This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name's Chris Guillebeau, your host, and welcome as well to Failure Friday, our weekly segment featuring a collection of short stories about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure. What goes wrong? You're always hearing about success stories, what goes right, and I love this feature because it's just kind of making things real, looking at those times of struggle or hardship when perhaps someone makes an assumption and that assumption turns out to be incorrect.
I do that all the time, and I think there's so many lessons that we can learn from that process. So today offers an especially important lesson about product market fit, making sure there is an actual buyer for your brilliant idea. If you've ever had a brilliant idea and it hasn't actually worked, it may be because there wasn't product market fit. So today's story features Dale Wilson. We told the story of his live stream wedding business on episode 1669, it's called Married Live Stream, and he operates that business together with his wife, Lydia.
Now, this business is going really well. And when COVID struck, you might be familiar with that a couple of years ago, they thought, you know, surely what we do for weddings will be applicable to other markets because we've acquired this expertise in live streaming weddings. What else can we do with it? Which sounds like a perfectly reasonable assumption. You know, speaking of assumptions, if you had asked me, you know, before hearing this story, going back a couple of years in Dale's position, I would have said, yep, makes sense to me.
Sounds like something worth trying. But of course, that's not how it always works out because you don't just need a good idea. You need more than that brilliant idea. You also need the right buyer. Okay, so Dale's gonna bring us this whole story.
It's well told. I'll come back at the end with a very quick wrap up. [Music]
Hey everyone, this is Dale Wilson. And I, along with my beautiful wife, Lydia, are the founders of Married Live Stream. And we provide high quality live streaming and videography for couples who are getting married, but can't include everyone on their guest list to be a part of their wedding, whether that's due to COVID-19 or disabilities or people can't travel.
We try to create an experience where everybody feels included. We were featured on episode 1669 of Side Hustle School. And this is our business failure story. Back in 2020, when COVID started to take hold, we noticed that the wedding side of our business was really increasing. And along with weddings, we also noticed that there were other industries that needed live streaming as well.
Corporations were looking at how to stream corporate events. Funerals were needing to stream for people who couldn't be there in person. And one of the biggest areas that we saw that had a need for live streaming was houses of worship. Almost all of their congregations were moving online because of gathering restrictions. And so we saw that there was a huge need for churches to be able to connect with their members, connect with their entire congregation virtually because they just didn't have the ability to meet in person.
And so when we saw this opportunity to help churches better connect with their congregations virtually, we created a completely new brand that was separate from our wedding business, new social media, everything. And then we spent a couple months reaching out to churches and offering our services to them to help them get online faster and have a high quality live streaming experience for their congregation. And after a couple of months, we were experiencing absolutely no sales. Churches just weren't interested in what we were selling. Small churches who had a huge need for what we were offering didn't have the money to pay for our services.
And mid-sized churches were a little bit hesitant to spend enough money to make their live stream better because there were cheaper alternatives that were available that were good enough for what they were doing. And large churches generally already had a media team or somebody who they were working with for their live streaming. And so we were really struggling to find a product market fit. And not only just customers who were willing to pay for our services, but also able to pay for our services. And so after a few months of reaching out and trying to divide our attention between our wedding business and churches, we decided to just let the church side of our business completely go away and only focus on our core business, which was live streaming for weddings.
And what we learned through this is that we needed to find ways to fail faster and figure out whether or not there was actually a product market fit before investing a ton of time, energy, and resources. And I think that we could have very easily done that before even building a website and social media and going through all of that effort. I think we could have started reaching out to churches, started talking within our network and finding out is there a demand for our services or is this just something that we think is a good idea but other people don't find much value in. And so that's what I would recommend for anyone who's thinking about pivoting in a new direction. Find cheap and quick ways where you can explore the industry and see if there's a good product or service market fit so that you can save yourself a lot of time when it actually comes to the building and implementation part of it.
And ultimately that side of our business did fail but it allowed us to invest into the core part of our business which has become very successful. Thanks so much to Side Hustle School for featuring us. It's been such a blessing to be part of this community and we're looking forward to growing and learning along with everyone else out there who's starting a side hustle or thinking about starting a side hustle. [Music]
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. As I said in the introduction, Dale's assumption or at least his idea seemed perfectly reasonable, right?
You think, well, surely we have this skill, this expertise, it will apply in this different market. But as he discovered, you need the right offer, you need the right price, you need the right buyer, all of these variables kind of have to come together. So it's not just about good ideas, it's about that combination of factors. And this is such a great story to illustrate that point. So thanks to Dale for sharing this transparent and truthful story.
Check out his website, Dale and Lydia, at marriedlivestream.com, marriedlivestream.com. You might be interested in what they're doing from a business perspective. You might want to learn more about live streaming if you have a wedding perhaps, or you know someone who has a wedding who might benefit from live streaming. Even if you're having an in-person wedding, the idea of live streaming to allow other guests to participate from afar, it's pretty cool. So check it out.
If you've got a question or an update for us about your hustle, sidehustleschool.com/questions, today's show notes, sidehustleschool.com/1945. Thank you so much for tuning in today. I hope you'll join me again tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the "Onward Project."
