Hey guys, it's side hustle Thursdays. Rules For Rebels here with Episode 6 of Side Hustling. Today's story is about a women who turned a hobby project into a successful busines. It's about a single mother who made over $15,000 in a short period of time by creating and selling an astrology calendar.
What I like about today's business is this is a handmade good. This women made the item herself meaning there's likely nothing else like it on the market. It's utilizing a hobby she enjoys doing. And typically the margins on this type of business are pretty good.
When it comes to business I think we all need to decide if we want to be the next Mark Zuckerberg and take over the world and if we're ready for that commitment of time and energy, or if we enjoy our lives and just want a side hustle to bring in some extra money. I see a lot of times peoples actions don't match their ambitions. There's nothing wrong with just a plain old side hustle.
What I love about them are it gives you freedom and opportunity. Unlike a job a side hustle is yours and you can do it however you like. I also love that your earning potential unlike a job is completely untapped, you can build your business however large you want to if the market will allow it.
Todays story is about Julie Wilder from Florida. Prior to starting this hustle we're going to be discussing today Julie ran an organic restaurant for a number of years. She enjoyed it but it was long hours and a lot of work.
Even while running the restaurant as kind of a fun side project to blow off some steam Julie would make astrology calendars and every year she would update them. She never thought of this as a business, and never sold them, it was just something fun she did on her own.
One day she heard about Etsy, and a short time later kind of out of the blue she decided to try to sell her calendar on there. People seemed to like it and there wasn't really anything else like it on the market. She decided to delve a bit deeper and and invest a bit more time and effort into the marketing of these calendars and within a pretty short period of time she had made $5,000.
Money continued to roll in, it wasn't long before she made another $2,000. Now this is very low effort, she makes the calendar once per year and then can continue to sell that calendar for the rest of the year until the following year when she updates it, tweaks the design a bit and rolls out the following years calendar.
Now about her product and her niche. There's two good things about astrology. I don't know much about it, but I do know a lot of people are interested in it which is a good thing. It's also something which stirs up strong opinions. It seems like people who are into it are into it, and people who aren't think it's "hooey" or non-sense. This is actually good as well strong opinions or something controversial. You don't want to enter a space where nobody cares. You want people to be passionate about or have strong feelings about whatever it is your doing.
Another interesting thing is I would expect there to be a lot of astrology calendars out there. Now Julies hustle started some years back so this may have changed, but at the time there were not alot of calendars on the market. There were essentially just 3-4 major ones which all were very new agy and kind of the same. Now many people like that but not everyone.
Julie's calendars were different. They were not new agy, they were modern and had a unisex design that would appeal to everyone and that's what really wound up seperating her calendar from the rest.
Now as for the marketing Julie didn't just throw a listing up on Etsy, she made some video tutorials on using the calendar ie content marketing guys I'm always pushing content marketing, its very powerful. Now only videos but she did some blog posts, shared her posts and videos in some Facebook groups, etc. Basically very few costs involved.
This calendar costs Julie $1 to produce and she sells it all day long for $15, pretty good margins, fantastic margins actually. It's also a lot easier than running a restaurant.
Julie says she puts about a week into design at the beginning of the year and the rest of the year is just a little bit of marketing and the rest order fulfillment. She works with her young daughter who sometimes helps her which is pretty cool as well. She gets to expose her daughter to Entrepreneurship and also spend time with her doing something she enjoys, pretty cool..
She took a passion project and found a way to make money off it. She did something different than what others were doing and that's why she succeeded. That's what I want you guys to do. If Julie had just copied everyone else's astrology calendar the project wouldn't have gone anywhere. IT's because she put her own twist on it, that is the reason it was successful and that's what I encourage you guys to do. If I give an idea, a business idea a product idea, don't just copy, put your own twist on it.
This is kind of a unique business so it's not quite like affiliate marketing where I can give you an example of how to copy this business, I do however have a few similar examples for you that may spark an idea within you.
The first is a project I started years ago. I talked about this before but when storage auctions became saturated and I couldn't make any money I decided to find a way to make money off all these people ruining it for me. I started a blog about storage auctions, I would also sell lists of upcomming auctions to newbies who didn't know where to find out about them. My project wasn't creative so much as it was practical but it was similar to Julies in the sense at the beginning of the month I would scour the internet finding all the auctions and then repost them with an autoscheduling tool and sell those lists. I would skate for the rest of the month until the following month came around and it was time to put out another list. It cost me nearly nothing in money or effort.
Now one thing I want to add about handmade goods, not always do they make a good business. My girlfriends mom for example croches really nice blankets and hats. The problem however is that you can buy a cheap blanket made in China. The amount of time as well as the cost of yarn for her probably woudln't make it feasible to sell these as a business. Another example is down by my parents house in South Carolina they are famous for these sweet grass baskets. They are very nice baskets but even a small little basket could cost upwards of $200 because the amount of time it takes to make them. What's nice about Julies business is while she designed, drew, and created the origional calendar, obviously what she was selling was reprints which allowed her to scale this. Had she had to individually draw every calendar this would not be feasible or profitable.
One last example and this one comes from the book the $100 Startup. It's been a while so I'm a little sketchy on the details but here's basically the story. A group of friends wanted to create a map for themselves. THey wanted to create an interesting, old school, sorta lord of the rings style treasure type map for their city, something different and more artsy than just a road map.
They designed it themselves as they were both artsy and I think one had some schooling in design. They created their map and wanted to get a couple copies printed for themselves to hang on their wall. Unfortunately the printer they found would only print a minimum of 10 maps and they only needed 3. Whatever they bought the 10 maps, the 3 of them took 3 of the maps and they gave another map or two away to some other friends.
It turned out people loved the map. A couple of their friends friends asked if they could buy a copy and they wound up selling out of their 10 maps. They realized they may be onto something and had more printed, those sold as well.
Basically this turned into a business where they would make these old school style like Treasure maps for various cities, locations, etc.
Anyhow guys, I hope this story maybe stirs some ideas up within you and maybe inspires one of your own. Until next time thanks for watching and if you liked this video please thumbs up, share and subscribe. If you have anything to add or discuss drop a comment below. Thanks guys and I'll catch you next time.
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