This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hello, hey, what's up and welcome. My name is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. This is the weekly recap. Looking back on the week, sharing some thoughts. This is actually week number 48 that we're finishing up, which is hard for me to believe myself, but here we are.
I've got a lot to share with you today. I'm gonna talk about identity. Several of the stories this week kind of focused on concepts of identity and belonging, which are really critical. And a lot of different side hustles and in thinking through who you're gonna serve and how you're gonna provide solutions to people's problems. I've also got a couple of great listener emails and questions, somebody asking about how do you find products to sell online.
Somebody else asking about pricing and even a listener call in as well. Now over here in my world, I'm doing some travel this week, but it's a bit different than I usually do. This week I'm going on my annual review trip. And at some point I might do an extended episode all about the annual review. This is something I've been doing myself for more than 10 years.
It is probably the single thing that I can trace whatever productivity I have, whatever goals I've been able to accomplish, whatever success I've been able to have. And I've had lots of failures too of course, but whatever good things have come, I really can't point back to a lot of those things and say it was this annual review process that helped me to make those things happen. So basically what I do, and I'll publish a link if you'd like to read more about this. I've got thousands of words written from more than 10 years of sharing part of my annual review process online. But basically what I do is kind of look back on the year, do some reflections, ask myself like what went well this year, what did not go well?
Like what am I proud of? What am I happy about? What am I disappointed in? What could have gone better? And then I spend a better part of a week kind of plotting out my next year, setting goals for a lot of different categories.
I have work categories, I have personal categories, I have categories that kind of overlap. And at some point along the way, I usually set an intention or a theme of the year. And this process has evolved quite a bit since I began, but the core part of it remains the same, which is identifying my priorities. Like what are the goals I'm gonna work on? What am I trying to achieve or accomplish?
What are the values I live by? And how are those goals and values connected? It's basically about living intentionally. So that's what I'm up to this week. Of course, I'm gonna continue to record the show every day.
But for now, if you'd like to learn more about this annual review process, just come to sidehustleschool.com/annualreview. And that will redirect you to my personal blog where I have a whole bunch of posts written up over the years for those who are curious. So that's sidehustleschool.com/annualreview. All right, so I've got a couple of listener emails I want to share with you and also that listener voicemail that I mentioned. First email is from Andy.
Andy says, "I always understood from your writing and podcast that leveraging your passion or career is a great way to find something to sell. The impression I get is that by being in an industry, you have this knowledge, you're able to figure out a way to make a side hustle from it. So as long as you keep your head up and eyes open for all the opportunities around you, you'll find something. But in a recent recap episode, you mentioned that you sold Legos for a time, even though you are not especially interested in them. My question is, how did you get into selling Legos?
If there's an easy answer, like my buddy was a Lego distributor, can you explain how we find arbitrage opportunities in general? In fields we have little to no knowledge of. Thanks for your help." Well, Andy, thank you for the question. Yeah, I mentioned that long ago, one of the things I sold on online auctions was Lego kits. And I personally am not an adult fan of Lego.
I think they're cool, but it's not really my thing. But when I was selling stuff online, when I was a reseller doing online auctions, this goes back a long, long time. Well, the short answer is I just looked at what was selling on places like eBay and other auction sites at the time. And I paid attention to what the prices typically ended at. And all this information is public.
So when I noticed a significant difference in price from one source to another, or I found a way to purchase something that I was fairly confident that I could sell for a higher price, that's how I would decide what to sell, basically. So again, it wasn't that I was passionate about Lego, and I also didn't have a lot of knowledge about Lego. The knowledge that I had acquired from doing that kind of reselling project was about reselling itself. Like I learned how to buy things in one place and sell them somewhere else. So in the case of that kind of side hustle, it's not so much about specialized knowledge of the topic or the content.
It's just about understanding more about buying and selling and learning how to pay for one thing one place and sell it for a higher price somewhere else. I hope that helps, and thanks for listening. Next question comes from Kyle. Kyle says, first of all, thank you for the book and the podcast, the side hustle I'm working on contains a lot of information. And I'm not sure if I should leave out the information or pile all the details on people.
For me, I want to have all the information to absorb, but a lot of people want just the basics. For example, if you're buying a watch, more times than not, the information provided will be the material it's made of, whether it's automatic or quartz, and the diameter of the face. But there's so much more to a good watch than just that. So how would you advise I go about this problem? I tend to think the more you know, the better, but I also realize people have a short detention span.
Okay, Kyle, I'm glad to know you're out there. This is a good question, and I have a direct answer. I would be wary of information that focuses too much on features. And let's talk about watches because watches can cost $5 or $5,000. In fact, they can cost a lot more than $5,000.
And somewhere there's probably a place to buy a watch for a dollar. So if you consider that there's this product that can cost very little money or a ton of money, and obviously there's gonna be a difference in quality, but is the $5,000 watch much better than the $4,000 watch? Like at a certain point, it's gonna come down to the story that you tell. And the best watchmakers sell a story. They don't sell information.
