Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin - “I Turned My Hobby Into a Jobby. Now What?” (Listener Intervention)

Episode Date: June 19, 2024

Today's listener did the thing: he turned his hobby into a jobby, and is selling his art. Now he wants to know... how much should he sell it for? Nicole jumps in with a tip that will help make it rain.... Originally aired 12.24.21

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 I love hosting on Airbnb. It's a great way to bring in some extra cash. But I totally get it that it might sound overwhelming to start, or even too complicated, if, say, you want to put your summer home in Maine on Airbnb, but you live full-time in San Francisco and you can't go to Maine every time you need to change sheets for your guests or something like that. If thoughts like these have been holding you back, I have great news for you. Airbnb has launched a co-host network, which is a network of high quality local co-hosts with Airbnb experience that can take care of your home and your guests. Co-hosts can do what you don't have time for, like managing your reservations, messaging your guests, giving support at the property, or even create your listing for you.
Starting point is 00:00:38 I always want to line up a reservation for my house when I'm traveling for work, but sometimes I just don't get around to it because getting ready to travel always feels like a scramble, so I don't end up making time to make my house look guest-friendly. I guess that's the best way to put it. But I'm matching with a co-host so I can still make that extra cash while also making it easy on myself. Find a co-host at airbnb.com slash host. One of the most stressful periods of my life was when I was in credit card debt. I got to a point where I just knew that I had to get it under control for my financial future and also for my mental health. We've all hit a point where we've realized it was time to make some serious money moves. So take control of your finances by using a Chime checking account with features like no
Starting point is 00:01:18 maintenance fees, fee-free overdraft up to $200, or getting paid up to two days early with direct deposit. Learn more at Chime.com slash MNN. When you check out Chime, you'll see that you can overdraft up to $200 with no fees. If you're an OG listener, you know about my infamous $35 overdraft fee that I got from buying a $7 latte and how I am still very fired up about it. If I had Chime back then, that wouldn't even be a story. Make your fall finances a little greener by working toward your financial goals with Chime. Open your account in just two minutes at Chime.com slash MNN. That's Chime.com slash MNN. Chime feels like progress. Banking services and debit card provided by the Bancorp Bank N.A. or Stride Bank N.A. Members FDIC. SpotMe eligibility requirements and overdraft limits apply. Boosts are available Hey guys, are you ready for some money rehab?
Starting point is 00:02:21 Wall Street has been completely upended by an unlikely player. GameStop. And should I have a 401k? You don't do it? No, I never have. You think the whole world revolves around you and your money. Well, it doesn't. Charge for wasting our time. I will take a check.
Starting point is 00:02:41 Like an old school check. You recognize her from anchoring on CNN, CNBC, and Bloomberg. The only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand. Nicole Lappin. Before we get started, I wanted to say Merry Christmas Eve to everyone that celebrates and wishing all of you happy, happy, happy, happy holidays. I hope you're surrounded by loved ones and you get to wear your fuzzy PJs all weekend or heck, all week.
Starting point is 00:03:09 You know, that work from home life. Okay, let's get into it. It has been so fun for me to read your comments on Apple Podcasts and to get your emails and DMs. It really, truly makes my day getting to read all of your stories. So thank you. After releasing episode 37, Turn Your Hobby Into a Jobby, I heard a lot of stories of people getting serious about their side hustles.
Starting point is 00:03:35 One of the obvious metrics to assess whether your hobby can become a jobby is whether you stand to make real money from it. If you want to explore the possibility, you'll have to ask yourself questions like, how or how much? These are some of the questions we'll be going over in today's listener intervention. So, Kevin, welcome to Money Rehab. Well, thank you for having me.
