This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Turning late night edits into a niche agency, a niche profitable agency, I should say. And welcome back to the podcast. This is Side Hustle School. That's the name of the podcast. But also this is Throwback Thursday, where we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them.
And we like to hear how their business has grown or evolved or transformed, perhaps a challenge they have been through, perhaps a big success. It could be all those things. It could be a couple of those things. It just depends on the story. Last week we heard from a freelance SEO auditor who transformed one-time reports into a monthly subscription.
So this was a big success for them because they were getting paid once and now they get paid every month. That getting paid 12 times a year is better than getting paid once a year. And they're doing that by offering clients new keywords, insights, ongoing support, and so on. Today, kind of a similar process of evolution, a little bit of a different outcome, but a similar process of thinking, how can I grow my business a bit and have it provide more reliable income, not just one-time income? So we're gonna hear from a Toronto freelancer who turned these scattered editing gigs into a specialized agency serving fitness creators.
And that's how she has focused her business, which now provides sustainable monthly income, as noted, better than just one-off income. What has happened since we last heard from her, gonna pass the microphone, and I'll be back at the end for a few words of wrap-up. [Music]
I started out editing YouTube videos late at night in my Toronto apartment. In the early days, I took on any client, gamers, makeup tutorials, even a guy who was recording bird-watching logs. But I realized that scattering myself too thin was draining.
I needed some kind of focus. So after noticing how many female fitness influencers struggled to maintain professional-looking workout videos week after week, I decided to cater directly to them. I knew if I could help them consistently produce polished, branded content, I'd find steady, recurring work. So I reached out to two fitness influencers who I'd seen complain about video backlogs. For a flat monthly fee of $300 each, I promised a set number of edits, quick turnarounds, and a unified look that matched their personal brand.
So both said yes immediately. That was $600 a month already, much more than what I made hustling one-off gaming highlight reels that took forever to patch together. And seeing this modest success, I repositioned myself as a fitness channel editor. I emphasized consistent output and a style that kept followers engaged. I showcased a couple of before and after examples of my editing improvements on a simple landing page, and I joined a few influencer Facebook groups offering a free channel audit for the first few people who contacted me.
Three more fitness influencers signed on, each of them committing to my $300 monthly package. So that bumped me up to $1,500 in recurring revenue, breaking my first $1,000 target with room to spare. I realized I didn't have to scramble for random projects anymore. I had something predictable. However, I was also editing every night and weekend to keep up.
So to fix that, I decided to hire a subcontractor, an editing pro from a freelance site who specialized in color correction and audio mixing. I passed off some of the grunt work maintaining creative oversight and client relationships. This allowed me to raise my monthly package to $400 by adding premium touches like custom thumbnails, branded intro sequences, and even short social media teasers. Clients loved it. They appreciated the consistency and I appreciated sleeping before midnight.
Within just a couple months, I'd brought on two more subcontractors, one for motion graphics and another for editing bonus reels for Instagram or TikTok. We joked about naming ourselves something cheesy but decided against it. The reality was we were functioning like a niche mini agency, catering exclusively to fitness influencers who wanted to upgrade their production value without hiring a full-time editor in-house. So I kept the vibe professional but straightforward. Sign up for a monthly package, get your videos back fast and no drama.
The Slack channel we use to coordinate edits always felt like a casual but efficient digital editing room. No sappy mission statements, just results. So all things considered, focusing this way has been a huge improvement in my business. Now I'm thinking about what comes next and I'm thinking even bigger. [Music]
All right, I love that story.
Thank you so much for sharing the updates and I hope it's gonna get some of our listeners thinking about how they can go from a small service or I shouldn't even say small, just an initial service to turning that service into more of an agency model. An agency doesn't mean having a lot of employees. It just means being a little bit more specific about the services you provide, perhaps narrowing down that client focus as we just heard about or maybe something else. But the point is you take a skill that you have, you develop an offer and then you consider what can I do to kind of level up here to make my life better, to provide better results for my clients but also to make my life better, increase my income or perhaps make it recurring and reliable as you have heard here and kind of similar to last week's story as noted. All right, that's it for today but of course much more is coming up.
New episode every day, always free. Hope you'll subscribe, follow wherever you get your podcasts. It's also great if you can leave us a quick five star review or rating, it just takes a moment and it does help other people discover the show. So thank you if you've done that. If you haven't, that would be awesome.
But either way, I'll be back again tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
