The Rise and Fall of BirdSupplies.com

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

What's up, my friends? I'm so glad you're listening today. It is Christmas Eve. For those listening in real time, you might be listening later. And I'm so excited to bring you this story. It is called the Rise and Fall of Birdsupplies.com, one of

my favorite stories, one of my top 10 stories, no doubt, from the archives of Side Hustle School. We're gonna re-record it today, perhaps have some updates and such. But in short, we're gonna go back to the early days of e-commerce more than 20 years ago when a bird-loving social worker had a dream. The dream was to bring bird supplies to the masses, at least the bird-owning masses, in particular parrot owners. Very specific. And her site goes on to make up to

$250,000 a year before falling prey to the vultures at Google. I'm not making any of this up. And if you're like, "What do I mean?" Well, that's what the story is about. Listen to it. You're not only gonna go behind the cage of this aviary income source. You'll also hear how she goes from success to failure and then to

success once more as she rebuilds her nest egg. Again, it's called Rise and Fall of Birdsupplies.com. I thought about calling it bird lover makes soaring profits from parrot plucking prevention. That would also work. That would be applicable. And you will hear. So stay tuned. Do not go away. Without feather

ado, we will take flight after this sponsor message. Diane Burroughs has had an affinity for birds since childhood. Her family raised chickens as she was growing up. Later, as an adult with two kids of her own, she found herself rehabilitating injured birds that she found in her neighborhood. After one successful rescue, Diane and her young kids realized how much they missed the bird's company. Didn't take much convincing on the kids

part to get a feathery friend of their own. So they set out to find the perfect type of parrot for the family. Diane soon adopted Peanut, a cockatiel. And once they felt they could confidently take care of Peanut, they adopted a larger and more challenging bird, a Malucan cockatoo named Peachy. And if I mispronounce any of these bird words, I apologize, but I assure you I'm committed to the story. Diane was passionate about making sure her birds were properly

enriched. Through her extensive research, she knew that the parrot's exoticism meant that they needed specialized care. Without it, the birds were likely to experience significant stress. Yet, Diane couldn't find any quality products in her hometown. And here you're probably thinking, "Well, why didn't she just order these products on Amazon?" Well, this is way, way back in 1998. Actually, that's how

I got started. Diane's been doing this a long time. The word "Amazon" mostly just meant a river in South America. There weren't a ton of online shopping opportunities back there anywhere, especially for a niche market like bird care. Now, Diane was a stay-at-home mom at the time. She'd always dreamed of

owning her own business. She also knew that parrots were a popular pet, the third most popular in the United States, in fact. So, although it was risky, Diane had a hunch that the same upper-income people who were attracted to owning parrots would also be attracted to new technology like e-commerce. So she decided to start her own online store, Birdsupplies.com. She spent $12,000 on this. It was harder to set up a website back then. And in the first year, she made

$12,000 worth of sales from selling 350 products. There were few competitors. Diane chose to sell high-end products resulting in a greater profit. So, good start. For the next 12 years, in fact, Diane's business grew and grew. She was selling all kinds of items from bird toys to cages to vitamins and

more. In fact, she was even planning on quitting her day job and moving from Kansas to Colorado in pursuit of bird riches. In advance of the move, she hired a marketing firm to do all of the SEO search engine optimization for the site. She'd always done it herself, but it just made sense to have somebody else take over. And she had a good six months with this. Her SEO was fantastic. Whenever

people search for bird supplies of all kinds, her site was at the top. But then, one day, disaster struck. Diane had been relying entirely on those Google search results for her sales leads. And Google introduced a new algorithm to penalize sites that were using that type of SEO. This penalty clipped the wings of birdsupplies.com and went from being the number one keyword result for many searches to number 165. Diane went from making $250,000 a year in profit to just

$50,000. So that was devastating. She cried foul, but Google didn't listen. Also, foul doesn't even relate to parrots. That's another problem. She got back to

working full-time. It took her a grueling 18 months to get the penalty removed. Diane learned the hard way to not put all of her parrot eggs in one basket. She now works on having birdsupplies.com rank highly wherever she can, not just Google. She links her website to her Instagram and Pinterest posts, parroting her content so that people can find it wherever they are. She also advertises in

the best-selling avian veterinary journal. Through this, she also picked up several endorsements from veterinarians. This has strengthened her credibility and helped her target more people. Not only that, but the 18 months of slow business gave Diane the opportunity to reevaluate her business. Within the last few years, she narrowed her focus from all things birds to almost exclusively selling feather plucking products. Okay, say that three times fast. Parrots have a tendency

to pull out their feathers. This can be caused by a number of reasons, from boredom to anxiety. Birds live very stressful lives, of course. They got to ask for crackers and all that, you know. So to keep these birds from manifesting their cracker panic into plucking their own feathers out, Diane invented a sort of collar for the birds. It's kind of like the cone of shame that some dogs

have to wear. It's just made of fleece instead of plastic. So now her business is much more manageable. And with this specialization, Diane wrote a series of ebooks all about feather plucking. Listen friends, I am not making this up. Here is

a brief selection of some of the ebooks she has published. Eight secrets to end parrot feather picking and mutilation. How to stop a biting parrot. How to read parrot body language. Is your screaming parrot driving you nuts? And hormonal

parrot behavior what you need to know. That one is a best-seller. And I'm actually not even kidding. Like it is a best-seller. The new business is making $100,000 a year focused entirely on feather plucking prevention, you know.

And they said it couldn't be done. So the Google penalty seemed like it was the universe flipping the bird at her business. But Diane grew and ultimately became stronger through her struggle. Like a parrot phoenix rising through the ashes, overcoming the desire to pluck her own feathers, she is now stretching her wings, flush with birdseed, and banked deposits. Well friends, I think this episode illustrates why I have enjoyed working on the podcast for so many years. If it sounds at all like satire or some kind

of made-up thing, I assure you it is not. And in fact birdsupplies.com is still in operation many, many years later. Took a look at the website just now. It says "Sore into savings for your feathered friend." That's their call to action to join the newsletter, which of course you'll want to do, even if you don't need any bird supplies. And I think on the the business lesson obviously is like be careful about building your business on one source of income or referrals. But it's

also okay to treat your side hustle as bonus money that might go away at any time. Hopefully you enjoyed the story. Hopefully there's a lesson there for us. And it also got me thinking about my own ebooks. Feather plucking for cash money.

That's one of my favorites, as well as get your parrot out of my pocket. Those books are available, I was gonna say, wherever books are sold, but it's more like nowhere. So unfortunately you can't get those books. But one day I'll work on that. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Thanks for

tuning in. Happy holidays. Thanks for being out there in general. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.

From the Onward Project.