Weekend Workshop: The WordPress Revolution

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

What if the key to scaling your expertise wasn't doing more work, but teaching others to do the work themselves? That's exactly what Shannon Mattern discovered when she transformed her web design hustle from trading time for money into a scalable teaching business that reached thousands of students. Hey friends, welcome to Side Hustle School. Chris Guillebeau here, your host. This is our weekend workshop segment.

It's all about helping you learn the key steps to a new hustle in 2025, one step or concept per week. It includes activities, examples, and more. Of course, it's all free. For the first half of the year, we went through the 27 steps in the book Side Hustle from idea to income in 27 days. Now, in the second half, we're looking at more detailed case studies so you can understand how people apply this framework.

Let's talk about Shannon Mattern. Shannon Mattern worked a full-time IT job, but it developed strong WordPress skills on the side. WordPress is a platform you can use to make websites. She initially monetized this knowledge by taking on freelance web design projects for small businesses. That was fine, steady work, well-paying, but Shannon quickly ran into the classic service provider problem, which is that her income was directly tied to her available time.

To earn more, she had to work more hours, there was no way to scale beyond those time limitations. She also noticed something interesting about her clients. Many were frustrated by their dependence on web designers for every small update. They wanted to learn how to manage their own websites, but felt overwhelmed by WordPress's complexity. WordPress is the kind of platform that can be simple or it can be complex.

There's a lot you can do with it, but sometimes beginners or newbies struggle to adapt. This frustration represented an opportunity Shannon didn't recognize at first, but then she began to see it. Her clients weren't just buying websites, they were buying independence and control over their online presence. Her breakthrough came when she realized she could serve more people by teaching WordPress skills rather than doing WordPress work. Instead of building websites for individual clients, she could teach hundreds of people to make their own websites.

This required completely reimagining her service, rather than positioning herself as someone who builds websites for others. Shannon repositioned herself as someone who empowers others to build their own sites, and she called the new venture WordPress BFF, like Best Friend Forever. The name reflected Shannon's understanding of her target market. People learning WordPress didn't want to feel like students in a formal technical course. They wanted help from a knowledgeable friend who could explain things clearly.

Her initial offering was an online course, walking students through building a WordPress website from scratch, but she quickly expanded to include templates, tutorials, and coaching options. Let's talk about how that worked out, what were the results for Shannon, and how might you apply this in your own business or side hustle idea. Quick shout out to our sponsor, and then coming right back with results and application. Shannon's transition from doing web design work to teaching web design skills created dramatic changes in both her income and her work-life satisfaction. The economics in particular, instead of earning a few thousand dollars per website project, Shannon can earn the same amount from dozens of course sales.

She could eventually serve hundreds of people, then thousands, rather than creating dependence through traditional client relationships. Students meanwhile appreciated this approach because it gave them what they really wanted, the ability to control their own websites without relying on expensive technical help. They paid premium prices for education that provided long term independence. So a huge shift there, big success for Shannon and for her students. She also created recurring relationships rather than one-time transactions.

Traditional web design projects end when the website launches, but educational relationships continue as students implement what they learn and encounter new challenges. So your implementation guide to apply Shannon's approach of transitioning from doing the work to teaching the skills follow this framework. Step one, identify what your clients or customers really want beyond your immediate service. We talked about that a little bit with Jake Posco's guitar lessons last week. They don't actually want to learn scales in theory.

They might need to learn that, but they want to be able to play their favorite songs. So in Shannon's case or in your case, are they buying your work product or are they buying the capability to achieve similar results themselves? Step two, consider if your expertise could be packaged into a teachable system. And this is really the key question, like if you can break your knowledge down to learnable steps that others can follow to achieve similar outcomes. If so, great, test the teaching approach with a small pilot program.

Step three, basically create a simple course or workshop to validate demand. And then from there, if it works out, build supporting resources that help students succeed. Ultimately teaching is not about sharing information, it's about ensuring students can successfully apply what they learn. You can do this in lots of different ways. It is a transition.

It's a big transition from service work to teaching. It requires different skills and mindsets. It might also require patience, just because it does take some time. But as you can tell, Shannon's transformation was well worth it. What expertise do you currently have?

What could you transform into a teachable system? Might be a chance to multiply your impact, increase your income while reducing your time investment. Three good things there or at least good aspirations. And I hope you will take at least one step today to get closer to a goal that's important to you. Remember, it's better to have a simple idea you can start right away than a brilliant idea that never launches.

This is episode 3,130 of the podcast. But of course, the entire archives are available to you for free download on the website, sidehustleschool.com. You can also subscribe or follow wherever you listen for new episodes out every day. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.