Architect Creates Mini-Blind Repair Tool

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

[Music]

Architect Creates Mini Blind Repair Tool. Welcome back, friends. Welcome to Side Hustle School. It's Chris Guillebeau, your host. This year, we're bringing you some remixes of our early best year's stories.

Greatest hits, if you will, especially in those early years, which was a long time ago, 2017 and 2018, re-recording every episode, giving some updates in some cases. And today, sometimes I tell you a story so you can learn what not to do. In fact, we had a whole series called Failure Friday. Perhaps we'll revisit that at some point. Or maybe let's say what could have been better, which is not to make light of anyone's story in any way, but rather to illustrate that this is a learning process.

And I want your Cytosil to not cost a lot of money to start. I want it to not take forever to start. These are two core values of Side Hustle School. Don't spend a lot of money. Don't take too long before moving forward.

And now the outcome of today's story is a good one. It's about an architect who sells this mini blind repair kit. He brings in an extra $15,000 a year once he's up and running. But it did take some real time and some real money to get to that point. So a couple of different ways you could look at it.

You can be like, it's great that he makes $15,000 a year without doing much. You could also say, well, with all the time and money it took to get there, I wonder if we could have done something different on the front end. And I've had lots of projects that I've spent money and time and haven't been able to achieve $15,000 a year in return. So just to clarify, not knocking the process at all. But again, we're doing analysis here to consider what is the best idea for you and what are the best practical steps for you to take to move forward with your idea.

So with that in mind, I'm gonna bring you the story of Chad Wooters in Chicago, Illinois, all about creating this little tool, which these days is still selling. So when I first recorded this episode, maybe I was like, "Hey, don't do it this way." But if he's still making $15,000 a year without doing much for it, then probably worth the effort. Anyway, detailed story coming right up. [Music]

Today's side hustler, Chad Wooters, learned a lot of lessons along the way. By day, he's an architect working as a project manager in Chicago, Illinois.

His side hustle is a mini blind repair tool called Mini Blind RX. He sells this through Amazon's Fulfilled by Amazon program. He got the idea for the tool while working in commercial real estate. His company spent a ton of money replacing damaged blinds. Eager to find a more budget friendly solution, Chad's boss asked him if he could locate a tool on the market that could repair them so that they wouldn't have to replace them each time.

After some exhaustive searching, Chad couldn't find anything. And you know how it goes? He then decided maybe he would try and invent one himself. Now, Chad had never done anything like this before. So it ended up being an expensive drawn out process.

First, he made a working prototype out of plexiglass. Then he had a patent lawyer do a search to make sure nobody else had made something similar. That cost about $1,500. Once he learned that his invention was unique, he hired another lawyer to take some sketches from the prototype and write up the application, which costs just under $5,000. Two years later, that's right, two years later the patent office came back with some questions that needed answering.

So he had to pay an additional $1,500 to have the lawyer answer those, all told the patent process took three years. Now let's talk about product market fit. Chad thought this could be used not only by janitors in commercial cleaning services, but also by apartment dwellers or parents of small kids who were concerned about their security deposits. So he spent a year going to trade shows to see if anyone would license many blind RX. He didn't rent a booth, he just walked the floor and asked to speak with purchasing agents for various companies.

And unfortunately that didn't go anywhere. Then he spent a year trying to sell wholesale and convince retail stores to carry the product. He'd still go to trade shows, but he spent more time collecting names and going to the after parties to make contacts. Then he'd follow up with the leads. He also made a database of independent hardware stores, cold called them, stopped by local stores to speak to managers.

And it worked a little bit, but not a ton. He sold just a hundred units after four months of hustling. Now at some point he realized he either have to give up or be much more hands on. So the third year he started selling online directly to customers through eBay and Amazon, which actually ended up working out pretty well for him. And ultimately he dropped eBay.

He decided just to let Amazon do it all so that he wouldn't have to go to the post office each day. Now we asked Chad why he decided to stick with this for so long. And he first mentioned he'd never done anything like this before. So he didn't go into it thinking it was gonna be a simple process. He knew it was gonna take some time, but he saw an opportunity to make something that simply didn't exist in the market.

So his advice to others is to get a really good idea of what such an undertaking would require before you start investing your time and your money into it. Then just make a decision if you're willing to be in it for the long haul. For him, one of the biggest problems was not being able to find a manufacturer who would agree to make something completely new and unique. Most of the manufacturers he reached out to found it really challenging to fit it into their product line so it wasn't feasible for them to take on his order. And by the way, you may recall an episode a couple of weeks ago when we talked about this guy, Nate in Maine, who created a whole tool, like a multipurpose tool that fits in a wallet, and he had the same problem with manufacturers.

They don't wanna make something that has never been done before. So that can be a little bit of a challenge. Chad says another mistake was spending so much money developing the product, almost $40,000 in fact, from prototype to tooling to the patent process. And luckily he has recovered his investment. It is now a profitable product, bringing in about $15,000 a year in net income.

But if he could go back and do things differently, he said he would do a couple of things. First of all, he would seek out a manufacturer not located in the US, even though he wants to support local manufacturers, just realized how difficult that was cost-wise and even finding somebody willing to do it. He also said he would probably not bother with patenting his product. How about that? Like after going through the whole process, he succeeded, but he says, I think the better strategy is to be first out of the box and maybe get a trademark, which is a little bit easier, and go from there.

Patents are expensive, and like we talked about, it took three whole years. Something else he realized along the way is that when you're developing something as intensive as this, other people are likely not gonna go through the work and dish out the initial expense in order to copy it. If it's a relatively simple product that can be easily replicated, maybe it might be a worthwhile investment. But if you're coming up with a product as complex as his was, he thinks your money could be better spent elsewhere. In Chad's words, it is a high bar your setting, and he doesn't believe as many people would be willing to dedicate the kind of time and money it would take to replicate your product.

So it's worked out well for him, as I said, he's earning every year, and that's great, but you always gotta think about what is best for you, what is best for your side hustle, what is best for your next idea. [Music]

A couple other fulfilled by Amazon stories you might wanna check out from those early years, episode 170, just go to sidehustleschool.com/170. Nomadic family cooks up profit with houseware import business. Those guys are some friends of mine, they've done very, very well with their business. And then also episode 286, woman sells hair grips, earns fringe benefits, and $4,000 a month, 286.

Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. There's so many different ways to make money and pursue creative projects these days. I hope that you take at least one step to get closer to a goal that you're excited about, and come back tomorrow for a new episode. My name's Chris Guillebeau, you're listening to Side Hustle School. [Music]

From the Onward Project.