This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey there, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. Got a really fun story for you today, and it's all about passive income. Now, you may know, if you've been paying attention, for the most part, I've actually been really careful about not using that phrase too much.
I think it's a bit overdone. I think when you hear the phrase passive income, it sounds really great, but you also have a fair amount of skepticism about it, and for good reason. Now, sometimes you have to work pretty hard for something to be passive. So I want to make sure you understand that side hustles are not a get rich quick plan, at least not for most of us and not most of the time, but nevertheless, it is really, really great when something you set up turns into a recurring source of income without you needing to do anything for it. So that's what you'll hear about today.
It's a story of a student who creates a visual resume service to make extra cash, then transitions to make that service work for him. It now brings in more than $460 a month in, you guessed it, completely passive income. When Tim Aiten was a sophomore in high school, he aspired to work as a programmer for a digital agency. Being a high school student, he knew he had to do something to stand out, so he decided to create an unconventional resume. Instead of using a word processor like most people would, he used Adobe's Photoshop Suite to create a visual resume that looked completely different from every normal resume he'd ever seen.
He didn't end up getting a job because he was a high school student after all, but the owner took notice and became a business mentor to him. A few years later, he remembered this experience when he was in college and needed to make some cash. Maybe he thought he could offer a custom resume service for other students. Tim was smart. He didn't want to just work with students at his college.
He knew the market was much larger, so he decided to promote this offer online. He went to the website fiverr.com and posted a listing. I will create a stunning custom resume for just $5. That very first day he received an order, and once he filled it and got a rave review for it, the next day he had another order. Within a few short weeks, he was receiving and filling more than eight orders a day.
$5 an order won't take you far, but Tim had improved upon that. Even though basic services on Fiverr cost just $5, the site lets you offer a lot of upgrades and cross-sells in your listing. So by adding on some additional purchase options, Tim's average order was closer to $15. Still, that wasn't a ton of money for a busy student who had to budget his time carefully. When his class schedule got busier, he shut down the listing.
At the end of the next term, he returned to the idea. He felt he was onto something with the resume templates. They were interesting, fun, and clearly a lot of people liked them. From all these orders on Fiverr, he knew there was a clear demand for his service, but he also knew he didn't want to spend all his time filling orders, especially at a low price. Could there be a better way?
Tim spent part of the next summer trying a few different ideas. First, he listed his offer on a different website, trying to break out of the Fiverr ecosystem where low prices ruled the day. The results were lackluster, but he still believed in the concept. Then he tried creating his own website called Resume Redesign. Unfortunately, this too didn't get off the ground.
Finally, more than a year after he'd launched his first resume service on Fiverr, he hit on something. He didn't want to be a designer doing client work, creating his visual resumes from scratch. What he wanted to do was to sell that template itself. So he called the new business Foundry Resumes, and he created 16 unique designs. It was a lot of work to create all those templates, but template is the key word.
Once he made them, they didn't need to be changed or customized further, at least by him. Tim would sell the templates and customers would personalize them by adding their info. By switching from custom design to selling a template, he was also switching from clients to customers. So it's no longer a service-based hustle where he's doing all this work. It's a product-based one where he's just selling something online.
And for this new focus, Tim created a new website. He also listed those templates for sale on Etsy, which typically offers handcrafted items, and also a website called Creative Market, a directory of design assets and stock photos that people pay to download. Just as he saw when he first launched his original service, he had sales right from the beginning. This time, he sold the templates for $11 instead of $5, and this time, he no longer had to do any work once people purchased from him. Instead of looking at his inbox and feeling overwhelmed, he looked at it and saw notifications of money arriving, coming in on a regular basis.
And within a few months, this side hustle was earning more than $460 a month with no work whatsoever from Tim. [Music]
So Tim was always a hard worker, but over time, as he kind of went through different iterations of this project, he learned to work smart too. So I call this lesson, "If at first you succeed, keep trying." Because what he did right from the beginning technically worked, and he could have kept running himself ragged, making custom resumes for $5 or $15. Technically, it would have been a viable hustle, but even though that was a great experiment, it helped him gain confidence in his skills, he also knew it was a bad idea in the long term. He didn't want $15 clients.
He didn't want to have to do resume custom design for a very small amount of money. The much better idea that he had, which kind of came through as he tried different iterations and experimented, was to really focus on the core problem that his side hustle revealed, but changed the solution he provided for it. So students and others needed a custom resume. He had this kind of fun, unconventional design that hadn't been seen before, but he realized he didn't actually have to do the customization and personalization for it. And this change of solutions is what allowed Tim to be more creative and free up more of his time whilst he's getting paid.
So he's onto other stuff. He's doing other projects now, but yet he's still earning that $460 a month. So that sounds like a pretty major victory to me, and it is a true story of passive income. And as always, it may not happen exactly like that for you, but if you listen to these stories and begin applying them to your own hustle, you will see results over time. Remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better.
If you'd like to see the show notes for today's episode, including links to all of the services and platforms I mentioned, just head over to sidehustleschool.com where every day there's an original post with all those notes and links. We have so many more fun stories and lessons and experiments for you to consider coming up. I'm Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School, and I'll see you tomorrow.
