This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hello, my friends. Side hustle school listeners and community. My name is Chris Guillebeau. I've got a great story for you today. It's about someone who is tremendously successful, ends up making a lot of money in a short period of time.
And what's funny about it is he doesn't actually intend to make money, at least not in the beginning. In the beginning, he's just doing some work research, research about how to be a better employee and serve his company's customers better. And as part of that process, he creates a little practice store. I'll tell you all the details in the story, of course. And this little practice store ends up making real money.
Like I said, not just a small amount of money, but a lot of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars. So good question for today. What happens when your work experiment makes real money? How do you find yourself in that situation to begin with? Or let's say, actually, how do you proactively create that situation?
Or at least create the circumstances in which it can occur? And then what do you do about it? Like what happens next? Well, that is, in fact, the focus of today's story. It's about a freelance graphic designer whose work goes viral with playful T-shirts.
He actually turns that work research into a goldmine that earns more than $400,000. So let's say a quick little thank you to our sponsor. They allow the show to be completely free. It doesn't cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars. It costs you nothing.
And then I'll tell you exactly what this guy did. [Music]
Mike Paisley is an ideas man. The only thing the professional graphic designer likes more than ideas is putting them into action. He's been coming up with money-making ventures for a long time. In fact, at the wide-eyed age of 12, he created his first side hustle an eBay store to sell old items.
It's been an entrepreneurial whirlwind ever since, along with a series of day jobs as well. And from those childhood eBay stores, Mike went on to pursue a degree in marketing. After graduating, he continued to be busy. He had a freelance career for a while. He worked in the craft beer market.
And then he found himself working as a digital marketer for Viral Style, an online fulfillment company which specialized in custom apparel. This was his first step into the print-on-demand industry. And suddenly he was in uncharted territory. You see, Viral Style lets anyone, anywhere, upload their t-shirt design and sell it online through a crowdfunded format. Once a customer orders a design, it goes to print and is then mailed to their address.
We haven't talked about Viral Style before on the show, but we've talked about print-on-demand. It really is a simple business model, extremely simple, with a lot of benefits. There's no inventory, there's little overhead fees, and of course you can do it part-time. So Mike was working for Viral Style, and he needed to figure out the best way to attract potential sellers to the site. To do that, he thought about reverse engineering the process.
If you were gonna be a successful seller, you had to know how to design and sell t-shirts. So he set out to learn that skill for himself. And he created his own practice store called Famous in Real Life. That way, by learning a bit more, he would understand what people needed when they visited the site and how they would use it. After hours, he began looking more into other print-on-demand platforms, like Printify and Ink Threadable, and he also began to go from novice to expert.
That's where that funny thing comes in. His practice store began to bring in real money and not small amounts. People really liked his t-shirt designs, and they liked them so much, they would pay for them. After just a few months, Mike's new accidental side hustle was earning as much money as his day job. He used his first big paycheck to pay off part of his student loan debt, and he celebrated it as a milestone towards a new life.
He felt like this newfound financial freedom was a weightlifting from his shoulders. Now, it gets better because it wasn't just a one-off big success, it continued. As he made more designs, he figured out what people liked, and within six months, he was consistently bringing in an average of $10,000 a month. This was all from virtually no startup costs, just a few hundred dollars in advertising to test designs. So essentially, all the money coming in was either additional income or money to invest in new side hustles.
His biggest challenge was his time. Long hours at work meant that evenings and weekends were usually dedicated to his freelance clients, 'cause he was still doing that too, but the addition of this new side hustle meant that free time became even more scarce. Mike says it wasn't always easy to balance work, graduate school, which apparently he was going to as well, I'm just saying that in my notes, those freelance clients, the side hustle, and some attempt at a social life all at the same time. But with each success, as the months continued, it became easier for him to see the long-term value in those priorities. He believed he was making a short-term sacrifice for a long-term gain.
He also believes that the key to success in print-on-demand is just starting. Like we've talked about before, it's an easy industry to enter, and people can start earning money without much capital. Print-on-demand businesses thrive by testing new ideas, and one experiment could be your next viral design. Naturally, there are also downsides, which we've talked about before as well. One downside is a lot of people are trying to do this, so it's not like every design is gonna be a success.
Most of them won't be. Another challenge that Mike mentioned is design theft. Good ideas are easy to steal because they're visible. So you have to constantly be thinking of what's next. What's the next design?
What's the next platform? Is there something I haven't thought of yet? You can't really just coast on your success. For Mike, though, he has no plans of coasting. By the end of 2017, Mike had earned more than $400,000 in income from this project.
He recently hired his first employee to work on the side hustle exclusively, and he set himself a revenue goal of $1 million for 2018. That's right, potentially a million-dollar side hustle selling T-shirts. We'll have to see how it goes, but based on the success he's had so far, that goal could be right up his sleeve. Okay, so I have a couple comments here. First of all, congrats to my amazing story.
I continue to be amazed myself at people that are just making great money from doing things like T-shirt designs and all the other stuff that we talk about from time to time. But what I wanna talk about is this question of, is this a sustainable business? Now, here's the thing, I don't know. Like, I have no idea. I don't think you could believe anyone who answered that question one way or another because there's so many unknowns.
There's so many variables. I guess I would say, like, based on all the information that we have, it's probably not a sustainable business, at least not long-term and not without making some changes. But I also think that's okay because he's making so much money, he's learning so much, and he's being wise about investing in new designs and bringing on that employee. So I tend to think of stories like this, like the story I told you at the very beginning of the year, think it was episode two or something. I think it was the January 2nd episode about this guy who resells items from Walmart.
Like, he goes to Walmart and Home Depot and buys things and he's found a way to resell them online and make a profit from it. And in his first year of doing it, he made something like $200,000. So obviously another huge success. Not everyone's gonna see that kind of success, to be clear, but some people do. And so it's always good to look and say, okay, what did that person do differently from other people?
If I wanna have that kind of business, like, how do I apply those lessons to what I'm doing? And both of these stories, like the Walmart guy and then this guy, those ideas probably will go away sooner or later, but with each of them, you can diversify. You can use them as a bridge to something longer lasting. So if you encounter like a gold rush like this, that's the phrase I use for projects like these that end up really taking off like far beyond anyone's expectations, it's a gold rush. You know, first of all, nice work if you can get it.
It doesn't matter if it's sustainable or not because it's a huge success. But ask yourself, okay, what can I do in this situation to preserve it, to protect it? To ensure that I'm not just making that money one month, but hopefully three months, six months, 12 months into the future, and maybe even on from there. But you know, the most important thing is that I'm learning this side hustle lifestyle. I'm learning how to be entrepreneurial, even if I stay in my day job.
I'm learning to create something for myself so that I'm not dependent on anyone else. That to me is the greatest overall goal. Like no matter what you wanna do, I want you to have independence so that you can choose what's important to you. That's the value of side hustle school. That's what I try to talk to you about every day in different ways.
Again, congrats to Mike, what a great story. And for everybody else out there, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Of course, we have show notes for today's episode. I mentioned a few different resources. I will link those up for you.
Those notes are at sidehustleschool.com/424. That's for episode 424. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back tomorrow with something else. And wherever you are in the world, I hope you're having a wonderful day.
I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.
