#28: Should You Turn Your Hobby Into A Business?

SAM: Hello welcome back to another episode of the lazy entrepreneur. I’m Sam Priestly and today I’m joined by a special co-host Ben Larkin.

BEN: Special. Hello.

SAM: Special indeed. We’re here today to talk about, should you turn your hobby into a business? And a little bit about how you can do that. And I thought Ben would be the best person to talk to because it’s basically what you’ve been doing for the last ten years or so.

BEN: Yeah my life is pretty much having a hobby and turning it into a business.

SAM: Yeah yeah it makes sense and it’s very much hobby first. You start off with the hobby and then you make a pit of money out of it.

BEN: Yeah I started playing table tennis about nine or ten and then got to eighteen and thought let’s try and make something out of this and yeah it paid off but not that it always pays off but it paid off for me.

SAM: Ben and I grew up together and I remember when we were whatever age it is sixteen seventeen, seventeen or eighteen when you’re picking what university to go to. I was going off to do computer science and then was gonna go off and do geography and then one day he turned around said instead of going to university to study geography, he was going to go to table tennis academy and just spend his time playing table tennis.

BEN: Yeah I don’t think at that point I fully thought it through.

SAM: We all thought you were mad.

BEN: It was more just picking the most enjoyable option although saying that we’re at 18 you can always do something for a couple of years and then go back to university anyway so it didn’t feel like much of a gamble but yeah once I started once I started at the academy taking it seriously then I kind of started thinking I’d turn it into a career somehow but didn’t know exactly what that would look like.

SAM: and you kind of been doing that ever since so from what like 21 or something you didn’t start looking into actually earning some money from it and then you went and you were a coach for a while yes I started coaching when I was still training quite seriously so from the age of like 18 19 did some coaching on the side and the money was really good, like when you were 18 get about 20 pound an hour or some – gun coach kids for a couple of hours on a Friday afternoon um so suddenly you start thinking this could you know you just start doing the math add this up times by eight hours a day and you know it looks like a really good salary not that you can actually do that much because of all the traveling and stuff. Yeah that was when I started thinking why not just do this.

SAM: Yeah and then after that you started your blog about table tennis expert table tennis dot com.

BEN: Yeah because so I quit, well I didn’t quit uni, finished uni 2011 started coaching table tennis down in London full-time for about a year I was just literally trying to do as many hours a week as possible because you know if you’re getting twenty five pounds an hour every four hours there’s an extra 100 quid a week. So just filling up my weeks and then it got to a point where I was doing 25 plus hours a week. It’s pretty exhausting and you realized that no one’s really gonna pay more than thirty quid an hour for table tennis. A year out of uni you’ve kind of hit your maximum earning potential. Started asking other coaches that I knew like table tennis or other sports like what their long-term plans were. None of them seem to have any long-term plans. Okay this doesn’t seem like, it’s not like everyone else is doing this with a vision of something else happening so I thought better start looking into other stuff and then started blogging as a, maybe this will make something happen which it did.

SAM: So we actually went into the blogging thinking this could be a business?

BEN: Yeah because I looked into other ways to make money and I started that African pygmy hedgehog website.

SAM: We won’t talk about that now but I did do another interview with Ben where we went deep into all this stuff which you can check out. It’s one of the bonus episodes it was already been released.

BEN: And then I mean relevant to this I realized that if you’re gonna do something like start a blog or an online business, it makes sense to pick something that you are actually interested in and care about rather than some random topic that you don’t know anything about so it seemed that I knew a lot about table tennis and actually enjoyed doing it. I decided that was the way to go.

SAM: So you did the blog and then a bit later we teamed up when we started making table tennis bats which is now one of our main businesses and is doing quite well and then more recently we started a gin brand. We now make gin together.

BEN: Not that I’d call that a hobby of mine before we started.

SAM: Well that’s something we could talk about cuz I was talking to Emma about this yesterday and she was well what hobbies have you turned into a business? And I said quite a few things and then she said what about the gin? Oh yeah definitely that it was very much a hobby of mine not the making of it but the gin and the culture around it in general.

BEN: Yeah and that I guess would be a passive hobby that you can turn into an active hobby if you yeah if you have the know-how. yeah because drinking gin is very much a passive hobby.

SAM: Yeah you can’t get very good at drinking gin, it’s not like a skill you can learn. Before we sort of dive into that let’s talk quickly about what do we mean by buy a business because there are a whole range of ways you can kind of make money out of your hobby and turn it into a career. So we’ve talked about Ben, he started a blog and nowadays you know there’s YouTube channels, Instagram accounts, all that kind of other stuff where you’re kind of creating content for people to consume. We’ve also got stuff like the table tennis bats that we’re making so creating some sort of physical product that people in the hobby can use. Table tennis bats are an obvious one but most hobbies will have something you know if you’re doing dungeon and dragons you can make kind of handcrafted really cool dice or whatever it is. That’s actually quite a big business, sort of art as a dice for dungeons and dragons.

