This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey there, what's up? Welcome back, my name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. We're beginning a new week together and we're gonna begin it with a pretty awesome story. I call this a gold rush story.
I have this category of projects I think of as being like a gold rush in the sense that they're a bit unique. They usually bring in a lot of money in a short period of time and there's probably a bit of luck involved or circumstance. Now the thing is it's not like you can immediately replicate what you hear in a gold rush story. Like the people who were successful in the original California gold rush were the first people. Or maybe they weren't always first, but the point is not everyone who pursued the California gold rush got rich.
Still, I think you can learn from these stories because luck doesn't usually come out of nowhere. And what you'll hear today is about how someone did get lucky, but they kind of positioned themselves to be in a place where they could be lucky. This is a pretty cool affiliate story of an army veteran who makes more than $600,000 in less than a year. As I said, unusual, but you can definitely learn something from it. Now also all week, we're looking at side hustle failure stories as submitted by you, the listeners.
Now I ask you to call in and say, what was your biggest side hustle failure? If you've tried something that hasn't worked out, most of us have. I've learned a lot from listening to the calls and emails over the past few days. So before I tell you the gold rush story, let's jump right into a couple of those. Listeners, what didn't work out?
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Hi, my name's Nikki. And my biggest side hustle failure was a small little yoga studio. I let myself get talked into partnerships and the side hustle project that I wanted to be small and manageable became a big giant thing and a mess. And it about took me under and almost made my main hustle fail. It's a great question.
I hope nobody's scared to fail and learn from it. Thank you for inspiring. [Music]
Hey, Nikki, thank you so much for the message. Thank you for sharing that story and for your words of advice. I'm glad that failure didn't take you under.
And I completely agree regarding being careful about partnerships. You said that very well. And I appreciate your encouragement to the other listeners as well. Keep hustling. [Music]
Steve Delerwell was working at a paper company when he struck gold, earning an unexpected $650,000 from his new side hustle in one year.
How did this happen? Well, I'll tell you. First, Steve was born and raised in the small town of Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. He had served three overseas tours for the army before returning to his home state, getting married, and getting trained in computer programming. Outside of his full-time job, he had been experimenting with designing mobile apps.
When I say designing apps, he'd actually gotten pretty creative because he wasn't designing apps from the ground up. He had found a way to buy source code, reposition some existing apps by changing the graphics, maybe adding a feature or two, and then re-uploading them to the app store. Now, this process is a bit technical. It's not really what we're focusing on here. I'll just mention that what he was doing is acceptable when you purchase source code, and especially if you modify the app in some significant way.
So he called this hustle One Zero Apps. Now, as part of this project, he signed up with an ad company, which meant he would make money off the ad impressions that his apps generated, sometimes up to $2 every time someone downloaded an app from the ad. This is what he thought his business model was. So Steve decided to start a blog called beardedrobotapps.com to document this attempt to make money from apps, along with his trials and tribulations in the app store. The blog cost him a grand total of $20 a month, and apart from that, he had no setup or ongoing costs.
He used the blog to publish revenue figures for all of his apps separated by publisher so that readers knew who he was making the most money with. And this ad revenue was generating about 600 to $900 a month, which is pretty good, right? Like good story so far, but here's where things got really crazy. Steve discovered that the ad company he was using was called RevMob, had an affiliate program where he would earn 10% commission from anyone he happened to refer to them. He thought, well, this isn't really my business model, but why not?
You may remember that last week I told you, why not sign up for Amazon's affiliate program, like there's no downside to it. So that's kind of what Steve's thinking was here, doesn't take much work. So he signed up and he provided the link on that blog he was writing. And then not much changed for about a year. He kept trucking along with his project, earning between 500 and $1,000 a month, not really getting much traction beyond that, but still learning as he went.
