This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Greetings, hello and welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau, your host. Welcome as well to our Throwback Thursday segment, weekly segment where we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them. Now, last week we heard from Maggie Palmer. She is the founder of Pep Talker, Pep Talk Her, an app that has helped more than 60,000 users, mostly women, negotiate a pay raise.
So that's pretty cool. Today, in our latest feature, we'll hear from Melissa Moore. And Melissa is from Atlanta. She's the founder of Strike A Match. We first featured her in episode 665, which was what, like 1,000 episodes ago?
Chemical analyst strikes a side hustle matchstick. That is indeed her business, selling matchsticks. And you might think, can you actually make money doing that? Don't matchsticks cost just pennies? And aren't they essentially a commodity?
Well, evidently she has figured something out because since we first told her story more than 1,000 days ago, not only is she still going, she is now doing it full time. And she sells on her own website, through Shopify, I believe, on Etsy, and on Amazon. So she actually has three stores. And in fact, she stays so busy during the fourth quarter, Q4, that she sometimes has to close the website, like close the website to sales and say, hey, you know, too much business is coming in. Which is, of course, a good problem to have.
I thought that part was especially interesting as I was working on this update. So let's hear more about it from Melissa. Melissa Moore, and I'll come back at the end to wrap us up. [Music]
My name is Melissa Moore. I'm in Atlanta, Georgia.
And my side hustle, well, it's full time now, is called Stryker Match. And I was featured in episode 665. I sell matchsticks, like exactly the kind you find in your supermarket. They're in boxes. They have a Stryker ship on the side.
They're for candle lovers or people who use matches to grill like their fireplaces, like their incense. And then I also sell the Stryker material that's found on the side of the boxes. I sell entire sheets of it or I cut them into shapes like rectangles and circles. It all started when I was trying to find cute containers to hold matches that looked just as nice as the candles that I was always buying or my incense holders. And lighters just looked ugly to me.
So it started as a quest to find an accessory to candles and incense that looked just as nice as those. Since I was first featured on Side Hustle School, my business has grown considerably. Sales have essentially doubled since that first episode. And during Q4, sometimes they triple. The biggest challenge has been keeping up with the volume of the orders.
However, I've put more steps and planning time in for Q4. Now I think about Q4 like all the time. It used to just be, I would just react to Q4. Now I plan ahead for Q4. I'll schedule time to even shut my store down.
I have three websites. So I have my Shopify site, which is the newest. I sell on Amazon and I sell on Etsy. And so with Amazon, I'll deactivate the listings. With Etsy, I'll just close the shop or put it on vacation mode.
And with my Shopify site, I can put that on pause. So I've learned that even during the holiday season, it's important just to take some time to just catch up on orders. Put a big announcement however I can. Say orders will not be processed on these days to set expectations and do as much prep as I can in the months before, like about a month ago. I took a bunch of my little plastic baggies that I put some of my orders in and I went in and just labeled a whole bunch of them.
Just sat down for a couple of hours, just labeled. It's slow right now, so I can do things like that. And just to give myself breaks, just to plan to give myself breaks. And I will say another lesson I've learned, what's called a challenge is just accepting mistakes. Like every now and then, despite as careful as I am, I'll still get an order wrong every now and then.
And just the other day even, because I'm actually in a new apartment right now and I was talking to a consultant and spilled a drink, of course, on my keyboard. I had a pile of papers on the side. I took the papers, put them in my bedroom. This was what, the beginning of July. And for some reason, just two days ago, I knew I had to go through that pile of paper anyway.
But something clicked to just go through the papers just a little bit, just to get things started. And of course, I found a pile of orders where I had packed, I printed the packing slips, I printed the labels, and I had no idea they were there. And at first I freaked out thinking, oh my God, how many orders is this? Oh, this is gonna take forever to... And when I finally sat down, it was just 10 orders, right?
And just last night, I thought it would take me an hour to go through all, it was just 10 orders, 20 minutes. I emailed everybody, people started responding right away. Oh yeah, no problem, go ahead and mail it out. Only one person said, oh, can you maybe expedite it? And I was like, well, see, I panicked.
I panicked for not for nothing, but it just wasn't nearly as big a deal as I thought it was gonna be. And I find just, it's so easy to get in your head and freak out about a mistake you've made. But once you really sit down and address the mistake, it usually isn't as bad as you think it is. And I've heard other people's failure Fridays or turn back time episodes where the manufacturer had an error on thousands of their products, and I've never dealt with anything at that scale, but even the small ones can trip you up if you don't put them into perspective. And if I just sat down for that five minutes and just picked up the orders, I would have seen how small a group it was, and I wouldn't have freaked out for so long.
And just, I find transparency is the best policy there. I just, hey, ma'am, I've made a mistake. Your order was supposed to ship, it didn't. Here's why, I'll ship it today if you want. Otherwise, if it's too late, I'll give you a refund.
And so far, people have been great. [Music]
Thank you so much, Melissa. Really appreciate those updates. I could actually learn a lesson from her about taking breaks and not overscheduling myself. I think it's so impressive when somebody who has an e-commerce store and is willing to like actually stop taking orders there.
I think for me, I would be like, I'll just take the orders and I'll figure out what to do about them. And sometimes that works. You know, sometimes that's the way to do it. It's good to push yourself at times. But if you wanna create something that's sustainable, you know, and something that's actually bringing you joy instead of bringing you stress, then I think Melissa's way is probably much smarter.
So I will work on taking a cue from her. Check out Melissa's website at strikeamatch2.com. That's the number two, strikeamatch2.com. Or follow her business on Instagram at strikematches. She's got some really cool stuff for sale.
I'm actually gonna place an order myself. I have never ordered matchsticks online before. So I figure first time for everything. I'm also gonna get some striker strips, which look pretty cool. They have like an adhesive backing that you can stick to something and then use that striker strip to strike a match.
If I'm not describing this well, it's because I haven't tried it before. So I will do so and report back. If you have a question, if you have an update for us about your side hustle, sidehustleschool.com/questions. Thank you so much for joining me today. By the way, this was episode 16.99.
Tomorrow, episode 1,700. How about that? 1,700 coming up. I'm so grateful to our wonderful community all over the world doing awesome things. And I can't wait to bring you so much more.
Much more is on the way. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
