This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Long ago, there used to be ads in the backs of magazines that promised that you could earn money by mailing postcards. Not surprisingly, the promise was greatly exaggerated at best. Most of the time people did it, they just wasted their time and a lot of stamps. Well, today you're gonna hear about somebody who actually earns money mailing postcards. She's not just doing it randomly, she's got a business model to it.
Let's say you have a friend or an enemy or perhaps a frenemy and you want to prank your friend or embarrass your frenemy, what do you do? You send them an awkward anonymous postcard in the mail. They'll never know it was you unless you tell them. Welcome to Silenceful School. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
This California bartender's revenge by mail service takes 10 minutes a day and brings her an extra $100 a day. It is a creative, inventive idea. This episode also includes a little lesson on stealth Reddit marketing, which I'll try to be clear, I'm not necessarily endorsing, I'm just telling you how she did it. It's a fun story all around. Stay tuned for the details.
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Kelly McCarthy is a bartender, yoga teacher and mobile notary in San Diego, California. She's always had a few different things going on, but until this year, she's never had a side hustle in the form of an online business. Her new project, Revenge by Mail, came about when she heard about a guy who offers shipments of glitter to someone you don't like or just wanna play a joke on. It was such a simple and low cost product, Kelly thought it was brilliant, but she didn't think it was something she would pay for as a consumer. She would, however, pay money to harmlessly embarrass her frenemies.
A frenemy, if you're not familiar, is someone who is both your friend and your enemy. In other words, a little bit of both. So she took the glitter idea and made it her own. The concept of revenge by mail isn't really about taking revenge on someone, it's more about playing a prank or joke on someone. Kelly used her rudimentary design skills to create a series of fake promotional postcards.
They came from made-up companies and congratulated the recipient in an embarrassing way. Now, the whole point of a postcard, of course, is that anyone who gets the mail, in a home or business or wherever else, can see the postcard, right? So for example, some of the postcards that Revenge by Mail sends out includes something from a made-up website called bargainbrides.com. It says, "Congratulations on your mail-order bride, Jim." There's also one from the My Little Pony Friendship Club. Welcome to our newest member.
Those are a couple of the tamer ones. There's also a popular one from XXL Mail Enhancement that says, "Congratulations, you've reached gold-level status. Your package is on the way." Now, this is a family-friendly show, so for her most popular postcard, you're gonna have to check out the notes to see it. I'll just say it congratulates the recipient on being a frequent buyer of a highly personal product. Kelly's startup process was extremely simple.
She didn't know how to make a website, so she Googled how to make a website. She used Vistaprint for printing the postcards with a total startup cost of $250, and she buys postage stamps as she goes along. So she's got the idea. She's figured out how to design and print the postcards, and she's figured out how to make a website. How would she get the word out?
Well, this is interesting and controversial, so I'm just gonna tell you exactly what she did, along with a disclaimer, don't try this at home, or at least if you do, make sure you know what you're getting into. Her initial marketing strategies did not produce fruit. She tried paying for Google AdWords, she tried reaching out to bloggers, she tried doing affiliate marketing, and nothing worked. As interesting as it is, it's a tough product to market, because Facebook, for example, won't let you advertise adult or political products, and some of her postcards played on adult or political themes. Even though she's not really selling adult products or political products, it's hard to explain to them that it's just a postcard.
So then she had a friend of hers post a photo of one of the postcards on Reddit. This friend didn't say anything promotional, he just said something like, "Hey, I got this postcard in the mail. "Thought it was funny." That's because the Reddit environment is not super welcoming to people who come there with something to promote. Because it was posted under the guise of, "Hey, I just got this thing in the mail," it got 50,000 upvotes in two hours. In fact, it became the top Reddit post on the front page for about five hours, and Kelly's inbox was dinging with another sale almost every second.
She ended up with $4,000 in sales in just a few hours. For the next few days, she was handwriting postcards from sunup to sundown, but she says that positive reinforcement was the best feeling in the world. Now, Reddit eventually took down the post because the photo included some personal information. It included somebody else's address in the background of the photo. So ironically, it wasn't taken down for being promotional, it was taken down because it violated some other guideline.
But thanks to the exposure she got from that, and now that the website has been up for a while, she's getting visitors and orders every day through Google. In fact, these days, she's bringing in around 10 orders a day at $10 each. The postcards cost 10 bucks each, so she's making an average of $100 a day. And the time commitment to do this is about 10 minutes a day, so not a bad wage. This whole experiment has got Kelly thinking about what comes next.
She's already working on her second online project hoping to build more passive income. And if you ever need to take revenge by mail or just play a prank on someone, maybe you should order up a revenge by mail postcard. [Music]
All right, several things to point out here about this project. First and foremost, two disclaimers. I made the disclaimer about Reddit.
I don't wanna get in trouble there. I'm not telling everybody to go out there and spam Reddit and post promotional stuff all the time. She definitely took a little bit of risk in doing that, but of course in her case, it paid off well. And secondly, second disclaimer is, her project isn't mean, okay? It's actually funny.
Like I went to take a look at it before we profiled it on the show because I've seen a couple of similar things before which are actually about insulting people for real. And that's not really the spirit of what she's doing here. So for example, she said a couple of times she's had people ask for something like, "Hey, you're fat." And she's not gonna send out an anonymous postcard saying, "Hey, you're fat." Or whatever else is like a legitimate insult. It's pretty clear from looking at the postcards that it is a joke, it's a prank. And maybe not everybody's gonna get the joke or not everybody's gonna get the prank.
But I do think there's a distinction there, at least in intent. Also, she had some really great advice. We always ask people like, "What would you advise somebody else who's thinking of doing something like this?" And remember that her idea came from when she saw somebody else's idea about sending glitter in the mail. And she thought, "Well, that's a brilliant idea, but I personally would never pay for that. What would I pay for?
Oh, I think this postcard thing could actually work." So what she said was like, "When you find an idea you like, don't say I wish I'd thought of that. Rather, you should ask yourself, how can I put my own spin on that?" It may seem like every good business idea is already taken, but learning about existing profitable side hustles can be the most valuable brainstorming tool. I love that quote because that's essentially what I'm doing here on Side Hustle School. Like every day I'm telling you these different stories, not expecting you to go and start your own postcard project, or not expecting you to start selling bidets, like I talked about yesterday. But ideas can lead to other ideas.
So it can indeed be valuable brainstorming to consider all these different ideas and approaches. And then last but not least, don't forget, my friend Marie Forleo always likes to say, "Everything is figureoutable." Again, Kelly didn't know how to make a website, so she Googled how to make a website. I just, I love that. She didn't know how to print postcards, so she spent some time looking that up. She wasn't a designer, but in some ways, the lack of polished design skill actually kind of fits this kind of project.
Like it would be weird if the bargain brides postcard, congratulations on your mail order bride, looked legit. Like I mentioned about the not being mean thing, most people can look at this and see, okay, it is a joke. So everything is figureoutable. There is an idea out there for you two. Maybe you'll hear about it on the show.
And if you're new to the show, don't forget that all the archives are completely free. We are in episode 563. All 562 previous episodes are completely free. You can listen whenever you'd like. You can just come to sidiscool.com to download those.
And the show notes for today's episode in particular are at sidiscool.com/563. As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. I wish you and your friends and your frenemies even a wonderful day. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Sidiscool."
