This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Hey there, thanks for tuning in today. This is episode 1990 of Side Hustle School. We are almost to 2000. I'm so excited about that. I'll have more to say as it gets closer.
But for now, today's episode is part of a feature we've been doing all year long. It's called your first $1,000. And as you might surmise from the title, or as you might know by now, it's all about how someone made their first $1,000. How did they get to that point? Not their first $100,000 or million dollars, like the business you're gonna hear about today actually is a multi-million dollar business now.
But of course it didn't start that way. It started with an idea and then the implementation of said idea. So this feature comes from Neil Parrott in Los Angeles. We first featured his business Made This back on episode 1452. Reddit post inspires Airbnb cleaning service.
Now the business grew to, as I said, millions of dollars in revenue and much expansion. He actually was able to work remotely, kind of oversee this business while traveling. Pretty cool. But again, what about those first steps? How did he make it happen?
What did it feel like? And what did he learn? Let's hear it from Neil. And I'll come back at the end with a very quick wrap up. [Music]
Hi, my name is Neil Parrott, and I'm the CEO of a company called Made This franchise, which is a work from anywhere cleaning franchise focused on Airbnb's and vacation rentals.
And this is the story of how I made my first $1,000. So it was a few years ago, and I was working in private equity and finance, and I was sitting at my cubicle at work, and I thought, you know, I really want to do something to escape the rat race. I want some sort of side hustle. I want to quit. I want to travel.
You know, of course I'd go online and Google and type in, I had to start out side hustle, side hustle ideas. I had to quit my job and travel, and I'd come across a picture of this guy who was on a beach with his laptop just working. And I thought to myself, I want to do that. I want some sort of remote side hustle. Would that allow me to travel?
So I started, let's say, an e-commerce site. Then I tried digital marketing. Then I tried drop shipping, and nothing seemed to work. Finally, I was on Reddit one day at work when I was supposed to be working, and I started doing my job. And I was on the subreddit and a guy had posted how he had started a local cleaning company.
And he had posted the steps to do it and start the company. So I thought, you know what the heck? I'm trying a bunch of different things. Let me just give this a shot as well. So what I did is I didn't know anything with tech or marketing.
So I just bought a $100 template for a website, threw it up online, made my logo on Microsoft Word, and just had a very, very basic first website. After that, I didn't even have cleaners. And I thought, you know, let's just see if this works. So what I did is I quickly made a Google AdWords account. And I said, okay, I'm gonna devote the budget to Google AdWords and tried to get a sale, and let's just see what happens.
Pretty much the next day, someone had found their website through Google AdWords and ended up creating a booking. And I was beyond stoked. I remember I was at work, I ran outside, and I just started dancing 'cause I was so excited. I didn't know this at the time, but I was dancing in front of a bank building which had tinted windows. So pretty much everyone inside the bank could see me dancing.
But regardless, I was stoked. This is, in hindsight, I call it the money milestone. Where when you make your first dollar from doing your own thing, it doesn't matter if it's a dollar, it doesn't matter if it's $2 or $1,000, it's just that first dollar feels like freedom. You feel so excited, so excited that you're able to do this yourself. So that really gave me the motivation to go out and make more money.
So let's say that first shop was 100 bucks. I realized, hey, here's kind of winning formula. So I doubled down a little bit more into Google AdWords. I figured out the Yelp was really big in my markets, started doing paid ads that way, and got $1,000 in cleaning sales, which then I, at the beginning, just outsourced to a third party and got a go in. And that really gave me the confidence to keep going.
And in hindsight, when I was looking at what I was doing and why it worked compared to everything else I was doing, I think it has to do with the competition. You know, when I was trying e-commerce, dropshipping, freelancing, you're competing against the entire world for this, meaning it's very hard to market. When I started a local cleaning company, I was only competing against my local market and only those cleaning companies in my market. Most home service companies don't really know what they're doing with online marketing. So the competition is much less, and that allowed us to go pretty fast.
So about two years after that, we were pushing around 30,000 a month in revenue, and that's when I decided to quit my job and book a one-way flight to South America and started traveling and working on my cleaning company, completely remote. So since then, I've been around 35 countries over the last five years, just working remote on my cleaning company, and we've since then started franchising. So now we are offering a franchise offering for anyone who's looking for a side hustle to transition to full-time to pretty much copy the blueprint of what I did over here. If I was to go back and give myself advice on how to more quickly make that first $1,000, I'd probably just say, hey, develop a budget and just experiment and go for it as much as you can. I think I quickly fell into what's called analysis paralysis, which is I kept analyzing and reading stuff and trying to get "ready," and it just made me feel very productive when I was not really doing anything.
And finally, when I said, hey, I'm just gonna get a budget and put it in Google AdWords, and even if I lose money, let me just see what happens. That's when things actually started to go, when things started to move. So my advice for anyone looking to make your first $1,000 online is, hey, just try something. If it doesn't work, try something else, but just have a dollar amount in mind, vote some budget to it, and then see what happens, and it could be really, really big and change your life. - Thank you so much, Neil, the money milestone.
I love it. Money milestone, first $1,000. I totally agree with that feeling or sense of empowerment. I've just seen it over and over, which is why I try to encourage listeners to, as Neil said, just try something. Well done, great story.
Thanks, Neil, for telling us about that first $1,000. Listeners, I hope you found it encouraging. Check out madethisfranchise.com. Made this franchise, and made is spelled M-A-I-D. And to learn more about his business, you can also follow him on Twitter, Neil B. Perick,
N-E-E-L-B-Perick, P-A-R-E-K-H, we'll link it all up, where he describes himself as former private equity dude recovering digital nomads. I love it. If you've got a question or an update for us about your hustle, sidehustleschool.com/questions. Otherwise, I hope you'll subscribe, follow, we'll come back tomorrow, so much more is coming up. My name's Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School.
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From the Onward Project.
