“Home Haircut” Invention Becomes Viral Moneymaker

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

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Welcome to a brand new week. What's up, my friends? This is Chris Guillebeau. The program is called Side Hustle School, and I am so glad you're there. Every single day this week, I'm gonna bring you a different story of somebody out there who's found a way to create some freedom for themselves.

Either through what eventually becomes full-time entrepreneurship, or just a way to make some extra money. But whatever it is, it all starts with an idea, an idea combined with resourcefulness, an idea combined with the willingness to step forward to take a little bit of a risk, but not a huge risk, not going into debt, not borrowing a ton of money without quitting your day job, all those good things. All right, so in today's story, a 13-year-old has an idea for an invention and then abandons it for a decade, 'cause he was busy being 13, 14, 15, et cetera, only for it to become a viral sensation a decade later when he decides to follow up. Now, as we've talked about before, your target market is not everyone. If you've got a product and you're like, "Who's this product for?" It's for everyone, not a good idea.

That's true, even if your product is something that can help a lot of people, which is the case in this story, you'll still often be more successful by being more specific. The interesting thing is that by honing in on a market, you'll often end up helping people outside that market as well. And the story you'll hear today gives you a good example of this. Also, one more thing, what happens when you get too many orders? Is there such a thing as too many orders?

How could that possibly be a problem? Well, all of this is coming up in today's story. So stay tuned, here's a quick shout out to our sponsor. [Music]

As a kid, Joshua Essnart was a problem solver. Growing up in the small town of Ithaca, New York, he had to find ways to get things done when there weren't tons of options.

Things like getting a haircut. He couldn't drive. His parents were at work all day at Cornell University, and the only barber was miles away. So he began cutting his own hair. It didn't go well at first.

Lines weren't straight. He gave himself a few bald spots, but he knew he could figure out a solution. It was just a matter of eliminating the same errors he was making over and over again. He grabbed some cardboard and plastic from his dad's supplies and cut out a few curved guides that he could hold up while trimming to get a clean, straight cut. He even gave this handmade solution to a common problem a name.

He called it the cut buddy. Fast forward a decade to 2014. Joshua was moving a treadmill into his garage. He had to take off the door hinges to get it in, and when he did, he just left that door sitting to the side. He was tired and figured he would do it later, but his girlfriend didn't see it that way.

"You never finish what you start," she complained. It was the verbal kick in the pants Joshua needed. She was right, and he didn't wanna be that kind of person, especially once they had kids. So he decided to follow through on one of his entrepreneurial ideas, and he knew just the one. The very next day, he took his old cut buddy idea to a patent attorney.

He also began making prototypes out of basic supplies from Office Depot, taking them to startup pitch competitions. But time and time again, he lost. Nobody believed the product really solved a huge need, and Joshua's lack of experience running a business made it a hard sell. Then his girlfriend had an idea. Her dad helped engineer parts for Cornell and NASA.

She asked if he could spare some time to help. He agreed, and within a few weeks, Joshua had a CAD rendering with precise angles and a stress test approved design. Maybe when you meet that girl of your dreams, Joshua jokes now, you should ask if her parents are engineers. It might be helpful to know that sooner rather than later. Joshua invested nearly $10,000 on the full CAD design, getting a website built and 100 boxes of cut buddies, ready to sell at $14.99 a pop.

It was time to launch. The cut buddy wasn't based on a well-known product, so Joshua knew he had to demonstrate it. And the best way to do that was on YouTube. He made a few videos showing people how to cut their hair in different ways using his product. After a few weeks, it started to work.

He was getting three to five sales per day, but needed more. He started combing over the results of his sales and realized that his typical customers weren't just random people. They weren't just everybody out there. They were veterans. They were people with disabilities, or people who cared for people with disabilities.

Even though the cut buddy could be helpful to a lot of people, it solved a very particular need for those who had a hard time cutting their hair because of some sort of disability. He also saw trends with college students, barbers in training, and moms. Joshua took that knowledge and started reaching out to YouTubers with audiences that resembled his own. He didn't have big money to pay them, so he simply offered a percentage of sales if their followers used a unique discount code. A number of them accepted the offer and sales jumped significantly.

Soon, he was selling 20, then 50, sometimes up to 150 units per day. But he was still a hair short of his, I'll go full time if I reach this point goal. He'd always said that if the shipments from a single day stacked up taller than his height, and if he had six months of living expenses saved, he'd jump ship from his day job. On March 5th, 2016, that day arrived. One of his affiliates uploaded a video that went viral.

It received hundreds of thousands of views in less than 24 hours. Joshua remembers being at a Cirque du Soleil show and thinking his phone was glitching. Notifications were popping up like crazy. His phone just couldn't handle it. But it was real.

The cut buddy itself had gone viral, and thousands of sales happened that night. That's correct, thousands of sales. The excitement he felt was accompanied by anxiety. Because he didn't have thousands of cut buddies in his garage, he only had 300. And that was just the beginning of his problems.

His bank, SunTrust, and PayPal froze his accounts. Both of the payment processors figured the huge increase in orders had to be credit card fraud. After gathering up tons of documents and talking to SunTrust for a few hours, they finally unfroze his account. But PayPal wasn't so easily convinced. It took days of going through paperwork, proof of purchase, and demanding to talk to higher-ups to get them to unfreeze Joshua's account.

And even then, it wasn't as simple as SunTrust because PayPal's official policy said they hold your money for six months after unfreezing your account, no matter what. It was a hard blow, but thankfully there was just enough money in that SunTrust account, about $15,000, for another manufacturing run to fill the orders. The hard blow turned into a close shave. Most of Joshua's customers took up his offer of a two-for-one cut buddy deal instead of a full refund to account for the delayed shipments. A few left negative reviews, but the majority were excited about the product and the generous two-for-one offer.

After getting invited to sell on Amazon and even venturing into retail, Joshua eventually licensed his product to the Andes Clipper Company, which now bundles the cut buddy with other grooming products and sells them in every Walmart in the country. He's making good money from the deal, but now they get to worry about sales, inventory, and dealing with counterfeits. Joshua is thrilled about the cash he's made, and he's itching to do it again. He's working on new inventions, getting into real estate, and may even start a truffle farm with his friends, because, you know, that's what you do when you make a lot of money from a haircut tool. He's also now a dad, and doesn't have to pay for kids' haircuts.

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We asked Joshua if he celebrated his first sale, or his first batch of sales in this case, since it's a pretty low-priced product, which he obviously went on to sell tens of thousands of. He says, "I did not celebrate. "The first sales were close to holiday times, "so I was with my family. "I had a little stamp machine and packages. "You could tell some of my family members "were questioning if I was sane or not, "while some of the other members were very proud.

"It was tough because the post office "was closed during the holidays, "and I wanted to mail the products on time. "But I did write my first few thousand customers "a personal handwritten note. "That was my celebration." When you start your side hustle, whatever it is, some of your family members may very well question if you were sane. But in Joshua's case, he said some other people were proud, and besides, even if nobody was, he's building a future for himself. This is an obviously tremendously, tremendously successful project.

I also love that part about writing his first few thousand customers a personal handwritten note. I've done things like that before, but first few thousand is pretty good. So that shows dedication, commitment to product quality, and also commitment to customer service, which is how a product like this is going to succeed in the long term. So congratulations to Joshua, love this story, and listeners, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/926.

That's for episode 926. Be sure you're subscribed to tell your friends it's completely free. My name is Chris Guillebeau, oh, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]

- From the Onward Project.