This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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I believe we can learn as much from failure as we can from success, perhaps even more. Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name's Chris Guillebeau. Welcome as well to Failure Friday, our weekly segment all about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure. It is essentially a collection of short stories about all these things that go wrong.
Not the big successes, but the challenges that we encounter along the way. And you get to hear directly from a Cytosil who has struggled to get something off the ground. So these stories tend to vary a bit, but they often begin with an idea, an idea or an assumption, something that they thought might be a good idea, but of course it doesn't turn out that way. So what happened? What did they learn along the way?
Today's short story features Bertie from Central Ohio. She's one of our listeners who had an idea to sell gift baskets for corporate alumni. Unfortunately, buyer demand wasn't as great as she hoped for. In fact, this buyer demand was, well, I guess we can say non-existent. Let's hand it over to her to tell the story.
[Music]
Have you ever tried to sell something that no one wanted to buy? Guess what? I did. I was going to say that this is the story of me selling something that didn't get a lot of sales, but that's not exactly accurate. It got zero sales, as in absolutely none.
What's funny is this happened after a previous idea I had worked well. I guess I thought I could do no wrong. You know what they say about pride going before fall. All right, so my idea, gift baskets in the theme of school colors. I thought this could be great for alumni parties, fundraising, or just general school spirit.
I talked to my college alumni office to see if they'd be interested, and it seemed like they were. Later, I realized they were probably just humoring me. Anyway, I spent a lot of time, too much time, curating items for the gift baskets. I wanted them to be perfect. So I made dozens of calls to potential vendors and looked at hundreds of items.
In contrast, I spent very little time thinking about marketing. Big mistake. I guess I just thought, "If you build it, they will come." But they definitely didn't. Once I had the offer page ready to go, I'm not sure what I expected, but it was supremely anticlimactic. Very few people visited, and no one added anything to their shopping cart.
As for the alumni office, when I followed up with my contact to let them know the product was ready, they passed me on to someone else. But that person never responded, despite repeated follow-ups. In the end, I realized I might've sounded desperate or at least discouraged, and I was. I'd worked on this a lot, and nothing came of it. After a couple of weeks, I finally recognized that this situation was almost entirely my fault.
I'd made something that no one wanted, and then failed to devote enough time to marketing. I guess I'll never know what would've happened if I solved the second problem, but my gut says it just wasn't a good fit in the first place. I left feeling humble, but not humiliated. After all, I'd been able to succeed in the past, and I even learned a valuable lesson from this failure, live to fight another day. Just not with the same idea.
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat, and also live to fight another day, just not with the same idea. The first one is our theme of Failure Friday, and the second, of course, you just heard some advice from Bertie, live to fight another day, just not with the same idea. Fair enough, I've been through that myself a bit. I never tried to sell gift baskets in this particular fashion, but lots of ideas I had that just didn't work out, and the big thing for me to do was just try something different, as opposed to continuing to bang my head against the wall, trying to make something work that wasn't going to work. So thanks so much to Bertie for sharing that story, and listeners, if you've got a question, an update for us about your hustle, or something else, sidehustleschool.com/questions, we make this podcast every single day for you, so let me know what you need and how we can continue to improve.
We're gonna keep working at it seven days a week. Thanks for tuning in today. My name's Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
