This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Side hustle school listeners, welcome back. My name is Chris Guillebeau, here with another side hustle success story for you today. You know, sometimes you go to school or begin a career, only to see it morph into something totally different. If you're out there and doing something other than what you planned for or trained for, you're definitely not alone. I once thought I was gonna study accounting, and that lasted about a semester and a half before I realized I had no aptitude for it whatsoever.
And the world of side hustles is perfect for exploring something different. 'Cause when you have a side hustle, you're not taking a lot of risk. You're not making a decision for the rest of your life. Sometimes it might not work out, but you'll still learn something. Sometimes you'll develop a new creative outlet or skill for yourself.
And sometimes it might actually lead to a whole new career path. That's what happened with today's story, which features a California law student whose side hustle is now his full-time job. But of course, it wasn't always that way. And by the way, this story mentions several different tools and resources. In the wrap-up section, I'll explain a bit more about what each of them do so you can consider whether they might be good for you.
And that story is coming right up after this brief message. [Music]
Today's story comes from Ari Banyan in Los Angeles. While he was a law school student at the University of Southern California, he started working on a side hustle, which is now a company called Habitnest, and is also now his full-time job. Habits have always played a huge role in Ari's life. He wakes up early, reads regularly, meditates daily, exercises, and maintains a healthy eating regimen.
That's right, he's one of those people. And while he was in his second year of law school, a friend approached him and another friend about creating an app to help people develop healthy lifestyle habits. And Ari was stoked. The three of them went to dinner to run through ideas, and they met a few times over the next month about the app they wanted to call every damn day. They started by putting in about $3,000 each to pay for various services.
They spent that money on a service autopilot to run their email newsletter, Zapier to integrate their newsletter with a new Shopify store they made, and some other applications. They also paid for a subscription to store social media content and have it posted automatically at designated times. They then created a free accountability partner email chain called Partners and Grind, where they'd match people up with similar habits to hold each other accountable. To do this, they created a landing page with a form where people could sign up, select a habit they wanted to work on, like exercise, meditation, reading, eating healthy, and they would share their geographic location. Users would then receive a series of emails with specific content related to the habits they signed up for, and then they'd connect with other users interested in the same habit.
Ari and his friends marketed the service through Instagram and through a product hunt launch. They also used the popular question and answer site called Quora, where Ari began answering questions about habits, success, productivity, and so on, and he'd find ways to include Partners and Grind in his answers. As a result of the marketing and media coverage, they had hundreds of signups within a few hours. However, these signups were free, and Partners and Grind eventually died out when they learned through user interviews that email wasn't the right way to connect people. They still believed people wanted to be matched with others for accountability, but they found that email was a difficult way to connect and hard for partners to stay consistent.
Still, Partners and Grind helped Ari and his partners get their company name out, build an email list of about 6,000 people, and test out their concept of matching people for accountability. Next, they decided to create Morning Sidekick, a journal to help people wake up earlier and build a morning routine, which was the habit that the majority of their users were interested in developing. Ari wrote the introduction and put together some content. One of the other friends organized it into sections and added more content. Then the third friend worked with the front cover, tracking pages, animations, and design aspects.
They launched a Kickstarter for the journal and promoted it to that email list. They also reached out to various YouTube channels and podcasts related to habits, especially those that they'd mentioned in the journal to help them get the word out. They made $20,000 on that Kickstarter campaign, and they worked on consistent sales for the journal to raise more money to fund the app. They also offered a free PDF of the first week of the Morning Sidekick journal to get people signed up for their newsletter, and they created step-by-step action guides for their articles in the form of PDFs people can download after giving them their email address. Then they would market the journal to those folks on the email list to help achieve consistent sales.
So far, they've sold almost 4,000 units of the Morning Sidekick journal, which cost $34 on their website. The journals were manufactured in China and shipped over, then stored in a warehouse in Los Angeles before being mailed to buyers who placed an order. Then they did something interesting. They'd already done the Kickstarter campaign, but they decided to also launch an IndieGoGo on-demand campaign as an additional landing page. So they took all their Kickstarter content, put it on IndieGoGo.
IndieGoGo then promoted the campaign with a couple of emails, and that brought them some initial sales, and they still make a few sales a week there. So interesting lesson there. If one crowdfunding platform works for you, you might wanna try something similar on another one. And if that's not enough, they actually have two other sales channels. They also sell the journal on amazon.com.
And when they did that, they promoted it to their email list, so they sold about 100 journals in the first three days of launch. That propelled them to being labeled a hot new release by Amazon, and they became a best seller in the productivity planner section. Since then, they've been doing five to 10 sales a day on Amazon, and there they sell the journals for $25. Amazon takes about an $8 cut, leaving them with $17 per journal sold. And the final sales channel, they also sell the journal on the flash sales site, Touch of Modern.
