This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Side hustle school friends and listeners, welcome back. This is your hustling host, Chris Guillebeau. And here we have just finished week 34 of the show. I've got several fun things to tell you about this week. I've been traveling a bit.
I was in Anaheim for an event called Podcast Movement, got to meet a bunch of other folks in the podcasting field, gave a little talk on Thursday morning. And then I went to Upstate New York, or at least two hours outside of New York City for a camp GLP. GLP stands for Good Life Project. It's run by my good friend, Jonathan Fields. And he's been putting this event on for several years.
This was the first time that I've been able to come. I'm actually still here this weekend. Gotta be honest with you, I'm not really a camper, at least not by nature. When he asked me to come, I was like, sure, as long as there's a Weston heavenly bed or a Sheraton sleeper bed. You have that at camp, right?
He was like, well, I'll get back to you on that. Anyway, I haven't had a Weston heavenly bed, but it is a pretty awesome community of fun people, including, as I learned, a bunch of folks who listened to side hustle school. Very cool. Before I look back on the episodes of this week, I want to read an email to you, listener feedback, actually. I'm gonna give a shout out to Katie.
I thought this was really fun. She writes in to say, I just made $25 on Upwork. It doesn't sound like much, but this full-time paralegal and mom of an infant is beginning her side hustle. Why did I start? Because my family has debt and I want to help my husband pay it off.
This is my first step in giving my son a more secure financial future. Don't know if I'll be a virtual assistant as my side hustle or something else, but I have to start somewhere. Katie, good work. I admire your vision. Thank you for sharing that and good luck with your next steps.
There are a lot of folks like Katie out there. Just want to say I'm cheering you on. I love getting notes like that. And I'm always happy when I see people taking action. And speaking of taking action, I'm pretty busy myself.
The side hustle book comes out in just 22 days. And again, to be honest with you, as always, 22 days feels like tomorrow to me. However, I have made some progress. Like I told you last week, the tour signup is now ready, at least for my first 30 to 35 cities or so. If you go to sidehustleschool.com/tour, you can see where I'm going beginning September 19th.
And if you live in one of those cities or are close to one of those cities, and you can sign up to spend the evening with me or an afternoon with me if it's a weekend event. And not just me, but a whole bunch of other folks who are pretty awesome. Like this community is amazing. Ever since I first published my first book, The Art of Nonconformity, I believe that was something like 2009, if I have that correct. And I said, I want to go out on the road and meet my readers.
I went to all 50 US states, then every province in Canada on that tour. And I just went away with so much more vision and understanding of what I hope to do myself. And also of just like all the incredible people out there who are doing awesome projects of their own. And I realized then that one of the most important things I could do was try to connect some of those people. And book tour is a big part of that.
So I hope you will join me. And we will have some more cities announced soon. It's just a matter of coordination. It's this huge jigsaw puzzle of trying to figure out what goes where. But we're making progress.
And also I mentioned briefly in the check-in message the other day, I've got a free report for you called 48 Hustle Ideas to Get You Started. And that comes from this need I've heard over and over in the workshops I've done and all the listener feedback I get, that a lot of people really just kind of want an idea handed to them. Like they're still learning this process of how to discover their own ideas and understand what makes for a viable idea. And so we kind of comb through the archives. We looked at the most popular episodes as well as the episodes that featured ideas that were the most replicable.
And we created this report called 48 Hustle Ideas to Get You Started, kind of refers to specific episodes. So if you're new, you don't want to listen to 230 episodes in a row. It will direct you precisely where to go. And this report is totally free. It's not for sale.
I am giving it to anyone who pre-orders even a single copy of the Side Hustle book, which as I said, comes out September 19th. And you can pre-order that book from amazon.com, from Barnes and Noble, from iBooks, from your local bookstore, like wherever you prefer to buy books, you can do that. And you just need to come to sidehustleschool.com/book and then upload the order receipt or just send us your receipt number and you will get that report immediately. I've got some other free stuff I'm working on as well. I'm not quite ready to announce that yet, but just know that when you pre-order, you will get any bonuses that come out later as well.
So you're not missing out in any way if you buy the book now. You'll get that report right away and that also makes a huge difference for authors, in this case, me, because it shows book buyers for different distributors. It shows people in the publishing industry that there is demand, that there is interest in this upcoming book. So if you ever hear authors encouraging people to pre-order, that's why, it's 'cause it does make a big difference. Anyway, that tour is at sidehustleschool.com/tour.
The pre-order bonus is sidehustleschool.com/book. [Music]
Looking back on this week from episodes 233 to episode 238, several popular shows ranging from Mexican avocados to fidget spinner cookies, to a fashion forward police officer and a marketing director who pops tags at thrift shops. Definitely packed in a lot of value this week. There's another episode I wanna focus on the most, but just briefly first, that fidget spinner cookie became a viral sensation, it brings in $2,000 a month. And in that episode, I talked about how it's not always good to kind of focus on a trend, because a trend by nature comes and goes, it's not gonna be there forever.
But if you're already doing something and you are positioned to take advantage of a trend, then that's a different story. And that's what you saw in that episode. This woman is already making custom cookie creations in lots of different fun shapes and sizes and styles. And then once everyone in the world started talking about fidget spinners, she thought, "Well, I'll make a fidget spinner cookie." And nobody had done that before, so it got picked up by lots of media. It's not making her rich, but this is something she started years ago, literally just for her friends and colleagues, selling cookies for $1 or $2, up to $3.
