This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Digital art reaches physical homes worldwide. Hey friends, what's up? Welcome to the podcast, episode 3,404 here. We've got a segment known as First Thousand Dollars. How does somebody make $1,000 with an idea?
Today, we're gonna hear from the co-founders of Wonder Colors. Wonder Colors, great business name, great brand. And together, working together, they produce digital art of iconic travel destinations. It's important to note that this work is not AI generated. It's digital.
They are making digital art, but they are in fact creating it themselves. So just a key distinction to make in this day and age, right? Emily and Christine are in Toronto, Canada. The co-founders of this brand, again, Wonder Colors offering digital art. We first featured them way back on episode 1681.
So that was, I don't know, 2000, not quite 2000 episodes ago, but a lot of episodes ago. They're still going strong, continuing to grow, but what about their first $1,000? How did they make it happen? What did it feel like? And what did they learn?
We're gonna hear today from both Emily and Christine, in fact, so that's cool. Get a little duo appearance. I'm gonna be back at the end with a quick wrap up. [Music]
Hi, we are Christine and Emily, the co-founders of Wonder Colors, an online travel art shop. We sell original, hand-drawn digital paintings of iconic travel destinations as art prints, phone cases, and postcards.
You may have heard about us from a previous episode on "Side Hustle School," called "Management Consultants Create Travel-themed Digital Art." Today, we would like to share with you our origin story and how we secured our first $1,000. Since childhood, we both had a strong passion for the arts and attended specialized high school programs that were focused on visual arts. However, we both ended up pursuing a degree in business and ultimately worked as management consultants upon graduation. When the pandemic hit, we found ourselves reminiscing on our academic exchange and travels from our university years and decided to express that through the medium that was most dear to our hearts, art. That is how Wonder Colors was born.
Securing our first $1,000 was not an easy task, as there had been a surge of small businesses going online during the lockdown. We had to strategize. First, we had to understand our target market and the type of artwork, destinations, and products that would appeal to them. We then planned out the type of content we would post on social media and tested the best dates and times to do so. Initially, we received a lot of purchases from family and friends, but shortly after, our customers became friends of friends, friends of friends of friends, and so on.
To scale our side hustle, we tried various marketing methods, both organic and paid. We used cross-channel marketing by posting in various Facebook groups that were related to travel, art, or the values that we stood for. Subtle Asian Trades, a Facebook group that is well-known amongst the Asian community worldwide. With summer, we found an immense amount of support. People in the group who saw our artwork contacted us for custom pieces and partnerships.
Our artwork was soon seen on Spotify, BuzzFeed, and HGTV, and we gained more visibility and naturally more revenue. - Through this experience, we learned the importance of media traction and decided to get creative and begin proactive outreach. We reached out to magazine companies, worked with a public relations consultant, and reached out to corporate firms. We hosted a paint night event with a corporate firm where each participant received a print from our store. And just like that, we saw our first $1,000.
It was a surprising but evidently rewarding feeling to see how far we've come from our beginnings, as we truly never expected Wandercolors to see the type of success that it did. However, we recognize that there are always opportunities to improve, and that is something we recommend all side hustlers to keep in mind when they are reaching for their first $1,000 or after. During our journey to becoming profitable, we had done polls on our Instagram to get a better feel for what the customers liked, and we're continuing to survey our audience to understand their preferences, tastes, and suggestions. It is vital for businesses to stay customer-centric and tailor its offerings to the customer. Starting a side hustle is a ton of hard work, and it can be easy to feel defeated in the early stages of setting up your business.
Don't underestimate small acts of progress as you never know what it can snowball into. Keep your chin high and keep working towards making your business a success. [Music]
Listeners, I hope you enjoyed this episode. Check out wandercolors.com. Wander colors and color is spelled C-O-L-O-R-S.
That is the U.S. spelling of colors, even though these are Canadian artists, Christine Chen and Emily Liu. Every print is an original digital painting capturing the beauty of beloved destinations. Well done, and thank you so much, Emily and Christine, for sharing your update with us here today. Side Hustle School community appreciates it, and I do too.
Listeners, if you have a question or an update about your hustle, sidehustleschool.com. You can also access notes pages for every single episode. Also some resources, some other fun stuff, a bootcamp, perhaps. More to come, seven days a week, new episodes out all the time. You can always subscribe or follow wherever you get your shows.
My name's Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]