They don't sell those details, those features. If you look at all advertising for expensive watches or even mid-range watches, it's all about how this timepiece can be a meaningful part of your life, a special memory, something to pass on, or whatever it is. It's very, very much focused on an experience. It's not focused on like the tech specs, like the geek talk, all that kind of stuff. So when you're thinking about what information to include, well, if you've got a great story, then yes, tell the story.
And hopefully you do have a great story, but to use your phrase of piling information on people, I don't think that's a good idea. Focus instead on the emotional benefit to the real impact that the watch or whatever it is you're selling is gonna have on someone. And now let's hear from a listener who called into the Hustle Hotline. As a reminder, I would love to get your questions or comments. That Hustle Hotline is 8449 Hustle, or 8449487853.
You can also record me a little voice note with your phone and email it to podcast@sidehustleschool.com. So let's hear what's going on today. Hey Chris, it's Scott from Toronto. I've been listening to the podcast to try to find a way to use my side hustle to fulfill my creative passion, which it's currently doing, but to also have it make me passive income, which it currently isn't doing. My side hustle is making rustic home decor from wood, and I've really found a further niche within that crafting decorative ladders.
They're selling really well in my local market, but I'm faced with two ceilings that are currently holding me from taking it to the next level. One is a time limitation. I can only sell as much as I can make. And two is a geographic limitation. These ladders are roughly five feet tall, so shipping can make them quite expensive.
I'm wondering if you have any thoughts or inspiration that can help me unlock the next level with this hustle to overcome my time geography conundrum. Hey Scott, what's up? This sounds like a really interesting project. Would love to check it out. If any of our listeners have some advice for Scott, just send us an email and we can pass that on to him.
Just listening to your story, I had a couple of thoughts. So the first part, about the time ceiling, well, something like this is always gonna take time. I would say if they are selling really well, like you mentioned, but it's mostly kind of fulfilling your creative focus rather than your income focus, and by nature they take a lot of time, it sounds like you might need to raise the price. That's the first part about that. Now as for the second part, that geographic limitation, I don't know exactly what to tell you, but it does seem possible that there are products that are kind of bulky and heavy or otherwise difficult to ship that still manage to get shipped.
Like I'm thinking of this company called Big Ass Fans. I don't know if you've heard of them, but check out bigassfans.com. They have the best name in the world and that name is just completely descriptive of what they do. From time to time they get a complaint about the name and they publish that complaint on their website, they totally play it up. But even leaving aside the individual sales, I wonder if there's a way to enter one more market.
Since you're selling well in Toronto, could you make a dozen of them or whatever would fill half a truck or something and find a way to get those to Ottawa or Montreal or somewhere else in Canada or across the border to Detroit or wherever? So then it's not just your local market, but you have two markets. And of course there's gonna be some logistics involved, some complexity, but rather than saying I'm gonna sell worldwide at first, you just kind of add on one market. Because as you said about the first part of the problem, well, your time is limited. So if you had 10 times as much demand, you wouldn't be able to make 10 times as many ladders.
So in any case, it sounds really cool. I would love to check it out online. And if our listeners have some advice, send it to me and I will pass it on to Scott. Thanks, man, good luck. [Music]
All right, so in reflecting on some of the episodes for this week, I realized we had this clear theme of identity and belonging that I wanna talk about.
I guess we also had poisonous frogs, like the Florida woman who gets paid to remove poisonous frogs. The strange but true story of a high school science teacher who earned several thousand dollars a month for moving and euthanizing these frogs. That was episode 332. But for the sake of this conversation, let's leave that one out and focus on the next two episodes, 333 and 334. First one was about a business analyst who turns a weight loss problem into $130,000 solution.
And the one after that was a crossfitter who sells gym equipment for seven figures. Now about this weight loss problem, this was a woman who had had bariatric surgery and she created a subscription box for other women who had been through this experience and wanted to get well. Like the way you get well for this treatment is it's not just the surgery, it's also a big adjustment in lifestyle and kind of paying attention and being mindful after the surgery so that you continue to be healthy. And in the episode I talked about how she had had this problem herself. So she was her ideal target market.
She understood the pain points as well as the aspirations of other people like her. Well, what I wanted to focus on is that this is a clearly identifiable group. It's people with different demographic backgrounds, but they can identify with one another based on this common problem. So they have a shared experience with a struggle as well as a shared experience with a desire to get well. And part of what's great about the online world is that it's very easy to connect with people based on that shared struggle, that shared desire to get well.
Whereas now it's possible to say like, here is the product that I'm making and it doesn't matter where you live. You can learn about it in 10 seconds and understand immediately if it's a good fit for you or not. Like if you look at that product and that's not you, you haven't had that experience, you don't have that need, but someone who has had that experience and does have that struggle or that need, they're at least gonna pay attention to it. They're not gonna pass it up. You still have to sell them.
You still have to show them that you have the solution to their problem. But by sharing that experience, you're building a powerful rapport that then at least has the potential to open the door to a profitable side hustle. Like this woman has found a very profitable one. And the same thing with that next episode, like I talked about people who do CrossFit, they are a tribe, they identify with one another. So identity is an important part of that as well.
