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- [00:01]
Rob Phelan
Two grand a month in college.
- [00:03]
Nick Loper
Semi passive income on the side. What's up? What's up? Nick 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 fieducator.com Rob Phelan. Welcome to the Side Hustle show.
- [00:31]
Rob Phelan
Hey, Nick, thank you so much for having me. I'm looking forward to it.
- [00:34]
Nick Loper
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 want to talk through some of the digital assets, some of the products that you've created and how you've grown that business, because 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 8020 to product sales with everything that you've created. Like what, what are some of the best sellers here? What have you seen perform?
- [01:16]
Rob Phelan
Well, I mean, I'm still always refining what that 8020 is. And I think we're always trying to figure out like, well, what is that 20 that's going to 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. They want something that's going to 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 you as 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 want to 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, engaged 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 at the front of the room.
- [02:23]
Nick Loper
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, personal finance space. Do you think that's important to build some level of credibility or niche down to a certain topic inside your store?
- [02:41]
Rob Phelan
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, even though you do make your audience smaller, which does seem counterintuitive. I love the idea of the 1000 true fans finding that group of a thousand 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 will be to say, like, no, I am high school personal finance. Small individual resources that are going to enhance what you're already doing.
- [03:44]
Nick Loper
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 may be a newer subject where maybe it's a bluer ocean to go and try and compete in.
- [04:33]
Rob Phelan
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 going to 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 per 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.
- [05:19]
Nick Loper
It's such a broad topic. And remember my math teacher in high school, he had to teach us exponents anyway, so bless us already took it upon himself to teach us about dollar cost averaging and index funds and going down this road. And he's like, well, in 40 years you're going to 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? So it's like, how do you bring this home and make it compelling and interesting and relatable to somebody's like, well, you know that that's not the time horizon that I've even thinking about. And I think you've done a good job with that. It looks like I'M on the teachers pay teachers store. You can find it at fi educator 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.
- [06:05]
Rob Phelan
These are set up?
- [06:06]
Yeah, I mean, you start in the beginning figuring yourself out, especially if you've created digital products before. Like you have to figure out like what your theme is going to be, your, your niche, the way you want to run things, what, what are people going to 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 going to be like, oh, well, that wasn't great. Like I'm not going to come back again. So you'll notice. Yeah. 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 going to practice skills, they're going to play games, they're going to do activities, they're going to 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.
- [06:54]
Nick Loper
Yeah, if you can sneak it in there somehow, like, hey, we're going to play this, you know, crossword puzzle game and never, never mind that you're actually learning some spelling while we're doing this. How about if you can make it fun? Was there any on etsy or even YouTube or blogging? There's 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 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.
- [07:26]
Rob Phelan
There's no really useful tool like you might find for Google or when you're writing a blog and you can just feed your article into a plugin and it tells you like, oh, you're, 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, I think as you grow your store, you level up to the point where you will start using these sorts of tools because 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, 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, yeah, building your keyword bank from that and making sure that's in your title and your product descriptions.
- [08:16]
Nick Loper
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, you know, 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 going to break in as a new seller?
- [08:38]
Rob Phelan
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 tpt 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.
- [09:16]
Nick Loper
And it seems like most things on here are priced between 5 and $30 thereabouts. So it's very much a volume type of game, if I'm understanding that correctly.
- [09:27]
Rob Phelan
In my case, yes. If you browse through other stores, you will see some teachers who go for like 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 and 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 very one sided value. What they're getting in terms of product is way more than the 5 or 20 or $30 that they're paying for in terms of the time that it's going to save them, the stress that it's going to save them, the improvement in their classroom management that they're going to 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.
- [10:24]
Nick Loper
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 start selling at the district level or the state level. Like hey, this is mandated by your, 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. I could see how that would be a much higher ticket than a $6 one time thing. But also it's like, well, if this is passive, people are just coming out of this website and ordering my stuff. And it's like, well yeah, this is a longer sales cycle, much longer term game to play.
- [11:05]
Rob Phelan
I did the other side of it. I worked for 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 a rubber stamp that works across the entire country or even the entire state. So it's, 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'll be some support for trying to get something bigger into their school or their district or the state.
- [11:49]
Nick Loper
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.
- [11:56]
Rob Phelan
I also have competitors who are people like NextGen Personal Finance or NGP App. 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.
