AI transcript
(upbeat music)
Two grand a month in this college semi-passive income
on the side.
Oh, what’s up, what’s up, Nick.
Oh, Loper here.
Welcome to the Side Hustle Show
where we’re breaking down legit ways
to make extra money outside of your day job.
Cool example of somebody doing just that this week.
He’s got a digital products business
that doesn’t rely on having an audience of his own
and it’s been growing 40% a year,
lately earning around $2,000 a month.
He’s a high school math and personal finance teacher
from PhiEducator.com.
Rob Phelan, welcome to the Side Hustle Show.
– Hey, Nick, thank you so much for having me
and looking forward to it.
– Me as well.
Stick around, we’re covering how to come up
with popular slash profitable product ideas,
how to tap into a marketplace
of millions of potential buyers and lots more.
Now the marketplace in question here is teachers pay teachers,
which I know all the teachers in the audience
will be familiar with,
but fun fact, you don’t need to be a teacher
to sell on there.
So I wanna talk through some of the digital assets,
some of the products that you’ve created
and how you’ve grown that business.
‘Cause I think it’s a really cool example
we talk a lot about digital products on Etsy,
but hey, that’s not the only game in town.
So curious to dive into this platform.
And maybe we start off with,
I imagine there’s an 80/20 to product sales
with everything that you’ve created.
Like what are some of the best sellers here?
What have you seen perform well?
– I mean, I’m still always refining what that 80/20 is.
And I think we’re always trying to figure out like,
well, what is that 20 that’s gonna account
for all the 80% of everything that we make?
But what I’m finding is that teachers don’t want shallow.
They want deep, they want quality.
They want something that’s gonna be
this amazing exchange of value.
And we know that that’s like a core thing
when it comes to creating any product
or for any business is that the customer has to feel like,
yes, that was an amazing exchange of value
and use the seller have to feel like
that was really worth my time as well.
So I find with my store,
I create personal finance education products for teachers.
So that is my niche.
I’m very much focused on financial educators,
mostly in the high school space.
And what I’m finding is that
I don’t wanna create an entire curriculum for them.
What I want is for them to have their own curriculum in place.
And then they’re coming to me
when they want something extra, something better.
They’ve identified a part of their curriculum
that doesn’t really feel great.
Students are bored.
They wish it was better.
They wish it was more exciting or engaging.
And that’s when they come find my store.
And that’s what I try to serve is
I want products that are going to get students
talking to each other, engage with the materials
and using personal finance in a practical way.
So they end up learning a much deeper lesson from that
than just a teacher lecturing in the front of the room.
– Okay, so rather than creating something
for social studies and something for English writing
and something for math, it’s like, no, no, no.
My niche here is the personal finance space.
Do you think that’s important to build some level
of credibility or like niche down
to a certain topic inside of your store?
– I do.
I don’t think TPT is a throw your net wide
and you’ll end up coming out ahead kind of thing.
I think the more niche down you are,
the better you’re actually going to do it,
even though you do make your audience smaller,
which does seem counterintuitive.
I love the idea of like the 1000 true fans,
like finding that group of 1000 people
who would want to buy your product
and then really making sure you serve those.
For me, that was financial educators.
I was in the space myself, didn’t really like what was out
there in terms of major product offerings.
So from Dave Ramsey or Jumpstart or Junior Achievement.
And I started creating resources for my own classroom.
So I still teach full time in public high school education.
And I just was like, okay, like I use this.
I think it’s good.
Let me throw it out there and see what other teachers think.
And I found that if I kept creating
personal finance resources, teachers were excited.
They were coming back.
I ventured into math a little bit
because that’s also my certification.
And it was a very crowded space.
And like high school math is such a general idea
that it’s hard to win that market share
as easily as it would be to say like, no,
I am high school, personal finance,
small individual resources that are going to enhance
what you’re already doing.
– Yeah, I love this example of,
hey, this is something that I was creating
for my own class, for my own use.
And then maybe there’s a way to sell that sawdust,
to sell that, you know, to reach a wider audience.
I think there’s so many examples of files
and templates and things that we’ve built
in our own businesses that, you know,
maybe you could license that out to somebody else.
Maybe it’s a way to get paid over and over again
from that work that you did once,
kind of like a behind the scenes type of product.
I think that’s really cool.
The other thing that might be interesting here
is there was some semi-recent legislation
where personal finance education
is becoming a graduation requirement
in more and more states where it’s like, you know, math.
People have been teaching math for hundreds of years
in high school, but you know, this is a newer sub,
like the personal finance focus, maybe a newer subject
where maybe it’s a bluer ocean to go
and try and compete in.
– Yeah, and I think when you try and think
of a new business idea, thinking about what is trending
currently or what’s coming down the road
that you can maybe hop on and be an early adopter on
or an early creator on, personal finance
is sort of that thing.
And that was just by luck for me.
Like that’s what I’m passionate about.
That’s what I work in.
And it just happens to be a very growing industry
in terms of education because more and more states
are mandating it.
And then the problem teachers have is
they’re not trained in it.
So they often get tossed this class like,
“Hey, you, you’re gonna teach about money next year.”
And they’re a social studies teacher.
They’re a math teacher.
They’re maybe a business teacher,
but they’ve never taught personal finance before.
So there’s a huge demand for how do I do this?
And I need resources that really, really walk me through
this very simply because I don’t really know what I’m doing.
I’m not an expert yet at this content area
and I need support.
– Oh, and it’s such a broad topic.
And remember, like my math teacher in high school,
like, you know, he had to teach us exponents anyway.
So Blessus already took it upon himself
to teach us about, you know, dollar cost averaging
and index funds and, you know, going down this road.
And he’s like, well, in 40 years,
you’re gonna have, you know, $3 million or something.
But you’re like, as a high school student,
you’re like, yeah, but that’s in 40 years, right?
It’s like, how do you bring this home
and make it compelling and interesting and relatable
to someone’s like, well, you know,
that’s not the time horizon that I’ve even been thinking about.
– And I think you’ve done a good job with that.
It looks like now I’m on the teachers pay teachers store.
You can find it at fieducator.store.
If you want to check out some of his listings,
a lot of them look like they’re almost like gameplay based
where it’s maybe a multi-week unit
where people can kind of track their,
or students can track their progress.
Is that kind of how some of these are set up?
– Yeah, I mean, you start in the beginnings,
figuring yourself out,
especially if you’ve created digital products before,
like you have to figure out
like what your theme is gonna be, your niche,
the way you want to run things.
What are people gonna know you for?
And I found that I wanted to create things
that were three E’s, exciting, engaging and educational.
And that’s almost my mission for my business
and everything I create has to come back to that.
If it doesn’t meet those standards, I don’t publish it
because I don’t want anything subpar quality
that teachers are gonna be like,
oh, well, that wasn’t great.
Like I’m not gonna come back again.
So you’ll notice yet, when you look through my products,
like there are things that are going to get students
either out of their seats or talking to each other
in meaningful ways.
They’re gonna practice skills.
They’re gonna play games.
They’re gonna do activities.
They’re gonna do big projects
where the learning is almost a byproduct
of what they’re doing.
They don’t even realize they’re learning half the time,
which is why I think so many teachers
enjoy using the resources I create.
– Yeah, if you can sneak it in there somehow,
like, hey, we’re gonna play this, you know,
crossword puzzle game and never, never mind
that you’re actually learning some spelling.
Well, we’re doing this.
But, you know, if you can make it fun.
Was there any on Etsy or even like YouTube or vlogging,
there’s like this level of keyword research
where I want to go where there’s some level
of existing demand rather than trying to create demand
from scratch.
Is there any sort of keyword research,
you know, volume estimates, competitive estimates
that exist for teachers, pay teachers specifically
or anything like that that went into the thought process
before creating extra products?
– There’s no really useful tool like you might find
for Google or like when you’re writing a blog
and you can just like feed your article into a plugin
and it tells you like, oh, you’re perfect for SEO
or no, you should change these things.
It doesn’t quite exist for TPT.
There is a program called Your Data Playbook,
which I don’t personally use yet.
It’s one of those things that I think
as you grow your store, you level up to the point
where you will start using these sorts of tools
’cause if they are quite expensive,
but that will give you some ideas of like products
that you could be doing better on if you change keywords.
It doesn’t really suggest the keywords for you.
It just kind of tells you like, hey, you could be doing better.
Really, it comes down to using the search function,
like you would for Google.
It’s a search engine at the end of the day
that leads you to products.
So going into the search bar and typing in like similar phrases
to what your product is, seeing what pops up,
what are the most popular resources there
and then building your keyword bang from that
and making sure that’s in your title
and your product descriptions.
– Is it a matter of looking at like,
well, here’s what I had in mind
or this is what I was thinking about creating
and the top results only have three reviews.
So they must not be selling a huge volume.
So maybe there’s room for me to compete there
versus, oh, if I see just pages and pages of results
that seem to have been there for years
and they’ve sold tons.
It’s like, well, how am I gonna break in as a new seller?
– I should be doing more of that.
I don’t.
I look at it as what do I need to enhance
what I’m doing in my own classroom.
So like every time I teach this subject,
I’m like, where are the weak points and what needs more?
And I’ll have a quick look to see
does anything else exist out there,
but I’m not even really looking at TPD that closely
to see what the top ranking things are.
I think as I start to kind of fill out my product offerings
and I feel like, okay, I’ve done a good job
at meeting the market need
that I will start refining what I’m doing,
really focusing more heavily on SEO
and trying to rank higher on those pages.
But no, for right now, it’s really a case
of building what I know I need
and what I know my audience needs
based on social media feedback, newsletter, feedback,
that sort of thing.
– And it seems like most things on here
are priced between five and $30 they’re about.
So it’s very much a volume type of game
if I’m understanding that correctly.
– In my case, yes.
If you browse through other stores,
you will see some teachers who go for an entire curriculum.
