English Teacher Turns Passion for Verbs Into Online Income

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

[Music]

Hey there, what's up? This is Side Hustle School, my name is Chris Guillebeau. Let's talk today about phrasal verbs. Does that sound exciting, phrasal verbs? If you don't geek out over grammar, I will tell you exactly what phrasal verbs are.

And if that doesn't sound too exciting to you, well, let's talk about how an English teacher makes extra money. Is that better? It's a story about an English teacher who turns a passion for verbs into online income. This teacher creates a verb that shows students how to use those phrasal verbs. So you'll wanna turn it up.

And that will make more sense once you know what phrasal verbs are, if you don't. Now, by the way, as I was researching this episode, I came across a study that showed two thirds of teenagers and young adults these days do not know what a floppy disk is. That's right, two thirds of teenagers and young adults don't know what a floppy disk is. And in fact, in this study, a lot of them identified the floppy disk as the save icon. You know, when you go to save something on your computer, they're like, that's the floppy disk.

Well, for any young people out there, that save icon used to be an actual thing called a floppy disk. Now, also in that same study, half of the respondents didn't know what a cassette tape was. Last but not least, if your school ever used an overhead projector, do you remember those? Well, some of us might remember them, but apparently they just don't exist anymore. Not a good side hustle to start, because 71% of teenagers and young adults have no idea what they are.

Maybe one day there will be a Renaissance movement, everyone going to vintage stores to acquire a retro overhead projector, but it seems that day is not today. Time marches on and so does our episode. So let's say thanks to today's sponsor and then go straight into that story. [Music]

Teaching is one of the most important professions in the world. And taking the knowledge you've gained in your own life and passing it on to others is a noble endeavor.

But, as many of us know, the salary of a teacher isn't usually enough to live the high life. Sometimes it isn't even enough to get by. There's an old joke that goes, "Teachers deserve a lot of credit. Of course, if we paid them more, they wouldn't need it." In most cases, the earning potential is limited to the amount of time they are physically in front of students. And there's only so many hours in a day.

So what do you do when your passion, your drive, your calling doesn't align with making a lot of money? Well, you get creative. This is the situation Alex Bricker from Fort Collins, Colorado found himself in. Alex is an ESL teacher, that's English as a second language, and he enjoys his job. In fact, he loves his job.

It's purposeful, meaningful, and challenging in the best of ways. More than five years ago, Alex had tried starting a side hustle together with his brother. Their goal was to create an online directory of businesses for sale. That project wasn't a big success and never made much money, but it did teach Alex a few lessons and it gave him the confidence to have it go at something else. So in early 2017, he got interested in starting another project.

He went back to the blackboard. Are there blackboards still? Maybe those are like overhead projectors, I'm not sure. Anyway, he went back to the drawing board, let's say that, and after throwing around a few ideas, he devised a truly unique concept. One that he was fairly certain he could find a market for and make money with.

For his second lesson in the entrepreneurial classroom, Alex took the go with what you know approach. Rather than trying to understand a new market that he knew nothing about, that online directory of businesses for sale, he looked at what he was already doing, teaching English to international students. He understood those students' needs better than anyone and he thought he had a product idea that truly added value. He also thought this product idea was truly one of a kind and innovative. Now, before I can explain exactly what this project is, I gotta give you some background here.

I'll do that with a quick English lesson of my own. By the way, apologies to all the real teachers out there. I am not an ESL student, but I am a high school dropout. I'll be at one with a master's degree, it's complicated. And you know what else is complicated?

The English language. Native speakers like myself, perhaps like you, find that difficult to understand. There are so many quirks of this language that make it tough for non-native speakers. And one of those quirks, one of those challenges, those things that make it hard, they're called phrasal verbs or multi-word verbs. So take the phrase turn off, like turn off the light or turn off the stove.

To a lot of us, that sounds intuitive. You turn off the light, you turn off the stove. But English students often get tripped up because the word turn normally means turn around, like go left or right, not to turn something off or on. Make sense? Other examples could include come on, break down, or leave a five-star review of recital school.

At least two of those three examples are accurate. And by identifying the difficulty in phrasal verbs, Alex had identified a huge problem, one that millions of students all over the world are struggling with. Alex's idea was to gamify the learning process and make it easy for phrasal verbs to stick in the minds of students. The concept he landed on was a card game, a way to make learning fun by producing random phrasal verbs. The name of the game was phrase it.

