Sign Language Videos Spell Out Profits for Special Ed Teacher

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

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Whatever your skills are, there's a traditional path to using them in a career and at least one non-traditional path. If you have a degree or special training of any kind and you're trying to figure out how to do the side hustle thing for the first time, often one of the best starting points is to look at that education or training you had. How is that skill valuable and useful? Who might benefit from what you know how to do? Welcome to Side Hustle School.

My name is Chris Guillebeau and every day on the show, I'm giving you a different example of how somebody is doing this in all sorts of different ways, using the skills they already have, just finding a different way to adapt them to the world of making money, as opposed to the world of working for an employer. Now today's story features a special education teacher. After making puppet sign language videos for her toddlers, she stumbles upon an underserved market. She then goes on to turn her homemade videos into more commercial ones, selling them on Amazon and elsewhere, marketing through celebrity parents and bringing in up to $15,000 a month. That is correct, up to $15,000 a month.

And the story is called Sign Language Videos, Spell Out Profits for Special Ed Teacher. Stay tuned. Here's a quick thank you to our sponsor, and then I'll tell you all about it. [Music]

When Shelby Rideout graduated from Vanderbilt University with a degree in elementary and special education, she didn't go into teaching. She went into acting.

She moved to New York City and started trying to land auditions. She knew that making it as an actress probably wasn't going to happen immediately. So to make ends meet, she began sign language interpreting and tutoring for elementary age kids. She put up flyers around private schools across the city, and before she knew it, she was tutoring a lot. She made a name for herself and even tutored Bono's son, who still hasn't found what he's looking for, but couldn't live with or without her.

Shelby's favorite subject to tutor was reading, but it was also a challenging one. Some kids take to reading eagerly, but for those who struggle, reading is a nightmare. It can damage their self-confidence. It can make them timid to learn, which in turn will hurt them across other subjects. Shelby was working with kids as young as four years old who would say things like, "I hate myself," or, "I'm stupid," because they couldn't read well.

It was heartbreaking, and she knew she would do anything she could to help her own children learn to read at a young age. Now, in fact, as time went by, she had two of them, a one-year-old and a two-year-old. Being a one-year-old and a two-year-old, they required a lot of attention, and Shelby sometimes just wanted to do things like cook dinner without being constantly interrupted. So she came up with a plan. She would make some home videos about how to read and sign that would keep her kids entertained while she cooked.

She set up a screen in her basement, pulled out an old puppet named Polly, and started filming. It was fun, and it allowed her to combine her three passions, acting, signing, and teaching. Altogether, this first round of videos took only an hour of time and a few dollars for a simple white screen. Polly worked for free, and her kids loved them. Before long, those kids were her best party tricks.

At one point, Shelby's son was still just one year old, but he signed "Banana" in front of her friends, and everyone was amazed. They wanted those videos for their own kids, so Shelby burned a few copies onto DVDs and gave them away. By the way, side note, DVDs are these things that used to exist before streaming. Long story short, streaming is better. After a couple years of seeing her friends' kids learn to communicate at rapid speed, an idea clicked.

Why wasn't she selling those videos? They were clearly working and definitely wanted by other parents. It seemed like the perfect side hustle, but to do that, Shelby knew she was going to need some help. And she got some help. She started with some assistance from a friend in the film industry, and she got puppeteers, animators, and a musician.

She also found a local designer to make the accompanying flashcards, a manufacturer for the cards in boxes, and a second manufacturer for burning hundreds of the finished DVDs. It was a massive project, but Shelby and her husband knew it was something they were passionate about and that there was market demand. Or at least they thought there was, because you don't really know until you go to sell something. Finally, after two years, Bright Signs Learning started selling on amazon.com. The product included four videos, flashcards, and a workbook, all for just over $100.

They had some early sales just through Amazon Search, but one of Shelby's friends gave her the idea that would really make the brand grow. That idea was to give away copies to celebrity parents. There was a show on TLC at the time called "Rattled" that featured a family with quadruplet babies. Did I say that right? I've practiced it, quadruplet.

