This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
All right, all right. Hey, what's up? Guess what? You'll never guess. Well, somehow we have made it to 2,000 episodes. That's right, Sidal School episode number 2,000. We've been making this
podcast every single day since January 1, 2017. So first and foremost, most important, thanks for tuning in. Thanks for being out there. You're the reason I make this podcast. I never imagined I'd be doing it five years in, and as I said, 2,000 episodes, but I also believe the best is yet to come. So in this short episode, I'm just going to do some brief reflecting.
I'll talk a little bit about how we came to this point, and I'll keep it short because I want to keep the focus on you. I love telling stories. I love answering listener questions, doing my best to support you in your quest to start a side hustle, an income generating project, perhaps something much more, or whatever it is you're trying to work on. That's the whole point. But we do have a lot of new listeners, and maybe you're wondering if you've just joined in recently, like anytime except 2,000 days ago, you might be wondering, "Hey, what's this all about?" So in brief, Sidal School started with something that I noticed in the summer of 2016. So I had
been touring for a book that wasn't really about entrepreneurship at all. It just had one brief chapter in the midst of 12 or 13 total chapters, one brief chapter about starting a side hustle. And I used that phrase then, which was a little bit lesser known at the time. And during the 20-minute talk that I would give at each event before I did question and answer, I probably spent 40 seconds, maybe a minute at most in that 20 minutes, saying something about starting a side hustle before I move on to the rest of the book. But then like during Q&A, people always return to it. It was something that they asked about over and over. And so I was like, "Hmm, you know, there's
probably something to this." And it was clear that a lot of people didn't identify with startup culture, but still like the idea of building something on their own. And they wanted to build something that didn't necessarily have to scale, something that could provide extra income, security, help them pay off debt or just take a vacation or whatever it is. Those reasons tended to vary, but the desire was somewhat common. Somewhat, I don't want to say universal, but lots and lots of people. So I kind of dug into that process and I ended up writing another book, which was actually called Side Hustle, a very creative title, at the same time that I was developing this podcast behind the scenes. And so in January 2017, we launched the show.
I said, "I'm going to do it every single day for a year." It went to number two on all of iTunes for several days. In fact, which was crazy because right in the very beginning, we got a lot of listeners who were committing. And I kind of made a public commitment of saying like, "Hey, I commit to making this program for you every day for a year. I'm not quite sure what day seven is going to look like or day 10 or certainly not anything beyond that, but I'm going to figure it out. And if you make the commitment to listen just 10 minutes a day, then you can rely on me being there and there being an episode for you essentially." So it was a really interesting and exciting time.
I'll be honest with you, the first year was kind of scrappy. The first year was like we really were making it up as we went along. And I honestly didn't know from week to week what we were going to feature. And sometimes I did come to the end of the day and wasn't really sure what was going to happen either the next day or the day after that. So that was a little bit stressful for me and the team, but we made it through. And at the end of the year, I thought, "Well, let's do it again.
Let's do it another year and hopefully improve along the way." So what has changed since then? Well, I'm going to tell you that in the next section. First, a quick little commercial break. And let me just say here that I really appreciate our sponsors. They allow the program to be free to our listeners. So it's a win-win situation. We can just continue to focus on making great content.
You don't have to worry about paying for it. So it kind of works out for everybody. So I appreciate our sponsors, and I appreciate our listeners checking out the sponsors whenever there's a deal or an offer that might be relevant to you. So quick commercial break, and then what has changed and what hasn't since we started 2,000 days ago? I think it's good to first mention what hasn't changed since we first started 2,000 days ago.
And the first thing is that we are story focused. I'm trying to tell lots of stories of real people. I'm not looking at famous entrepreneurs or celebrities. I'm not looking at people that you've heard of for the most part. I'm just trying to tell stories of real people who don't invest a lot of money. They don't take out their life savings. They don't take a huge risk,
but they choose to invest their time and their experience, all the knowledge that they have gained up to this point in life in starting this income generating project. And so it's real people who are just kind of experimenting and trying to build something. I mean, that's how it's been since January 1, 2017. That's what I'm still trying to talk about here now. So in some ways, the mission is timeless and hopefully to provide support and resources for people like you who are hoping to kind of follow this model or adapt the model in your own way.
Now, what has changed a bit is the format because after doing this for like three years, the same thing every day, we introduced a couple of new formats to make the show more interactive. So I still have the case studies coming out twice a week, but we also have several days a week of listener Q&A. We have a segment called Throwback Thursday, where we kind of pull from the archives of one of the previous episodes and go back and talk with the people. New segments, Failure Friday and First Thousand Dollars. Those are the most recent segments we've added, and I really enjoy working on those two in particular. So when I think about like the State of the Union here,
I'm like, well, I'm so thankful. I am so thankful for our listeners. We have a lot of listener success stories. That's one of the things I enjoy the most. A lot of stories from the archives are actually from listeners who joined us a couple of years ago or whenever, and now they have their own project. Maybe at a certain point, we'll do a whole series just about that because there are so
many stories like that. So mostly we're going to continue. You know, we're going to continue onwards. I'm committed until at least the end of this year. We'll see after that. But so far,
the journey has been a joy. And for that, I'm thankful to our team and to you, our listeners. Speaking of our team, special thanks to Jed Chang and Chuck Reed. A bunch of people have worked on the podcast over the years, but Jed and Chuck have worked on it the most, especially in the past three years. Our longtime crew, Jed is my side hustle sidekick. He does all kinds of stuff with me.
He's also part of the World Domination Summit, which is happening this week in Portland, Oregon. Chuck is our producer and audio engineer based in Los Angeles. He also chooses all the music for the show, which we get lots of email about that. People really enjoy the tunes. And so you can thank Chuck for that. Thank you, Chuck. Both those guys do a lot of stuff to make sure everything
works. I'm also grateful to Gretchen Rubin and the Onward Project, as well as everyone at our distributor Cadence 13. And mostly to you, our listener. That's right. You're the best.
Say hi on social media. Let me know what you're up to or just keep enjoying. After all, we're making the show for you. And guess what's coming up tomorrow? Tomorrow is episode 2001. That's right. Back to regularly scheduled programming.
The best is yet to come. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. From the Onward Project.
