This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Internet trolls eat their words in this comedic cake hustle. After seeing a meme comment on Dolly Parton's Facebook page, a woman realizes the absurdity of internet trolling and bakes up a hilarious and ironic side hustle. Hey, what's up, friends? Welcome to Side Hustle School. Chris Guillebeau, your host here.
This year, we're bringing you some remixes of our early years best stories, especially from 2017 and 2018, when we first got started, we were a baby podcast in early 2018. We only had a few hundred episodes done. Isn't that crazy? We've now got 3000 plus episodes. So if you weren't listening back then, these stories are completely new.
If you do happen to have an incredible memory, well, each one is being rerecorded and will also include some new updates in some cases. And this story is about reading online comments. You know, you're not supposed to do that, right? It's like a great way to be miserable and interact with sometimes the lowest form of humanity, perhaps not always, but basically there is that rule of like, never read the comments. Don't read the comments on news sites in particular.
Just don't do it. It's not good. But in this case, a woman reads that mean comment on Dolly Parton's Facebook page, and she decides to fight back in this really creative, funny, as I said, absurdly ironic and hilarious way. So if somebody on the internet has ever said anything mean to you, you might like this story. And I'll bring it to you in a moment when our program continues.
[Music]
One day, Kat Thek was taking a mental break from her copywriting job when she noticed something on Facebook that struck her as completely ludicrous. Someone had left a comment on Dolly Parton's page and it said, "Your mama be so disappointed in you." Kat looked at it for a good long moment. For some reason, this comment just stuck out like a sore thumb. Why would anyone waste their time to insult a complete stranger like that? It wasn't even a good insult.
It was grammatically incorrect. It's a strange impulse to want to attack someone with random, senseless Facebook trolling, especially so if it's toward Dolly Parton. A couple of days went by, but Kat couldn't stop thinking about it. At some point, the idea of a cake with the troll comment written on it popped into her head. Something different than the usual happy birthday or get well soon messages.
So she baked the cake, wrote out that comment with icing. She and her friends got a kick out of it. And then the idea hit her. She should send it to the person who made the original comment. After some investigative work to find the address of the troll, she sent him the cake and a printout of his original comment on Dolly Parton's page.
The whole idea was fun, sarcastic, and it gave everyone that Kat told about it a good laugh. She realized that many others might want to call out their internet trolls with cakes. So she bought a domain, built a website, and launched Troll Cakes Bakery and Detective Agency. She priced her cake simply, $35 for a troll cake and $60 for a troll cake and detective work to find the troll's address. If she couldn't find the address, she figured she would just refund the order and apologize.
After buying some more cake supplies and setting up the site, her total startup costs for troll cakes were right around $230. And to market her new hustle, Kat went old school. She printed off a couple dozen paper tear-off sheets with her ad and website. She hung them up on light posts along her daily commute. As I said, an old school marketing tactic, but in the end, it worked because about a week later, Troll Cakes received its very first order.
Kat was ecstatic and a little terrified. She baked a cake, topped it with the comment, found the troll's address with some clever online searching and shipped it off. Despite mistyping the tracking number and an email to the customer, the first cake was a delicious success. A couple of weeks passed by without more orders, but soon Troll Cakes began getting featured on websites regularly. Even NPR told the story of Kat's cakes.
And of course, in the early days of side hustle school, we told it as well. And Kat began to receive several orders a week, consistently, sometimes more. In less than two months of business, she was nearing maximum baking capacity in her Brooklyn kitchen. And before she knew it, Troll Cakes was profitable. Nearly every day, her table was covered with hilarious cakes and messages, saying things like, oh no baby, what is you doing?
Short hair really doesn't suit you. I don't like your dog. I'm horrified by your disturbing post. And one of my personal favorites, Britney Spears, you need Jesus. After NPR inside us all school, the mother load of internet press came upon Troll Cakes.
That would be, at least at the time, Buzzfeed. The response was bittersweet, we have to say, because Kat was flooded with hundreds of orders. She went to every baking store she could find in all five New York City boroughs to buy out their candy letters, and she still didn't have enough. She thought about ordering more online, but she liked shopping locally, and she also didn't have the baking capacity to meet every order anyway. She began emailing customers explaining that there was a waiting period of at least two months.
Some of those orders ended up being refunded, but a surprising number of customers were more than happy to wait. As the saying goes, revenge is a dish best served cold. Kat doesn't consider Troll Cakes to be a major endeavor. She's not trying to recreate her day job income, it's just a fun hustle. She continued to sell at least one cake per day on average, but she has no plans to scale Troll Cakes, partly 'cause she's not sure how sustainable the flow of orders will be months or years from now.
But that's okay. She planned to continue her work as a full-time copywriter while enjoying the absurdity of this creative side hustle. [Music]
Well, the next time someone says something mean to you on the internet, or if you get in a comment war, well, maybe just try to avoid that. But if it happens, maybe you'll want to send them a cake. The one thing I thought from a business perspective, when we first worked on the story, or the one comment I had was shipping is included.
And I think, you know, why not charge at least $10? Like people expect if you're gonna order a cake, we don't necessarily expect that to be free shipping the way we expect so many things. And I think, obviously, Kat knew what she was doing, she wasn't trying to make a ton of money, but I just thought that would be a small thing that would probably help, especially since she's making multiple cakes a day on some of those busier days. That was my one business note, but obviously I was inspired by the story of Kat, Thek, and Troll Cakes. Listeners, thank you for being out there.
Love making the show for you all these years later, since we first started 3,049 episodes ago. Much more is coming out. The best is yet to come, in fact. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
