This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Happy September! Welcome to Episode 2070-2070-2070. Here we are moving into fall, or maybe spring, depending on where you are in the world. But wherever that is, I am grateful for you. Glad you're tuning in, and I hope this series is helpful to you. Today's particular segment,
Throwback Thursday, also known as "Where Are They Now?" where we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them. Last week we heard from the founder of a baseball training academy. He is sliding into growth. During the pandemic, he opened an additional business selling training gear on Amazon. He's still operating that baseball training academy while going back to work as a teacher. Today in our latest feature,
we'll hear from Cowrie Becker, the founder of Cowrie's Kitchen.com. Cowrie is Japanese-American. I believe her mom is Japanese, so Cowrie is half Japanese. She started teaching mochi-making classes together with her mom in the Bay Area. But as you'll hear, she pivoted to a new business selling mochi donuts locally in Ohio, where she now lives. So from one mochi monetization to
another. I like mochi. Who doesn't? I'm not sure I've had a mochi donut, but I would love to try it. Anyway, let's hear directly from Cowrie about this transition. A couple of other updates as well.
I'll be back at the end with a quick wrap up. My name is Cowrie Becker. My side hustle is Cowrie's Kitchen cooking school, and I was featured on episode 976. We actually pivoted due to the pandemic to doing online mochi classes. So that's kind of a shift from what we were doing before. And I do teach classes still. My mom is also teaching classes online, mochi classes.
And I also run a mochi donut shop here in Columbus, Ohio. And we go to the farmers market about two to three times a month and make about 350 donuts each time. And then we usually sell out or we have a few left. But yeah, it's a pretty good market here in Columbus. I started helping out for free at the seasoned farmhouse cooking school. And I was watching instructors. And in my head, I was like,
oh, you have to have a cooking degree or, you know, a culinary degree to teach a class. But then I was seeing instructors teach classes based on their heritage. And I realized, wow, yeah, I don't have to go to culinary school to do this. I can actually teach Japanese cooking classes based on being half Japanese. So I started teaching a ramen class at seasoned farmhouse and then other Asian classes.
And then I taught a few at the conservatory nearby Franklin Park Conservatory. And then when we were getting ready to move to California, I decided I'm just going to go full time and start teaching cooking classes around the Bay Area and just kind of have it be a business. And it definitely evolved from there to places that I didn't know it was going to go. We've pivoted to online classes. And my mom is actually Yukiko. She's the one who taught me how to make mochi in the first place.
And now she's doing a lot of my online team building classes. So a lot of companies will still hire us like Google, Facebook. They'll hire us to do virtual team building mochi classes, which I do want to talk about because we were really surprised about how the difference between teaching an in-person class and then teaching an online class and the challenges, but also the kind of like amazing part about it, too, that came from that. And the main difference we found that actually it was actually easier to do online classes because you don't have to go somewhere and set up all your supplies and like go shopping. So that takes up a lot of time for online class.
You just need your portion of ingredients. So you just need, you know, a cup of mochiko for the mochi, a cup of water, some sugar and the filling. So you don't have to buy a bunch of things and go set up. But it was not as much money per person. It was like maybe we're charging like 35 a person versus like 75 a person because of the experiential factor of being an in-person class.
However, we did find like we've been getting bookings of companies who pay like a thousand dollars to have like 50 people attend at $20 each or something. It ended up being really cool because we could make about the same amount of money doing an online class, but way less hassle, like way less preparation and travel and things like that. Our biggest challenge now is we're still getting bookings online, but people are starting to venture out into doing in-person classes. So navigating going back into in-person classes, but also with COVID still hanging around a little bit. So like how do we ease back into in-person classes, but also keep everybody safe is one of our challenges. And I'm working on my mochi donut project here in Columbus, Ohio. I'm
working on, we're doing farmer's markets, but getting more into doing wholesale. So selling our donuts directly to coffee shops, cafes, so that people can buy from them and have a more regular schedule because the farmer's market will go down during the fall and the winter. So how can we keep a continuous amount of sales throughout the year versus just having it be in the summer? I think if you really want to dip your feet in the water with something, just cold email or cold call, maybe not cold call, just email your local DIY workshop classes or like cooking schools. And if you say that I want to like help you out for free and just see what you guys do and just like kind of like an internship, I'm sure they'll be more than happy to let you come and help out for free. Like who doesn't like free labor? And that's the
way I learned how to start teaching cooking classes and how to make this into a business. I think just reach out and you'll never, you never know what will come out of it. Awesome. Thank you so much, Kyrie. Really appreciate you sharing those updates.
By the way, fun fact, I wanted to call this episode online mochi making classes, freeze out the competition, which if you like mochi, you'll get the joke. Otherwise, you might think like, well, I don't get it. It doesn't make any sense. But it also didn't make sense for a title because she's not really freezing out any competition. Also, she's transitioning from the mochi making classes, etc. So just a fun fact for you there.
More importantly, check out her website, cowrieskitchen.com. That's spelled K-A-O-R-I, cowrieskitchen.com. We'll link it up on the notes page. You can in fact still book a virtual mochi making class either for yourself or for a company or team. Or of course, if you happen to be near Columbus, Ohio, go get her mochi donuts. I want to do that so bad. Hopefully, I'll get a chance
at some point. Let me know what you think and who you'd like to see featured from our archives of more than 1,000 stories, 1,000 stories, 2,000 plus episodes. If you've got a question or an update for us about your hustle, sidehustleschool.com/questions. And that's all for today. But a new episode is coming out tomorrow. Thanks for tuning in. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
This is Side Hustle School. From the Onward Project.
