This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Today, we're gonna jump into the world of niche hobbies and uncommon skills. Niche hobbies, niche hobbies, two different ways of saying that word, basically specialized hobbies, things that are a little bit quirky, perhaps. How can you transform a personal passion or quirky community tradition? I had to practice that phrase, quirky community tradition into a successful online course or some other money-making venture. Now, I believe that everyone is an expert in something and often you're an expert in multiple things, sometimes take some time to figure out what is the thing you're an expert in that can actually be translated into a money-making venture.
That's a big part of what we try to do here on the podcast is help people figure that out. So let's look at it specifically in the instance from Taylor. Taylor from Bozeman, Montana is pondering this exact question, stay tuned as we explore the fascinating potential of teaching the world to ride unicycles and master yo-yo tricks, perhaps some other uncommon skills right after the break. [Music]
Hey, Chris, this is Taylor from Bozeman, Montana. I grew up in a community where we celebrated random hobbies and uncommon skills, things like riding unicycles or advanced yo-yo tricks.
Lately though, I've been considering turning this passion into a project by creating an online course platform dedicated, you know, exclusively to these out of the ordinary skills. Do you think there's a market out there for something like this? What platforms or what strategies would you recommend to get started? - Taylor, I actually have a specific suggestion for you here and to your question, do I think there's a market out there? Well, I don't know, there could be.
I mean, there are people interested in all kinds of things, right? But here's my specific suggestion. Given the visual and engaging nature of skills such as unicycling, advanced yo-yo tricks and so on, YouTube could be a brilliant starting point before diving into making a more formal course. When you make a course, you always have to ask, okay, who's gonna buy this course? Who is my market?
And you can start by thinking like, okay, what is the customer archetype? Who's the kind of person, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But if you don't actually have a community, if you don't have an email list or a social media following oriented around that topic, it's gonna be difficult. There are some things you can do. We've talked about that in other episodes, but I think it's much better in a case like this to focus on building the audience first.
So let's do audience first rather than course first, in my opinion. And YouTube could be great for this. Like if you were able to just offer some tutorials, show people how to do some really simple things, start putting out content, you know, one detailed video a week and maybe like one or two shorts a week. And maybe there's some other platforms as well. You know, you could do this on Twitch.
You could have a TikTok, you could have an Instagram, but I don't want you to get overwhelmed. Like if you wanna do one thing, I think for this particular topic, YouTube is the way to go. So start by thinking what are the best tutorials, challenges, maybe showcase events that you can make, engage with the audience wherever possible, use the comment section, use polls, use any community features, YouTube is great with that. And you may be able to start monetizing directly on YouTube. And as you monetize on YouTube, you can also start thinking about building courses yourself.
So in other words, I think there will be some runway, it's gonna take some time to build up a brand in a community in this area. But as long as you're excited about it, then that's great. And if you're not excited about it, maybe think about something else because this is gonna be something you want to invest in for a long period of time. So as long as you are motivated, definitely proceed. Let me know how it goes if you decide to take this advice or if you don't, that's okay too of course.
Listeners, if you have a question, sidehustleschool.com/questions. I wanna be as helpful as possible. Give me some details about your project. If you have a website already, that's great too. I can take a look, I can share it with our community.
Of course, we've got new episodes coming out every single day. It's all completely free. You can listen wherever you like. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.
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From the Onward Project.