There they only make about $13 on each journal, since Touch of Modern keeps 60%, but they've already sold almost 600 journals on that platform. Ari finished law school, but instead of joining a firm right away, he's decided to spend some time focusing on this business and seeing if he can grow it further. The partners are still developing the app, but in the meantime, they've created a nutrition sidekick journal to compliment the morning sidekick journal. And they're also close to launching a project called The Greatest Gift, which is a product to help people build the habit of gratitude. Ari focuses on writing content for their website, for Quora, for guest posts he does for their newsletter.
Co-founder number two, Amir, is head of growth, focusing on social media, SEO, and marketing. And the third co-founder, Mikey, focuses on product development, including interviewing and hiring developers. He also does a majority of the customer service. Through sales from the growing website and newsletter, they're consistently making more than $7,000 a month in net profit on the journals. And with all their different marketing efforts, as well as the new products they're building, they're hoping they can increase this considerably in the months to come.
All right, well, first of all, congratulations to Ari and the two other co-founders. I love the concept of the morning sidekick journal. And I also really respect their hustle. Like these guys are everywhere. They're not just making a website and a Shopify store.
They're also doing Kickstarter. Then they do Indiegogo. They're doing social media, search engine optimization, question and answers on Quora, reaching out to YouTube celebrities. And a bunch of stuff I didn't even mention. So the hustle is real, great product and great effort.
And I mentioned a number of resources in this story. Let's just do a quick rundown of them in case you're not familiar. The first service they paid for was called Autopilot. I'm not super familiar with the service myself, but it looks like a system for managing email campaigns. There are a lot of different systems for that.
Personally, I use ConvertKit. Last year, I moved several of my mailing lists over to ConvertKit from another provider, but there's also other good choices as well. Next, they mentioned using a social media scheduling service. Now there are a couple of different ones of these. One is called buffer.com and one is called later.com.
There's probably some others, but those are the two that I'm familiar with. I've used both of them and both of them have a free version in addition to a premium version. And with these services, you can prepare your social media content in advance, upload photos, write a description, et cetera. And then these services will automatically post for you throughout the day or the week or whatever you schedule it for. Can definitely save a lot of time as well as reach people in different time zones.
They mentioned using Zapier, which is z-a-p-i-e-r.com or z-a-p-i-e-r.com. And by the way, I'll link up all of these resources on the show notes page. And Zapier is a tool that connects other tools, essentially. It creates links between software applications. They're usually called integrations.
Like if you have a Shopify store, for example, and you also have the email software. Well, you can use Zapier to create an integration where anyone who purchases through your Shopify store is automatically added to the email software of your choice. And there are lots of other uses for Zapier. Essentially what you need to know is it connects various tools. And now let's talk about the marketing tools they used.
Ari is a big fan of a website called Quora. And I've had a great experience with Quora as well. Quora is q-u-o-r-a.com. It is essentially a question and answer site where people post all sorts of questions on any imaginable topic. And anyone who's registered can go and provide answers.
The community then votes on which answers are the most popular, and those answers then get seen more. It is totally possible to use Quora to very gently promote a product or service, as long as you're providing legitimate value, actually answering questions, and not just doing something promotional for the sake of doing something promotional. If you can spend some time with it, it's often a great resource. And the second one they used was called Product Hunt, which is just producthunt.com. That is a very popular site with something like 200,000 subscribers.
And Everyday Product Hunt features all kinds of different products. Those products tend to be tech-focused, like apps or websites. But there's also a lot about productivity, which of course was a great fit for Ari's projects, the Morning Side Kick Journal, as well as the Partners in Grind project that they started with. Lastly, you're probably already familiar with Kickstarter and Indiegogo, the crowdfunding platforms. What I thought was so interesting in this story was that they did the Kickstarter, and then they turned around and did an Indiegogo as well.
I think that only works if Indiegogo, or whatever the service is, is willing to promote to their users. Because in a typical crowdfunding campaign, like you go to your own people to start, and your hope is that it then snowballs into something further. Well, presumably you've already done that with Kickstarter, at least in this case, but it seems like Indiegogo is willing to promote to their user base, which definitely helped a lot. So with all these different marketing efforts, their whole goal is to reach different pockets of people and to bring more people into awareness of the Morning Side Kick Journal, the Nutrition Side Kick Journal, and now the app that they're working on. As I said, it sounds like a great product, and I totally respect the hustle.
I hope this episode has been helpful to you. Inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. Today's show notes, including a rundown on all those resources I mentioned, are at sidehustleschool.com/206. That's for episode 206. We are cruising along.
We'll have much more for you tomorrow and every day this week. I'm Chris Guillebeau "This is Side Hustle School." [Music]
