This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
All right, all right. What's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. So glad you're here.
Welcome friends, welcome listeners, welcome community, awesome people at the internet. Or if you're offline, that's cool too, as long as you were able to download this episode. This is our weekly segment, a new segment that we have introduced starting a few weeks back, all about failure, all about disasters and recovery. 'Cause I believe we can learn as much from failure as we can from success, if not more, in fact. So in this segment, we highlight mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, actual failures.
And just like our Throwback Thursday segment, you'll hear directly from Cytosilers who have struggled to get something off the ground. They'll tell you a short story of something that went very wrong, and these stories will vary. They've already varied quite a bit. But often it starts with an idea. It starts with an idea or an assumption, like what they thought would happen, and then what really happened.
And of course, what they learned from it. I really respect the courage and vulnerability of anyone who's willing to share this kind of story. And today's short story features John Lee Dumas. John Lee Dumas from his headquarters in sunny Puerto Rico. I've mentioned John several times on the show over the years.
He is one of the very few people who had a daily podcast long ago, like, you know, long before it was cool. I actually spoke to him before starting Side Hustle School so I could get his advice and hopefully avoid, you know, becoming a small business disaster myself, at least with this particular project. Last week as well, I told you about his new book, "The Common Path to Uncommon Success." Subtitle is "A Roadmap to Financial Freedom and Fulfillment." I was able to read it a bit before it came out. It's also very honest and transparent and very helpful. So you might've heard a lot about this book 'cause he's been on many different interviews over the past two weeks with the book launch.
It's doing super well on Amazon, and it couldn't happen to a more generous, hardworking guy. John is one of the hardest working people I know. So I invited him here to tell the story of one of those experiences of a time that he got it wrong. He was very gracious in sharing that experience. So I'm gonna hand it over to him and I'll come back at the end to wrap us up.
[Music]
Hey, this is Johnny Dumas, the founder and host of "Entrepreneurs on Fire." And wow, do I have a disaster story for you. Let's rewind the clock back to 2012. I was in the first year of running "Entrepreneurs on Fire," which was the first daily podcast interviewing entrepreneurs. So I definitely had my hands full finding entrepreneurs to interview on a daily basis, editing their episodes, uploading, and doing all that other jazz. And I was not having enough time to actually find ways to make money doing this thing.
So I said, "You know what, it's been a year. "I produced over 365 episodes. "I'm not really making any revenue at this time." It is time though to start finding ways to generate some dollars, some cents, some money to come into my business so I can keep doing this for the foreseeable future because I love it. I love getting to talk to amazing entrepreneurs and share their successes, their failures, their strategies and their tactics. So I sat down and I said, "How in the world can I make some money?" And I asked my audience, "What is your biggest struggle right now?" And they told me surprisingly that they were actually struggling finding ways to get their message and voice out to the world and they potentially want to start their own podcast in music or in sports or in any other number of things.
And I said, "Okay, let me now think "what I could possibly create for them "that would make so much sense "that they would pay me money for it." And I went into my closet and I sat down and I thought and I thought and I thought. And then I came up with something all on my own called Pod Platform. Pod Platform was going to be a company that I would create that would essentially say, "Hey, send me your MP3, just your recording "and I'll do the rest. "I will edit it, I'll upload it to a media host. "I will schedule it.
"I will create the show notes pages for it. "All you need to do is just hit the record button "on a microphone, interview somebody "or just talking to the mic, send me the recording "and I will do the rest." I thought this was gonna be a massive hit. I hired a number of virtual assistants. I trained them, I did all of those things. And then I pushed publish on the sales page, let my audience know and I had two people purchase.
It was a disaster. I was ready for at least 30 to 50 people to sign up for this monthly service. That would be a few hundred dollars per month to support my team that was not cheap. Now things even got worse. Within 24 hours, one person canceled.
But I was like, "You know what? "Things start slow, maybe things will pick up." And over the next couple of weeks, I was servicing this one client that I had to the best of my ability. But it finally dawned on me that this was doomed for disaster when I got an email in the middle of the night from this individual who said, "You forgot to take out the UM at a minute 27, 34. "Do this now, I need this to be done "before tomorrow morning." And I was like, "What am I doing? "I've signed to no more clients.
"There's no interest whatsoever. "And I need to shut this down." So I refunded that individual all of their money. I had to let go of that entire team, unfortunately, and I had to sit down and say, "What did I do wrong?" And what did I actually do wrong? Well, I never asked my audience if they would like this. They just told me what they were struggling with.
I created what I thought would be the solution, but I never actually proved the concept with them before I sat down and created it. I just assumed they would want what I was going to create for them. The moral of the story is I never created another product or service or community or anything without first proving the concept with my audience. The next thing that I did was podcast was Paradise, and I just approached it in a completely different way where I said, "Hey, I'm gonna create a community "that's gonna teach you how to create, grow, "and monetize your own podcast with video tutorials, "with templates, with a Facebook group for community, "but I'm not even gonna start creating this "unless I get 20 people to pay me $250 right now. "This won't even be open.
"Paradise doors will not open for another 45 days "'cause I haven't even started creating it yet. "I'm being honest with you. "But if you want to be a part of the early birds "and help me create this, and pay $250 now, "and save $250, 'cause when the doors open in 45 days, "it'll be $500." And I had 35 people sign up over the weekend, prove the concept, and now as I'm standing here today, Paradise has been running for over eight years. We have over 6,000 members. It's generated over $7 million, and it's one of our major revenue streams at Entrepreneurs on Fire.
So Podcaster's Paradise was as amazing of a success as Pod platform was a absolute disaster. But again, I learned from that disaster of Pod platform and applied it to all the future things that I did. [Music]
John, thank you so much for sharing. Really appreciate that. Definitely sounds like Podcaster's Paradise was the way to go.
I had actually never heard of the previous service that he mentioned, but that's probably because it did work out so well. I've definitely heard of Podcaster's Paradise. 6,000 members and $7 million, you heard it from him. So I think that counts as a pretty successful recovery. I'm really grateful to him for helping us out with this segment.
I want to encourage you to check out his website, eofire.com. You can also subscribe to Entrepreneurs on Fire wherever you get your podcast. I have been a guest, I think, two or three times now. And do check out the new book. Again, it's called "The Common Path to Uncommon Success." You can find that, of course, on Amazon or your local bookstore or wherever books are sold.
If you have a question, if you'd like to update us about your side hustle, if you've got some feedback, whatever it is, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/1553. Doing my best to catch up to Entrepreneurs on Fire, 1553. Thank you so much for joining today. I hope you subscribe.
I hope you'll come back tomorrow. But mostly, I hope you do something for yourself. So take a moment to just do one thing today to get closer to a goal you believe in. I'll try to do that as well, and then I'll be back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
You're listening to "Side Hustle School." [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
