This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey, Side Hustlers. Welcome to episode 325 of the show. In the US, it is Thanksgiving week. I hope you're having a good Thanksgiving wherever you are. Today, I've got a great story for you about an engineer, software engineer who makes $64,000 selling nerdy playing cards on Reddit.
So a bunch of good lessons here about this kind of product as well as that platform. How do you sell something on Reddit? And editing this story kind of brought me back to some childhood memories. I remember when I was a boy, right after the Civil War, our nation was still rebuilding. The telegraph had just been invented.
Railroads were connecting the Eastern Seaboard with the Western Pioneer. And while my dad was outside hunting buffalo for our dinner, I would spend time with my Nana, my grandma, and we would play video games. Now, at least one of those things is true. Starting at age five or six, I used to play video games with my Nana. She was pretty good at Mario Brothers.
Whenever I got into trouble, I'd pass her the controller and she'd help me out. And then a few years later, the first Legend of Zelda game came out and it changed my life. Like I played Legend of Zelda pretty much like all the time for six months. It was basically like all I did. I think once in a while I went to school.
And even if you're younger than me, you probably know, or at least you might know about the Legend of Zelda because it's a cross-generational thing. Like I remember when the first one came out, but I think these days they're on like Legend of Zelda 26 or something. Like it's still going strong. So today we'll hear about that software engineer. We'll hear about those nerdy playing cards.
And we'll hear how this engineer draws on nostalgia for games like Legend of Zelda and other fantasy worlds to pursue a different creative outlet and also to make money, 'cause it's a side hustle. I'll bring you that story in just a moment. [Music]
Today's story comes from Sorin Kala in San Francisco. By day she's a software engineer at a startup. Her side hustle is designing and selling custom playing cards.
She's got a Legend of Zelda themed deck, a Star Wars themed deck, and a Sailor Moon themed deck. Sorin got the idea after a friend of hers bought her a Legend of Zelda concept art book for her birthday. She decided she'd make her friend a Zelda themed thank you gift. This friend always had a deck of cards on him. So she decided to draw a link from the Legend of Zelda in the format of a playing card.
Once she was done, she posted the image she'd drawn on Reddit in the gaming subreddit, like a sub forum, and was surprised by the response. People loved the design and kept asking when she'd finished the full deck and whether she'd sell it to them. She hadn't planned to create a full deck, it was just one card, but that response was motivating. After doing more design, she spent some time looking for the best way to print the cards and ultimately settled on a vendor called Printer Studio. They let her upload custom images for the front and back of each card, as well as the box the cards are later packaged in.
After uploading her artwork, she gets it printed in batches and then waits for them to come in the mail. When she decided to sell that first full deck, she had no idea how many people would be interested in buying them, so she decided to accept pre-orders for two weeks and then decide how many decks to order. But in a stroke of good luck, she got on the front page of Reddit. So after that two weeks, she had 623 pre-orders. She ordered 1000 decks to be printed so that she'd have some stock after the pre-orders were shipped, and for future decks, she quit running pre-orders.
She just stuck to ordering decks in batches of 500. Marketing on Reddit has been a learning process. Her first post that motivated her to make that full deck got popular by accident. When she was ready to sell her cards, she spent more time figuring out what was best. She learned that posting at popular times, especially around 8 a.m. Eastern time on a Monday or Tuesday,
and phrasing her post in a certain way would help her get a lot more clicks. Her main goal was to hit that gaming subreddit, but she also posted in smaller subreddits that were more relatable to the product. She learned that in larger subreddits, it's okay to mention that something is on sale, like Legend of Zelda playing cards now on pre-order, as long as you don't draw attention to the fact that you're selling your own product in the title. But in smaller subreddits, it's important to not sound like you're selling something at all. In the comments, you can answer questions and discuss how you make the cards and so forth, but getting people to pay attention to the title is the biggest hurdle.
Soren also tried paying for Reddit ads, but didn't get much traction there. The free posts actually did much better. In addition to Reddit, Soren also submitted posts on Tumblr, which would get reviewed and sometimes published on other blogs. There are a lot of blogs and fan pages for playing cards, art, illustration, fans of Legend of Zelda and Sailor Moon, et cetera. So therefore, there were a lot more places to post than the subreddits.
