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[Music]
Marathon Runner earns full-time income trying on shoes. It's a great story. Fun one when we first worked on it several years ago. Back with some updates for you here today. A decade long marathon distance project earns six figures in affiliate commissions for this patient runner.
And you know what they say, the journey of a thousand miles begins. Well, okay, you know that already. Today's overnight success story takes 10 years in fact, but fortunately he goes on. And as I said, has been earning a lot of money. And of course he has to be patient because he is a runner.
He is a distance runner. You spend a lot of time just kind of running and not much else to do. I mean, you can think, you can listen to podcasts, you can listen to music, but you're just kind of out there. So this guy gets the idea first because he's bored, turns it into a hobby, a passion project, a side hustle. It brings in an incredible $9 in the first month, but then eventually does turn into a real money maker.
So let's hear about this. Get ready to run the distance. Story is coming right up. [Music]
Roguero Loda has been an avid runner his entire adult life. Few things give him more pleasure than lacing up a pair of shoes and hitting the road.
It never occurred to him that he could use that passion to earn an income, at least until he lost his job as head of merchandising for a major shoe brand. Now Roguero's side hustle story is kind of like running a marathon. It spans the course of 10 years with a lot of hard work along the way. But let's jog back to the first day in, I think it was 2009, when he lost his job. He viewed the sudden time off like a rest day in marathon training.
Rest day is when runners relax, rebuild energy for more training in the week ahead. And in this case, he would regroup for a couple months and then start looking for work. But like any good runner, he couldn't just do nothing. So he used the time to read a few books. He was able to get some ideas, lessons for building a side business.
And that side business turned out to be a running shoes review website. In fact, it's called runningshoesguru.com. It's now been up for 15 years, but again, let's stick with the origin. Some running publications were doing short reviews, but there was no one doing in-depth research. So Roguero spent a couple of weeks building the site.
He spent a grand total of $50 on a domain name and hosting. And the first version was nothing special. It launched with a few running tips and reviews of eight shoes that he was familiar with. But that was okay because he didn't have any grand plans for the site in the beginning. He just figured it would be a fun project to work on.
He might be able to show prospective employers for his next job. But he had heard he could put affiliate links on the site, linking out to products he reviewed. And if anybody went and purchased those shoes after visiting his site, he would make a commission. So he added those links. And the next Sunday afternoon, he made his first commission, which was $9.
Not a record-breaking sum, but nevertheless, something to get excited about because it was his first online income. And it was passive, like he had put in the work to build the site right through reviews, but now he's just sitting there and all of a sudden $9 come in. So naturally he starts thinking like, what if I try to build this up more? So he does go out and get a job. He starts working in sales for a computer company, all the while building running shoes guru on the side.
About a year later, the site was receiving 30,000 visitors a month. Income had also grown. Rugaro began buying new pairs of shoes just so he could review them and create more high-quality content. He also started building a small group of remote testers to help trial and review the shoes. So it wasn't just him.
And before the end of the next year, the site had grown to 80,000 visitors per month. And it turned out he was just hitting his stride. He continued the same strategy for two more years. By 2013, the site was picking up the pace. Traffic was 300,000 visitors per month.
He thought running shoes guru actually had the potential to become his full-time job. But he wanted to make sure that if it didn't work out, he would have a soft landing. So he took a job, a new one, managing the e-commerce store for a large online shoe retailer. He spent several years there learning valuable skills, how to build a team, how to hire the right people, how to motivate them and so on. And of course, all this time, he's growing the website on the side.
And by this stage, he had brought on a freelance web developer and designer that enabled him to make updates faster. Pretty soon, he's got 400,000 unique visitors per month, which is a pretty big number. Finally, in year seven, that's when he actually does quit his full-time job to go all in running shoes guru. The site was reaching 1 million visitors per month, generating six figures in profit every year. He's got a team of testers, testing over 100 pairs of shoes annually.
In fact, he views this as his competitive advantage over the other review sites. A lot of them don't even try the product they're reviewing. They just write something up. And so he's like, "I'm putting my effort into it. This is real." And his website visitors have rewarded that.
When we last left off, Rugero planned to double down on his effort, hire a few more employees so that he could continue to delegate, hopefully giving him some more time, not just for running the business, but also for running. And I think this story proves a good side hustle can in fact be a marathon or an ultra marathon even, not just a sprint with consistent deliberate work. You can push through the wall and cross the finish line. [Music]
Well, it has now been 15 years since Rugero started runningshoesguru.com. I was just taking a look to see how it's going.
And guess what? It's going. He's got lots and lots of reviews. I can't even count. I'm not sure there's probably some central directory, but basically I look at all the major running shoe brands, which I'm pretty familiar with as a runner.
And he's got all sorts of reviews for them. Lots of other content as well, but the clear focus is on running shoes, which I think is smart. I think in this situation, a lot of people, they start just building out more and more content. And they're like, "What else can we do?" And that can be wise for a bit, but ultimately it's like, what's the goal of the site? The goal of the site is to review running shoes, to encourage people to make the best decision for them, and then to click into buy.
And so I think wisely he has kind of kept that focus and it's like the biggest thing you see on the site. So good for him. Well done. And listeners, always wanting to hear stories from you. I hope that you have a six figure or beyond success story in the making.
Remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Get out there, take some action, even if it takes time, even if you're building something just like this guy did, there is something out there waiting for you. It's my privilege and pleasure to bring you these stories through the daily episodes, as well as the archival catalog of more than 3,200 episodes, all completely free. Hey, thanks so much for being out there. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
