This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hello, hello, what's up? And welcome to "Side Hustle School." My name is Chris Guillebeau, your host. All throughout 2020, I have been answering listener questions, which has been so much fun. I have learned a lot through the process myself. Hopefully, our longtime listeners have learned as well.
We've just heard so many different issues and challenges, obstacles, as well as successes and things that have worked out or things that haven't. Just really interesting stuff. And so, got a great question here today. I mean, they just keep rolling along. Today's listener has a question that I know many other listeners will relate to, which by the way, that's our whole goal here is to help individuals, but then also to kind of teach or share by proxy to understand the common experiences, the common challenges that we all have.
So I often talk about starting where you are. Like, if you don't know the end goal, you don't necessarily have to reverse engineer your ultimate outcome if you don't know what it is, but there's always a first step you can take. And so when I say start where you are, sometimes I mention how, even if you don't have a lot of social media followers, you still know people, like you have a network. And that network may be critical, in fact, to getting the word out about your new project. But of course, you don't necessarily want to be selling your friends and family all the time.
You might not want to do it at all, depending on what it is that you are selling. So how do you then manage this conflict of values? How do you introduce your side hustle to your personal network? As I said, our listener has a really good example of this. She's got a project that is pretty cool, and she's just kind of wondering how to handle this dilemma.
So I've got a quick message from our sponsor. We're gonna talk about this in some detail. How do you market sell to your personal network of friends or family or coworkers? [Music]
Hi, Chris, this is Eunji Chung from Los Angeles, California. And I've been listening to the show for about a year now.
And it's really helped catalyze the launch of my recent STEM coloring book for kids regarding cell biology. My question is regarding how to get over feeling somewhat like a saleswoman or a salesman to your personal network. To be more specific, I love my day job as a biomedical engineering professor, and I would never give it up. Having said that, I wanted to channel my extra entrepreneurial energy. Along the way to completing the coloring book, I knew the best way to start would be to advertise to my existing network of scientists as well as other moms.
However, I didn't wanna feel too salesy and hence awkward to people that I would regularly run into. When the coloring book was right around finished, COVID-19 became a pandemic. And so I launched a coloring book on Amazon and Etsy, thinking it can be a great homeschooling resource for parents during this time and with all proceeds donated to the CDC. Both of which were a great boost for me to pull the trigger and go live as the attention was not focused on my own personal gain. I feel like others could struggle with this internal conflict as well.
And I was wondering if you had any insight and recommendations on how to introduce your side hustle to your current network. Thanks, love your show and hope you're seeing Steve. Bye. [Music]
Lunci, thank you so much for sharing. Thank you for calling in.
Congratulations on launching your project. A STEM coloring book for kids about cell biology. This is so cool. I want to take a look. The listeners, if you want to see it, check out Lunci's coloring book.
Just go search for her shop, A Little Science on Etsy. So if you're on etsy.com, search for her shop, A Little Science. The title of the coloring book itself is A Little Cell Biology. Which by the way, side note, great way to set herself up for a series, right? Because the brand is A Little Science and then you've got the first coloring book, A Little Cell Biology.
I'm not a scientist, but I would imagine there are some further topics she could explore in future books. Okay, and then one more side note, she mentioned, Lunci mentioned that her, all the proceeds are going to the CDC during this time. So as she alluded to that, kind of obviates some of her concern about feeling salesy. Like it's easier to promote something that you've made if the proceeds are going to charity. But I think it's helpful for this conversation to not assume that you're donating your profits to charity because ultimately it's great that she's doing that, but this is Sadasul school, I want you to be able to make a profit.
So assuming you have made something that you are selling for a profit, I think it's best for your friends and family to be more of a support network than a lead generation tool. Like your friends and family are not necessarily going to be your client base, but there is a lot that they can still do to help. Some of them may choose to buy from you just because they want to help. Like I send my mom a free copy of my book, of course, when it comes out, but then she goes and buys more herself, which is amazing, thank you, mom. That's different than asking them to buy it.
I'm not like sending my mom emails, hey, will you buy my book, you know? But what you want their help with, whether it's your mom or somebody else in your support network, is in becoming an ambassador. If you have a lot of people in your network, like Oonji does, who actually kind of do meet the target market for this project, well, they probably do as well. And so you're looking for a network effect here. You might even proactively offer to send them a free copy, either for their kids, if they're a parent, or for nieces and nephews, or for somebody else that they know.
So often your friends and family will be very active in kind of promoting you in a way that you might not want to do, because you're concerned about being salesy, which I understand, but if it's your friend, just think about it from the other perspective. Imagine that your friend, you're a scientist and your friend has created this coloring book, and you look at it and you're like, wow, this is really cool. Of course, I'm gonna help, I'm gonna post about it, I'm gonna tell other people about it, and I'm not really selling anything because I'm just talking about my friend, okay? So again, I think you're looking for a network effect from your network, not necessarily trying to sell to your network, especially for a low priced product, like a coloring book. And I do the same with my books, like I have a lot of author friends, and when they have a book coming out, they will often send me an advanced copy, and they're not really asking me to go and buy more copies, even though sometimes I do, just because I want to support them.
They're asking for my help, you know, if it's a good fit to introduce this book to other readers. And of course I do the same thing when I have a book coming out. So I think that's what you're looking for in terms of that network of friends and family, the network effect of becoming an ambassador. As I said, wonderful project. It's so fun to see what people are doing out there.
If you have a question or an update for us, if you just want to let us know what's going on, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. We'll be featuring them throughout the rest of the year along with more updates from other listeners as they launch and grow those projects. Thank you so much for listening out there. You are awesome. Do come back tomorrow.
Much more is coming up. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the "Onward Project."
