How we built a side-hustle with lessons from Escape The City

A ‘side hustle’ if you aren’t up to speed on startup buzzwords is basically something you can do outside of your ‘main hustle’ (a full time job for most people) to bring in a secondary income/explore something you’re interested in. Apparently half of millennials haveone.

My side-hustle Rebel Book Club was born in Bali in 2015 when Ben Saul-Garner and I couldn’t find a book club that felt like a good fit for us. We wanted to finish more non-fiction books and extract real tangible value from what we read. We thought it’d be cool to read the same book at the same time with other curious minds. We tested the idea pretty quickly and thought it had enough legs to charge a monthly £15 subscription fee which covers:

• x 1 non-fiction book
• x 1 inspiring meetup
• x 1 custom cocktail inspired by the book, served at the meetup by our friends at Mix & Muddle

We launched in May 2015 and had 24 paying members, a number of whom we consider good friends now! Each month Ben & I put in a little time to keep things ticking over and the community grew organically month on month. A year later we had 104 paying members and enough leverage to reach out to some bigger authors… and actually get a response.

A few emails later, we ended up meeting Ryan for a coffee whilst he was over in London and he kindly joined our meet via Skype from The States for a private Q&A after we read his book in August 16'.

In truth, we didn’t have the bandwidth to invest heaps of time into the project but we kept the formula simple and whilst it was small, we continued to grow month on month via word of mouth with zero marketing spend. After running a couple of workshops at festivals on ‘how to get maximum value from badass books’ we were asked to talk at a TEDx event.

Things were starting to feel pretty legit.

Our usual distribution channel was via Amazon vouchers giving members the freedom to redeem Kindle or Paperback versions of our monthly book but we were drawn to distributing physical books a few times — partly because we had enough scale to negotiate wholesale prices directly with publishers and partly because we thought a physical book turning up in a branded envelope could take the member experience to the next level.

We learnt quickly that physical distribution for us was increasingly time consuming and added a heap of customer service challenges if the book didn’t arrive as intended. Part of me still thinks one day we may revert back to this method and get it right but for now we decided to leave it to Bezos and the pros.

Living that packing life.

Enter Albert. Ben and I were both working hard on other businesses (I was running Startup Accelerators at Escape The City) and Albert was just what we needed, he was already a popular member within RBC and stepped up to head up all things related to member happiness — ultimately he kept things running behind the scenes and in true side hustle fashion was also managing to work full time, play a key role within a charity and churn out ultra marathons all over the world — the guy is a beast and we will always be grateful for his support.

On a good month, we’d meet twice as a team — once for breakfast round the corner from Alberts office and again on the last Tuesday of each month at our meetup. We were getting stronger but things were still a little reactive rather than proactive and last minute by nature. In hindsight, we probably missed some opportunities to double down and grow faster but we always managed to keep things on track by keeping the basics consistent.

We got asked to speak for TEDx again and Dojo blogged about us out of the blue which supercharged applications that month.

Ben SG pretending not to be nervous

In January 2018 we had 159 paying members, so £2,385 monthly recurring revenue.

In May, we celebrated our third birthday with our usual recipe of forward-thinking conversation and cocktails, plus some cake, obviously.

Rich (the cocktail god) and I prepping for our 3rd birthday

In August, I went for a beer with Ben SG before our meetup and told him (pending final sign off from my wife) that I was planning to move to Koh Lanta in Thailand with our three kids. We have a history of fairly crazy adventures so this conversation wasn’t particularly out of the ordinary but it did throw up a potential challenge — how would we split responsibilities if I was on an island in a different timezone on the other side of the world?

Fortunately, it went well — having one of us work remotely actually meant we spoke more often with more clarity on our roles and whilst in Thailand I managed to carve out more time than ever before to put into RBC which had a positive impact.

By the end of 2018, we had nearly 400 paying members. We were growing quickly but our churn rate was a little higher than we’d like and our insights suggested this is predominantly down to people not always being able to make the meetups. So in May 2019 we switched to a minimum 3 month membership to give our community more chance of making meetups and build better book and community connections.

It worked!

Our churn rate is dropping and our membership is growing steadily, now up to 650 paying subscribers with £10,000 monthly recurring revenue.

We’ve conquered 53 books across a diverse set of themes, created 53 amazing custom cocktails and collectively read over 5 million pages so far. We’re also building satellite RBC’s in Oxford, Bristol, Barcelona and Berlin, hosted by London members who have moved on.

All of this has led to us deciding to turn RBC from a side-hustle to a full-time venture. We know what works, the business model is sound and the community is cracking. We could continue to grow organically but we’d struggle to build a team quickly and improve the membership experience. So we’re going for our first round of funding — £100k for 10% equity in the business — and over the last month we’ve been on-boarding our community, 63 of them have now invested in their book club.

This week we go live on Crowdcube to raise the rest of the funds we need to turn our side-hustle into what we think could be the best non-fiction book club — and business — in the world.

Key Lessons learnt building Rebel Book Club as a side-hustle:

1. Charge money from day 1 — Have confidence in what you are selling and investigate what your target audience are willing to pay. Use feedback from people that are paying for your product or service to improve the offering.
2. Have a profitable model from day 1 — Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity. In order to run a sustainable venture, you need to figure out your basic profit and losses.
3. Don’t have expectations beyond 1 or 2 months — Keep the business lean and agile. A good strategy is to explore and fine tune your assumptions before declaring a long-term plan.
4. Focus on being creative and helping people have fun/read more — Creativity fuels big thinking. If you focus on your user and their experience with your business, it will open the door to new growth opportunities.
5. Don’t worry about what a future business might look like — If you focus too much on the future you will miss an important detail in the present.
6. Build the relationship with your project partner month by month — Co-founder relationships can be challenging, particularly when both parties are running other ventures. Build trust and set clear parameters.
7. Asking ‘big name’ authors if they want to join in is surprisingly effective — The power of the influencer!
8. Bespoke cocktails based on book themes are popular — no explanation needed.
9. Use no-code tools to operate: Strikingly, GoCardless, Eventbrite etc — These easy to use ‘start-up tools’ will help you start a business cheaply and quickly.
10. Knowledge empowers, spread it! Build credibility and trust by being a thought leader in your industry.

Join Rebel Book Club > https://www.rebelbook.club/

This article was originally published on October 1, 2019.