This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Hey there, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. Welcome as well to my favorite segment of the week. It's called Failure Friday, a collection of short stories about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure. Just like our Throwback Thursday segment, you get to hear directly from side hustlers who have struggled to get something off the ground.
Something has gone very wrong. Today's short story features Steve Barlow from Florida. We told the successful story of his big bat house project on episode 909. Revenge of bat houses, there's more than one seller. We made that episode after profiling another seller of bat houses, I guess a few weeks or maybe a month or two before.
And I was surprised to learn that bat houses are kind of an industry, at least a small industry. And as you're going to hear in this update, Steve's business is trucking along just fine, but then the global pandemic arrives. And you might have heard some of those rumors about bats. It is in fact fake news, but fake news can be powerful. And fake news can cause all sorts of beliefs and behavior as well, of course. So let's let Steve give us the story. He's going to give
us his bat house update. I'll come back at the end with a brief wrap up. Hello, my name is Steve Barlow and I'm the founder of Wildlife Integration, home of bigbathouses.com and nestingpost.com. These are innovative applications which integrate wildlife habitat features right into our everyday human environments, really on a massive scale. Now, as a wildlife biologist, I've spent my life, you know, working with wildlife habitat and designing wildlife habitat structures and then finding innovative ways to get them into the landscape for the benefit of both wildlife and people. Now, my side hustle has been a great outlet for me to pursue this quest and to provide
habitat for millions of bats and tons of cavity nesting birds. For example, each one of the big bat house units can accommodate thousands of bats. And by the year 2020, I'd sold them in 27 states and even had some in Central America. Now, as we entered 2020, I was coming off my best side hustle year yet with around $40,000 in gross revenue. And, you know, this is after experiencing exponential growth for about the past seven years or so. So things were really looking great and I was really
excited, you know, going into 2020. With everything going so well, I was reinvesting 100% of my proceeds back into the business. And in late 2019, we were, you know, planning such things. I was totally reworking the website. Plans were also in place to do some new product launches, podcasts, blog postings, various social media collaborations. So, you know, I was aggressively rolling into
2020 and I had gig staff off of Upwork.com working to help me. And we really had a lot of things planned. But then, as we all know, 2020 happened. And to make things even worse, fake news and all the other conspiracies blamed coronavirus on, you know, someone eating a bat. So bats were once again the devil, as they've often been maligned throughout human history. And all of a sudden,
no one would even speak of putting up a big bat house in their city park, their wildlife refuge, or local facility. So that was a tough blow for the bat house business. Since then, I've received zero big bat house inquiries. Whereas prior to that, I'd be working on several proposals a month, sometimes several a week. Now finally, just in the last week, as of this recording, I received a proposal request for a park to purchase a big bat house. Certainly,
this time has been a tough run for my side hustle. But so many others have suffered so much more than me. And again, you know, this was my side hustle. So I had my day job to pay my bills. So I really couldn't complain. Also, fortunately, my other patented product nesting posts began to take off
in 2020. Nesting posts incorporates a bird nesting cavity into pipeline right of way markers. Right now I have a very large pipeline company putting these bird cavities onto their pipeline rights of ways in several states. Now the pandemic has been tough for all of us and I'm grateful to start seeing some daylight on the other side. Right now, you know, I'm dealing with costs and availability of materials. That continues to be a challenge. But the good news is interest in the products
are starting to pick back up. Thank you. Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. Thank you so much, Steve, for sharing that transparent and truthful story. I'm so glad that bat business is slowly beginning to return.
Listeners, I want to encourage you to check out Steve's website at wildlifeintegration.com. It's got all kinds of things, bats and birds there, some resources, some information. And of course, if you'd like to order your own bat house or something else, pretty cool stuff. If you have a question for me or an update for us about your side hustle, just come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. Thank you for tuning into this Failure Friday segment.
I hope you do something for yourself today. I hope you'll tune in again tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. From the Onward Project.
