This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Greetings and welcome. You're listening to Side Hustle School. This is your host, Chris Guillebeau. Glad to have you back today. Question for everyone who drives a car.
Have you ever been offended at somebody else's parking job? You know, you go to the mall or a parking garage or just somewhere on the street and someone else has done such a terrible job that they actually have taken up an extra space or have made it difficult for you to get out of your car or have otherwise just done something stupid. It is sadly all too common. So what do you do when you encounter that situation? Do you just kind of curse them in your head and walk away?
Do you actually try to register your frustration in some way? Have you ever left a note? Have you ever done something more aggressive, perhaps? Well, today's Side Hustle story is about a guy in LA where driving and parking are daily challenges, more than just a challenge. Sometimes it can be like the Southern California Olympics.
And this guy creates a profitable project selling magnets that punish bad parkers, while also encouraging them to pass on the message when they encounter a parking frustration of their own. And of course, because this is Side Hustle School, it's not just an interesting story. It's a project that makes this guy an extra $25,000 a year. And I will tell you all about it in just a moment. If there's one thing most drivers can agree on, it's that bad parking is a cardinal sin.
Entering an almost full parking lot to find someone has double parked across the last available space is enough to make sane people go crazy and maybe even leave a nasty note. But for designer Peter Vangendries, none of this was doing anything to solve the problem. Peter wanted a way to change how people communicate about bad parking and create a delightfully distasteful way to start the conversation. The idea was simple, to create a series of magnets that could be stuck to a bad parker's car and then passed on from that driver to the next bad parking job they see. Thus, it would move the conversation forward, doing no damage to cars, no keying or scratches, yet still giving drivers the opportunity to vent their frustrations.
As Peter cites from what is no doubt a highly scientific study, approximately 100% of people enjoy the satisfaction of slapping a magnet on someone's car who has improperly parked. Working alongside two partners, he came up with the idea for do your park, kind of like do your part, get it? And the motto park better, pass it on. The team also started a Trello board, where their friends, who Peter says have a tremendously verbose sense of humor, could also suggest ideas. After some market research and using surveys to get feedback from potential customers, Peter found that people loved magnets that were around a seven out of 10 on the insulting scale.
In other words, enough that the person who receives it can realize they've done something stupid, but also laugh at themselves. They use the seven out of 10 scale to settle on their first assortment of 25 magnets to perfectly capture the emotion of the situation. Some of the best magnet taglines included, coloring books must have been hard for you, and airlines would charge you double for this. The next step was to take the hustle online, and Peter used his own experience to set up a website and create a Shopify store in less than a week. This allowed them to get going with the resources they already had.
Speaking of resources, their initial startup costs were around $2,000, which included the first set of magnets. They also spent some of that money on paid marketing in the form of a few paid blog posts on relevant industry sites. Peter says there could have been a bigger marketing push at the start, but the viral nature of the products allowed them to be picked up by outlets including the Huffington Post, the Onion, and the Atlantic. In order to create the physical product, they located a generic printer in their local area and invested in their first run of magnets. Being local was important because magnets are heavy, and if they could pick them up themselves, they would save on shipping costs.
As always on the show, it's not just a hobby, it's a hustle. Do Your Park is currently averaging about $25,000 a year in income, mostly through seasonal online sales as the product makes for a perfect stocking stuffer. Peter has recently bought back some of the equity from his two other partners, and is looking at ways to increase the project's year-round income. This will include an increased marketing push in trying to get the product featured in more retail stores in Los Angeles. If its current rate of growth is anything to go by, this side hustle has a parking spot reserved around the world.
Just don't park outside the lines. [Music]
What bothers you or annoys you or frustrates you? Always a good question to ask when you're trying to find your hustle. Peter took something that annoys a lot of us and created a fun solution for it. It's probably not the only solution.
People are still gonna park poorly, unfortunately, but it's an interesting little gift item. And as mentioned, a lot of his sales are coming around holiday times, which makes sense because I think this is the kind of thing that people buy for someone else, more than they buy for themselves. And the way that you market a gift item is different than you market something that people buy for themselves. These kinds of things tend to work well in novelty stores or as impulse buys at the cash register. And of course you can sell them online as well.
But for something like this, it does help to establish that kind of buzz that Do Your Park has been able to get, especially from a website like The Onion, which consists entirely of parody stories or humor. I hope Peter is ready for the influx of sales that come from side hustle school. Peter, let us know how that goes. Now, also, before we go, a quick comment on the pricing. Peter's selling these magnets at $12 for a pack of 10, which seems reasonable enough.
But he notes that some customers have complained that this feels too expensive for something they're just gonna give away. I don't mean giving away the pack as a gift item. I mean, the magnets themselves going on someone's car. Listen, here's the thing about pricing. Some people are always going to say that your price is too high, no matter what it is.
If you simply ask people, hey, what's the right price for this, they're always gonna give you a low price. But Peter is more than happy to take a stand and say, you know what, if $12 is too much for you, you must just not hate bad parking jobs enough. And that's okay. I am convinced that you could sell a $20 bill for $10 and some people would be like, wait, that's like half the value, why would I do that? And we should have a whole episode about that at some point.
But for now, just know, if you wanna make money with your hustle, which of course you do, you don't have to choose a bottom basement price or the lowest possible price. Because obviously in this case, even though some people think it's too high, he's still making an extra $25,000 a year from this project and it's just getting off the ground. So we'll see what happens next. I hope you enjoy this one. As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better.
Every day I'm telling you a different true story on the show, more to come tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/283. This is Side Hustle School. I'm Chris Guillebeau and you are a rock star. I hope you'll join me again tomorrow.
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