So this would be what a teacher would use
from start to finish to run an entire class.
So curriculum, if you’re not familiar with the word,
start to finish everything that you would need.
And those you can find priced
from like 500 to 2,500.
Yeah, like there’s very high ticket items in TPT.
I don’t have those offered yet.
For me, it’s always coming back to that idea
of I’m a teacher myself.
My target market is teachers who are usually the buyers
in I would say 70 to 80% of the case.
So they’re digging into their own pocket to buy this stuff.
And my target market’s not the most flush with cash.
So I always want to make sure that I’m providing,
you know, very one-sided value.
What they’re getting in terms of product
is way more than the five or $20 or $30
that they’re paying for it in terms of the time
that it’s gonna save them, the stress that it’s gonna save them,
the improvement in their classroom management
that they’re gonna see,
and also the performance of the students.
So on all those metrics, I want teachers to feel like,
you know what, that was an amazing exchange of value for me.
Yeah, and at that price point,
it’s low friction versus trying to deal with the red tape.
Obviously, I mean, the dollars may be there
to try and start selling at the district level
or the state level, like, hey, this is mandated
by your state government.
Now you need to teach personal finance in schools.
Like, hey, we’ve got the proven out system of how to do this.
I’ve been a teacher myself for years and years.
Here’s what works.
We could build out that whole curriculum for you
and license it across however many different students
or schools.
Like, I could see how that would be a much higher ticket
than a $6 one-time thing.
But also, it’s like, well, you know, if this is passive,
people are just, you know,
coming out of this website and ordering my stuff.
And it’s like, well, yeah,
this is a longer-term sales cycle,
much longer-term game to play.
– I did the other side of it.
I worked with Choose a Five Foundation.
We created a pre-K through 12, entire curriculum,
and we tried to get schools to adopt it.
Like, it’s free.
Just take it, use it.
It’s great.
And even then, it was such a pain to work with schools
because schools are very restricted in what they can do.
Every district is basically its own little islands.
It’s hard to get like a rubber stamp
that works across the entire country
or even the entire state.
So, yeah, it’s a big challenge
versus like teachers are very much allowed
to kind of flex within their curriculum
and bring in additional resources.
So, it’s sort of like a backdoor in.
And maybe eventually,
I will grow to offer my own curriculum.
And at that point,
I will have had so many teacher adopters
that on the, at least the ground level,
there will be some support for trying to get something bigger
into their school or their district or the state.
– Yeah, down the road, that may be coming.
I definitely see that as an opportunity
for some of the assets and content that you’re creating.
– I also have competitors
who are people like NextGen Personal Finance or NGPAP.
So, like, if you’re a financial educator
or a teacher or a parent who wants to support this,
like that is an amazing free curriculum that exists
because it’s backed by a billionaire founder
who wants it to be free,
is able to pay staff to create amazing resources,
teacher professional development.
So, like, I don’t want to compete directly with them
because I love what they do
and it’s very hard to compete
with people who offer free things.
So, being able to enhance what they do
or enhance any other curriculum
is kind of a nice way to stay in my niche
and be valuable to customers.
– More with Rob in just a moment,
including the smart and creative ways
he markets his listings right after this.
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What feed does the platform take in this case?
– So, TPT has two tiers for sellers.
You’ve got the free version.
So, unlike Etsy, where they charge a listing fee
to put your first product up or whatever it is,
TPT does not charge a listing fee
so anybody can create an account
and you can start listing products for no cost.
The split on a sale is 50/50 at that basic tier.
So, at the free tier, 50/50 split,
you sell something for $10, they keep five, you get five.
And then they’re also handling sales tax
if you’re in a state that does need to charge sales tax.
And then if you upgrade to the premium seller,
which I think is $60 for the year,
it now becomes an 80/20 split.
So, you keep 80, they keep 20.
And there’s no higher tier available.
There’s no way to keep more of it.
That’s kind of the deal if you’re gonna use
the marketplace platform that they offer.
– Right, and you have to look at that as,
well, that’s my marketing expense, basically.
I get access to these audience of 7 million teachers
who are proactively looking for the stuff
that hopefully I’m selling versus the 50/50.
It’s like, it’s cool that there’s no listing fee,
but man, I think it’s expensive fast.
And then it’s like, that’s when you start to be like,
well, if I’m moving a certain volume,
then yeah, it’s a no-brainer to go to upgrade
to this $60 paid tier and then improve that ratio,
improve that split.
– I think I upgraded within like the first few months
of being a seller.
Like I was like, I’m going to eventually make enough money
to make this worth it, like 60 bucks,
like I can take a shot on that for a year
and see what happens,
but I was like, if I’m gonna make stuff,
I wanna keep more of it for me.
– Yeah, is there a play to get people off platform,
if you have other product,
like do you get access to the email list of customers?
Is there a way to drive your own traffic
to your own digital storefront?
Just trying to think of,
is this purely a marketplace type of play for you right now?
– So TPT, yeah, the marketplace gives you
very little information about individual buyers.
You can get a little bit of like demographics about them
or location by state,
but you don’t get an email address when someone buys from you,
which is different to maybe what you would get from an Etsy.
So when it comes to assembling your own email list,
you have to think like, okay,
what can I embed in the product
that would convince someone to give me an email?
So a lot of times there’s a freebie inside of a product
or one of my best lead magnets is like,
I have my entire 90 day curriculum pacing guide.
So if you wanna see how this resource fits into
what I do in my classroom,
you can follow along with me
and just give me an email and it gets sent out to you.
So trying to find ways to get people to convert
from being a TPT buyer to also on my newsletter is a big one.
I do go to social media a lot
to try and harvest people from my newsletter too.
So giving them freebies, looking for product testers,
free team people and they all just kinda slowly trickle in
and build up that newsletter,
which is much more valuable than the TPT search
or the social media platforms can be.
– Yeah, hopefully they like the product
and now you have a way to get back in touch with them
when you’re launching something new.
Otherwise it’s like, well, I made a one-off $7 sale
and now I can’t get in touch with that customer again.
So it’s like, well, how do we improve the lifetime value?
And it sounds like that’s one way that you’re going about it.
– Yeah, and making sure that in the products,
like you have those calls to action to come back
and leave your reviews or send me an email,
let me know what you think.
And just any of those touch points
are enough to get me an email address
and then let me add them to my newsletter
where it does become much more of a return customer scenario.
I think once they know, like and trust you,
they’re much more likely to come back,
especially when a teacher’s stressed,
they’re short on time, they need something.
The marketplace is reputable.
So that’s a great plus and part of that 20% loss of sale
is for the fact that teachers pay teachers
is considered a reputable place to buy something
and that they will, they’ll make it right
if the product you buy is total crap
or it’s a dud or it’s a scam of some sort.
Versus like buying something off of maybe eBay or an Etsy,
I don’t know how good the customer service
would be on that side.
– Oh, for sure.
– And then each individual store
has to build their own reputation.
Reviews is gold in terms of trying to get people
to like first time to your store to know, like and trust you,
but after you’ve made that first sale
and making sure that you kind of nurture that customer
to come back again and again is huge.
When you were first launching,
did you do anything proactive to try and drive traffic,
drive those initial reviews to just kind of,
this is what we’ve seen on platform after platform.
It’s like, if I can give that algorithm
a little bit of a nudge,
then it starts to work in my favor a little bit more.
And sometimes it’s harder to get those first sales
than it is to get the next 10.
Where it’s like, if I can just, you know, seed my store
with a few, you know, warm, happy customers,
then the rest starts to work more automatically.
– I mean, in the beginning, like launching my store now,
it was like walking in the dark and spinning around
and just hoping that something landed.
Like now, for example, I just launched a product last week.
It’s going to be a $5 product, like a $497 price point.
It’s free right now.
So what I did was on social media, I was like,
“Hey, I’m launching something new.
I’m looking for early adopters.
Leave me your email in the comments
or send me via DM and I will send you like the resource.
Really what I’m going to do is I’m going to send them to TPT
where they can download it for free.
Reason I don’t have a lead page is that I want the comments
coming in in this Facebook group.
So by people leaving their email in a comment
or sending me a DM, it drives it to the top of this group.
The group’s not mine.
It’s a group that I am very active in.
And there’s actually, there’s no admin really in it.
It’s like a ghost admin who doesn’t really do anything in it.
So trying to get people to comment and engage on the post
so that more people see it and then we’ll send them to it.
And then once they buy the product,
I have like a whole, you know, nurture part inside of it
where I’m like, Oh, you know, I hope you really enjoyed this.
Please come back and leave a review.
Once you’ve had a chance to use it, if you loved it,
can you post a picture of your students enjoying it
on social media or in these particular groups?
And that’s for the first week.
So anyone who is a follower of mine who, you know,
gets my stuff regularly on social media.
So they’ve been an engaged person.
So it does pop up top of their news feed
or they’re on my newsletter.
They’re going to get it for free this time around.
And the play is that I’m going to build the reviews.
I’m going to get that product out there.
And that’s in the long term,
it’s going to be much more valuable to my store.
So if I can get 50 to 100 reviews from this,
like that would be huge because at the moment,
I’m only just hitting about 400.
So I’m really looking to, yeah, drive up the friendliness
of the algorithm to my store.
– Yeah, I like that.
That’s similar to like a free Kindle launch strategy
where it’s like, if I can throw some downloads
towards that book on Amazon
and collect a critical mass of reviews
before I switch it over to being a paid product.
And yeah, absolutely that can help boost it up, I imagine.
And there’s no cost.
Like yes, I’m losing out on potential sales,
but if I’m at like 400 free downloads now,
so how many of those would have been paid customers
if I just started at a price point of 4.97?
Probably like 50, that would be typical for a product launch.
So I’m trying something totally different to see,
does it yield those reviews that I really, really need?
And then yeah, does it yield much more sales down the road?