Whereas now she's shipping cookies nationwide for $5 each, and making, as I said, a couple of thousand dollars a month. So a very significant additional source of income for somebody who already has a day job. Similarly, that Mexican avocado story. Mexican avocados ripen into $85,000 contract. Wasn't really about a trend, but it was about new media.
In this case, Snapchat. These two guys who are making geo filters for Snapchat end up catching the attention of the Mexican avocado board, a powerful force. And even though they were just two random guys and lots of marketing agencies were trying to compete for this contract, they ended up with an $85,000 gig. So in some ways, once again, it's about being in the right place at the right time, but how do you get to be in the right place at the right time? Well, you show up, you take chances, you put things forward.
And not everything will work, but maybe something will. Now I wanna focus most of the looking back to this episode that I really, really liked. In fact, to be honest, it's one of my favorite episodes of Seto School since we began. I know that lots of other folks liked it as well. This was episode 237.
Stop loafing around. Woman on food stamps earns $86,000 teaching people to bake bread. If you have not heard this episode, I would highly encourage you to go back and listen to it. I mean, I'd like you to listen to all the episodes, but I'm just saying like this one was really good. And that headline doesn't even tell the whole story.
She was on food stamps. So you can probably tell that she was poor, but she had also just left an abusive relationship. She had a son with autism. She had a terminally ill mother. It's like the hardship just kind of keeps going on and on.
You're like, wow. But despite those challenges and hardships, she was able to essentially turn her whole life around through teaching people how to make sourdough bread. And she created this whole series of courses. The first course she made $25,000 from, which was not just huge, it was enormous. It was life-changing by itself.
But then she decided to kind of go deep in the sourdough bread niche. There's probably some great pun there, but I can't think of it at the moment because I really just love this story. Ends up creating 10 courses all about sourdough bread, like who would have thought. And last year makes more than $80,000 doing that. This year on track to exceed that.
And I think I said in that episode that it's really cool that she was doing this not by teaching people how to program or not by teaching people how to make an app or something that's super high technology, like baking bread is pretty old school. But then I thought about it some more and I was like, well, actually what we have here is a combination of things because she is using this old school skill, baking bread, but the success is the result of combining that skill and that ability to teach people that skill with the tools of modern day technology to deliver that content to people because she's teaching online courses. So to me, this is kind of like the best use of technology. It's like a blend of the old and the new. And in this very creative fashion, Teresa, the woman featured in that story, truly ends up creating a whole new life for herself, which I think is just admirable and amazing.
I make the show because of stories like Teresa's, because of emails like Katie's, like I read at the top of the show, and hopefully because of you as well. One of the reasons I'm so excited about this fall tour is I know I'm gonna meet a lot of listeners and I'm gonna hear more stories. And I look forward to having stories to share on the show. I look forward to kind of connecting the online community with the offline community and vice versa. But one way or another, community and empowerment are essentially the values of the show.
We've got some great stories coming up next week that I think you'll really like. There's a tea sommelier who turns leaves into a million dollar business. Am I saying the word sommelier right? I guess I'll find out. It's a mean email.
An insulated ice shaker that sells $80,000 in six months. Just some crazy stuff. And you know, I still get emails from people, not necessarily complaining about my sommelier pronunciation, though I'm sure I'll get those too. But I still get emails from people who are like, are these stories real? Like, I don't believe it.
And I'm always like, well, you know, crazy thing. You can go and look them up. And we actually link to their websites on the show notes page. And you can see their social media and you can go read about the whole thing. If I was making these stories up, it would be hard to do it every day.
Like if Side Hustle School ever goes to like once a week, then you can worry. But for now, this is legit. [Music]
And speaking of legit, as we close out the week, I want to give credit where credit is due. Say thanks to a couple of people who work on the show. You may know them by now if you've been listening for a while.
Our production team is led by AC Valdez, also featuring Odelia Rubin. Show notes in Portland, Oregon are by Whitney Karinek, my cat Libby Gillibo, ready to go on tour, packing her bags, except she's not going. And she doesn't have bags because she's a cat. We, Side Hustle School, are part of the Onward Project, led by Gretchen Rubin. You can check that out in Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Gretchen has a book coming this fall as well that I'm excited about. It's called "The Four Tendencies." Oh, and by the way, speaking of Apple Podcasts, thanks so much to everybody who has left ratings or reviews. We did a little push for those a couple of weeks ago, and they are still coming in. That is super, super awesome. We'll be coming up on 1,000 reviews or ratings soon, and I am most grateful for that, as well as everyone who tells their friends about the show, about the book, about the tour, about all the fun stuff that we're doing.
You are a rock star, and the show is gonna get better and better because of your support. Fun fact of the week, even though the manager at the bread store told the baker to stop loafing around, he said that was his job. If you use that on social media, I expect a credit, and I'll stop while I'm ahead. In every episode, I say inspiration is good, but action is even better. I'm so glad you're listening.
This is an investment in yourself. Episodes go online at 601 a.m. Eastern time every day, and I hope you'll join me for them this next week. I'm Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
