This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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The Mushroom Kingdom of North Carolina. This is a fun one. Welcome back friends. Welcome to Side Hustle School. Welcome as well to Throwback Thursday.
In this segment, we do a little bit of a look back, an update on somebody whose story we first featured often long ago. Last week we heard from Janet LeBlanc. She is the spreadsheet seller who, well, she was an accountant. I think she's still an accountant, but she made a product for Etsy sellers, a product to help them with their finances and tax planning and so on. I think she actually made multiple products, ended up creating a really successful side business that made money while she was doing other stuff, which is great.
So that was a good update. That was episode 3,330. Today, here we are seven days later. We're focusing on the phenomenal fun guy business from Asheville, North Carolina. We first featured this one.
This guy's name is Dave way back in episode 1003. Fun Guy Becomes Sporadic Mushroom Farmer. Had some fun with that headline. Today, we're gonna hear from his partner, Shannon Barrett. She comprises the C-suite of the company.
Dave looks after the mushrooms. Shannon does things like update the website and talk to us. So when we had this update from Shannon, what she's gonna tell us about, they were selling around $20,000 a month, 20K in mushrooms, love that. Let's hear this update, some details from Shannon. I'll come back at the end with a few words of wrap up.
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We launched our side hustle in 2018 and initially thought we would be growing gourmet mushrooms to sell at farmer's markets and to local restaurants. Instead, our business now focuses on providing equipment and supplies to other mushroom growers. David or Cougar, as he's known to friends, has been a mushroom forager since he was a kid. When we moved to Asheville, we discovered a large community of mushroom enthusiasts. He began growing mushrooms in bags at home and soon we had more than we could eat.
As a 30-year herbalist and a self-proclaimed science nerd, he knew there were other things we could do with those mushrooms. So he began making extracts, also known as tinctures. The tinctures capture the beneficial compounds from the mushrooms, making them more bio-available. We started sharing them with friends and family and then decided to launch an online business. At the time, we thought we'd sell a few tinctures online but would focus on selling fresh mushrooms locally.
David is the founder of the company and the heart and this is his main side hustle. He was a master carpenter for almost 35 years and wanted a business that incorporated his passion for mushrooms, the outdoors, and helping people reconnect to our original medicines. In 2019, he scaled back from working as a carpenter and focused on the side hustle full-time. I help out in my spare time but I still work as the HR director for our local municipality. My experience in project management, budgeting, communication, and marketing help support the business.
So much has happened since we were last on the show. As we shared in our original episode, Whole Foods had just proclaimed mushrooms as a top food trend in 2018, noting their health benefits. By 2019, more people were starting small-scale mushroom farms to do what we'd originally planned, grow gourmet mushrooms to sell locally. Anyone growing at that scale needs certain specialized equipment and supplies. One piece of equipment that makes life a lot easier for hobbyist and small mushroom farmers is a laminar flow hood.
This piece of equipment creates sterile air flow which is essential for working with mushroom cultures and for bag production. David built his own when he had trouble finding one to purchase. A friend saw it and asked him to build one for him, then another friend asked, and eventually I suggested we list them on our Etsy site. In 2019, we were selling about one flow hood a month. We also began selling mushroom cultures.
A small amount of mushroom mycelium, think mushroom seeds, that gets expanded on substrate to produce the fruit bodies or mushrooms. During that time, we sold some fresh mushrooms but most of what we were growing was going into our mushroom tinctures. Our business took a turn when we realized that we were not going to be mushroom farmers but instead we'd be supplying other mushroom growers. In 2020, our business exploded. We went from averaging about $1,400 a month to $20,000 a month in sales.
Everything changed when the pandemic hit. Suddenly people had time to try new hobbies and they began buying flow hoods and cultures. We had a hard time keeping up with the demand. We learned a lot about production, supply schedules and shipping last year. Our biggest challenge currently is the same so many other businesses are facing, access to supplies and materials.
We use HEPA filters in our flow hoods and it now takes our manufacturer about 12 weeks to ship them. When we started, it took about two weeks. The lead time keeps increasing and we never quite catch up. We also experienced trouble sourcing plywood earlier in the year. Now it's metal.
We use metal trim to protect the filters and we're having a hard time sourcing it. Shipping continues to be one of the bigger challenges although we've come a long way from last year. We tried the big national carriers and had terrible experiences. Now we rely on private couriers that we find through the online platform U-Ship. We also use freight for some hard to deliver areas like Puerto Rico and Hawaii.
The advice I would share with someone thinking about starting a hustle like ours, one that's based on a passion or a niche, would be to think about the supplies and equipment that are required to be successful as a possible business option. Our pivot happened organically but in hindsight, I'm glad it did because we're in an area with a lot of other mushroom farmers so there is a lot of competition. David is starting to offer classes locally and we have plans to record videos with information about how to grow mushrooms at home. We've partnered with another entrepreneur who created a unique hydroponic system that allows you to grow just about anything on your kitchen counter. We're working with him to produce mushroom spawns specifically for his systems.
Our business doesn't look anything like we originally envisioned and that's okay. We're really excited to see what comes next. Hey, Shannon, big congrats to you and to Dave. Listeners, you can check out phenomenalfungi.com. All types of mushroom products for sale there.
Tinctures, mushroom cultures, mushroom merch. Gotta get your mushroom hoodie, t-shirt or mug. And let's see what else. Oh, well, of course, congratulations on going from, what was it, $1,400 a month to $20,000 a month. Glad to know that Dave is full-time in the land of mushrooms.
Listeners, let me know what you think, who you'd like to see featured from our archives of 3,000 plus episodes, 1,000 plus case studies and stories. If you have a question and an update about your hustle, sidehustleschool.com. You can also access notes, pages, detailed references, resources, all kinds of fun stuff for every single episode. And so much more is coming out as well. Seven days a week, always free.
Subscribe, follow, wherever you get your podcasts. My name's Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the "Onward Project."