- [12:29]
More with Rob in just a moment.
- [12:30]
Nick Loper
Including the smart and creative ways he markets his listings right after this with our partner Airbnb.
- [12:37]
Rob Phelan
You already know that you can turn your home into an income generating asset when you're not using it. But you might not be sure where to start. Well, here's a little secret. You ever wonder how some entrepreneurs seem to get so much done and they make it look so simple? A lot of the time it's not about being the expert, but it's about finding qualified people to help you out. With Airbnb's new co host network, you can hire a high quality local co host to take care of all the details of hosting your home, starting with creating an eye catching listing and even styling the space. And then they'll help you manage reservations, communicate with guests and even provide on site support. You provide the space, they handle the details and you get paid. Now that's a side hustle I can get excited about because when I'm traveling for work or with the family, I don't really want to be glued to my phone. Here's a way to add extra income without extra stress. Get started today by connecting with an awesome local co host@airbnb.com host. Running a business is hard if it were easy, everybody would be doing it right. You got a to do list a mile long and a dozen different hats to wear. Well, here's a resource to help lighten your load. I'm excited to partner with Gusto for this episode as they've been one of the most recommended services by guests over the years. Gusto is the easy, affordable online payroll, HR and benefits tool for modern small businesses. In fact, they help over 300,000 businesses like yours take the pain out of tasks like payroll, tax filing, direct deposit, health insurance administration, 401k benefits, onboarding tools and more. Whether your team is 1099 or W2 or a combination of both, of course, do your own due diligence. Check out their reviews online and I think you'll find some common threads in the comments about ease of use, great customer support and great value. And here's the deal to help you get started or to make the switch from another provider side Hustle show listeners get 3 months free just go to Gusto.com Sidehustle to start setting up your business today and you'll see what I mean when I say easy. Again, that's three months of free payroll@gusto.com Sidehustle that's Gusto. G-U-S D S T O.com Sidehustle what.
- [14:47]
Nick Loper
Fee does the platform take in this case?
- [14:49]
Rob Phelan
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 5050 at that basic tier. So at the free tier, 5050 split, you sell something for $10, they keep 5, you get 5, and then they're also handling sales tax. If you are 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 8020 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 going to use the Marketplace platform that they offer, right?
- [15:33]
Nick Loper
And you have to look at that as well. That's my marketing expense. Basically. I get access to this 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, that gets 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.
- [15:58]
Rob Phelan
I think I upgraded within the first few months of being a seller. I was like, I'm going to eventually make enough money to make this worth it. 60 bucks. I can take a shot on that for a year and see what happens. But I was like, if I'm going to make stuff, I want to keep more of it for me.
- [16:10]
Nick Loper
Is there a play to get people off platform if you have other products, do you get access to the email list of customers? Is there a way to drive your own traffic to your own digital storefront? Trying to think of is this purely a marketplace type of play for you right now?
- [16:27]
Rob Phelan
So tpt, yeah, the marketplace gives you very little information about individual buyers. You can get a little bit of 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 want to 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 for my newsletter too. So giving them freebies, looking for product testers, street team people and they all just kind of slowly trickle in and build up that newsletter which is much more valuable than the TPT search or the social media platforms can be.
- [17:25]
Nick Loper
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 how do we improve the lifetime value? And it sounds like that's one way that you're going about it.
- [17:41]
Rob Phelan
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 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 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 you know, buying something off of maybe ebay or an Etsy, I don't know how good the customer service would be on that side.
- [18:25]
Nick Loper
Oh, for sure.
- [18:25]
Rob Phelan
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.
- [18:41]
Nick Loper
When you were first launching, did you do anything proactive to try and drive traffic, drive those initial reviews to just this is what we've seen on platform after platform. It's like if I can give that.
- [18:52]
Rob Phelan
Algorithm a little bit of a nudge.
- [18:54]
Nick Loper
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 seed my store with a few warm, happy customers, then the rest starts to work more automatically.
- [19:12]
Rob Phelan
I mean, in the beginning of launching my store, no, it was walking in the dark and spinning around and just hoping that something landed. 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 to me via DM and I will send you like the resource. And 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, because the group's not mine. It's a group that I am very active in and 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 a whole nurture part inside of it where I'm like, oh, 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 gets my stuff regularly on social media, so they've been an engaged person, so it does pop up top of their newsfeed 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, that would be huge because. Because at the moment I'm only just hitting about 400. So I'm really looking to drive up the friendliness of the algorithm to my store.
