This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Pride goes before a fall or before a major business expansion. I'm excited to bring you today's Failure Friday segment. Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. And Failure Friday, of course, is a collection of short stories about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure. Just like our Throwback Thursday segment,
you hear directly from side hustlers. Often they have struggled to get something off the ground, or in this case, it started really well and then they made some assumptions. You get to hear this short story of something that went very wrong, along with, of course, what they learned. Today's short story features Sam Davidson from Nashville, Tennessee. We told the successful story of his business with two friends and co-founders on episode 1083, boxing up the best of handmade Nashville. But their early success led to overconfidence and a lot of wasted money. In fact,
we could call this episode How to Lose the Better Part of Several Hundred Thousand Dollars. All right, we'll let you hear the story from Sam. I'll come back at the end with some brief comments. My name is Sam Davidson, and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Batch. We curate thoughtful artisan made gifts from all across America. In other words, we help big businesses support small
businesses. Back when we launched eight years ago, we started just as a subscription box company based on our hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. Each month, we would send out four locally made items to our subscribers. And initially, our big dream was to get to 200 subscribers by our third month, we ended up blowing that out of the water and actually getting over 1000 people by month three. So because of that, we thought we could do anything. And expansion was on our mind because,
hey, if this happened in Nashville, then why couldn't we do it in other iconic American cities like Austin or Charleston. And so knowing that we couldn't necessarily fund it on our own, we went out and we raised some capital we took on outside investment to the tune of around $300,000 with the point of bringing our subscription, e commerce and corporate gifting business to other markets. So we went on a hiring spree, and we pinpointed sales reps in Memphis, Tennessee, Charleston, South Carolina, and Austin, Texas. I remember being so excited as a young CEO, because hey, now our business is multi city. How cool is that I was managing people in other territories. And off
we went. But what we failed to account for was exactly the recipe, the ingredients for our success in our hometown of Nashville, we thought, great, let's just find a person, rep the brand, put some money in some marketing, and off we go. But we failed to truly account for every single element of that. Namely, there were three of us who started this in Nashville. We also were leveraging years of connections and relationships, we had capitalized on a dense vendor network, not to mention a city whose brand was on the ascent. And so just because we thought we could throw money at it and do what
we did with three people and 10 months time in Nashville, we thought that we could do that in other cities with one person in about 10 weeks. And so long story short, we no longer have people working in those other cities, one eventually broke even, but the others lost us nearly all of that capital that we had raised. Luckily, we're still thriving. We now source gifts from other cities, but we do it all from our hometown here in Nashville. So it can be tempting, I think that when you want to expand upon your success, especially geographically, just to think, hey, what worked in City A is going to work in City B. My encouragement to folks out there would be to
really dissect every element of the success. And don't forget to also include a little bit for luck. Sometimes businesses succeed because they happen to just be a little bit lucky. And that's okay. My one piece of advice is never outgrow your infrastructure. And so when it is time to expand,
make sure that your home base has enough stability and support a solid foundation under it so that when you decide to bring on people in those other markets, you've got a clear accounting for what it's going to take to succeed and you've got enough support, infrastructure and runway to make it really take off. Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. That is the theme of Failure Friday. Thank you so much, Sam. Really appreciate that detailed transparent story, along with some lessons learned and advice, very helpful to me, and I'm sure many of our listeners. Now listeners,
if you'd like to check out Sam's business, it's pretty cool. Just go to their website, batchusa.com or follow them on Instagram at batch Nashville. If you've got a question of your own, if you'd like to update us about your side hustle, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions and the show notes for today, including links, et cetera, sidehustleschool.com/1763. Thank you for tuning in today. We'll have another segment like this next Friday, and of course, another episode every single day. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You are listening to Side Hustle
School. From the Onward Project.
