This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Hello and welcome to Side Hustle School. This is your host, Chris Guillebeau. So glad you're out there. Thanks for tuning in today. Today's episode coming out at the beginning of the week is part of our first $1,000 series.
First $1,000, as you might guess, it's about how someone made their first $1,000. How in fact did they get started? What was their origin point? How did they go from idea to income? I always think there's something we can learn from these experiences, especially when we hear a couple of different ideas or we hear something that went wrong along the way.
And we have a whole series about that called Failure Friday. But just looking at the process of what's the idea, why does someone have a frustration or a problem that they're trying to solve? And then what is the solution to that? Either in business terms, the product or service that they are offering to the world, or at least to their customer base, let's say. And then also what problem are they trying to solve for themselves?
And today we're gonna hear from Lola in Virginia. Now, Lola had a particular problem in that she is working as an independent designer and that's going mostly well, but she's also a little bit frustrated. She wants to find a way to get off the hamster wheel of client chasing, constantly chasing the new client, having to explain the same things over and over. And now she's in the process of doing that, getting off the freelance train by creating a standardized service. So this is the solution to her problem.
She's also providing a solution to others, of course, in the form of a website audit. So she'll explain that a bit more. How did it get started? What is her takeaway from the process? I'll come back at the end with a very quick wrap up.
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Hi, this is Lola and I'm an independent designer in Virginia. I've been freelancing off and on for the past 10 years and it's always been a struggle. What I mean is that I can make enough income, but it's always just a matter of one client after another. Every time I have to explain the same things and go through the same issue of clients not even knowing what they want. I don't mean to complain.
In fact, that's not what this story is about. Instead of complaining, I decided to do something. I started a new service to accompany my design work. I call it the website audit and it's exactly like it sounds. Instead of doing any actual design, I go through a client's existing media properties and make detailed notes.
I use Figma to mark up the site and include lots of tips and suggestions. In a way, it's a lead generator program because after the audit, the client sometimes wants to hire me to implement the suggestions. But I decided to treat this as a standalone service of its own. Almost more like a product, clients pay a flat rate, either $250 for a personal website or 400 for a business site. And I deliver within three days.
The funny thing is that most of the website audit is what I used to do for free when a client came to see me with an existing design. So now I'm just getting paid for that, which is really nice. The first month I mentioned the service, I was pretty low key about it and I didn't do any promotion. I still got two clients and it worked well. The second month I ramped up and began posting more about it.
I also reached out to every client I'd worked with in the past. Maybe they knew someone who'd be interested. I thought about offering some kind of referral bonus, but I decided to skip that for now. That month, six people signed up, including two at the business rate. This was so exciting.
I could tell it was working and that I might be able to keep going. Looking forward, I'd love to do one of these a day. They take about an hour or two, but it's a different energy than I use when I'm doing design work. So it doesn't tire me out. My biggest challenge now is that people sometimes want to have a long conversation before buying the service.
That's not how this works. Buy the service and then we'll talk. Thanks so much to Side Hustle School and for all you do. It's so inspiring. [Music]
Thanks so much to Lola for telling us about their first $1,000.
I hope you found it encouraging listeners. And of course with Lola, she's already working as a freelance designer, but this is her first $1,000. And now beyond that with a particular service, a standalone standardized service that she's created, I think this makes so much sense because with a design process, there's a lot of energy and creativity that goes into it. A lot of personalization. And the more you can in fact standardize that personalization, which is what she does with a website audit, the easier it is for you to perform that service, the less explanation you have to do.
And last but not least, as you heard from Lola, it can actually end up bringing her more clients. So people want to then hire her for personalized design after having the website audit. Of course, that's something she'll have to navigate and figure out how do I, what kind of business do I want to have? How much actual design do I want to do versus only doing these website audits? But these are, of course, good problems to have.
So for now, if you have a question or an update for us about your hustle, sidehustleschool.com/questions. This has been episode 2,165. Got a new one coming out for you tomorrow. I hope you'll subscribe, follow, tune in, wherever you like to listen. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the "Onward Project."