Because now it’s such a highly reviewed product
that new teachers can be like, oh, let me check this out.
Let me try that.
– Are you using AI at all for ideation
or to help fill in the blanks on some of these products?
– Sometimes, I mean, I love playing with AI.
I love ChatGBT as like just a sounding board
for anything and everything.
So usually if I’m thinking of, say I was doing insurance,
I did a product on insurance recently
where students are creating an insurance plan
for their cell phones in the classroom.
I would like use ChatGBT, like what are the main considerations
when someone is building an insurance plan?
So it’s a really quick way to do a bit of basic research
and then I can build a product from that.
So I’m not letting AI write anything for me.
And I don’t know if TPT is yet spotting AI generated content
in their results and marking them down or not.
But I don’t want, again, I don’t want to jeopardize
the reputation of my business by saying like,
oh, someone’s saying that this was created by AI.
Like you created this in 10 seconds
and you’re charging whatever number of dollars for it.
I could have done that myself.
I don’t want to do that.
So if it can assist me in some way, absolutely.
But it won’t ever take over what I do.
– All right, anything else on the marketing front
to try and drive sales if I’m a new shop owner?
– So new shop owner, big thing is making sure
that your thumbnails are as good as they can be,
experimenting with those, trying out different things
to see what is going to look really well for you,
having previews.
So like with previews, you want to make sure
that you have one first of all.
So products that have previews will sell way better
than ones that do not.
And then also thinking like video previews,
it’s worth the time doing it.
I find a lot of new sellers will create really cool products.
And then when it comes to the addressing it up
with the thumbnails, the previews right in the description,
they kind of lose steam at that point.
And they end up putting up a sub part listing,
which just doesn’t sell, even though the product itself
might be really good.
And that’s where I had to go back as a more experienced seller
and review some of my initial stuff and be like,
okay, this needs better thumbnails, better description,
more stuff in the preview, like changing the shape
of the preview from portrait to landscape,
that sort of thing.
– Right, give me, yeah, I want to know,
put myself in the user’s shoes here,
like how is this going to work for me?
– One thing that I’m noticing on the store too
is what looks like a, you know, crossed out list price
and then a sales price.
And maybe this is just for bundled content
where it’s like, you know, here are several products
all in one to increase that average order value
and that value for the customer.
– Yeah, so you have the option of taking
your individual products and bundling them together
if you have common themed ones.
And usually, yeah, there’s a discount on the price.
So when teachers are coming in,
they see what the price would be to buy each item
individually and then what the discounted price is.
So like I have a business project on there,
which has 13 products in it.
And I think if you added all the products together,
it would be like $66.
I have it marked down to 30, something like 32,
because for me, like that’s a good price
for what I would sell the bundle for.
Like very few people would have bought all 13
of the individual ones anyway,
if they were picking and choosing.
So I feel like that was a good price point
to get people in and be like, okay, I want to buy this bundle.
– Got it, I love a bundle deal.
Yeah, it makes sense.
– Yeah, who doesn’t?
– So do you remember your first, you know,
a few months of sale, like I’m trying to get a sense of,
you know, was it crickets early on?
How long before you’re like, you know what?
I can see how, you know, it might take a few years,
but I could see how this is going to be a thing.
It’s going to start to be a significant source of income.
– I should send you my like sales graphics.
You can see the chart because it was like,
it was a flat line for months.
And then I think in like September of 2019,
there was a little blip of 52 cents.
Like that was my first sales, like 52 cents.
And that to me was just like, that’s 52 cents
I did not have before.
And that product was put up months ago.
So it was cool to get that email to be like,
hey, you made a sale.
And I think that was one of the things
that kind of jumpstarted me going back into it
and creating more.
It was like, okay, like I find,
if someone finally convinced me
that they will buy something that I created
if I put, you know, the effort in
and keep putting myself out there.
And so I really came back, started creating more,
found that personal finance niche,
which really starts to take off.
And then you start seeing that exponential growth curve
that you want to see in a business.
And I haven’t looked back since
it’s definitely been a really energizing business so far.
We’re like every month seems better than the previous one
or comparing to the same point last year,
which is what I recommend.
If you’re going to sell on TP2,
you compare it to the same month,
the previous year versus the previous month
because teachers go through cycles
in terms of when they buy things.
So like August, September will be the best selling months
for most stores when it’s back to school.
Summer will be super quiet, getting around the holidays.
If you have like holiday themed things, it will go up.
If you don’t, it might go down.
– Yeah, a lot of seasonality for sure.
– So comparing to the same month, the previous year
is your best bet when you’re trying to figure out like,
well, how is my store actually doing?
– I love that motivation of that first 52 cents.
Yeah, I think there are so many stories of that
where it’s like, it was, you know, there was nothing.
And then someone clicked on an ad and it was 11 cents
or you know, somebody bought my thing,
a stranger on the internet bought my thing.
And there’s like that motivation to keep going
and keep putting stuff out there.
– Looks like you’re at around 120 products in the store now
and continuing to add more?
Are you kind of like, am I tapped out on ideas?
– No, I have like a notebook full of ideas
and it’s just fun and the time to work on them.
But I always have to remind myself,
TPT was something that was created as a side hustle
and it was a very intentional choice
of business to venture into.
Like I’ve done things like tutoring
where I’ve traded my time, you know,
hour for dollar kind of thing.
And that wasn’t very sustainable,
especially when my wife and I had a kid.
So we had that pivot point that stimulated a change
in what we do, which I think is also a very common thing
with business owners.
And so I was like, okay, I need to create something
that I can work on when I want to work on it.
And it’s going to be mostly passive.
So that once it’s made, it’s going to just keep
generating money and teachers pay teachers
just look like the most obvious solution.
I’ve doubled in courses too, didn’t do the same.
And so I was like, okay, teach me teachers
where it’s going to be at.
And yeah, I haven’t looked back since, it’s been awesome.
– And do you find that the products from years ago
still continue to sell?
Or is there a freshness angle to the algorithm?
– Maybe not to the algorithm, but certainly,
I think the quality of what I’m creating more recently
is better than what I created in the past.
There are still, like my best seller
is one of the first products I created.
It was called Space Quest.
It’s a game where students are imagining
they’re traveling to an unexplored planet
and they’ve decided what they’re taking
with them on the spaceship.
They have a bunch of items to choose from
and they go into debates about what stays, what doesn’t.
And then you tell them there’s budget cuts
and they now have to remove some of the items
that they’ve already just managed to negotiate
with each other to bring.
And that continues to be one of my best sellers
and that was probably my first 20 products I created.
– I like it.
It’s like, you know, organ trail, but for space.
– It’s funny, like, yeah, like there’s so many
like inspiring games from my childhood.
I’m like, oh, this kind of drives that idea.
Yeah, we went camping over the summer
and I was like, this gives me an idea for a resource.
So I made a resource about going camping
and friends all chipping in money
and now you have to divide that money
amongst the different items in a store.
So like there’s high quality, low quality,
high price, low price stuff and the teams again
have to figure out how they’re going to spend their money.
– Yeah, this is, this is all really cool.
Those were some of my favorite activities as a student
where it was, you know, kind of it was structured as a game
where like, okay, you’re, you know,
part of the, you know, new world colonizers
and you’ve got to figure out, you know,
how are you going to allocate your resources
on farming versus hunting versus, you know,
and all this stuff is like, oh, this is, this is kind of cool.
So really, really fun, what you got built over there
and how it will continue to grow
by virtue of continuing to adding new, adding new products
and just the, you know, maturity of the platform
as more and more people jump on there.
So really appreciate you sharing the insights
on how all that works.
And we’ve got more with Rob coming right up
including donate a business idea right after this.
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All right, we’re back with Rob from phyeducator.com
for round two.
And this is the donate a business idea around.
This is something that you might start yourself
if you had more time.
This is something that you think the listeners
could take and run with a pain point,
something missing in the marketplace.
We’ll tee it up like that and let you go.
– So this is one that has always been like
in the back of my mind like, oh, I’d love to start this.
And that is, I am a big soccer fan.
I love playing soccer.
I’ve played competitively, basically my entire life
up until like kind of a couple of years.
Well, COVID really is what shut it down.
It was playing competitively till COVID
and then everything stopped and then everyone back.
But one of the reasons I miss it is I love being part
of that team.
I love being part of that kind of group environment.
And the fitness part was always great too.
So I’m always like, I would love to start
like soccer fitness classes.
Like very much themed towards adults who used to play soccer
and it’s going to have a fitness component to it
much like going to practice would have.
But with a, you know, a high fitness level focus
and then, you know, a little bit of play as well
but the ball would always be involved.
So it’s not quite a team.
You’re not playing in leagues, which might be beyond
a lot of adults at this point, but you are getting
that team feeling that seems to be missing now
as an adult when I’m maybe playing a little bit
of rack and pickup.
And it’s not the same as like going to a group fitness class
at a gym kind of thing.
– Okay, I like it.
Maybe the angle is, you know, aimed at these former players,
you know, soccer themed fitness.
The reason I bring it up is we see at the gym,
you see like, you know, get in shape for ski season,
like these almost sport specific classes and drills
and workshops.
It’s like, I absolutely think something like that can work.
– Yeah, I like, I couldn’t see the absolute, like, you know,
do you miss being part of a team
but you don’t want to be on a team anymore
and just get that kind of mentality
that cohesive group feeling going again.
– What would you do first to market it
or get off the ground or proof of concept here?
– I mean, it would be so low cost and so simple.
Like find a park that you can use,
go either have everyone bring their own ball
or buy 20 cones and 20 balls and get yourself started.
But just some basic like kind of hit workout exercise
that are adapted to have a soccer ball involved as well,
market it on some of those local soccer pickup pages.
And just, yeah, say like, if you’re a former soccer player
and you want to find that team feeling again,
you want to get fit,
you want to do something with a ball,
this is going to be our thing.
