This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey, hey, what's up my friends? So glad you're here. My name is Chris Guillebeau. Excited to bring you a new episode of the podcast today, just as I've been doing every single day for the past 1,567 days. Whether you have been along for every one of those days or you just tuned in today and you're like, what is this thing?
Whatever the case may be, my mission is to bring you stories, tips, actionable examples of real people out there who are all finding a way to reinvent themselves, often through the form of a money-making project. That's what it's about. Those are our parameters. People with day jobs, starting side projects that happen to be profitable and usually doing so without going into debt, without spending a ton of money and by starting quickly. Now, a lot of our stories, of course, are success stories, but I believe we can learn as much from failure, if not more, in fact.
So it's with this principle in mind that we have an all new segment called Failure Friday. It's a collection of short stories all about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure. So just like our Throwback Thursday segment, you will hear directly from side hustlers who have struggled to get something off the ground. They'll tell you a short story of something that went very wrong. These stories will vary, but often it starts with an idea, an idea or an assumption, perhaps, what they thought would happen and then what really happened.
And of course, what they learned along the way. So I applaud their courage. This is so much fun to work on. Today's short story comes from a serial side hustler who makes a series of mistakes, but he also keeps going, serially, I suppose you could say. We told a successful story of his former project on episode 427, "Netflix of Restaurants Side Hustle" earns $50,000 a year.
But naturally, he had some struggles along the way, including getting crushed by both Google and Etsy, separately, in fact. He'll tell you a bit about that as well as what he's doing now, and I'll come back at the end to wrap us up. [Music]
Hi, my name is Mike Van Heidt, and I founded a few different side hustles over the years. In 2005, I founded e-crafter. e-crafter was a site where people could sell their handmade crafts online.
This actually beat Etsy to market by a few months, but it had two major problems. First, we didn't understand SEO at all. We couldn't understand how Etsy would rank for thousands of specific keywords like red baskets, and we wouldn't. The second mistake we made is that we were selling crafters a website to sell crafts, and Etsy correctly understood that it was creating a marketplace to sell arts and crafts. Needless to say, Etsy crushed us.
Once e-crafter failed, I founded Fudio 54 in 2006. Fudio 54 started because of a competition Netflix created to recommend movies. If you could beat Netflix by a certain amount, they would give you $1 million. I learned a ton about recommender systems, but when it became clear that I wasn't going to win the prize, I repurposed the algorithm I had to recommend restaurants instead. With the learnings from e-crafter, Fudio 54 did much better on SEO, and ultimately 25 million people have visited Fudio 54, and it made on average about $50,000 a year from ads.
One SEO crisis I did have happened with the Google Panda update. I was driving from Ohio to Austin, Texas for South by Southwest. I checked traffic while I was getting gas and thought the site had actually crashed, but it was still up. Looking closer, I could see that from one hour to the next, it had lost 75% of its traffic. At South by Southwest, I was able to catch Matt cuts of Google in the hallway and plead my case, but that didn't help.
Luckily, within a few years, I'd had a lot of content counteract the Panda update, and Fudio 54 had actually recovered. In recent years, between the pandemic crushing the restaurant industry and increased competition from billion and even a few trillion dollar companies, Fudio 54 has become much less profitable. Once I saw the writing on the wall, I wanted to pivot to another side hustle. In case it's not obvious, building side businesses is my passion. I found myself periodically searching for specific people that appeared occasionally as guests on podcasts, and it was frustrating that I couldn't just follow them the same way that I followed the podcast.
From this problem, iv.fm was born. About a month ago, my wife and I launched iv.fm. It is a podcast player and podcast discovery service that allows people to follow over a million guests, tags, and topics, in addition to podcasts. I took the lessons I learned from e-crafter and Fudio 54 and applied them to iv. The three most important things I learned are, one, your side hustle might not be forever, so you should always be on the lookout for new side hustle opportunities.
Two, pick your niche wisely and put your strengths against your competitors' weaknesses. And three, make sure you are solving a real problem that people have. Thank you for listening, and I hope my story helps you with your next side hustle. [Music]
Awesome, thanks so much, Mike. Really appreciate that update and all the transparency about what has gone well and not so well.
I just love how Mike is able to recover from getting crushed by Etsy, to use his words, and then getting crushed or demolished by Google in the great Google Panda update, the algorithm change that took away so much website traffic from so many sites, including his, but as you heard, he just kind of keeps going. So that's what I really respect, that perseverance and willing to adapt. His new project, as mentioned, is iv.fm. It is a new way to discover podcasts. You can check it out there, ivivy.fm, or download the app in the Apple App Store or Google Play.
If you have a question for me or an update, perhaps, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. That's where we're sourcing all this material that we've been featuring, well, for five years now, but in particular, the Failure Friday segments, the Throwback Thursday segments, and all the question and answers that we bring you each week, along with, of course, the case studies. I'm so glad you could join me today. Remember, never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. That's what this is all about, and I hope you'll come back, well, next week, but also tomorrow, because there's an episode every day.
All right, that's all for now. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to "Side Hustle School." [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
