This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Hello there and welcome to Side Hustle School. I'm your host, Chris Guillebeau. You are awesome. If you've been listening for a while, thanks for being part of our community. I hope the stories you hear will serve you well in your quest to create a new source of income.
And if you're just joining us well, welcome. Now this is a big week for me. It is day two of Side Hustle, Side Hustle the book, not Side Hustle School, being out in the world. Last night was the launch in Seattle, Washington. I'm going on to Los Angeles tonight, San Diego tomorrow, my hometown of Portland the day after that.
You can get all the details about the tour at sidehustleschool.com/tour. We'd love to see you somewhere. And also thank you so much for all your support and nice notes. Been hearing from a lot of folks about the book launch. Ultimately, the book will be successful if people find it helpful and tell their friends about it.
So I know it's just out. You probably haven't had a chance to read it yet, but when you do, let me know if it meets that test. If you do think it's helpful and it's worth sharing. Now today's story is about a rogue financial analyst, actually a former financial analyst who earns $34,000 from a golf membership site. This is actually $34,000 in recurring annual income.
And the side business has only existed for about eight months. And just like yesterday's story featured a longtime friend, Stephanie Zito, today's story features another friend, Sean Ogle. I actually first met Sean, I don't know, something like 50 years ago, it feels like. It might actually be more like eight years, but I wrote about Sean in my first book, "The Art of Nonconformity." Among many other things, he was a founding team member of the World Domination Summit and remained part of that team for five years. And today I'm gonna tell you about how he's been very successful with this golf membership site.
That story's coming up in just a moment. [Music]
Sean Ogle got his start as a financial analyst, but he didn't last very long in that career. He had a bucket list full of goals, objectives, and missions of all the things he wanted to do in life. So he started a blog, "Location Rebel," as a means of public accountability. Now in another story, which I told some ways long ago in "The Art of Nonconformity" book, six months after starting the blog, Sean ended up quitting his job, moving to Thailand, and then working on "Location Rebel" while freelancing to pay the bills.
That's not what we'll talk about today. Today we'll talk about his side hustle. Because yes, even self-employed people need side hustles. Pretty much for all the reasons that employees do. Multiple sources of income are good, and also doing different kinds of work is good.
It's healthy, it's creative, it's fun. And Sean's side hustle is called "Breaking 80," which is a golf membership club. And he monetizes it through a community he created within the site called "The 80 Club." It's basically an online forum for private golf club members around the world. And Sean also has a Quest, which is closely connected to "Breaking 80." The Quest is not just to break 80, which I think is some kind of golf score. It's to play the top 100 courses in America and the top 100 in the world.
And as a bonus, he's actually playing most of them for free. Now, the way this works is, to play the top 100 courses in America or the world, it's not just a matter of time and money, because a lot of these courses are totally private. They don't allow just anyone to show up and pay and go play the course. You have to be invited somehow. And Sean originally created this project to document his Quest, and also to help him get access to some of these exclusive clubs.
So after he created the site on an Instagram account, he would reach out to the clubs he was trying to play, explain what he was doing, saying he would love to document, take photos, highlight that course for everybody else out there. Would they be interested in having him as a guest? And a lot of them said yes, and over time he built up relationships with people, used those relationships to reach other people at other courses. And he's now played 41 of the top 100 courses in America and 35 of the top 100 in the world. By the way, as a side note, Pine Valley, just outside Philadelphia, is the number one course in the world, and he hasn't been able to play it yet.
So he's looking for a connection. So anyone with a connection to Pine Valley, get in touch with Sean, that would be an awesome secondary success of Cytosol School. But back to our focus. His Quest is personal, it was always something he wanted to do, but he also has a business goal, and that business goal is to create win-win scenarios for his club, which by the way, costs $500 a year. So how does he find new members who pay $500 a year?
Well, on Instagram, that social network has actually been his number one source of reaching new people. I'll tell you more about where that money comes from and how it breaks down in a second. But first, what about the tools that Sean used to build this membership site? Well, it's actually really simple. He has a WordPress site for the blog, then he installed some forum software called Discourse.
That's for the club, the private area of the site. And he pays something like $10 a month to them. After somebody applies, he sends them a PayPal link to purchase and set up the recurring payment. And then he manually creates an account for them in the Discourse software. They also get signed up for a welcome email series using ConvertKit, the same newsletter software that I use.
And since there's actually no private membership content aside from that forum, he doesn't need any other software, any other kind of plugin, or really anything else. So it's actually super simple. If you didn't understand some parts of that, basically what it means is he's using WordPress, which is either free or low cost, depending on how you do it. For payment processing, he's using a PayPal account, which most people have, you probably have one. And he pays $10 a month for this software that helps him have a community, a forum where people can talk to each other.
That's it. And what about those results? Well, right now he's just passed the 150 member mark in about eight months of being in business. The AD Club continues to bring in one or two members a week on average, which may not sound like a lot, but they pay $500 a year when they join. So right now he's looking at about $35,000 in annual recurring revenue.
That's actually growing quite a bit since he raised his price from $250 a year to $500 a year a couple of months ago. He may raise the price again at some point, but whatever price someone comes in at, that's the price they pay for life. So there's a bit of an incentive to joining earlier, or at least before the next price increase. He also does golf product reviews, which brings in affiliate revenue each month as well. So this is going pretty great.
Obviously it requires some maintenance and attention, but for that kind of return, it's definitely well worth it. And he's also doing something he enjoys. He's chosen a topic he's passionate about. He's found a way to connect that passion with other fans of the topic, bringing them together to talk about courses and trips and equipment, all kinds of stuff. And because people sign up for an annual membership, he'll be able to continue to count on that money and predict how much is coming in, month after month and probably year after year.
In fact, you could say he has a driving ambition that is par for the side hustle course. [Music]
So here's the thing, golf is a great topic or niche for your side hustle, because it's a hobby that people spend money on. In fact, while I don't know much about golf myself, aside from playing Tiger Woods PlayStation Golf many years ago, I'm pretty sure there's no way to participate in this hobby without paying money. Like the whole sport or hobby or activity, whatever you wanna call it, requires you to spend money to participate. So just like personal finance is a great blog topic when it comes to monetization, a couple of weeks ago we featured that guy who's a target store manager, earning $45,000 a month, writing a blog about personal finance.
So too is golf for this kind of side business. So it's always great to think about things like that. What are activities in life that people spend money on? It might be easier to monetize your product or your service in those industries, those topics, than in something else where people aren't used to spending money. Now I also like what Sean is doing in terms of branching out from his original focus with Location Rebel.
He's still doing that, but I think he also recognizes, first of all, nothing lasts forever. And second, it's just smart to have more than one source of income. So congrats to Sean. And for you out there, as always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/263.
We'll link up all those sites I mentioned. Sean's project, his Instagram account, that software he uses to run a community, anything else I forgot. And I'm gonna keep traveling. I'm headed to California now where I will speak to you from next. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.
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