This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Friends and listeners, welcome back. This is Chris Guillebeau here with you for another episode of Side Hustle School. This is episode 231, getting ready to close out another week. And I wanna encourage you today, don't sell yourself short. If you have a dream, well, pretty much everyone has some kind of dream, I would suggest you have those dreams for a reason.
And even though I want this show to be very practical, I want it to give you tips, I want it to give you action points, I want it to give you a clear direction. I also wanna be clear, I hope that helps you follow your dreams. I wanna make sure we don't miss the point, you should follow your dreams, you should pursue your big ideas. And I hope today's story illustrates that, it's about a marketing professional and new mother who creates a digital and print magazine. That was always a dream of hers, she followed it.
It's a meaningful project as you'll hear, but because it's a side hustle, it's also one that makes money. And I'll tell you all about it in just a moment. [Music]
Sarah Hartley had three lifelong goals, to create a magazine, write a novel and own a clothing boutique. As a marketing coordinator for an architectural firm, she wasn't making any progress on any of those goals. So when her son was born in 2014, she decided that she needed to get going on at least one of them.
She picked the magazine thinking that would be the easiest goal to start with. Well, it wasn't easy, it actually took a lot of work. But she had a great starting place, because during her pregnancy, she wrote about her struggles on a personal blog in a very real, vulnerable way. The grateful responses that she got from her readers encouraged her to keep writing and engaging conversations. It was this experience that shaped what kind of magazine Sarah decided to start.
She realized that there was something missing from the mainstream media, that kind of honesty and vulnerability that she was so willing to share. So Sarah decided to start a magazine that talked about the real issues that women face in a genuine way. No stories about losing those last five pounds or what color is in this season. Instead, Sarah wanted to share stories about mental health, love, loss, infertility, and other major life issues that women grapple with. With this clear vision in place, Sarah began by investigating different publishing platforms.
She eventually decided on one called Izu for both the look and the price. The price was great because there was a free option to get started. She used Adobe InDesign and Photoshop software to create the magazine, and then WordPress to create a website to go with it. These costs were low because she did most everything herself. Sarah estimates she spent around $200 a month, the first couple of months, to get her first four issues out.
And to get writers for them, she started reaching out to friends and family who had incredible stories, and she asked if they wanted to contribute. She also recruited some fellow bloggers. And after the first issue came out, people started coming to her asking if they could contribute. That's made the whole process much easier for subsequent issues. Sarah called the magazine Hole and Lane, and the first issue came out in June 2015.
Her initial goal was to publish every other month and make the magazine completely free for readers. But after those first few issues, a lot of people said you should be charging for this, at least a low price. So for the first issue of 2016, she started charging $3 an issue. Still pretty low, but this change meant that at least $400 a month was now arriving in her bank account. And also around this time, Sarah got some much needed help from several women who wanted to volunteer.
One of them became an editor, another manages the Facebook group, and someone else helps with general operating tasks. Sarah says the fact that they do this for free is absolutely incredible. They believe in the magazine admission as much as I do, so it no longer feels like just my project, it's all of ours. From January to June 2016, Sarah continued to produce the digital magazine and slowly increased her monthly revenue. But from her very first issue the year before, her readers kept telling her how beautiful it was and how much they wanted a print version.
So for the one year anniversary of Hole and Lane, Sarah decided to do her first print issue. She started with research early in the year to see how much printing would cost, and she settled on a platform called PixArt Printing, both for the price point and print quality. The very first print issue sold out almost immediately at $17 a copy, which helped to offset the additional costs. And that print issue was popular enough that Sarah decided to keep doing it. But starting in 2017, she made a strategic decision to move to quarterly issues instead of every other month.
All of these factors combined to increase revenue while reducing the total number of hours she put into it. Revenue is now about $2,000 a month, and Sarah also had to start paying for some new services to manage everything. Now specifically she used three resources, all of which I'll link up for you on the show notes page. One is called Moonclerk, which manages subscriptions, another is called Cognito for article submissions, and she also added G Suite from Google for email and cloud storage. That revenue figure is coming mostly from subscriptions, but advertising is another solution Sarah's looking at to make more profit on this labor of love.
She's been selling advertising on and off since the very first issue, but it's been challenging because most big companies aren't interested in working with her. But earlier this year, Sarah tried something new with the next issue that's coming out later in 2017. For prices starting at just $150, advertisers got exposure in seven different ways, including a full page ad, an Instagram feature, and a mini interview. Sarah works with advertisers to help them pick the best seventh option for their company, whether it's a giveaway, a social media takeover, or something else that works for their situation. This strategy helped the advertising sell out much quicker, which brought in $1,500 in sales and almost covered her entire print costs.
Sarah plans to keep going with this strategy at a slightly higher price point for future issues. And side note, we have a lot of small business owners out there, if Sarah's demographic is interesting to you, maybe you should check it out. Sarah is optimistic that based on what she's built so far, she'll be able to begin paying some of her volunteers next year. And beyond the financial rewards, the response from readers and the story she's been able to tell is what's kept her going. She says people in general are good and want to help one another.
So we're giving them a platform to do just that. [Music]
All right, there's a lot to learn from this story. First of all, congratulations to Sarah. I love the whole concept of starting a magazine, but even more, I think I respect the content and style and tone of her work. It's a wonderful mission.
And if you're out there and interested in printing a magazine or something similar, there are several resources in this episode. I will link them all up at sidehustleschool.com/231. You can check out the magazine itself as well as all those different platforms she used to make it. And I also want to give a quick shout out to a friend of mine, Brandon Harvey. His vision was to start a newspaper, an actual printed newspaper in 2017.
I know, so crazy. And he called it the Good Newspaper, a printed newspaper full of good news. He did this partially in response to all the bad news we hear about the world on a weekly or even daily basis. And his mission statement is that good news isn't dead and every quarter we set out to prove it by printing the stories of the people, ideas, and movements that are changing the world for the better. I was a proud backer of his Kickstarter project and you can check out the Good Newspaper at goodgoodgood.co.
So that's the word good three times, goodgoodgood.co. Thank you as always for listening. I hope you're doing well wherever you are out there. Don't forget inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. I'll see you tomorrow with the weekly recap.
Much more is on the way next week. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]
