This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
A New Zealand-based software developer puts her digital skills to artistic use by creating virtual lettering brushes for digital calligraphers. This is the story of a Kiwi coder who makes an extra $50,000 a year from digital paintbrushes. Digital paintbrushes. This story goes back to 2018. Every Wednesday this year we're bringing you some remixes of a few of our favorite stories from those early years, 2017, 2018.
If you happen to have an incredible memory, well, each one is being rerecorded. We'll also include some new updates in some cases. And if you haven't heard this story, of course, then it is completely new to you. What happens when a software engineer discovers digital calligraphy? That's what we're looking at today.
For Karen Newport, the answer was a creative explosion that evolved into a big side hustle, a big side hustle. She said $50,000 a year from iPad lettering without paid ads, without a flashy website. Basically, she combines her technical know-how with artistic passion. She thinks about pricing. We'll look at that in the story.
She is growing. She's got an online course. It is just a fantastic success story. And I think it illustrates the idea, the core principle of side hustle school, in fact, which is that there's something everyone can do. Something you can do, in fact, to create extra income without quitting your job.
Setting up this story of Karen Newport. Stay tuned. Karen Newport is a software engineer in New Zealand who enjoys her day job. But her analytical day-to-day work left her needing a creative outlet. She always loved calligraphy.
But her tiny apartment meant art supplies and canvases weren't an option. Then in 2016, it all changed. She got her first iPad Pro and Apple Pencil. She downloaded an app called Procreate and started lettering to her heart's content. Using her technical skills combined with an artistic eye, Karen began creating her own digital paint brushes to give her work the types of textures she was after.
She loves bright colors and watercolor effects and wanted brushes that could capture that look and feel. She made her own brushes using the settings within that app, Procreate, and realized that other people might find them useful as well. To test the waters, she made a basic website called iPad Lettering. In fact, it's still up today, ipadlettering.com, and posted a few brushes as free downloads. She thought if 100 people download these for free, maybe there's an interest.
One week and 100 downloads later, it was clear that there was. But would people pay? There was only one way to find out. Karen posted more brushes, this time with a price tag. Three hours later, she had her first sale.
She jumped up and down in her apartment with amazement, realizing that she was onto something. Pricing was a tricky question. She wanted the price per brush to be less than the cost of the Procreate app, which was $8 at the time. She priced each brush at $2.50 and a set of three for $6. She soon found that most people actually bought three sets at a time, spending $18 on their new virtual art supplies.
Now she really knew that there was a demand. So she began posting more online, posted on Instagram, splashed her beautiful lettering images with an ipadlettering hashtag, and quickly built up a following. In fact, a following that was hundreds of thousands of followers with a hashtag, ipadlettering, that had almost 200,000 posts. Karen emphasizes that her success on Instagram isn't just about posting pretty pictures. She always engaged with followers, liked their posts, left comments.
Karen made a point of answering users' questions to truly help along with the creative process. In fact, she feels part of the hand lettering community. And she's also had a big hand in growing it. Karen offers free tutorial content, guides and grids, even free brushes. She shares them with a growing email list, tens of thousands of subscribers who just can't get enough of her ever-expanding range.
Now the money is equally impressive. At the time of our story, she brought in $50,000 a year with nothing spent on advertising, and zero costs outside of the ipad and Apple pencil that she'd already bought. She set up a free website and by her own estimate, it's not perfect, but it's all she needed to generate a significant income while holding down full-time work. In fact, Karen emphasizes that perfectionism is the enemy when it comes to getting your revenue-generating project off the ground. It's cool to have like a fancy website, but is it necessary?
In fact, it could be detrimental because it kind of distracts you from what you really need to do, which is creating that product, that service, offering it for sale. She has found instead that her time is much better spent on the things that offer value in the long run, like video tutorials on how to install brushes that has saved her answering hundreds of questions and also gives customers confidence that the product works. Saving time has in fact been a big priority for Karen because she's continued with her day job. iPad lettering takes up a bunch of evenings and weekends, but for her it's worth it. It's both enjoyable and profitable.
Much more to come from iPad lettering. At the time of our story, Karen had just filmed her first iPad lettering online course. She also planned to start selling her hand lettering artwork. She also planned to partner with affiliate programs. She found that linking to lettering courses on her website run by a few carefully selected calligraphers has been an extra revenue stream.
So much more to come, but this story continues. iPad lettering is still up and running. I took a look. Looks great. And it seems like she's still selling lots of products.
So with that growing, following, happy customers, new revenue streams on the horizon, this is one side hustle that won't be brushed aside. So one of the business notes from this story that I think I mentioned in the original episode is that the bundle pricing makes a big, big difference here. If you're selling digital items for $2.50 each, you have to sell a whole lot of them to make significant amount of money. But when you make it easy for customers to package them in a bundle, as Karen does, well, I think she said at the time her average order size was $18. That's a big difference.
$2.50 versus $18. You still have to sell in volume, but she's doing that. So if you're selling low ticket items, bundling them together can make a huge, huge difference. In fact, I think anyone who sells any kind of digital products should consider that. That's my suggestion for you today, and I hope this gives you a point of inspiration.
But as I sometimes say, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. I hope you take action today on a goal that's important to you. I hope you do one thing to get closer to that goal. And of course, I hope you continue to listen, subscribe, or follow wherever you get your podcasts. Always free, complete archive, available for download at www.sidehustleschool.com.
That's all for today. My name is Chris Guillebeau. I'm going to talk to you about his side hustle school.
