This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
What's up, friends, listeners, community? Thank you for tuning in today. You're listening to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau, your host, and this is our weekly segment known as Failure Friday. One of our most popular segments, in fact, it is a collection of short stories about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure, in essence, things that go wrong.
And just like our Throwback Thursday segment, which you might have heard yesterday, depending on when you're listening, you get to hear directly from side hustlers who have struggled to get something off the ground or otherwise encountered a significant roadblock, obstacle, hindrance, you know, whatever it is. They're going to tell you this story about what happened, often very transparently and honestly, as well as what they learned. So I really like working on these. Today's short story features Britton Kovac and Josh Shookman. We told the successful story of their project on episode 1751. Hopefully it was 1751. I think that's right. Nomadic couple
starts vintage camper rental biz. So they have a pretty cool story of like renting out air stream trailers and doing something really creative Airbnb like but in their own way. And here they return to talk about a couple of difficult parts along the way, including some advice that I really think a lot of people should pay attention to when they're thinking about following a dream. So it's not just about Airbnb and this particular business that they have. It's just really good advice, very grounded advice, I think, in terms of following any dream, especially a business idea dream. And it turns out your dream is going to have the best odds of success. In other words,
coming true, if you're willing to get into some nuts and bolts of it. Well, without further ado, let us turn it over to Britton and Josh, you're going to hear from both of them actually. Pretty cool. Two for one. Britton and Josh will tell us more. We are Britton and Josh, our business
is out of normal and we turn air streams into unique Airbnb experiences. We were featured on side hustle school episode 1751. Our failure happened in 2019 when we had the dream of transitioning from our brick and mortar hostel that was running seamlessly and on autopilot. We had someone living on site as part of a work live exchange. So they were able to do the bed turnovers, keep the place clean, great guests and be there for entertainment and movie nights, things like that. So we thought that we could completely flip our business into renting private
air streams and carry that same autonomy over into this new business model. But it wasn't that easy. And that was not the case. So to dive deeper into this, I'm going to let Josh take over. So the thing for me about this failure that we had, the lesson that I learned is that oftentimes it's the boring parts of your dream that really can make your dream happen. And
so let me tell you the story about what happened to us and tell you why I have come to feel that way. So like Britton mentioned, we were trying to transition from this brick and mortar hostel that we had run for two years on the road seamlessly. We had someone on the ground running that and we felt that we could transition that and move into private air streams as they were being beans. And the way we started doing that, we figured, you know, hey, we just have a test model with an air stream, a vintage air stream. We had, we'd put it on Britton's parents land. We chatted
with them and put it on our parents land with the agreement that, hey, they wouldn't really have to be involved. We would just use their land and we would work out systems to make sure that Airbnb guests could stay in that air stream. That maintenance would happen, cleaning would happen, guest happiness would happen and things like that. We were still on the road. The reality though, of that transition was not really that easy. And even though we had this big dream of creating this
awesome glamping experience for people, like I said, it was kind of the quote unquote boring stuff that got us. And so Britt, why don't you break down some of the specific numbers and exactly what happened with that? Yeah. So just keeping it really simple from July 5th to October 19th of 2019. So just a three and a half month period, we did gross just under $1,500, which is, you know, we felt really good at the time, um, for, for what it was and what we were testing. Now the thing is
though, that during those three and a half months, I actually had to block off the calendar a number of times to prevent people from booking because we did not have our systems in place that Josh mentioned. So we took a bit of a hit because we went in a very excited, very energetic, ambitious, very, everything's going to work positive. And then we learned that we maybe didn't have all of our ducks in a row as we should have. Yeah. And I think that's the thing about failure too, is sometimes if you're not careful, a failure can cause you to think that the model is not there.
So that could have happened to Britain and I, you know, this was the first time we had jumped in and tried to run an Airstream as an Airbnb and we had failed at it. We didn't have the right systems to turn it into a profitable model. We didn't have the right systems to where Britain's parents, you know, didn't have to be involved, which we really wanted that to be the case. And so we could have looked at that and said, Hey, you know, this is just not going to work. But the reality of it was we just like I opened with the boring parts of our dream are not the fun parts to focus on.
So we hadn't focused enough on them. But when we really started digging into that and we started realizing, Hey, you know, if we have the right cleaning team in place, if we have the right maintenance in place, if we have the right things in place to keep our guests happy at the hostel, we had somebody on the ground who would keep our guests happy and we'll greet them and things like that. Those are really important parts of our systems. And not thankfully today we have multiple Airstreams running as Airbnbs and they're profitable. But were it not for this initial failure that showed us that sometimes you just got to focus on the boring parts of your dream so you can realize your bigger dream. If we hadn't had that failure, I don't know if we'd be where
we are today. But that's the key thing that we learned was that a lot of times you got to dig deep and figure out what are those boring parts of your dream that you didn't quite get right to see, you know, really how your dream can become a reality. Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. That's our theme of Failure Friday. Britton and Josh, thank you guys so much. Really appreciate the story and the advice.
I actually took some notes on this for myself. This whole thing about a failure can cause you to think the model isn't there. I mean, listeners, if you remember nothing else besides the fact that Britton and Josh are really cool people doing good stuff, remember that, okay? Because, you know, often you're doing things and it doesn't work out. And sometimes things just don't work out because they aren't going to work out. But other times, just as you heard, you know, you've just got to
tweak some stuff, right? The model is there. You just got a couple of things wrong. And if you get discouraged and go away and never try, you know, some variation or changing some variable, then you're not going to get to that point of success beyond the point of Failure Friday or whatever day of the week it is that your failure occurs on. So as I said, you know, I took notes on that myself because I was like, man, that's so good. You know, dig into the boring parts of your dream
to figure out what to change. I also love that. And I think, you know, in the end, losing $1,000 or whatever it was for them, like, that's a small price to pay. You know, I don't mean to say $1,000 is a small amount of money, but it sounds like it was an investment for them. So good work. Thanks again, Britton and Josh for sharing that transparent, truthful story.
Listeners, check out their website, outofnormal. That is outofnorm.al. Outofnorm.al. You can also, here's a fun fact, you can also follow their cat on Instagram using the hashtag Walter Eisenmauer. Walter Eisenmauer, isn't that the greatest name for a cat? I want to go take a look at those pictures.
If you've got a question or an update for us about your side hustle, sidehustleschool.com/questions. Thank you for being out there. Thank you for listening. And I encourage you to move forward with your ideas. Even if you get stuck, we all get stuck. I think the magic is in moving beyond
that. And the magic is in choosing to say, all right, well, it didn't go exactly as I planned, but I'm going to keep trying. So I hope you do that today. I hope you'll come back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You are listening to Side Hustle School.
from the Onward Project.
