This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Oh, hey, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. I'm Chris Guillebeau. If you've been listening for a while, you know that every day I'm telling you a story of a different person who creates an income-generating project for themselves. But the whole point of doing this is to learn from them.
How do they get the idea? How do they make it happen? What challenges do they have? What mistakes do they make, perhaps? Do they have any failures?
Do they have any false starts? And sometimes I tell you a story so you can learn what not to do. Or let's say, what could have been done better? And this is not to make light of anyone's story in any way, but rather to illustrate that it's a learning process. And you may not get it right the first time, but then you can regroup and try again.
Or perhaps by listening to these stories, you might actually avoid some of those mistakes on the front end. If you've listened for a while, you also know that one of the core values of this process is, I want your side hustle to not cost a lot of money to start, and I want it to not take forever to get off the ground. That's why the whole side hustle school method is idea to income in 27 days. Again, without spending any money and certainly without going into debt. Well, the final outcome of today's story is a good one.
It's about an architect who sells a mini blind repair kit, and that brings in an extra $15,000 a year. However, since we often talk about challenges, it took some real time and real money to get to that outcome. And I'll tell you more about it in just a moment. Let's say thanks to our sponsor. [Music]
Today's story is a bit different from some of the others we featured.
As I may have mentioned in the intro, the outcome of this project was successful. The guy who started it is bringing in an extra $1,200 a month or so, but it took some time to get to this point. That person, today's side hustler, Chad Wooters, learned a lot of lessons along the way. By day, Chad is an architect, primarily working as a project manager for a nonprofit in Chicago. His side hustle is a mini blind repair tool called Mini Blind RX, and he sells this tool through Amazon.com's Fulfilled by Amazon program.
He got the idea for the tool while working a previous job in commercial real estate. His company was constantly spending money replacing damaged blinds. Eager to find a more budget friendly solution, Chad's boss asked him if he could locate a tool on the market that might repair them, so they wouldn't have to replace them each time they were damaged. But after an exhaustive search, Chad couldn't find anything. You probably know how this line goes.
He then decided maybe he'd try and make one himself. Now, Chad had never done anything like this before, and it ended up being an expensive and drawn out process. He first made a working prototype out of plexiglass. His tool fits around the ladder string of mini blinds and lets people squeeze to essentially straighten them out fixing any kinks or bends. But coming up with a design and making the prototype was only the first step.
He then had a patent lawyer do a search to make sure nobody else had invented something similar. That search cost about $1,500. Once he learned that his invention was in fact unique, he hired that lawyer to make up some sketches from the prototype and write the application, and all that process cost just under $5,000. Two whole years later, the patent office came back with some questions that needed answering, so he had to pay an additional $1,500 for the lawyer to answer them. It took three whole years, but at least he got the patent.
His idea with this tool is that it wouldn't just be used by janitors and commercial cleaning services, but also by apartment dwelling pet owners or parents of small children perhaps who were concerned about getting their security deposit back. So he then spent another year going to trade shows, not like every day, just off and on throughout the year, and his goal in doing that was to see if anybody would license his product, which he was calling mini blind RX, like a prescription for mini blinds. He didn't rent a booth, he would just go to the show, walk the floor, and ask to talk to people. Unfortunately, that didn't lead to anything. He then spent another year trying to convince retail stores to carry the product.
He'd still go to trade shows, but this time he spent more time collecting names and following up with the right people. He also made a database of independent hardware stores and cold called them, or he would just drop by in person at local stores to speak to managers. In the two years since his patent had been approved, Chad had found a way to manufacture his product. All of those efforts of following up with trade show contacts and dropping in at hardware stores eventually paid off, at least somewhat. He sold about 100 units to the hardware stores and then another 1,000 units wholesale, but he didn't get any reorders because wholesalers have to charge three times their cost, which then makes the price too high.