So it’s going to be $10 a session, meet at this park,
bring your own ball and just go from there
and see what happens.
– Yeah, you get 10 people to show up for an hour.
Now you get a hundred bucks an hour side business
and who knows what comes down the road from that.
Maybe they decide they do want to join a league
and if nothing exists,
then you can be the spearhead of the organizer
for something like that.
– Or it looks like your kids leagues
where, you know, if you have a young kid
and you start playing soccer, they just go
and do like a practice and then they play a game
at the end of it and like, it could look like that
where you’ve got 60 adults come in
and then you divide up and play small sided tournaments
at the end, it can be really fun.
– Yeah, some level of scrimmage.
I think this could be a fun one
and anybody who’s listening could take this
and run with this in any number of different sports.
Well, what did you use to play?
Oh, you used to be a tennis player.
Oh, you used to be a baseball player.
Could you host classes and clinics and fitness,
you know, geared toward that sport for grownups
or could you turn around and offer that for kids?
I’ll give your kids swim lessons or tennis lessons
or, you know, basketball drills or, you know,
friend of ours, you know, played catcher,
you know, for his whole life.
And so he’s like, you know, here’s the catchers clinic
coming back to my hometown and the way to make money
during the off season and stuff like that.
So I think there’s definitely something there.
– Yeah, and if you do it in Maryland,
please let me know.
I would love to join.
– Yeah, and on top of that, I’m sure Facebook already knows,
you know, these people who used to be soccer players,
they could help target everybody
in that demographic for you.
All right, that is round to donate a business idea
that was adult fitness classes,
sport specific fitness classes for grownups.
But of course you can pivot that, do it with kids,
do it with whatever group, whatever sport that you like.
I think that’s a cool one.
Let’s go to round three.
This is the triple threat.
We’re gonna start off with a marketing tactic
that’s working for you right now.
Could be related to fly educator,
could be related to teachers pay teachers,
could be something that your students
can teach an entrepreneurship in class,
something that’s working for them.
– So big one that’s working for me right now
is when I launch a new product
or I wanna refresh your product,
I will go into a social media group and I’ll say,
I’m looking for 10 people to try this out for me
and give me feedback.
So be an early adopter and again,
leave your email in the comment section
if you want to be entered into the draw
to be one of those 10 people to try it out for me.
And really I don’t care that much
about getting the feedback from them.
What I really want is to have an excuse
to kind of put my product out there
and again, get the engagement on the comment section.
So it comes up in front of a bunch of people.
I get to measure who’s actually really interested in this.
So the ones who really want it for free,
I’m gonna give it away to 10 people,
but then I’ve got suddenly a list of people
who are really interested in it
and I can send them a nurture sequence
about getting the product and paying for it.
So that’s been working really well
and it’s just kind of a rinse of feet
over and over again every time I have a new product.
– And you’re looking specifically
in groups of teachers in this case?
– Yeah, Facebook groups,
I find the most effective place to sell.
Instagram is I think great for kind of just building trust
and maybe a little bit of awareness of who you are
and your brand.
I don’t find that people click over from Instagram
very often to buy something,
but Facebook groups, specifically teacher groups
and even more again, niche groups for those teachers.
So like for me, it’s the business educators group
or group called Fanatics.
So financial literacy fanatics,
those two groups are amazing for getting volunteers
to try stuff out and then also being very interested
in what I am selling.
And I’ll find that I’ll get a lot of clicks
from Facebook going to TBT
and I’m sure it’s coming from those two groups.
– Yeah, I like this one.
It’s going where your target customers already are.
It is offering something of value.
It is being a member of that community.
Like it checks a lot of smart boxes here.
So I think that makes a lot of sense.
And you can find a group for just about any target audience
that you want to serve.
And you know, of course,
play nice by the rules and the moderators
and everything else and be of service first.
Can’t come in and just spam up the place,
but it sounds like this one is leading with value.
Like, hey, I created this thing.
I think it’ll help you out.
If you want to be among the first to test it,
let me know, I’m looking for some early users.
– It goes down a lot better, I feel like,
with teachers than the buy my stuff posts.
– Yeah.
– Especially like, you know,
marketing materials to teachers can feel hard sometimes
and teachers kind of have this almost ingrained culture
of freely sharing and that we’re all in this
for the service aspect and the higher calling
and we’re not doing this to be paid a lot
or to make money from it.
And that’s almost like a toxic culture within teachers.
So you can get a lot of pushback
when you start trying to market products to teachers
and it’s not free.
They’re like, well, why aren’t you giving away
your best ideas for free and just sharing
and being a part of the community?
And I always have to look at it like, well,
I can give you the free stuff that I create for myself
and it won’t be very high quality.
It works well for me,
but if you want me to put the hours in
to make a turnkey for you and amazing for your students,
I think that’s something that I do get to charge for
and it will be worth your time and your money.
– And that’s something else
because if somebody is in a Facebook group,
they’re not necessarily expecting to be sold to,
but if they’re browsing on teachers, pay teachers
or they’re browsing on some of their marketplace,
they’re going in there with the expectation to spend money.
And so it’s like a natural fit for that audience.
That is the marketing tactic.
The second part of the triple threat is a new
or new to you tool that you’re loving right now.
– I think for me, it is a tool from AppSumo,
which I’m sure you are familiar with.
And it’s called VideoTap.
And it’s one where I’ve been able to take a lot
of my videos that I’ve recorded.
So I do a lot of recording guest speakers from my classroom
and sending that out to other teachers
and letting them use it for free.
But it lets me break that up into small,
bite-sized social media clips using an AI tool within it,
produces a caption, produces the closed captioning for it.
And it’s an amazing tool.
Like I love it.
It’s just perfect for taking a video,
breaking it up in chunks.
And then it’s only easy to post it as small videos
or a blog post or whatever it is.
– A very cool video tap.
We will link that up in the show notes currently sold out
on AppSumo, but you never know when it’s gonna be back
in stock and we can absolutely link that up.
Cool resource.
Thanks for sharing.
That’s new to me.
All right, and the last segment of round three
of the triple threat is your favorite book
from the last 12 months.
– My favorite book from the last 12 months
has to be Never Split the Difference.
Really good book about negotiation from a former,
I think FBI agent or Secret Service agents
who would do hostage negotiation
and just the overlap of how that works with business.
I feel like I’ve read the book twice
and I just, I want to keep going back to it.
Every time I read it, there’s something new
and exciting in there that I can apply to my business.
– Do you find yourself in a lot of negotiation scenarios
with students or with customers here?
– Every day’s a negotiation, yes.
– How so?
– You’re always trying to convince students
that to buy what you’re selling in terms of the information
and to give your attention or to give their attention
to you, we’ll talk about being responsible consumers
and haggling or the example the other day
was when you go in for a job application
and they ask you what do you want your compensation to be
or what are you expecting a compensation?
Just the human psychology aspect of give them a range
and make your ideal number the low end of the range
so that they anchor to the high number
and everyone’s gonna feel like they win.
They feel like they’ve negotiated you down
to your lowest amount and you feel like,
well, that’s what I wanted anyway.
So just a tactic like that
that I would have been unaware of until I read that book.
– Interesting, I’ve always seen this title pop up
in Amazon search results.
I always assumed it was just kind of a negotiation book
and it sounds like there may be parallels to parenting
and other aspects of the business.
It’s not always negotiating dollars and cents
and meeting in the middle, but maybe you’re negotiating
attention and chores and tasks and other things too.
– It’s applied to my job, it’s applied with my kid,
it’s applied with my wife.
Yeah, it’s very much about relationships
and money comes into it a little bit,
but just negotiating conflict,
avoiding conflict in the first place,
making sure everyone feels like they’ve won
when it comes to a negotiation.
Yeah, it’s got a lot of applications
across a broad range of things.
– All right, well, you convinced me, you sold me,
I’m gonna add it to the reading list here.
Never split the difference.
We’ll link that up in the show notes along
with links to all of Rob’s resources
like phyeducator.com, phyeducator.store.
We’ll get you over to the teachers pay teachers page
so you can check out some of his listings there.
If you’re wondering what to listen to next,
if you like this digital product business,
I like it, if you create something once,
sell it over and over again, no fulfillment costs,
fantastic.
I’ve got another couple episode recommendations for you.
Most recently, I sat down with Debbie Gartner,
she shared how she was earning around a thousand bucks a week
from her Etsy Printables business in episode 637.
Don’t have to scroll too far down in the podcast app
to find that one.
And then we had a really popular interview
with Becky Beach in episode 582 from late last year
on how she was building out this whole suite
of digital products and bundles and using AI
to help generate ideas and some of the content.
It was really cool.
And if digital products aren’t your jammed,
that, yeah, that’s okay too.
And in that case, I want to invite you
to generate your own personalized side hustle show
playlist at hustle.show.
Just answer a few short multiple choice questions
about your interests and goals
and it’ll recommend eight to 10 episodes to start with
based on your answers.
Again, that’s at hustle.show.
Big thanks to Rob for sharing his insight.
Big thanks to our sponsors
for helping make this content free for everyone.
You can hit up sidehustlenation.com/deals
for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place.
Thank you for supporting the advertisers
that support the show.
Really does make a difference.
That is it for me.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
If you find in value in the show,
the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend.
So fire off that text message to that teacher friend of yours
and say, hey, you should totally check this out.
Until next time, let’s go out there
and make something happen.
And I’ll catch you in the next edition
of the Side Hustle Show.
Two grand a month in this college semi-passive income
on the side.
Oh, what’s up, what’s up, Nick.
Oh, Loper here.
Welcome to the Side Hustle Show
where we’re breaking down legit ways
to make extra money outside of your day job.
Cool example of somebody doing just that this week.
He’s got a digital products business
that doesn’t rely on having an audience of his own
and it’s been growing 40% a year,
lately earning around $2,000 a month.
