This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Welcome to Side Hustle School. Welcome as well to Throwback Thursday. This is a weekly segment, conveniently happening every Thursday, where we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them. And of course, you get to hear directly from this Side Hustler in question. Last week, we heard from a North Carolina orthodontist who invents a better way to treat impacted teeth.
Interesting feature, I actually learned a lot about orthodontics through working on that episode. Today in our latest feature, we'll hear from Peter Quinn. Peter's originally from Northern Ireland, now living in Los Angeles. We first featured him on episode 1039, animator reanimates his income selling graphic kits. Now, last week I learned about orthodontists.
This week I learned about Peter, actually. Peter is pretty cool. He's got an amazing Instagram account. I'll tell you more about it at the end of the episode, but I actually lost, well, I shouldn't say I lost, I spent about 20 minutes of time, I invested 20 minutes of my time watching his videos just because they were so fun. He's recently done an animated video with Snoop Dogg.
In fact, that was all over the internet. And he's also created some passive income, significant passive income through the sales of these animation kits and tools. So he works with this software program, Adobe After Effects, among others, and he's put together various resources that can save people a lot of time who are using those tools. So great business model, as I said, a very creative guy as well. So let's hear more directly from Peter and I'll come back at the end with a quick wrap up.
[Music]
Hey, I'm Peter Quinn. I was featured on episode 1039 here in Los Angeles. My side hustle is making workflow tools for Adobe After Effects, which helps people making motion design projects get there faster. I've been working in video production for years and it's notoriously a very stressful, busy kind of day job. So sooner or later, I figured out that I could sort of stockpile little pieces of animation and code and texture animations so that the next time I had a stressful day, I could dip into that little reservoir.
And rather than spend, say for example, half an hour making an animated texture, I could just make that once, store it, and then just sort of keep that on file so it becomes a two second job to just like get that texture animated. And then after a while, I figured out that, oh, right, I need, you know, I need multiple little animated textures here. I'm gonna give myself a little folder of high res 4K animated textures. And sooner or later, I had this sort of large library. My day job is making interesting ads and I like to throw in a bit of personality in terms of, you know, a bit of humor here and there.
So basically having good product that people actually wanted coupled with a funny ad meant that people commented and shared and liked the ad, which sort of ended up with a sort of cyclical effect where the video was popular and the product was popular. And then, yeah, I basically just sort of fell in the butter in terms of getting people's eyes on these ads and the little animated products that I had made just really started to take off really quickly. And I sort of strategically made them, so my texture kit is called GridKit, which sounds cool, but I called it PQ GridKit, which is my name, Peter Quinn. But then I also came up with PQ through toys and PQ art parts. So I have this self-branded sort of vibe to the whole suite of products.
This still is a side hustle, but I've had a very interesting year. The sort of time and the focus that I used to have on the side hustle was sort of, you know, good evenings and weekends. But because of the attention and sort of the popularity of the products, I ended up sort of thinking, oh, I need to sort of make this a bit more, I need to take this a little bit more seriously. With selling even more tools and branching out even more into freelance work and doing my own sort of larger projects, the income that was sort of a fraction of my full-time job income is like almost matched now by my side hustle activity. Since I was last featured on the podcast, I went from just sort of like passively selling these little tools for 50 bucks a pop to continuing those sales.
But also because I have like a bit of an Instagram presence, I'm able to promote people who are using my product, which means that I can sort of keep reminding people that this product exists. And because I've also been doing more and more interesting Instagram videos, I've been getting much more of a following. It means that I have my own audience then to sort of sell to. And just coincidentally, the people that are interested in my interesting Instagram videos are the same sort of people that would be interested in buying those work photos. So there's just by complete accident, a sort of overlap of those audiences.
The biggest challenge with my side hustle is the one that I guess everybody says, and that's my own time. I am spending all my evenings and weekends and lunch times and breakfast times just trying to get ahead and tick heart or all those little projects that I've said yes to over the years. So I'm just busy. If I could duplicate myself, it would be so useful, but so far I haven't been able to do that. [Music]
Thanks so much to Peter for sharing his updates with us.
As mentioned, his Instagram is next level. Give it a follow. I did so myself. Follow him on Instagram at Peter Quinstagram. Peter Quinstagram, you just typed that in, you're gonna find it.
As I said, I spent 20 minutes watching videos including the shoot with Snoop Dogg, another one about how Peter imposed his image and branding on billboards throughout Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. And that would be Peter's image, not Snoop Dogg's image. Peter's just a guy like you and me. And he's like, I wanna have billboards of my image all over Sunset Boulevard. So he made that happen.
He's got videos that show how he did it. Once again, Peter Quinstagram on Instagram. Let me know what you think and who you'd like to see featured from our archives in more than a thousand stories, questions, updates, comments, sidehustleschool.com/questions. This has been episode 1888. Isn't that fun?
One, eight, eight, eight. We'll be back tomorrow. That'll be one eight, eight, nine. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
