This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Hey there, what's up? Welcome, thank you for tuning in. My name is Chris Guillebeau, your host of Side Hustle School. And today is Throwback Thursday. Our weekly segment with an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them.
Now last week we heard from the owner of Heathen Wines. After hosting wine tours all over Europe, he changed his business model during the pandemic to offer virtual tours and sell private label wine. Today in our latest feature, we'll hear from Pam Farley. She's the co-owner of Comic Crate, a monthly comic book subscription box service based in Sacramento, California, and also the owner of a comic book store. Now I want you to pay attention to something in particular from her update.
She really knows her audience. And that audience, her customers, is not in fact the kids who are reading the comics. In fact, she says something like, my advice relates to comics, but you can expand it to other industries. Pay attention to that because there's a really important lesson there. So let's hear directly from Pam, let her take it from here, and I'll come back at the end to give us a brief wrap-up.
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This is Pam Farley from Sacramento, California. My side hustle is called Comic Crate, and we were first featured on episode 685. Comic Crate is the only subscription box for comic books where you get to choose the rating of the comics you receive. So you always know that they'll be perfect for your favorite reader. We've owned a comic book store for more than 20 years, and we were trying to think of a way that we could reach outside of our local market and make it easier for parents or grandparents or whomever to buy comics that they knew would be appropriate for their kids.
A six-year-old shouldn't be reading the same comics that a 20-year-old would be reading. They have different art styles. They have different, obviously, vocabulary. Different people are comfortable with different storylines and superhero violence and things like that. While my advice specifically relates to comics, you can actually expand it to other subscription boxes or other things.
We took a specific problem in the marketplace and found a solution for it. So if you are, let's say you're a mom and you want to get some comics for your kid, you can actually order comics online from Marvel Comics and DC Comics, and they'll send them to you. But the obstacle is how do you know what's appropriate? So if your seven-year-old wants to read Deadpool, well, that's extremely inappropriate, just because he saw the commercial doesn't mean that it's okay for him to read Deadpool. So we had to figure out if there was a need for what we wanted to sell, and I just did some Facebook polls and things, and then how could we meet that need and make the right amount of money to make it worthwhile?
And even though we're comic book people, our target market are not comic book people because the buyers are the parents, the aunties, the grandpas, so we're not targeting the end user in our advertising, we're targeting a different set of buyers. So thinking about a problem in the marketplace and how you can solve it and don't try to solve everything, just start with one thing, get really good at it, and then branch out. We have been expanding our advertising, so of course we want to reach more kids all over the country. I expected to get mostly city kids, but we've noticed that there are, we're getting quite a few kids in rural areas who might not even have access to a comic book store. And we have heard from a few parents who have said, "Hey, now that lockdown's over, "we've loved our subscription, "but we're gonna go back to our local store," which I think is great.
If we can help improve the state of the comic book industry, which in turn elevates kids reading, I mean, of course we want to make enough money to continue and to advertise and to reach more kids, but if we can get more kids into reading and doing art and things like that, that's a much more exciting long-term goal or result. So I think that's pretty amazing. I would say our future goal is to get loads and loads of more kids reading and especially reading comics. [Music]
Awesome, thank you, Pam. Really appreciate that update.
And listeners, as I mentioned, I really liked what she had to say here about, I think I've highlighted the comment here. Even though they're comic book people, their target market for her business, her target market is not comic book people because the buyers are the parents, the aunts and uncles, the grandpas, grandmas, that's the people that they are targeting. So they're not actually targeting the end user and they're advertising. They're thinking through the buying process that an actual buyer will go through. And if you look at their website, which I will mention here in a moment, all of the messaging, it's all designed to cater to that audience while still being really fun and showing like a bunch of cool comics, kids are gonna love them, et cetera, but they're providing various reassurance.
There's a lot of discussion about ratings and what's appropriate for different ages. And so for an industry like this, comic books, it would be possible to kind of forget about that or maybe just gloss over it a bit. But by hitting it so directly, I think that's partly why comic create has been so effective and successful. They also are the only parent-selected, kid-approved comic book subscription box. So just to be clear, it's not about appeasing parents necessarily, it's about providing a great product that kids are going to love, but adults are gonna feel good about.
So well done. Check out their website, comiccreate.org, comiccreate.org, or find them on Facebook. Perhaps this could be a good gift for someone you know. Throwback Thursday was one of our most popular features of 2020. As you've heard, we've kept it rolling all 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. You've got a question for us or an update for us of your own, just come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. Thank you so much for tuning in today. I hope you'll come back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
