This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Well, hello there. It's Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. Got a great story for you today. It's all about podcasting. Well, it's about somebody who's making money using podcasting.
I get a fair amount of questions about that topic. I'll do a little bit of follow-up in the commentary after the episode today. But today is actually about podcast production. And with the rise in podcasts, which you're probably familiar with since you're listening to this show, there's also an opportunity for people to work on production, on all the stuff that's associated with the audio and the files and the uploading. If you've ever wondered how do these shows actually get made, well, there are a few models.
You can totally DIY it like a lot of people do. It's not that hard to learn the basics. Or you can be part of a network, a company, like My Network Panoply. I'm really grateful to them because they make my life easy. I just focused on the content for the show and they handle all the production.
But there's also a third way, which is somewhere in between. That's what we'll talk about today. And this story is about a guy who's a landscaper for his day job, then begins doing freelance podcast production for his hustle. It ends up going so well that he eventually makes the leap to do it full-time, where he's currently earning at least $4,000 a month. Definitely a tremendous success.
That story is coming up after this quick shout out to our sponsor. [Music]
Jeremy Innes was working at a landscaping job in Vancouver, Canada. And he knew he didn't want to do this job forever. That's why he wanted to start some kind of side hustle to increase his options. When it came time to decide what that hustle would be, it was actually a pretty easy decision.
Because you see, Jeremy is obsessed with podcasts. He listens to 50 hours a week at double speed so he can get through as many as he can. And in addition to his love of podcasts for their content, he also has the necessary skills to edit and produce them since he went to school for audio engineering and production. As he started thinking about doing podcast editing and production as a side hustle, he realized there was also a huge potential audience for these services. In his mind, he had hit the side hustle trifecta, passion, skill, and opportunity.
His first step was to reach out to some friends who had outsourced their podcast production to learn more about their workflow and see how they found and picked their editor. One of those friends put him in touch with a podcast editor who worked as a freelancer for a podcast production company. After connecting with that editor, a couple months later, Jeremy started doing some freelance work for them. While he was seeing who else he could connect to in his network, he was also actively trying to land the first client of his own. He sent out around 100 cold emails after combing through iTunes to identify podcasts that were big enough to have a budget to hire an editor, but not so established that they would already have one.
After a few weeks, however, this outreach effort had only led to one client. Having that first client was great, but of course, that's a low return on investment for all the time he spent. So he took another approach. He began applying for jobs on Upwork.com, where various people list technical services that providers can bid on. He managed to land his first client there within a week.
So that validation was the boost he needed to really pursue this hustle further. Over the next couple months, he kept landing clients via Upwork, and he realized that not only did this idea have merit, but he also needed to update his website to reflect this new focus. You see, his existing site, which was hosted on Wix, was aimed at musicians looking to record albums. Very different market than podcasters, so he began to update and tweak that site. With some minor changes and no additional marketing, Jeremy continued to get more clients via word of mouth and still coming from Upwork.
So he made a good shift there. Three months in, he made another shift. He moved over to WordPress and also hired a graphic designer to make an infographic for his site. This was literally the first cost he incurred for this hustle. Everything to that point cost $0, which I guess means it didn't cost anything at all.
Around that time, he also signed up for Google Suite to help him organize and manage the behind the scenes aspects of stuff. But aside from that, he's tried to keep things as simple as possible to manage. After he'd been doing this for about four months, Jeremy started thinking about turning this into his full-time work. Well, that's not entirely true. Here's how he puts it.
He says, "From the moment I got my first client, "I knew that this could turn into something full-time "if I worked at it and was patient. "I had this goal of quitting my day job in September. "As I got halfway through August, "I realized that that point was only a month away "and it was decision time. "I had enough money saved up to get by for three months "and I figured if I couldn't make it work, "the landscaping job would be there for me again "to fall back on. "So I gave a month's notice on August 15th." Now here's something I found amusing.
