This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
As we begin today, I wanna give a shout out to Scott Keys. He's got a new book out called "Take More Vacations," which sounds like a wonderful theme for 2021 after such a year of being homebound. We featured Scott on the podcast a couple of times. He is the founder of Scott's Cheap Flights. I also wrote about him in the "100 Side Hustles" book.
Really great guy, very generous and helpful. And I think this book is gonna do really well. So if you'd like to take more vacations, check it out wherever books are sold. And welcome to "Side Hustle School." Now, I believe we can learn as much from failure as we can from success. That's what today's segment is about.
It is indeed "Failure Friday." We've been doing this a couple months now, getting great listener feedback on it. "Failure Friday" is a collection of short stories about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure. So just like our "Throwback Thursday" segment, you get to hear directly from "Side Hustlers" who have struggled to get something off the ground. They'll tell you a quick story of something that went really wrong. The stories vary, but often it starts with an idea or perhaps an assumption.
That's what we've got today. An assumption, something that they thought would happen. And then of course, what really happened and what they learned along the way. So I applaud their courage. I appreciate their honesty.
Today's short story features Jeff Campbell from Austin, Texas. Told you about his transition to full-time blogging on episode 718. Jeff is the middle-class dad. That's his kind of online persona. Middle-class dad earns passive income from parenting advice, built up this pretty successful blog, but then had an idea to transition to YouTube.
And the first part goes okay, but not so much the second. I'll step out of the way. Let's let Jeff tell the story and I'll come back at the end briefly to wrap us up. [Music]
Hi, my name is Jeff Campbell and I'm a full-time blogger and YouTuber. At this point in time, I have seven different websites and two YouTube channels.
I'm a website guy by nature. I started creating those probably close to five years ago. And that's what I've had the greatest success with. But about a year ago, I decided to get into YouTube to see how that worked and how it could maybe compliment the websites that I already had just to kind of diversify because I do believe very strongly in diversifying both the kinds of niches that I'm in, but also the way that I get traffic and the type of content I'm creating. So I started this YouTube channel about a year ago and it was almost an immediate success.
Within four months, I had hit the minimum number of subscribers and views in order to get monetized on YouTube. And here we are about a year later and I've got over 10,000 subscribers and thousands of views per video. And it's just going great. So my mistake was in thinking that, well, if it worked once, it's gonna work again. I can just do the exact same thing in a different niche and it's gonna work just as well.
So my wife and I collectively started a second YouTube channel about six months after that first one in a totally different niche and more importantly, in a much more competitive niche. The original YouTube channel that I had, there was really only one other channel that was in the same vein that was cranking out good videos that had good view counts and good subscriber counts. Most of the other videos in that niche were from channels that were years old that hadn't put out anything new recently, had terrible thumbnails, et cetera. The second niche for the new channel was extremely competitive. There were probably hundreds of other channels that were putting out videos every week with great thumbnails, engaging videos, hundreds of thousands of subscribers and views and things like that and it was just very, very different.
My mistake was in thinking that, well, I could just do everything I did with the first channel for the second channel and it would work out just exactly the same. Couldn't be farther from the truth in all honesty and it didn't work at all. We put out four videos our first week and then two videos each week thereafter and even after about six months, we only made it up to 45 subscribers and we were lucky to get 30 views per video. I felt like a failure. It was so frustrating to put so much effort in and see so little return on that and the most frustrating thing was the fact that these videos were technically much better than the original videos I had done on my first channel and the lesson that I learned was that don't assume that just because you had success once, that it's just gonna magically happen again and again.
You have to understand why something worked or why something didn't work and then and only then can you really replicate that success. So take that for what it's worth and I hope this helps you in your journey. - Thank you so much, Jeff, appreciate that. Man, those assumptions, those assumptions can be killer. I often have assumed as well that, oh, I know what I'm doing here and I was able to achieve success with this particular medium or idea or project, whatever it is.
So therefore, I'm gonna apply that same thinking or approach and I'll be just as successful with the next. And just like with Jeff's story, it doesn't always work out. Sometimes you discover, oh, there's actually a reason why somebody else is doing so much better or what I learned with this one medium or field or product doesn't actually apply in the same way. But of course, you only figure that out by moving forward. That's why I like Jeff's approach to diversification.
I think he said he had something like what, seven different websites. You can check out his main one, at least the one that we talked about here before, newmiddleclassdad.com or follow him on Instagram or Twitter @middleclassdad1. I guess middle class dad was taken, but he's got middle class dad one. And one of his new projects I just noticed was kitchenappliancehq.com. I'm guessing without having read that in great detail, I'm guessing it's about kitchen appliances.
So kitchenappliancehq.com. If you have a question, if you'd like to update us about your side hustle, just come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. This has been episode 1595. We are almost at 1600. Thank you so much for being out there.
I hope you will subscribe or follow and come back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
