This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hello and welcome. This is "Side Hustle School." I'm your host, Chris Guillebeau. Every day I've got a different story for you about someone who starts a side hustle without quitting their day job. How do they get their idea? How do they make it happen?
What challenges do they encounter and eventually overcome? And what can you learn from their experience? Today's story comes to us from South Carolina. It's about a user experience designer who starts a watercolor stationary brand. Now she markets this brand almost exclusively through Instagram and she was nice enough to throw in some free Instagram marketing tips, including three things you can do right now.
I actually need to take this advice myself and I'm gonna commit to doing that, at least two out of three of them. So I'll tell you what those things are. We'll talk a bit about how do you find manufacturers, especially for a paper product, but really anything. How can you use the process of reverse engineering to figure out where something came from? All of that is in today's story and commentary.
It's coming right up after this quick thank you to today's sponsor. [Music]
Renee Gutswiller has always had a bit of a creative streak. These urges were hardly encouraged by the creative role models she had growing up. Her mother was a full-time photographer and her grandmother had been a seamstress. Paired with the business acumen of her entrepreneurial inclined father, Renee was on the fast track to learning how to pursue a creative career.
She went on to get a master's degree in design management and landed a role as a user experience designer for a tech company in Charleston, South Carolina. But despite the creative elements of her day job, Renee realized that she still wanted more. She fell in love with watercolors and started filling her home with her works of art. The move to Charleston had brought many changes. Far away from her friends and daily routine, she found that she needed something a bit more substantial to fill her free time.
It would be nice if this thing made money. What Renee needed was a side hustle. Inspired by the beauty of this old coastal city and its influx of tourists, Renee decided to start painting watercolors at the area and selling them to visitors eager for a keepsake to take home with them. She called her new company Island House Papery and she wanted to sell her watercolors in the form of prints, cards, notepads, and of course, stationery. Or hold on, maybe we shouldn't say of course.
Why stationery in this digital age when snail mail is becoming a thing of the past? Well, it all makes perfect sense if you know one thing about Renee. Growing up, she had always collected stationery and was a huge fan of Lisa Frank. If the name Lisa Frank doesn't ring a bell, you've still probably seen her designs. She's known for outlandish stationery and school supplies full of bright colors and animal prints.
And from a young age, Renee had always dreamed of having her own stationery line. Whenever she would travel, she made sure to pick up stationery that had the place where she was traveling on it. So for her, it was a natural fit, but she still had to figure out how to actually make products in bulk. To get some inspiration, she started looking at the products that others like her were producing. What she noticed was that a lot of these producers often had their manufacturing partners listed somewhere on the packing of their products.
She made a list of the ones she found and began reaching out to them to get an idea of their rates. Based on that research, she found that paper products were much more cost effective to produce than other products. So building on her desires to join the ranks of Lisa Frank stardom, Renee started her paper rate with stationery notebooks and cards. When she first got started, she sold her products in person at market events and on her website. But these days, you can find those products in 10 different stores, eight of which are located in Charleston.
She found stores to feature her collection by doing research, mostly on Instagram. She then visited the stores if they were local to understand their vibe. After that research, she would go back to the store and give her elevator pitch along with some samples. Once she began making a consistent profit, coffee mugs and market totes seemed like a natural extension of the brand. So she started offering those as well.
So far, she's selling around $1,000 each month in product. The only expenses she has are printing. So she clears at least $700 each month. Her profit has been increasing recently because she's starting to print larger quantities, which makes her printing costs go down a lot. This is a low risk side hustle.
Her startup costs were under $1,000 and most of that was the cost of supplies that she was gonna buy anyway, or at least supplies that she had her eye on. Now we mentioned those local stories, but what about online buyers? How does she reach them? Well, most of her marketing is through Instagram. In fact, she says this social media platform alone brings in over 90% of her business.
So naturally we asked her for some tips and here's what she had to say, pay attention. First up, if you're running with a traditional Instagram account, you should update to a business account. A business account will provide you with customized analytics for your posts and it's free. It'll show you what time of day you gain the most followers, when you have the most engagement and so on. Second, from this information, know the time of day that your posts are going to do the best.
For most people, 7 a.m. to noon and around 9 p.m., this is Eastern Standard Time, are the prime hours of each day that you should be posting. But still, when you get your business account, you'll learn precisely when it is. And third, be consistent and don't worry about bombarding your followers. You should try to post every day.
I definitely need to apply these tips. I am very inconsistent with Instagram, even though I like that platform a lot. So I'm gonna take up the challenge and at least do two of those three things. Okay, the most challenging part for Renee has been getting strict with her time. Whenever possible, she tries to wake up a little bit earlier than she needs to for work.
This gives her a chance to check her side hustle inbox. If she doesn't do that, it's more challenging for her to concentrate at work and give it her full attention. So on those mornings that she doesn't wake up early enough, Renee sets aside a couple of 15-minute breaks, strategically placed in the morning and afternoon, that allow her to check that inbox and send any replies. Renee is an avid believer that if you write out your goals, you're more likely to make those goals happen. She sets daily goals for herself because she thinks it's good to look at tasks from a day-to-day perspective.
And it's also satisfying to check things off as you go. Writing things down and crossing them off can be a legitimate added boost of accomplishment. And fortunately for her, she has plenty of paper to write down her goals. Okay, so first, remember those Instagram marketing tips. Be sure you sign up for a free business account.
Again, there's no downside to it. You can make that change from a personal account to a business account in your settings on Instagram. From there, you're gonna learn the best time of day to post and be sure to be consistent, post at least once a day. So those tips are from her. For me, I wanna talk a bit about reverse engineering.
So the principle here is that a lot of information is public or at least semi-public. You just have to know where to look. And this is an important skill. If you can acquire the skill, you can use it in lots of different ways. Long, long ago, when I was selling things on eBay and other online auctions, the way I figured out what to sell is I would look at what's selling.
And then I would try to figure out, okay, where does that come from? Is there a manufacturer? Is there a distributor? Where can I buy those items and how much of a markup can I get? In this example with Renee, she needed to learn how to manufacture paper products and she didn't know.
So one of the first things she did was she looked at other products she liked in that same space. And she discovered, not surprisingly, that in the packaging for those products, at least for a lot of them, you could discover who the manufacturer or the printer was. And then of course, she reaches out to that company to talk about pricing, feasibility, logistics, and so on. Now the same principle is true with so many different things. Perhaps not everything, but a lot of products, even services, even blogs.
Like when I started writing my blog 10 years ago, I went to see what everybody else was doing, like people that I admired. And I tried to decode their process. I tried to look and see, okay, what systems are they using? What tools? How do they schedule certain things?
And it wasn't so much about copying from them, although probably in some ways I was. Hopefully I have my own twist on it, but you don't need to reinvent the wheel for a lot of things. If you want to make a paper product, you don't have to find a manufacturer that doesn't make paper products for anybody else. In fact, that's probably not a good idea, right? Because you want somebody who knows what they're doing.
So there's nothing wrong with looking and seeing, okay, how do other people do this? How can I apply this to my vision, my idea, the thing that I'm trying to make? So reverse engineering, thinking about how to decode a process is a powerful tool. Remember that. Remember as well, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better.
I want you to be able to take action on the ideas you hear on Side Hustle School. And by the way, if you want to find the show notes for today's episode, these are actually digital notes. They're not paper products, but you can find them nonetheless at sidehustleschool.com/473. I guess I assume you could print them out. I mean, there's no rule against that.
I'll be back again tomorrow. My parting words for today, no matter how much you push the envelope, it'll still be stationary. This is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.
