This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Side Hustle School, friends, listeners, and community, welcome back. I am your host, Chris Guillebeau. I have the privilege of bringing you a different episode every day. And the purpose of Side Hustle School is to help you create a new source of income without quitting your job. Over and over and through lots of different stories and examples, I want to illustrate the fact that wherever you are in life, even with limited time, there's something you can do to create more freedom for yourself. Because ultimately, that's what a side hustle is about.
It's not a part-time job. It's not just working harder. It's creating an asset that works for you. And we've just finished week number 43 of the show. Been going strong since January 1. Over
here, I just came back from Texas next week to California, San Francisco, and Santa Cruz, and then to Detroit the next day. Which fun fact, did you know that Detroit is not next to San Francisco? Apparently, I did not when I booked this tour. But the show must go on and so does the tour. If you would like to join me somewhere, just come over to sidehustleschool.com/tour.
Every week, we're adding at least two cities. And if you'd like me to come to your city, and I haven't been there yet, or if you missed it, and you'd like me to come back, send me a note. Let me know. You can write to me from the sidehustleschool.com site. You can send me an email at chris@sidehustleschool.com. Send me a tweet, an Instagram direct message, or a carrier pigeon.
All up to you. Now, as we kick off this recap, I want to talk about the concept of finding your ideal customer. This is really important. And if you've been working through the side hustle book, you know that every day for 27 days in a row, you have a different task. Day number eight is to have imaginary coffee with your ideal customer. And the principle here is that there's one person
out there who meets your perfect profile as a perfect customer. Now, the side hustle world is different from what you may have heard about startups or other startup business lessons. I almost never say target market. I tend to focus much more on individuals. So in this exercise of finding your ideal customer, it's all about understanding like that one person out there, who do they represent? And obviously, ultimately, there's going to be a lot more than one person.
We're just trying to get really specific. You want to focus on that person's goals, their hopes, their aspirations, and also their problems, their frustrations, their pain points. In the book, I tell the story of a friend of mine, John Lee Dumas, who wrote something like 1,200 words about his ideal customer. He actually even created an avatar and named him and thought about what he did each morning and how he commuted to work and what his hobbies were and all this kind of stuff. And the whole point of thinking that specifically was to truly understand the emotional needs of the people he was trying to serve. Your ideal customers have clear emotional
needs too. They're not just buying your handcrafted embroidery because they had a space for it in their house. They're buying it because it has some sentimental effect on them. Maybe it's nostalgia or looking back on a positive memory. Maybe it's some sort of connection, either a connection with the product itself or a connection with you, the maker. If you're providing a coaching
service or a consulting service, you're not just advising people about diet and nutrition or productivity or how to build a website or whatever it is. They're probably also looking for something else. So as you move forward, this is an important thing to spend time on. Now, let me say just one more thing before we do a look back at the episodes of the week. Is starting a side hustle easy? I
don't say it's easy, do I? If you've been listening to the show for a long time, do you hear me use the word easy very often? I would suggest no. What I'm trying to do is simplify. So I often use the word simple because I'm trying to take complex concepts and strip them down to what's essential so that you can actually start one of these projects within 27 days or a similar short period of time. So anything that's worth doing often requires some effort. So I can't make everything
