This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
In today's episode, a listener has created a valuable educational resource, but she doesn't wanna handle all the distribution herself. Let's consider how she can license her curriculum or teaching materials for broader reach and perhaps passive income. Does that sound good to you? We're all about helping people create passive income or at least income of some kind, a secondary income apart from your day job. That's what we've been doing for 3,100 plus days on side hustle school.
Creating a great product is only the first step. The next challenge, of course, is getting it into more people's hands, especially in the case of today's caller. She doesn't wanna be the one running a warehouse, managing bulk orders, et cetera. So what can she do to focus on what she's good at and achieve this goal of greater reach and more sustainable revenue? All right, let's talk about it.
How does licensing work for educational content? How might this help somebody else out there as well? As always, detailed question and my answer coming right up. [Music]
Hi Chris, this is Reina from Toronto. Over the past couple of years, I've created a set of branded educational worksheets and curriculum materials for early literacy.
I initially designed them for a tutoring program I ran, but they've taken in a life of their own. Teachers and homeschoolers have started requesting them and I've sold a few digital downloads online. I'd love to reach a wider audience, but I don't have the time or resources to handle mass distribution or print production. I've been thinking about licensing the materials to an educational publisher or learning platform, but I have no idea how to approach that. How does licensing actually work for something like this and what would make a company want to pick up my materials?
All right, so in this situation, our caller has done the hard part already. She's created something teachers actually want. She has found a need that she has the answer, the solution for. Now it's about getting it in front of the right partners, making the offer appealing from a business standpoint. So in this situation, here's how you think about it step by step.
First, package what you have as a licensable asset, a licensable asset. Don't just say, "Hey, I've got some worksheets." You wanna create a system, make it a system, like organize your materials into clear units or modules, show how they fit together, what's the objective, what grade level or age range they serve, what makes the approach unique, include sample pages, usage instructions, add some branding, consistent design elements. This really signals professionalism and can definitely increase the value of what you are hoping to license. This basically becomes your curriculum packet or your core product. Next, understand what companies are looking for.
So educational publishers or platforms, they want proven or promising demand. So we already have covered that, that's great. They want materials that fill a gap in their catalog, alignment with their brand or audience, and something that's easy to plug into what they're already doing. Like think about how you can make this as simple as possible for the right educational publisher to say yes to. Make their job easy.
And then you wanna look for the right targets. So look for niche publishers focused on early education. Look at a digital marketplace like Teachers Pay Teachers. We've featured them before, it's a great platform. Maybe some ed tech platforms that offer curriculum bundles.
There's probably somebody else, I don't know this industry super well, but basically you're gonna do some hunting, do some detective work and find the right targets. And then reach out with a brief, confident pitch. Don't write them a novel, just a few short sentences, explain who you are, focus on, like I've sold over X number of downloads independently, just establish that proof really quickly. I'm looking to license the material. I'd love to send you a sample and see if we can have a conversation.
So that's basically all you're trying to do. And if it seems like you might be able to move forward, then you need to think a bit more about financial terms like are you licensing the content outright for a fixed period of time? Are you trying to do a revenue share model? That might be better, especially if they're hosting and marketing it. A basic royalty rate might be 10 to 30% of net revenue.
So there's more to be done at this point, but now you've kind of gone from, I have a product, I'm trying to figure out how to license it. Those are your first steps. You also don't need to pitch a hundred companies. This is a very specialized thing. So start with maybe five highly targeted prospects and see how that goes and see if you can get at least one good conversation out of it.
Thanks for the great question. Listeners, thank you for being out there as well. Let me know what's on your mind, sidehustleschool.com/questions. We've also got the complete archives of the podcast available for download for free on the website, sidehustleschool.com. And of course, new episodes come out every day, seven days a week, always free as well.
My name's Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