Starting point is 00:03:56 Tell me a little bit about what's going on. Well, several years ago, I came off a deployment and had a bunch in my sketchbook. So we put together some children's books, kind of a hobby, launched them on Amazon, self-published, and they did pretty well. Years down the road when COVID hit and we kind of reconvened, more than a few artists that still do actual physical paintings. So we got together, started working on some books and thought that, you know, we have the original paintings left over. How do we sell them? How do we market them? How do you price them? And I did a little bit of work looking around on the web and there doesn't seem to be a consensus on how an individual artist goes about pricing their work and finding
Starting point is 00:04:43 that. So I thought listening to your podcast, I thought this might be a good topic for that. It's a great topic. Can you tell me a little bit more about what you're selling and how much you're selling it for and where you're selling it now? Okay, great. What we do is Amazon has a platform by which you can generate your own material and self-publish it. It sits out there and generates income uh you make the books you put them out there you market them people can go to amazon purchase them and then you just receive profit from that and we did that uh with two books about a decade ago and then they're still making a profit they're still coming in so when a pandemic hit and we were kind of forced to you know stay home uh we really thought okay let's make
Starting point is 00:05:25 some let's lean into this and make some really great books and we realized we had all this original artwork left in all these paintings and we had never really wandered into that arena like how do we how do we sell the original paintings a lot of people are saying just read your market but that opens several other questions you You mentioned different markets. Do you have an idea of where you want to sell? Have you asked those customers how much they would want to pay? In other words, have you tested your product? Yes. We were really lucky in that the work that I do is aimed at a very specific genre. So they have conventions and there are existing publishing houses and collectors for that kind of work. So I started out there. So we knew we had an audience.
Starting point is 00:06:14 And we're in the process now of kind of broadening that. We started out with the steampunk market, and we did pretty well with that. And I really like, I'm getting into the retro sci-fi stuff. with that and i really like i'm getting into the the retro sci-fi stuff so and it um it's gotten quite a lot of um quite a lot of attention but we i'm not i haven't because of the pandemic obviously i haven't been able to go out to to shows and what have you promote that yet so it got us wondering i sell mostly uh illustrated work like an artist i mean an author will approach me and say hey i've got this idea and then we'll negotiate a price on that. And then I usually will negotiate into the price if they want to keep the original work. But in this case, I'm the author making the book. So I have this leftover paintings. And that's where I was wondering about how to go about
Starting point is 00:07:00 getting a price on those. Have you tested your pricing? about getting a price on those. Have you tested your pricing? I'm going to go ahead and say no, not necessarily. Not on the original work. Okay. That's my biggest suggestion to you is to test, test, test, test, test, test. It sounds like there's already a need for your product or a audience for it, or there's some, you know, demand for it. Oftentimes, when people are
Starting point is 00:07:27 starting businesses or side hustles, I suggest to test that first. You know, this is not a new concept. When the two founders of Airbnb started their company actually as a side hustle just to pay rent, fun fact, they didn't just get out of bed and, you know, throw everything behind their idea, thinking that it's the greatest idea in the history of the world, which a lot of entrepreneurs do because it's like their baby. They tested it first. You know, they set up a basic website with pictures of their extra room and images of the air mattresses and, you know, whether or not they could include breakfast or not.
Starting point is 00:08:01 And they really analyzed what that traffic looked like before they left their jobs and went into this business in a big way. So I would suggest to test, test, test anything you're planning on doing as a side hustle, as a potential business. Ask people if they want that product. You know, you may think that there's a huge demand. You may be right. You may be wrong. And so there are a lot of different ways you can ask people about that. A basic way is do a SurveyMonkey. Anytime I launched another product, I would do SurveyMonkey testing to figure out how much to price it at. I didn't just like come out with a price out of my buttooty. I asked people what they would pay. That's a great idea. So set it up,
Starting point is 00:08:51 you know, on SurveyMonkey, it costs a little bit of money. But honestly, the data that I got personally for things that I was launching was invaluable. It was well worth the fee that I paid to set up the survey. It went out to people that were in my target demo. I asked them how much they would pay. Ultimately, interestingly enough, I sort of overrode what I found in some of the data because I was selling, for instance, in the last survey I did, I was selling a financial class. I found, shockingly, that people would actually spend more than I thought, which is high class problems. I didn't feel personally comfortable pricing a class about money at a higher level because I was teaching people how to make money. But I was totally shocked at the numbers. It was definitely not what I expected to see.
