This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Fixing guitar pedals becomes a high margin hustle. Gonna hear today from a guy who has a little side hustle repairing broken guitar pedals. He learned how to do it by watching YouTube. That's how we all learn these days, of course. He's built a profitable business, fixing, modifying, reselling gear.
In fact, he discovered that guitar pedals were actually more profitable than selling guitars. So that's interesting. And I should say as well, welcome to Throwback Thursday. This is our weekly segment where we take a look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them. We've had all kinds of people on the show over the years.
Last week in this segment, we heard how a sarcastic embroidery project turned into a long time hustle after a single joke hat went viral and sparked hundreds of sales. Maybe it was thousands, I'm not sure, lots of sales. But today in our latest feature, we're gonna go to Dave. He's the guy who learned how to repair broken guitar pedals. He built a profitable business, fixing, modifying, reselling them.
What's happened since we first had him on the podcast? Let's hear the story or the update directly from him. I'll come back at the end with a few brief words of wrap up. [Music]
Okay, so I've been playing guitar forever, but I never really thought about pedals as anything more than just little boxes that make weird sounds. But a few years ago, I'm scrolling through eBay, I noticed something.
There's a ton of broken guitar pedals listed for like dirt cheap, like doesn't power on, foot switch busted, LED flickers, but no sound, stuff like that. Meanwhile, working versions of the same pedals were selling for like two, three, even four or five times as much. I thought maybe there's an opportunity here if I can figure out how to fix them. So I did what any normal person would do. I went to YouTube school, started watching tutorial after tutorial, stuff like how to replace the stomp switch, how to clean a scratchy meter and basic soldering for pedal repair.
And even own a soldering iron at that point, but bought a beginner kit for like 30 bucks off Amazon and just started practicing on, you know, like junk electronics. First real test, I bought a broken boss DS1 distortion pedal for 15 bucks, wouldn't even power on. Took it apart, cleaned the battery contacts, reflowed some solder joints around the power jacket. Boom, it worked. Sold it a week later for 55 bucks.
I've had for my first try. So then I went deeper, started hunting Facebook marketplace, Craigslist, Reverb, basically anywhere musicians sell gear and made offers on like lots of broken pedals. Sometimes I'd get like six or seven pedals for under a hundred bucks total. After about six months, I was flipping like eight to 12 pedals a month. Each one was like 30 to 80 bucks per flip depending on the brand and how rare it was.
The best flip was a broken electro harmonics memory man that I bought for $60. Took like five bucks worth of parts to repair it and resold it for 240 bucks. And here's the thing. Margins on pedals are way better than margins on guitars. Guitars are bulky, expensive to ship, easier to break in transit, pedals, tiny, sturdy.
They go out in first class mail. Half the time I could ship them for like under 10 bucks. Eventually I got into like modding too. It wasn't crazy custom work, just little tweaks that made players feel like they're getting something special. And that let me bump up the price even a little higher.
At one point, I even had a few regulars and musicians who DM me whenever they needed repair, wanted one of those custom boss pedals I was known for. By the end of the year, I'd made about 8,500 bucks in net profit, all just part time. It's not a life changing money, but honestly, it was one of the most fun, satisfying side hustles I've ever had. Fixing pedals taught me a couple things. One, there's a lot of money in what people throw away.
And two, learning a slightly annoying skill, like soldering tiny little circuit boards, can give you a huge edge because most people just don't wanna deal with it. Micro skills have a macro value. Also, smaller products mean bigger margins. It's way easier and cheaper to flip pedals than bulky gear. And honestly, nothing beats the feeling of plugging in a pedal you fix yourself, stepping on it and hearing that first crunch of sound.
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Awesome, Dave, thank you so much for the update. Listeners, thank you as well. I appreciate you being out there. Let me know what you think, who you'd like to see featured from our archives of thousands. I can say thousands now, 3,100 plus, in fact.
Thousands of episodes. If you have a question and update for us about your hustle, sidehustleschool.com. You can also download the complete archives of the podcast there as well, all completely free. New episodes drop every day, seven days a week. That's all for now.
My name's Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