Then suddenly, one day in 2015, Steve woke up and discovered $13,000 sitting in his PayPal account. This money was sent from that ad company's affiliate program that he'd signed up for a year ago. And at first he thought it was a mistake. So he even emailed them to ask, but there was no mistake. It turned out he had referred a developer who had a big hit the previous month, made $130,000.
And that meant Steve received $13,000 as his 10% commission. Now, after recovering from the shock, Steve celebrated by paying off his truck within days. He wanted to shed his debt in order to be free to start more side hustles. And naturally he was suddenly rejuvenated, but the success didn't end there. The money just kept rolling in month after month.
The next month from the same source, his payout was $35,000, then $45,000, then $60,000 and so on. In fact, his highest month ever from this gold rush was over $100,000. And this led to Steve learning the little known facts that PayPal won't let you transfer $100,000 or more to your bank account. So he had to transfer $99,999.99. And then the rest later.
When all was said and done and the proverbial ad dust settled, Steve had brought in $650,000 for the year. There was no overhead, no costs, it was all profit. And this was all because he had signed up for that affiliate program for an ad company he didn't even work for, advertising an app he didn't even own. Now you could say this was a lucky break, and perhaps it was. But Steve says if he hadn't invested a whole year in consistently publishing that blog, or if he hadn't had the foresight to become an affiliate, there's no way it could have happened.
So he did get lucky, but he also worked hard to make that luck possible. He says while the experience overall was incredibly positive, of course, he did have some challenges. He had never made anywhere close to this amount of money before. So he said he didn't know who to trust or where to go for advice when all of a sudden all this money is arriving in his bank account. But still the benefits of having all this money arriving in his bank account far outweighed the challenges.
With the sudden profit, Steve was able to use cash to buy 20 acres of land and build his dream house for his family. At the end of the year, the money stream did eventually run dry when the ad company changed the rules of their affiliate program. I suppose they got tired of sending him $100,000 a month. So Steve quit sending referrals to them and then the cash stopped. But his side hustling didn't stop.
He soon launched a new project called remotejobber.com, a job aggregate site for remote tech jobs. This venture also didn't cost him a cent since he set it up himself. He now spends about 10 hours a week on this site. It's making a more modest $1,000 a month through Google AdSense or other affiliate links he puts on the site. Even though it's far less money than what he saw through the gold rush, he's still excited about it and he hopes to grow it further.
Throughout the whole time that all that money was arriving, Steve never quit his day job because he wisely recognized he had no control over it and it might not last forever. Still, now that he's had this great experience and is starting new projects, he does eventually hope to become a full-time hustler. And of course, he's hoping his lucky streak continues. [Music]
Was that an awesome story or what? Now, listen, I know there are far more stories on side hustle school of these successes that are like $1,000 a month or $2,000 a month or whatever.
And that's because stories like that are much more common. Like if I told you a story every day of someone who made a half a million dollars or more in a year, in some ways it would be awesome. In other ways, you might think, well, gee, is that really realistic? Like that's great for that person, but is that really gonna happen to me? And the reality is most likely it won't happen that way.
But I do think there are at least a couple things to learn from this. First of all, sometimes it does happen. So whenever you hear people say, oh, this is a fantasy, this is not reality, you can say, well, maybe it doesn't happen all the time, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen at all. Second, if you see an opportunity, why not take it? If he hadn't signed up for that affiliate program, not knowing necessarily that anything was gonna happen with it, he wouldn't be positioned for that huge windfall that arrived.
And speaking of that, ask yourself, what can you do to position yourself for the kind of success you want to see? Like if you want to have more luck, how can you take more chances? How can you create more opportunities for something to arrive in your PayPal account unexpectedly? So again, I think that's pretty amazing. Congratulations, Steve.
I love that he's an Army veteran as well. As this new week rolls out, remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Today's show notes, including a link to Steve's blog and his new project, Remote Jobber, are at sidehustleschool.com/156. We've got much more rolling out the rest of the week. I'm so glad you're out there.
Have a wonderful rest of the day. I'm Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
