This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Greetings, hello, and welcome to Side Hustle School. I'm your host, Chris Guillebeau. What are two of the first things you should do when you start your side hustle? Well, this is pretty simple. You should open a business banking account of some kind and make sure you have a payment processor of some kind.
This can be as simple as logging onto PayPal.com. If you already have a personal account there, you can easily add a business one at no charge and then either visiting a local bank or opening an account online. We'll talk about that a bit in today's story. It's all about a nonprofit employee in Fort Worth, Texas who creates a sticky side hustle selling gourmet ice pops. So far, she's sold more than 25,000 of them for something like $80,000 in revenue, and it all began with her making a bucket list of sorts.
How did that work? Well, I'll tell you in just a moment. [Music]
Carolyn Phillips' side hustle journey started back in 2014 when she and her husband created a list of 30 things they wanted to do before they turned 30. One of the items on the list was starting a side hustle, and they framed that list and would put stickers next to the items they completed. But as the stickers started to add up, one item remained completely sticker-free.
That was their side hustle. Around this time, Carolyn threw a party at their house. In a fit of inspiration, she decided to create alcoholic ice pops using a bottle she had in her liquor cabinet and some items she had picked up from the farmer's market. Living in Fort Worth, Texas, anything that can be used to beat the heat was gonna go over pretty well with people. And gourmet pops were essentially the gourmet cupcakes of the sweltering Southwest.
Now, by the way, you may be used to the word popsicles. It turns out that's actually a trademark term owned by Unilever. So the generic terms include ice pops, ice drops, icy poles, and freezer pops. Fun fact. Carolyn's boozy pops were a juicy success, and it occurred to her that this might be the side hustle she was looking for.
Not only could she make them using whatever seasonal ingredients were available to her at the time, they were also wildly popular across multiple demographics. And despite the apparent success that this foodie item was having in other major cities, it was non-existent in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. So she started experimenting from her kitchen with different flavor profiles and combinations. When she wasn't working her nine-to-five job in donor relations, she spent every free hour on her new side hustle, which she called "Alchemy Pops." She would have friends over to try out new flavors of pops and take a pop quiz. For her birthday party, she made herself more boozy pops.
She basically took any opportunity possible to get feedback on her ice pop flavors. Carolyn also found a gourmet frozen pops group through a subreddit and began to frequent her local farmer's market, both to get to know the farmers and also to learn more about her fruit options. Through the farmers, she learned what was in season and what was unique to the greater Texas area. Some of her first initial summer flavors came straight from what she learned at the farmer's market, watermelon basil, cantaloupe mint, and blackberry lemonade. In addition to all the in-person research, she also created social media accounts and tried to post consistently, coming up with her own themed hashtags, like #FruitHumorFriday, to create content.
By the end of the year, Carolyn was convinced that she wanted to pursue alchemy pops more seriously. She bought her domain name through Squarespace, signed up for PayPal, and got a business bank account to make sure that she kept her funds separate from her personal account. She also got a special freezer from her dad that actually belonged to her grandma long ago because her upright freezer in the kitchen wasn't cold enough to evenly freeze the pops. From there, Carolyn volunteered at the Fort Worth Food and Wine Festival so that she could talk to a bunch of chefs in one place and ask if anyone had extra kitchen space they would rent to her. Only one said yes, but that was all she needed.
In early 2015, she moved her operation from her home kitchen to a commercial kitchen in a local bakery. This meant she had to get commercial liability insurance and upgrade the type of pop mold she was using. She also bought her first pop cart for $500 on Craigslist, which brought her startup cost to around $2,000. In 2015, Carolyn also booked her first event, a charity car wash, through a family friend. This car wash benefited a little girl with cancer to help the family pay their medical bills.
She said it was an amazing feeling to not only set up on site as a business, but also as someone there to help out and give back. That's when I first realized the potential of using my business to give back to others, which I later dubbed our Pops for a Cause program. From that charity event, she got her next gig catering a wedding three hours away from her home. So then she had to figure out pretty quickly how to make and store enough pops and transport them three hours in the car without any of them melting. But she pulled it off and kept the momentum going.
