This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Hey, Side Hustle School friends, listeners, and community. Welcome back. My name is Chris Guillebeau. I am your host. Got a great story for you today that is all about reading.
Well, it's also about making money because this is Side Hustle School. But specifically, the project involves encouraging people to read classical literature. And by way of framing the story, I might ask, do you spend too much time on your phone? I mean, who would do such a thing in this day and age? I can't think of anybody except maybe half the population, sometimes including me.
Look, there is nothing wrong with technology. Among other things, it enables us to have these conversations every day. It enables many of the stories I tell you every day to exist in the first place. But I also love to read. Maybe you do, too.
And even though I sometimes read e-books, overall, I still prefer print books. Well, this brings us to today's story. It's about a Chicago-based architect who makes access to classical literature easier for readers, raising $50,000 on Kickstarter along the way. He ends up changing the world of commuting, at least for a lot of people, one pocket-sized book at a time. I'll bring you the whole story after saying thank you to today's sponsor.
As a professional architect/journalist, David DeWayne has always believed in the unique power of the written word. As a lifelong fan of books and the ideas that come from their pages, it's no surprise that his passion for literature became his side hustle. David spends his workdays thinking about how to build ideas and bring them to life in design. But like many good ideas, the inspiration for his side hustle came out of nowhere. Or more specifically, it came while he was riding a bus.
His snowy, slow bus commute in Southside Chicago was the one place he could zone out during the day, at least for a few minutes. It was, and still is, a route he takes at least five days a week. And one particular trip was not unlike the rest of them, except for one thing. David looked around and noticed that every single person on the bus was looking down at their phone. Everyone that is, except him.
He was holding a pocket-sized book in his hand, with dog-eared corners and worn-out pages from reading. Just then he got a text from a friend and took his phone out of his pocket. He noticed that the phone and book were pretty much the same size. They were both easy to travel with, and furthermore, they both held worlds of possibility. The more David thought about it, the more he realized that just about everybody holding a phone was reading something.
Well, some of them may have been playing Angry Birds, but a lot of them were reading. And if they were already reading while commuting, or waiting in line at the grocery store, or working out on the elliptical trainer at the gym, it wouldn't be hard to read something else if it were within easy reach. He looked around the bus again, everyone still had their eyes glued to their phone. What if they had a real book in their pocket, he thought, something that gave them a richer and more engaging experience than just scrolling through Instagram? David wondered if they might be more likely to pick up that book instead of their phone.
At least some of the time. The idea to revolutionize classical literature and put a book in those commuters' hands didn't happen overnight. First there was an eight-hour workday standing in David's way, but he didn't push the idea aside. The fire had been lit, and so during his lunch break, David pulled a short story from the internet. Now, take note, he didn't pull just any short story, because most recent books and stories are under copyright.
They actually belong to the person who wrote them. But a lot of books that are much older, especially those published before 1923, are in the public domain. That basically means that anyone can use them however they'd like, even printing their own version of them for sale. So he took that story, pasted it into his Adobe software, made a few formatting changes, and hit print. He called his idea "mousebooks," and he now had a prototype.
David hustled quickly. The pocket-sized book went from idea to prototype to Kickstarter success in less than a month. He first printed a limited run of 100 copies for his friends at Christmas, then he thought about how he could get the mousebooks in the hands of other people. That's where crowdfunding, and specifically Kickstarter, came in. David took the leap and launched a campaign that became a huge success, raising over $50,000 for more than 1,000 backers.
He took $20,000 of that money to print and ship the first run of mousebooks, and he invested the rest of the money to help prepare for the next installment. He built a website, hired a book designer, and brought an editor on board to help curate the book selection. For some reason, he couldn't keep using his printer at work to publish thousands of books, so he also used some of that money to put a deposit down and help secure an ongoing relationship with a local Chicago-based printer. That campaign's success was a huge turning point because it showed him that people wanted easy access to quality literature, and they would spend time reading books if they had them. In choosing his selections, he makes sure that each mousebook doesn't take longer than 90 minutes to read.
That means that even the busiest people can find time to read Jane Austen, Walt Whitman, or Franz Kafka, and bring a dose of well-written prose and big ideas into their day. That $50,000 Kickstarter campaign and then a follow-up one that brought in $12,000 have produced most of the revenue for mousebooks so far, but the nature of a crowdfunding campaign means that you can't do this all the time, unfortunately. Aside from those, David is now bringing in about $2,000 a month from website sales, and because of his big success on Kickstarter, mousebooks was one of the first projects invited to join the company's Drip program. I never heard of this before myself, but the Drip program from Kickstarter allows backers to support creators through recurring monthly donations, not just one-off pledges. David says it's like the lovechild of Kickstarter and Patreon.
This brings in another $500 a month for average monthly income of $2,500. The plans for mousebooks don't just end up with more books on campaign backers' shelves. He plans on adding an online book club so members can come together to explore the ideas they've read about. He also hopes to scale up production in order to expand into retail stores. His ultimate goal is to continue publishing the mousebooks to be a gateway into more classical literature for readers, especially when a book can go wherever the reader does.
Whatever happens next for mousebooks, it's sure to be a real page-turner. So what can we take away from David's story, his success with mousebooks? Well, I think it's a great project. He's obviously hit on something that has resonated very well. I recently gave a talk to a room full of small business owners and entrepreneurs, and I chose to focus much of that talk on the topic of emotional needs.
Because when you are making and marketing something, even if it's something really practical, really basic, you're not selling coaching or something that has this direct emotional connection, I actually think that no matter what you're selling, there is some emotional need that connects to it, not just the desire for whatever the product or service is. When people make purchasing decisions, just about every decision, maybe not for a commodity, but just about everything else, there is some emotional investment there. So people have all sorts of emotional needs, from affirmation to validation to security, feeling like their life is worth something, feeling like they're contributing to something, belonging, having a sense of being part of something bigger than themselves, there's a whole list. And as you think about your side hustle, you should really ask yourself, how is this going to connect with people on a deeper level than just whatever the product happens to be? So in this case, what is the emotional need that David pinpointed in pursuing this project?
And in particular, by choosing the crowdfunding model to start it with. Well, I think it's somewhat a combination of nostalgia and rebellion. The nostalgia comes in, in the form of reading those print books, and perhaps from an earlier time in which you would always carry a book around with you, and now a lot of people just carry their phone around. So this isn't a message of like, hey, you should go and throw away your phone. I certainly don't believe that.
I mean, that's how a lot of us are connecting right now. But the rebellion does come in, I think, when phones and other technology kind of take over our life and become the default. And when we stop investing our time in reading books or appreciating art. So by connecting those emotional needs from what seems to be a large group of people with the product he's making, these public domain books, which he has free access to download and format and set up and print himself, that's why it's worked so well, especially on a platform like Kickstarter, which as I've explained before, is great to debut this kind of project. It's not great for everything, but for something like this, it's ideal.
So I'll leave you with that today, think about emotional needs, think about how your practical product or service can meet someone's emotional needs. And of course, along the way, that project is going to meet some of your needs too. Because it's not only about helping others, it's also about helping yourself and building something for your own future. I believe you can do both of those things. That's what I try to talk about every day, one way or another.
So remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. If you want to check out mouse books or learn more about public domain works or anything else I mentioned in this episode, just come to Sidiscool.com/408. Those are our show notes. You can also pick up a free five steps to hustle course, or of course, you could tell your friends about the show, only if you like it, of course. Thank you so much for listening today.
I'll be back tomorrow. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Sidiscool.