Starting point is 00:09:50 So you could be shocked either way, but you just don't know until you do it. Okay, that's great. You know, there are a lot of different ways that you can poll people. SurveyMonkey is just one option. You can obviously use free tools on social media. You can just ask people on your social media, how much would you pay for this? You could send out a little survey through any email list you might have and ask people what they would pay. You could come up with a few different options. You could show them an example and you could say, hey, would you pay, you know, a hundred bucks, a thousand bucks, a million bucks for this? And then you'll get a lot of data. You can be creative depending on your product.
Starting point is 00:10:25 I talked about this in one of my books where this popular UK beverage company called Innocent Drinks, they tested their product at a music festival. And after people tried their smoothies, they could throw the empty cup in two different trash cans, yes or no. The question was, should I give up my job to start this business? And at the end of the festival, the yes bin was overflowing. And that was enough to have them leave their jobs and chase their smoothie dreams. So depending on your business, you don't necessarily have to spend a bunch of money. There are a lot of different tools you can use to spend a lot of money, Nielsen and other things, but you don't have to. Especially if you don't have the money
Starting point is 00:11:11 to spend, you can get creative. Hold on to your wallets, boys and girls. Money Rehab will be right back. I love hosting on Airbnb. It's a great way to bring in some extra cash, but I totally get it that it might sound overwhelming to start or even too complicated if, say, you want to put your summer home in Maine on Airbnb, but you live full time in San Francisco and you can't go to Maine every time you need to change sheets for your guests or something like that. If thoughts like these have been holding you back, I have great news for you. Airbnb has launched a co-host network, which is a network of high quality local co-hosts with Airbnb
Starting point is 00:11:45 experience that can take care of your home and your guests. Co-hosts can do what you don't have time for, like managing your reservations, messaging your guests, giving support at the property, or even create your listing for you. I always want to line up a reservation for my house when I'm traveling for work, but sometimes I just don't get around to it because getting ready to travel always feels like a scramble, so I don't end up making time to make my house look guest-friendly. I guess that's the best way to put it. But I'm matching with a co-host so I can still make that extra cash while also making it easy on myself. Find a co-host at Airbnb.com slash host. One of the most stressful periods of my life was when I was in credit card debt. I got to a point
Starting point is 00:12:22 where I just knew that I had to get it under control for my financial future and also for my mental health. We've all hit a point where we've realized it was time to make some serious money moves. So take control of your finances by using a Chime checking account with features like no maintenance fees, fee-free overdraft up to $200, or getting paid up to two days early with direct deposit. Learn more at Chime.com slash MNN. When you check out Chime, you'll see that you can overdraft up to $200 with no fees. If you're an OG listener, you know about my infamous $35 overdraft fee that I got from buying a $7 latte and how I am still very fired up about it. If I had Chime back then, that wouldn't even be a story. Make your fall finances a little greener by working toward your financial goals with Chime back then, that wouldn't even be a story. Make your fall finances a little greener by working toward your financial goals with Chime. Open your account in just two minutes at
Starting point is 00:13:08 chime.com slash MNN. That's chime.com slash MNN. Chime feels like progress. Banking services and debit card provided by the Bancorp Bank N.A. or Stride Bank N.A., members FDIC. SpotMe eligibility requirements and overdraft limits apply. Boosts are available Now for some more money rehab. Well, one of the things that we thought about doing was incentivizing, kind of our getting people to contribute uh information help us build our database and uh so we we made decals of some of the artwork uh sent them out to people who have frequented us in the past basically just kind of increase our awareness and then maybe that's something we could do we could incentivize people say hey give us some feedback and we'll draw from those people who answered us and they'll get a package of decals or shirts or what have you and mail it. Still
Starting point is 00:14:09 kind of increasing our brand. It's a great idea because that's actually what a lot of survey companies do anyway. When I was in college and had no money, I would sign up on the little bulletin boards for those surveys. I would take the number from the sheet that had a bunch of little, you know, things coming out of it. And I would sign up to do like science surveys and all sorts of weird stuff for 20 bucks an hour. And so you could just take that into your own hands and say, here's how I'm going to compensate you. You can ask your friends and family. Oftentimes, you're not going to get the most unbiased answer or honest answer from them. So that's why I think finding strangers that are in your demo and compensating them is
Starting point is 00:14:53 where you're going to get the best information. And that's what survey companies do. I mean, people don't do this out of the goodness of their hearts. This is not, you know, charity. And so if a survey company is going to pay somebody or give somebody a gift card, there are a lot of sites where, you know, you can sign up and be a person who takes a survey and gets stuff. But you could also do that essentially yourself where you're getting something of value in exchange for your time and your opinion. Great.