She rolled that love of pops into a successful crowdfunding campaign that summer, raising over $8,000 for more than 100 supporters and using that money for kitchen equipment, an outdoor tent and banner, more freezers and more molds. Seeing people rally around her reinforced what Carolyn already believed, that a strong active community was a critical part of a successful side hustle. So she joined some key groups in her city, including her local chamber of commerce. There she was nominated as emerging business of the year and also won a business plan competition. In 2015, between events, catering and the crowdfunding campaign, she made over $15,000 while pursuing her side hustle on weekends and evenings.
By the next year, Carolyn made the jump and decided to turn her side hustle into her full-time focus. But before she quit her job, she created a spreadsheet of all the money going in and out of her family's personal and business accounts. After getting a detailed accounting of their overhead, she realized that they weren't huge spenders and she could afford to do this. The next step was figuring out how many frozen pops she would need to replace her full-time salary and how long she estimated it would take her to get to that number. The direct cost for each pop cost around 25 to 30 cents each.
She turns around and sells them for three to $4, depending on the ingredients. And deciding on this pricing, she surveyed the landscape of the market, looked at what other gourmet pops were doing and then set herself up in a way that alchemy pops is not the least expensive seller and also not the most expensive either. She says that's been an advantage for her. She aims for a net profit margin of 15 to 30% after taking into account the indirect costs of running the hustle like energy bills, push cart maintenance and so on. In 2017 alone, alchemy pops has sold more than 25,000 pops, bringing in roughly $80,000 in revenue with about 1500 to $3,000 each month as pure profit.
Once she had all those numbers in front of her, she realized it was actually a pretty easy decision to quit her job. The move to running alchemy pops full-time meant that Carolyn could focus all of her efforts on expanding her pop empire, but it's also allowed for more freedom and flexibility. She says that she works more hours now than when she had a nine to five job, but she's more than made up for that in living her life on her own terms. For example, this past winter, Carolyn and her husband took a month off to travel in New Zealand and Australia, perhaps checking off another item on that bucket list. She's now working on her very first brick and mortar store that's scheduled to open in spring 2018.
She's got ideas for new products, additional locations, and perhaps a new idea for a different side hustle. She's glad to have ticked that item off her bucket list. And now that she started, she can't wait to continue. All right, congratulations to Carolyn. Actually got a chance to meet her at the Dallas side hustle tour stop, where she did in fact bring out a selection of alchemy pops.
Thank you, Carolyn. Also a fun fact we learned in the research for this story, at one point she ordered some equipment from Brazil and she had her home address listed as the delivery location. She got a call from the company the day of delivery, just confirming that there was a loading dock for the 18-wheeler that would be delivering it. Of course, Carolyn didn't have a loading dock at her home. So after making some frantic calls, she was able to get permission from a company down the street.
They let her deliver the equipment there and then one of the employees kindly drove it down the street on their forklift. These are the things you learn about when you start a side hustle. Okay, so there's some good first steps here. I mentioned in the introduction that it's always good to have a separate bank account for your side hustle funds. That's usually very easy to set up, especially in the US or Canada, but presumably in lots of other countries as well.
And you should definitely sign up for at least one payment processor. If you want to keep it really simple, just sign up for PayPal. If you don't like PayPal, there's some alternatives. Try Gumroad, try Stripe. There's actually a list of them in the side hustle book.
And by the way, speaking of accounting and projections and all that kind of stuff, there is a back of napkin spreadsheet available in this side hustle book resources. So in the book, there's this whole chapter about how you can estimate your profit using the back of a napkin. Well, you don't actually have to use a napkin. You can use a very simple spreadsheet that we make available and you can get that for free when you register your book at sidehustleschool.com. Just click the little button that says conveniently, register your book.
And we'll get that out to you along with some other free resources. Well, that's it for today. Now I'm thinking about ice pops, even though it's not very warm where I am at the moment. Maybe the next time I'm back in Texas. For now, remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better.
Come check out today's show notes at sidehustleschool.com/341. Thank you for listening as always. I'll be back tomorrow. I'm Chris Guillebeau for side hustle school. [Music]
