This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Hey there, Side Hustle School listeners. It's Chris Guillebeau back with you today. Now we've got something different for you in this episode. We don't normally feature two projects in one episode, at least not side by side. And to be clear, this is just one person with two projects.
Sometimes people are doing more than one thing, but we tend to focus on one of them for the Side Hustle School story. But today's featured hustler has set a mission to start multiple projects simultaneously as part of his goal to create financial freedom, which he defines as five projects earning at least $2,000 a month each. So in this case in particular, it makes sense to look at his first two of these money-making ventures, which are both off the ground and profitable already. We'll also talk about whether you should do it this way, whether this kind of multi-project approach is a good idea, or whether you might wanna choose to focus on a single project, especially when you're first getting started. All of that is coming right up in today's episode.
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Paul Desert is on a mission. The Airbus Defense and Space web developer is working toward his five by 2000 goal. That goal is to create five side hustles in the form of small online businesses that will each generate at least $2,000 a month. His first two projects, Resume Beacon and Jungle Flip, are well on their way. Resume Beacon came about after friends and family kept asking him, as the resident computer guy, to help them with formatting their resumes when word processing software was proving to be less than user-friendly.
It was a technical obstacle, but one for which Paul had a solution and the knowledge to implement that solution. That's when he created this project to help people create a professional layout for their resumes. Resume Beacon operates as a freemium service where basic resume layout, which includes one unoptimized template with no skill section, is available at no charge. Upgraded services, such as more template options, those skill sections, other stuff, begin at $9.95. The site also offers other job resource content, including articles on resume writing, cover letters, interviewing, and resume samples.
Once you create your resume, there's also an option to get daily email updates with job opportunities from ZipRecruiter. And Paul earns a referral fee for signing people up there. To create the site, he just got started writing code. A lot of us can't do that, but when you're a web developer, that's right up your alley. His startup costs were minimal.
It was just a matter of registering the domain, then investing his time to get the site up and running. On average, monthly expenses for Resume Beacon are about $80, and it always generates at least $500 in profit. Paul's second side hustle, Jungle Flip, is a website featuring discounted goods, returns, and open box items, usually, from Amazon.com's warehouse. It includes deals starting at 30% off retail, with new items added every hour by an algorithm. Jungle Flip generates its revenue through an affiliate advertising program by linking to Amazon.com.
If visitors make a purchase through one of the links, Jungle Flip and Paul earn a commission. Now, this project evolved a bit. It began as a gift registry website, but the technical challenge was too big for Paul to handle alone, so he changed direction to make it more manageable by focusing on just one retailer. He had to rewrite a lot of his initial software, but the outcome was a searchable site that gathers Amazon's reduced, pre-owned, and open box goods in one convenient place. Now, just like with Resume Beacon, startup costs were much more a matter of time over money.
The only hard cost was domain registration, and the monthly expenses are about $40. Jungle Flip, so far, is generating an average of $300 a month. So, just getting started, but it is profitable. Now, as with many people featured on Side Hustle School, and perhaps like you as well, Paul wasn't trying to recruit investors or partners. He didn't want to hire a bunch of employees.
He wasn't trying to build a billion-dollar company. He just wanted to be in control of his life. He wants something that will support his family, a lifestyle business that will bring him more freedom of choice. That's why he's starting these little projects. In terms of marketing, Paul is constantly experimenting.
He's had the most success with search engine optimization and Reddit. With SEO, Paul says there's no secret, just four steps he follows for each of his side projects. Number one, research the keywords you want to rank for. Number two, use those keywords in the title tags on your page. Number three, make sure the content on that page is relevant and high quality.
And number four, promote those pages and get links. When you're first starting out, Paul recommends focusing on and creating content around the top 10 keywords. Reddit can be another great place to gain exposure, although Paul noted that the secret to marketing on Reddit is don't do it. He means don't take the traditional approach. He said he sees it often, people have a new project they want to push, so they pick a related subreddit, they copy and paste their pitch, they post it, and they get lots of nasty comments.
We've actually talked about this recently in another episode. With Reddit, it's important that you offer something of value, like actual true value, not a 10% discount, not something really small, but if your product is helpful or entertaining, it can be well received. So in Paul's case, he created and offered free cover letter templates and resume templates. He didn't require anything for people to download them, but he did cross-promote resume beacon with these free products. Paul says if you think of this strategy as a way to gain exposure, not something that will provide direct ROI, you'll be more successful.
If something you're doing gains popularity, Reddit will want to feature it. And in fact, resume beacon was picked up by Lifehacker using this exact strategy. Paul also tried using Google AdWords, but he didn't see a good return on investment, so he just put those on pause for now. He also admits that he's a victim of the shiny object syndrome. Sometimes he starts chasing a new idea before completing a previous project.
It's part of his desire to do five projects at once, but he's realized he does need to focus on getting each one up to speed, then moving on to the next. Still, he remains committed to reaching his overall goal of five by 2000. That's five projects, making at least $2,000 a month. And between his two current side hustles, his next ambition is to get resume beacon to $2,000 a month, then begin the third project, which he's hoping to achieve in early 2018. Let's wish him good luck and happy hustling.
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All right, so should you follow this model or not? Should you just pick one project and try to make that your main side hustle? Or should you say, well, actually I want like three or four or five like Paul did here? I think there are three factors that help you make this decision. First of all, how much experience do you have?
Like, are you completely new to this world or have you done it before in different ways and you're just learning to apply it in a new way now? If you don't have a lot of experience, maybe you just want to choose one thing to focus on, at least for your first 27 days, like the model I use for the side hustle book. Doesn't mean you're just gonna do one thing forever for the next year, but when you're trying to learn a model, you're trying to learn, okay, how do I actually create a product or a service and get that out to the world, begin to see some money coming in, it might be easier to make that happen if you just have one project. Second factor is the kinds of projects that you choose. Now, in this case, Paul, as a web developer, he's choosing these really specific online properties, essentially, which I suppose is a fancy way of saying website, but what I mean is that the site is really well-defined.
It's very clear, it's very specific, and it's also fairly automated. Like, JungleFlip is all about code. He's built this way to bring this feed in from Amazon.com where people can go and search and see all this stuff coming in, but once it's built, he doesn't have to do a lot for it. Like, what he needs to do with that site is market it and improve it a bit, but it's not like he has to be monitoring all the deals coming in. He could leave it for a week or a month and work on something else.
And it seems that the same thing is true, mostly with resume beacon, although there might be some more intensive work there. It seems he's trying to build them in a way that will be less labor intensive, where he works for a while building the project, but then it's just kind of out the door and running. And then third, I think the role of your personality matters. I think some of us are pretty excited about doing more than one project, whereas others of us were like, well, we're already too busy, we got lots of other stuff going on. I just want one side hustle.
That's all I can think about right now. And I'll do better work if I just choose one project. So those are the criteria, the factors that I think you should look at when you're trying to figure out which path do I go down. As always, I think you should figure out what's best for you and do that. People can be successful in different ways as you're here on the show.
So what's most important is to understand what your strength is, what you're gonna do, how you're gonna offer that to the world. It doesn't have to be done the same way that I do it or Paul does it or anybody else that you hear on the show. It's your side hustle, it's gotta work for you. Speaking of work, don't forget, inspiration is good but inspiration with action is so much better. Today's show notes are online at sidehustleschool.com/335.
We'll include links to Paul's project so you can check them out yourself. I'll be back tomorrow with another story and then the weekly recap after that. Thank you for listening. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]
