Immigrant Couple Translates Heritage Into Children’s Flash Cards

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

Immigrant Couple translates heritage into children's flashcards, which is a really great story as part of our series where we're bringing you some remixes of our best early stories from 2017-2018. For new listeners, these stories are completely new, and if you do happen to have an incredible memory, well, each one is being re-recorded, so a lot of the details here are new and will also include some updates. So in this story, an immigrant couple from Laos, that would be the country Lao, sometimes pronounced Laos, a country in Southeast Asia, this immigrant couple settles in the US and longs to teach their children in their heritage language, and they do so by creating sets of flashcards that go on to sell more than $50,000, and that was just the start of the business. It's still going today. As part of this story, we'll look at the importance of focusing on a relatively small and focused target audience.

Sometimes this small and focused audience can be a much better bet than going wide and trying to reach a lot of people. I think you're going to like this one. Stay tuned. The story is coming right up. When the Communist Party took over the Lao government in 1975, the country became hostile toward the Hmong ethnic group.

As allies of the United States in the Vietnam War, the Hmong people were considered risks to communism and a violent wave of persecution began. Thousands fled the country and relocated to America, including young Maikou and Tujir Tao, the side hustlers of this story. After settling in Minnesota and getting married, Maikou and Tujir had their first child. They loved to read to her, but they were disappointed by the lack of language learning tools for the Hmong language. There were no children's books, no magazines or primers, basically nothing.

The couple wanted their daughter to be bilingual in English and their heritage language, so they began looking into creating their own Hmong flashcards. A month later, this was November 2016, they hired a designer from Upwork to create 26 images for their animal flashcards, and they printed them out in their home office. The cards looked great, but in terms of a side hustle, they didn't do anything with them right away. In fact, they questioned their initial decision and put the project on pause. After some time went by, Maikou and Tujir realized they were sitting on an idea that could help thousands of families, so they agreed to set aside their hesitations and test it out.

The couple made a simple video of Maikou teaching their one-year-old daughter the names of the animals and uploaded it to YouTube. They then posted it on Facebook, but it only received a thousand views, which in their minds was a very small number. However, despite the low number of views, the couple sold 125 flashcard sets at $20 each, bringing in more than $2,500 over a two-week period. Maikou and Tujir fulfilled everything manually, using PayPal invoices, self-printed shipping labels and an Excel spreadsheet. When it was all said and done, the couple had profited $1,000 from this initial set of cards.

This first launch wasn't a huge success in terms of sales, but it definitely was a success in terms of conversion rate. In fact, one in 10 viewers had ordered the cards, and Maikou and Tujir knew they were on to something. As the new year rolled around, they began brainstorming ways to expand. They rehired the designer and created three new sets of flashcards. In addition to animals, they now had numbers, foods, and objects.

After setting up a website on Shopify called mongbaby.com, the couple made another video. In less than three days, the new video displaying new sets of flashcards had been viewed 150,000 times and had more than 2,000 shares. Over the next 30 days, mongbaby received $10,000 worth of orders. At one point, Shopify actually put a hold on the store's revenue because the system tagged mongbaby's dramatic spike in sales as a possible scam. After a couple anxious phone calls, the site was functioning as usual again.

Thankfully, fulfilling these orders was much more efficient than it was with the first batch. Shopify handled the payments, shipping, and inventory with ease. Thank you, Shopify. On fire with the thrill of sales, Maikou began working on a new project, a mong children's book. Over the next few months, she wrote the story, hired that same designer for illustrations, and began exploring printing options.

Compared to the flashcards, the logistics of printing a book were far more complicated. The flashcards were printed locally, which made communicating with the printer fairly simple. The book would be printed in China, which was stressful since they couldn't communicate with the printer in person. They also had to do a lot of googling to figure out how freight forwarding and customs worked. Still, they figured it out, and once they had their sample book and were happy with it, they created a crowdfunding page on their website.

Many of their customers had expressed interest in a children's book, but this is how they would validate that interest by asking those customers to support the production costs. Once again, Maikou and Tuzure made a video. This one was viewed over 125,000 times and generated more than enough pre-orders to fund the project. A couple months later, hundreds of Maikou's books were being read to kids across the country. In that first year of business, Maikou and Tuzure generated just over $50,000 in sales.

Not only have they created a way to teach their daughter the language of their heritage, but the business has enabled them both to become self-employed so they can spend more time at home. They want to make more products and streamline their method to be more efficient and effective. They've also received inquiries from people in other immigrant communities who want to replicate their success. Most of all, they're glad they overcame that initial hesitation and took a chance on making that first video. So what I want you to notice here is the conversion rate when focusing on a targeted audience.

They posted on Facebook, they got 1,000 views, and they ended up getting a lot of sales from those views, 1,000 views, you think that's not very many, but they were able to get a big number of sales just because the people who were watching that video were exactly the right audience. So I think so often people are thinking how can they reach the most number of people and how can they get tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or more views, impressions, email addresses, whatever the metric is. But if you find the right people, this is what's going to allow you to thrive. And we see that again and again, but this is one of the first early stories of Side Hustle School that I think illustrated that well. I also think it's great that it's a really specific idea.

You want to be able to say your business idea in one sentence, and you should also be able to say who it's for in one sentence. So if you're not able to do that with your current idea, maybe spend some more time thinking about it because it's going to make it so much easier for you later on. All right, that's all for now. Thank you for listening. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better.

Get out there and do something with your idea. And, of course, I hope you'll stay subscribed, stay following, much more is coming up. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to Side Hustle School. from the Onward Project.