- [20:50]
Nick Loper
Yeah, I like that. That's similar to 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. Yeah, absolutely. That can help boost it up, I imagine.
- [21:03]
Rob Phelan
And there's no cost. Yes, I'm losing out on potential sales, but If I'm at 400 free downloads now, how many of those would have been paid customers? If I just started at a price point of 497, 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.
- [21:29]
Nick Loper
Are you using AI at all for ideation or to help fill in the blanks in some of these products?
- [21:35]
Rob Phelan
Sometimes. I mean, I love playing with AI. I love ChatGPT 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 use ChatGPT to be 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 saying, this was created by AI. You created this in 10 seconds and you're charging whatever number of dollars for, I could have done that myself. I don't want that. So if it can assist me in some way, absolutely. But it won't ever take over what I do.
- [22:28]
Nick Loper
All right. Anything else on the marketing front to try and drive sales if I'm a.
- [22:33]
Rob Phelan
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 dressing 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 subpar 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.
- [23:22]
Nick Loper
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 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.
- [23:43]
Rob Phelan
Yep. 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 that's a good price for what I would sell the bundle for. 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.
- [24:18]
Nick Loper
Got it. I love a bundle deal. Yeah, makes sense.
- [24:20]
Rob Phelan
Yeah. Who doesn't?
- [24:22]
Nick Loper
So do you remember your first few months of sales? I'm trying to get a sense of, was it crickets early on? How long before you're like, you know what? I can see how it might take a few years, but I could see how this is going to be a thing. This is going to start to be a significant source of income.
- [24:38]
Rob Phelan
I should send you my sales graphic so you can see the chart because it was a flat line for months. And then I think In September of 2019, there was a little blip of 52 cents. That was my first sales. 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 was like, okay, like I find someone finally convinced me that they will buy something that I created if I put, you know, the effort and keep putting myself out there. And so I really came back, started creating more, found that personal finance niche which really started to take off. And then you start seeing that exponential growth curve that you want to see in a business and haven't looked back since. It's definitely been a really energizing business so far where 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 in tpt, you compare it to these same month, the previous year versus the previous month. Because teachers go through cycles in terms of when they buy things. So like usually 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 holiday themed things, it will go up. If you don't, it might go down.
- [25:55]
Nick Loper
Yeah, a lot of seasonality for sure.
- [25:57]
Rob Phelan
So comparing to the same month, the previous year is your best bet when you're trying to figure out how is my store actually doing.
- [26:02]
Nick Loper
I love that motivation of that first $0.52. 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 it'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. Or you're kind of like, am I tapped out on ideas?
- [26:27]
Rob Phelan
No, I have like a notebook full of ideas and it's just finding 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. I've done things like tutoring where I've traded my time hour for dollar 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. And teachers pay teachers just looked like the most obvious solution. I've dabbled in courses too, didn't do the same. And so I was like, okay, teachers pay teachers where it's going to be at. And yeah, I haven't looked back since. It's been awesome.
- [27:15]
Nick Loper
Do you find that the products from years ago still continue to sell? Or is there a freshness angle to the algorithm?
- [27:23]
Rob Phelan
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.
- [27:28]
Nick Loper
Sure.
- [27:29]
Rob Phelan
There are still like, my best salary 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 then 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 in my first 20 products I created.
- [27:55]
Nick Loper
I like it. It's like Oregon Trail, but for space.
- [28:00]
Rob Phelan
It's funny, there's so many inspiring games from my childhood. I'm like, oh, this kind of drives that idea. Yeah, 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.
- [28:20]
Nick Loper
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 you're like, okay, you're part of the, you know, new world colonizers and you've got to figure out, you know, how you're going to allocate your resources on farming versus hunting versus, you know, and all this stuff. I was 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.
- [29:05]
Rob Phelan
In the next 60 seconds, 23 hires.
- [29:08]
Nick Loper
Are going to get made on Indeed.
- [29:10]
Rob Phelan
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- [30:35]
Nick Loper
And haven't looked back.
- [30:36]
Rob Phelan
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- [31:27]
Nick Loper
All right, we're back with Rob from fieducator.com for round two. And this is the Donate a business idea round. 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.
