Physician Designs Plush Toys to Teach Anatomy

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

[Music]

Let's talk about the skills you need to develop and the tasks you need to complete to create a physical product that hasn't existed before. So this isn't about making an online product, it's not about reselling, and it's not about merely importing something from overseas with a small tweak or modification to sell as your own product. So what we're talking about here is the steps to go all the way into creating your own unique manufactured physical product. And these steps are not complicated per se, but they do require a lot of work, okay? So to do this, let's look at the quest to create such a product.

You are listening to "Sottos Will School." My name is Chris Guillebeau. Every day I'm bringing you a different story of somebody out there who creates an income generating project by using the skills they already have or by developing or acquiring the skills they need and usually without spending a lot of money. So our story today, have you ever wanted to make your own plush toys in the shape of human organs? No, that's not you. Okay, maybe you haven't, but a Washington DC doctor has taken on this goal.

And these toys are used to teach kids about the human body and also as get well soon gifts for hospital patients. In this episode, I'll tell you how she did it, what she learned, and what you would need to do to pursue a similar path. Here's a quick thank you to our sponsor. All those details are coming right up. [Music]

By day, Dr. Ronak Mehta is a physician

at a Veterans Affairs Hospital in Washington DC. As a doctor, she spent a good chunk of her life helping those who need it. More recently though, she decided to get into the side hustle game and do something for herself while also continuing to help others. And the beginning of this story takes us back to her time in medical school, the better part of a decade ago. While studying, Ronak wanted to help children understand the human body.

She decided at the time, the best way to do that was to write an educational kids book. She titled it "The Extraordinary Expedition Into the Human Body." The goal was to create a book that was similar to the old Dr. Seuss stories. The characters in that book would be walking, talking, cartoon versions of organs in the human body. However, Ronak wasn't an illustrator, not by a long shot.

So for the illustrations, she turned to Upwork, a popular outsourcing website. There she found an illustrator who was able to create the characters of heart, lung, bladder, and uterus. She decided on an ebook format for easy distribution, but alas, unlike Dr. Seuss's books, it was not a best seller. Still, the lackluster performance didn't faze her.

She thought of one of Dr. Seuss's best quotes, "You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose." So with this sage advice in mind, it was time to steer in a new direction. Those organ illustrations weren't created in vain.

Ronak had fallen in love with her cartoon characters. Her hope was to someday create plush toys in their likeness. In addition to teaching kids, she thought they could serve as a cute, get well soon present for someone who was hospitalized or preparing for surgery. The idea stayed with her through graduation and didn't go away, even after years of working as a physician. But it wasn't until earlier this year that she decided to bring her characters to life.

And she decided to call her new business Nerdbugs. To get things going, Ronak set aside $10,000. It was a lot of money, but she looked at it like an educational expense. If Nerdbugs didn't work out, then that's okay. She would be all right.

And she already had her full-time job as a physician. Now that she was in the toy manufacturing business, she figured she'd better learn how to get toys made. So to do that, she turned to a secret online resource that you only hear about on this show. That resource is called Google. You might want to write that down.

It's G-double-O-G-L-E. Now after researching with this secret online source, it seemed clear that manufacturing in China was the best choice, at least economically. So she searched for custom toy manufacturers and shortlisted 50 potential suppliers. After checking their previous work, their quotes and response times, she decided on the manufacturer she wanted to use for Nerdbugs. She used the illustrations from her old ebook to brief the manufacturer on what she wanted.

After the first few discussions, everything was flowing right along. The manufacturer created a sample and sent some photos to Ronak, which she enthusiastically approved, along with the go-ahead to manufacture several hundred Nerdbug toys. Unfortunately, this was her first mistake. The photo looked great, but upon receiving the actual sample in the mail, Ronak realized it was of poor quality, not up to the standards she had hoped for. Fixing this involved some tough conversations with the manufacturer.

Ronak is naturally non-confrontational, and this part was difficult, albeit essential. In the end, the manufacturer agreed to start from scratch and reproduce the toys to a higher standard. From here on out, things with Ronak and the manufacturer improved. Now she had a product, but she still had to figure out how to sell and ship it. She thought about having the inventory sent directly to her house, then she would ship each order at the post office.

Still, even with a tool like ShipStation, it seemed incredibly tedious and time consuming. So instead she decided to use a fulfillment service. Fulfillment service is a company that will lease you a small space in their warehouse and ship out your products on your behalf in exchange for a small fee. All you have to do is have your product sent directly from the manufacturer to their warehouse, and then forward the orders as they come in. After some more Googling, she decided on Amazon's fulfillment service, that's known as Fulfilled by Amazon for US orders, and a Chinese fulfillment company for anything else.