And it was here that the teacher became the student because for the first time in his life, Alex needed to have a product manufactured. He thought about doing it overseas before deciding to make it in the US. And after a bit of research and back and forth, he found someone who could make them for him. In the end, his startup costs were around $4,000. Now it's not a small amount of money, of course, but when compared to a brick and mortar business or lots of other businesses, a lot of traditional startups, it's not a huge amount.

It's not completely unreasonable. So Alex did that, he made his product and now he needed customers. And to find those customers, he decided to first try direct sales. He made those direct sales to his colleagues, fellow English and ESL teachers. That gave him a little confidence and then he spoke at a couple of ESL conferences.

He would mention his product before and after the presentation. At one of those conferences, he sold $1,300 worth of phrasal games in a single day. Now he had some real validation, sales from people outside of his direct network. His theory was that even though he wanted an online side hustle, he wanted that passive income, he knew that direct sales could be a good way to test the market. He figured if he could physically sell the product to people and they liked it, he could find a way to scale that process online.

And that's exactly what happened. After achieving some success using that direct method, Alex moved to amazon.com, specifically the Fulfilled by Amazon program, where they stock your inventory, place it on their website and handle all the logistics. This made things much easier because if you can find a winning project, something that people want, Amazon will provide a steady stream of customers. Within days of listing on Fulfilled by Amazon, he'd made his first few sales. Alex, his wife and kids celebrated in one of the best ways I know.

They had a pizza delivered. Hmm, I might celebrate that way later today. I haven't sold anything on Amazon. These days, that platform, Fulfilled by Amazon, is the main driver of sales for the Phrase It game. The project has more than paid for itself and just a year in, Phrase It is generating an average of $1,000 a month in net income, mostly through those Amazon sales.

And that's not all. The revenue generated from the card game enabled him to launch a new product line. So from January of 2018, versions of the game are now available in both dice and magnet form as well. This has been driving even more revenue and Alex expects things to grow fast. In fact, while his average is $1,000 a month, last month he made more than $3,000.

The total money earned so far isn't quite enough to quit his job, but it's a good start. Alex is able to supplement his teaching income while essentially teaching more students without being on the clock. Teaching continues to be his passion and he's excited to see what happens with the new versions of Phrase It. This is a story that deserves more than just a passing grade. [Music]

All right, congratulations to Alex and thanks as well Alex for that lesson in phrasal verbs.

I had to do some reading myself to make sure I knew what I was talking about. And the thing that stood out to me the most about this project was its specificity. Okay, so we know that there is a huge market of people learning English, just like learning lots of other languages as well. But this is not just a general learn English game. It tackles a problem that a lot of students struggle with.

So again, the specificity, I think that's why it's doing well. I think that's why it has the potential to go on and do even better. And it does lead itself to natural expansion, not just in terms of the different mediums. So he went from the card game to the dice game to the magnet game. But presumably there are other grammar issues like phrasal verbs that could be developed into a similar game.

So Alex is not just making a one-off product, even though that would be cool too, he really has the potential to make a whole brand here. So that's awesome. And then also I like what he did about selling it in person because it's totally true. If you can sell something in person, great. Now what you do is you take what you've learned and you focus those efforts more on selling online.

'Cause in the long run, you are gonna be able to reach so many more people selling online through Fulfilled by Amazon like he's doing or through some other platform or network or just through your own website. But what often happens is people just start doing the online thing and it doesn't go super well because they've got something wrong in terms of the message, in terms of the copy, the offer. Basically there's a problem that they could have solved which they could have gotten more information about if they had started with a direct sales model first. So if Alex had done that talk at the conference and nobody liked the product, he would have some information that's helpful. He would say I need to rethink this or I need to change something about it.

But because he had that validation, he was then able to move forward with confidence in doing the online sales, which are now making, as I said, $1,000 a month or even $3,000 last month alone. So can't wait to see what happens with that as well as so many of our stories that we're featuring every day. I'm really excited to see all these fun things come across my desk. I hope that you enjoy hearing about them as well. Don't forget, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better.

I wanna hear about your project at some point. Feel free to touch base, let me know how you're doing. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/499. That's $499, almost there to $500. Come check those out if you wanna learn more about phrasal verbs or if you just wanna see Alex's project.

All kinds of fun stuff there and of course we've got much more on the way. Thank you for joining me. I'll be back tomorrow, of course. My name is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]