- [31:44]
Rob Phelan
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 a kind of a couple years. Well, Covid really is what shut it down. I was playing competitively till Covid and then everything stopped and then never went 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 paying, you're not playing in leagues, which might be beyond a lot of adults, at least 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 wreck and pickup. And it's not the same as like going to a group fitness class at a gym kind of thing.
- [32:41]
Nick Loper
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 could work.
- [33:00]
Rob Phelan
Yeah, I can see the absence. 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.
- [33:10]
Nick Loper
What would you do first to market it or get off the ground or.
- [33:13]
Rob Phelan
Proof of concept here it would be so low cost and so simple. 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 kind of hiit workout exercises that are adapted to have a soccer ball involved as well. Market it on some of those local soccer pickup pages and, 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, 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.
- [33:51]
Nick Loper
Yeah. If you get 10 people to show up for an Hour. Now you got 100 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. And you can be the spearhead, the organizer for something like that.
- [34:05]
Rob Phelan
Or it looks like your kids leagues where if you have a young kid and you start playing soccer, they just go and do a practice and then they play a game at the end of it. I'm like, it could look like that where you've got 60 adults coming and then you divide up and play small sided tournaments at the end. Could be really fun.
- [34:19]
Nick Loper
Yeah. Some level of scrimmage. I think this could be fun. 1. And anybody who's listening could take this and run with this in any number of different sports. Well, what did you used 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, a friend of ours, you know, played, played catcher, you know, for, for his whole life. And so he's like, you know, here's the catcher's clinic. Coming back to my hometown of a way to make money during the off season and stuff like that. So I think there's, there's definitely something there.
- [34:55]
Rob Phelan
Yeah. And if you do it in Maryland, please let me know. I would love to join.
- [34:59]
Nick Loper
Yeah. And on top of that, I'm sure, 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 two. 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 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 going to start off with a marketing tactic that's working for you right now. Now could be related to fi educator, could be related to teachers, pay teachers. Could be something that your students are teaching, entrepreneurship in class, something that's working for them.
- [35:36]
Rob Phelan
So a big one that's working for me right now is when I launch a new product or I want to refresh a 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 going to give it away to 10 people. But then now 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, repeat over and over again every time I have a new product.
- [36:24]
Nick Loper
And you're looking specifically in groups of teachers in this case, yeah, Facebook groups.
- [36:29]
Rob Phelan
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 for me it's the business educators group or a group called Finlit 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 tpt and I'm sure it's coming from those two groups.
- [37:04]
Nick Loper
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. It checks a lot of smart boxes here. So I think that makes, 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.
- [37:36]
Rob Phelan
It goes down a lot better, I feel like, with teachers than the buy my stuff post. Especially like 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 don't, we're not doing this to be paid a lot or to make money from it. And that's a, it's almost like a toxic culture within teachers. So you can get a lot of pushback when you try 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.
- [38:25]
Nick Loper
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 other 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 sales. Second part of the triple threat is a new or new to you tool that you're loving right now.
- [38:46]
Rob Phelan
I think for me it is a tool from AppSumo, which I'm sure you are familiar with and it's called Video Tap 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 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 suddenly easy to post a small videos or a blog post or whatever it is.
- [39:20]
Nick Loper
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 going to 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. Of Round three of the Triple Threat is your favorite book from the last 12 months.
- [39:39]
Rob Phelan
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 agent 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.
- [39:59]
Nick Loper
Do you find yourself in a lot of negotiation scenarios with students or with customers here?
- [40:04]
Rob Phelan
Every day is a negotiation, yes.
- [40:07]
Nick Loper
How so?
- [40:08]
Rob Phelan
You're always trying to convince students to buy what you're selling in terms of the information and like to give them. To give your attention or to give their attention to you. You know, 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, like, what do you want your compensation to be? Or what are you expecting in compensation? Just the human psychology aspect of. 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 going to 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.
- [40:48]
Nick Loper
Interesting. I've always seen this title pop up in Amazon search results. I always assumed it was just kind of a negotiation book. 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.
- [41:09]
Rob Phelan
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 application across a broad range of things.
- [41:28]
Nick Loper
All right, well, you convinced me. You sold me. I got to 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 fieducator.com, fieducator store will 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. 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 1000 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 jam, that yay. 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're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend. So find 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. Hustle on.