This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Greetings and welcome. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. The only show that brings you a different story every day of an employee who starts a side hustle without quitting their day job. Now I'm in Amsterdam this week.
I'm doing a talk at a tech-oriented event. It's a great event, lots of good people here. But it does remind me of this contrast between the business-y startup-y world and the kind of people I'm trying to reach with this show. So there's a lot of talk here about what's next for startups and how the world of investment capital is changing. So that can be interesting to hear about, but it's definitely not what I'm focused on.
In fact, the people I make this show for are like Tanika, who's featured in today's story. Tanika is an oncology nurse who works 12-hour shifts, yet has been able to start a project that helps people while making money for her. And not an insignificant amount of money either. We're talking about something like $60,000 last year. And that isn't something that's gonna be featured at a tech event or anything that focuses on traditional startups.
But to me, I actually think it's more interesting. And that's why I make the show. So enough preamble. Let's get straight to her story right after this quick message. [Music]
Tanika Randall's story is all about growth.
Growth she's experienced in her personal life, her professional career, and even hair growth. Tanika, or T, as she's more commonly known, has created a profitable side hustle selling natural hair products that promote healthy hair while also stimulating follicle growth. And T comes to this hustle through both professional and personal experience. Professionally, she is an oncology nurse who often works 12-hour night shifts from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.
And in 2009, she started making hair products for herself. She calls herself a healthy hair junkie and wasn't thrilled with the existing products she could find. They were full of questionable chemicals like parabens, sulfites, formaldehyde, and artificial colors and fragrances. Not only that, the results were pretty unimpressive. T wanted more natural products for her hair and she liked the idea of creating them herself.
But all of that got put on hold when a bone marrow test revealed that she had leukemia. Fortunately, she pulled through all the treatments cancer-free, but five rounds of strenuous chemotherapy had left her completely bald. Dismayed, yet victorious, she began to research the best ways to naturally regrow her hair. And that's when she discovered the world of essential oils and all of their powerful properties. She tried out a series of combinations before settling on her own unique recipe.
She then shared her newfound knowledge with her friends and family so that they could benefit from her research and she began developing new hair care products. At some point, she even branched out to include soaps and body scrubs. And she posted photos of these experimental products online. As her hair regrew, people kept asking what her secret was. How did she get it to grow back so thick and healthy after chemo?
One day, she realized she was creating products that others might actually want to purchase themselves. And better yet, her target audience was right there in front of her. So in the fall of 2014, she decided to take the plunge and begin accepting orders. She did this entirely through Facebook, no website at all at first. The response she received was overwhelmingly positive, so she decided to build for the future.
She got back to doing research, the same skillset that had enabled her to create the hair care products in the first place. And she started learning about online business. She used the service Legal Zoom to set up her LLC, calling the business Tease Hair Secret. That same season, fall of 2014, she attended her first event as an official vendor. It was a local women's networking event.
And she said, "I made a few hundred dollars "at that first event. "While that may not mean much to some people, "to me, it was a lot." And more than just making some extra money, she saw there was a real market for her products. She took that first few hundred dollars in revenue, as well as what she'd made on Facebook, and put it back into Tease Hair Secret. In total, she spent about $1,500 to get it going. $800 of that was recouped, as it went toward buying ingredients and supplies directly related to creating her products.
She also bought flyers and business cards, and eventually set up a simple website, using a platform called Volusion, so that she could officially take orders online, instead of through Facebook. Now, all of these investments paid off. In 2015, Tease cleared more than $20,000. Aside from spending a few thousand dollars more on ingredients, to create prototypes of potential new products, she managed to keep all her costs extremely low. She also got to work on social media.
When she had picked her name back in late 2014, she grabbed all the different accounts, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, et cetera, and in 2015, she focused on making a presence for herself through all these different accounts. She also joined more networking and entrepreneurial groups in her area, and through all these efforts, she cleared $80,000 in 2016. Now, all of those social media accounts came at a bit of a price. She's now trying to be more targeted, because she says that first year of growth in 2015, she was a bit all over the place, trying to be on everything, and she realized she couldn't maintain a consistent presence on all of them. So now she's narrowed her focus to be more consistent on Facebook and Twitter, the two networks she thinks are most important, in a way that combines product promotion, sharing knowledge, and just sharing more about her own journey.
Tease's long-term goal is to make this her full-time focus sometime in the next few years. Remember that she's built this side hustle while working these long hours as a night shift oncology-registered nurse, and much of the extra income she's received went toward a down payment toward buying her first home for her children to grow up in. When Tee herself was growing up, her family moved from apartment to apartment, so being able to buy a home was a tremendous accomplishment. [Music]
Wow, so what's not to love about this story? Honestly, just about every characteristic that I consider in developing the show is represented here.
It's someone who's busy but has a desire to make something, is willing to invest in themselves. It's someone who focuses on the skills that she already has. She does learn some new skills as well, but those are related to marketing or otherwise running the business side of her project. Tanika, or Tee, loved research. She had this background as an oncology nurse, and then she had her own experience of losing her hair through chemotherapy and experimenting with different essential oils and other ingredients to create the right combination.
Lastly, she doesn't necessarily know how to do all of this when she starts. She makes a couple of mistakes, but then she figures it out. And when she makes a mistake, she course-corrects. And look at these great results. More than $60,000 last year, making something that people clearly want, and it clearly has a major impact on her life as well.
So thank you, Tee, for making my life very easy today. Your story is a perfect illustration of what I hope to demonstrate on the show. And for all who are listening, I hope you find this inspiring. But of course, I also hope you take action. I want you to have a story like Tee's.
I want you to be able to look back and say, you know, I also took the skills I have, and I found a way to use them in a different way, or I learned to adapt something. I was busy, but I chose to go for it anyway, 'cause I knew it would be worth it. And maybe I didn't know what I was doing when I started, but that's okay, I figured it out. If I made a mistake, I course-corrected. That is my mission for Side Hustle School.
And just on a super practical note, in Tee's story, she mentioned registering her business name across different social media accounts. There's actually a free service you can use called Name Check, where you can type in your name, or the potential name for any project, and it will immediately show you if any of those social accounts are taken already, or if they're available. So that's Name Check, spelled CHK. And of course, I'll link it up on the site for you today. Come over and check that out.
Everything I mentioned is at sidehustleschool.com/140. That's 140. I'm excited to bring you this week's recap tomorrow, and a whole set of new stories next week. I'm Chris Guillebeau. You are listening to Side Hustle School.
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