This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Hey there, welcome, thanks for tuning in today. This episode is part of a new feature called Your First $1,000. As you might guess, it's all about how someone made their first $1,000. How did they get to that point? Not their first $100,000, which is awesome, but also a long story.
How did they actually get started? And in this case, we're actually looking at a transition as someone goes from one side hustle to another. This feature comes to us from Vicky Weinberg in the UK. We first featured her bamboo baby products business, try to say that several times fast, back on episode 1520. And as she worked more in that business, which was going along quite well, she began getting a lot of questions.
These questions were not in fact about bamboo baby products, at least for the most part. They were more about how she sold on Amazon. So of course she faced a choice there. Do I pay attention to these questions? Do I pay attention to the direction it might be leading me in?
Or do I remain focused on the core business? So Vicky in fact did a bit of a transition. She now focuses more on guiding people through the process of Amazon selling, which as she explains can be quite complex, which is totally true. So let's hear more about that transition. How do you go from one side hustle to another?
How do you make your first $1,000 in a new business? And among other things, Vicky has a really interesting perspective on being an expert. So pay attention to that. I'll come back at the end with a quick wrap up. [Music]
Hi, my name's Vicky Weinberg and I featured on Side Hustle School talking about my baby products brand Tiny Chipmunk.
So today I wanna share my origin story around what I'm doing now and how starting that first business led onto that. So what I talked about in my previous episode was how I created and launched my own range of bamboo baby products and started to sell them on Amazon. At the same time that I did this, which was around six years ago now, I started documenting my journey and my many trial and errors and mistakes in the form of a blog in the hope that perhaps at some point, somewhere down the line, someone would stumble across it and it'd be useful for them. I figured if I could help people avoid some of the mistakes I did early on, then that would be brilliant. So I kept that going for a while and my baby products business started to grow.
I started selling on different channels, but the main place I still made the majority of my sales was Amazon. And I did become, I guess, a bit of a specialist in working on Amazon, selling on Amazon and how to manage the platform, which can be quite complicated. And as I went by, people did start to find my blog and I started getting people reaching out to me with questions, which I was really happy to answer. But there did come a time when I realised actually, I was getting asked a lot of questions and I was spending a fair bit of time, given that my business was selling baby products, answering questions from people who contacted me because they had questions about some aspect of selling products or usually selling products on Amazon. And this is when I decided, okay, I'm gonna see if I could perhaps monetise this, which I'd been quite resistant of doing because I didn't figure myself to be an expert.
But I guess one of the most useful pieces of advice that I heard around this was someone said to me, well, you don't need to be an expert, you just need to know more than the person who's paying you to help them. And when I kind of changed my mindset and thought of it from that way, that I don't need to know everything, I just need to be able to provide value and know more than the person who I'm helping, that really helped me a lot. So what I then did is I set myself up on a freelancing site offering sort of general Amazon support. And I thought, well, I'll just see if anyone's interested in paying me for my services. And when people started contacting me through the blog and saying, can you help me?
I would sort of say, yes, I can, and this is my hourly rate. And to my surprise, people were happy to pay me because I've been giving away a lot of, 'cause I've been helping people for free and I had this free blog, I kind of assumed incorrectly that nobody would want to actually pay for my expertise because I thought, well, why would they, they can go and read this on my blog or someone else's site? But actually people were and still are really happy to pay me. And now things have moved on a little bit. And actually my main business now is that consultancy, helping people to create their products and to get them set up and selling on Amazon.
That's what I do full-time now that actually exceeded my baby products business. And that's what I do. And it all began really from just sort of seeing there was a need, seeing that people were sort of asking questions, obviously interested in my services and my expertise and what I could do, and then just attempting to monetize that and seeing what happened. And since then, as I say, it's become my main business. I now charge more than I did.
I've really refined what I do. There are things that I will do and things I won't do kind of based on my knowledge and also the things that I do and don't want to do, which is quite a nice situation to be in. And I really hope that this will be helpful to someone. [Music]
Vicki says I didn't figure myself to be an expert. I didn't think of myself as an expert, but as she mentioned, you don't need to be an expert.
You just need to know more than the person you're helping. So there's a lot that we could do there. I feel like that applies to so many different business models, so many different service businesses in particular. Like you don't need to be an expert. You just need to know more than the next person, at least more than the person who needs your help.
And hopefully, as long as you're steering them in the right direction, as long as you're giving them the appropriate next steps, then you are a resource for them. So pay attention to questions. I think that's a very useful step in terms of figuring out your next side hustle, your next business idea. What are the questions that people ask you? And you might expect that they're gonna ask you about a certain thing, like in Vicki's case, those bamboo baby products.
But if all the questions, or at least a good portion of them are about something different, that might be a clue. So pay attention to questions. Thanks to Vicki for telling us about this transition, her first $1,000 in the new business. Hope you found it encouraging. Check out her website, VickiWeinberg.com.
We'll link it up in the notes page as well, VickiWeinberg.com. If you've got a question or an update for us about your side hustle, sidehustleschool.com/questions, come say hi. Hope you're doing well wherever you are in the world. I hope you will subscribe or follow, come back for more new episode tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
You are listening to Side Hustle School. [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
