This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
All right, all right. I'm excited for today's episode. You're gonna love this one. It is failure Friday here on "Side Hustle School." The principle is we can learn as much from failure as we can from success. A collection of short stories about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure.
What goes wrong? In this case, we're even talking about extinction. Extinction or is it evolution? You're gonna find out, just like our "Throwback Thursday" segment, you get to hear directly from a side hustler who has struggled to get something off the ground. They're gonna tell you that quick story of something that went very wrong.
Now these stories vary, but often they begin with an idea, an assumption, perhaps, what they thought would happen, and then what really happened. So I wanna get to it really quick here today because it's a great story. This story features Brad Blue. And as you're gonna hear, he had an idea to create Swichosaurus. Swichosaurus, it is a dinosaur card game.
Looks really cool. And it also ran into some serious problems with manufacturing. Would the project go extinct? Let's hear about it from Brad. I'm gonna be back at the end with a quick wrap-up.
Swichosaurus, Brad Blue. [Music]
Hey, Chris, my name is Brad Blue, and my side hustle is called Swichosaurus. It's a mix and match dinosaur card game I made in the early days of the pandemic to play with my kids, Penny and Sam, then turned into a full production run when I received good feedback from my family and friends. I loved the early days of this side hustle because it was the rare opportunity to spend more time with my family with a side project, not less. In this case, I found a hustle that included the people I love spending time with, so comparatively little of my time spent on the project felt like a trade-off.
The original game was just dinosaurs drawn on flash cards, then cut in half. We had so much fun laughing at our new dinosaur creations like Tricerosaurus rex, Velocitops, and Mosadocus, which has the fishy tail of a Mosasaurus with the long neck of a Diplodocus. These times made some of the problems later on a little easier to swallow. When my friends got excited about the concept of the game and told me their own kids would like to play, I knew it was time to make it my next side hustle. I'd been dreaming about being on your show someday, but this is where my first $1,000 episode fantasy starts turning into a failure Friday episode fiasco.
A good friend of mine who had had some success of his own making card games pointed me toward a local card printer. My first sample was $56 and it turned out great. The bulk run was going to run about $5 per deck because I was using tarot-sized cards and a waterproof, tear-proof card stock to ensure they'd hold up to lots of kids playing with them. But instead of going with a sure bet from a strong referral, I started looking at options with better margins and fancy packaging. A mega corporation based in China found its way into my web searches and connected me with one of its suppliers, which agreed to supply not just the cards, but also a dinosaur poster and a game tin, plus shipping to my doorstep, all for less than just the cost of the deck with my local supplier.
I had some reservations about doing business overseas, but despite their namesake's association with 40 thieves, they eased my discomfort by promoting their trade assurance program, which their website says protects buyers and helps them get their money back in the event of problems with product quality or shipping date. I paid $243 for three samples, which were phenomenal, even better than the first set. I was sold and I agreed to purchase 500 units for $2,450 on the condition that they would be shipped within 27 days, which would give me a chance to sell them during the holidays. On the 27th day exactly, they marked the items as shipped. Two weeks later, they showed arrived on the company website, but nothing ever came.
I asked them about it and they said they made a mistake and gave me a new tracking number showing the items had not shipped until weeks after our agreed upon date. The items arrived the day before Christmas, and worse yet, every unit had damaged corners and was made of cheap material. They actually weighed 5% less than my samples. I opened a trade assurance case and after weeks of supplying dozens of detailed pieces of evidence, was surprised to find that the system did not protect me. It felt like they were more concerned about offending their supplier.
This project I set up to spend time with my family was taking me away from them for hours at a time as I jumped through a seemingly endless series of hoops. At the end of a month, it felt like I was further from a resolution than ever and I couldn't even get the company to admit that the purpose of a sample is to be a representation of the final product. I was spent, so I accepted a meager refund and decided to move on with my life. And perhaps that is the best piece of advice I can give to others in similar situations. And a lesson I got to learn for the cost of just a couple thousand dollars, find a way to move on with your life after a little defeat.
Ultimately, my $2,700 investment is not an insignificant amount at all. But the more time I spent fighting this company to get them to do the right thing, the more it took my focus from moving my business forward. Chris, you often say that Failure Friday episodes are about making sure we don't confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. For Switchasaurus, I won't confuse evolution with extinction. I'm excited for the next chapter of this project and I plan to turn this small defeat into something fruitful by donating some of these flimsy but still playable and fun cards to teachers and parents, sending others to game reviewers, and the rest to building my email list by giving decks out for free or at cost.
I'd love to know what you'd do given a similar predicament and a similar opportunity. Thanks, Chris. [Music]
Brad, thank you so much. That is an awesome story. Indeed, never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
That's our theme, but I love the addition here about finding a way to move on with your life after a defeat. Perhaps that is the most important lesson, not just in this story, but in many life experiences. So I need to apply this to my life today. I was thinking about some things recently that haven't gone well, and I'm like, I need to find a way to move on with that. And following Brad's advice, don't confuse evolution for extinction, or was it extinction for evolution?
I think it was the first one, but I understand what he means. Also, I gotta get myself a Mosadocus. That sounds pretty cool. I've always liked T-Rex, but that's pretty common, I guess. So Mosadocus does make me feel a little bit more unique.
So thanks, Brad, again, for sharing this transparent and truthful story. Listeners, I wanna encourage you to check out Switchasaurus, and you can get there by going to, well, switchasaurus.com. Exactly like it sounds, you know, think thesaurus, except switcha, switchasaurus.com. On his homepage, it says this page is currently being excavated, like, you know, under construction, but it's actually being excavated. Anyway, all good stuff there.
If you've got a question or an update for us about your hustle, sidehustleschool.com/questions. Indeed, never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat and find a way to move on with your life. Thank you so much for joining me today. My name's Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
