This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
It always seems impossible until it's done. Have you heard that before? Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is the weekly recap.
I believe it is the 33rd weekly recap of our second season. For those listening in real time, Labor Day is coming up in just a couple of weeks. We're doing something special with the Onward Project, a special episode or two. All about Labor Day habits, all about the idea of reclaiming Labor Day to make it a happier Labor Day. Stay tuned as that rolls out.
I'm also planning an event in San Francisco this fall, which will be my first public event in quite a while. I've been holed up this summer, not traveling too much, not doing a lot of public events, but I'm gonna start doing some more again this fall. And one of them will be in San Francisco, October 16th or 17th, sometime in that time range. When I know more, I will let you know, and hopefully I can see you if not there, maybe somewhere else. I think I'm gonna be in Oklahoma at some point.
I think I'm going back to Atlanta at some point, New York City. So, you know, stay tuned and I'll get back on the road. Just gotta finish this book. And in today's recap, I wanna tell you a couple of quotes from some of the people we have featured on the show. I've also got a throwback audio update from someone that we featured long, long ago, week number one of Side Hustle School.
And she has grown her business quite a lot since then. So I'll let her tell you by how much and what she's done to make that happen. So first about advice. Okay, I'm calling this episode when to ignore good advice or when to ignore at least well-meaning advice. Now this week on episode 592, it was all about an agricultural teacher who earns $200,000 selling lesson plans.
That was actually $200,000 just last year. She's been operating this business for quite a while. Started it as a side hustle, of course, and now does it full-time together with her husband. Now she had a quote from our notes, our interview with her that I didn't actually include in the story, but I was looking at it later and I was like, I should throw this in somewhere because it's important. And she said, as she's grown her business, here is something that she has learned.
She says advice from customers is great, but take it with a grain of salt and not as an absolute truth. Because what they want and what they will buy are two very different things. I have tried to highlight that point a couple of times as well, but I think it bears reinforcing, if you have tried to sell something and it hasn't worked out, there could be any number of reasons why that's the case, but maybe this is it. Sometimes your customers, your clients, your prospects are great sources to go to for thinking, okay, what do I develop next? What is the next product or service?
And sometimes they aren't. Sometimes they're looking to you for leadership. They're looking for you to figure out, okay, what is the next thing? And just because people say they want something does not mean they are willing to pay for it, as Alicia said in a different way. Totally true.
And next, last week, I think I also mentioned, I was reviewing some notes from a story we featured long ago. This is all about the book I'm working on, which you'll hear about it at some point. But in episode 111, 111, I told the story of James Aschenhurst. And James is an organic chemist who started an organic chemistry blog that ended up growing to a six-figure blog, selling study guides, in particular to medical students who are taking these difficult entrance exams. Now, like a lot of us, James had a long and winding road to get from where he was when he was first going to school, studying organic chemistry, to where he's now doing this full-time business, which, like all of our stories, came as a side hustle.
And I had another quote from him that I liked. I wanted to pull this out and share it with you, 'cause I don't think we put this in the episode either. He said, "One of the most important decisions I ever made "was to take two to three months and move to a new city, "live like a hermit, get bored," he put bored in quotes, "and watch what I would do to entertain myself." He said, "That was very useful experimental data." Perhaps only a scientist would say, "Observing yourself getting bored "is useful experimental data." But the point was, through that process, and there's a longer story to it, but the point of it is that through that process, he stumbled on something completely different. He ended up doing online tutoring. And he started doing online tutoring at a time when almost nobody was doing it.
And in fact, his friends and family basically said, "That's a dumb idea." So thankfully, he didn't listen to what seemed like good advice, to go back to Alicia's comments. And the other thing he did was that he took some time for himself and kind of forced that boredom, and it ended up changing his life. Okay, so there is nothing as motivating as being told, "This won't work," or, "You can't do this," whenever people tell you that. You should take that to the bank, because that's gonna be the fuel for your fire, essentially. Then you go and do it.
You go and do whatever they said couldn't be done. And then you can say, "Thank goodness I didn't listen to them, because I just proved them wrong." And like I said at the top of the episode, it always seems impossible until it's done. [Music]
So we have been collecting audio updates from some of the people we featured on this show in the past, just to kind of talk with them about what's happened since then. What lessons have they learned that they would like to share with the community? So every week we're playing at least one of them, and we might do something bigger with all of them at some point.