Also because her product is so image heavy and Tumblr responds well to images, it worked out well. However, even though she gets a lot of views and likes on Tumblr, she noticed that she got less visits to her store than she did on Reddit. Since people going through Tumblr usually just scroll through a bunch of stuff. A couple of years after she first started making the cards, Soren decided to sell at conventions so she could interact with fans of her product directly. This process often involves applying six to eight months before convention days.
Other conventions operate first come, first serve, which can be stressful since some of the larger ones fill up all the vendor space within five minutes of opening applications. She also has to pay an entry fee and apply for a temporary seller's permit, which is free, at the state the convention is held in. Soren learned that the convention customer base is different than her online customer base. Convention customers are more dedicated fans, but they're also often looking to stockpile inexpensive products. She decided to start selling posters at a lower price point to reach people who would hesitate before buying a deck of cards at 15 to $20.
Well, what about copyright? With this kind of fan art, it's not a settled issue. It's much more of a gray area in the art and business communities. Soren started out by trying to get copyright permission, but this was a challenge in itself because Nintendo had a blurb on their site saying they don't give out licensing rights and had the right to take down anything infringing on their copyright. Soren contacted the legal department, but got a copy and pasted response of that same website blurb.
She wasn't able to get in touch with anyone at Disney either, and she just didn't contact Sailor Moon because she can't read Japanese. Soren has tried to make her art unique and distinct from the source material, which is a key aspect of the legality. She also says if she ever gets a cease and desist letter, she'll just take the cards down. But so far in several years, she hasn't had any response. This side hustle started when Soren was in college in Davis, California.
She operated it from Seattle before moving to San Francisco. So it's something that's been able to travel with her. In the early days when she was in college, she spent up to 25 hours a week working on it, but now she spends just about eight hours a week. That's because she's busy. In addition to her job in side hustle, Soren is also working on artwork for a visual novel and a two-player strategy board game.
Her goal is to eventually make art a larger part of her career than software engineering, though she has no plans to quit her day job anytime soon. She says the hardest part of this side hustle is knowing when to cut back. Sometimes she's had to not go to a convention she wanted to or spend less time on social media than she would like, but she now has a plan to update her website to better reflect the changes she's made in her brand identity over the past three years. When she first started selling the cards, she made around $20,000 a year from it. Not bad for a part-time college gig.
But now that she devotes less time to it, it's about $8,000 to $10,000 a year in extra income. She makes around $10 per deck and has sold 6,432 decks to date. That adds up to $64,000 in nerdy playing cards. Well, congratulations to Soren. If you'd like to take a look at this artwork and see why 6,000 people have chosen to purchase these decks of playing cards, be sure to come take a look at the show notes.
And if you want to sell on Reddit or any social network, really, it's best to do some research and learn a bit about it first. And Reddit in particular has a lot of protocol in terms of how you're supposed to interact and engage and what's okay and what's not. Something like this kind of fan art is what tends to go over well there. And in fact, this side hustle came to be because of a simple post she had made, not offering anything for sale, but just showing off her artwork. Now also, as mentioned, this is a bit of a murky area in terms of whether you're allowed to do this or in what fashion you can do it, making something that is substantially unique and distinct from the source material, like Soren has done, is pretty important.
But in other cases, what tends to happen is that this kind of stuff can work until it doesn't, if that makes sense. And what I mean by that is at a relatively small scale, it's fine and you're not gonna get in trouble doing it. These large companies understand that there's actually a huge fan art industry itself, but the challenge comes if it really grows into a much larger business because then they do tend to start paying more attention. So as always, your side hustle should relate to your goals. In this case, Soren was interested in pursuing a different creative outlets and making some extra money on the side.
And it's not small money, it's $60,000 so far. So it's still something that can have a major impact on her life and also bring her that balance as she has her software engineering day job. Well, that's it for today. Inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. Those show notes where you can take a peek at her work are at sidehustleschool.com/325.
I will be back tomorrow with something new. Thank you for listening. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]
