This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Oh, hey there, what's up? Welcome back to Sadduceal School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is episode 476 as we approach the end of the week. I hope you've been enjoying the latest batch of stories as much as I have enjoyed telling them to you and getting lots of great feedback by email, social media, comments in the Sadduceal Society and really all over the place. I am just as excited about this show as when we started 475 days ago
and each day I look forward to sharing this time with you. All right, so today is a story about chess. It is about an Atlanta chess champ who finds checkmate with a tutoring side hustle. It starts as a hobby and turns into a profitable passion project. Now, this guy is doing okay. He's making about $1,000 a month. Of course,
I'll tell you how he gets the idea, how he makes it happen and so on. And I'm also gonna have a couple of suggestions for him. You know, sometimes I like to focus on stories that are just getting going so that you can see, okay, this is the origin of something. And it might go on to be a huge success. Of course, it might not. But I don't want to
always tell you stories of like, oh, so-and-so makes $100,000 or whatever it is. Those stories are all true, of course. And I do think it's important you understand that this side hustle thing is not just something small, right? And some of the stories that you hear, people are able to grow the business until it's making quite a lot of money, often enables them to make all sorts of different changes, different life choices. But in most cases, even the really big projects, they all start with this seed, this kernel, this first attempt at something.
And so if you can't relate to making an extra $100,000 from your side hustle, maybe you can relate to making an extra $500 or $1,000 a month. And also, when you hear these stories, you might be able to think for yourself, not just based on what I say, but you might be able to think, "Oh, hey, I wonder what that person could do to be a little bit more successful. I wonder how they could take that initial success, which of course is fantastic, and turn it into something even greater." Okay, so without further ado, I'll bring you today's story right after this quick thank you to our sponsor. Do you remember what you were into when you were four years old? A lot of us were just into trouble. But Xi Haoqing was into the game of chess. In fact, by just six years
old, he knew it was something he wanted to take seriously. Where did Xi Hao acquire this passion? Well, it all started from his first chess mentor, his mom. She taught him the basics, knighting in him the love of the game early on. Then as he grew up, Xi Haoqing took it to the next level with the guidance of professional chess coaches. This led him to
top rankings in many chess tournaments, including first place in the Georgia State Championship. What's just as impressive is Xi Haoqing's ability to turn this lifelong interest into a successful side hustle, called Chess 1000. By a happy coincidence, 1000 not only references the chess rating that he helps his students achieve, but it also currently coincides with the extra $1,000 a month he's earning from it. Now, by the way, if you're wondering what Xi Haoqing's chess ranking is, it's $2,300. And if you're wondering what chess rankings mean in general, well, below $1,200 is a novice, and $2,700 is a world championship grandmaster contender. So Xi Haoqing is pretty good, in other words.
Chess 1000 is really built around Xi Haoqing's chess tutoring business, one that he started after college. He found that teaching chess was a nice compliment to his full-time job. Plus, he got to play a game he loved. Did you know that these days, about 200 million people play chess online? Whereas only 2 million people play chess in person, at least competitively.
Knowing that the vast majority of his market was online, Xi Hao decided to build a website. He took the initiative and learned how to use WordPress, watching YouTube videos to work through some obstacles along the way. From there, he used Mailchimp to build his network through an email newsletter. Having competed in many chess tournaments, he already had a good network to start, and the newsletter gave him a platform to reach out and spread the word. Still, despite this website and newsletter, 90% of his current student base comes from simply talking to parents at different tournaments. And for now, at least, most of his students
are kids or teenagers. He personalizes each session based on the student, teaching them different tactics, how to work to checkmate, finish off opponents, or just learn new patterns to get more pieces. All of it works together toward helping students acquire that 1000 rating. One great thing about a teaching-based business is that Xi Haoqing is able to have a recurring multi-session teaching plan for each student. Even with 15 students at a time in his roster, he meets with them multiple times a week or month, building repeat business. The cost
for his lessons range from $50 to $70 an hour, with the exact price based on any travel needed and the number of students within a session. At least based on the positive testimonials he features on the site, his students clearly love his approach to the game. And it's not just students. Parents rave about how their kids have improved. They talk about tournaments they've won and progress they've made.