Starting point is 00:15:20 It would seem that the thing to do would be to maybe do this sort of annually, because as I mean, when you start out marketing artwork in particular, I would think that the market would evolve and you might want to be really honest and, you know, use that information as a place to pivot. You can, you know, check analytics from any website that you might set up. You can also create a small budget for Google AdWords for your product. You know, so you can get an ad, let's say, in literally two minutes where you can see which keywords get the most traction for you. You can look at metrics like conversion rate, you know, or the number of people who actually signed up for your product after seeing the ad. So all of these stats will help you understand how much money you need to throw down to acquire a customer and whether or not it's worth it. There are a lot of companies that are so-called zombie companies where they're just trudging
Starting point is 00:16:34 along and they look like death. That's why they're called zombie companies. And I think a lot of those companies would be revived or come back to life if they did some basic testing where they looked at metrics for their most optimal success. So I did a show called Hatched, which was different from Shark Tank, where we heard pitches from entrepreneurs, but they were all consumer products. So we tested them in a retail environment and we looked at what those surveys were from people who came and interacted with the product before making a
Starting point is 00:17:05 final decision because that consumer feedback is so, so important. I wouldn't suggest this to anyone who asked me about how to price their consumer product, but have you looked into NFTs? I was going to ask you about that. That's all the rage right now. I'm hearing that from a lot of artists. I don't do digital work, but obviously you can take a painting and photograph it and render it. A lot of people are curious about that. Right now, I'm going to wait and see how it develops. I listened to your episode about it. It got me curious. I'm still hanging in there. I think that there's some potential. I think it's going to shake out in a form that's sustainable in a little while. But I would be really interested in the next steps with that.
Starting point is 00:17:50 Because obviously, if you look through my stuff, I tend to focus on distinct characters. And that lends itself well to the NFT market, I would think. Yes, there have been a lot of successful NFT series that are character-driven and that they have limited amounts. A lot of them, I will be honest, you know, have the artist or the creator with a large social following or base or, you know, some celebrity behind it. But I don't think that there's much to lose if you want to even test and see. Again, my biggest takeaway from our entire conversation is test, test, test. So if you don't know, I don't think there's much harm in testing and seeing what happens. You could be surprised and actually make quite a bit of money from it.
Starting point is 00:18:40 Great. I agree. I think it's worth looking into. Well, you've given me quite a bit to think about. I'm so glad. Yeah. I certainly appreciate you making the time because we've got a little bit to rethink here and come up with a plan, but we definitely know more than when we started. So thank you so much. For today's tip, you can take straight to the bank. Don't treat your pricing strategy like pin the tail on the donkey. You don't need to put a blindfold on and take a random guess at your price point. You can and should ask people how much they would be willing to pay for what you're selling.
Starting point is 00:19:15 Plus, it's an early initiative to start engaging with your new customer community. And an engaged customer community is a recipe for jobby success. Money Rehab is a production of iHeartRadio. I'm your host, Nicole Lappin. Our producers are Morgan Lavoie and Mike Coscarelli. Executive producers are Nikki Etor and Will Pearson. Our mascots are Penny and Mimsy. Huge thanks to OG Money Rehab team Michelle Lanz for her development work, Catherine Law for her production and writing magic, and Brandon Dickert for his editing, engineering, and sound design. And as always, thanks to you for finally investing in yourself so that you can get it together and get it all.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.