This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
When you learn to cook as a college student, what do you do next? Well, naturally you start a blog showing your fellow students how to prepare more than boxed mac and cheese and frozen pizza. Nothing wrong with those things, by the way. I enjoy a good box mac and cheese, at least I have in my childhood and young adulthood. And if somebody put some boxed mac and cheese in front of me, I would not hesitate to prepare it and frozen pizza.
Well, that's just like a lifelong journey, right? Nevertheless, we are focused today on side hustle stories and I've got one for you. In fact, it is a remix of one of our original stories from way back in 2018. If you were listening back then, well, we've got some updates, of course. And if you weren't listening back in 2018, it's a completely new story to you.
So you're gonna hear about this college grad who shares more than mac and cheese student recipes, creates passive income for her, allows her to travel to other things, experiment, take on a job, but still make money kind of go on in life and still having this project out there. So it's helping people, it's making money. Those are two good things. We always encourage our listeners to work towards both of those goals. College grad, student recipes, that's the story.
It's coming right up. [Music]
Chelsea Cole was a student at the University of Oregon on the fast track to becoming an elementary school teacher. But a couple years in, the realities of the public school system started to sink in. She was no longer certain that she wanted to work in traditional education. That's when she started to pay attention to the things she enjoyed to see if there were any other alternatives.
The first thing that boiled to the top was her love of food and cooking. You see, Chelsea had started a food blog called A Duck's Oven, just because U of O's mascot is a duck, to document her adventures in cooking. It was a way for her to unwind after a day spent cramming for tests. But up until she realized that a life of chalkboards wasn't for her, cooking had just been a hobby. Now she was looking at it with fresh eyes.
Since she loved cooking so much, why not try her hand at cooking for others? So like many idealists before her, Chelsea's first thought was to open a restaurant. Eugene Oregon was a nice college town, but she had her sights set on Eugene's foodie-obsessed sister, Portland. That's right, Portland, Oregon. So she heads off to Portland.
She decides to get a job at a restaurant until she learns the ropes enough to open her own. But just like Moses said, when delivering the tablets of stone, just because there's dough in the oven doesn't mean it will become a biscuit. Chelsea actually liked the fast-paced environment of working at a restaurant, but also discovered that running one was far from being a piece of cake. So back to the cutting board. Since the majority of her audience with the blog had been fellow classmates, she thought about ways she could cater directly to them and their needs.
She knew from experience that many of them were living off of boxed mac and cheese and frozen pizza. Hmm, again, nothing wrong with that. And she decided to set her goal on helping them branch out from the frozen food aisle. How exactly was she going to compete with the siren song of Hot Pockets? Well, she would create content and recipes that were simple and easy to put together.
Chelsea had moved to South Africa for a year while her husband was finishing a grad school program there. She then returned to Portland and went back to the restaurant, this time working as a support specialist. A year later, she scored her first official marketing job and began to manage the social accounts of an antique furniture store. Now, in more ways than one, Chelsea's blog is a large part of how she grew to be such a strong marketer. Each post she published was a new opportunity to build on her brand and drive more traffic to the site.
It also gave her content for her social media channels, which brought in new people who could benefit from what she knew. This was also a cost-effective marketing strategy. Blogging can be a great way to learn more about the wants, needs, and interests of your audience. And Chelsea took all that experience with her to her new career as a marketer. Meanwhile, a duck's oven has returned to being the fun and profitable project that it was while she was in college.
Narrowing down the focus of the blog helped her grow her following. And when we first ran her story, it was bringing in more than $1,000 a month. Some of that money comes from affiliate relationships, some from advertising. Chelsea's also been able to make money helping other bloggers develop recipes. Costs of the business are also very low, less than $50 a month in total.
Now, we always ask the people we feature what kind of advice they have for someone looking to follow in their footsteps. And Chelsea suggests, well, first of all, she emphasizes the importance on being clear of what you want to do. And then after you figure that out, she suggests you get even more specific with focusing on a particular topic. This eliminates a lot of the blind risk-taking and instead allows you to understand the likelihood of success in that field from the beginning. As far as the content itself goes, Chelsea keeps in mind the different needs of people with different lifestyles.
When she publishes a recipe, she always tries to include a cheater way, or a shortcut, basically, for people who want to spend less time cooking. Last but not least, Chelsea is working hard to cook up more passive income for herself. There might even be a cookbook in her future. Well, who says blogs are dead? Here we are many years later.
A duck's oven is still up and running, at least as a passion project. And just like there's nothing wrong with frozen pizza, nothing wrong with passion projects either. Not everything needs to scale. Check it out at ducksoven.com. And I also love the cheater ingredients or the hacks.
I think those are always great or at least helpful. Sometimes not everybody is able to follow the detailed recipe or the detailed set of instructions, whatever it is. It could be something entirely different from cooking. So options like that can be useful. All right, that's it for today.
Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. This was episode 3,189. I hope you will go away feeling inspired, motivated, and maybe even ready to take the next step toward your side hustle or small business, whatever the case may be. Take care of yourself as well. I'll be back tomorrow.
My name's Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