He’s a high school math and personal finance teacher
from PhiEducator.com.
Rob Phelan, welcome to the Side Hustle Show.
– Hey, Nick, thank you so much for having me
and looking forward to it.
– Me as well.
Stick around, we’re covering how to come up
with popular slash profitable product ideas,
how to tap into a marketplace
of millions of potential buyers and lots more.
Now the marketplace in question here is teachers pay teachers,
which I know all the teachers in the audience
will be familiar with,
but fun fact, you don’t need to be a teacher
to sell on there.
So I wanna talk through some of the digital assets,
some of the products that you’ve created
and how you’ve grown that business.
‘Cause I think it’s a really cool example
we talk a lot about digital products on Etsy,
but hey, that’s not the only game in town.
So curious to dive into this platform.
And maybe we start off with,
I imagine there’s an 80/20 to product sales
with everything that you’ve created.
Like what are some of the best sellers here?
What have you seen perform well?
– I mean, I’m still always refining what that 80/20 is.
And I think we’re always trying to figure out like,
well, what is that 20 that’s gonna account
for all the 80% of everything that we make?
But what I’m finding is that teachers don’t want shallow.
They want deep, they want quality.
They want something that’s gonna be
this amazing exchange of value.
And we know that that’s like a core thing
when it comes to creating any product
or for any business is that the customer has to feel like,
yes, that was an amazing exchange of value
and use the seller have to feel like
that was really worth my time as well.
So I find with my store,
I create personal finance education products for teachers.
So that is my niche.
I’m very much focused on financial educators,
mostly in the high school space.
And what I’m finding is that
I don’t wanna create an entire curriculum for them.
What I want is for them to have their own curriculum in place.
And then they’re coming to me
when they want something extra, something better.
They’ve identified a part of their curriculum
that doesn’t really feel great.
Students are bored.
They wish it was better.
They wish it was more exciting or engaging.
And that’s when they come find my store.
And that’s what I try to serve is
I want products that are going to get students
talking to each other, engage with the materials
and using personal finance in a practical way.
So they end up learning a much deeper lesson from that
than just a teacher lecturing in the front of the room.
– Okay, so rather than creating something
for social studies and something for English writing
and something for math, it’s like, no, no, no.
My niche here is the personal finance space.
Do you think that’s important to build some level
of credibility or like niche down
to a certain topic inside of your store?
– I do.
I don’t think TPT is a throw your net wide
and you’ll end up coming out ahead kind of thing.
I think the more niche down you are,
the better you’re actually going to do it,
even though you do make your audience smaller,
which does seem counterintuitive.
I love the idea of like the 1000 true fans,
like finding that group of 1000 people
who would want to buy your product
and then really making sure you serve those.
For me, that was financial educators.
I was in the space myself, didn’t really like what was out
there in terms of major product offerings.
So from Dave Ramsey or Jumpstart or Junior Achievement.
And I started creating resources for my own classroom.
So I still teach full time in public high school education.
And I just was like, okay, like I use this.
I think it’s good.
Let me throw it out there and see what other teachers think.
And I found that if I kept creating
personal finance resources, teachers were excited.
They were coming back.
I ventured into math a little bit
because that’s also my certification.
And it was a very crowded space.
And like high school math is such a general idea
that it’s hard to win that market share
as easily as it would be to say like, no,
I am high school, personal finance,
small individual resources that are going to enhance
what you’re already doing.
– Yeah, I love this example of,
hey, this is something that I was creating
for my own class, for my own use.
And then maybe there’s a way to sell that sawdust,
to sell that, you know, to reach a wider audience.
I think there’s so many examples of files
and templates and things that we’ve built
in our own businesses that, you know,
maybe you could license that out to somebody else.
Maybe it’s a way to get paid over and over again
from that work that you did once,
kind of like a behind the scenes type of product.
I think that’s really cool.
The other thing that might be interesting here
is there was some semi-recent legislation
where personal finance education
is becoming a graduation requirement
in more and more states where it’s like, you know, math.
People have been teaching math for hundreds of years
in high school, but you know, this is a newer sub,
like the personal finance focus, maybe a newer subject
where maybe it’s a bluer ocean to go
and try and compete in.
– Yeah, and I think when you try and think
of a new business idea, thinking about what is trending
currently or what’s coming down the road
that you can maybe hop on and be an early adopter on
or an early creator on, personal finance
is sort of that thing.
And that was just by luck for me.
Like that’s what I’m passionate about.
That’s what I work in.
And it just happens to be a very growing industry
in terms of education because more and more states
are mandating it.
And then the problem teachers have is
they’re not trained in it.
So they often get tossed this class like,
“Hey, you, you’re gonna teach about money next year.”
And they’re a social studies teacher.
They’re a math teacher.
They’re maybe a business teacher,
but they’ve never taught personal finance before.
So there’s a huge demand for how do I do this?
And I need resources that really, really walk me through
this very simply because I don’t really know what I’m doing.
I’m not an expert yet at this content area
and I need support.
– Oh, and it’s such a broad topic.
And remember, like my math teacher in high school,
like, you know, he had to teach us exponents anyway.
So Blessus already took it upon himself
to teach us about, you know, dollar cost averaging
and index funds and, you know, going down this road.
And he’s like, well, in 40 years,
you’re gonna have, you know, $3 million or something.
But you’re like, as a high school student,
you’re like, yeah, but that’s in 40 years, right?
It’s like, how do you bring this home
and make it compelling and interesting and relatable
to someone’s like, well, you know,
that’s not the time horizon that I’ve even been thinking about.
– And I think you’ve done a good job with that.
It looks like now I’m on the teachers pay teachers store.
You can find it at fieducator.store.
If you want to check out some of his listings,
a lot of them look like they’re almost like gameplay based
where it’s maybe a multi-week unit
where people can kind of track their,
or students can track their progress.
Is that kind of how some of these are set up?
– Yeah, I mean, you start in the beginnings,
figuring yourself out,
especially if you’ve created digital products before,
like you have to figure out
like what your theme is gonna be, your niche,
the way you want to run things.
What are people gonna know you for?
And I found that I wanted to create things
that were three E’s, exciting, engaging and educational.
And that’s almost my mission for my business
and everything I create has to come back to that.
If it doesn’t meet those standards, I don’t publish it
because I don’t want anything subpar quality
that teachers are gonna be like,
oh, well, that wasn’t great.
Like I’m not gonna come back again.
So you’ll notice yet, when you look through my products,
like there are things that are going to get students
either out of their seats or talking to each other
in meaningful ways.
They’re gonna practice skills.
They’re gonna play games.
They’re gonna do activities.
They’re gonna do big projects
where the learning is almost a byproduct
of what they’re doing.
They don’t even realize they’re learning half the time,
which is why I think so many teachers
enjoy using the resources I create.
– Yeah, if you can sneak it in there somehow,
like, hey, we’re gonna play this, you know,
crossword puzzle game and never, never mind
that you’re actually learning some spelling.
Well, we’re doing this.
But, you know, if you can make it fun.
Was there any on Etsy or even like YouTube or vlogging,
there’s like this level of keyword research
where I want to go where there’s some level
of existing demand rather than trying to create demand
from scratch.
Is there any sort of keyword research,
you know, volume estimates, competitive estimates
that exist for teachers, pay teachers specifically
or anything like that that went into the thought process
before creating extra products?
– There’s no really useful tool like you might find
for Google or like when you’re writing a blog
and you can just like feed your article into a plugin
and it tells you like, oh, you’re perfect for SEO
or no, you should change these things.
It doesn’t quite exist for TPT.
There is a program called Your Data Playbook,
which I don’t personally use yet.
It’s one of those things that I think
as you grow your store, you level up to the point
where you will start using these sorts of tools
’cause if they are quite expensive,
but that will give you some ideas of like products
that you could be doing better on if you change keywords.
It doesn’t really suggest the keywords for you.
It just kind of tells you like, hey, you could be doing better.
Really, it comes down to using the search function,
like you would for Google.
It’s a search engine at the end of the day
that leads you to products.
So going into the search bar and typing in like similar phrases
to what your product is, seeing what pops up,
what are the most popular resources there
and then building your keyword bang from that
and making sure that’s in your title
and your product descriptions.
– Is it a matter of looking at like,
well, here’s what I had in mind
or this is what I was thinking about creating
and the top results only have three reviews.
So they must not be selling a huge volume.
So maybe there’s room for me to compete there
versus, oh, if I see just pages and pages of results
that seem to have been there for years
and they’ve sold tons.
It’s like, well, how am I gonna break in as a new seller?
– I should be doing more of that.
I don’t.
I look at it as what do I need to enhance
what I’m doing in my own classroom.
So like every time I teach this subject,
I’m like, where are the weak points and what needs more?
And I’ll have a quick look to see
does anything else exist out there,
but I’m not even really looking at TPD that closely
to see what the top ranking things are.
I think as I start to kind of fill out my product offerings
and I feel like, okay, I’ve done a good job
at meeting the market need
that I will start refining what I’m doing,
really focusing more heavily on SEO
and trying to rank higher on those pages.
But no, for right now, it’s really a case
of building what I know I need
and what I know my audience needs
based on social media feedback, newsletter, feedback,
that sort of thing.
– And it seems like most things on here
are priced between five and $30 they’re about.
So it’s very much a volume type of game
if I’m understanding that correctly.
– In my case, yes.
If you browse through other stores,
you will see some teachers who go for an entire curriculum.
So this would be what a teacher would use
from start to finish to run an entire class.
So curriculum, if you’re not familiar with the word,
start to finish everything that you would need.
And those you can find priced
from like 500 to 2,500.
Yeah, like there’s very high ticket items in TPT.
I don’t have those offered yet.
For me, it’s always coming back to that idea
of I’m a teacher myself.
