This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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If you've ever had a website or Shopify store, any kind of templated product where you have to upload images, write, copy, et cetera, then you'll probably notice that a lot of things work really well, and then a few things don't. Like you get things looking sort of good, but then all of a sudden it's like, how do I center my product images? Or why is my shopping cart icon floating in space? And sometimes fixing these really small issues, if you're not a programmer, is just a real pain. Okay, so today's storyteller, today's side hustler, he knows that pain well.
He is a front end developer. He spent six years freelancing on the Shopify Experts Marketplace, which is a place where you can go if you have a Shopify site and you're like, I need some help fixing one of these things. And so he did lots of contracts and many of them felt the same. It was kind of like move a button around, hide a price, embed a video, fix this error message. He would collect a small fee for each of these things.
And then he would see the next client ask for basically an identical fix. So one sleepless night he realized, okay, I've already got the answer, the antidote, in fact, to these repeat headaches. I've got all these copy and paste snippets, little code snippets. There's a programming language called Liquid, which is used in Shopify. And I know this works.
So maybe I can, instead of charging one client at a time, I can package the entire library and sell it. And then also I'm selling a product, not just that one-time service. So this ends up working really well for him. He'll talk about how well it's going and a couple of things he learned along the way. It's part of our first $1,000 series where we hear how somebody makes their first $1,000.
In his case, he goes on to earn a good bit more than that. But of course we focus on the genesis of the idea and those first steps. So today's story, Shopify Library Becomes Paid Subscription. Gonna pass the microphone to our featured storyteller. I'll be back at the end with a few words of wrap up.
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So I've been, I guess, knee deep in Liquid, programming language developed by Shopify since college. By 2024, I deployed more than 100 theme tweaks, color swatches, animated carts, one-click upsells, and tiny jobs, each one billed at $50 or $100. Helpful work, but the deja vu was brutal. I'd finish hiding a variant selector for one client, then open a new support ticket and discover the same request, staring back at me. So I started pasting every finished snippet into a single best of file.
You know, concise comments, mobile safe, no bad JavaScript. When the document hit 42 pages, I asked myself, would store owners pay for a coding cookbook instead of hiring me for a one-off fix? I whipped up a landing page, just headline, three gift demos, and a Stripe Blue Unlock Vault button wired to Stripe checkout. Behind the paywall lived a Notion database, sorted by difficulty, beginner, intermediate, and I promise this works, but backup first, kind of thing. Subscription price was $15 a month, cancel any time.
I launched on a Tuesday with zero marketing budget. My entire promo strategy was just to be genuinely useful on Reddit and Hacker News. Whenever someone posted, theme is stuck and bold, I replied with a short solution, then added, if you'd like pre-tested versions of 120 plus tweaks, links in my bio. Redditers hate spam, so the fix had to work. No teaser gibberish, just real help first.
That first week, 36 people subscribed. Stripe notifications felt like popcorn in the microwave. Slow at first and then rapid fire. By day 10, I'd crossed 100 users, and by day 21, the count sat at 170. Multiply that by $15, and the math is easy.
That's 2,500 in monthly revenue. My first 1,000 in profit arrived sometime around the 12th subscriber, but I barely noticed because new signups kept pinging. Keeping customers happy mattered more than chasing new ones. Every Friday, I added one fresh snippet, sometimes a sticky add to cart bar, or other times a little accessibility upgrade that announced variant changes to screen reader software. I recorded two-minute loom videos explaining the logic and then emailed members, hey, new drop is live, copy at will.
Those tiny deposits created a rhythm and got churned to under 6% per month. The biggest surprise? Agencies began buying seats, so junior devs could speedrun simple tasks. One firm signed up for 10 licenses, which I sold as a discounted team plan, and that single upgrade doubled my MRR overnight without adding any support burden. I still take freelance contracts, but now I turn down the micro jobs that once clogged my calendar.
Instead of writing the same snippet 30 times a year, I write it once, polish it, and let the subscription handle distribution. If you're sitting on a library, code, templates, lesson plans, remember that your archive might solve a universal problem. Package it thoughtfully, price it fairly, and get ready. [Music]
Thanks so much for sharing this story. This is a pretty big market.
I forget the number of Shopify stores that are out now, but I think it is hundreds of thousands, like lots and lots and lots of people use this platform, and therefore lots and lots of people need help. It's the same with WordPress or any other popular platform that allows you to make a website or an online store or something. And for the most part, like I said in the introduction, it works pretty well, it's fairly intuitive, but then little things go wrong. And so this guy's come along to solve many of those problems for people, and he's doing well. He's making a difference for people, making their lives easier, and he's getting paid, which is always, of course, the goal of Side Hustle School.
So glad it's worked out well for him. How are things going with you? What are you working on? What is your project? How are you going to turn your idea into income?
Or maybe it's your next idea if you've already done it once. I hope the podcast is helpful to you. That's why we have a new episode every day. If you have a question and update for us about your hustle, sidehustleschool.com. You can also access the complete archives of the podcast.
They're all completely free. New episodes drop seven days a week. Listen wherever you'd like. My name's Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.
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From the Onward Project.
