History Of A Successful Side Hustle

Regular readers know that my main side hustle is not this blog but my graphic arts business.  And what a year it was.

I set a goal to earn $6,000 this year ($500 a month average) and I’m ecstatic to say that I passed it!  My total for the year came to $7,143!  That comes out to be just under $20 a day.  It doesn’t sound like much on a daily basis, but it adds up.

It’s been an amazing year and I’m pretty damn stoked at my progress.  I’m also grateful to live in a time where I can sit around in my underwear with a 9 year old laptop that I paid $400 for and make over $7,000 creating and selling “art”.

I put the word art in quotations as I’m not exactly Picasso.  But I’m finding that art is like rock and roll music in that it doesn’t have to be all that good to find an audience.

 

Meager Beginnings

Back in October 2016, more than a year before I started this blog, I decided to give the graphics arts thing a shot.  I had always toyed with the idea since I had solid skills in Photoshop and Illustrator, but kept kicking the can down the road. 

What compelled me to finally dive in was something I do not do or allow on this blog, namely politics.  The two people that were running for president in 2016 we’re so incredibly easy to parody with funny designs I just couldn’t resist. 

So I started with some election stuff but quickly pivoted to outdoor sports once the toxicity of anything political starting to smell through my monitor like a rotting carcass on the side of the road. 

I created, and kept creating.  Most of my early stuff was focused on cycling and climbing, but I quickly expanded to kayaking, stand up paddling, hiking, and running.  Then I added national parks and wild places. 

And yes I even have some financial independence themed designs.

I found my audience, and my audience found me. 

In the summer of 2017 I expanded again by taking on custom designs, mainly blog logos, after GuyOnFIRE asked me to do his.  Next thing you know I started to get more requests for custom work.  They still come in sporadically, and today I’ve done about 25 logos for various businesses and websites.

When I started in November 2016 my total earnings for the month were a meager $2.45 and I sold designs on two sites.  This past month I earned $1,385 and I sell on 11 sites. 

That paid my mortgage and all utilities, with some decent scratch left over.

Here’s what steady progress looks like, my monthly earnings:

It kind of looks like a stock market chart, and that gives me warm fuzzies.

So what’s my secret? 

I don’t have one.  Actually my best advice is to read Steven Pressfield’s “The War Of Art” (affliliate link).  That’s it.  It’s a really short book and I’ll make it even shorter for you.

Show up, do the work.  Show up every day.  Keep creating bad shit until you start creating some okay shit.  Then keep creating okay shit until you start creating some good shit.

Really, that’s the formula.  It’s about persistence.  The long game.  Pushing through, even when the results aren’t there. 

 

How I Show Up

I’m semi-retired and only go in my W2 job 2 days a week.  On other days my routine is simple.  Wake up early, usually 5:00 or so, grab coffee, then design for 3 to 5 hours.

I freaking love it.  And it’s better than writing because unlike writing I can listen to podcasts at the same time. Designing requires a completely different piece of cognitive real estate in my brain than absorbing a podcast does.  It just works, and I often find the content of a podcast actually tipping me off to a design idea since many of my podcasts are about outdoor sports.

How far can I take this side hustle?  Pretty far.  Namely, as far as I want.  There are tons of folks bringing in six figures a year doing it.

To get to that level however I would likely have to either chase pop culture nonsense, which I have no desire to do, or strike gold in the ultra-competitive genre of wedding invitations.

Which I also have no desire to do.

The good news is that the line in the chart of my earnings has been rising at pretty much the same rate as the number of total designs I have out there.  So more designs = more opportunity for sales = more money.  Plain and simple. 

In this online print-on-demand world volume is your friend.  Currently I have about 1,200 designs.  By this time next year I’ll have around 1,800 to 2,000 because I’m going to keep showing up.  So if the growth of the past 3 years continues I can expect to be making $1,600 to $2,000 by next December.  Not too shabby. 

And get this, I could stop creating new designs all together and the money will keep coming in.  Because I’m creating assets.  Once I create and upload a design, it keeps making money with no additional work. 

It’s not a passive side hustle up front, but it sure can be completely passive in the future once the work is done.

To get exposure I’m relying on organic search for the most part.  If you follow my Accidental FIRE accounts on any of the socials you’ll notice I rarely post my designs with a link.  I don’t like being spammy and would make a horrible used car salesman or MLM person. 

I do have a Twitter account for my design company and tweet out stuff there with links, but it’s hard to get traction.  To be honest, I really dislike social media and would rather just design more instead of strive to optimize exposure and sales.

The great thing about being FI is I don’t need this money.  I do like the money, but more importantly I love the fact that people continue to buy what I’m creating.  That means something. 

Even if it is silly stuff like this:

Actually when I sell the silly stuff it’s even better because it somewhat validates my weird sense of humor.  Someone else gets me out there, enough to wear it on their clothes and present it to the world. 

And every time I get a sale my phone rings out with a “cha-ching!” cash register sound.  I get dopamine hits all day long, it’s like a drug that puts money in my pocket instead of the opposite.

So there you go, that’s the history of my side hustle.  I arrange 0’s and 1’s on a computer into designs that people like, and they buy them on swag.  Is this a great time to be alive or what?

So find something you like to do, show up every day, and get after it.  

And a happy and healthy 2020 to all my readers – thank you for your support!

*This article contains affiliate links. Using those links throws some change in my pocket at no additional cost to you. Here’s my disclosure.