Pathetic Triathlete Creates $30,000 Facebook Group

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Side hustle school friends, listeners, community, what's up? Hey, it's Chris Guillebeau here. Welcome to episode 458. I really like today's story. I think you're gonna like it too.

It is about a so-called pathetic triathlon runner who creates a $30,000 Facebook group. And when I use the word pathetic, there's a reason for that. I don't usually go around calling people pathetic, but this person calls himself pathetic. You'll hear all about it in the story. It's a really good one.

Today is also national finder rainbow day. So I guess that's a reminder to go out and appreciate the small things in life. Now I haven't done a triathlon myself, but I've done a few marathons and a number of half marathons. For the past few years, I haven't done any races. I've just tried to kind of maintain a base level of fitness, but I may have mentioned I have this big birthday coming up.

And so I'm trying to actually get back into things and run a little bit more competitively. So I've signed up for a half marathon, which is coming up soon. Maybe I'll tell you about it. If you don't hear anything, it's probably because it was a disaster, but hopefully that's not the case. And I recently did my first race.

It was a 15K race, 15 kilometers. And when I first found this race, for those who don't run or aren't familiar with running races, 15K is kind of an unusual distance. Like most running races are 5K, 10K, half marathon or marathon. And I usually think in terms of miles, not kilometers. So when I first saw that this was a 15K race, I was like, huh, I wonder how much that is.

And it really took me a couple of minutes of thinking before I was like, wait, I know what a 5K is, I know what a 10K is. I bet, you know, if I add 5K and 10K together, I have a suspicion that I'm gonna come up with 15 kilometers. And in fact, I did. So it was a 9.3 mile race. And yes, this also demonstrates why I'm not in charge of math or perhaps logic either.

But you know, we shall overcome. It's probably best if I just move on to the story here because I do think you're gonna like the story. So let's say thanks to today's sponsor and then on with the show. [Music]

Swimming, cycling, running. These are the three sequences of a triathlon.

They're difficult, strenuous, and people train for years to prepare. And according to Zachary Rose, for some reason, many otherwise nice people turn into total jerks once they learn how to swim, bike, and run long distances. Now Zach can say this because he himself is a triathlete. He was fed up of seeing those jerks. His word, not mine, dominating the triathlon Facebook groups.

He thought they were condescending, way too serious, and just generally sucked all the fun out of the community. Surely he wasn't the only person to think so. There needed to be a place where goofy, fun, and newcomer posts could be celebrated and enjoyed, not shot down by elitists. So on a bit of a whim, Zach decided to create his own Facebook group. And he called it the pathetic triathletes group.

That's why I called him a pathetic triathlon runner in the title for this episode. He's actually a pretty cool guy. Zach created a quick logo, wrote a description that outlined the restrictions on elitism, and shared his group and other triathlon groups. Just a couple hours later, over 100 people had joined. Fun posts started showing up organically.

As he suspected, people were holding back in the other groups afraid to ask fun or just basic questions. But here they could thrive, they could be silly, and even better, they could be honest. Zach describes his marketing approach as gorilla style. He joined every relevant group, triathlons, marathons, cycling races, swimming meets, you name it. And then searched around for fun, goofy, or just beginner question posts.

When he found one, he would comment saying, "Nice, this post belongs in the pathetic triathletes group." In the group's second week of existence, it hit 500 members and it didn't show any signs of stalling. More and more people were posting and declaring how great it was to finally have a judgment-free zone. Now Zach was a side hustler at heart. He didn't start this project to make money, but once it was taken off, he started to explore ways to monetize the group. And he came to the conclusion that since the group was a source of fun and silliness, his product should be too.

That's how the idea for his first product arrived. It was simple, easy, and plain vanilla. He called it a T-shirt. Not wanting to risk any of his own money on printing shirts and not sure how well the idea would go over, Zach created a Teespring campaign. This would allow him to effectively take pre-orders and then drop ship his shirt without ever having to lay hands on one.

His profits would be a lot lower this way, but it was also virtually risk-free. So he set up his account on Teespring and started designing the shirt. On the front, he simply wrote pathetic in big, bold letters. On the back, he attached the logo for the Facebook group. Looking back, it was, according to Zach, really bad.

