This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hello, hello. Thanks for tuning in to Side Hustle School. This is Chris Guillebeau, your host. Really glad you're here today. Today's episode is part of a feature we call your first $1,000.
It is, in fact, all about how someone made their first $1,000. How did they get up and running? How did they go from idea to income? And something that we have seen a lot through the archives and through many different case studies, more than 2,100 episodes so far, is that getting going, you know, getting that first $1,000 is often much more difficult than getting the first $10,000 or $20,000, whatever it is. So your goal, if you're just starting out, is to really kind of get to that point and find a way to have sales coming in, to have a viable business model, and then there's so much you can do to scale from there.
So it's just fun to kind of present these examples and, you know, I get out of the way so you can hear directly from them. And with that in mind, today's feature comes from Allie. Together with her sister, she is making a combination board game and app that teaches people about the stars. It's a cool concept. It also has kind of a touching origin story.
So you're gonna hear more about that from her. You'll also hear about that first $1,000 or at least her first sales. How did she make it happen? What did it feel like? And what did she learn?
Well, I guess her and her sister, we're gonna hear from one of them, one of the sisterly duo Allie. And I'll come back at the end with a quick wrap up. [Music]
Hi, this is Allie. One half of the team behind Stargazer, a digital app and board game that helps people learn to recognize stars and constellations. I run this side hustle together with my sister, Lenny.
Growing up, our dad was big on astronomy and used to take us out to a big field outside the city where we could look up at the stars. He brought a telescope and showed us what to look for. At first, Lenny and I thought it was dumb, but then we both secretly began to enjoy it. It even turned into a not so gentle competition between the two of us to see who could identify certain stars the quickest. We thought about it more years later when we were out of college and looking for a project.
Unfortunately, our dad had recently passed away and the combination of wanting to start something of our own while honoring his memory led us back to the stars. We bounced around a lot of different ideas before landing on Stargazer. The idea was that people sometimes need a nudge to learn something and it helps if it's fun. After a year of researching and listening to Side Hustle School, we were ready to move forward. We invested about $10,000 into making the board game and the companion app.
It felt daunting to do both at the same time, but we also felt that the project would be much more likely to succeed if it wasn't just a game or an app. The combination seemed vital. Once our beta version was ready to go, we announced a pre-order sale to friends and family. More than 200 people ordered, which was a lot more than we expected or that we had capacity for. We had to go back to most of them to ask if they'd be okay waiting a couple months and almost everyone agreed.
We're now in another stage of preparation before we go live to the world and hopefully earn a lot more than $1,000. But since everything starts somewhere, I wanted to report it now. Thanks for all your help and inspiration. We'll see you in the stars. - Hallie, thank you so much for telling us about your first $1,000 and of course the origins, the development of Stargazer.
I love the idea of it being a combination board game and a digital app. It is often difficult to combine two different mediums. Often the advice is, hey, just pick one thing and do that first, and then you can always add the other thing later. We talked to somebody recently, or at least I talked to somebody recently, I haven't told you the story yet, but I've got a story in the works of someone who is developing a new independent journalism hub and their vision was to do video podcasts and blog posts all at once. And the lesson there, there's more details to it, but the lesson was maybe just pick one of those things at first.
Nevertheless, for a project like this, it kind of goes hand in hand, the board game and companion app. So it definitely sounds like they've found a good fit here, or at least they're well on their way. So I hope you found the story encouraging. We'll look forward to more updates on Stargazer. Of course, if you've got a question or an update for us about your hustle, let me know.
sidehustleschool.com/questions. Thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you'll subscribe, follow new stuff coming out tomorrow and every single day. My name's Chris Guillebeau, this is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the "Onward Project."
