This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Greetings friends, community, side hustle school listeners. This is Chris Guillebeau. So excited you're here. Got a story for you today about personalized greeting cards. These greeting cards allow you to tell a story about the cards recipient.
The Houston Pharmaceutical Sales Rep and MBA student who starts this project, funds it with his earnings from Airbnb and by mining cryptocurrency. Kids these days, coming up with all kinds of stuff out there. Now this project is off to a good start with earnings at $2,000 a month and growing. We have a spirit of good to great. I also have a couple of notes or comments for him that I will share at the end.
Also, do you have a side hustle? If so, I would like to know about it. We'd love to consider you to be featured on the program. If you'd like to nominate yourself or someone you know, just go to sidehustleschool.com/about and then scroll down for the link that says, submit your side hustle story. Give us as many details as possible and if we can use it, we will be in touch.
Okay, coming up next, Illustrated greeting cards provide personal touch. Stay tuned. [Music]
We've all stood in front of the racks containing dozens of greeting cards looking for just the right one. But that unicorn card seldom appears because greeting cards are so often generic and trite. Meanwhile, most snail mail these days consists of junk promotions and bills.
When we do hear from our family and friends on a special occasion, it's often in the form of a digital message via social media, text, or email. A pharmaceutical sales rep by day and an MBA student by night, Alex Krakowski of Houston saw this from both sides. He disliked mass-produced greeting cards and he fondly remembered getting letters in the mail from his grandmother. Later, he had a pen pal and enjoyed the anticipation of checking the mailbox for a letter each week. Then as an adult, he started sending cards and letters to family and friends, complete with doodles and stick figures as a way to stay in touch.
The recipient said they loved opening the mailbox to find something special and personal. And it's that experience that led him to his side hustle, Talinga. Talinga creates personalized hand-drawn greeting cards. The sender chooses a story length, either one day, one or two weeks, or one month, and uploads a photo of the recipient with a description of the story they wish the cards to tell. The story can be funny, dramatic, romantic, or anything you choose.
It can even be completely fictional. You can make the recipient into a superhero or the leading lady or gentleman in a romance. Talinga's team of illustrators and artists will then tell that story through personalized illustrations. A few days later, the recipient will start receiving the one-of-a-kind greeting card-sized illustrations in their mailbox every other day until the package ends and their story is complete. Who wouldn't be thrilled to open that envelope?
Now, Talinga isn't only helping out those who struggle to find the perfect gift. Alex contracts with 25 talented artists, many of whom are students at various colleges throughout the Houston area. The artists illustrate the cards, giving them a chance to prove all the people who told them an art degree was a waste of money wrong. Talinga allows the artist to flex their own creative muscles and promote their brands. There are some loose guidelines they need to follow, but overall, they're free to showcase their own unique style with each illustration.
Alex and Talinga are also doing their part for the environment. Most store-bought greeting cards are tossed into the trash, and many are never bought at all. But people who receive these treasured drawings frame them, turn them into coffee table books, and even use their illustrated doppelganger as their social media profile picture. Talinga isn't Alex's first foray into side hustling. He makes extra money with Airbnb and by mining cryptocurrency.
These hustles actually help to finance Talinga, the startup costs of which were around $8,000. Alex describes $2,000 of that investment as "mistake money" that he wishes he could have back. We all spend a little mistake money from time to time. The good news is that Talinga is currently earning $2,000 a month in profit and growing quickly. In addition to the mistake money, Alex has a few other regrets when it comes to building the company's website.
Particularly, he regrets not focusing more on SEO for Google searches and less on social media marketing. Luckily, he has recently finished his MBA and is putting the skills he learned into practice in his real-world setting of running a business. Having completed his degree, he has plans to integrate a sharing economy model into Talinga in an effort to streamline the onboarding of aspiring artists and writers. The writers will create love letters, poems, or fun narratives, which will be paired with the illustrations to more fully tell the stories that people want to share. And for stories that are too good to end, Talinga hopes to soon offer a subscription plan.
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Awesome, so congratulations to Alex. This is a really fun project. I think it's really cool. And so it's in that spirit of good to great, as I said in the beginning, that I do have a couple of comments and concerns. So when I look at the website, which I would encourage all of our listeners to go and check out, I actually want to order one of these greeting card stories myself.
So I'll do that at some point. My dad's birthday's coming up, so hopefully he's not listening to this. He probably unsubscribed a long time ago. But anyway, Talinga sells different packages. All right, so you can get a one-day story, one-week story, two-week story, or a one-month story.
Now, the one-day story consists of a single hand-drawn image sent one time. It goes all the way up to the one-month story, which consists of 12 hand-drawn images sent every other day throughout one month. The price of the one-month story is $59.99, just under $60. But the price of the one-day story is $7.99, just eight bucks. I think starting at eight bucks is pretty cheap.
It's just, it's way too cheap, actually, because this is not a greeting card. I mean, greeting cards can cost $8 these days. It's not a greeting card. It's a permanent memento. Like, it's a custom work of art.
It's a personalized illustration, you know, of your gift recipient in a story. And they actually look really cool. Like I said, check out their website. It's got some really good examples there. So I think they should really push the ones that are at least $29.99.
So I think that's kind of the baseline price for this. And right now, the two-week story is priced at $34.99. So somewhere in there seems like, you know, the base level pricing. And then I think the subscription option is key, which he's planning to do at some point. So good idea there.
And I could see it being like a really cool thing to get somebody like this whole thing for a year. You know, you could spend a couple hundred dollars and, you know, every week they're getting something. Now, a lot of people might not do that, but some would. And having that option would be a good little anchor price. You see that thing and you're like, oh, I'm not gonna spend a couple hundred dollars or whatever, you know, for a whole year.
But here's an option for only $50 or whatever the price is to do it for a month or a few weeks or something. So I think that could be good. And then last but not least, he has the option for his customers, his users to leave reviews of the service on the site, which is good, but there's only a few reviews for each package. And so if he's really doing $2,000 a month in profit off of a pretty low sales price, he's got a lot more customers than are actually leaving reviews. So I would do, in this situation, I would do whatever I could to encourage people to go and leave reviews.
Go and list your friends, ask for beta users, reward your customers in some way for leaving reviews. You're not supposed to do that on Amazon or other sites like that, but this is his own site, you know? So run a giveaway, you know, ask the artist themselves to do reviews, do whatever it takes to show that there is real interest and satisfied customers. If you're going to list public reviews, in other words, you should have more than a few. You should have a whole bunch of them.
Just my two cents. As I said, it's a cool project. I think it's really fun. So do come check it out. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better.
The links to Tlinga and anything else I mentioned will be at sidehustleschool.com/978. Thank you so much, my friends. I'll be back again tomorrow and I hope you will join me. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.
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- From the Onward Project.