My target market is teachers who are usually the buyers
in I would say 70 to 80% of the case.
So they’re digging into their own pocket to buy this stuff.
And my target market’s not the most flush with cash.
So I always want to make sure that I’m providing,
you know, very one-sided value.
What they’re getting in terms of product
is way more than the five or $20 or $30
that they’re paying for it in terms of the time
that it’s gonna save them, the stress that it’s gonna save them,
the improvement in their classroom management
that they’re gonna see,
and also the performance of the students.
So on all those metrics, I want teachers to feel like,
you know what, that was an amazing exchange of value for me.
Yeah, and at that price point,
it’s low friction versus trying to deal with the red tape.
Obviously, I mean, the dollars may be there
to try and start selling at the district level
or the state level, like, hey, this is mandated
by your state government.
Now you need to teach personal finance in schools.
Like, hey, we’ve got the proven out system of how to do this.
I’ve been a teacher myself for years and years.
Here’s what works.
We could build out that whole curriculum for you
and license it across however many different students
or schools.
Like, I could see how that would be a much higher ticket
than a $6 one-time thing.
But also, it’s like, well, you know, if this is passive,
people are just, you know,
coming out of this website and ordering my stuff.
And it’s like, well, yeah,
this is a longer-term sales cycle,
much longer-term game to play.
– I did the other side of it.
I worked with Choose a Five Foundation.
We created a pre-K through 12, entire curriculum,
and we tried to get schools to adopt it.
Like, it’s free.
Just take it, use it.
It’s great.
And even then, it was such a pain to work with schools
because schools are very restricted in what they can do.
Every district is basically its own little islands.
It’s hard to get like a rubber stamp
that works across the entire country
or even the entire state.
So, yeah, it’s a big challenge
versus like teachers are very much allowed
to kind of flex within their curriculum
and bring in additional resources.
So, it’s sort of like a backdoor in.
And maybe eventually,
I will grow to offer my own curriculum.
And at that point,
I will have had so many teacher adopters
that on the, at least the ground level,
there will be some support for trying to get something bigger
into their school or their district or the state.
– Yeah, down the road, that may be coming.
I definitely see that as an opportunity
for some of the assets and content that you’re creating.
– I also have competitors
who are people like NextGen Personal Finance or NGPAP.
So, like, if you’re a financial educator
or a teacher or a parent who wants to support this,
like that is an amazing free curriculum that exists
because it’s backed by a billionaire founder
who wants it to be free,
is able to pay staff to create amazing resources,
teacher professional development.
So, like, I don’t want to compete directly with them
because I love what they do
and it’s very hard to compete
with people who offer free things.
So, being able to enhance what they do
or enhance any other curriculum
is kind of a nice way to stay in my niche
and be valuable to customers.
– More with Rob in just a moment,
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he markets his listings right after this.
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What feed does the platform take in this case?
– So, TPT has two tiers for sellers.
You’ve got the free version.
So, unlike Etsy, where they charge a listing fee
to put your first product up or whatever it is,
TPT does not charge a listing fee
so anybody can create an account
and you can start listing products for no cost.
The split on a sale is 50/50 at that basic tier.
So, at the free tier, 50/50 split,
you sell something for $10, they keep five, you get five.
And then they’re also handling sales tax
if you’re in a state that does need to charge sales tax.
And then if you upgrade to the premium seller,
which I think is $60 for the year,
it now becomes an 80/20 split.
So, you keep 80, they keep 20.
And there’s no higher tier available.
There’s no way to keep more of it.
That’s kind of the deal if you’re gonna use
the marketplace platform that they offer.
– Right, and you have to look at that as,
well, that’s my marketing expense, basically.
I get access to these audience of 7 million teachers
who are proactively looking for the stuff
that hopefully I’m selling versus the 50/50.
It’s like, it’s cool that there’s no listing fee,
but man, I think it’s expensive fast.
And then it’s like, that’s when you start to be like,
well, if I’m moving a certain volume,
then yeah, it’s a no-brainer to go to upgrade
to this $60 paid tier and then improve that ratio,
improve that split.
– I think I upgraded within like the first few months
of being a seller.
Like I was like, I’m going to eventually make enough money
to make this worth it, like 60 bucks,
like I can take a shot on that for a year
and see what happens,
but I was like, if I’m gonna make stuff,
I wanna keep more of it for me.
– Yeah, is there a play to get people off platform,
if you have other product,
like do you get access to the email list of customers?
Is there a way to drive your own traffic
to your own digital storefront?
Just trying to think of,
is this purely a marketplace type of play for you right now?
– So TPT, yeah, the marketplace gives you
very little information about individual buyers.
You can get a little bit of like demographics about them
or location by state,
but you don’t get an email address when someone buys from you,
which is different to maybe what you would get from an Etsy.
So when it comes to assembling your own email list,
you have to think like, okay,
what can I embed in the product
that would convince someone to give me an email?
So a lot of times there’s a freebie inside of a product
or one of my best lead magnets is like,
I have my entire 90 day curriculum pacing guide.
So if you wanna see how this resource fits into
what I do in my classroom,
you can follow along with me
and just give me an email and it gets sent out to you.
So trying to find ways to get people to convert
from being a TPT buyer to also on my newsletter is a big one.
I do go to social media a lot
to try and harvest people from my newsletter too.
So giving them freebies, looking for product testers,
free team people and they all just kinda slowly trickle in
and build up that newsletter,
which is much more valuable than the TPT search
or the social media platforms can be.
– Yeah, hopefully they like the product
and now you have a way to get back in touch with them
when you’re launching something new.
Otherwise it’s like, well, I made a one-off $7 sale
and now I can’t get in touch with that customer again.
So it’s like, well, how do we improve the lifetime value?
And it sounds like that’s one way that you’re going about it.
– Yeah, and making sure that in the products,
like you have those calls to action to come back
and leave your reviews or send me an email,
let me know what you think.
And just any of those touch points
are enough to get me an email address
and then let me add them to my newsletter
where it does become much more of a return customer scenario.
I think once they know, like and trust you,
they’re much more likely to come back,
especially when a teacher’s stressed,
they’re short on time, they need something.
The marketplace is reputable.
So that’s a great plus and part of that 20% loss of sale
is for the fact that teachers pay teachers
is considered a reputable place to buy something
and that they will, they’ll make it right
if the product you buy is total crap
or it’s a dud or it’s a scam of some sort.
Versus like buying something off of maybe eBay or an Etsy,
I don’t know how good the customer service
would be on that side.
– Oh, for sure.
– And then each individual store
has to build their own reputation.
Reviews is gold in terms of trying to get people
to like first time to your store to know, like and trust you,
but after you’ve made that first sale
and making sure that you kind of nurture that customer
to come back again and again is huge.
When you were first launching,
did you do anything proactive to try and drive traffic,
drive those initial reviews to just kind of,
this is what we’ve seen on platform after platform.
It’s like, if I can give that algorithm
a little bit of a nudge,
then it starts to work in my favor a little bit more.
And sometimes it’s harder to get those first sales
than it is to get the next 10.
Where it’s like, if I can just, you know, seed my store
with a few, you know, warm, happy customers,
then the rest starts to work more automatically.
– I mean, in the beginning, like launching my store now,
it was like walking in the dark and spinning around
and just hoping that something landed.
Like now, for example, I just launched a product last week.
It’s going to be a $5 product, like a $497 price point.
It’s free right now.
So what I did was on social media, I was like,
“Hey, I’m launching something new.
I’m looking for early adopters.
Leave me your email in the comments
or send me via DM and I will send you like the resource.
Really what I’m going to do is I’m going to send them to TPT
where they can download it for free.
Reason I don’t have a lead page is that I want the comments
coming in in this Facebook group.
So by people leaving their email in a comment
or sending me a DM, it drives it to the top of this group.
The group’s not mine.
It’s a group that I am very active in.
And there’s actually, there’s no admin really in it.
It’s like a ghost admin who doesn’t really do anything in it.
So trying to get people to comment and engage on the post
so that more people see it and then we’ll send them to it.
And then once they buy the product,
I have like a whole, you know, nurture part inside of it
where I’m like, Oh, you know, I hope you really enjoyed this.
Please come back and leave a review.
Once you’ve had a chance to use it, if you loved it,
can you post a picture of your students enjoying it
on social media or in these particular groups?
And that’s for the first week.
So anyone who is a follower of mine who, you know,
gets my stuff regularly on social media.
So they’ve been an engaged person.
So it does pop up top of their news feed
or they’re on my newsletter.
They’re going to get it for free this time around.
And the play is that I’m going to build the reviews.
I’m going to get that product out there.
And that’s in the long term,
it’s going to be much more valuable to my store.
So if I can get 50 to 100 reviews from this,
like that would be huge because at the moment,
I’m only just hitting about 400.
So I’m really looking to, yeah, drive up the friendliness
of the algorithm to my store.
– Yeah, I like that.
That’s similar to like a free Kindle launch strategy
where it’s like, if I can throw some downloads
towards that book on Amazon
and collect a critical mass of reviews
before I switch it over to being a paid product.
And yeah, absolutely that can help boost it up, I imagine.
And there’s no cost.
Like yes, I’m losing out on potential sales,
but if I’m at like 400 free downloads now,
so how many of those would have been paid customers
if I just started at a price point of 4.97?
Probably like 50, that would be typical for a product launch.
So I’m trying something totally different to see,
does it yield those reviews that I really, really need?
And then yeah, does it yield much more sales down the road?
Because now it’s such a highly reviewed product
that new teachers can be like, oh, let me check this out.
Let me try that.
– Are you using AI at all for ideation
or to help fill in the blanks on some of these products?
– Sometimes, I mean, I love playing with AI.
I love ChatGBT as like just a sounding board
for anything and everything.
So usually if I’m thinking of, say I was doing insurance,
I did a product on insurance recently
where students are creating an insurance plan
for their cell phones in the classroom.
