Latest / The Side Hustle Career Podcast with Fexingo: Second Income, Freelancing While Employed / How a Corporate Trainer Built a 30K Monthly Side Hustle in Training Content
Transcript
- Lucas: So there's this idea that side hustles have to be something completely separate from your day job — like you're a teacher by day and you build websites at night. But a lot of the most lucrative side hustles actually come from taking the skill you already use at work and selling it to a different audience. Luna: Yeah, and today's guest is a perfect example. Maya works as a corporate learning and development manager for a mid-sized logistics company. Her day job is designing onboarding programs and compliance training. Her side hustle? She repackages that same kind of content into a subscription library for small businesses. Lucas: And the numbers here are pretty striking. Maya's side hustle is doing about thirty thousand dollars a month. That's not a typo. She's making more from the side gig than from her full-time salary. Luna: And we'll get into how she built it, but first — Lucas, I know we don't run ads on this show, and I think that's part of why listeners trust us. If you've gotten value from episodes like this, you can support the show at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. That's it — no pressure, just a way to keep this ad-free. Lucas: Exactly. And it's because of listeners who do that that we can keep bringing you these deep dives without interrupting with sponsored messages. So thank you. Now back to Maya — the key insight is that small businesses need training content just as much as big corporations, but they can't afford a full-time L&D person. Luna: Right. So Maya started by looking at her own company's training modules and realizing that a lot of the core material — things like 'how to give constructive feedback' or 'safety basics' — is pretty universal. She just needed to strip out any proprietary information. Lucas: And that's the crucial legal line we'll come back to. Because you can't just take your employer's slide deck and sell it. But you can rebuild the concepts from scratch in your own voice. Maya spent about three months creating her first ten modules using Canva and Articulate Rise. She kept the design clean and branded it under her own company name. Luna: She called it 'TrainFast Library' — very straightforward. And she priced it at five hundred dollars per month per client. No contracts, cancel anytime. That was a deliberate choice to lower the barrier for small businesses. Lucas: So to get to thirty thousand a month, she needed sixty clients. That's a lot, but it's not insane when you consider that a single HR director at a fifty-person company might spend that much on one off-the-shelf training program. Maya's model gives them a whole library for less. Luna: How did she find those first clients? Because that's always the hard part. Lucas: She used a two-pronged approach. First, she optimized her LinkedIn profile to signal that she specialized in training content for small businesses. She started posting short tips — like 'three ways to onboard a remote employee' — and that built credibility. Then she did cold outreach to HR managers at companies with under two hundred employees. Luna: Did she use any kind of template? Because cold messaging can feel really spammy. Luna: That trial period is smart — it lets them see the value before committing. Lucas: Exactly. And about sixty percent of trial users converted to paid. Once she had a base of ten clients, she started getting referrals. One HR manager told another, and that's when it started to snowball. Luna: I want to circle back to the legal side. Because if I'm a corporate trainer listening to this, I'm thinking, 'Can my employer come after me for this?' Lucas: It's a real risk, and Maya was very careful. She did three things. First, she checked her employment contract for any non-compete or IP assignment clauses. Hers was standard — anything created during work hours using company resources belongs to the company. So she built everything on her own time, on her own laptop, using only publicly available frameworks. Luna: That's key. She didn't even use the same design templates as her employer. Lucas: Right. Second, she never directly copied any of her employer's proprietary content. The topics might overlap — like both might have a module on 'effective communication' — but the actual slides, the exercises, the case studies were all original. Third, she made sure her side hustle didn't compete with her employer's business. Her company doesn't sell training to other firms, so there was no conflict of interest. Luna: That's a good filter for anyone considering this kind of side hustle: is your employer in the business of selling what you're offering? If yes, you're probably walking a thin line. Lucas: Absolutely. Now, the content library itself. Maya started with ten modules and has since expanded to about forty. She updates them quarterly based on feedback. The most popular ones are 'Managing Remote Teams' and 'Giving Performance Reviews' — which makes sense given how many companies are still hybrid. Luna: And she's not doing this alone. Is she still working her full-time job? Lucas: Yes, she is. She spends about fifteen hours a week on the side hustle — mostly on weekends and a couple of evenings. She's also hired a virtual assistant to handle customer support and a freelance graphic designer to polish the modules. That costs her about three thousand a month, so her net is around twenty-seven thousand. Luna: Still very healthy. And the beauty of a subscription model is that it's recurring. She's not constantly hunting for new clients to replace churned ones. Lucas: Exactly. Her churn rate is about five percent per month, so she needs to add roughly three new clients each month just to stay flat. But since she's growing, she's adding more like six to eight. She's actually considering leaving her day job in the next six months if the trajectory holds. Luna: Which brings up an interesting question: at what point do you jump? Because thirty thousand a month is clearly enough to replace a salary, but there's also the benefits, the stability, the social aspect of a full-time job. Lucas: Maya told us she's waiting until the side hustle hits fifty thousand a month and she has a six-month cash buffer. That's a pretty conservative approach. She also wants to make sure she has systems in place so the business doesn't require her constant attention. She's building toward something that runs without her. Luna: That's the dream, right? A side hustle that becomes a scalable business. But it's also worth noting that not everyone wants to scale. Some people are happy with an extra two thousand a month and no stress. Lucas: For sure. And Maya's model actually scales pretty well because digital content has low marginal cost. Once a module is built, you can sell it to a hundred clients for almost no additional expense. The bottleneck is client acquisition and support. Luna: So what's the one takeaway for someone listening who might want to try something similar? Lucas: I'd say look at the training or documentation you produce at work. Is there a version of that that a smaller company would pay for? And then ask yourself: can you legally and ethically build that on your own time? If the answers are yes, you might have a thirty-thousand-dollar-a-month side hustle sitting in your skill set. Luna: And if you want to support more episodes like this, you know where to find us. Thanks for listening. Lucas: We'll be back next week with another story of someone turning a job skill into a business. Until then, keep building.