwback Thursday segment. Every week we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them. Last week we heard from a blogger in India who earns affiliate commissions on financial products.
This is a market that's pretty mature in the US, but still fairly new in India. So he's been able to profit from it quite well and also position himself as an authority even as the market matures. Today in our latest feature, we'll hear from Alex Bricker, an English teacher who turned his passion for verbs into online income. Specifically, Alex made a game to help non-native speakers of English learn phrasal verbs, which are verbs followed by a preposition that kind of changes the meaning of the verb. So like hop on, come over, come back, go there.
It's a concept that can be confusing to people learning English as a second language. Now he first featured Alex many days ago, in fact, it was about two years ago in episode 499. So what has happened since? Well, a number of things have gone well, but not everything. So I'm glad that Alex shared a story of a significant misstep, a big mistake he made in addition to some successes.
So I always appreciate that transparency from folks. Let's hear directly from him and I'll come back at the end to wrap us up. [Music]
- My name is Alex Bricker, I'm from Fort Collins, Colorado. And I founded the company ESL with Purpose, which developed the product called Phrase It. And I was last on episode 499.
So if you wanna hear about Phrase It, and when I got started with that, that episode talks about that. I basically create English language learning games to help students have fun practicing difficult parts of the English language, just improves lives. And I believe that if you learn English, it's gonna change your life. You're gonna get a better job, better opportunity. So that's why I do what I do.
The idea came from when I was in the classroom teaching, I've been an ESL teacher for over 10 years, mostly paid roles, a lot of volunteer as well over the years. And one of the things that I noticed students were getting really confused about was our concept of phrasal verbs. And a phrasal verb is a two or three word construct that has a verb and a preposition. So like, go up, come back to, think about. Most other languages don't have that construct the way English language has it.
And I noticed my students were struggling with this when they left the classroom. Like, this is how American English speakers would talk to them and they would be so confused. And so I thought, oh, something needs to be done here. There aren't any products developed to teach this specifically. There are some worksheets and there's some stuff in books, but for this topic, I thought, wow, I need to create something that's gonna help students in a fun way, enhance their learning.
I've been continuing to grow Phrase It and ESL with Purpose over the years, the last few years, and I still need a day job. So I work at a marketing agency actually full time. So when I read the book, "The Bunny Tree," I'm like, oh, I resonate with the character because I get it. And it was a really good read to go through that book. ESL with Purpose is definitely a passion that's gonna continue to just take my extra time and effort to put towards it.
And the part of that is I've refined my vision to really focusing on the two audiences, which are teachers and students. And also my YouTube channel has just grown and I continue to get around five to 20 subscribers a day now on YouTube. So it's been really fun to see that. I'm gonna say one thing that set me back so I'm not as far as ahead as I'd like to be, but I got sidetracked in another investment on a different product I tried to sell on Amazon that was a toy related product. It was fun, it was cool, but I lost $17,000 doing it because the market was oversaturated.
I ran a deep discount on the product and I didn't factor in my cost of goods. And so that I really learned how to really calculate your, do your math. If you're gonna run a business, do your math. So that really helped me learn that. And I realized that I was chasing money more than my passion when I did that.
And for me to have a sustainable long-term business that's gonna be an effective side hustle, it's gotta be something that I'm passionate about. And so that's what I'm focusing on now. I know that a lot of people on Amazon, what they'll do is they'll look for what's selling and what's hot and they'll just try to copy that and they'll do the same thing and they'll try to make a lot of money. And that's fine, if that's your thing, go for it. However, I lost a lot of money in doing it that way because the market I chose is oversaturated.
And so everybody then started selling the exact same thing and private labeling it themselves. And then it's like, you have to compete so heavily with ads, you've gotta know all these other little tricks and things to make sure your listing gets on page one. You can do that. Another piece of advice I would say is grow your email list. And that is key for building long-term trust 'cause of email, you can communicate anytime.
You can send your email out and say, "Hey, I've got this new video I launched on YouTube." Or, "Hey, I'm launching a new product." Or you can just send something like a free, something valuable to your audience for free. Just say, "Hey, I found this English language video, "I thought you might enjoy it." That kind of stuff, you can continue to communicate and build trust with your audience. So as far as someone following in my footsteps to do something similar, just find your market and don't give up. - All right, thank you so much, Alex. Really appreciate that detailed update as well as the transparency and just hearing about the misstep, how you spent a bunch of money trying to create a different product on Amazon and then realized it wasn't the right path.
So I'm glad you've been able to regroup on that. And yeah, this is the kind of market teaching English as a second language, helping with something really specific like what Alex is doing. It's the kind of market that's huge, it's tremendous. Like so many people are interested in these kinds of resources. So that's good.
That's why YouTube is a great platform for it. I'll tell you about his YouTube channel in a second. And the challenge is because there are so many resources out there for free, how do you make money with it? So that's why in Alex's original episode, when we focused on the game he made, it's actually a game that teachers can buy or students can buy. I think that is kind of the key.
I think that is the key, rather than just providing more online education because there is so much of that already. So in any case, I'm grateful to him for helping us out with this segment. We're gonna keep doing these throughout the rest of the year. They've been very popular. Let me know who you'd like to see featured from our archives of more than 1,000 stories.
2020 is our year of interaction. If you have a question, if you'd like to update us about your side hustle, for all of that, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. And if you'd like to learn more about phrasal verbs, just hop on over or hop over to Alex's YouTube channel. It is ESL with purpose. So just go to YouTube and type in ESL with purpose.
I hope you saw what I did there. Hop on over. I did something with that in the title as well. English language game throws down Amazon Gauntlet. This concludes the episode for the day, as well as your bonus grammar lesson of the day.
All right, thanks so much. Your show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/1307. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