I would like use ChatGBT, like what are the main considerations
when someone is building an insurance plan?
So it’s a really quick way to do a bit of basic research
and then I can build a product from that.
So I’m not letting AI write anything for me.
And I don’t know if TPT is yet spotting AI generated content
in their results and marking them down or not.
But I don’t want, again, I don’t want to jeopardize
the reputation of my business by saying like,
oh, someone’s saying that this was created by AI.
Like you created this in 10 seconds
and you’re charging whatever number of dollars for it.
I could have done that myself.
I don’t want to do that.
So if it can assist me in some way, absolutely.
But it won’t ever take over what I do.
– All right, anything else on the marketing front
to try and drive sales if I’m a new shop owner?
– So new shop owner, big thing is making sure
that your thumbnails are as good as they can be,
experimenting with those, trying out different things
to see what is going to look really well for you,
having previews.
So like with previews, you want to make sure
that you have one first of all.
So products that have previews will sell way better
than ones that do not.
And then also thinking like video previews,
it’s worth the time doing it.
I find a lot of new sellers will create really cool products.
And then when it comes to the addressing it up
with the thumbnails, the previews right in the description,
they kind of lose steam at that point.
And they end up putting up a sub part listing,
which just doesn’t sell, even though the product itself
might be really good.
And that’s where I had to go back as a more experienced seller
and review some of my initial stuff and be like,
okay, this needs better thumbnails, better description,
more stuff in the preview, like changing the shape
of the preview from portrait to landscape,
that sort of thing.
– Right, give me, yeah, I want to know,
put myself in the user’s shoes here,
like how is this going to work for me?
– One thing that I’m noticing on the store too
is what looks like a, you know, crossed out list price
and then a sales price.
And maybe this is just for bundled content
where it’s like, you know, here are several products
all in one to increase that average order value
and that value for the customer.
– Yeah, so you have the option of taking
your individual products and bundling them together
if you have common themed ones.
And usually, yeah, there’s a discount on the price.
So when teachers are coming in,
they see what the price would be to buy each item
individually and then what the discounted price is.
So like I have a business project on there,
which has 13 products in it.
And I think if you added all the products together,
it would be like $66.
I have it marked down to 30, something like 32,
because for me, like that’s a good price
for what I would sell the bundle for.
Like very few people would have bought all 13
of the individual ones anyway,
if they were picking and choosing.
So I feel like that was a good price point
to get people in and be like, okay, I want to buy this bundle.
– Got it, I love a bundle deal.
Yeah, it makes sense.
– Yeah, who doesn’t?
– So do you remember your first, you know,
a few months of sale, like I’m trying to get a sense of,
you know, was it crickets early on?
How long before you’re like, you know what?
I can see how, you know, it might take a few years,
but I could see how this is going to be a thing.
It’s going to start to be a significant source of income.
– I should send you my like sales graphics.
You can see the chart because it was like,
it was a flat line for months.
And then I think in like September of 2019,
there was a little blip of 52 cents.
Like that was my first sales, like 52 cents.
And that to me was just like, that’s 52 cents
I did not have before.
And that product was put up months ago.
So it was cool to get that email to be like,
hey, you made a sale.
And I think that was one of the things
that kind of jumpstarted me going back into it
and creating more.
It was like, okay, like I find,
if someone finally convinced me
that they will buy something that I created
if I put, you know, the effort in
and keep putting myself out there.
And so I really came back, started creating more,
found that personal finance niche,
which really starts to take off.
And then you start seeing that exponential growth curve
that you want to see in a business.
And I haven’t looked back since
it’s definitely been a really energizing business so far.
We’re like every month seems better than the previous one
or comparing to the same point last year,
which is what I recommend.
If you’re going to sell on TP2,
you compare it to the same month,
the previous year versus the previous month
because teachers go through cycles
in terms of when they buy things.
So like August, September will be the best selling months
for most stores when it’s back to school.
Summer will be super quiet, getting around the holidays.
If you have like holiday themed things, it will go up.
If you don’t, it might go down.
– Yeah, a lot of seasonality for sure.
– So comparing to the same month, the previous year
is your best bet when you’re trying to figure out like,
well, how is my store actually doing?
– I love that motivation of that first 52 cents.
Yeah, I think there are so many stories of that
where it’s like, it was, you know, there was nothing.
And then someone clicked on an ad and it was 11 cents
or you know, somebody bought my thing,
a stranger on the internet bought my thing.
And there’s like that motivation to keep going
and keep putting stuff out there.
– Looks like you’re at around 120 products in the store now
and continuing to add more?
Are you kind of like, am I tapped out on ideas?
– No, I have like a notebook full of ideas
and it’s just fun and the time to work on them.
But I always have to remind myself,
TPT was something that was created as a side hustle
and it was a very intentional choice
of business to venture into.
Like I’ve done things like tutoring
where I’ve traded my time, you know,
hour for dollar kind of thing.
And that wasn’t very sustainable,
especially when my wife and I had a kid.
So we had that pivot point that stimulated a change
in what we do, which I think is also a very common thing
with business owners.
And so I was like, okay, I need to create something
that I can work on when I want to work on it.
And it’s going to be mostly passive.
So that once it’s made, it’s going to just keep
generating money and teachers pay teachers
just look like the most obvious solution.
I’ve doubled in courses too, didn’t do the same.
And so I was like, okay, teach me teachers
where it’s going to be at.
And yeah, I haven’t looked back since, it’s been awesome.
– And do you find that the products from years ago
still continue to sell?
Or is there a freshness angle to the algorithm?
– Maybe not to the algorithm, but certainly,
I think the quality of what I’m creating more recently
is better than what I created in the past.
There are still, like my best seller
is one of the first products I created.
It was called Space Quest.
It’s a game where students are imagining
they’re traveling to an unexplored planet
and they’ve decided what they’re taking
with them on the spaceship.
They have a bunch of items to choose from
and they go into debates about what stays, what doesn’t.
And then you tell them there’s budget cuts
and they now have to remove some of the items
that they’ve already just managed to negotiate
with each other to bring.
And that continues to be one of my best sellers
and that was probably my first 20 products I created.
– I like it.
It’s like, you know, organ trail, but for space.
– It’s funny, like, yeah, like there’s so many
like inspiring games from my childhood.
I’m like, oh, this kind of drives that idea.
Yeah, we went camping over the summer
and I was like, this gives me an idea for a resource.
So I made a resource about going camping
and friends all chipping in money
and now you have to divide that money
amongst the different items in a store.
So like there’s high quality, low quality,
high price, low price stuff and the teams again
have to figure out how they’re going to spend their money.
– Yeah, this is, this is all really cool.
Those were some of my favorite activities as a student
where it was, you know, kind of it was structured as a game
where like, okay, you’re, you know,
part of the, you know, new world colonizers
and you’ve got to figure out, you know,
how are you going to allocate your resources
on farming versus hunting versus, you know,
and all this stuff is like, oh, this is, this is kind of cool.
So really, really fun, what you got built over there
and how it will continue to grow
by virtue of continuing to adding new, adding new products
and just the, you know, maturity of the platform
as more and more people jump on there.
So really appreciate you sharing the insights
on how all that works.
And we’ve got more with Rob coming right up
including donate a business idea right after this.
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All right, we’re back with Rob from phyeducator.com
for round two.
And this is the donate a business idea around.
This is something that you might start yourself
if you had more time.
This is something that you think the listeners
could take and run with a pain point,
something missing in the marketplace.
We’ll tee it up like that and let you go.
– So this is one that has always been like
in the back of my mind like, oh, I’d love to start this.
And that is, I am a big soccer fan.
I love playing soccer.
I’ve played competitively, basically my entire life
up until like kind of a couple of years.
Well, COVID really is what shut it down.
It was playing competitively till COVID
and then everything stopped and then everyone back.
But one of the reasons I miss it is I love being part
of that team.
I love being part of that kind of group environment.
And the fitness part was always great too.
So I’m always like, I would love to start
like soccer fitness classes.
Like very much themed towards adults who used to play soccer
and it’s going to have a fitness component to it
much like going to practice would have.
But with a, you know, a high fitness level focus
and then, you know, a little bit of play as well
but the ball would always be involved.
So it’s not quite a team.
You’re not playing in leagues, which might be beyond
a lot of adults at this point, but you are getting
that team feeling that seems to be missing now
as an adult when I’m maybe playing a little bit
of rack and pickup.
And it’s not the same as like going to a group fitness class
at a gym kind of thing.
– Okay, I like it.
Maybe the angle is, you know, aimed at these former players,
you know, soccer themed fitness.
The reason I bring it up is we see at the gym,
you see like, you know, get in shape for ski season,
like these almost sport specific classes and drills
and workshops.
It’s like, I absolutely think something like that can work.
– Yeah, I like, I couldn’t see the absolute, like, you know,
do you miss being part of a team
but you don’t want to be on a team anymore
and just get that kind of mentality
that cohesive group feeling going again.
– What would you do first to market it
or get off the ground or proof of concept here?
– I mean, it would be so low cost and so simple.
Like find a park that you can use,
go either have everyone bring their own ball
or buy 20 cones and 20 balls and get yourself started.
But just some basic like kind of hit workout exercise
that are adapted to have a soccer ball involved as well,
market it on some of those local soccer pickup pages.
And just, yeah, say like, if you’re a former soccer player
and you want to find that team feeling again,
you want to get fit,
you want to do something with a ball,
this is going to be our thing.
So it’s going to be $10 a session, meet at this park,
bring your own ball and just go from there
and see what happens.
– Yeah, you get 10 people to show up for an hour.
Now you get a hundred bucks an hour side business
and who knows what comes down the road from that.
Maybe they decide they do want to join a league
and if nothing exists,
then you can be the spearhead of the organizer
for something like that.
