This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Greetings and welcome. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. Thank you for joining me for another exciting episode. Today I've got an interesting story for you about some creative thinking.
All right, so here's the question to set it up. What do you do when you have an idea, but then discover that the most obvious way to reach customers is saturated or just highly competitive? All right, so you've got something that you know you can work if you can only reach the right people. But the most obvious way to reach those people seems really difficult. Well, in a situation like that, there are three main options.
You can, first of all, number one, give up. You can say I'm gonna try something else because I can't figure this out. You can, second of all, bang your head against the wall and just try really hard. And you know it's highly competitive, but you think somehow I'm gonna be able to stand out. And you may be able to be successful doing that, but it is an uphill battle.
The third option, or perhaps the alternative, is to find another way in. Like you know you've got this good product or service. How else can you reach people? How else can you reach those potential customers in a way that kind of goes around what everybody else is doing? Okay, so to illustrate this, today's featured story finds another way in.
This story is all about a public policy researcher who starts a Washington, D.C. tour guide business and overcomes the hurdle of competitive TripAdvisor reviews. So in his case, the service is private tours and the obstacle, or the hurdle, is this highly competitive world of TripAdvisor reviews. Stay tuned and I'll tell you how he finds another way and manages to create this successful second income. [Music]
Rob Pittengolo loves hanging out with people and he also loves his hometown, Washington, D.C.
For four years, he worked a second job, apart from his day job, as a part-time tour guide. Doing that, he got to meet interesting people and show them around the nation's capital. A big chunk of the D.C. population works in government and Rob is no different. His full-time job is in public policy research.
And in addition to the population of government employees in D.C., there are also a lot of tourists. These tourists can give the city a constant hum of excitement. Sometimes it even made Rob feel like he was on vacation himself. And that's why he spent a lot of his free time in that second job working as a tour guide. It wasn't his own side hustle.
He worked for one of the biggest tour operators in the city. As a true people person, Rob most enjoyed the small, intimate private tours with only a few people. But when working for a large operation, there are very few opportunities to give those kinds of tours. The real money for those companies is in volume. So the chance to lead a group of only a few people rarely comes up.
Rob looked for a solution outside that tour company and he decided to take matters into his own hands. He took a step that America's founding fathers would be proud of and inched himself closer to the American dream. What did he do? Well, he decided to start his own side hustle. He'd offer private tours that he knew tourists would love.
He fleshed out his idea. He designed a guide book and he even had a custom t-shirt printed because you know, every tour guide needs a custom t-shirt. Rob was ready for business. And so to get customers, he first thought he would use TripAdvisor. Go where the tourists go, right?
However, it's not so easily done. Competition in DC for tour guides is fierce. There are currently more than 150 companies listed in the tour section of TripAdvisor. With 22 million tourists visiting each year, it's easy to understand why this is a good business for the right people. Still, because there were so many companies, you can't just add your listing to the site and hope for the best.
TripAdvisor prioritizes reviews above everything else. So when you're new to the party, you're at a real disadvantage. In Rob's case, he found that some of the top companies in DC had hundreds of reviews already. His revelation led him to a hard truth. The difficult part of starting his tour company would be getting people to know he even existed.
As the Buddha once said, if a guide talks in the city and no one is around to hear him, is he really a guide at all? Instead of heading down the same path as everyone else and fighting over TripAdvisor crumbs, Rob thought differently. He decided to try YouTube as a way to reach potential customers. Now this turned out to be a great insight. You might not realize this, but YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, second only to Google.
And Google actually owns YouTube because, you know, world domination. With that knowledge to guide him, Rob decided to use what digital marketers call YouTube SEO. So YouTube search engine optimization. That's the process by which you optimize your video content and descriptions around certain keywords. After launching a basic website with WordPress, he started posting videos on his own channel.
He called it Travel Hacks DC. His videos were on topics like how to ride the DC Metro and tips for visiting DC museums. He used relevant tags and descriptions that he thought people would be searching for. He made his videos short and informative and also injected a sense of his own personality into each one. The goal was to make his videos come up at the top of search results when people were looking for information on visiting DC.
In those videos, he directed people to his website where he could then sell them on the private tours of DC. The unconventional strategy worked like a charm and produced almost instant results. In fact, it was so successful that Rob barely had time to celebrate his first sale. In the same week he made his first booking, he then booked three more tours. He says he had to celebrate on the job.