BEN: I thought you made that up off the top of your head.

SAM: If it’s a sport you could put on tournaments, you can open a club, you could do coaching, kind of all sorts of things. But not all hobbies would probably work as a business. You mentioned active and passive.

BEN: Yeah it’s something I’ve been thinking about recently you know I thought like maybe as a society we’re moving towards more passive hobbies and less active hobbies so when people have free time instead of going out and doing something or learning they’re kind of monging around on the sofa watching Netflix, endlessly scrolling through Instagram, like that is a hobby or a pastime but it’s not, you’re not actively doing anything you’re just passively taking stuff in. Yeah which you can’t really make a career or a business out of watching Netflix or scrolling through Instagram.

SAM: It’s weird what isn’t it because with Netflix you’re watching lots of films and you know there is ways to make money out of that being film reviewers and stuff like that. Another quite passive thing is playing video games, there are ways to make money out of that.

BEN: Well video games would be a bit more active because you could become the best in the world at a video game. But you can’t be doing your best in the world at watching Netflix.

SAM: But you could become the best in the world at being a film critic.

BEN: But that is active watching not passive watching.

SAM: Yes I think that’s the trick isn’t it. It’s not that watching Netflix itself is monging out it’s more like the procrastination side of it that way you’re being active about it and you’re kind of hunting out types of films and writing reviews about them or whatever. It is a very different type of hobby.

BEN: In the same way that I’ve started this Spotify playlist, where sure I’m listening to music but I’m actively searching for new artists as opposed to listening to the UK top 40 all day long which wouldn’t be active that would just be passively listening to pop music.

SAM: So what is your playlist?

BEN: Yeah so I do this thing where I search for unknown UK urban artists that I like and then put them into a playlist not as any big business idea but that is more of a hobby but it’s an active hobby because I’m searching people out on Twitter and YouTube and Spotify.

SAM: Yeah it’s almost like your hobby is contributing something.

BEN: Yeah I am trying to curate talent in one place and support people because a lot of these guys have got like you know 100 followers on twitter, they’re completely unknown but the music they’re making might be quite good. And a few of them I’ve like posted about and then in the future, a year later they’ve got really big.

SAM: Yeah whereas I consume music in completely the opposite end of it, where it’s just for, just for enjoyment, just for filler and I don’t there’s no kind of active thinking involved it’s almost the opposite. So let’s say you got your business, so you got your hobby and you want to make it into a business. The next question then is, are you able to make that business work?

BEN: Yeah because just because you’ve got a decent idea doesn’t let’s say for instance you love table tennis but you are not actually that good at table tennis and you’re not a very good communicator, then you’re not going to be a very good coach and if you don’t know yeah like the physical side of things if you’re not very good at organizing your time, money, you’re not going to be able to start a decent business without at least first learning all those skills.

SAM: Yeah because there does seem to be a trend at the moment that people who are into fitness are becoming fitness coaches, becoming physical trainers but there’s quite a lot of them who don’t really know anything about physical fitness.

BEN: Which can work if you’re really charismatic and good at bragging.

SAM: Yeah if you got really good people skills, you’re very good at motivating people or whatever.

BEN: So you kind of need one or the other and ideally both. Ideally you need to know what you’re talking about it and being a good communicator and a charismatic personality but if not you could probably make it happen with just the charismatic personality but you’re just a bit of a fraud.

SAM: But then again just because you’re not you don’t know enough at table tennis to do a business where your position is an expert, there are ways to create business where you don’t need to be an expert in the sport. For instance, I got a friend who started making kimonos, gis, for Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. He started doing that when he was quite new to jiu jitsu he’s just sort of very good at finding suppliers and doing fabric quality and all that kind of stuff.

BEN: I guess he is an expert in something. It’s just more in the designing of it.

SAM: On the business because depending on what business you’re doing there’s definitely skills involved in that. Your business isn’t just an extension of your hobby, it’s a different skill set altogether.

BEN: Yeah and it’s no good knowing everything about jiu-jitsu but nothing about business. You’re probably better off knowing a little bit about jits and a lot about business.

SAM: Because there’s loads of people in jits who try and start business and fail spectacularly.

BEN: Probably because they don’t understand how numbers work or the way that they count how much money they’ve made doesn’t actually make sense.

SAM: I mean probably whoever’s listening to this podcast is interested in learning about business. They know that business itself is a skill that they can learn and get better at.