But for now, let's hear from Julie Wilder. - Hey, this is Julie from Central Florida. My side hustle is Spiral Spectrum, featured in Side Hustle's debut week on episode six. Since then, I've expanded from Justin Essie Shop to my own online storefront at spiralspectrum.com, using Shopify. Opening a Shopify-based storefront has been an entirely positive shift for several reasons.
One, I design nature-based calendars featuring the moon, stars, and planets that are detailed and require a little bit of explanation to learn to read and use. Two, my brand is now more appealing for collaborations with such a robust and well-designed website with integrated shop. I designed a mini moon calendar for a monthly subscription box company called Goddess Pro Visions and got in front of an audience of 6,000 of my ideal customers, which may not have been the case if I just had an Essie shop. Three, I've been building a wholesale channel on spiralspectrum.com, which is fortunate because Essie just killed their entire wholesale segment with very little notice. During episode six, I was super proud of having just made $15,000, but my 2018 edition brought in $50,000.
My advice, anticipate where the market is going and be proactive. If I hadn't been following the news about Essie's change in leadership, I would not have noticed it was time to adapt their diversification. In the beginning, spiralspectrum was too small to risk Shopify's monthly fees and needed Essie's legion of shoppers to notice me. Now I've grown into my own and can comfortably take these steps. Next up, I'm planning to try out either Kickstarter or Indiegogo to launch a few new products.
My original calendars are slightly advanced for the average person, so I'm designing a simpler upscale calendar called Stella Moon focused on just the moon phases and meter showers with gold and silver foil. While I love crowdfunding conceptually, I also see this as a smart marketing move and additional sales channel. I'm definitely eyeing wholesale as a smart area of growth for my brand and since large posters can be a challenge to merchandise and retail settings, I'm designing complimentary products that will merchandise easily in order to land wholesale contracts with science and art museums and home decor outlets. I'm optimistic that I can hit a healthy six figures by 2020 and see spiralspectrum mature from a side hustle to my main gig for the foreseeable future. - Julie, thank you so much for sharing that update.
I really appreciate it. I know our listeners do as well and it's so fun to see how far you've come since we first talked with you in the very first week of side hustle school when you had that big success of making $15,000. Now $15,000 was pretty awesome, but as we hear in this update, last year you made $50,000. So 50 is better than 15, right, 5015. And I'm so glad as well that you have built your own Shopify store now.
I think that's a smart move. If you're building your brand on someone else's platform, whether that is Etsy or anything else really, it can go away at any moment because it's always dependent on their algorithm and their policies and their leadership and all kinds of stuff. So even a good platform, it's kind of like having a good job. Your good job is good until it's not good, right? And then it's time to make a change.
So yes, I completely agree with being forward thinking, not asking, okay, what is the hot thing right now? But what is the hot thing going to be? What is coming next? Like what's coming down the road? So the more you can be forward thinking, I think the more successful you're gonna be.
And also it's not just about making more money. I think the easier it's going to be. You're gonna encounter less resistance. So well done, Julie and everyone else. If you wanna follow along with her, her Instagram is @thespiralspectrum.
So instagram.com/thespiralspectrum, all one word. More of these to come as we continue to hear from our throwback case studies. [Music]
Now, if you are new to the show, or even if you're not new, even if you've been around for 596 episodes, which by the way, we are coming up on 600 episodes. How about that? I feel like only yesterday, the podcast was going to its first day of school.
We took that little cute picture and it went off with its lunchbox. And now look, almost 600 days later, here we are. But I digress. Whether you are new to the show or not, it's not just featured case studies, other side hustlers from days of old that we like to feature. I love to hear what you're working on as well.
Or if you have a question. Sometimes we answer questions on the show. Sometimes we use them in our research. We also take nominations for other people to feature on the show. So a couple of different ways you can communicate.
Pretty simple. We have a hustle hotline. You can call the hustle hotline, leave me a message. That number is 8449-HUSTLE or 844-948-7853. You can also write to podcast@sidehustleschool.com.
Or you can send me a message from the website, sidehustleschool.com. I mentioned we like nominations. If you have a project that you might want to see featured at some point on the show on that website, sidehustleschool.com, you look at the about page, you scroll down, there's a little form where you can fill out some information and send that to us. And if you know someone else you think should be on the show, well, send them to that website and we'd love to take a look at what they're doing too. I don't know about you, but I think the show and the stories that we're getting on the show just continue to get better and better.
