This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to Side Hustle School. This is Chris Guillebeau, your host of a daily podcast, all about helping you make extra money without quitting your job. Now today, our segment is known as Failure Friday. We started this last year, it's been very popular, looking at all the stories of things that don't go well, right, because of course, we're all about success here on Side Hustle School, but sometimes you come to success through a pathway that is lined, let's say, with mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure.
As I said, the things that don't go so well. And just like our Throwback Thursday segment, you get to hear directly from a side hustler who has struggled to get something off the ground or otherwise encountered a mishap, right? They're gonna tell you the story, their idea, their assumption, what ended up happening, and of course, what they learned from the process. So today we have a valuable lesson. I have actually been through this lesson myself of getting my Facebook page hacked at some point.
You're gonna hear a similar story from Shari, who is from Chicago, I believe. And after spending a year building a Facebook page up to 40,000 fans, good work, Shari, but then some bad news happened. She got hacked and lost access for several weeks, which can be really discouraging. It can be really just antagonizing and frustrating and annoying, and you just can't get in touch with the people who originally signed up to hear from you. And it's your whole business, at least in her case it was.
So let's hear the story from her. I'll come back at the end with a quick wrap-up. [Music]
Hey there, this is Shari from Chicago. So for the past year, I've been building my business as a growth coach, helping women feel more confident and make better decisions. Side Hustle School has helped a lot.
I'm focusing on women in their late 30s and early 40s, and many of them still use Facebook a lot. I know lots of people moved on to Instagram and then TikTok, but I decided to focus on Facebook. Well, it was all going very well, at least for the first nine months. I built a page and joined a bunch of communities. I commented and posted every day, and pretty soon more than 100 people a day would like or follow the page for the first time.
After a while, I had 40,000 fans and thought I really was onto something. I used it as a lead generation tool and was getting booked up on paid consulting. Then one day I got an email from Facebook, or at least I thought it was from them. It said I needed to reset my password, so I did, or so I thought. It turned out I'd been targeted for a hack, and as soon as I reset my password, I was locked out of the account.
The hackers also disabled the admin privileges of my virtual assistant, so she couldn't get in and add me back. I have to admit that was smart of them. Okay, so I was hacked, bummer, but I figured, well, I'll just send a message to Facebook and they'll fix it. This was the worst part. Facebook was incredibly unhelpful.
I got an auto response back that said they wouldn't read any support messages because of COVID. How stupid is that? I kept writing them from any outlet or email address I could find, and no one ever replied with a real message. Finally, after three weeks of begging and waiting, I got the page back. What a nightmare.
I know this might sound over the top, but I was borderline traumatized by the experience. The page represented my whole business community and the only way to reach them. A month later, and I'm still rebuilding. My posts don't reach as many people now, and I'm sure the hack had something to do with it since I wasn't posting all that time, but I'll persevere. The lesson for me is, first of all, don't click any links from senders you don't know, but we all know that, and people still make mistakes.
I don't think I should have lost all contact with my audience for three weeks just because of a dumb mistake. The bigger lesson is, don't depend on Facebook. I'm trying to build my audience away from them now and towards something I have more control over. Thanks for your help and for letting me share this story. I hope it helps someone else out there.
[Music]
Hey, Shari, I really appreciate you sharing that story with our listeners. I mean, definitely gotta be careful of those links, but it's just so common these days to get hacked and the hackers are more and more sophisticated. So it's so easy to make a simple mistake like that. I was reading the other day that now sometimes hackers can basically accomplish the same thing without people actually clicking one of those links. They can just send you the link in some cases and even if you delete the message, basically they've already gotten through.
So definitely a scary time. And I think the bigger lesson is what Shari said about, don't build your business, not just about Facebook, like let's not pick on them entirely or exclusively, don't build your business on any platform that you don't have some degree of control over because those platforms can change at any time. It's not just about getting hacked. Sometimes they change their algorithms. Sometimes they remove pages or profiles or content without telling you why.
So wherever possible, maintain your own control, direct contact with customers. It's not always possible, of course, but just be aware that these things can happen, all right? But also never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. I'm glad Shari is getting back to work. Listeners, if you've got a question, an update for us about your hustle, or if you have had an experience, negative or positive, you know, whatever it is, sidehustleschool.com/questions.
We'd like to feature it all here on the podcast. The notes for today are at sidehustleschool.com/2134, 2134. We continue to roll along throughout the year. Thank you for being a big part of it. My name's Chris Guillebeau.
This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