BEN: Yeah and the problem is when people just love their hobby and think I love this so much I must be able to make it work and then rent a shop for thousands of pounds each month and just don’t realize. So what you can do though is like partner with someone who knows business because maybe you’re never gonna be a great business person but you love making cakes so partner with someone who’s good at business. They can do that and you can just focus on the cakes.

SAM: Yeah I think that’s a good tip. Especially if you’re really good at making cakes but you’re also a real introvert and you don’t have much confidence. A big part of selling cake is actually going out and finding customers especially if you want to supply coffee shops or whatever, partner with someone who’s got the personality that works for them to get you to go in and meet the business owners. That stuff could work quite well.

BEN: I went on one of those brew dogs study tour things recently and they were saying that the two brothers that owned, it one of them pretty much stays in Scotland the whole time making beer. Doesn’t leave the factory place. The only time he does leave is to go to like the other places where they make beer and make sure the beer is good enough and if it’s not like says you can’t sell it, so he’s just mad for the actual beer making process and then the other brother just goes around like the businessy salesman type thing, getting the deals but you couldn’t do it one without the other. You need someone who makes sure the beers really good and you need someone who is actually gonna go and get that in front of people.

SAM: Year beer is a really good example because in the UK, we have maybe thousands of small craft beer producers a lot of which actually love making beer and love drinking beer but most of them don’t really get very far.

BEN: Yeah and it’s not through lack of quality. The same with the music stuff in the playlist. I played some of this music to my wife and she’s like oh that sounds like it could be on the radio yeah but it’s not through lack of quality on the music. It’s not the lack of music quality it is just that it hasn’t got in front of people yeah but the music we hear on the radio isn’t the best music, it’s not an objective measurement, it just hasn’t got the exposure. Robert Kiyosaki the Rich Dad Poor Dad guy always writes in his book stuff like I don’t want to be the best writing author, I want to be the best selling author. Obviously you’ve got to be fairly good at writing, otherwise it’s gonna be useless but do you want to be like the absolute best or do you want to be the best-selling.

SAM: And I think we do get a few survivor bias from that, there are some of the best writers who have then made it and some of the best singers who have then made it, but just because there are these outliers who people like Stephen King who kind of has no interest in the business side but is just really into the writing doesn’t mean that that is the best route if you want to turn your hobby into a business. That’s the best route if you want to be the best writer and you might then be lucky enough that it becomes a career but it doesn’t normally work like that. I was thinking about that with say table tennis, so table tennis is a sport where if you’re the best table tennis player in the world you have a career, but if you’re all like the best table tennis player in London you might not have a, there might not be enough money in there.

BEN: You have to be like top 5 in the UK to make a decent living out of just playing yeah so yeah it doesn’t really matter whether you’re like 100 in the UK or 20 in the UK, you’re not gonna make good money from playing.

SAM: Whereas there is a lot more room to make money by doing other types of businesses around the hobby.

BEN: But being 20 versus being 100 isn’t gonna help you.

SAM: You know if you’re coaching beginners or something like that, yeah to them you’re both unbelievably good. Yeah let’s talk a bit about the issue of when you turn your hobby into a business and then you lose interest in the hobby. What’s the saying that the best way to stop enjoying your hobby is to do it full-time?

BEN: Yeah and you can kind of see what people mean. I think it depends what kind of business you turn it into. So like not that we want to talk about table tennis all the time but I know people that started getting paid to play table tennis for a club and they used to love training and competing and everything, once they started getting paid to play, they start saying well I’m paid to train twice a week and play a league match like 15 times a year, and they stop training more than that because they say well I’m not going to train for free. They’re only paying me to come to two training sessions. it’s like but before you used to love training and used to have this big purpose of trying to be the best and now you’re just doing it because you get paid to do it and they’ve definitely lost some of the love that they had before of just wanting to get really good and now they’re just doing everything on a numbers basis.

SAM: Because the whole idea of an amateur I see you’re doing it for the love of doing it, whatever it is, so you got that side where people feel like they don’t want to do the hobby without getting paid for it because they’re worth something, but then they got the other side where they might be playing it or doing whatever the hobby is ten hours a week and really enjoying it and now they’re doing it professionally and they’ve got to do it 60 hours a week. And they just get sick of it.

BEN: Yeah potentially, I mean again I think it depends on what it is because you’d find a lot of people who are, they would say they’re only able to do it ten hours a week because they’ve got to do other, and then once they turn into a business or full-time suddenly they can do it all day every day and it’s their favorite thing to do. I guess it depends what it is.

SAM: I wonder if there’s also a difference between, we’re talking about active and passive earlier. What about when you’re doing it for fun the way you train and the way you practice is quite different than if you’re just doing it in order to get the best or could you’ve been paid.

BEN: Yeah I guess there’s less pressure.