At that point, he realized he'd either have to give up on this project, which he had now spent several years on, or find a way to sell directly and cut out the middleman. So in that third year post patent process, he started selling online directly to customers through eBay and Amazon. This is when he began to see real success, at least in terms of sales. He was getting orders every day, but then he'd have to fulfill those orders. So he worked his day job, then at night he'd go to the post office.
It was fun for a while, but it was also a lot of work. So he finally decided to just let Amazon do everything, and he switched to the Fulfilled by Amazon program, where he would just ship directly to Amazon, they would ship out to all their customers. He says that figuring out the Fulfilled by Amazon model was reasonably simple, at least compared to the years getting the patent and walking the trade show floors, but getting his mini blind RX tool to rank high when people were searching, and get in front of the right people who needed it, required more experimentation. When he first got started, he found that using keywords in his title was what brought in the most amount of traffic, but these days Amazon prefers for the title to clearly state what the product is, and perhaps who it's for. He says if you're looking to sell your product using the Fulfilled by Amazon program, focus on putting together a highly detailed description of your product, clearly explaining who it's for, and take lots of high quality pictures, that will help you stand out.
And if you're thinking like, wow, this was a long time to wait, why did he stick with it for so long? His answer is that he'd never done anything like this before, he didn't go into the patent process thinking it was gonna be simple, so he just decided to see it through. Looking back, he can identify two big mistakes. The biggest mistake was spending so much money developing the product. From the prototype to the tooling to the patent process, he spent almost $40,000.
$20,000 of that was for the product tooling, and the rest was for everything else, that patent process, the design, the development, et cetera. He also says if he could go back, he wouldn't bother trying to get a patent. It took so long, it cost so much, after going through the process, he thinks maybe it would be better to just be first, not wait all that time on the patent. Those are important lessons, but as I mentioned, he does have a good outcome. After all this time, he has recovered his investment, it's now a profitable product, it's bringing in about $15,000 a year in net income, and again, he's doing this through the Fulfilled by Amazon model.
There's still some customer service issues he has to handle, but for the most part, the business can operate on its own. MiniBlindRX was not an overnight success by any means, there are definitely things he would do differently if he had the chance to start over, but on the bright side, he did make it through, the product is out there, he is making money, he has recovered his initial investment of $40,000, which is no small thing. And of course, it's been a tremendous learning experience. He wishes it hadn't taken so long for those lessons to arrive, not to mention the money, but he knows what to do differently next time, so in the end, perhaps it was worth it. [Music]
So as the saying goes, hindsight is 2020, there are always lessons that can be learned.
Even if you don't spend a lot of money, even if you don't spend three years waiting for your patent, you can probably look back, or at least I can look back on just about every project I've started and think, you know, I wish I had done something a bit differently, or I spent a lot of time on something that didn't actually end up having much of a result, or maybe I did spend too much money somewhere, maybe I just went down the wrong path and got distracted, I had shiny object syndrome or something. So I appreciate Chad letting us share this story, it does look like a great product, and I'm glad that in the end, he found a way to make it work. Now, by the way, if you're interested in the fulfilled by Amazon model, we have featured a number of stories on the show of people doing this in different ways. Two of my favorites are from episode 170 and episode 286. As a reminder, you can find any episode of the show by going to sidehustleschool.com/ and then the number of that episode, right?
So 170 is sidehustleschool.com/170, 170. That episode is about a nomadic family who cooks up a $40,000 profit with a houseware import business. They're doing something really fun. I'm sure their business is actually well past $40,000 now. They're building a real brand.
And in episode 286, that's a woman who sells hair grips, earning not only fringe benefits, but also $4,000 a month. And I remember appreciating that story in particular because two of her largest target markets are Orthodox Jewish women and drag queens. How's that for a fun fact? Anyway, much more to come. Thank you so much for listening.
As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Today's show notes, if you'd like to find some quick links to those episodes I just mentioned or check out the Mini Blind RX product, this is episode 406. So those notes are at sidehustleschool.com/406. I hope you have a wonderful day wherever you are in the world. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.
