Office Worker Turns $15 Into $500/Month Custom Cup Hustle

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

[Music]

Hello and greetings. Welcome to Side Hustle School. I'm your host, Chris Guillebeau. Today, we're gonna talk about an office worker who turns $15 into a $500 a month side hustle. Lots of people are trapped in jobs they don't enjoy.

Lots of people complain about their jobs. Well, this person complained about her job, but actually found a way to make money from her complaints. How about that? And in this episode, we're gonna look at print on demand, also called POD. And we've talked about this on this show, but it's been a long time.

Basically, the way that print on demand works is there's a number of companies that will print whatever design or quote or image you want on all kinds of stuff. In this case, it's gonna be mugs or cups, but it could also be T-shirts, iPhone cases, lots of other stuff. And the key part of print on demand is that you don't actually have to make an investment or stock any inventory for your designs. And the demand part comes in when somebody places an order. So when somebody places an order for something, then they go and print it, they ship it to the customer, you never actually handle it.

So this is great for all kinds of reasons. As you might imagine, there's no risk. You can test out a bunch of different ideas. And if it works like it does in this case, it can turn into recurring income. So I'll tell you the story and give you some resources of how to learn more about this world.

Maybe get started with your own print on demand hustle. And all of those things are coming right up. [Music]

Like all too many people in the nine to five grind, Stisha Sims felt that her work wasn't being appreciated. Her ideas and suggestions were ignored, promotions passed her by, and she was left to fend for herself in the cruel world of office politics. Stisha admits this left her feeling, well, a little petty.

In order to cope with the drudgery of going to the office each day, she came up with a set of quips to help convey her feelings without getting her fired. She calls this throwing shade on her job by telling her friends and coworkers things like, I'm only here for the direct deposits. Or I just showed up for the insurance. She knew that other people felt the same way about their jobs too. That's where the idea for her side hustle came from.

What if she could sell something that brought together all the people who felt stuck in their office jobs, but were using them to fund bigger and more important parts of their lives? Stisha decided she'd take the shade that her friends and colleagues loved about her and print it onto the side of cups. She thought they were something that most office workers are able to bring from home. They could be played off as a joke to management. They might constantly remind that person of the bigger motivation behind their day-to-day efforts.

She called this idea T plus shade, and that became her brand name. Next, she bought a domain and signed up for a Shopify store. She chose Shopify because they were offering a free trial and Stisha wanted to test to see if her idea was viable before incurring any startup costs. She implied the same mentality to her email marketing and signed up for MailChimp. In the introduction to this episode, I mentioned print on demand, which allows you to do things like sell custom mugs without having any inventory, without doing a production run, and choosing Shopify turned out to be fortuitous because they have a free app that simplifies all of her processes for this called T-launch.

With T-launch, Stisha could upload her designs, and that service will print and ship them on an order-by-order basis. Each cup costs $5 to make, $4.50 to ship, and then $2 for each additional mug in the same order. This allows Stisha to charge $15.50 per cup, plus shipping, and make a $9 profit off each of them. Finding a designer for her shady mugs wasn't too hard either. She used a resource called Fiverr, which we've also talked about on the show, but it's been a while.

This Fiverr service is a directory of low-cost service providers. So using Fiverr, she performed a quick search for the kind of designer she was looking for. They had some emails back and forth, and then they got to work. Total costs for this initial round were $15. So not quite $5, but, you know, $15, not too much.

By the way, if you're ever looking to do this yourself, Stisha recommends make sure you're purchasing the rights for the image or whatever that designer creates. Common sense might suggest that what you buy is yours to do with what you want, but that's not always the case. So be sure you clarify it. This combination of free trials, free apps, and designs from Fiverr meant that Stisha and her new T+ Shade side hustle only had to sell two mugs to recoup her initial investment and go home with a profit. And since she started, she's been able to earn a consistent $450 to $500 a month, and is also seeing a little bit of growth each month.

Sticking with the theme of free, T+ Shade has mostly been marketed through free channels, social media in particular using active Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter feeds. She uses memes and imagery that fits with the shade throwing part of the brand and features people who use the cups to help create brand awareness. Each cup also comes with a brand name beneath the quote, allowing the visual aspect of the cups to draw attention and promote that brand in the workplaces where her actual target audience spends their time. At some point, Stisha wants to expand this brand onto t-shirts, tote bags, and other visual products to help people keep throwing shade in new and creative ways. Lots of people out there complain about their jobs.

That's why the show "The Office" was so popular. So many people could identify with those situations. But Stisha didn't just complain, she turned her complaints into a money-making project. [Music]

Awesome, so in this episode, I mentioned a bunch of different resources, including Fiverr, which, like I said, I've talked about before, but it's been a while, and the same with print-on-demand in general. So of course, on the show notes page, I'm gonna link all these different things up if you wanna learn more about it.

I do think this world of print-on-demand is pretty interesting because it allows people to experiment in this way, just like you hear in the story without taking a lot of risk. If there's any downside to it, like you might ask if this is so great and so easy, why isn't everyone doing it? Well, there are a couple of things to be aware of. And one thing is that the production cost can be fairly high since it's print-on-demand. Like the old way of selling mugs would be I'm gonna manufacture 2,000 of them at a time.

Then maybe they're gonna cost like one or $2 each. So if I sell them for $10, I have this great profit margin. But a great profit margin is only great if you have customers willing to pay. And you could also have a situation of creating 2,000 mugs and nobody wants to buy them. So then you're out a lot of money.

With print-on-demand, you don't have that risk, you don't have to keep the inventory, but the cost is gonna be a lot higher because obviously those companies, those services wanna make money too. Second thing is because there's so much out there like this, it can be hard to stand out. So you really need to do something that is a bit different like what Stisha did here. She had this clear market in mind. She had these quips that she was coming up with and staying around the office and people thought were really funny.

And then she used social media to spread the word. So in the best possible scenario, you do something like this and you put it out there and then it earns relatively passive income for you. If it doesn't work, then you do this and you put it out there and nothing much happens. Or you might get a few sales here and there, but you're not earning $500 a month. So that's just something to be aware of.

It can be hard to scale a project like this because of those high production costs. But I suppose if a particular design or product line ended up taking off, you could then look into manufacturing that item. And you could do so with some confidence that you're gonna be able to sell whatever inventory you buy because you know people are buying it. Like people are actually placing orders for it now using the print-on-demand service. Or you could just not worry about that, let the print-on-demand thing do its work for you.

Lots of different options for you there. Side Hustling is always about options and opportunities. So as you listen to these stories, I hope that you find something that sparks your interest and it might get you to work. That's because I believe inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Those show notes are online at sidehustleschool.com/318.

Thank you for listening. I'll be back tomorrow. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]