Also, getting back to that name, Chess 1000. Once a student has achieved a rating of 1000 or higher, they can compete in both child and adult tournaments. Many of those tournaments have cash prizes. So this is a start of a side hustle. What's next? Xi Haoqing says that one-on-one networking
has been a great way to build his business, but he also wants to create online courses. Since he only has weekends and occasional weeknights to devote to the side hustle, building a more online business will help him efficiently scale. In fact, he might even be able to play a more offensive position, taking the materials and techniques he teaches one-on-one and bringing them to a wider audience of aspiring grandmasters. Okay, so when it comes to me and Chess, there's not a whole lot to say. At one time I had my own Chess set, but then I ponded it. You know, there's not much hope of me advancing
down the board. So instead of talking about my experience with Chess, let's talk about Xi Haoqing and his website and his project. So 90% of his current student base comes from talking to parents at different tournaments. This is both good and bad. Okay, so the good is he's already in this position through his passion, developing his love of chess and his skill at the game from age four to age six, all the way up to teenage years, college years and beyond. So it wasn't that hard for him to go to the next step of saying, "Okay,
I'm going to start a tutoring business. I know lots of people." And he's able to build that business to $1,000 a month. Okay, but he recognizes, and I think this is why he's starting a website and putting more attention there, that the potential market for people who could learn from him and people who could pay him to teach them is far, far, far greater than the people that he encounters at the tournaments he attends. And so basically the challenge for him, like the challenge for Xi Haoqing is to clearly communicate through his website what this is all about and why people should hire him. There's probably lots of other chess tutors or teachers around the world in somebody's local area that they could hire. Why him? And my thought when I took a look at his website, which we will link
up in the show notes, my thought was that his website is not really communicating the clear and strong promise that he actually provides through his business. I think the whole idea of having a number of saying chess 1000, like if you take my tutoring course, you're going to actually achieve this rating. And I think he actually has it down to a timeline, like within a certain amount of time or a certain number of lessons, you're going to be able to go to 1000 or higher. I think that's really good, really strong and specific. It's a clear promise, but if you look at the website, it's not super clear. The homepage of the
website just has a bunch of testimonials at the top, and normally testimonials are good, but the point of testimonials is to reinforce a promise. The promise itself is actually more important. If you look at the website and see all the testimonials, you're like, "Okay, these people like him. That's great. What does this mean for me?" So I think the promise should be like right from the top, sign up for my tutoring course, whatever he chooses to call it, maybe it's just chess 1000. And within this period of time, you're
going to achieve this ranking. Here's a little bit more about it. Here's why this is awesome. And here's why these other people think so. So the testimonials provide the social proof that the promise is actually more important. And then secondly, you need a call to action.
So on his website, he actually doesn't have much of a call to action. The call to action is just contact him. So I think it's really, really critical to make it easy for people to do something. I don't know how many webpages the average person visits every day. For some of us, it's probably a lot more than others, but you've probably heard the statistics about the number of advertising messages that we're all exposed to. It's something like 3000 messages
a day. Again, it probably varies, but the point is it's a lot. So you need to make it really simple. It needs to be clear like, "Here's the promise. Here's what I need to do. Just sign up." So that's my advice for SheHow, but not just for him, really for anybody.
If you're making your website, if you're thinking about your side hustle, think benefits first. Think what is your big promise? How's it going to change somebody's life? What's the promise? Why is it going to matter to them? And then what should they do to participate? How can
they sign up for your service? How can they purchase your product? What is the easiest process they can go through to do that? I really think that the more you work on those two things, especially in this example, but in lots of examples, this is somewhat universal. The more you can focus on a big promise and clear benefits, and the easier you can make it for people to take advantage of that, then the more successful you're going to be. So
I will leave you with that today. Congrats to SheHow. If you want to learn to play chess or get a high rating, maybe check out his site, which as I said, we will link up. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Those show notes are online at sidehustleschool.com/476. I'll be back tomorrow with the weekly recap and then a whole new
set of stories next week. Stay tuned. My name is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.
