This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Hey there, Side Hustle School listeners. Welcome back. This is Chris Guillebeau. Back with you today with a fun story. It's all about a tech worker in San Francisco who leads urban hiking tours on the side, making a very significant side income for herself, along with enjoying the time spent outdoors as well as connecting with visitors to her city.
And this story is a great example of doing a different kind of work for your side hustle than you do for your day job. Now it's often important to use a different skillset or a different kind of creativity or just do a different kind of work for your side hustle. So this is a good example of someone who's a writer and editor, project manager, obviously spends a lot of time on the computer, usually working indoors. And it's not that that's bad. She enjoys her work.
She finds it meaningful, but she also likes to be outside. So I think often people think, oh, I'm not enjoying my work at the office or wherever it is. I need to quit. I need to do something entirely different. Maybe that's true.
But for a lot of people, especially the kind of people I'm trying to reach with the show, you don't necessarily have to quit your job. You just need to find something else. And that something else will be good for you income wise, but also for all kinds of other reasons, like you'll hear about today. And today's episode also includes an action plan on how to do this yourself, the specific business model. I think you'll like it.
And in addition, all week long, we're looking at a failure story as submitted by you, the listeners. So a side hustle that didn't quite work out. And as a reminder, the question for next week is what prevents you from moving forward and making progress? And do you have a tip for overcoming that, for getting unstuck? I'd love to hear your answer to that, but first, a side hustle that didn't work out.
- Hi, Chris. This is Meredith from Portland, Oregon, and you featured my business, A Waldorf Journey, on episode number 13 of Side Hustle School. So I am a huge fan of the show. I wanted to record this message about my biggest side hustle failure. And for me, it was all about getting distracted.
When I first started my blog, I really liked the technical side of things. I dug deep into learning CSS and HTML. I was doing constant makeovers and redesigns of my website. I spent the next two years and over $10,000 learning web design and launching a web design business. As you might guess, the business never really took off.
So I learned two things from this experience. One is be careful about how much you invest in your side hustle. I'm still paying off that debt. And then secondly, think about what you already know and expertise that you already have before going off and learning something totally new to start your side hustle. Thanks so much for recording this podcast and keep up the good work.
Yay, thank you so much, Meredith. It's so fun to hear from you again. I hope everybody checks out episode 13, if they have not already, to learn more about Meredith's project. And she is totally right. Start with what you know, just like she has done for her Waldorf Journey project.
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San Francisco-based Alexandra Kinan has a flexible job as a project manager and editor for a fully remote company. In a lot of ways, it's a dream job in the sense that she's able to set her own schedule and go back and forth from focusing on those job responsibilities to building something for herself. Now this company is in the tech industry, but as I alluded to in the introduction, Alexandra's side hustle is completely different. It's all about getting outdoors and showing city dwellers and tourists a lesser visited side of San Francisco. The part of the city that includes scenic hills and hiking trails.
It's called Urban Hiker San Francisco. And Alexandra caters to small groups as well as private and corporate events. Thanks to that flexible schedule she has, she's able to offer the corporate tours any day of the week and even in the middle of the day. Now this is not a plug, but I was personally honored to hear that Alexandra used the $100 startup model to start this project. She bought a domain name, she bought hosting for her website, a set of business cards, kept it pretty simple.
And then she came to the Royal Domination Summit and told everyone that she ran an urban hiking company. I love the fake it till you make it perspective. And then she completed a five step plan. Now here was her plan. First of all, she reached out to companies like Airbnb to see if she could offer tours to their guests.
Then she met with other tour providers to see how they got their business started. She next offered free and discounted tours so that she could attract initial customers and get reviews. Then she reached out to her network to see if people worked at companies that wanted to do team building activities. And she also joined her local visitors bureau to meet other people in the industry. Now she didn't do all of this in one week.
It was a side hustle. But over the course of a few months, she definitely found a niche. She discovered it was best to run the small group tours on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays on a set schedule. And then to work with companies on those private and corporate events, whenever was best for them. She offers tours on her website, urbanhikersf.com.