But despite that really bad design, he sold 30 shirts. When the campaign ended, Teespring fulfilled the orders and sent Zach a check. It was a small amount of money, less than $150, but it proved that he didn't just have a growing group. He also had a group filled with at least a few people that were financially committed. What happened next?

Well, like any celebrating triathlete, Zach ate an entire package of Oreos, and then he created more shirts. Zach himself designed all the basic Tees with just text, but then he hired someone on freelancer.com to do more complicated work. Yet he never paid more than $10 a design. Over the next few months, Zach made hundreds of sales and the group was growing too. In fact, month by month, the pathetic triathletes group grew by over 1,000 members, then by over a couple thousand members a month.

Several months in, Zach realized that triathletes seemed to go crazy for stickers. He saw them on cars, luggage, water bottles, everywhere. He wanted to get into creating stickers for the group, but there wasn't a Teespring for stickers. He would have to put up some money to print them, and he financed his first order with the profits from the shirts. As for how he would sell and fulfill those stickers, he tried Shopify at first, but for him, it didn't work out.

The free or inexpensive templates just didn't cut it. So instead, Zach went to create an Etsy store. And for him, he found that to be easier. It was easy, it was trusted, and Zach quickly realized that it made shipping lots of orders fast and smooth. Sure enough, a simple sticker of his goofy logo sold hundreds of units.

Zach created more stickers, a couple hats, even a coffee mug. It was all fairly hands-off, streamlined, and stress-free. The pathetic triathletes group has continued to grow. When we learned about it last month, it had more than 45,000 members. With the exception of a few targeted Facebook ads here and there, and that initial guerrilla marketing campaign, all the growth has been organic.

Zach now has a good team of volunteer moderators, and he's constantly making new designs. Those members have now made over 3,000 purchases, all of which are somewhere between $5 and $25 each. And as best as we can tell, that pathetic Facebook group, it wasn't started with any money-making goal in mind, has now made more than $30,000. Ultimately, Zach created this group because there needed to be more fun in the world of triathlons, and the group has accomplished that. He's glad it's making money, but for him, that's not the main benefit.

In fact, he says, I started this group to have fun, and the second it stops being fun is when I know I need to reconsider the strategy. But so far, he's not reconsidering anything. Awesome, congratulations to Zach. I love the pathetic triathletes group. And here we have a great example of a project that started just because somebody wants to start a project and sees this need.

But because he thinks like a side hustler, he also thinks, hey, I wonder if I could make some money with this, not because I'm trying to get richer, but just to make the project sustainable, to provide some sort of reward for me for all the time I put into this. And as you heard in the story, he did this without any risk at all because the Facebook group was free. And then for the products, he used Teespring and some dropshipping companies and other print-on-demand services so that he actually didn't have to spend anything. Well, eventually he spent $10 a design, but extremely small startup costs, extremely small ongoing costs as well. So to me, this illustrates if you have a community, if you have people who identify with your message or your mission, it's not that hard to figure out what kind of products to make for them.

The much harder challenge is when you've got a product and you're like, okay, who is this for? Where do I find a community? Which is the situation that a lot of our stories find themselves in. So maybe if you're struggling on the product front, you should think a bit more about the people. Like who are your people?

Where is your community? Where can you find a group like this or create a group like this, just like Zach did? Then over time, as you serve those people, they're loyal to the brand, to the message, the mission. You can do just like he did in terms of slow expansion, adding the stickers, adding the coffee mugs, and so on. And maybe you can grow it further and scale it, or maybe it just kind of stays this fun project, which is also great.

Lots of different roads, lots of different pathways ahead. I should have had some kind of fun triathlon pun in there, but it just kind of eluded me. Don't worry, I'll get my mojo back, stay tuned. Thank you for listening. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better.

Today's show notes are online at sidehustleschool.com/458. I'm now gonna go outside and run a grueling mile and a half. I don't know how many kilometers that is, but I'm pretty sure it's less than 50. This is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.