This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Hello and welcome. You are listening to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau and we have just finished week number four. So I'm actually on the road today recording this recap. I've been in Asia for the past four or five days. I was in Tokyo a couple of days and now I'm in Hong Kong.
And it's really fun to be in a different time zone than usual. So I travel a lot. I've been traveling for more than a decade. But this is the first time since the show has been out that I've been overseas. So it's been interesting to be on a different time zone because the show goes out every morning at 601 a.m. Eastern time. And normally I live on the West Coast in Portland,
Oregon. So that's 3 a.m. Pacific time. Now I actually get up not every day, but just about every day. I usually kind of wake up in the middle of the night just to make sure everything's okay with a new episode. And then I go back to bed and get up a couple hours later for real. But here I can
actually kind of watch the show come online live, which is my evening time. And then I go to bed and I wake up six or seven hours later with all the different notes and feedback and questions about today's episode. So it's kind of like the whole schedule is flipped for me. And I know that people are listening from all over the world. So your schedule may be totally opposite. The point
is for me, it's just interesting to see how people are engaging, how people are listening and experiencing the show. And speaking of that, a few people have asked how far out I'm working with the show. Because obviously it's going to be a year long 365 episodes. But of course, we haven't completed all 365 episodes. My goal is to work about two weeks out, about 10 to 14 days with everything produced, everything written, recorded, produced. That's because I don't want to be
stressed out about tomorrow's episode or the next day's episode. I want to make sure that we've really invested the time to put together a quality show for you. But I also don't want to work too far out because this is an organic process. This is not meant to just be kind of one way communication of me speaking to you. It's intended to become a living, evolving community project. And I can
already see that the show is evolving and improving based on response from listeners, which is fantastic. That's my goal. So for example, last week we did the first listener questions during this recap. We got some really good feedback about it and also a lot of questions that started coming in. If you have a question, you can just leave it on the website, sidehustleschool.com. And by the way, thanks so much for telling people about the show. The
show continues to grow, getting reports from all over the world, which is fantastic. And really telling people about it is the number one thing you can do to support it. If you believe in the message, if you believe it's helpful, you think it can help other people as well. So coming up today, a recap of the week, focusing on a few specific lessons that I want to go into in more detail and then a fun preview of what's to come next week. You'll hear about all those things right after this. So what happened this week on the show? Well, episode 22, we began with the
story of a 17 year old high school student who made $7,000 from a holiday pop up shop. And this is a story of hard work, of preparation, of being willing to experiment. But there was also a certain element of good fortune. And you can see this in a lot of the stories. I think it's totally possible to look at any particular success story in life and say, okay, maybe they worked hard, but there was also this element of luck or good fortune or favor that occurred. And I think
that's okay. What we can take away from it is that fortune favors the prepared and Brianna, the student who had the holiday pop up shop, a lot of things did fall into place. And she did get this free space at the mall, but she had to be ready for that. She had to know about her products and she had to be willing to work. So good fortune may or may not come your way with any particular hustle, but if it does arrive, make sure you're prepared and willing to work for it.
