How a side gig turned into a full-time business
No matter what kind of entrepreneur you are, you’ve undoubtedly faced (and hopefully conquered!) some key challenges: how do I find clients? How can I improve my product or service? What’s the optimal way for me to structure and run my business? And since entrepreneurship is a difficult but ultimately rewarding journey, it can help to get inspired by fellow business-builders to hear how they’ve made it in their industry.
Tommy Griffith is the founder of ClickMinded, a digital marketing course platform for entrepreneurs. He began the business while he was the SEO manager at PayPal and later Airbnb, eventually growing his “side project” into a complete replacement for his corporate income. He’s learned some important business lessons along the way, some of which he’s sharing with us today.
Tommy and I talk about how and why he started his business as a side project in 2008 after being inspired by the then-new wave of digital nomads and online entrepreneurs. He shares the early structure of his business, why he’s so passionate about SEO, how he used strategic business partnerships to get his business off the ground, and a lot more about the technical side of his business. Tommy also shares some valuable (and funny) stories about the mistakes he’s made as an entrepreneur, what you should keep in mind if you’re starting an online business, and how to use your current experience as a launchpad for your future success.
In this episode, we discussed:
How Tommy got started
My main business is search engine optimization. I've been doing SEO for about 10 years, I kind of have done a number of different things leading up to that the last eight years of my life. So I was doing kind of more core pretty SEO stuff, managed search engine optimization, and PayPal and then Airbnb. And what we're probably going to talk a lot about today is my side project called Click Minded. It's just funny, I still call it a side project, even though it's been my business for two years full time. But yeah, Click Minded is a digital marketing training platform for entrepreneurs and marketers. It's an online course, we train people on how to do how to do digital marketing. I guess I got my start in 2008. Like a lot of people did sort of in this industry reading four-hour workweek.
I wrote a, I wrote an E book, I wrote a very dorky ebook, and try to get it ranking in Google. That's how I learned search engine optimization. I started selling the book for $10. Nobody bought it, I dropped the price to $5. Nobody bought it. And then I increase the price to $47. And 250. people bought it. So I was like, What internet marketing is cool, right. And so that was the first catalyst to try business. A friend of mine and I, we had this idea, we took out a bunch of loans from family and friends, we worked on it for a year, and I just did everything wrong, everything wrong, and ended up you know, eventually quitting giving up, going back with my head down back to you know, I was traveling back to the US.
But I had spent a year learning digital marketing. And ultimately, it was just kind of right place right time,
PayPal was hiring an SEO manager I applied. I had been doing SEO nonstop on this failed business for a year and a half or two years. And it ended up like what do they call it failing up failing, failing into a job kind of thing. And that's sort of how I moved to the Bay Area to start managing SEO at PayPal, I had all this debt, and sort of was like, okay, you know, I have this job. But I have to start paying that some of that debt that I acquired, and actually told us other people before I think the single biggest motivator you could ever have is being miserable and in debt. Because sometimes when you're very comfortable, it's hard to want to wake up on that Saturday morning and work on that side project, something like that, you know, so I was living in a tiny little shoe box of an apartment in San Francisco. Expenses are high, taxes are high. So salary was low, you know, the debt was still there. And so I tried a million different things, so many different ideas, right? Some of them would last a couple months, some of them would last a day.
There's an ongoing joke we have with some of my friends were like, you know, you're kind of a neurotic sort of idea tester based on how many unused domain names you have in your web hosting account. I'm sure a lot of your audience can relate to this, like, why did I buy that domain three years ago? Am I going to renew your account, renew it for another $10 and never do anything with it? Right? My domain hosting account is just a graveyard of these things. I mean, there's so many click Lana was the one that worked, my boss actually asked me to do like a SEO training course a physical in person training for my colleagues.
And it was a two hour course put it together got a lot of really good feedback on it and decided to start doing it on the weekends. So I was physically training startups on Saturday mornings in San Francisco, it would be one to five people kind of all day. All you can SEO, right. And so they've come in and out physically prepare for the lecture, look at their domains and do this really comprehensive sort of in person training. And that's, that's how it got started.
“Sad Saturday” and transitioning online
So this was, what's the term, the trough of sorrow? Have you ever heard that term? Like, you know, anytime you start a side project, or a business, you can get this initial bump of enthusiasm and revenue and sales, and then this devastating crash immediately after, that's where most people give up. So I really excited about this business. And then after two or three classes, I realized that it was terrible, was a terrible business. I was physically training in person, right, I would do a revenue share with the CO working spaces because I didn't have the money to book places and then get really stressed out about filling them in, people would come in and you know, I we were charging and give you the numbers:
I was charging $500 per person. And so all day Saturday, and so when I would have classes of four or five or six people, it was great. But anytime I had a class with one person, it was terrible. And I had this moment, did a talk about this once and I called it this moment in time, sad Saturday, I had this guy emailed me, he said, Hey, I want to come in. I want to learn SEO. But I can only come in on this certain day. And it's only me. And so it was I remember that. So clearly, it was my 26th birthday. It was a Saturday morning. He was like, Can I come in? And I'm like thinking about all this debt I had. I'm like, Okay, fine. You can come in.
He's like, give a promo code. And yes, okay, here's the promo code. And then he came in. And but I did the math. It was terrible, right? Like, there was a 50/50 revenue share with the CO working space. You know, I printed out materials, I would buy the guy lunch, right, like event, right fees, PayPal fees.
You know, I spent four hours preparing for it all. I did all the math, and I was making about $12 an hour and separate San Francisco minimum wage is $13 an hour. And so I was like, This is not working.
What ended up happening. And the problem was that I loved it. I love teaching. I'm really passionate about search engine opposition's very dorky, but I try and talk to people about it in bars, they run away from me. So when I get people to pay me to talk about it, like, it's great, right? I ended up being really right place right time with this kind of online learning Renaissance that we're in now. So there's 2012, you to me was sort of just starting to take off. And the SEO courses either weren't that good, or there are non existent.
You know, I had done 10 live SEO courses back to back to back to back you to me was actually based in San Francisco, and I sort of put together the first one on you, to me, that ended up changing the business entirely and the pivot to online. And then since then, yeah, it's been it's crazy. But it's been about seven years since then. And every year we've refilled the course and updated and obviously grown and grown and grown and grown. And there's a lot of details there in between.
But the basic idea was once it became an online course, I started using it at PayPal to train up my internal team on SEO, I said that I start using an Airbnb to train up my teams, everyone that joined the SEO or the growth team at Airbnb took the course. And then three years ago, it ended up eclipsing my salary at Airbnb, so came higher than my salary that I eventually left. And now we do we have seven digital marketing courses, I have a small staff, and it's kind of an online product from there.
Tommy’s Top Tips:
Start building a client base offline first - instead of trying to build a company entirely from the solitude of your own home, get out and meet people in your community who are interested in what you do. Meetup is a great way to find people who might be your first users!
Consider business partnerships – this can be controversial, but offering a cut of your revenue in exchange for distribution of your product or a physical space to offer your courses might be a great investment.
Think about your exit velocity – how does what you’re doing right now prepare you for your next venture? Maybe you can talk to coworkers about what they’re looking for in a product. Maybe your current role offers you learning opportunities. Try to maximize the knowledge you’ll take away to your side hustle.
Want to learn more? Check out episode #16
Or, any of Tommy’s detailed post on his experience here