This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Hey there, welcome back to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. Are you ready for a crazy story? Now, if a six-figure fitness pole dancing studio isn't awesome enough for you, if a novelist who makes more than $100,000 a year on a brand new writing course doesn't impress you, and if you don't understand why a woman would want to reinvent the bra, well, you might not understand this story either, but you might be entertained. So let me just break it down for you. Here's the headline, No Need to Leave You in Suspense. This story is
about a man who sells live crickets to reptile owners. Now, there's one critical part of this story. I'm just going to give it away from the beginning. He doesn't actually have to handle these crickets, at least not most of the time. So if you too want to learn how to drop ship live insects all across the United States or somewhere else in the world, or at least if you want to learn how this guy has been able to do it and make money from it every month, stay tuned.
Side hustle school will not let you down. Jeff Neal has a day job as a project manager for an industrial painting contractor. He looks for contracts and manufacturing facilities. He then puts together estimates. And if he makes the sale, he has to see the project through to completion to ensure it's profitable and successful. Now he's also a serial hustler. When I was first
looking for stories before starting the show, he sent me three or four of them. Among other things, he searches for side gigs on Craigslist. In his first month doing that, he made more than $600. He also has a coupon site, which is interesting and could make for a story of its own. But what interested me the most was this little side note he made in my survey form. And he said,
"By the way, I also sell live crickets to reptile owners. I've been doing this for more than six months and it's going really well." Needless to say, that caught my attention. So I asked him to tell me more. But to be honest, I also thought, well, this is going to make for a great headline, but who in the world actually wants to do that? I've had a lot of hustles in my life. But this
is something that I've never heard of, nor would I be interested in doing it myself. Or at least that's what I thought at first. So before we go any further, I want to go back to that critical fact that I alluded to in the introduction. Jeff does not receive any inventory. He doesn't have an ice chest full of crickets or a drawer in his refrigerator that he opens up whenever he receives an order. In fact, with one exception, he's never seen the crickets at all. He is simply
a reseller for a cricket farm. He handles orders and takes a markup, but then an actual cricket farm does all the shipping. And when I heard that, I was more interested. I also didn't know there were such things as cricket farms, but let's stay on track. So how do you get started in all this? Jeff knew from his extensive hustling experience as well as his work for an e-commerce
website to look for a niche that has low competition. And crickets easily fulfill that criteria. Not a ton of people out there reselling live crickets. The greater problem was finding the right drop shipper. Usually the original source, but sometimes another distributor will handle the actual shipments. Jeff learned that there are several cricket farms in the US that offer drop
shipping, but their shipping rates are so high because they use FedEx that it's really difficult to anticipate shipping costs and to maintain a good profit margin. So after doing some digging on what he calls probably around page 10 of Google results, which by the way, what a world we live in, apparently there are 10 pages of Google results for cricket farms who will do shipping for you. He found a small family owned business that looked a little off the beaten path. He gave them a call and he found out they offer drop shipping at a great price. And they shipped with a post office, which helped a ton with shipping costs. Now this leads to the one only time he actually took
possession of any crickets. And it was good that he did because he learned something important. He had this family owned business send him a demo shipment and it looked fine. The only problem was it was missing some instructions that were supposed to be included. And apparently the instructions were missing because crickets eat paper and his inventory had consumed the instructions while traveling from the cricket farm to Jeff's house. So important lesson learned.
Once he started taking orders, he knew to send the instructions in a confirmation email to his customer and just tell the cricket farm to not include anything else in the box. One recent month he had over $1,200 in revenue and was pretty excited. Unfortunately, the next month he saw a big dip in sales and his total number was about $760. He thinks the reason is because the reptiles these crickets are fed to during a certain season of the year go through a process called brumation, which is essentially reptile hibernation. So he's hoping once they come out of that hibernation, they'll be hungry and he'll see another surge in sales. So where to begin? What can we possibly
learn from this story? Well, first of all, if you ever mail yourself some live crickets, don't include any paper in the box because that would be a big mistake. But beyond that lesson, there are actually some really helpful things to notice in this story. Now, I already mentioned that Jeff knew to look for a niche with little competition and throughout successful school, you hear a lot of stories like this. Most of them won't have to do with live insects, but they do relate to this concept of finding markets where most people wouldn't expect to look. Now let's talk about
dropshipping. Dropshipping has a long history in the hustle world. Pre internet days, there were companies that advertised in magazines and lots of people would attempt to start this kind of business, some successfully and most unsuccessfully. And it continues today. But if you're interested in dropshipping, the way to succeed is not by searching dropship program in Google. That will lead you to people selling products about dropshipping, not the actual
dropshipping for the most part. And if you think about it, it makes sense. If it were that simple, everyone would do it. So in fact, the skill that's required to succeed in this kind of hustle is the skill of research. So if you're good at research, and you enjoy going on fact finding missions, you like going to page 10 of Google search results, looking beyond the obvious and trying to find something deeper. Well, dropshipping or just reselling in general is a really good
option for you to consider for your hustle. And when I spoke with Jeff last, he was about eight months into the cricket operation. He's putting all of his earnings back into his website and trying to improve search engine optimization. And for the most part, it doesn't take a ton of time between some customer service and emailing the dropshipper. He puts in about one or two hours a week. And he actually says that he hopes that amount of time will increase. Because if it does,
then it means he's receiving more orders. Well, as high school school listeners, I'm pretty sure that your story is going to develop a bit differently than Jeff's. I don't expect you to start a live insect dropshipping business. But if you listen to these stories, you begin applying them to your own hustle, you will see your own results. They will be unique.
Remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. You want to check out the show notes for today's episode, learn a little bit about dropshipping, maybe even orders from live crickets, or at least look at Jeff's website, go to sidehustleschool.com/46. I'm Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School, and I'll see you tomorrow with another story.
