Marathon Runner Earns Full-Time Income Trying On Shoes

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

[Music]

The journey of a thousand miles begins, well, you know how that works. Today's overnight success story takes 10 years, but fortunately the person who starts it goes on to earn six figures and what is ultimately his full-time work is patience. And he has to be, he's a runner. I am a runner too, I enjoyed working on this story. I'm actually preparing to run my first marathon in about six years, coming up in just a few weeks for those who listen in real time.

And if you're listening later, well, hopefully I survived. But in any case today, I'll tell you how this patient runner starts a running shoe review site. First because he's bored, then as a hobby, then a passion project, then a side hustle that brings in a whopping $9 in month one. But after miles of pounding the pavement turns into a real moneymaker. It's a decade long marathon distance project that earns a lot of money in affiliate commissions for this fleet footed former computer sales employee.

This is Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. Get ready to run the distance in this jogger knot success story. [Music]

Ruggiero Lota has been an avid runner his entire adult life. Few things give him more pleasure than lacing up a pair of shoes and hitting the road.

It never occurred to him, however, that he could use that passion to earn an income. That is until he lost his job as head of merchandising for a major shoe brand. Ruggiero's side hustle story is a lot like running a marathon. It spans over the course of 10 years with a lot of hard work along the way. But before we get to those business details, let's jog back to that day in 2009 when he lost his job.

He viewed the sudden time off like a rest day in marathon training. A rest day is when runners relax and rebuild energy for more training in the week to come. In this case, he decided to regroup for a couple of months and then start looking for work. But like any good runner, he couldn't just do nothing. So he used the time to read a few books.

He was able to distill some lessons that would lead to him creating a side business of his own. That side business turned out to be a running shoes review site. He started it because he was shocked to find that no such websites existed, at least no good ones. Some running publications were doing short reviews, but there was no one doing in-depth research. With that, his side hustle, runningshoesguru.com, was off and racing.

He spent the next two weeks building the site, spending only $50 on a domain name and hosting. Now the first version of this site was nothing special. It launched with a few running tips and reviews of eight shoes Ruggiero was familiar with. That was fine. He didn't have any grand plans for the site in the beginning.

He figured it would be a fun project to work on and he might be able to show it to prospective employers for his next job. However, he'd also heard he could put affiliate links on the website linking out to products he reviewed. Then if anybody purchased a pair of shoes after visiting his site, he'd make a small commission. So he added those links. A week later on a Sunday afternoon, he made his first commission $9.

Not a record-breaking sum, but still something to get excited about. His first online income. He earned a few more dollars over the next month, but then started running out of money and decided it was time to find gainful employment once more. He began working in sales for a computer company, all while working on runningshoesguru on the side. The next year the site was receiving 30,000 visitors a month and income had also grown.

Ruggiero began buying new pairs of shoes so that he could review them and create more content. The following year he started to build a small group of remote testers to help try more shoes. The strategy was working and by the end of that year, the site had grown to 80,000 visitors a month and it turned out he was just hitting his stride. He continued that strategy for two more years. At this point, traffic had grown to 300,000 visitors per month and his mind began to spin like a treadmill.

He thought that runningshoesguru had the potential to become his full-time job. By this stage, he'd hired a freelance web developer and designer to help build the site. That allowed him to make faster updates and combined with all those reviews, as his team was writing, the site grew to 400,000 unique visitors per month. A huge number. Run forward one more year.

It's now 2016 in our story and Ruggiero decides to do up his laces and make the final sprint. It was time to actually quit that full-time job and go all in on runningshoesguru seven years after launching it. Now in a marathon, many runners hit what's called the wall in their last few miles. Or if they're like me, they hit it around mile 18 with eight more miles to go. 8.2 to be precise.

They've exerted all the energy they can and have nothing left. For Ruggiero and RunningShoesGuru, it was the opposite. He actually picked up speed toward the end of the race. The site is now reaching 1 million visitors per month. It's generating six figures in profit every year.

Ruggiero and his team of testers try out over 100 pairs of RunningShoes annually. They view this as their competitive advantage over the other review sites, which many don't even try out the product they're reviewing. They just copy over the notes from the shoe company, which is hardly an unbiased source. Over the next year, Ruggiero plans to double down his effort and hire a few more employees. That will give him more time for running, not just running the business.

His story shows that a good side hustle can be a marathon, not a sprint. And as a reward, you'll get paid in more than just Gatorade and Bananas. With consistent, deliberate work, you can push through the wall and cross the finish line. All right, a RunningShoes review site. This is the kind of site which is using an affiliate sales model.

Again, he's getting paid when people click through and purchase the shoes from different retailers. This really is the kind of project that is suited for that kind of running metaphor because it builds over time, at least ideally, that's the goal, as you add content, as more and more people are coming to the site, as it gets higher rankings in Google and other sites that are referring traffic, then all of the metrics go up over time. So you are building an asset. And now it's reached the point of providing a lot of passive income, which doesn't mean that he's not spending a lot of time on it because he is still, he's investing in it, he's putting up more reviews and so on. But the point is, if he didn't put up reviews tomorrow, he would still make money.

If he didn't put up reviews all next week, or even all next month, he would still be making money from people who are coming to the site, from the search results, from the other referrers. So again, it's an asset. It's a profitable one and it seems to be a sustainable one as well. So good for him. Congratulations, Ruggiero.

Thank you for allowing us to share your story with our listeners and listeners. As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. If you're gonna check out the show notes and learn more about RunningShoes Guru, just come to sidehustleschool.com/625. And speaking of running marathons or running in general, I often post stories and photos of my runs in different parts of the world. You can follow those on Instagram at 193 countries, 193 countries.

If you're in real time, you can see more about marathon I'm doing pretty soon. And you can also add me up on LinkedIn, where I accept all invitations. If you wanna add me as a contact, I will add you back. My profile on LinkedIn is just my name, Chris Gilavo, and that last name is spelled G-U-I-L-L-E-B-E-A-U. Let's hang out online or perhaps on a run somewhere.

Thank you for listening. I'll be back again tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Sidustleschool.