This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
What's up, hello and welcome. My name is Chris Guillebeau, the host of Side Hustle School. As we kick off season two, we've got a whole new set of stories of people creating a new source of income for themselves. And by doing so, they're creating freedom. They're creating options.
They're allowing themselves to follow their dreams. Even if they love their day job or have no plans to quit, I believe everyone needs a side hustle and that's what this show is about, teaching through storytelling. And today's story is a good one. It's about culture, it's about family, and it's also about making money because this is side hustle school. Now I've done a lot of traveling.
I've been all over the world and people sometimes ask about my favorite places. Well, I have to kind of divide it up by region because the world is big, but in Southeast Asia, Laos is probably my favorite country. This small little country kind of wedged in among Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand. I had a really great visit there a few years ago. I would love to return, but this story is much more important than my list of favorite places.
It's about an immigrant couple from Laos who settle in the US and want to teach their children their heritage language. And they do so by creating sets of flashcards that go on to sell more than $50,000 in the first year. Now the story is amazing by itself, but we'll also look at the importance of focusing on a relatively small and focused target audience. Sometimes that small and focused audience can be a better bet than going wide and trying to reach a lot of people. That's what you'll hear about today.
So if you like traveling, if you have kids, you just like culture, or if you just like interesting stories of people making money in different ways, I think you'll appreciate this story and I'll bring it to you in just a moment. [Music]
When the Communist Party took over at the Laotian government in 1975, the country became hostile toward an ethnic group known as the Hmong people. The Hmong people were allies of the United States during the Vietnam War. So they were considered a risk to communism and a violent wave of persecution began. Thousands of Hmong fled the country and relocated to America, including young Maikou and Tujure Tao, the featured side hustlers of this story.
After settling in Minnesota and getting married, Maikou and Tujure had their first child. They loved to read to her, but they were disappointed by the lack of language learning tools for the Hmong language. There were no children's books, no magazines or primers, nothing. The couple wanted their daughter to grow up bilingual in English and their heritage language, so they began looking into creating their own Hmong flashcards. A month later, in November of 2016, they hired a designer from Upwork to create 26 animal images.
This would be for their first set of flashcards, which they printed out in their home office. The cards looked fantastic, but in terms of a side hustle, they didn't do anything with them immediately. When they hired that designer, they had a side hustle in mind, but then they questioned their initial decision and put the project on pause. After more time went by, Maikou and Tujure realized they were sitting on an idea that could help thousands of displaced families. So they agreed to set aside their hesitations and test it out.
The couple created a simple video of Maikou teaching their one-year-old daughter the names of the animals and uploaded it to YouTube. They then posted it on Facebook, but it only received a thousand views, which in their minds was a very small number. They were hoping for a lot more. However, despite the low number of views, the couple sold 125 flashcard sets at $20 each, bringing in more than $2,000 over a two-week period. They fulfilled everything manually using PayPal invoices, self-printed shipping labels, and an Excel spreadsheet.
When it was all said and done, the couple had profited $1,000 from this initial set of cards. That wasn't a major success in terms of sales, but it was definitely a success in terms of conversion rate. One in 10 viewers had ordered the cards, so Maikou and Tujure knew they were onto something. As the new year rolled around, just as we were getting started with side hustle school last January, Maikou and Tujure began brainstorming ways to expand. They commissioned more designs and created three new sets of flashcards.
In addition to animals, they now had numbers, food, and objects. In March, they set up a website called mongbaby.com. By the way, mong has a silent H at the beginning of it, so it's H-M-O-N-G, and then they made another video. They thought that they might have better luck if they uploaded the video straight to Facebook, just bypassing YouTube, and their hunch was right. In less than three days, the new video displaying four new sets of flashcards had been viewed 150,000 times and had more than 2,000 shares.
Over the next 30 days, mongbaby received $10,000 worth of orders. At one point, Shopify actually put a hold on the store's revenue because the system tagged mongbaby's dramatic spike in sales as a possible scam. After a couple of anxious phone calls, the site was functioning as usual again. Thankfully, fulfilling these orders was much more efficient than it was with the first flashcard set. This time, they had a system together to handle the payments, shipping, and inventory.
On fire with the thrill of sales, Maikou then began working on a new project, a mong children's book. In the spring and summer of 2017, she wrote the story, hired that same designer for illustrations, and began exploring printing options. Compared to the flashcards, the logistics of printing a book were far more complicated. The flashcards were printed locally, which made communicating with the printer fairly simple. However, the books would be printed in China, which was stressful since they couldn't communicate with the printer in person.
They also had to do a lot of Googling to figure out how freight forwarding and customs worked. But once they had a sample book and were satisfied with it, they began crafting a crowdfunding page on their website. Many other flashcard customers had expressed interest in a children's book, but this is how Maikou and Tujir would validate that interest by asking their customers to support the production costs. So once again, they made a video. This one was viewed over 100,000 times in under seven days and generated enough pre-orders to fund the project.
A couple months later, hundreds of Maikou's books were being read to kids across the country. In their first year of business, Maikou and Tujir generated over $50,000 in sales through Hmongbaby. Not only have they created a way to teach their daughter their heritage language, but the business has also allowed both of them to spend more time at home. They want to create more products and streamline their method to be more effective and efficient. They've also received inquiries from people in other immigrant communities who want to replicate their success.
Most of all, they're glad they overcame their initial hesitation and took a chance on making that first video. [Music]
Well, I love everything about this story. What a wonderful way to preserve heritage and culture, not just for themselves, but now hundreds and thousands of other immigrant families who want their kids to grow up bilingual. And of course, it's also great that they found a way to do this in a sustainable manner. So they are helping people, but they're also making money.
That then allows them to do more projects. Now I want to focus on this question of a conversion rate with a targeted audience. I really thought it was interesting about how that first video they posted, they were kind of disappointed with the number of views. They're like, "We only got a thousand views," but then they got 125 orders. That is a tremendous conversion rate.
What makes for a good conversion rate varies a lot by industry, but in a lot of fields, 1% is a good conversion rate. So the fact that more than one in 10 viewers of the video went and placed an order is tremendous. If you know clearly who you're serving and you're able to reach those people, it doesn't matter if the number of people is relatively small. I was talking with someone recently who was doing an event at a venue, and in partnering with the venue, they got access to that space's email list. And once they got the list, they were disappointed because there was only 2,000 email addresses on that list, and they were expecting a lot more.
But then they realized, actually, these are 2,000 email addresses of people who have been to events at this venue, so it is very specific. A lot of those people are highly likely to attend another event at that venue, or at least if you emailed them about it, they would pay attention to it. It's much better to have the contact information of 2,000 of those people than 20,000 other people in the same city who had nothing to do with the venue. So sometimes I say that you need to be able to describe your side hustle idea in one sentence. I think you should also be able to say who it's for in one sentence.
And this story is a great example. It's language learning cards, and now a book, for immigrant families from the country of Laos. Very specific, very targeted, very clear what it is and who it's for. [Music]
All right, I hope you liked this story. I hope you found it inspiring, just like I did.
I would encourage you to use it as motivation or a model for something you're doing or thinking about. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. And I'll also invite you to come on by the website, sidehustleschool.com/368. That's for episode 368. And there you're gonna find the show notes for today, links to their website.
You can also sign up for a free Five Steps to Hustle course, which we have recently updated. And you can learn about the upcoming launch of Side Hustle Society, our training program and online community that's been in the works for just about a year now. I'm very excited about that. And I'm also excited about all that's to come on the show this year. Thank you for joining me for it.
Keep listening. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]
