If At First You Don’t Succeed, Make DIY Journals

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

[Music]

If at first you don't succeed, make DIY journals. Are you a journaler? Are you a doodler, a planner? Do you have a notebook and write things down? I carry my notebook with me as a security blanket of sorts, and I'm often writing down different ideas and tasks, things to do, or just things that are on my mind.

Friends, listeners, community, welcome to Sadosville School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. Today's story is all about two friends who try to start an online wedding platform, but they end up with something totally different. They actually end up with a monthly subscription service offering personalized DIY journals. Now we have featured different people making different kinds of journals a couple of times on the show.

Apparently journals are the new app. There's golden in their journals, just like George Washington used to say, and a couple of episodes that we've had before. Number 206 is about a law student who creates a $6,500 a month morning routine journal, and episode 494, a communications teacher who turns the love of journaling into an Etsy shop. So with this surfeit of journals out there in the world, how does someone get an idea to create something that is unique enough to stand on its own and to reach enough of a target audience to be sustainable? Well, if you are new to the show, we use a case study model, where every day I'm telling a different story of somebody who's creating a second income for themselves, usually without quitting their day job.

And in today's story, I'll tell you all about these two friends who make this journal idea come to life. Here's a quick thank you to our sponsor. They allow the show to be completely free to you, and then we will dive right in. [Music]

Mija Agrawal and Joe Yao go way back to a friendship in college. When they graduated the two friends with their separate ways, but that separation didn't last long.

A few years into their careers, Mija decided to start a side hustle in the form of a luxury wedding platform that would connect brides with vendors online. Her friend Joe had just finished a coding bootcamp, so it made perfect sense to partner up. Launching that project took quite a bit of planning, and they figured bullet journaling would be a great way to organize their thoughts and next steps. The idea of bullet journaling is to take a journal with dotted paper and sketch beautiful designs that you can use to track things like your weekly calendar, to-do lists, and perhaps a few things you are grateful for each day. Taking the time to hand draw your planner is supposed to be soothing, mindful, and clarifying.

The only thing was Joe and Mija were both terrible at it. They just couldn't recreate the gorgeous page designs that were trending on Instagram, and the time they spent trying over and over again to make everything look nice and pretty was actually destroying their productivity. In Mija's words, it was deflating. There had to be a way to capture the personal wellness and productivity side of bullet journaling without being an expert artist. But Mija and Joe really couldn't find any pre-made journals that worked.

The limited options out there were boring, one-dimensional, and just bland. They seemed like they were made by corporations, not by creative people. So in July of 2017, they tabled their wedding platform idea and immediately got to work on a new hustle that they called Silk and Sonder. The goal was to blend the best bullet journal concepts, lifestyle and productivity thought pieces, and planner designs to create a monthly-themed journal that would inspire self-care for the less artistic. It would include features like habit trackers, gratitude prompts, weekly planners, productivity hacks, inspirational quotes, and mindfulness exercises.

After two weeks, they had a minimum viable product, or MVP for short. That product had a few designs, articles, trackers, and a calendar printed out on regular sheets of printer paper. They folded that paper into journals and gave them to a few friends, let them play with them for a few days, and collected all the feedback they could. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, so Mija and Joe continued giving their free time to the project. They refined their digital graphics skills, set up a website from scratch using their coding skills, that was Joe, thanks Joe, and found a printing partner in Oakland who would work with small production runs.

They also set up social media accounts and started engaging with the bullet journal and lifestyle community by commenting on pictures of journal designs, particularly on Instagram. Some of the more influential people later ended up sharing Silicon Saunders designs with their own followers, which helped gain some pre-launch traction. All in all, their startup costs were just a few hundred dollars each, since they didn't have to place an order with the printer until they had sales. Finally, in September 2017, they launched the project in preparation for their first monthly journal in October. Thanks to that early social media traction, they actually got their first sale that same day on their website.

A few weeks later, they successfully fulfilled that first month's few dozen orders, finished up the journal for November, and began to ramp up marketing. What happened next was just a lot of hard work. More social media posts, reaching out to influencers, doing giveaways on Instagram, submitting guest posts to lifestyle blogs. Nothing fancy, just the tried and true methods that aren't easy, but usually work with enough patience. In month two, Silicon Saunders broke $1,000 in sales for the first time, but they also hit a major roadblock.

Their California printer was producing high-quality journals, but it was taking them far too long. You see, Mija and Joe weren't printing hundreds of journals a month, and they felt like they were always the last priority of that printer. Rather than taking two to three days to print their monthly journals, it was taking seven to nine. This big logistical problem ended up with customers receiving their journals several days into the month, and it just wasn't acceptable in the long run, so the hunt for another partner began. Thankfully, they found a printer in New York that was happy to guarantee short turnaround times and was easier to work with.

The journey since then hasn't been smooth sailing or backbreaking. It's just been a lot more disciplined, hard work, more strategic marketing, more cold emails to people, more creating. These slow and steady tactics are generating growth over the long term and starting to pay off. The June 2018 Journal of Silicon Saunders shipped to 25 states. They recently broke $3,000 a month in sales.

They have over 300 monthly subscribers and are seeing 30% growth month after month. They know they're doing something right because gift subscriptions make up 25% of all orders, and those recipients almost always subscribe on their own after the gift subscription ends. Decide income is great, but for Mija, the ability to facilitate self-care and personal growth for hundreds of people around the country is a reward on its own. More than anything, she says, that's the part she's most excited about growing. [Music]

So if at first you don't succeed, make DIY journals.

Or perhaps let's say if at first you don't succeed, just try something else. Don't give up, but don't hesitate to switch it up. If I go back to my early entrepreneurial days, more than 20 years ago, back in the days of the cavemen, I never thought I would sell Lego. I used to sell Lego and other toys online on eBay. I sold coffee for a long time.

I didn't grow up as a kid and say like, hey, one day I want to grow up and sell Lego and coffee on eBay, or anything else that I sold 20 years ago, or any of the businesses that I've had since then. Never thought I'd have a podcast. Even after podcasts had been out for several years, I wasn't an early adopter at all. So sometimes, or actually let's say very often, one project can lead to something else. Like you start going down one road and then you find, okay, this might not be a terrible idea or it might be, but it's just not the project for right now.

But along the way, I've discovered this other thing and that's what I want to do actually. And to me, this is another great benefit of having a side hustle because the stakes are low. This is not like your day job or a long career in which you're making this life transforming move. If it doesn't work out, you'll choose something else. And I think it's also not the same thing as getting distracted.

It's more about being willing to explore different ideas when you're just getting started and finding your way. If you've already found your way and you've found your direction, well then don't be distracted. But a lot of us are still in this process of exploration. And when you're in that phase, probably the worst thing you can do is commit to something for the longterm when you're not really sure if it's gonna work or if it's what you really wanna do in the first place. So congrats to Mihan and Joe.

This seems like a fun project. I will check it out myself and perhaps maybe you will as well. If you would like to see these journals, just come check out the show notes. Those are at sidehustleschool.com/585. This is episode 585 of the show.

As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Thank you for listening. Today, I'll be back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau and this is Side Hustle School.