easy, but the advantage I'm trying to give you is to remove what's not essential, to demystify some of this process so you don't waste your time and essentially give you a head start to that second paycheck or that third paycheck or those PayPal notifications that arrive when you're asleep and you wake up and you see that you got money. That's what I'm trying to do. So if you hear some criticism or somebody says, "Oh, he's saying it's easy." I'm not saying it's easy, I'm saying it's worth it and here's what you need to do to make it happen. That in one sentence is what Side Hustle School is all about. Looking back on this week, beginning with episode 296, that was about the musician who turns drum lessons into a six-figure podcast. He also has some other revenue sources
as well. He is really focused on building community among drummers. Now, drummers have a need for instruction and community. So do guitar players, so do violinists, so do people who play any instrument. And if you were trying to do something like this, you could also focus on orchestra members of all instruments or studio musicians of various instruments and so on. In other words,
you could group people in at least a couple of different ways. And then over time, this guy, I think his name was Nick, did exactly what I was talking about in terms of that ideal customer. He was a drummer himself. He spent a lot of time interviewing other drummers for the podcast, kept improving along the way to the point where he knew exactly how he could serve them well, and now he's built this asset for himself. Six-figure podcast, well done. Episode 297 was
a Minnesotan who earns $70,000 a year teaching wine classes. This is actually a story of a side hustle to full-time income. You usually have about one or two of these stories each week. If you're new, by the way, it's not everybody's goal to quit their job and do a side hustle. In fact, I'm very deliberate about that. I think a lot of people are happy in their jobs. Not everybody
wants to be an entrepreneur, not everyone should be. But I also like to highlight these stories of people who do make that transition. And most of the time with maybe a couple of exceptions now and then, they build their side hustle without quitting their job, which is the whole point of side hustle school. So they're creating security, they're building this other asset without giving up the security they already have. And just to comment on the topic itself, teaching wine classes, this is a great topic for a side hustle because wine is like golf. A few weeks ago, we had an
episode about golf and I mentioned that golf is an expensive sport or expensive hobby, whatever you think of it as. There's no way to participate in the sport of golf without spending money, usually a lot of money. Well, if you like wine, guess what? The only way to appreciate wine is to buy it. So anything like that is always going to be easier than something where there's lots of different ways to participate like walking or running or hiking, for example. Obviously,
people will pay for information and knowledge about those things too, but there are ways to enjoy those activities without spending money. So in the case of the wine classes, it's just a perfect fit. Episode 298 was the Australian who uses online classified ads to sell wedding flowers. Now this is a great story. It was a side hustler who listened to the show, specifically episode nine, way back when we started, the Craigslist photographer, he's a friend of mine named Oliver Asis. He's actually in the side hustle book as well. He
makes something like $3,500 a month doing one wedding a month, still has his regular job not trying to be a full-time wedding photographer. This story is doing something similar. She's a florist or at least she took a course in floral design, then used a website called Gumtree, which is popular in Australia and the UK and elsewhere. It's very similar to Craigslist and has been able to get consistent clients through those ads. She's been putting up so successful. In fact, that she's actually had to pull back and say, I don't want to get burned
out doing this. So she set some limits, some barriers around herself so that she can continue to enjoy her side hustle, which is something that comes up from time to time. I get a bunch of questions about that. Episode 299, teachers joined forces to launch Nerd Summer Camp. Now in this story at first, the teachers who started this project, the school system took their profits and the second year they did it, they found a way to form an LLC so that they could keep the money.
Now listen, I'm already getting comments about this one from people who are like, why isn't the school getting this money? In case I wasn't clear enough, this is something additional that they are doing. This camp didn't exist before they started it. It's not part of their regular responsibilities. So the money really shouldn't belong to the school system.
