This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey friends, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. Chris Guillebeau, your host in today's episode. Well, it's part of the first $1,000 series. We're gonna meet a typography enthusiast who transforms a quiet design obsession into a source of ongoing digital income.
This person, her name is Callie. She's always been fascinated by lettering, collecting fonts, types, redrawing logos, all that kind of stuff. And eventually she started experimenting with creating her own fonts. What began as a hobby became a focused project. She's gonna talk about how she learned to make $1,000 in her first month, with just two products.
And of course, this project continues to earn. So it's not just one and done. It is a great example of building something once and getting paid repeatedly. I know we have a lot of listeners out there who love the idea of making something like that happen for themselves. So let's talk about it.
Typography lover turns letters into revenue. That's today's story, gonna pass the microphone to Callie. I'll be back at the end with a quick wrap up. [Music]
This is Callie, and I've always loved fonts. Not just picking them for projects, but studying how they work.
In college, I took a calligraphy course for fun, then got into digital lettering. I used to spend my free time redrawing signage I saw in the wild, and testing an illustrator just to see how it would flow in a layout. Eventually, I started making my own typefaces. The first few were experimental, weird proportions and consistent spacing, but they taught me how to work with glyph sets, kerning and open type features. Once I got more confident, I built a clean sans serif called Transit Echo, inspired by subway signs and uploaded it to Creative Market.
I priced it at $18 for personal use and $45 for a commercial license. The entire set had uppercase, lowercase, numbers, punctuation, and a few alternates. I included OTF and TTF files, plus a sample sheet showing it in use. I posted a preview in a typography discord, and also submitted it to a free design newsletter that highlights indie fonts. The first day, I made $36.
Two sales. The next week, I had 17. Not bad, right? Then Creative Market featured the font in their new and noteworthy section for a week, and that's when it really took off. I crossed $1,000 in earnings about four weeks after listing it.
What helped, I think, was treating it like a real product, not just a creative exercise. I made a clean landing image with mockups, signage, book covers, tech branding. I wrote real descriptions that said who the font was for. UI designers, brand strategists, and minimalist web developers. After that, I created a second font called Hatchline, a hand-drawn serif with rough texture.
It was harder to make. It took me weeks to get the vector smoothing right, but it served a different market and attracted buyers in the rustic brand space. Now I've got four fonts total. I sell them on Creative Market, Etsy, as digital files, and my own Gumroad page. Most of my revenue still comes from the first font, but I get consistent trickle in sales across platforms.
I don't promote much. I've just uploaded everything to Fontshare and typed out metadata that matches what people actually search for. For anyone who's into typography, here's what I'd say. Don't get stuck thinking you need to compete with Adobe Fonts. The goal isn't to build a hundred font library.
It's to make a few great usable typefaces for specific use cases. There's room for originality, even in something as old as the alphabet. [Music]
Hey, Callie, thanks so much for sharing that story. There are a lot of creative ways to make money with design and art, especially these days with AI. But in this case, I think she's doing it all herself, while using apps and software, of course, but then selling them on those platforms like Creative Market and just directly through Gumroad.
Listeners, I want you to know there's an opportunity for you. There's something you can do as well. There's a skill you have that you can use in more than one way, hopefully in a way that can bring you income, not just once, but repeatedly as we're seeing here in this story and so many others. This was episode 3187. Thanks for tuning in today.
Much more is coming up seven days a week. My name's Chris Guillebeau, you're listening to "Side Hustle School." [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
