This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
English language game throws down the Amazon gauntlet. Hey friends, what's up? Welcome back to Side Hustle School. Chris Guillebeau, your host here in this week's Throwback Thursday segment. We're gonna hear from an English language teacher who turns his passion for verbs into online income.
This is a fun one. Of course, in Throwback Thursday, we get this update from somebody we first featured on the podcast a long ago. In this case, we first heard from Alex Bricker, the English teacher way back, episode 499. That was our first time. So that was what year two of the podcast.
We're now in year 10. So a lot of things went well since we did the original episode and then this update. But of course not everything. Alex is gonna tell us the story of a pretty significant misstep in addition to some successes. And Alex's game is all about phrasal verbs, by the way.
Phrasal verbs are like a combination of a verb plus a particle, preposition, or adverb that create a meaning different from the verb alone. So some examples are to look up, which is to like search for information. I'm gonna look up some information. Or figure out, which is like solve or understand. I'm gonna figure out this problem.
Carry on, give up, take off. These phrases can be difficult for learners of English. If you're a native English speaker like me, then we kind of just like know what these things mean. But when you're learning it, it's like that's a little bit complicated. So Alex made a game to help people with this.
His company is called ESL with Purpose. The game is called Phrase It. Gonna pass the microphone to him. I'll be back at the end with a quick wrap up. [Music]
My name is Alex Bricker, I'm from Port Collins, Colorado.
And I founded the company ESL with Purpose which developed the product called Phrase It. And I was last on episode 199. So if you wanna hear about Phrase It, and when I got started with that, that episode talks about that. I basically create English language learning games to help students have fun practicing difficult parts of the English language. Just improves lives.
And I believe that if you learn English, it's gonna change your life. You're gonna get a better job, better opportunity. So that's why I do what I do. The idea came from when I was in the classroom teaching, I've been an ESL teacher for over 10 years. Mostly paid roles, a lot of volunteers as well over the years.
And one of the things that I noticed students were getting really confused about was our concept of phrasal verbs. And a phrasal verb is a two or three word construct that has a verb and a preposition. So like go up, come back to, think about. Most of the languages don't have that construct the way English language has it. And I noticed my students were struggling with this when they left the classroom.
Like this is how American English speakers would talk to them and they would be so confused. And so I thought, oh, something needs to be done here. There aren't any products developed to teach this specifically. There are some worksheets and there's some stuff in books, but for this topic, I thought, wow, I need to create something that's gonna help students in a fun way, enhance their learning. I've been continuing to grow Phrase It's an ESL purpose over the years, the last few years.
And I still need a day job. So I work at a marketing agency actually full time. So when I read the book, "The Bunny Tree," I'm like, oh, I resonate with the character because I get it. And it was really a really good read to go through that book. ESL purpose is definitely a passion that's gonna continue to just take my extra time and effort to put towards it.
And the part of that is I've refined my vision to really focusing on the two audiences which are teachers and students. And also my YouTube channel has just grown and I continue to get around five to 20 subscribers a day now on YouTube. So it's been really fun to see that. I'm gonna say one thing that set me back so I'm not as far as ahead as I'd like to be, but I got sidetracked in another investment on a different product I tried to sell on Amazon that was a toy related product. It was fun, it was cool, but I lost $17,000 doing it because the market was oversaturated.
I ran a deep discount on the product and I didn't factor in my cost of goods. And so that I really learned how to really calculate your, do your math. If you're gonna run a business, do your math. So that really helped me learn that. And I realized that I was chasing money more than my passion when I did that.
And for me to have a sustainable long-term business that's gonna be an effective side hustle, it's gotta be something that I'm passionate about. And so that's what I'm focusing on now. I know that a lot of people on Amazon, what they'll do is they'll look for what's selling and what's hot and they'll just try to copy that and they'll do the same thing and they'll try to make a lot of money. And that's fine, if that's your thing, go for it. However, I lost a lot of money doing it that way because the market I chose is oversaturated.
And so everybody then started selling the exact same thing and private labeling it themselves. And then it's like you have to compete so heavily with ads. You've gotta know all these other little tricks and things to make sure your listing gets on page one. You can do that. Another piece of advice I would say is grow your email list.
That is key for building long-term trust 'cause of email, you can communicate anytime. You can send your email out and say, "Hey, I've got this new video I launched on YouTube." Or, "Hey, I'm launching a new product." Or you can just send something valuable to your audience for free. Just say, "Hey, I found this English language video. I thought you might enjoy it." That kind of stuff, you can continue to communicate and build trust with your audience. So as far as someone following in my footsteps to do something similar, just find your market and don't give up.
[Music]
Awesome, hey, thanks so much to Alex for helping us out with this segment. I was just taking a look to see if PhraseIt is still available since it's been a long time since we first talked about it. And in fact, it looks like it is still selling on Amazon, probably elsewhere as well. Alex also has a popular YouTube channel. He hasn't posted recently, at least at the time I'm recording this, but there's a lot of great evergreen content there that is still very relevant.
ESL with purpose is the name of that channel. You can find it on YouTube. Listeners, thank you so much for being out there. The complete archives of the podcast available for download or streaming at the website, sidehustleschool.com. And of course, much more is coming up.
New episodes every day, seven days a week, always free. My name's Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to "Side Hustle School." [Music]
from the Onward Project.
