This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
A couple goes from crashed drone to a soaring side hustle. This is in fact a sky-high success story of a six-figure drone coaching business that begins after a man crashes a drone into a parked car in New York City. Got to look out for those. Drones are everywhere these days. A lot of them crash. I think we had a story once of a drone hospital where drones
go to get repaired after they inevitably crash because their users make a mistake. This year we're going to bring you some remixes of our best stories over the years, especially the early years, which was a very long time ago, 2017-2018, bringing you some of the greatest hits, some of my favorite stories. This was actually originally in episode 500 and now we're on episode 3140. Now, of course, each time we record an episode, we record it new. We go back and look at everything. Sometimes we have some updates. If you do happen to
have an incredible memory, and you heard this back on day 500, more than 2,600 days ago, in fact, well, you're going to hear something new. In today's story, this guy, Alan Perlman, I actually know Alan. He's a pretty cool guy. He's built a number of businesses. This one, I think, I don't know if this was his biggest invest, but certainly one of the most interesting and unusual, just as people were learning about drones and buying drones and crashing them, of course, he decides to make a change from an affiliate marketing business where he was reviewing different drones, earning some commissions from Amazon, et cetera, into, well, that's what you're going to hear about today, the drone school that actually does really, really well, makes a lot of money and also just kind of makes people's lives better, helps them to get better at flying their drones and not crashing them.
So let's take a look at Alan Perlman's story. Again, it's called Couple Goes From Crashed Drone to Soaring Side Hustle. Alan Perlman never intended for his side hustle to become a full-time business. In fact, Alan, a regular side hustler for more than a decade, had modest goals in mind when he started his website uavcoach.com. This original plan was to make some extra money on the side by reviewing quadcopters and drones, his favorite toys.
You see, Alan loves UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles, so much that he could drone on about them for hours. But let's go back a bit. Alan had purchased his first drone with the idea of doing some basic aerial photography. And a fun little side note, on its maiden voyage, he crashed the drone into a car in New York City. It was in fact a parked car. Fortunately,
nobody was hurt. Alan's pride perhaps wounded a bit, but he continued to learn. And he had seen friends build successful review websites and drive traffic with SEO. That traffic could be monetized with affiliate offers through stores like Amazon. And he thought, maybe I can do the same thing for this newfound passion. So he decided to launch the website
on a whim. Now, this was a good market to go into because drones are high priced items, right? I mean, there are basic drones, but some of them get pretty expensive. So with Amazon's commission structure, it was possible to earn up to $60 per sale on some of those models. And he could bring in real money if he sold even a few each month. Now, technically,
the website made money in its first month, but it was actually 14 cents. So just to be very honest and transparent, it wasn't a huge hit at first. But in times like these, many people lose hope, move on to the next thing, but not Alan. Alan didn't lose heart. He kept working on the site, made a big investment of time producing long form, high quality content. And the site began receiving more traffic. Visitors read the reviews, then they
bought drones based on his recommendations. Just a year after launching, UAV coach generated five figures of income in a single month, most of it coming from Amazon. Now that's pretty awesome, right? And you might think, well, that's great. This is the success. He
just goes on to make tons of money. But actually that five figure month was the single largest month ever for affiliate sales. And things began to decline after that. And there was no way of recapturing the revenue. And that's the whole thing about affiliate sales. They're
great, but it's one and done. And then that customer is gone forever. If somebody else's website gets better rankings, if Amazon or anybody else changes their commission model, you are just completely stuck, right? Like your business could actually disappear. So Alan was like, what can I do next? Well, he started collecting the email addresses of
his website visitors. He was generating thousands of email subscriptions, in fact, from people interested in drones. And this is where phase two of the plan comes in because Alan sends them all an email basically says like, Hey, can you tell me more about what you're into? Like, why did you sign up here? What were you doing on our website? And these emails
led to a lot of one-on-one conversations, which highlighted a very specific and unmet need. A lot of drone enthusiasts needed flying training and education. They often didn't even know the laws around flying drones in their local area. And of course, they didn't want to crash their drone, just like Alan had when he first started flying. So Alan was like, all right, let's go into this and build out UAV coach much more. They put together
a flagship course he and his wife worked down to the wire. They were up until 4am the night before the lunch, making sure everything was perfect. And this time, this time, my friends, the first month, even the first week, even the first day of the new business model brings in a lot more than 14 cents. In fact, the first day, they did $60,000 in sales. The first day the new flagship course was open. And then they just kept selling like they
kept selling, they kept building this flagship product, new products, new educational products, they stayed on top of the market in 2017, their business generated six figures in revenue, multiple six figures beyond that, the money earned through affiliate sales, at least at the time we first featured them was only 10% of their total income. And the rest came from their training courses. So they really built this out well. They had five employees, they launched an in person training program, they just kept growing all because Alan learned to pay attention to his customers. In short, I guess we could say his business was flying high.
Well, I put this episode as number 500 way back in the day, just because I liked it so much. First of all, I like Alan, but I also think it's a great example of a really specific market and something that is a renewing market more and more people getting into drones all the time and not knowing what to do with them. Also not understanding the legality of it. So he now provides some free training on his website. Amazon commissions are nice when you can get them. But this is a business that is truly scalable, sustainable, you know,
all those good things. So well done to Alan. I'll have to catch up with him at some point see how he's doing these days. But looks like the website is still up. And looks like things are still going well.
Listeners, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Hope you enjoyed this story. Hope you enjoy the podcast in general. New episodes out every day. More than 3100 in the archives now all completely free as well. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You've
been listening to Side Hustle School. From the Onward Project.
