This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey there, what's up? Thanks for tuning in today. My name is Chris Guillebeau, your host of Side Hustle School. And today I'm bringing you our weekly segment known as Failure Friday. Goes out every Friday, conveniently packed between Thursday and Saturday.
It is a collection of short stories all about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure. What goes wrong? You're always hearing about successes. What goes wrong? How do we learn from it?
You know, and just like our Throwback Thursday segment, you get to hear directly from a side hustler who has struggled to get something off the ground or has otherwise encountered some severe difficulty. Today's short story features Luke Lorik from South Carolina. And we told the story of his tailgating challenge project on episode 1746. Luke is, I guess I would say, the world's foremost expert on tailgating. Tailgating is essentially, well, I'm not even sure how to describe it.
It's like going to have a party or a barbecue in the parking lot, often of a major sporting event. I don't know, I'm not sure. There's a whole episode on it. But Luke actually makes a few thousand dollars a month from a blog and review site about this sport/activity. But guess what?
Luke's Facebook page, which was very popular, 150,000 followers was hacked. And I actually had this problem myself too, a few months ago, not to sidetrack here, not to tailgate my way into another story, but everything that Luke says here about Facebook and not being helpful is absolutely true. I have to say, it's not just him. So when you hear this story and think, why didn't Facebook help him? Unfortunately, that's just the way, all right?
So let's hear the story from him along with the eventual resolution and an important reminder perhaps for some of us about updating your passwords. You need to hear this. Don't let this happen to you. Luke's story coming up. I'll do a quick little analysis and wrap up at the end.
[Music]
Hi, my name is Luke Lorik. I run Tailgating Challenge and this is Failure Friday. So my failure came in 2018, running social media platform Tailgating Challenge. And it all happened on my birthday. And so I call this a failure because it's something I didn't properly protect my business for.
You've seen this happen more since then too. Pages or loss are taken over by hackers. I watched as my Facebook page of 150,000 Tailgating Challenge fans was taken over by a hacker. To the point, they kicked me off of my own page. I had no control over my own page that I worked years to build.
Years to build with companies and interactions and building some genuine authentic trust with my fans. As I sat back and watched, the hacker started to post things that were less than family friendly. And so a lot of people were offended and I lost thousands of fans over the course of this month. It took a month to get it back. And so my failure in this was not properly seeing that this could happen and not properly protecting my brand.
So I went through everything I thought possible. Facebook is no help. There's still no help today. So they're not gonna help you with this. I even contacted the police.
The police did nothing with it. I contacted the FBI. I got no response on that. I continue to contact Facebook in every way possible. But as we know, their customer support is almost non-existent.
I finally found my win because I have a registered trademark for my brand. I sensed that someone was infringing on my trademark. Someone reached out to me. They said we'll give you back access as a moderator to your page and you will have to work it out with the other person that has taken over the page. So I took it over, I kicked them off and I changed all my passwords to all my accounts and all of my email accounts.
And I recommend every single person put on your double authentication so that someone can't just hack in there without having your phone to get that extra code off of there as well too. That's the big takeaway. And then having to go back and apologize, own it and know that we lost thousands of people through it but you can bounce back from it. So again, I am Luke with Tailgate and Challenge and this was Failure Friday. [Music]
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
That is the theme of Failure Friday. I'm so glad Luke was able to get back on his feet there and eventually get that page back. But of course it has a cost. And as I said briefly, like this happened to me too. This happens to a lot of people.
And sometimes it's because you might do something dumb and click the wrong link or something but hackers just get more and more sophisticated these days. So if you do make that mistake, don't feel terrible like it happens. But also sometimes it's just kind of outside your control. So the one thing you can do is change your passwords, set up that two factor authentication that I think Luke mentioned. Everyone is a target, that's the bad news.
The good news is if you have some basic security, hackers tend to move on because there's plenty of other fish in the sea. Plenty of other people out there who haven't updated their passwords. Anyway, Luke, keep up the good work, man. You are the tailgating master. Appreciate him sharing this transparent and truthful story.
Check out the website tailgating-challenge.com or follow him on Facebook to help him rebuild. Again, that's tailgating challenge. If you've got a question or an update for us about your hustle, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. We've got a new episode coming out every single day, seven days a week. I hope you'll subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
It is all completely free and it's such a joy to bring you this program. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
