This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
I believe we can learn as much from failure as we can from success, if not, in fact, more. And that's why every so often, well, every other week, in fact, we run a segment called Failure Friday. It is a collection of short stories all about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure. You get to hear directly from a side hustler who has struggled to get something off the ground or otherwise encountered a big setback. And you get to hear what happened along the way.
Like, you know, what do they do in response? How do they regroup, move forward, et cetera? Today, we're gonna hear a lesson I'm titling. They just weren't interested in what we were selling. And this is pretty interesting because we told the story of this guy's live stream wedding business.
His name's Del Wilson. He operates it together with his wife, Lydia. We told that story way back on episode 1669. So this goes back many years, actually pre-COVID. And when COVID struck, you remember that thing, right?
That whole global pandemic. They thought, surely with what we do for weddings, this is gonna be applicable to other markets. They're like, we've got this first mover advantage. We've been doing this for a while with weddings. Now we can just apply this for lots of other stuff, right?
Which sounds reasonable. You know, as I said, when we first ran an update from him, I was like, if you would ask me, I would have said, sounds good, makes sense to me. But of course, that's not how it always goes. No plan survives contact with the battleground, as they say. So you don't just need a good idea.
You need the right buyer. Without further ado, let's hand the microphone to Dale. He's gonna tell us this story. I'll come back at the end with a few words of wrap up. [Music]
Hey everyone, this is Dale Wilson.
And I, along with my beautiful wife, Lydia, are the founders of Married Livestream. And we provide high quality live streaming and videography for couples who are getting married, but can't include everyone on their guest list to be a part of their wedding, whether that's due to COVID-19 or disabilities or people can't travel. We try to create an experience where everybody feels included. We were featured on episode 1669 of Side Hustle School. And this is our business failure story.
Back in 2020, when COVID started to take hold, we noticed that the wedding side of our business was really increasing. And along with weddings, we also noticed that there were other industries that needed live streaming as well. Corporations were looking at how to stream corporate events. Funerals were needing to stream for people who couldn't be there in person. And one of the biggest areas that we saw that had a need for live streaming was houses of worship.
Almost all of their congregations were moving online because of gathering restrictions. And so we saw that there was a huge need for churches to be able to connect with their members, connect with their entire congregation virtually because they just didn't have the ability to meet in person. And so when we saw this opportunity to help churches better connect with their congregations virtually, we created a completely new brand that was separate from our wedding business, new social media, everything. And then we spent a couple months reaching out to churches and offering our services to them to help them get online faster and have a high quality live streaming experience for their congregation. And after a couple of months, we were experiencing absolutely no sales.
Churches just weren't interested in what we were selling. Small churches who had a huge need for what we were offering didn't have the money to pay for our services. And mid-sized churches were a little bit hesitant to spend enough money to make their live stream better because there were cheaper alternatives that were available that were good enough for what they were doing. And large churches generally already had a media team or somebody who they were working with for their live streaming. And so we were really struggling to find a product market fit.
And not only just customers who were willing to pay for our services, but also able to pay for our services. And so after a few months of reaching out and trying to divide our attention between our wedding business and churches, we decided to just let the church side of our business completely go away and only focus on our core business, which was live streaming for weddings. And what we learned through this is that we needed to find ways to fail faster and figure out whether or not there was actually a product market fit before investing a ton of time, energy and resources. And I think that we could have very easily done that before even building a website and social media and going through all of that effort. I think we could have started reaching out to churches, started talking within our network and finding out is there a demand for our services or is this just something that we think is a good idea, but other people don't find much value in.
And so that's what I would recommend for anyone who's thinking about pivoting in a new direction, find cheap and quick ways where you can explore the industry and see if there's a good product or service market fit so that you can save yourself a lot of time when it actually comes to the building and implementation part of it. And ultimately that side of our business did fail, but it allowed us to invest into the core part of our business which has become very successful. Thanks so much to Side Hustle School for featuring us. It's been such a blessing to be part of this community and we're looking forward to growing and learning along with everyone else out there who's starting a side hustle or thinking about starting a side hustle. [Music]
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
That's our theme of failure Friday. And perhaps a lesson here as well is like, you need the right offer, the right price and the right buyer. If you don't have all three of those things, then you don't actually have a business. I thought this was such a great transparent and truthful story and a lesson. Like I've thought about it a lot.
So I'm like, yeah, I would have said that was a great idea and it turned out to not be. Good news here is that Dale is still going strong. You can check out their website, marriedlivestream.com. Great domain, marriedlivestream.com. They're still doing weddings and a bunch of other stuff as well.
So many years later, the business is going strong. They just had to learn this one lesson. And I respect that. I'm learning lessons all the time. Hopefully at least that's the goal.
Listeners, if you have an update or a question, you know what to do, sidehustleschool.com. Notes pages for every episode, links, resources, all kinds of free stuff. Everything's free in fact, with the podcast. For more than 3,300 plus episodes, you can download or stream them wherever you like from the website, sidehustleschool.com or subscribe, follow and or I should say, subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes coming out every single day. Thanks so much.
My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