The people also find her through sites like TripAdvisor, Vayable, and Airbnb experiences. She even has a special dating hike in a partnership with Match.com. This side hustle has now been up and running for a while. And depending on the season, Urban Hiker San Francisco makes between $2,500 and $8,000 a month, peaking in July. Now you probably noticed that's quite a range.
It's because it is a seasonal business. Alexandra offers tours year round, but obviously some months are more popular than others. And overall, the gross income is about $50,000 a year. Between the tours that anyone can sign up for and the corporate events, corporate events are her biggest source of income. She typically earns $1,000 or more for a two to three hour corporate event.
And she also has four to five contractors working with her, especially in those busier months. To continue to grow the business, she wrote a hiking guide called Urban Trails San Francisco. And that has sold more than 3,000 copies since it was first published last fall. Naturally, this guide promotes Urban Hiker and she's hoping to sell at least 10,000 copies. One more number, more than 3,000 people have hiked with Alexandra and her guides, including a lot of foreign visitors.
And in fact, that's one of her favorite things. Sometimes it's a visitor's very first day in the United States. And she loves being able to show off her city and provide a good introduction to that visitor. One challenge has been having to cancel tours due to rainy weather. Now, normally this only happens a few times a year, but last winter in the Bay Area, the rain was out of control.
In fact, by some measurements, it was the wettest winter since rainfall has been tracked starting in 1895. So that definitely slowed things down before it picked up again this spring. Now, if you like this idea, if you like this concept, you think, well, I could do something like this, or maybe I know somebody who might be interested, Alexandra has some very specific advice for you. She says, first of all, anyone who lives in a city can create a tour business and it costs virtually nothing to start. She has a few annual costs like insurance, web hosting, et cetera, but those are very minor.
And aside from that, there's no cost associated with running a tour. That means anytime she runs a tour, it's almost all profit. So her first advice is to do some research on tourism in your area. First of all, are there enough tourists to start a tour business? San Francisco, not surprisingly, has a lot of tourists, about 18 million visitors a year, in fact.
What kind of tour do you want to run? Are there already competitors in this space? Who else is doing tours? Chances are, if you live in a big city, there are gonna be other tour companies out there and that's okay. So what are they doing and how are you gonna do something a little bit different?
Next, plan out your tours and test them, give tours for free or discounted prices, and then encourage those people to leave reviews on TripAdvisor, which is critical for this kind of experience. However you create your website, make sure you have booking software that lets people book tours directly on the site without calling or emailing. There's a number of options for this, they're free or low cost, and we'll include a couple of recommendations on today's show notes page. And last, just as she did, Alexander recommends you join your city's visitors bureau to get involved in the tour community and learn about visiting journalists who might want to write about your business. Like so many people I feature on the show, Alexandra stays busy, this side hustle is obviously profitable and sustainable, she has no plans to quit her day job or urban hiker, and she's also got other things she wants to work on.
She wants to start selling t-shirts about hiking in San Francisco. She's thinking about writing a new book. And at some point she might expand urban hiker to a new city. Alexandra has climbed to a steep success, all because she chose to follow up on an idea she thought had potential. [Music]
Well, if you are interested in this idea, you have an action plan to follow.
You should definitely check out her website to see more about how it works. But if this particular idea isn't for you, maybe the principle still applies. That contrast between something you do for your day job and something you do for your side hustle, or maybe you like her action plan, or fake it till you make it approach. Or maybe it's interesting to you that the tour business, at least once it gets going, is essentially all profit. So if you're trying to decide what do I do, well, what else could be a high profit idea?
Whatever it is, I hope something is helpful. As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/158. Next week, we're looking at what prevents you from moving forward and making progress when you feel stuck. If you'd like to leave your short response to that question, I would love to hear it.
Give me a call on the Hustle Hotline at 8449HUSTLE. Or just use your phone to record a quick voice memo and email it to podcast@sidehustleschool.com. Thank you for listening. I'm Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
