Listener Discovers Astronomical Success in Astrological Gifts

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

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Hey there, what's up? Welcome back to Side Hustle School. I am your host, Chris Guillebeau. How about some of these stories lately? Have we leveled up or what?

I hope you've been impressed. I'm always impressed when the notes come across my desk and I read about a college student who makes $40,000 a month, or any number of things that we featured recently. People out there are doing some amazingly creative stuff. And one of my favorite things about the show is hearing listener success stories. And as we go through the year, I'll be sharing those with you periodically.

And usually a few times a month, if not more, the episode itself is coming from a listener success story. Like somebody who started listening to Side Hustle School last year during season one, and then they got to work and made something happen for themselves. So I love that. I'm so glad to know it's helping people. I do wanna be clear and acknowledge that those people, or perhaps you, if you're starting your Side Hustle, are the ones who are doing all the work, right?

So I'm not taking credit for their success. I'm just glad that the show can be a little bit of a catalyst or perhaps an amplifier, or just a support. Anyway, all that to say, today's feature is a listener success story. It's about a woman who discovers astronomical success and astrological gifts. And she had been selling on Etsy for quite some time, but last year she decided to make a shift and do something different.

So I'll tell you her idea, I'll tell you how she made it happen, and I'll tell you what we can learn from it. All of that is coming up after this quick shout out to our sponsor. [Music]

Today's featured Side Hustler has been selling vintage items on Etsy for eight years. Her name is Sasha, and those Etsy sales brought in a bit of money from time to time, but they also had their limitations. Mostly, whenever she had a hit and something sold well, she was never able to replicate it.

Frustrated and looking to get ahead, Sasha started listening to Side Hustle School with the goal of creating a hustle that was low investment and low risk, but also replicable. After a month of listening, Sasha's thinking began to shift. She started to look at things in new ways. After two months, Sasha was coming up with an idea or two each week. Suddenly it was like a damn burst and she was seeing potential side hustles everywhere.

So what was she gonna do? Well, looking to combine her skill with physical products, that's what she had been doing on Etsy, with her interest in popular culture, Sasha created a line of astrology related printed goods. And she began with coffee mugs. After coming up with initial designs, she then found an artist to develop those ideas further. That artist was actually one of her former Etsy customers who specializes in far out 1960s inspired art.

She says it was a perfect match. She also says she had no idea whether her designs would be successful or not. She figured if they flop, she would at least end up with a lot of great Christmas presents for her friends. Fortunately, no flopping occurred. Some of her friends actually bought the mugs, but more importantly, a lot of strangers began buying the mugs.

From mugs, she moved to t-shirts and stickers and her sales are growing each week. Her expenses are covered by her day job. So for now, most of the side hustle's profits are being reinvested into new designs. Even though most profits are invested back, Sasha says that the additional income has made a real difference in her life. Among other things, she can now go to the acupuncturist once a week instead of just in urgent situations without feeling like she's spending from her food and basic expense budget.

And one strategy that's helped her streamline is dropshipping, a concept she first heard about on the show. Dropshipping is where you're selling products, but there's another company somewhere that's actually doing fulfillment. So you don't have to stock and pack and ship your items. They'll do it for you. After calculating manufacturing costs and fees, Sasha realized she would make a profit of about $6 a mug.

So she ended up connecting with a wholesale printing company in Arizona that makes and ships her mugs. When it comes to marketing, Sasha pays close attention to her Etsy search engine keywords, titles, and tags. And by looking carefully, she's gained some insights that have helped her make more money. For example, people don't find her products by searching gift mug, but she does get a lot of traffic from astrology gift. So once she learned that, she began including that phrase astrology gift more frequently in her listings.

Sasha's best advice for fellow hustlers is one that echoes the values you hear every day. Just start. Start before you feel ready. Sasha's side hustle began with those few mug designs and is now growing into a whole product line that has her thinking about other expansions as well. Being able to shift her mindset from working hourly to the side hustle approach where you make your product or service work for you has made all the difference.

It seems her astrological gift goods and her side hustle success were written in the stars. Awesome, so let's talk about Etsy for a moment because we have a lot of listeners out there selling stuff on Etsy. For anyone who's not familiar, Etsy is the world's largest handcrafted marketplace. All kinds of goods are bought and sold there. And we featured a number of Etsy success stories last year.

A lot of them were doing $500 to $1,000 a month. Some of them were doing several thousand dollars a month. And once in a while, we would stumble on a feature of an Etsy shop that truly scaled. If I remember correctly, we featured an artist who was making lighting designs, like really creative, fun stuff that nobody else was doing. And she actually grew her business to multiple six figures and eventually a million dollars.

So big successes like that are possible, but most people who sell on Etsy don't succeed, or at least let's say they don't make a significant income from it. And what I like about this story is how Sasha shifted her mindset. For eight years, she had been selling on Etsy, but only one-off items. She was never able to replicate it or create any kind of real business. But then when she began thinking about systematizing and creating items that could be made over and over, well, now she's building this whole product line.

So everything comes back to goals. Maybe you do wanna sell something unique that can't be replicated. That's okay. But in this situation, she was frustrated because she felt like she wasn't getting ahead. And she was essentially just trading time for money and doing this.

Whereas the situation now is she could be doing something totally different. She could be working at her day job and somebody goes and buys one of the mugs or a t-shirt or stickers or whatever else she's selling. That is passive income. And that, for a lot of our listeners anyway, is the goal. So listeners, let's make this a big year.

Let's make 2018 a year of action. Every day, ask yourself what you can do, even just a small step to get closer to the freedom that comes from having more than one source of income. What are the action points? Well, from this story, you could go and listen to the other episodes focused on Etsy. You could explore drop shipping.

You could learn about search engine optimization or SEO, which relates to that insight that Sasha had of how people weren't searching gift mug to find her, but they were searching astrology gift. So then she began focusing on that phrase more. You could also just ask yourself, if I sold a single product, if I sold one thing, what would it be? Even small steps are good and I do hope you'll take them. I hope this year that you'll be inspired and motivated, but even so, I also hope you take action on what you learn.

Today's show notes will include links to other episodes about Etsy, some free resources we have, and also a tool that Sasha uses to improve her rankings on Etsy. All that stuff is at sidehustleschool.com/374. Thank you for listening today. I'll be back again tomorrow. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.

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