This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
The perfect SAT score tutor gets rejected by a hundred publishers. That doesn't sound great. What is this all about? Why are we talking about something that did not go well? Because, my friends, it is in fact failure Friday.
Failure Friday. Every other Friday, we take a look at a story of something that does not go well at all. It could be a mistake. It could be a misstep. It could be a disaster.
Something imposed on the side hustler from afar. And of course, a total failure. And what do we learn through this experience? What does the person learn? How do they persevere or regroup or turn things around, evolve, transform?
Choose your verb, choose your response. Just like our Throwback Thursday segment, you get to hear directly from someone in this situation who has struggled to get something off the ground or otherwise encountered, as I say, a major obstacle typically. These stories vary, but they often begin with like, here's my idea. Here's what I think is gonna happen. And then of course, they encounter reality, a little different reality, and what do they do?
So, today's short story features Sean Patel. He's the owner of Prep Expert. We told the successful story of his standardized test prep business on episode 996. Mark Cuban actually invested a quarter of a million dollars in his business. So that's great.
But of course, this is failure Friday. So before he started this business, let's hear about something else. He pitched a book that was rejected by more than 100 literary agents and publishers. Let's hear the story from him along with his biggest lesson learned. [Music]
Hi, my name is Sean Patel and I am the founder of Prep Expert, SAT and ACT preparation.
So, I wanna share with you a little story I learned about failure early on in my career. When I was first starting out, I wanted to publish an SAT preparation book. Because I had raised my SAT score from average to perfect in high school, I wanted to help other students do the same. I thought that an SAT preparation book written by a perfect score SAT student would be revolutionary for the test preparation industry. However, when I pitched my book to over 100 literary agents and publishers, every single one rejected me.
They stated that the SAT prep market is too competitive and that I didn't have a platform to write such a book. I sat around hoping for a book deal for about six months, wishing that someone would give me a chance. It wasn't until I realized that I should just take the material I had written and turn it into an SAT prep course that my luck changed. The students in my pilot course had an average SAT score improvement of 376 points to their scores. That's equivalent to going from the 50th percentile to the 90th percentile.
This was proof that the SAT prep material that I had created really worked. Shortly after I created my own SAT prep courses, McGraw-Hill, the world's largest education publisher that previously rejected my broke proposal, came back to me and offered me a publishing deal. Now, my McGraw-Hill SAT prep book went number one on Amazon for SAT prep and sold tens of thousands of copies. So what lesson did I learn? I learned as an entrepreneur, and especially as someone who has a side hustle, you need to stop waiting for handouts.
When you are first starting out as an entrepreneur, you often expect others to help you. Because you often have no connections in the beginning, you want others to help you gain influence. Stop depending on other people to hand you success. Go out there and create your own. Stop waiting for handouts and create your own success.
[Music]
Thanks so much, Sean. And listeners, remember, never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. Sean went on to start this very, very successful business. As mentioned, Mark Cuban invested in it, and he's been doing very well. He's been doing well since then, it seems.
I was just checking out prepexpert.com. That is the website where he is continuing to bring in customers and serve parents, students, everybody interested in higher education and getting better test scores, et cetera. Very big market, of course. So check it out. And listeners, if you have a question or an update about your hustle, sidehustleschool.com on that same site, you can download or stream every single episode of the podcast, going back nine plus years to January 1, 2017.
New episodes drop every day, seven days a week, wherever you get your shows. My name's Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
from The Onward Project.