We're gonna go with it. Shelby knew they might be a perfect match and sent them a copy for free. The mother never mentioned Bright Signs Learning on screen, but after the show ended, she did mention the program on Twitter, which sent a flood of interested parents and led to significant press coverage. It also led to the first month they broke $1,000 in sales. This was a slower start than they'd expected.

There were many times when Shelby had doubts about the whole thing, but every five-star review she received that said it's making a difference in our kids' confidence and learning made it all worth it. The product worked. The hard part was just helping others see it. As Shelby reached out to other celebrities and influencers trying to get them to mention the product, she noticed a trend. Celebrities who are parents aren't the best fit, but parenting celebrities tend to produce results.

For example, a makeup celebrity isn't a good fit for a partnership, even if she is a parent who talks about her kids once in a while. It's the influencers about parenting specifically that end up driving sales. Once she realized that, she focused on that simple yet effective strategy and it began to pay off. In December of 2016, Bright Side Learning had its first $10,000 month, and monthly sales since then have been between $10,000 and $15,000 ever since. Shelby believes they're close to the tipping point where her customers will drive new sales rather than her having to focus on marketing so much, and she also has plans for phase two.

First up, they're gonna move away from DVDs and towards streaming via an app. They're also considering creating a second video series for kids as they get older. While the consistent study revenue has been thrilling, the best part of it all is Shelby hearing from her customers their toddlers are learning to read and sign at a young age, and Shelby knows she's helping kids all over the country become learners who will thrive in school and life beyond. All right, among other things, this story offers a lesson in understanding your market, understanding who you're trying to reach and what the best way to reach them is. In this case, Shelby's main tool was influencer marketing, and the more she did that, the more she figured out who the right people were to connect with, again, her ideal customers.

Now, speaking of ideal customers, those are your end users. Those are the people that you are trying to connect with because you have this solution for a problem they have or you have something that's gonna make their lives better. In this case, you're helping parents instill confidence and greater learning in their kids, which is a tremendous benefit, especially when you can demonstrate and prove it. So I took a quick look at their main Amazon listing, which we will link up in the show notes. And on that page, I can see that they have some really great reviews, more than 70 five-star reviews, most of them with a verified purchase tag next to them.

So you know that they're real reviews, or at least they're people who have purchased the product. And Shelby has also really engaged with customer questions because now, as you may know, on most product listing pages on Amazon, customers can ask questions and then other customers can answer those questions or the person listing the product, the seller can answer those questions. So she's really engaged in providing quick responses there. Maybe my one comment was, perhaps some better photography would help, just some really nice high-res photography of these products and maybe a little bit of a brand refresh, which would also be timely since she's making that transition from DVDs to streaming. Lots of people, myself included, don't have a DVD player.

I don't know if I've ever actually owned a DVD player. And the last computer I owned that included a DVD player was probably more than five years ago. So presumably she's gonna be able to reach a lot more people once that transition is done. And you know, updating the technology for something like this is important, but the real value is in her content. The real value is in her content and the relationships that she's building, the trust that she's building with parents.

And so as long as you keep updating your product and you keep nurturing those relationships, that real value never goes away. You know, technology is just a channel. It's just a means of transmitting information. The real value is in that content and the relationships. So congrats to Shelby.

It's a fun project. It's a meaningful project. And of course, because it's Side Hustle School, it's a profitable project. It's great when those three values can intersect, fun, meaning, and profit. And listeners, I hope you enjoyed this story as well.

Don't forget inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Those aforementioned show notes will be online at sidehustleschool.com/621. If you'd like to learn more about Shelby's product or anything else that I mentioned, including a link to some hot new deals on DVD players. Actually correct that, I'm just seeing in my notes here that that deal ended in 2005. Sorry about that.

But you can still come by and say hi, sidehustleschool.com. Thank you so much for listening. You're a rock star. My name is Chris Guillebeau and this is Side Hustle School.