This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Do you belong to any subscription boxes? We're gonna talk today about subscription boxes or more specifically about monthly clubs. They used to be called that. They used to be called of the month clubs. When I was a kid, I used to see all these advertisements in the back of magazines for the book of the month club or the audio book of the month club or lots of other of the month clubs.
You may have seen the plant of the month club, the wine of the month. There's actually multiple versions of each of those and lots of other of the month clubs as well. So today's caller is wondering about them. I guess it's the same thing, a subscription box of the month club with so many of them around, does it mean the market is saturated or does it mean that there's tremendous demand for yet another one? Do we need yet another version of the plant of the month club?
What do we need to know about this? What might be helpful as you're thinking about different ideas for your side hustle? A detailed question and my answer coming up after this quick message from our sponsor. Stay tuned. [Music]
Hey Chris, this is Yvette from Long Beach and I've been listening to the show for a couple of years.
I started looking at a wine club that sends out monthly wines and I stumbled onto a ton of other clubs. You can get everything from unique cigars to the latest in fresh pickles delivered to your door. Do all of these of the month clubs make money? I'd like to start one of my own. Also, how is the monthly club model different from subscription boxes?
It seems like subscription boxes are the cool new thing but the monthly clubs are still around and doing fine from what I can tell. Looking forward to what you have to say about this. Thanks. [Music]
Yvette, thanks so much for being out there. Thanks for the question.
Yeah, do I think there's wild and crazy demand for yet another pickle of the month club? No. Short version, short and complete version. Probably not. But yes, the of the month clubs are basically the forerunners of what is called subscription boxes today.
So you can more or less think of those things as interchangeable. Subscription boxes might have some different timing. Some of them come out every other month, every quarter. There might be some different variables but basically same kind of business model. And we've had a lot of episodes on subscription boxes.
So I would encourage you and anybody else like most of the advice and best practices kind of still apply basically whichever version you're talking about. Your goal with anything like this is to build it to a sustainable level where you have enough customers that you have a certain amount of predictability in terms of the items you need to procure and what your monthly recurring revenue is gonna be. If you have four customers a month, that's tough. If you got four customers a month subscribing to your pickles of the month club, not so good. If you have 40, okay, that's getting better.
If you've got 400, then you have a full-time business or at least something that could be a full-time business. And we've seen lots of different iterations of that through different stories. But again, I think having more specificity about both the product and the market fit would help a lot. If you're trying to sell wine to everyone or pickles and wine, maybe that's what you need to do, the pickle and wine club of the month club. Probably not that, but something specific that has a more defined market fit, try to narrow it down more.
That is gonna be your path to success or at least your path to start going down in terms of an of the month club or a subscription box. You bet, good luck. Listeners, if you've got a question, sidehustleschool.com/questions. We will continue to feature them throughout the year. Hope you'll subscribe, follow, come back tomorrow, new episode every day.
My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
