This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey there, what's up? Welcome back. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. Quick refresher on the benefits of a side hustle.
It's not just about making more money, even though that's awesome. It's also about having a creative outlet. Some kind of work that's different from your normal day job. Something you enjoy doing, but it's not just a hobby. It's also something that boosts your confidence, builds security for you, creates a new asset for you.
And I mention that because today's story hits on every one of those benefits. And it also makes something like $40,000 a year in part-time income. It's all about an employee who makes handmade desk accessories with his wife, and sometimes their four-year-old daughter slash shipping manager. Their story right after this. [Music]
Today's story comes from Alok Ahuja in Ottawa, Canada.
By day, he's the head of a partner program at Shopify. His side hustle, which he runs with his wife, is Madera Craft, a business designing and manufacturing handmade wooden desk accessories and phone cases. Alok and his wife, like technology and design, may have a habit of collecting office furniture. After attending local craft shows around town, they thought about melding their interests and creating their own products, working with a manufacturer to help bring their ideas to life. To find that manufacturer, they talked to other crafters they found on Etsy and at local shows.
They also did a bunch of online searching, ordering samples from multiple sources to gauge the quality and speed of each vendor. They wanted the products they would eventually create to have the best possible quality. So they were very particular on both the design and how the items felt when you held them in your hand. This was not a fast track project. The entire process took about six to eight months, part-time, of course.
They went through five or six iterations of each item, using prototypes to see how they'd work in real-life situations, and sharing them with friends and family who acted as beta testers. Many of those original ideas got shut down when they saw the actual prototypes, and they ended up with their final product line by a lot of trial and error. This allowed them to get a lot of feedback, create some personalization, and make sure they were 100% comfortable with what they were putting out in the world. Then when they were ready to go to market, they didn't start with just a few hundred pieces, they placed an order for more than 5,000 individual items, including desk accessories and iPhone and iPad cases. Now this was admittedly a big gamble and an investment, but with the new Shopify store they'd built and the feedback from their friends and family, they felt it was a risk worth taking.
The boxes and products took over much of their house, and after completing production, they worked with a photographer to get really great images of those items. In fact, out of that six to eight-month process, more than two months were spent getting the right photos and creating the right marketing materials. Because these are items that are intended to be displayed on a desk, they focused a lot on that photography and then leveraged those features on their website and social media. They experimented with Facebook ads, with Google AdWords, but the best experience they had was actually with targeted Instagram ads. In their first year of operations, they invested about $1,000 in social spending, mostly for those Instagram ads, and they got a return on investment of about eight times that amount.
They learned from comments and likes about which posts and therefore which items were the most popular, and so over time, they focused on the campaigns that people were responding to. This social media advertising not only got the ball rolling and brought attention to what they were doing, it also generated sales, and it helped to move some of those boxes out of their house. Something happened that first year that made a big difference. Madeira Crafts was able to sell their products on several flash sale sites. Now, you've probably seen sites like this before.
Maybe you've purchased from them. If not, they are e-commerce websites that are set up with the purpose of producing sales, and pretty much all they do is have different sales. They might have a sale going for a week, it might be going for a day, it might go until they run out of inventory, but the businesses that run these flash sales are in constant need of new items and new inventory, because their whole business model is to recruit new customers and get them purchasing as soon as possible. So the way it works behind the scenes, a vendor like Madeira Crafts provides the flash sale site with all the product images and descriptions, then the flash sale site adds it to their process, handles the actual checkout and payment. And once the sale ends, a vendor like Madeira Crafts or any of the others typically have about a week to get everything that was purchased, prepared and shipped to a warehouse.
Naturally, the flash sale sites purchase the items at one cost, customers then pay a higher cost, and the profit is then split in some fashion between the flash sale site and the vendors. Now, early in Madeira Crafts' operation, they were approached by one of these sites that asked them to participate. They decided to take a chance, they went for it, and then interestingly, a look noticed that it's a very incestuous industry, because once they were on one flash sale site, several others began to approach them and asked to list their products as well. So in the first year, they worked with several of them, including Touch of Modern, City Social, and Huckberry. If you're not familiar with these sites at all, I'll make sure to link them up in the show notes so you can take a look.
Based off that social media advertising and the flash sales, as well as people who just came to their website directly, Madeira Crafts' profit in their second year of operation was about $45,000. And because Alok works at Shopify, it was also a good opportunity for him to use his own platform, which he's passionate about, while himself learning about e-commerce and seeing what it's like for the other business owners who use the same service. His advice is to find a product that excites you and causes you to wake up extra early, thinking about ways to share it with the world. He also says to always think about expansion, about how more people can get their hands on your product, which is exactly what he's done through the flash sale site. And this business runs in the family.
Alok and his wife have a four-year-old daughter who they already refer to as their shipping manager. And as she grows up, she'll see not only her parents going off to work, but how they've created something for themselves as well, right there at home. [Music]
So I don't think I've mentioned flash sales at all before. And if you manufacture something, this is definitely something to look at. There are a lot of these sites out there.
Some have a larger user base than others, of course. And when it works well, if you're a vendor that has something that is attractive to the customers on that site, well, the good news is you can get a lot of sales all at once, can definitely have a big effect. And if there's any downside, it's that the price is going to be a lot lower than what you would normally sell on your website because it is, after all, a flash sale. So you have to make sure that you're still able to get enough profit to make that worth it for you. And also the customers that you get, the goal is that some of them will transfer over and become a fan of your products as well.
But their first loyalty is usually to that site where they purchase from. So you won't necessarily have a lot of repeat business from them. They belong to those flash sale sites because they want to pay less. They want to get a discount, a bargain. So they're not automatically going to be excited about buying something else from you at full price.
But still, sometimes it works. And for the right product, something like these kind of desk accessories that Alok and his wife are selling, it can be a really good fit. So as you see from this story and many others, a side hustle is more than just extra income. It's also just about building something apart from your day job, even if you love your job, and creating an asset for yourself. My goal with the show is that you won't just listen to the stories and be inspired.
Every day I want to encourage you to take action, to channel that inspiration into something you're building for yourself, just like you heard today. If you'd like to learn more about flash sale sites or see the kind of things that Madeira Kraft makes, just come over to sidehustleschool.com/117. That's one, one, seven. As always, I thank you for listening. I'm Chris Guillebeau.
This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
