This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Welcome to Side Hustle School. Welcome as well to Throwback Thursday. This is our weekly segment where we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them with more than 2,000 episodes finished now over the past, I don't know, five and a half years. Is that right? I guess so.
I just do it every day so I don't keep up with the years. We have so many people who have gone on to do all kinds of interesting things. Last week we heard from the founder of cowrieskitchen.com. She started teaching mochi making classes in the Bay Area. Mochi, a delicious Japanese dessert, but pivoted to a new business selling mochi donuts.
So that also sounds pretty good. Today in our latest feature, you're gonna hear from the co-creator of a boxed party game for adults called You Don't Know My Life. This is really fun. His name is Dennis. The other co-creator is Jeb.
And the two of them have been on quite a journey over the past couple of years. Among other things, they started a side hustle hosting virtual game parties for big companies like Dell and Cisco during the first phase of the pandemic. And that's actually grown into something much more than they expected in addition to the original boxed party game. So let's hear a bit more about that along with some lessons learned from Dennis. [Music]
My name is Dennis Hensley.
I'm based in Los Angeles, California. My side hustle is a boxed party game called You Don't Know My Life, which I co-created with a game designer named Jeb Havens. And we were featured in episode 1541 of Side Hustle School. You Don't Know My Life is a boxed party game that is based upon these offbeat questions that I developed over my many years as a celebrity journalist, interviewing stars for magazines like Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire and TV Guide. Over the years, I developed these kind of fun questions that I found got good responses out of people from my articles.
And a few years ago, I thought, maybe there's a game in these questions. So I partnered with a friend of mine, Jeb Havens, who's a game designer, and we came up with this game called You Don't Know My Life. It's been described as if Cards Against Humanity and your diary got together and had a baby. And then we did our own kind of crowdfunding campaign. We didn't go through Kickstarter because we didn't have time to get it all the way where it needed to be for Kickstarter.
So we kind of did our own friends and family version of that. And we were able to get the box games created just in time for Christmas. We got enough pre-orders to pay for everything. And they arrived on December 21st from China. And we had the envelopes all ready to go.
We rushed them in the mail and they got there just in time for Christmas. So it was a Christmas miracle and a very exciting time in our project. So since we were first featured on Side Hustle School, this little pandemic thing happened. And we thought, well, maybe we can do this online and help people stay connected. We thought it just might be fun and a way to contribute something.
So Jeb, my co-creator, worked with a friend of his and developed a web app. So we were able to have a game board that we could share on Zoom and people would submit their answers over the phone. So it was kind of cool the way the tech worked. And Jeb took care of all of that. And we started putting the word out among people that had bought the game previously.
We have a newsletter that we send out. And so people that were stuck at home and needed things to do or wanted to celebrate a birthday, they started booking virtual game nights. And they really were popular. I mean, at the beginning of the pandemic, we were doing a game night every night. And we didn't charge very much for it.
It was kind of like a pay what you can kind of thing. And like 15 or $20 a person, just something to sort of keep it going and pay for our expenses and things. And then as the pandemic sort of waned and things opened up more, personal games weren't our big bookings anymore. It wasn't somebody that needed to do a Zoom birthday. It was companies who still had workers working remotely.
And we partnered with a company called Elevent who books virtual games for mostly corporate teams. And they started getting us bookings and we were able to charge considerably more than we were when it was just friends and family. And we've been doing virtual games for companies all over the world. Big companies like Cisco and Facebook and Google and Salesforce and State Farm. We did a virtual game for Dell Computer where there were six people playing.
There was one person in Tel Aviv, one person in Singapore, one person in Vienna, one person in Paris, one person in Portugal. And we were hosting in Los Angeles. And so going into this corporate world has been a real eye-opener in terms of they really need these kinds of activities and they have budgets for them. I would say one of the biggest challenges that I'm facing is that I am very busy. And so it's juggling the different demands on my time.
And every time we get a booking for a game, I'm so excited, but then I'm like, okay, then that means I have to move this or that. So it's just managing my time. And also I am the MC of the games and it's based on my background and my expertise. So I'm a little bit hesitant to try to train somebody else to do it 'cause I feel like I'm the face of it and the person with the experience because during the course of the game, when stories come out, I know what follow-up questions to ask. And because of my background, I know how to make people feel comfortable and share.
And I'm sure there are other people that can do it, but I'm kind of like, this is my thing. This is my thing that I do. And I love to do it. So in terms of looking to scale and things like that, that's something we definitely have to figure out. But overall, I'm very pleased with how smoothly this transition has gone.
And it's been a joy to share the game with people and to work on and I hope it just keeps going and going. Well, I understand that challenge well. That challenge of like, do I get somebody to help with this thing or do I do it myself? I mean, I feel much the same way. I tend to vacillate in my own thought process over scaling versus maintaining more of a personal touch.
So I always appreciate the relatability of hearing someone else going through that. Anyway, thanks to Dennis for sharing those updates with us. Listeners, check out youdontknowmylife.com, pretty memorable, or buy the game directly on Amazon. And you could get to that by searching, you don't know my life, crazy how that works. It's actually just 20 bucks.
There are lots of five star reviews. It looks like an interesting and engaging experience. Let me know what you think and who you'd like to see featured from our archives of more than a thousand stories, 2,000 episodes, 1,000 plus stories. If you've got a question or an update for us about your hustle, sidehustleschool.com/questions. Take care of yourself out there.
I hope you'll join me again tomorrow. New episode every day. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
