Mother-Daughter Team Starts Squeaky-Clean Soap Shop

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

One of the questions that I hear from time to time, especially when I do media, if I have a book coming out or somebody wants to feature something about the podcast, I often encounter this pseudo skeptical question, which goes something like this, "These stories are really great, but can everybody do this? Or can anybody do this? Is every person out there able to somehow start their little business while they're also working their full-time job and being a mom or a dad or looking after grandparents or going to school or dealing with whatever else that you're dealing with in life? Is it really fair to expect that everybody can do this?" And to me, my response is like, "Well, people are doing this in lots of different ways." And not everybody is trying to build a six figure or a seven figure business. We've had lots of stories of people doing that, which I think is amazing and always inspires me, but we're all in different parts of life and we all have different goals. So

do I believe that every person can do something? Absolutely, of course. And that's been one of the greatest things about this podcast is to be able to kind of shine a spotlight on lots of different stories and people from all walks of life who have those different goals, but yet we're united by this shared value of like, it would be great to make money apart from your paycheck. It would be great to get paid from more than one source, not just your employer, ideally so that you're not dependent on that employer, whether you keep working that job or not. I mean, that's ultimately the goal. So yes, I do believe

everyone can do something and that's why I'm excited to keep bringing you these stories. This is episode 1380, 1380. And in this story, while staying up late one night, a mom and her 10 year old daughter decide that they want to start a business. The first iteration proves to be complicated and messy, but they clean up their act and start a squeaky clean homemade soap shop. That's what I'm going to tell you about today. It's coming up after

this quick message from our sponsor. Late one night in January of 2020, Erica Hackett and her 10 year old daughter Jada couldn't fall asleep. So instead, they decided to stay up and talk. At one point, Jada said that she wanted to start a business. Erica asked her what kind and Jada said she wanted to make lip gloss. Inspired, they wasted no time. That same night, they watched a few YouTube

videos and other online tutorials. Erica ordered all the supplies they needed to get started. When everything arrived, the mother daughter team got to work making their first batch of lip gloss. And they hated everything about it. It turns out that making lip gloss is harder than it seems. It's also incredibly messy. This was not the business of Jada's

sleepless dreams. But they bought a lot of supplies. So instead of wiping the slate clean, Erica started researching what else they could be used for. Through her googling, she learned that lip gloss and soap had a lot of common ingredients. Thus, it was decided they were going to make their own soap. The first recipe they tried was for whipped soap. From there,

they experimented with other kinds like bath bomb crumbles and body mooses. Soap beat out lip gloss by a wide margin. They had found their business. For the next five months, Erica and Jada worked to launch their new soap side hustle, called Dreamstar. After a couple of false starts with other online stores, they made a website on a platform called BigCommerce. Jada designed a logo. They hired an illustrator to bring it to life.

Once that was done, they apply the logo to the labels and website. Dreamstar launched in May 2020. That's right, this is prime pandemic time. They received their first order within an hour of launching from one of Erica's best friends. The next day, they received their very first request from a wholesaler. They worked to build up their social media presence,

starting accounts on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest. Right now, the majority of their customers comes from those social accounts, as well as Reddit. But that's not all. Erica has a few friends with large online followings, and they've pitched in to help promote. In particular, vegan activist and TikTok social media star Tabitha Brown recently featured Dreamstar products on her Very Good Mondays YouTube series. After that, sales went through

the roof. Within the day after it aired, they had completely sold out. Since launching in May, Erica and Jada have made $11,000. It's been hard to keep the items in stock, since it's just the two of them working from their kitchen. Not only that, but Erica has fallen into the slippery slope of working too much on her side hustle.

She would work on Dreamstar late into the night, after her day job, and on the weekends. At first, she wanted to have the company take off and become a household brand immediately. But eventually, she realized she needed to make herself take time away from both her day job and the hustle. Despite the struggles, Erica has loved the experience. One of her favorite parts is watching Jada's entrepreneurial skills come to the surface. Jada finds gifts

and writes captions for them. She picks out scents and colors for the new products. Not only that, but Erica has loved learning that she can do more than just draw electricity lines all day, which is what she does for her full-time job. With Dreamstar, she's been able to tap into her creativity. She would love to make it her full-time gig one day, and perhaps even open a brick-and-mortar shop.

Congratulations to Erica and Jada. I loved learning about Dreamstar Cosmetics. You can see that on Instagram at dreamstarcosmetics.com. Of course, we're going to link it up on the show notes page as well. Two quick notes. I wanted to mention BigCommerce. I don't have

any relationship with BigCommerce or any other online sales platform like Shopify, but I often talk about Shopify and a couple of others. I don't know if I've talked much about BigCommerce. This was an alternative that was really good for Erica. She found that after she had tried a couple other platforms, one of them didn't have a payment plan. That was really important to her. Then another platform kept freezing her payments. She was having all these little

issues. When she switched to BigCommerce, everything's been going well. They are, of course, at bigcommerce.com. Erica also had a note for us where she said, "The struggles that I've encountered mostly come from just wanting everything quickly." I'm just forgetting that I literally just launched in May of 2020 during a pandemic. I tend to be hard on myself at times. I've

learned that everything will take time and anything worth having is worth working for and waiting for and nurturing. I really like that. I'm going to try to take that advice to heart myself. We'll see how that goes. Listener's inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Thank you for

joining me on this journey both today and for however long you've been listening. Our show notes for today are at sidehustleschool.com/13801380. Of course, if you've got a comment or question for the show, that would be at sidehustleschool.com/questions. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. A new episode comes out every day. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.

From the Onward Project.