Graphic Designer Paints a Picture Worth $8,000/Month

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

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Hey there, greetings and welcome. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You are listening to Side Hustle School. This is episode number 587. Every single day I'm bringing you a different story of someone who is creating an extra income for themselves.

They're doing this by working smarter, not just harder. And in many cases, they are creating an asset, something that has the potential to make money for them while they are sleeping or while they're doing something else. Now today's story definitely fits that bill. It features a graphic designer who paints a picture worth $8,000 a month. This designer is in fact the picture of success with a side hustle that draws in a full-time income.

And the story includes some lessons in market research and finding a way to give people what they want. In fact, her early goal was just to make a few hundred dollars a month to contribute toward her retirement account. But by paying attention and tweaking as she went along, she ended up being much more successful. So if you have an idea of doing something artistic and not just doing it for yourself, but by doing it in a way that is bringing value to others and bringing some money to your bank account, because it is side hustle school after all, then you might like this story. Stay tuned and I'll tell you all about it after this quick thank you to our sponsor.

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Jade Orlando has always loved expressing herself through art. Pages of journals, margins and notebooks, you name it, she's drawn on it. The lifelong artists ended up in a career designing illustrations for a children's apparel company. But even with a nine to five that involved endless opportunities to create art, Jade still felt stifled. Her art was bound by client expectations, rules to follow, and even color requirements.

Also, she was always creating art on her computer and never with her hands. She had the desire to make some extra money in her spare time. And what better way to combine that search for artistic expression with a chance to potentially produce a second income. With these twin goals of creativity and money-making, Jade did some market research on Etsy and Pinterest during her lunch break. She wanted to see what kinds of art did well, what kinds of things she liked and didn't, and see what was missing in the vast online marketplace.

She'd noticed that there was a market for downloadable clip art on Etsy and Creative Market, typically featuring an abundance of floral prints. But there wasn't a lot of high quality character art or children's based watercolor packs. Jade had experience in both those things, watercolor and children's illustration, so what better way to build her early retirement fund than by making something for sale? It was important to balance the two goals of money-making and stretching her creative brain. So she started her side hustle by just focusing on creating things that she liked to draw and that she only drew for fun after work.

From there, it was just a matter of setting up her Etsy and Creative Market stores and creating enough initial pieces. When Jade felt like she had enough initial stock, she set herself a goal of earning an extra $400 a month for that retirement fund. She took a deep breath and posted her first items for sale. She didn't expect overnight success, especially since she was a new seller without any traffic, but then the unexpected happened. Her first sale came in six hours later.

She said it was such a surprise. Etsy makes a cash register noise on your phone when you make your first sale, and I was so excited. It was only $5.50, so I didn't do anything special to celebrate, but it was still a milestone. It turned out that these low-priced digital downloads of clipart had the potential to sell a lot. One sale turned into two, then 10, then 100.

Eventually, a few months in, Jade had to mute the cash register noise on her phone since she was beginning to make more from her side hustle than her day job. What an inconvenience, man. All those notifications telling you that you've got money. File under first-world side hustler problems. Riding the buzz of success and more creative inspiration, Jade created enough prints that she could essentially run a passive income side hustle.

She made the project fit into her life, even taking several months off to plan her wedding, get married, and take a honeymoon. All she needed to do to make hundreds of dollars a day during that time was answer a few customer inquiries a day. Startup costs were $0 because she already had the art skills and the paint supplies. She joined Etsy because they offered a trial with 30 free product listings. She did no paid advertising and last year went from $0 in income to $67,000.

This year, Jade is on track to draw in about $90,000 from her Etsy and creative market stores, even though she took those three months of the year off. Because her art tends to be consistent and doesn't heavily rely on seasonal pieces, her monthly income, that is her second income, she still has the day job, her monthly income is consistent too. Her highest earning month this year was $9,500, but it usually hovers right around $8,000. She says she owes this consistency to her extensive market research and knowing where the gaps are. During that research phase, she looked around at what kinds of things people sold, how they sold them, where they sold them, and she mapped out what was missing.

As she explained it, people sell all sorts of things digitally. So if you're not a watercolor artist, there's still plenty of other areas to sell digital downloads. Her skills might be specialized because she already had that background, but for other people, she recommends thinking about what you're good at and how you could sell something related to it that is digital. That way you can produce it once and people can pay for it over and over. Then you might have that problem of having to turn off the cash register sound on your phone.

Passive income is such a hassle. Jade is now well on her way to early retirement, especially since her watercolor print shop has led to other freelance works she can undertake in addition to running the store. She's planning to branch out and open her own shop outside of Etsy and Creative Market. But before that, Jade said she would love to get an assistant involved to process the artwork so that she can get back to what she loves doing, focusing on the painting. Well, I think that's pretty cool.

She initially hoped to save $400 a month, but now that she or she's on track to make $90,000 a year on the side. I think we can safely say she has overshot her goal. So good work, Jade, that's amazing. And there's lots of lessons here, you know. Lesson number one, there's nothing wrong with looking to the market to see what kind of art you should create.

Or let's say what kind of content, what kind of product, what kind of service, whatever it is. There's a time and a place to write in your journal. There's a time and a place to just make something for yourself, that's totally fine. But there's also a time to be a professional. And if you want to connect your art, or again, whatever it is you want to make with something that people are gonna pay for, then it has to connect to demand.

It has to connect to what people value. And this digital clip art that she's been able to make, she found a gap in the marketplace. Nobody was making these kinds of things that she is. And of course, if you'd like to see what she's doing, you can just take a look at the show notes page, which I'll mention in a moment, and you can see her Etsy shop, her creative market shop, and see exactly the kind of work that people are paying for over and over. Now, most of our listeners are not watercolor artists, and that's not the point of the show, is to say, "Go and do exactly what Jade is doing." But this process that she followed is replicable in lots of different ways, in lots of different fields.

So when you take the time to be a professional, and when I say professional here, I don't mean full time, I just mean that you're taking it seriously. When you take the time to do that and do the kind of research that Jade did, that's when you can find your work in such demand, just like she's experienced. So it doesn't happen by magic, but it can happen with effort. I will leave you with that today. As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better.

Those show notes that I mentioned are online at sidehustleschool.com/587. Come and check out what Jade is doing. You can also learn more about Creative Market. We haven't talked about that in quite a while. It's another marketplace, kind of like Etsy.

But focus more on digital items from the creative and design communities. I hope you enjoyed this story, and I hope you will come back for more. We've got one coming up every single day. Be sure you are subscribed in Apple Podcasts, or on the website, or wherever it is that you prefer to listen to podcasts. I just do my thing over here, and you can listen however you like.

My name is Chris Guillebeau, and this is "Side Hustle School." [Music]