It was just through some kind of quirk of bureaucracy or local regulations that without a legal entity, they couldn't receive the money. So the key point there is instead of saying, oh too bad, I guess we can't get paid for doing this or just giving up and not doing it again, they found a way to have the best of both worlds where they're doing something they enjoy, helping kids form identity, make friendships, collaborate, all great things and now they don't have to do it for free. So I think that's awesome. Episode 300, 300, a program manager builds a conference into a six figure business, second six figure business of the week. This was a conference about culture. And once again, speaking of your ideal customer, this guy was successful
when he shifted his focus from CEOs to people in companies who have culture in their titles. And that one key switch is what allowed this conference to succeed. And he went from bootstrapping in year one to actually having a good budget in year two, and now being able to actually make some legit money from it. So remember day eight of the side hustle book and there's actually a whole appendix in the back, how to write a letter to your ideal customer. I assure you, it will be a profitable exercise for you. Don't skip it. And then last but not least,
episode 301 and Oklahoma spreads light, sells candles and shares profits. This is an employee in the oil and gas industry who wants to help her friends raise money for charity. She picks up an old skill of making candles and ends up not only raising money for charity, but just like those teachers a few episodes ago, also getting paid herself. I tell you these stories because I don't expect you to relate to each one. I don't expect you to want to do what you hear about every single day. It's just so you can see all the different creative ways that people are creating
these kinds of projects. Like the possibilities really are unlimited. And I think it begins by developing your curiosity, noticing problems and opportunities, and also drawing out the skills that you have learned through education, through life experience, through your career, perhaps even at home or through travel or something else. And then figuring out how you can create a match between those things and something that somebody else wants. And who are those people? Once again,
they are your ideal customers. Alright, looking ahead to this week, I've got some great stories coming out. You don't want to miss them. One of them is for all of the writers out there. And we have a lot of folks out there who either want to make a living with their writing or just want to have their side hustle focus on the skill of writing. I always get really excited when I find
someone using that skill in a different or unexpected way. And the reason why is on the show, we don't feature a lot of people who just do freelance writing. Not because there's anything wrong with that, it's just there's not much of a story to it. And we at Side Hustle School are all about stories. But coming up soon, there's a story of a successful author who then creates a series of online courses using the platform Udemy to diversify her income. This was really
smart. And she's been quite successful at it. So I'll tell you exactly how she did it. Now, if you're listening in real time, this is also Halloween week. Will we have a special Halloween episode? Of course we will. You can check that out on the 31st of October, which just so happens
to be Halloween starting at 6 0 1 a.m. in the morning. But if you don't happen to download at 6 0 1 a.m. Eastern, it'll still be there at the rest of the day. Don't worry. Lots of other things
coming up as well. Of course, welcome to our new listeners. If you have just joined, I've been saying all year that I make this show for you. It is a listener supported free daily podcast, where if you make the commitment to make this part of your routine, I commit to supporting you in your quest to create that new source of income. If you've been thinking about this for a while, just haven't turned it into reality, let this be your opportunity to make it reality. If you've
just heard about the side hustle concept and this whole world is new to you, well, great, settle in. Go back through some of the archives, download the earlier episodes. They're all free and you can hear lots of stories of people doing this in different ways. Now, before I sign off for the week, let me give a couple of shout outs to the folks who make this show possible. Well, first of all, that's you, the listeners, but there's also some people who work on the show.
I record side hustle school every day, either on location at world domination headquarters in Portland, Oregon, or all over the world, depending on where I am. Those audio files get magically transported to Brooklyn, New York and Washington, DC, where the panoply studios team works their wonders. That team is led by AC Valdez. It also features Odelia Rubin. Back in Portland, the show notes are by Whitney Karenik. Side hustle sidekick Jed Chang has been helping me out with
communication. If you've emailed me and you haven't got a response, he might be getting back to you. He's much better than me. And last, of course, the official show cat Libby Gillibough has very few actual responsibilities, but her feelings get hurt if I don't mention her. Thanks Libby. Side
hustle school is part of the Amur project, which is led by Gretchen Rubin, author of The Four Tendencies and host of the mega popular podcast Happier. If you want to do something awesome for us, you could go to Apple podcasts, write on your phone and give us a little rating or review. Just takes a couple seconds of your time. If you think we've earned those five stars, I would be grateful. In every episode, I always say inspiration is good, but action is better. That's because I want you to
take action. I don't want to just tell you stories. I want to feature your story here on the show one day, just like we've been doing with a bunch of listeners who started listening in January. Much more to come. I hope to see you tomorrow and every day next week. Be sure to subscribe in Apple
podcasts or wherever you listen to the show, so that you'll get notifications and it will be automatically downloaded to your phone, computer, however you'd like to listen. And thank you for doing that. We're in this together. The best is yet to come. And I'm Chris Guillebeau for side hustle school.