It seems Jeremy is like me. He has some clear strengths, but there's also a couple of things he struggles with. He's not great at bookkeeping, also just like me. So the funny thing is that at that point, Jeremy had this money coming in from multiple clients, but he hadn't actually ever totaled up all of the income from his side hustle. So at the end of August, a couple of weeks after he gave his notice, he finally added it all up and realized that he had made more money that month on his side hustle than his day job, which was a good confirmation that he had made the right decision.
And within a couple of months of quitting his day job, he was bringing in an average of $4,000 a month. Since quitting that day job, he turned all of his energy to the podcast production hustle. He wrote an ebook on podcasting gear. He started doing some targeted marketing using lead pages and Facebook ads. But overall, he still tries to keep all of this marketing authentic.
He said, "For the most part, all I do is try to talk to as many people as I can about podcasts and podcasting, try to make connections, and so far it's paying off." Well, not only has this side hustle paid off financially, it's also paid off in some other major ways. Jeremy has always wanted to travel and not just travel for a week or two and go to the beach, but really travel, really get out there and explore the world. So since officially going full-time last summer, Jeremy has spent 10 months traveling across four continents and 13 countries. He does mention that he has to work wherever he goes, just like I do. It's not like he's a permanent tourist.
He's seeing the world, but he also has responsibilities. But still, he says the freedom he's gained and the ability to pick his own direction in life more than makes up for whatever stress he has in terms of managing his clients around the world. Also, what do you do when your side hustle goes full-time? Well, you probably need another side hustle, right? 'Cause everyone needs one.
Jeremy's new hustle is all about ice cream. He has started a personal podcast called Rain City Scoop with the goal of being the go-to source for all things ice cream. A lot of big news and resources out there in the ice cream world and Jeremy intends to capture it. It's not clear if Rain City Scoop has the same financial potential as his podcast editing gig, but he certainly has the passion and the skill. [Music]
Well, I really like this story.
I hope you do too. Whether you're interested in podcast production or not, I think that key point is the trifecta mentioned in the beginning. The side hustle trifecta of passion, skill, and opportunity. This is something that Jeremy was really excited about. He listened to podcasts 50 hours a week.
He had the skill because he had this background in audio production and engineering, and there was this tremendous opportunity, which still exists, of all these new podcasts coming out every day and a bit of a gap in the marketplace between people who just wanna do everything themselves, not spend any money, and then the more professional podcasts that come out from networks and companies. There's a big middle there in between those two different categories. So it makes perfect sense that this is a great hustle for him. I also thought it was smart how he made a couple of shifts in his marketing strategy. At first he thought it would be a good idea to just cold email 100 people from the iTunes list.
I don't think that's a terrible idea, by the way. I think it's something that's probably worth trying in that situation. But when he realized he got a fairly low return on investment with that strategy, he shifted and started listing his services or bidding for services that were up for auction on upwork.com. And of course he continued to evolve, actually updated his website, began doing more stuff once he went full time. But I think the really key point, the important thing is in the beginning of how he found that trifecta.
I think that is absolutely something you should be looking for in your side hustle exploration, 'cause it makes things so much easier. Now in my case, in terms of podcast production, as I said, I'm fortunate to have some really great folks who work at Panoply. They are very skilled at all the things that I'm not. So in my case, I just record the episodes, send to them, they put all the cool music in, they make sure everything sounds good. They handle the uploading to the feed that you listen from, all that kind of stuff.
But I mentioned in making this episode that people have a lot of questions about podcasts. I've been noticing on my tour that people are asking about podcasts as a side hustle model. So if you've got some questions about podcasting, how the business model works or how the production side works or anything else, go ahead and send them to me. You can just send a quick note to chris@sidehustleschool.com or hit me up on social media and I'll see if I can get those in when I record that next extended episode. For now, I will wish you well and encourage you that inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better.
Today's show notes include links to everything that I've talked about. I'll also include a link to a blog post I wrote earlier in the year with several thousand words of podcast lessons. When I record that extended episode, I'll actually have a bunch of updates from that. But if you want to see the original one, just come to the show notes page, which is sidehustleschool.com/319, 319. That's all for today, but I will be back.
I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]