This week alone, we had a story about a couple that's making $50,000 a month selling soap on Instagram. $50,000 a month. And this is a very new business. So that's pretty amazing. Also in the same week, what was it, three or four days ago, the coffee grinder that made $300,000.
A coffee grinder, once again, that made $300,000 in sales through Amazon. And it actually ended up turning into a whole mission for the guy who started that. So it was a lot of money first of all, but it was also a life-changing experience for him. And that's what these kinds of projects can be. I kind of vacillate between encouraging people to start a project where they are, what the skills they have without spending money, even if that project just makes a small amount of money.
Because $500 a month, which is the minimum amount that we require to be featured on the show. And of course, a lot of people go on to make a lot more than that. But $500 a month is still significant. Like it's still like a solid block of money that you can pay off some bills with. And it also just feels really good to have that extra source of income coming apart from your paycheck.
So if that's all that ever happens, that's still great. But at the same time, sometimes these projects really can be, as I said, life-changing. And a lot of people do end up eventually quitting their job to go full-time with them. And this is so different from the typical entrepreneurial message that you hear. This is what sets apart the message of Side Hustle School, which is that you don't have to go out and quit your job.
You don't have to take a lot of risk. You don't have to ask yourself, like, where can I get the money I need to start a business? That's what you hear if you watch Shark Tank. That's what you hear if you read other business books. I always try to focus on individuals, not companies, not the startup world, nothing to do with investing.
It's all about looking within and asking yourself, OK, what can I do? What can I create? What can I make? What can I sell as a product or as a service? And how do I go about doing that?
So the skills you need to do that, the things you need to learn, are not that complicated. The greater learning, the greater experience, the greater knowledge. That's what you already have, from what you have done so far in life. Whatever your job is now, whatever you studied in school, whatever that crazy hobby is that you've spent hundreds of hours on, that you understand now better than anyone else, that's the knowledge that we need to extract in some way and turn it into this money-making project, which is my mission. Coming up next week and in the weeks to come, we've got a number of great stories that I think illustrate that mission, as well as the values of our community, which are all about encouraging people to get started, as I said, and what they have, where they are.
And as we close out the week, I want to say a quick thank you to everybody who makes this show possible, which first of all begins with you, the listener. Thank you. You're awesome. I said on day one, which happened to be 595 days ago, that if you make the commitment to make this part of your routine, just listen for 10 minutes a day, take some simple actions, I commit to supporting you fully in your goal, your quest, to create that new source of income. That's what I want to see happen.
We have so many listener success stories. And if it hasn't happened with you yet, well, there's still time. You're not late. There's more stuff coming out all the time. There are new ways to make money.
There's different things that you probably haven't even thought of or considered yet. Just keep listening. And just keep moving forward in your own way. So thank you to you. And thanks so much, as well, to our production team.
Man, I'm just the guy kind of talking here at the microphone, but there's actually a whole team of people that make this possible. That production team is led by senior producer AC Valdez. It also features Sarah Barrett, who was recently up in her native Canada. I believe she is back in Mexico City now. Show notes, content management, working with our writers, working with me.
That is all managed by Whitney Karenik in Portland, Oregon. Our community liaison, who helps me with email and other communication, that is Jed Chang. Thank you, Jed. And of course, the cat, the official show cat of Cytossel School, Libby Liberia-Gillibow works the night shift. Very active from 2 AM to 4 AM.
All of us together, Team Cytossel, we are part of the Onward Project curated by best selling author Gretchen Rubin. I mentioned that she's got this Happier Labor Day project coming up. I'll tell you more about that soon. And I think that's about it. Oh, one more thing.
This is a free, listener supported show. If you're enjoying it, I'd be super, super grateful if you would just take a moment and leave us a quick little rating and review in Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. And that always helps other people discover the show. And by the way, a lot of people out there still do not know what podcasts are, which I know probably sounds strange to you, since you do know what podcasts are. But there's still a lot of people who don't.
So the number one way, and probably the number two and number three way as well, that our community has grown since we started 600 days ago, is from listeners telling other people about it and showing them how to subscribe on their phone. That usually makes a huge difference. So if you have done that, I'm very grateful to you. If you have a chance to do that at some point, thank you. All right.
As always, inspiration is good, but action is better. I want you to take action. I want to feature your story. I want to hear about what you're doing. Consider this an investment in yourself, a pretty quick, easy, painless investment.
Hilarious also, of course. And our new episodes go online at 6 o'clock Eastern time every single day. Do come back next week and join me. My name is Chris Guillebeau, and this is Side Hustle School.