There are men and women who do CrossFit, there are people of different ages and different backgrounds, but that's the thing that unites them. This shared desire for a specific kind of personal improvement and the guy who created that project understood that. And that was his identity as well. So he focused very much on that sense of belonging. And in fact, when he developed products, or when he sourced products rather, when he went out and said, okay, I'm gonna add this product to my catalog, he first tested it on himself by essentially asking, like, is this something that I would use?
And then secondly, he tested it at his gym, on his gym social media feeds by putting it out and saying like, hey, anybody interested in this? And if people said, yeah, that sounds interesting, then he might proceed to the next steps. But if nobody cared, if there wasn't much engagement, then he would just skip that. So if you're in a situation where your side hustle is gonna focus on a group kind of like this, it's very important to understand like what unites them and what divides them. So there's all kinds of stuff you can do there.
We could dissect it and go to all kinds of levels. I just want you to begin thinking about identity and belonging and asking like, does this apply to what I'm working on or at least the idea that I have? And if so, what does that mean for me? Or at least how does that begin to help me go down a particular path to understand what kind of decisions I need to make next? Of course, we had several other episodes as well this week.
I always encourage you to go back and listen in the archives. They are all free. You can access them on sidehustleschool.com or in Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, lots of other great sources as well. Coming up next week, I'm pretty excited. As we kind of come to the end of 2017, we've really got some great stories already beginning to think about 2018, what's to come.
I am building that program, Side Hustle Society, which I'll have a major announcement for soon. I'm excited and I know a lot of our listeners have been asking about it over and over, which kind of shows me that there's this shared belonging or at least a shared desire for something. But first and foremost, the episodes, we've got something about gourmet popsicles, like popsicles for adults, not just popsicles that you have when you're six or eight years old. Also, I have a note here, something about giant puppets. That's a note from my assistant, Whitney, so I'll have to ask her what she means by giant puppets, but apparently there's a story of giant puppets coming up.
Now, because this is Side Hustle School and you never know what you're gonna get, we have a former high times cartoonist. That's a magazine about cannabis, marijuana, a former cartoonist for that magazine who makes $20,000 in a weekend crafting wood-handled marijuana paraphernalia in his basement. That episode, of course, will be very stimulating or perhaps very relaxing, depending on your preference. And last but not least, in fact, I think actually coming up tomorrow, we have an episode, a story from the North Pole, or not quite the North Pole directly, but more by proxy. It does involve a particular bearded man who's known for traveling around the world, breaking into people's houses and leaving gifts.
So you'll hear about that very soon. Now, before I sign off, at the end of each weekly recap, I always like to say thank you. Today is day number 337. I told you on episode one that if you made this part of your routine and you stuck with it, I'm gonna stick with it too. Here we are now at the end of the year.
And if you just joined somewhere along the way, that's awesome too, welcome. The best is yet to come, stay tuned. Now this week, as I mentioned, I'm off on my annual review. Still recording the show, of course. It then gets transported magically to Brooklyn, New York and Washington, DC at the Panoply Studios.
The production team there is headed up by A.C. Valdez. He's assisted by Vera Carruthers. Show notes and scheduling and host wrangling, all kinds of other stuff are by my assistant, Whitney Karinec in Portland. She is joined once in a while by the official show cat, Libby Gillipo.
Although Libby is not always reliable, unfortunately. But listeners do keep asking when we're gonna put her up on the website. So we'll try to get a photo shoot of our Portland team soon. And all of us together, myself, the team, you, we're part of the Onward Project, which was founded and is led by Gretchen Rubin, author of "The Four Tendencies," "The Happiness Project," lots of other books, and host of the mega popular podcast, "Happier." You can learn more about that at the onwardproject.com. You can learn more about sidehustleschool.com.
And last but not least, as I say every single week, I want to thank you, the listener. If you're listening, you're the reason I make the show. True story. This is a free listener supported show. I want it to make a difference in your life.
In every episode, I always say inspiration is good, but action is better. That's because I want you to take action. I wanna be able to feature your story. I wanna get an email from you about what you're working on. I wanna see you on one of my tour stops and hear about what you're making and how that thing you're making is making a difference in your life.
If you wanna do one small thing to help us, you can tell your friends about the show. Makes a huge difference. If you're sharing online, use the hashtag side hustle school. If you're sharing in person, show somebody how to subscribe to the show. A lot of people are still new to podcasts.
They don't know how it works, but of course, you know, it's actually quite simple. So help them out. If you know somebody who needs a side hustle, introduce them to the show, and you know that they can count on getting consistent, daily, concise stories that are not just rah-rah stories, but there's actually a reason to them. They're something they're gonna learn every day. At least that is my goal.
That's what I'm gonna be working on all next week and in the weeks to come. Episodes to the show go online at 601 a.m. Eastern time every single day. My name is Chris Guillebeau, and this is Side Hustle School. [Music]