– Or it looks like your kids leagues
where, you know, if you have a young kid
and you start playing soccer, they just go
and do like a practice and then they play a game
at the end of it and like, it could look like that
where you’ve got 60 adults come in
and then you divide up and play small sided tournaments
at the end, it can be really fun.
– Yeah, some level of scrimmage.
I think this could be a fun one
and anybody who’s listening could take this
and run with this in any number of different sports.
Well, what did you use to play?
Oh, you used to be a tennis player.
Oh, you used to be a baseball player.
Could you host classes and clinics and fitness,
you know, geared toward that sport for grownups
or could you turn around and offer that for kids?
I’ll give your kids swim lessons or tennis lessons
or, you know, basketball drills or, you know,
friend of ours, you know, played catcher,
you know, for his whole life.
And so he’s like, you know, here’s the catchers clinic
coming back to my hometown and the way to make money
during the off season and stuff like that.
So I think there’s definitely something there.
– Yeah, and if you do it in Maryland,
please let me know.
I would love to join.
– Yeah, and on top of that, I’m sure Facebook already knows,
you know, these people who used to be soccer players,
they could help target everybody
in that demographic for you.
All right, that is round to donate a business idea
that was adult fitness classes,
sport specific fitness classes for grownups.
But of course you can pivot that, do it with kids,
do it with whatever group, whatever sport that you like.
I think that’s a cool one.
Let’s go to round three.
This is the triple threat.
We’re gonna start off with a marketing tactic
that’s working for you right now.
Could be related to fly educator,
could be related to teachers pay teachers,
could be something that your students
can teach an entrepreneurship in class,
something that’s working for them.
– So big one that’s working for me right now
is when I launch a new product
or I wanna refresh your product,
I will go into a social media group and I’ll say,
I’m looking for 10 people to try this out for me
and give me feedback.
So be an early adopter and again,
leave your email in the comment section
if you want to be entered into the draw
to be one of those 10 people to try it out for me.
And really I don’t care that much
about getting the feedback from them.
What I really want is to have an excuse
to kind of put my product out there
and again, get the engagement on the comment section.
So it comes up in front of a bunch of people.
I get to measure who’s actually really interested in this.
So the ones who really want it for free,
I’m gonna give it away to 10 people,
but then I’ve got suddenly a list of people
who are really interested in it
and I can send them a nurture sequence
about getting the product and paying for it.
So that’s been working really well
and it’s just kind of a rinse of feet
over and over again every time I have a new product.
– And you’re looking specifically
in groups of teachers in this case?
– Yeah, Facebook groups,
I find the most effective place to sell.
Instagram is I think great for kind of just building trust
and maybe a little bit of awareness of who you are
and your brand.
I don’t find that people click over from Instagram
very often to buy something,
but Facebook groups, specifically teacher groups
and even more again, niche groups for those teachers.
So like for me, it’s the business educators group
or group called Fanatics.
So financial literacy fanatics,
those two groups are amazing for getting volunteers
to try stuff out and then also being very interested
in what I am selling.
And I’ll find that I’ll get a lot of clicks
from Facebook going to TBT
and I’m sure it’s coming from those two groups.
– Yeah, I like this one.
It’s going where your target customers already are.
It is offering something of value.
It is being a member of that community.
Like it checks a lot of smart boxes here.
So I think that makes a lot of sense.
And you can find a group for just about any target audience
that you want to serve.
And you know, of course,
play nice by the rules and the moderators
and everything else and be of service first.
Can’t come in and just spam up the place,
but it sounds like this one is leading with value.
Like, hey, I created this thing.
I think it’ll help you out.
If you want to be among the first to test it,
let me know, I’m looking for some early users.
– It goes down a lot better, I feel like,
with teachers than the buy my stuff posts.
– Yeah.
– Especially like, you know,
marketing materials to teachers can feel hard sometimes
and teachers kind of have this almost ingrained culture
of freely sharing and that we’re all in this
for the service aspect and the higher calling
and we’re not doing this to be paid a lot
or to make money from it.
And that’s almost like a toxic culture within teachers.
So you can get a lot of pushback
when you start trying to market products to teachers
and it’s not free.
They’re like, well, why aren’t you giving away
your best ideas for free and just sharing
and being a part of the community?
And I always have to look at it like, well,
I can give you the free stuff that I create for myself
and it won’t be very high quality.
It works well for me,
but if you want me to put the hours in
to make a turnkey for you and amazing for your students,
I think that’s something that I do get to charge for
and it will be worth your time and your money.
– And that’s something else
because if somebody is in a Facebook group,
they’re not necessarily expecting to be sold to,
but if they’re browsing on teachers, pay teachers
or they’re browsing on some of their marketplace,
they’re going in there with the expectation to spend money.
And so it’s like a natural fit for that audience.
That is the marketing tactic.
The second part of the triple threat is a new
or new to you tool that you’re loving right now.
– I think for me, it is a tool from AppSumo,
which I’m sure you are familiar with.
And it’s called VideoTap.
And it’s one where I’ve been able to take a lot
of my videos that I’ve recorded.
So I do a lot of recording guest speakers from my classroom
and sending that out to other teachers
and letting them use it for free.
But it lets me break that up into small,
bite-sized social media clips using an AI tool within it,
produces a caption, produces the closed captioning for it.
And it’s an amazing tool.
Like I love it.
It’s just perfect for taking a video,
breaking it up in chunks.
And then it’s only easy to post it as small videos
or a blog post or whatever it is.
– A very cool video tap.
We will link that up in the show notes currently sold out
on AppSumo, but you never know when it’s gonna be back
in stock and we can absolutely link that up.
Cool resource.
Thanks for sharing.
That’s new to me.
All right, and the last segment of round three
of the triple threat is your favorite book
from the last 12 months.
– My favorite book from the last 12 months
has to be Never Split the Difference.
Really good book about negotiation from a former,
I think FBI agent or Secret Service agents
who would do hostage negotiation
and just the overlap of how that works with business.
I feel like I’ve read the book twice
and I just, I want to keep going back to it.
Every time I read it, there’s something new
and exciting in there that I can apply to my business.
– Do you find yourself in a lot of negotiation scenarios
with students or with customers here?
– Every day’s a negotiation, yes.
– How so?
– You’re always trying to convince students
that to buy what you’re selling in terms of the information
and to give your attention or to give their attention
to you, we’ll talk about being responsible consumers
and haggling or the example the other day
was when you go in for a job application
and they ask you what do you want your compensation to be
or what are you expecting a compensation?
Just the human psychology aspect of give them a range
and make your ideal number the low end of the range
so that they anchor to the high number
and everyone’s gonna feel like they win.
They feel like they’ve negotiated you down
to your lowest amount and you feel like,
well, that’s what I wanted anyway.
So just a tactic like that
that I would have been unaware of until I read that book.
– Interesting, I’ve always seen this title pop up
in Amazon search results.
I always assumed it was just kind of a negotiation book
and it sounds like there may be parallels to parenting
and other aspects of the business.
It’s not always negotiating dollars and cents
and meeting in the middle, but maybe you’re negotiating
attention and chores and tasks and other things too.
– It’s applied to my job, it’s applied with my kid,
it’s applied with my wife.
Yeah, it’s very much about relationships
and money comes into it a little bit,
but just negotiating conflict,
avoiding conflict in the first place,
making sure everyone feels like they’ve won
when it comes to a negotiation.
Yeah, it’s got a lot of applications
across a broad range of things.
– All right, well, you convinced me, you sold me,
I’m gonna add it to the reading list here.
Never split the difference.
We’ll link that up in the show notes along
with links to all of Rob’s resources
like phyeducator.com, phyeducator.store.
We’ll get you over to the teachers pay teachers page
so you can check out some of his listings there.
If you’re wondering what to listen to next,
if you like this digital product business,
I like it, if you create something once,
sell it over and over again, no fulfillment costs,
fantastic.
I’ve got another couple episode recommendations for you.
Most recently, I sat down with Debbie Gartner,
she shared how she was earning around a thousand bucks a week
from her Etsy Printables business in episode 637.
Don’t have to scroll too far down in the podcast app
to find that one.
And then we had a really popular interview
with Becky Beach in episode 582 from late last year
on how she was building out this whole suite
of digital products and bundles and using AI
to help generate ideas and some of the content.
It was really cool.
And if digital products aren’t your jammed,
that, yeah, that’s okay too.
And in that case, I want to invite you
to generate your own personalized side hustle show
playlist at hustle.show.
Just answer a few short multiple choice questions
about your interests and goals
and it’ll recommend eight to 10 episodes to start with
based on your answers.
Again, that’s at hustle.show.
Big thanks to Rob for sharing his insight.
Big thanks to our sponsors
for helping make this content free for everyone.
You can hit up sidehustlenation.com/deals
for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place.
Thank you for supporting the advertisers
that support the show.
Really does make a difference.
That is it for me.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
If you find in value in the show,
the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend.
So fire off that text message to that teacher friend of yours
and say, hey, you should totally check this out.
Until next time, let’s go out there
and make something happen.
And I’ll catch you in the next edition
of the Side Hustle Show.
Would you believe there’s a marketplace of millions of buyers eager for digital products for teachers — and it’s not Etsy?
Rob is a high school math and personal finance teacher at fieducator.com. He’s built an impressive side hustle selling lesson plans and resources online at fieducator.store.
Through the popular platform Teachers Pay Teachers, Rob has turned his passion for financial education into a growing business that regularly brings in $2,000 a month — and it’s been growing 40% a year.
Tune in to Episode 644 of The Side Hustle Show to learn:
- How to find your niche on Teachers Pay Teachers
- Rob’s $2k/month digital product business
- Rob’s process for launching new products on FB groups
Full Show Notes: $2k a Month in Semi-Passive Income on the Side
New to the Show? Get your personalized money-making playlist here!
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