This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey, hey, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. I hope you have enjoyed the first month of the year. It has continued the tradition of 2020 and being rough in lots of ways with COVID still being a major issue in so many parts of the world. Yet hope is on the way.
And also we've all learned a lot. At least I have learned a bit over what is almost now an entire year of dealing with this situation and just trying to adjust and be responsible for whatever it is that we can have control over, which is not a lot. But when you focus on those things, you tend to be a lot happier. At least that has been my observation. So I hope you're doing okay.
Today's story, after getting sore feet while using his standup desk, an engineer creates an inner soul for his shoes, becoming the sole proprietor of a successful side hustle. I did enjoy that one. There's more to come. I remember when I first got a standing desk a few years ago, I had exactly the same problem that this guy had. You'll hear more about it in the story.
I thought the desk was really cool, but I could only use it a couple of hours a day. And fortunately I got one that was easily adjustable. So I just kind of went back and forth. And these days I'm not using one at all, but I do try to walk around a lot throughout the day. Anyway, the story, engineer sells his soul to aspiring barefooters.
That story's coming up in just 30 seconds after this quick shout out to our sponsor. Stay tuned. [Music]
John Bergervot works as an engineer for a medical device company. A few years ago, he was given a standup desk at his office. Now at first this seemed like a huge win.
He had heard the benefits of standing over sitting all day and hoped it would help him reach new heights. Unfortunately, the positive stories didn't match his own experience. What the ergonomic experts in Silicon Valley types don't talk about is that there's usually a serious adjustment period for your feet when going from sitting to standing for several hours a day. In fact, the transition can be soul destroying. After a time, John found it difficult to stand at all due to the discomfort.
And he often found himself contorting into weird positions. Turns out the standing desk, which was introduced to help posture problems was now causing new ones. Rather than throwing out the idea completely, John began looking into how he could improve his experience. The first thing he looked to was his shoes. He wore expensive yet not quite comfortable dress shoes to work every day.
He realized they had to go. He replaced them with a pair of Vivo Barefoot minimalist shoes. Barefoot style shoes have a very thin sole, usually no more than a few millimeters, and what's called a low drop. The drop is the difference in the width of the sole from the back to the front of the shoe. John's dress shoes had a drop of 10 millimeters or a bit less than half an inch.
The Vivo's zero, no drop at all. John had read that barefooting your way to comfort was a long game. It takes him getting used to, but the payoff in the end would be the ability to stand for hours in complete comfort. John, forever the engineer, looked for ways to speed this up. Specifically, he looked into the inner sole of his new shoes.
As expected, due to the barefoot nature of the shoe, it was incredibly thin and also removable. He thought he could make a new inner sole that could make the transition to barefootedness a little more bearable. He conducted some research on insoles and the companies that manufacture them, along with the materials they used. Armed with that knowledge, he began making some calls. It turned out that many businesses operating in the space provided free samples.
He took advantage of this and soon had a handful of different materials he could use to experiment. Once received, he cut his favorite material into the shape of an insole for his shoes and sealed two layers together under heat before slotting them in. The next day at work, he felt liberated. Once received, he cut his favorite material into the shape of an insole and sealed two layers together under heat before slotting them in. The next day at work, he felt liberated.
His feet no longer ached and perhaps more importantly, he had a spark of inspiration. It was outstanding. John knew that wearing barefoot-style shoes was beneficial and that people struggled to make the transition from more conventional footwear. That gave him confidence that he might be able to sell his insoles to others, at least the ones who were struggling the way he was. He signed up for a 60-day free trial from Shopify and bought a heat press off Craigslist for $150.
Soon, he was up and running with the business name North Soul. He hopped on Facebook and joined a minimalist shoe group. At first, he just watched the conversations and waited to see if anybody was having the same issues he did. Sure enough, there were a few people experiencing the problem. After they posted, he sent a direct message to them and recommended his new product.
The first response came from a woman based in the UK. She commented that his price, $30, was too high and that Amazon had something similar for just $8. But John knew that type of insole would compress within a month and then be useless thereafter. So he made a note. When the month was up, he circled back and asked her how her soles were, her soles, you know, the ones she put in her shoes.
As suspected, those soles had compressed and she became his first customer. He continued to slowly pick up more customers. He also began marketing to Instagram users who had a lot of followers. In some cases, they requested a sample, but in others, John contacted them directly. This proved to be effective and soon, 90% of his website's traffic was coming from influencers, profile pages, or blogs.
This method of marketing combined with direct outreach through Facebook has seen Northsole grow to $1,000 a month side hustle, which puts John in an exciting position. He knows that to grow more, he'll have to invest more in inventory and try other more scalable marketing strategies, perhaps including paid advertising. If his success so far is anything to go by, this next phase of Northsole is sure to be a shoe-in. Maybe it'll even become his sole purpose. [Music]
Awesome, well, congratulations to John on his sole proprietorship.
And let's talk a bit here about the price. This is the thing that kind of stood out to me in addition to what might be an obvious lesson about the problem, the solution, understanding that a lot of people have this pain, a lot of people are transitioning to standing desks, presumably some people are still transitioning to barefoot running shoes or just barefoot shoes in general. But I wanna talk about this question of the price because this is a challenge. And a lot of businesses have encountered this whole thing about, oh, but I can get this product for so much less on Amazon, that kind of objection. And what I mean here by this objection, I don't mean the question of getting exactly the same thing on Amazon or elsewhere online.
That's kind of a different issue. I mean, what he encountered where it's not actually the same thing, like he was making a product that was substantially better, definitely had higher quality. So it's not the same thing that was sold for much less, but people assume that it is, right? People just look at it and say, well that, why should I pay that when I can get this for a lower price, even though that's not truly true. So in that situation, you need to make this argument front and center.
It needs to be something that you respond to right away preemptively. So on his website, northsole.co, which we will link up in the notes, of course, John understands this and he includes some testimonials from happy customers. Right on the homepage, there are several customers talking about how these made a difference. And I think there's even one specifically that says, one comment on Facebook that says, this guy's insoles are much better. My memory foam ones lasted about six weeks before squishing to nothing under the pressure points.
John's are still providing cushioning after over a year. I tend to think the more you can hammer that message in, the better, like make that very, very explicit. So I think that's how you handle that situation, which is not easy because people always comparison shop. They're always looking for the lowest deal, but you want to make that clear argument that this is better. All right, listeners, I hope you enjoyed this story.
Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Today's notes, including links to Northsole, anything else I mentioned in the episode will be at sidehustleschool.com/1492. That is episode 1492. I'm so glad you're out there. As we progress through 2021, I will be here every single day.
I hope you'll join me as well. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
