This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
What's up? Hello! Welcome back. This is Sidus Will School. I'm Chris Guillebeau and I have another little thought exercise for you today. As you go through your daily routine, all the
stuff that happens to you in life, pay attention to everything you encounter, every purchase you make, social interaction, advertisement you come across. Just pay attention in general and ask, "How could it be made better?" Now, I don't mean to be openly critical about everything. I just mean you ask yourself, you apply this power of observation that you've been learning about. You ask yourself, "Hey, what's not awesome about this and how could someone improve upon it?" Well, today's story came about because one man followed through on his observation and then created a very unique physical product that has grown in sales over time. And it all comes from pennies, which are something that probably shouldn't exist anymore in America, but for some reason still do. I'll tell you the story and also why we just can't seem to get rid of the penny
right after this. Do you have an extra $8.46? Maybe you could put it to use creating a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Our story today comes from Maury McCoy who works in the investment world. He pitches large endowments, foundations, and pensions and tries to get them to give money to investment managers that he represents. In industry terms, he's what's known as an
independent third-party marketer. Maury had read a story about a father and son in Florida who had created a giant wall-sized portrait of Abe Lincoln made entirely out of pennies. He'd always been a curious person, having previously started different projects ranging from producing video games to helping out with his wife's Etsy creations to unsuccessfully launching an app that he says was still a neat learning experience and his curiosity could not be stopped. Looking at the photo in that story he kept thinking about ways he could improve the image quality and also make it smaller. He couldn't resist. Within 15 minutes he had a mock-up in Photoshop that looked pretty good. Then, as is
the nature of all Photoshop editing, about 38 versions later he finally had one he was truly satisfied with. At the time he had no idea if people would be interested in it. He didn't really do any testing, he just thought it was a fun project, and he figured others might like it as well. Now at this point he had to take a leap of faith and place a print run of 2,000 units for his newly designed poster portrait. The order size was so large because the printer setup cost $800 whether he printed one copy or a thousand, so he thought might as well try to get the cost per unit as low as possible. He called his creation the penny portrait, and here was his pitch.
Create a portrait of Abraham Lincoln completely out of pennies. The penny portrait is the perfect way to keep kids entertained and use all those pennies you've been collecting over the years. Each kit includes a poster of Abraham Lincoln made from images of actual pennies. The poster is suitable for framing as is, but with a little effort, some glue, and 846 of your own pennies, you can have a unique work of art that truly shines. And yes really, it shines. He picked up
his batch of 2,000 poster portraits from the printer and then got to work. A buddy of his bought the very first kit, which was nice because he wanted to be able to ensure his new online checkout system was actually working. To make his early first sales, he had to do a lot of the hustling himself. He sent out a bunch of emails, he hopped on various message boards and forums. He wasn't really sure where to find his ideal customers because there were really multiple target markets, so he just dabbled a bit with them all. And for the first two years of the project,
his sales initially depended almost entirely on the effort he put in. Now fortunately as time went on, sales began to happen more organically. He also decided to list the penny portrait on Amazon, where sales picked up much more. As far as income goes, he averages about $10 in profit per unit, and so far he sold over 4,000 penny portraits. So at some point he must have gone back to the printer for another run of 2,000. Several times he joked to his wife,
he wanted to be able to make enough to buy a Lincoln automobile from selling Lincolns made from little Lincolns. With more than $40,000 in net profit, it sounds like he's achieved that goal. So here we have a unique idea that draws on a couple of different hustle categories. It's one part product, one part art project, and now maybe one part reselling in a way since he's using Amazon for a lot of his sales. Now Morrie mentioned something about his copyright that I thought was worth noting. He says, "One of the advantages of my product is that it's something
I created myself so I own the copyright and can decide how it's distributed." Now normally when you're just getting started, you're generating ideas, you're experimenting, worrying about your copyright is probably one of your least worries, or at least it should be. You should be worried about getting a viable idea and then getting that out to the right people. But for something that truly is unique, like what Morrie made, owning the copyright has helped a lot. Now in tomorrow's story, you'll actually hear a different experience with someone who really does have to battle copycats and it affects her business quite a lot. But we'll save that for tomorrow. By the way,
if you're listening from outside the US, you may wonder why does the US still have pennies? Just about every other developed country, and plenty of developing countries as well, have long abolished such a low value of hard currency. It's actually economically inefficient to support the penny because it costs about 1.4 cents to make each one of them. In fact, a few years ago, the price of the raw materials from which it was made exceeded the face value. So there was at least a potential risk that someone could acquire a lot of coins and then melt them down for raw materials. I'm not quite sure that's legal, but it would be an interesting
side hustle. And it also tends to support the idea that we really should catch up with the rest of the world and leave the pennies to legacy projects like Morrie's penny portrait. Side hustle school listeners, if you too apply the power of observation, if you too pay attention and ask how things could be improved as you go about your daily life, and then you begin taking action on those observations, you too will see results. Remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. If you want to see the show notes for today's episode, check out the penny portrait and read about the movement to end the penny in America, go to sidehustleschool.com/54. I'm Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School, and I'll see you tomorrow.
