This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey, what's up? Welcome friends, welcome listeners, welcome community. My name is Chris Guillebeau. The program is Side Hustle School. Today's feature, episode 1608, is our Throwback Thursday segment.
It comes out every Thursday. It's where we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them. And we've had so many stories on the podcast over the course of the past four and a half years. So it's been really fun to go back and look and see how someone has managed to challenge, perhaps, or has grown or changed their business in some ways, lots of different expressions of that. Last week we heard from Hannah Fastoff in New York City.
She is the founder of Go Dash Dot, which sells handbags and other accessories for active women. Today in our latest feature, we'll hear from an Irish travel blogger with type 1 diabetes. And that last fact is key. She actually started her blog focusing on how to be a traveler with type 1 diabetes. I'll say more about that in a moment.
But she has recently moved to YouTube, well, at least digitally, but she's also physically moved into a tiny home on wheels, also known as a van, that she and her partner plan to take across Europe and beyond. Her name is Catherine Urcasi, and we first featured her more than a year ago. I really liked how she and her partner chose to focus their travel blog on that topic of being a traveler with diabetes, both from a practical perspective, because there are just way too many travel bloggers these days. If you're gonna succeed, you have to stand out somehow. So they found a specialty.
And also from a personal perspective, because my dad also has type 1 diabetes. If you're not familiar, there are two types of diabetes, conveniently type 1, type 2. Most people have type 2 diabetes. So I think it's less than 10% have type 1. And if you have type 1 diabetes, it means your body doesn't produce insulin naturally.
It tends to develop in childhood or adolescence, sometimes young adulthood, as opposed to type 2, which tends to develop later in life and is more influenced by lifestyle factors. Whereas type 1, it's just kind of like, all of a sudden you discover that you are diabetic. Anyway, I won't get too sidetracked. The point is that's how she and her partner chose to focus their business. But what's happened since?
Like what has the world of travel blogging been like in the past year, right? So let's hear directly from Catherine. She's got a few different updates, and I will come back at the end to wrap us up. [Music]
I'm Catherine McGinnis. I'm from Lisbon, Northern Ireland, and my side hustle is Green Bay Travel Farm.
And I was featured on episode 949. My side hustle is a travel blog for adventurous couples covering everything from road trip to world travel. I run it with my partner, and we also inspire type 1 diabetics like myself to travel the world. We actually started at a university about five, six years ago, and it's become a fully-shedged business. We did do some copywriting after university to fund our travels.
But when we realized other people could make a living from their travel blog, we thought we'd do that too. Initially, it was actually just a type 1 diabetic travel blog, but we then realized to make a serious living from it, we would need to expand more greatly into the general travel realm as well. Since our last interview, we've actually managed to crew the blog to more than 150,000 PhDs a month. So this ended up providing us with a great income, and much of this was residual, meaning we actually have more time to focus on our travels and massively expand the blog itself. But then, of course, COVID hit, and this has had, obviously, a massive impact on the travel industry as a whole, which in turn has affected our website.
We've lost some views and income, but rather than get down a bit, we decided to work through it and create another revenue stream. So we decided to create another website, and that's called That Babetic Girl. This is more of a diabetes lifestyle website, and we want to make it as successful as we can make travel far. On initial research, we've done some research into the diabetes sphere, and there's not a lot of information about travelling with diabetes, but there's also a lack of information about other areas of support. And since I'm Type 1 diabetic, I thought this would be a great way to kind of get more information out there and build up another website.
So for us, this is more of a medium-term investment, but we're really excited about that growing. And since we haven't been travelling, we've been stuck in the same place, we actually decided to convert our own camper van. This is something we've wanted to do for a few years, but when you're on the road, you never actually make the time for it. So we thought, okay, we'll give ourselves three months, and we will do those camper van builds. And we decided to record everything along the way, and it turned into a 13-part series that we put on YouTube.
And we've actually got big plans to drive the camper van around the world in over two to three years, which is pretty ambitious, but we do believe we can do it. And then on from that, we're actually committing to YouTube. So we put the van build on YouTube, and as we drive around the world, we're gonna upload videos in the hope that we can also turn YouTube into another revenue stream in the future. The biggest challenge we're currently facing is probably finding enough time to do everything. So Dream Big Travel Far takes up a lot of time of right and blood research and learning new techniques to grow it.
And then we've added another website into the mix. And on top of that, we are trying to do YouTube, and I have to now learn the art of video editing, which is a challenge in itself. So time management is a big thing, but then the other big problem is actually not knowing when global travel is going to recover. And obviously, this will directly impact Dream Big Travel Far, and it is a travel blog, and we need people to travel in order to find it useful. So that's always a big worry.
Kind of gone from that, navigating the world has become a little bit of an issue because my partner Bradley is actually British. So Brexit has caused a few problems in trying to work out how to drive the van across Europe due to passport issues. So I'm Irish, he's British, and I have complete flexibility, and now he doesn't. So that is another thing that we have to work out if we wanna drive this camper van around the world. [Music]
Thank you so much, Kazee, really appreciate that.
It's great to see travel bloggers getting back into the game, and just a reminder, if you're gonna try that yourself, you have to stand out somehow. The way that Kazee and Bradley chose to stand out, at least at first, was by focusing on this condition, type 1 diabetes, which can often be quite limiting for people, but in her case, she was like, I want to be able to see the world and go to places like Sri Lanka and India and elsewhere, and obviously still take care of myself, but not limit myself so much. So by making resources for other people out there who have type 1 or perhaps know someone with type 1, she's been able to be a resource, be an inspiration, and also just provide some practical travel tips for everyone. So now, as you heard, they've evolved a little bit. They've got a new YouTube show.
It's called Dream Big Travel Far. You can also check out dreambigtravelfarblog.com. And on their YouTube, I really enjoyed their van tour. It's pretty cool, it's like 30 minutes long. I watched most of it showing off the results of three months of pandemic work, doing the build out on their van, which is now their tiny home on wheels, as they call it.
And this van actually includes space for two guests to join them and stay in the van. So it's a decent sized van, but it's not, I don't know, oversized, whatever that is, but they've creatively remodeled it in this fashion where, as I mentioned, they can take people along with them. They also have the new website, thatdiabeticgirl.com, which is more of a lifestyle site about advice and support on living with diabetes. A little bit less travel focused on that one. So good for them.
And I hope you enjoyed this episode. By the way, this is one of our most popular features that we started last year. So as you've heard, we're gonna keep it going this year as well. Let me know what you think and who you'd like to see featured from our archives of more than 1,000 stories. If you have a question, if you'd like to update us about your side hustle, just come to sidehustleschool.com/questions.
Do us a favor, give us a quick review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen, really helps a lot. And last but not least, our show notes for today, including links to everything mentioned and more are at sidehustleschool.com/16081608. Wherever you are in the world, I'm cheering you on and I hope you'll come back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
