This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Hey, what's up? Welcome back to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. As we are rolling out week one of the show, I want to mention that there are different categories of hustles. So today we'll look at one that's a service, which is very different from the other three you've heard so far. On episode number two, you heard about an affiliate hustle.
And then you heard about a manufacturing hustle in episode three. And yesterday's episode, you heard about a social media kind of online influencer project. So as we go throughout the year, you'll learn to identify all the different categories as well as their strengths and weaknesses. And most importantly, you'll identify what kind of hustle might be best for you. So today's story is really fun. It's about how one man purchased a hundred dollar
microphone and used that to start a service-based hustle that brought in over $8,000 in just under a year and a half. This story comes from Parker McDonald in Morristown, Tennessee. By day, Parker works as a product manager in IT, but in his spare time, he helps small businesses all over the world by providing voiceover services and their videos and ads. Parker has always been interested in hustles, but his day job is pretty time consuming. After researching different opportunities online, he came across a blog post recommending a site called Fiverr. Now on the site, Fiverr.com, people post jobs for various services ranging
from logo design to web development and a bunch of other stuff. And you can compete for those jobs or people can select you for one of those jobs after you made a profile. It's definitely not a bad way to get started at all, but these sites usually come with some pretty big built-in limitations, as you'll see. So Parker started out proofreading, copy editing, and writing blog posts for a few different clients, but he quickly realized that the work wasn't worth the minimum wage pay. That's pretty much the main built-in limitation. He knew that in order for this to be viable, he had to find another way to
make money. One of Parker's overseas clients from Fiverr approached him to help him create a video for his business since he knew Parker was a native English speaker. That video turned out really well, and then that client began recommending Parker to other business owners he knew that were also seeking voiceover talent for their projects. Parker saw an opportunity to try something new that could potentially bring in more money, so he jumped on it and he purchased a $100 microphone and downloaded some free audio software. After deciding on a good, better, best pricing model for his packages, each with a different price, he started to pick up clientele. I mentioned that Parker's day job is pretty demanding,
but this new side hustle provided him with a decent amount of income despite him not being able to dedicate as much time as he would have liked to it. For those random projects that came his way on Fiverr, he had an average order price of just $20. But as he started to receive requests to build educational courses and training videos, that price jumped to $50 to $100 per order, and then an average of $200 to $300 for a whole project. By taking on 10 to 20 jobs a month, Parker found that he had extra money to take care of expenses like his car payment. He had recently got married and he and his wife were able to enjoy more evenings out. It provided him with the freedom of a financial buffer in the case
that he needed it. In fact, in under a year and a half, Parker has brought in over $8,000 without ever having to spend more than $100 on a microphone, so it's a true $100 startup. Even as Parker has enjoyed the extra income his side hustle has provided, his favorite part of the hustle is the variety of people he's been able to connect and work with. On any given day, he could be recording for a Chevy dealership in Taiwan or a rave music DJ in Eastern Europe, so it's definitely not boring. And he also likes to hear how they ended up using his voice around the world. His next goal is to continue developing this
project and to build more recurring revenue. So a couple comments on Fiverr. And by the way, Fiverr.com is spelled F-I-V-E-R-R.com, so it's like Fiverr. I guess just Fiverr.com was taken. Fiverr.com and other sites like this are good for practicing. They're entrepreneurial playtime or something because there's basically
no risk and you can sign up, make a profile, and literally tomorrow, or if not tomorrow very, very soon, you can have your first client. And if you do a good job for that client and get a good rating, you can have more clients. And if you've never done this, it's actually pretty fun because you're like, "Okay, I'm playing a little SimCity style game except I'm getting paid for it." So that's great to start, but in the long run, you probably don't want to make minimum wage. You don't want $5 clients, which is what that site is known for, or even $20 clients. So that's why what Parker has done is so interesting.
And I've seen this with some other stories as well with people that begin with this kind of a low-wage thing, but then they figure out a way to provide a more specialized service. And providing a specialized service will almost always be much more profitable than providing a generic commodity service. On that site, Fiverr in particular, there's a lot of people willing to do freelance writing. So freelance writing is very generic. It's very general.
But if you can find a way to specialize, that's when you're going to be much more successful. And that's what Parker found as he became more specialized. He developed a great reputation and he was able to increase his rates to where he's actually making significant money with this hustle. Well, it may not happen exactly like that for you, but if you listen to these stories and begin applying them to your own hustle, you will see results over time. Remember, production is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better.
And I also want to mention our show notes. Every episode has specific notes that go with it. There might be some links, some resources, other things for you to learn. If you go to sidehustleschool.com/5, you'll see the notes for this episode. And you can also send me a question or see where I'll eventually be going for the upcoming side hustle workshop tour. And I hope to see you tomorrow with another story. I'm Chris Guillebeau. This is
Side Hustle School.