Now episode 23 was about Jake, the guitar teacher who sells lessons on Craigslist and makes $80 an hour up to $120 an hour. And as I said, there's nothing terribly unusual about teaching guitar. He's just been really successful at it. And he's been able to raise his rates, eventually quit his job. Now he works part time, makes $5,000 a month. So this is essentially a
story in messaging and in iteration. These are two topics that we'll look at more in future episodes. But messaging is about the copywriting that he did. He created what he called the most awesome guitar lessons in the universe. And that was kind of funny. It stood out and it made him
look different from anyone else who was offering guitar lessons. And then iteration was all about continuous improvement, because he was successful right from the beginning in the sense that he was able to be a guitar teacher, quote unquote, but he continued to refine that process. And by doing so, he was able to raise his rates. And this is one of the best things about building a hustle. Once you see a little bit of success and initial success, there's usually so much you can do to improve it. And at that point, it's usually much easier to improve it than it is to start something
totally new. So we'll look at that in lots of future episodes. Episode 24 was the honeymoon in Nepal that became the fashion accessories business. Now the way I told this story actually focused on the art of storytelling. And I tried to highlight the importance of not just giving people facts and features, but really and truly looking at the why behind what you do. And when
you can present an interesting why, there's a real reason if there's a core motivation, if there's some history behind why you're pursuing this particular hustle, it just makes so many things so much easier. And in this story, they were selling cashmere scarfs that they imported from Nepal to Canada. And the way the hustle got off the ground was they received this big media feature in their local newspaper. Now if they didn't have the whole history of getting married and going to have their honeymoon in Nepal, and then importing these cashmere scarfs, giving a portion of the proceeds back to charity to benefit girls' education, they never would have had that media feature. And even though it was a good product, not nearly as many people would have cared. Right after that episode 25 was about how Pottery Barn commissioned art from an independent
photographer, as well as a couple of other things that that photographer did to create a hustle that replaced a third of her total income. We have more artist stories coming up, including someone who's been very successful and made more than $90,000 as a painter without selling to galleries. Right after that was a story of Tim, another student, a college student in this case, who created a series of resume templates or CV templates. And he went through several iterations of his process. Kind of where he's landed recently is that he's moved on to other projects, but he's found a way to keep selling his resume templates. And they're bringing in
something like $460 a month in passive income. Now you might not be able to live off $460 a month, but if you're not doing anything for it, and it just shows up on your bank account every month, I think that's pretty great. Now, Tim is selling these templates on a platform called Creative Market. I've mentioned platforms like Etsy and Fiverr before. Creative Market is another platform that allows you to reach a lot of people without having much profile or a lot of followers yourself.
There's actually a story next week, I believe, about a guy who starts a hustle using Etsy and is now transitioning that to his own website. And if he'd started just with his own website, he wouldn't have had an audience. So that platform, Etsy in that case, was actually critical to him beginning the hustle. And Creative Market was critical for Tim as he moved on to other projects continuing to make money from this thing he started years ago. Speaking of the importance of storytelling and having an origin story, episode 27 was all about the stressed mommy who starts a private label wine business. Now, this is a story with a name that tells you what
it's about right away. I'm sure that Heather has a lot more backstory to talk all about how she ended up in the place she was right before she started the hustle. But you almost don't even need to hear it because you hear the name stressed mommy, you immediately get it, you understand. And so it's very relatable to new mothers, or to anyone who's been a new mother, anyone who's looking for a gift for a new mother. And this is also a great brand name because it perfectly lends itself to expansion. Because obviously, if you're a stressed parent, you can benefit from more than
one thing. So that's why she's going from wine to spa products. And we'll see what happens next. So as you can see, we are rolling right along. A lot of great stories so far, but I assure you, many, many more to come. And I've been looking at the submissions that are coming in because
all of these stories are nominated by listeners or by people who've heard about the show. And I have the fun job of seeing everything that's in the pipeline and preparing things for you. So just in the next week, for example, there's a story of a database administrator who does high end tutoring. There's a Seattle project manager who connects the worlds of real estate and art. There's a sports based project. I think it may be the first time that
we've talked in detail about sports. Sports are something that people are very, very passionate about. And people who are really into sports and have a favorite team, they have no problem spending money to support that hobby or passion. So we'll talk about how a couple has created a sustainable hustle out of their love of baseball. Also, one of my very favorite stories that I've actually been saving up for you coming next week, it's about a man who rents cars that he doesn't actually own to people he never meets and makes more than $4,000 a month doing it. Now, I guarantee
this will be one of the most creative things you've heard about on the show thus far. I'll tell you exactly how he does it, including the platform he uses and how you can experiment with it too, if you want. And of course, so much more to come. As I said, there are people listening from all over the world, have a lot of fun things in the works. I'm going to sign off now from Hong Kong.
Pretty soon I'm going to head to the airport for my next destination, but obviously the show will continue from there every morning at 601 AM Eastern time. Now, if you're enjoying the show, please take a quick moment to leave a rating or a review in iTunes. It's really simple. You can say anything you want. If you don't want to write a review, you can just click the button for the rating. Both of those things make a big difference and allow other people to discover the show.
As you move forward this week, as always, remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. I'm Chris Guillebeau, you're listening to Side Hustle School.
