This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey, hey, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. Thank you for tuning in today. This is episode 1857, last day of January in 2022. I am still getting used to saying that year.
I keep thinking it must be 2020. No wait, it's 2021, no wait. Oh my gosh, what happened? All right, today's episode is part of a new feature we've been doing for the past four weeks. We're gonna continue it, getting really good feedback on it.
It's called your first $1,000. Now as you might surmise from the title, it's all about how someone made their first $1,000, okay? How did they get to that point? Not their first $10,000 or $100,000. That would be a long story, probably a good one, but we wanna focus on what it's like to get started, how it feels, both how it feels and the logistics of it, both those things together.
So with that in mind, today's feature comes from Jacob Ratliff. And we first featured him back on episode 1184, digital marketer makes money marketing himself. Jacob now has a book out, he's doing really well. But again, what about his first $1,000? What did that feel like?
How did he make it happen? And what did he learn? So let's hear this story from Jacob. I'll come back at the end with a quick wrap up. [Music]
Hey there, my name is Jacob Ratliff and I am a client attraction coach and author of the brand new book, Client Attractor.
I've built my business helping high impact coaches attract their dream client. But that success didn't come out of nowhere. In fact, it was only several years ago that I was working a normal job, convinced that if I wanted to make more money, I had to get a raise, a promotion, or just flat out find another job. My stomach turned to the idea of spending my entire career chasing the next promotion, really leaving my financial future up to an employer, to someone else who had their best interest at heart, not mine. I knew I had to do something.
I told myself that in five to 10 years I wanted to have my own business. And that seemed reasonable. After all, 10 years down the road seemed pretty far away. One evening after an especially long day at work, I picked up my copy of Chris's $100 startup, which had been sitting on my shelf for ages. What's my passion?
What's my business? I kept asking myself, closing my eyes and hoping the genius idea would appear from thin air. I'm really good at marketing, I thought to myself, and I enjoy it so much that that's such a saturated space. There's no way I'd be successful doing that. So I went about my daily life, knowing I needed to start up a side hustle so I'd be positioned to go in on it full time in the next five or 10 years.
Maybe one night a week, I would spend a couple of hours sitting on my sofa, trying to force out the perfect business idea. But I felt like I was running around in circles. I kept coming back to something in the realm of marketing, but then I would say to myself again, "No, it's so saturated. "There's no space for me there." And then I'd go back to square one. Zero clue where to start.
And then one day out of the blue, my friend Brian said to me, "I know you're busy and I know you have a lot going on, "but my husband Gareth really needs some help "with his marketing. "Is that something you might be interested in?" "Of course," I said. "I imagine this as a great way "to get some extra cash on the side, "something to keep me occupied on evenings and weekends." But it didn't even occur to me that this could be the beginning of my business. By the time I got home, I had to email some Gareth, whom I had only ever encountered briefly up until that point. He told me a little bit about his work and where he was needing help, but my eyes focused on one thing in particular.
The very last line of his email said, "I'm envisioning this will pay between $500 to $1,000 "each month, depending on the workload." And for the 21-year-old that I was at the time, I was making just under $3,500 a month before taxes. I couldn't believe it. An extra thousand or even just $500 a month was massive. That's my monthly rent, I thought, as I began counting all the ways that extra cash would impact my life. But looking back, most important was the realization that came with it, that yes, it was possible to make a living building my own business, and that yes, I could carve out my own space in that big, scary world of marketing.
As this was all happening, I didn't recognize it as the beginning of a new business. I just thought it was a happy accident that my friend's husband needed some marketing help. But looking back, I realized that was no coincidence. I simply had a skill set that someone else needed, and that's all it took to make that first $1,000. [Music]
All right, I appreciate that story.
I'd love to know how the $100 startup was also a very small part of it. Unfortunately, you can't just magically see the results you want. I would probably sell a lot more books if that were the case. You could just buy it and put it under your pillow. You actually have to do the work.
Thankfully, Jacob did it. So good work, man. He also mentioned that he felt like the marketing space was saturated, but he discovered that there was room for him. And that's the thing. Yes, there are a lot of people doing marketing, but there are a lot of people and businesses in need of marketing services.
So it is just kind of a question of figuring out what service precisely are you going to offer. And that extra $500 to $1,000 a month paid his rent at the time and eventually led to much more. But I think a lot of that value comes from that initial onset of, "Oh my gosh, I can do something." Like that is where the empowerment and the momentum comes from. So thanks to Jacob for telling us about his first $1,000. Hope you found it encouraging.
Check out his website, jacobratliff.com, or for a free copy of his book. I think you just paid $10 in shipping or something. You head to clientattractorbook.com. If you've got a question or an update for us, sign us on school.com/questions. Come and check it out, lots of resources there.
Hope you're doing well, wherever you are in the world. Let's build something together this year. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