And with all that interest, he had to figure out the best pricing model. So he came up with two structures. Customers would pay either $250 a group for a private tour or $49 per person for solo bookings where they would join a pre-existing group. He wanted it to be cost effective for families and larger groups, not unreasonable for a solo traveler or couple. These prices are comparable to what other companies charge, but they can't match the personal service and attention that he gives to each customer.
With that initial success came the motivation to keep at it. Rob learned more about YouTube SEO, and he realized that the more he posted, the more they would reward his existing videos with higher rankings. Since he launched the channel around a year ago, he's aimed to post a video every single week with useful tips for navigating DC as a tourist. Now you might be thinking that to get started on YouTube, you need some high-end AV equipment. Well, at least if you're new to the show, you might be thinking that, because if you've been listening to Side Hustle School for a while, you know we are all about being resourceful.
Rob films all his indoor footage with a GoPro camera. The total costs for setting up his side hustle were around $300. And yes, that includes that custom printed T-shirt. In less than a year of working on the project part-time, Rob is now averaging $1,500 a month. The biggest challenge or roadblock, in fact, you might call it a filibuster, is the seasonality of this business.
While millions of people visit DC every year, they aren't spread out equally over the full 12 months. In fact, the winter months can be so quiet that there are barely any tours running at all. This means that there are some months when Rob does bumper business and others where he may book only one or two tours. But being an unconventional thinker, Rob already has a plan in place to counteract this little problem. His goal is to increase and diversify the types of tours he offers.
In 2017, he offered pretty much only one tour the whole year, the National Mall Tour. For this season, he plans to expand that offering to include a Capitol Hill tour and a seasonal cherry blossom tour. With those extra tours, he can increase his revenue per month during the bumper period, which will hopefully then see him through the slower months. Using his own initiative, Rob is guiding himself to the bank, earning that $1,500 a month and on track for more. Not bad at all for a little-known public policy researcher working on the side and doing it in his own way.
All right, so instead of giving up or banging his head against the wall, Rob got creative. Remember, there were three options. If you encounter a situation where you've got an idea but there's a lot of competition or the market just kind of seems saturated, you know you can do this thing well if only you can reach the right people. Rob chose door number three. So door number one is give up.
Door number two is just bang your head against the wall, you know, try to do it a little bit better than everyone else. But that's difficult. So door number three was to get creative and try something totally different. And that was YouTube SEO, making these little videos. Obviously, that was the much better approach for him and he's already standing out.
I just took a look at his website and some of the listings and here's how he describes his business. TripHacks DC offers Washington DC travel tips and hacks as well as 100% private customizable tours. These give visitors a much more personal experience than they would get on a typical large group tour. So he's basically taking direct aim, direct target at these larger companies. And he knows those companies well since he worked for one for a while.
And the pitch is, hey, come with me and you're gonna get a better experience, right? You're not gonna be with 100 people or whatever the number usually is. So that's great. I also think though it could still be good to pursue that TripAdvisor goal. Like simultaneously, while he is pursuing this creative strategy, why not also like do everything you can to get good reviews on TripAdvisor to move toward the top.
And I think he's doing that. Like I just took a quick little look and there are 153 tour companies listed on TripAdvisor for Washington DC. And right now he has number 66 of 153. So he's kind of sitting like solidly in the middle there. I think the goal should be, I mean, top 20 for sure.
Definitely top 10, if not the top five. I mean, that would be amazing. And clearly you can still build a pretty successful little business without doing that. But if he could simultaneously work toward that while continuing to produce these videos, while developing the tours and building them out a bit more like he's doing, that seems like it would have potential to make this even more sustainable. So anyway, congratulations to Rob.
I hope that story gets somebody thinking. What is it that you can do if the market's saturated, if you think there's too much competition, if you think you don't have a unique idea, I don't think you should be stopped by those reasons. I think you can still find a way to make something work just like all the stories I tell you every day. And I've got more coming up, so stay tuned. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better.
If you wanna see the show notes for today's episode, take a look at Rob's site, his little business, and see what he's doing. Just come over to sidehustleschool.com/508. That's for episode 508, oh my gosh. We are rolling along and more is on the way. My name is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.
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