This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
All right, all right, welcome to Side Hustle School. Thanks so much for tuning in. Hope you are amazing. Hope you are better than well. I hope you are holding up, keeping your head high during this holiday season.
We've got a lot of stuff coming up for next year. I can't believe next year is almost on the way, but in fact, in less than two weeks, we will be into a new year. But for today, we have a new episode, of course, because we have a new episode every day. This is Side Hustle School, I'm Chris Guillebeau. Today is Failure Friday.
Failure Friday, a collection of short stories about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure. All of the things that go wrong. Not success stories, not the I made a million dollar stories, more of the stories of I had an idea to do something and my idea met reality and eventually reality won, right? Because that's how it works in a battle between your assumption and reality. But of course, every story is different.
Every story has details. And today's feature is Robert from Long Island, New York. Robert's idea was to start a virtual consultation service to help people pick out the right exercise shoes. Now let's hear about how this idea didn't pan out. It actually kind of stumbled out of the gate, let's say.
It never hit its stride. All right, I'm done for the moment. I'll come back at the end though, with a quick wrap up. For now, here's Robert. [Music]
Hey, this is Robert.
I love exercising and I used to work as a personal trainer. As part of my quest to earn a more passive income, I tried to start a virtual consultation business to help people find the right running shoes. I should clarify, it wasn't only running shoes. Having the right shoes is important for all forms of exercise, but because running shoes is something people tend to struggle with, that's what I led with. I set up a quick WordPress site like you talk about and then advertise my service.
I followed that up by posting it on Facebook and in some online groups. At first, I even offered to do the consult for free. I figured it would help me get comfortable with the process without feeling much pressure and maybe some of the people I helped would write a testimonial for me. This is where it hit my first problem. Most people didn't want the consultation, even though it was free.
That should have been a good lesson right there. If they don't want it for free, they're definitely not gonna pay for it. But at the time I figured, okay, maybe I'm not explaining it very well. Plus maybe they'll value it more when it's paid. So I set the price at just $50 and said I was open for business.
50 bucks to prevent injury and find the best shoes for you seems well worth it, at least to me. After I got my first client, I thought, okay, only 19 more to go until I can be featured on the first $1,000 segment. Unfortunately, I only got three more clients. Two of the four had a hard time with my process since I need to see a video of how you run to be able to recommend a shoe. I thought that would be simple since everyone has a smartphone these days, but it turned out to be more complicated than I thought.
In the end, the demand simply wasn't there and I had to shut down this attempted side hustle. I'm gonna try something else in early 2023. In addition to that critical lesson about how you shouldn't expect people to pay for something when they don't even want it for free, I also learned to think more clearly about the entire customer process as I'm designing a business idea, not just as I go along. Thanks for all you do and keep inspiring. I'm gonna make it on that first $1,000 segment next year, I promise.
[Music]
Thanks so much, Robert, really appreciate that story. And a reminder to Robert and everyone, never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. Indeed, sometimes these initial ideas don't pan out or sometimes your middle ideas. I've had a lot of business ideas and many of them have completely flapped, lots of failure experiences of my own, but I just kind of keep trucking along. So that's what I always encourage you to do.
I guess in Robert's case, we could say, put one foot in front of the other. So thanks again for sharing that story. And listeners, if you've got a question or an update for us about your hustle, let me know. sidehustleschool.com/questions. This has been episode 2,176, 2176.
Much more is coming up. You can subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts. It's all completely free. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is SighthustleSchool.
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- From the Onward Project.