The reason for using two centers was because she planned to ship internationally from day one, and Amazon's fees were really high for shipping outside the US. Once she got that all set up, she had the manufacturer ship her first batch of plush organ toys along. Now this ended in a second costly error. A large portion of her first shipment went missing in transit, and another tough conversation had to be had. She insisted that she be reimbursed for the missing items, and after she pushed, she got exactly that.

Perhaps her next side also will be a course in confrontation. But back to this story. With the Nerdbug's brand ready to roll, it was time to start marketing. For that, Ronak turned to both Google AdWords and Amazon-sponsored ads. Both these services enable her product to show up when people search for relevant keywords.

She turned on the ads and made a sale her first day. It was just one sale, but that was her first day. That was also just over three months ago. Sales have continued to trickle in, and so far Ronak has sold a few hundred Nerdbugs to people all around the world. The initial $10,000 investment is already close to being recouped, and she expects to be at the breakeven point within the next two months.

Once that milestone is reached, she plans to extend her line of products. So far she's selling the heart, lungs, kidney, neuron, and uterus toys. The increased product line will include pancreas, liver, and bladder. Furthermore, in the future, she hopes to partner with children's hospitals to be able to give Nerdbugs as a donation to hospitalized kids. Ronak, thanks for sharing your story with us.

The Sautosville School team has a wish for you. Our wish comes in the form of another quote from your favorite author. "You're off to great places. "Today is your day. "Your mountain is waiting, so get on your way.

"And will you succeed? "Yes, you will indeed. "98 and 3/4% guaranteed." Nothing is fully guaranteed, but all of us here at Sautosville School wish Ronak much success. So here is a tip that I think is really important, a guideline that's really important in this kind of situation where you are gonna make a bit of an investment and you've got a vision of something you really want to make happen, you wanna make it come to life, but it's gonna take some amount of capital. Okay, so in this case, she chose to invest $10,000.

$10,000 is not a small amount of money, but it's also in the grand scheme of life with her day job as a physician. She said, "If I invest this money," in fact, here's her direct quote. She said, "Going into this entire endeavor, "I told myself I will invest X amount of dollars "and I need to be okay now with losing that "because there's always a chance this will not succeed. "Nothing in life is a guarantee "and in the event that this doesn't work out, it's okay. "I came to terms with not seeing that money again "once I made the decision to invest it in myself." So fortunately in this case, she is seeing the money again.

She's almost recouped that cost after just three months of being in business. So that's excellent, but if it didn't work out, again, the greater point is if it didn't work out, then she would be okay. So I think it's really important to set a limit to your investment and your risk and cut your losses if it doesn't work out. And we've seen this in different stories as well, both in stories that are successes and also in ones in which the person's first idea really wasn't a good one or it just didn't meet with enough market demand. And so they had to make a change and choose something different.

And now last but not least, there are also four common tools mentioned in this episode. As always, anytime we have a resource or a link or a website that we mentioned in the episode, the link to that is on the show notes page, if you wanna come and learn more. In this episode, we talked about Upwork. That was where Ronak first commissioned an illustrator for the e-book. We talked about Alibaba.

That's where she connected with a Chinese manufacturer. We talked about Fulfilled by Amazon, which is her fulfillment house. And we also talked about this secret online resource called Google, but I'm not gonna link that one up because you can probably find that yourself. Anyway, all the other tools there are on the show notes page. And as you go through these episodes, as you hear the different stories, my hope is that you're gonna become more and more familiar with them, not that you have to be an expert on any of them, but you kind of understand, okay, this person uses this tool to accomplish this goal.

Maybe for my project, I need a similar tool. Maybe I need something different, et cetera, and so on. Okay, that's it for today. Again, good work, Ronak. Thank you for sharing this story.

And listeners, as always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Those show notes, as mentioned, are at sidehustleschool.com/634. By the way, I recently recorded the audio version for the very first book I wrote a decade ago, "The Art of Non-Conformity." That audio book is available on audible.com, through Amazon, or anywhere else that you purchase audio books. If you wanna check that out again, it's called "The Art of Non-Conformity." And my name is Chris Guillebeau, but you probably know that since you're listening to the show. And thank you for doing that.

Thanks for being part of this community. I'll be back tomorrow with another story. This is "Side Hustle School," the one and only.