This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Hey there, what's up? It's Chris Guillebeau reporting in for Side Hustle School. So glad you're here. I hope you're working on your freedom plan wherever you are in the world today. Now, if you love CrossFit, I personally am not a CrossFitter, but I know a lot of our folks are.
If you love CrossFit, the obvious path to Side Hustle success are to open a gym or become a trainer. Those are the two kind of things that are the most obvious that people would think of if you're into CrossFit, what would you do? Well, the thing with opening a gym is it's pretty expensive. Like it's gonna require some capital. It's definitely gonna be an investment.
You're gonna have to make a long-term commitment to it. And there's certainly gonna be some risk. Doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, but those are important factors to be aware of. And similarly to become a trainer, there's not a lot of risk or capital involved with that, but it's a pretty set path in the sense that personal training is a service. And I don't wanna say that there's only so much you can do with it because we have seen people who've done something creative, but it's probably fair to say it's kind of a prescribed course.
So those are the two obvious paths. Now, today's featured side hustler ends up growing a seven-figure business. Doesn't start out that way, of course. It starts as a side hustle. He eventually quits his job, something like two years in, and he does this by taking a different approach, not opening a gym, not becoming a trainer, but providing the equipment that all of these gyms and all of these trainers need.
I'm always a big fan of looking for the third way or a different approach to do something. This is a good example of that, and we'll circle back to that concept at the end of the episode. Stay tuned. [Music]
For electrical supplies designer and marketer, Peter Keller, his honeymoon was the turning point in his life, but not in the way you might expect. In a small pub in Mexico, instead of focusing on a romantic evening with his wife, Peter found himself sneaking behind the bar to try and see what kind of fridge they were using.
It was at that moment he realized he was too obsessed with his current work and it was time for a change. He was ready to focus on something a lot cooler than fridges. Outside of his work, Peter was a keen crossfitter and had fully bought into the lifestyle. So he figured that might be the best place to start looking for his next idea. Not wanting to be a trainer or run his own gym, Peter decided he would instead focus on providing the equipment that could help people transform their lives.
Therefore, in 2010, out of the extra space in his home garage, he started his own side hustle, Fringe Sports. This would be an online store where people could buy the equipment for their crossfit needs. How did he do this? Well, he started by finding what is known as his minimum viable product. This is kind of a start-up term that I don't use very often, but it basically refers to the stripped down, most cost-effective version of the product that you want to sell.
For Peter, it would allow him to test the market, learn sales processes, and work with manufacturers on a small scale, but still generate income if he was successful. So he started with a single product, a set of gymnastic rings. Using some contacts from his day job in electrical supplies design, Peter found a manufacturer in China where he could buy the products at a markdown price. He set up a Shopify store, which he chose because of the integration possibilities with other apps, and created a small Google AdWords campaign to get traffic to his site. These initial startup costs came in at around $2,000, which included setting up the site, bringing that paid traffic to the site, and importing the first batch of product to the US.
And it worked. The test ran from 2010 to 2011, earning him eventually around $15,000 in revenue. He figured if he could sell someone gymnastic rings, he could probably sell them kettlebells as well. So following a similar process to what he'd just done, only this time using a US supplier, he began to test his hypothesis. This hypothesis turned out to be right, and this is the same system he's used ever since to grow his business and test his products.
Speaking of testing products, here's something that French sports does to see if a particular product is worth adding to their inventory. Because of Peter's love for CrossFit, that lifestyle that a lot of people have adopted, the first step is to see whether he thinks a product is cool, and if it's something he'd like to see in his own gym. If so, he then asked the gym to post about the product on their social media feed to see what people say about it. If it gets enough engagement, it's worth testing. If nobody cares, well, they can save their money and spend it elsewhere.
These two forms of testing have allowed him to keep his costs down while keeping profits high and avoiding expensive failures. Another tool that's helped him is the App ShipStation, which has been a partner of Setterskill since we started in January. This app works with all platforms that a distributor would like to sell on. From Shopify, eBay, Amazon, many others, it puts all of the data, payments, and batch orders into one easy-to-use dashboard. That tool helped Peter keep the backend of his business simplified.
Now, let's talk about the money and the results. This side hustle first began in 2010, and Peter has grown it ever since. After the first two years, he was able to quit his job and focus on it full-time. It is now a pretty big business. In its seventh year, the CrossFit equipment hustle should end the year with sales in the range of four to six million dollars.
But it all started with that first experiment, that first test to sell gymnastic rings, which cost about $2,000, ended up bringing in $15,000 in revenue over the course of about a year. If you're thinking of starting a similar hustle, Peter's advice is to become obsessed about a problem that people have, find out where the people who have this problem spend their time, and then go out of your way to help them solve it, which we talk about in lots of different ways on the show. Looking ahead, Peter's thinking of expanding into the supplement industry, perhaps growing that hustle along the same path as the first. [Music]
So in the intro, I mentioned that the two most obvious ways to make money in the CrossFit trend are to open a gym or become a trainer. And that's what a lot of people would think of if they're thinking of making a transition or gonna start their first small business, they might begin to go down that road.
But as you heard in this story, Peter found a third way. He wanted a lifestyle business that actually did turn into something more substantial. But in the beginning, the path, the origin was, don't spend a lot of money, focus on a single product, see if we can make that work, and then let's go from there. And like I said, I'm always a big fan of looking for a third way. There's a big market out there, and there's one or two things that most people think of, like what are people not thinking of?
So if you think about CrossFit or this kind of hardcore fitness that becomes a lifestyle for a lot of people, we've had some other episodes about people who made protein bars or protein powder. You could also make some kind of accountability program. Maybe there's a service you could provide that's not training, but something different. This is the kind of thing that people get really committed to. And whenever people are committed to something, then they're willing to invest time, money, resource into it.
So there's probably some other stuff that we haven't even talked about just for CrossFit. And if you're not into CrossFit, well, let's talk about a different industry. Let's think about something that you're into. What are the obvious entry points and what are the alternative ones? What are the ideas that in retrospect seem obvious too, but nobody else is doing them or far fewer people are doing them?
That's something good to think about, at least I think it is. But of course, as always, I don't want you to just be inspired. I hope you do something about it. Inspiration with action is better than just inspiration. If you'd like to learn more about Peter's business or ShipStation, anything else I mentioned, today's show notes are online at sidehustleschool.com/334.
Thank you for listening today. I hope you enjoyed it. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]