SAM: When I was playing table tennis with you, messing around and having matches was a lot more fun than drilling and hitting the same ball a thousand times in a row. The other thing I was thinking about is if your hobby fails and you’ve got a bit of a reputation in your hobby already you can be linked to that and it can be quite bad for your reputation because your reputation gets linked to your business.

BEN: So what do you mean?

SAM: So in brazil jiu-jitsu there’s one quite famous guy who started a series of tournaments called metamoris.

BEN: Oh I think I watched some of them.

SAM: You watched one of them yeah metamorphosis. Yeah, well that business failed and they weren’t able to pay a bunch of the people in the business went bankrupt and now everybody in industry remembers this remembers him as a guy who didn’t pay some of his fighters.

BEN: Yeah because in those things everyone knows everyone. Once something goes pear-shaped.

SAM: There’s one guy who started raising money on a crowdfunding to do a documentary series about top jiu jitsu players ended up not having enough money to finish the film and never finished it but there’s loads of random people, hobbyists who donated a film and now feel they’ve been ripped off.

BEN: Yeah could kind of tarnish your name a bit.

SAM: There’s a bunch of people who started clubs with their mates, the club hasn’t really made any money, it’s struggling has all the financial issues, there’s all the stress around that and then they end up falling out and not enjoying the sport anymore.

BEN: Yeah so that would kind of ruin your hobby in the sense that you’re now kicked out of the community that you were in, so you kind of ruined it for yourself. It’s not that it’s got ruined by yeah doing it too much it’s just you’ve, you know, messed it up.

SAM: Maybe there’s a thing about if you’ve been doing coaching all this time maybe you would have got a bit sick it up because even though you’re doing a business out of a hobby you enjoy, doing that full-time for ten years, you might have had enough.

BEN: Yeah I know a lot of people that do coaching that just get sick of it just because it’s too much like just repetitive over and over all day every day. But I think that that comes down to about what is a business. In my head I just get Duncan Bannatyne going, that is not a business that’s just you. When people say I am starting a business, I say, what’s your business. I coach table tennis people all day every day. Well how’s that a business. That is just you coaching people in table tennis. If you have a team of people coaching, then it could be a business. But if it’s just you that’s not a business, so I think that’s why people get sick of it. When it’s just, they have to go and do this at this time every day all day. Even all the best coaches and stuff they only normally do two sessions a day but if you’re trying to run it like getting paid per hour obviously you want to do as much as possible but then you just become brain-dead and you can’t give what you want to to each person because you haven’t got the time to prep or plan or anything so yeah so it just becomes like going through the motions all day.

SAM: I think there’s there’s probably something around that you basically just build a job for yourself and a job where you need to find your hours where you can earn less than the minimum wage given all the time trying to find new customers and traveling and all that kind of stuff.

BEN: Yeah so you haven’t turned your hobby into a business, you’ve just turned it into a job.

SAM: Yeah into a rubbish job. Yeah so you’ve done this table tennis, you’ve got this playlist you’re doing. Do you have any businesses that weren’t hobbies to begin with?

BEN: I don’t know I mean obviously we do the gin thing which isn’t really, that wasn’t a hobby of mine yeah I didn’t know anything about gin when we started that yeah just tasted different gins and decided what tasted good to me.

SAM: Because originally you weren’t involved in that and you didn’t want to be and then maybe a few weeks in or something you’re like I’ve been sitting up all night thinking of ideas for this business.

BEN: Yeah well when you’re hearing about it constantly you can’t help but yeah so I wouldn’t say something has to be a hobby for it to work as a business for you because I would say even now still I don’t care about gin that much. I don’t spend my free time like researching gin for the fun of it but if I start a business that almost becomes like the hobby in itself doesn’t it? Like you wanna see yeah oh how can I make this better how can I, so the business is the hobby.

SAM: I think I’m a bit like that. I find certain businesses a hobby and I like the self-improvement side of it, I like getting better at things, I like building on things and sometimes turning your hobby into a business is a good way to do your hobby a lot more and have it pay for itself and earn a bit of money. It’s probably not the best way to make loads of money.

BEN: Yeah I’ve been thinking about this recently, like what businesses make good money? And you see online people who are teaching you how to make money so their business is like helping start a business which kind of seems like nonsense but it makes a bit of sense because most businesses in the real world are business-to-business, the ones that do well anyway because the people that want to pay for stuff are the people that are going to make more money by paying for this thing so it’s a lot easier to sell someone something for a grant that’s gonna make them 5 grand then it is to sell someone something for a grand that’s just gonna entertain them for a few hours so it kind of makes sense but most hobbies aren’t to do with helping other people make money. Like with all the table tennis stuff, that’s not helping anyone make money, that’s just people helping people get better at a hobby.

SAM: Well and you’re kind of limited by how much people are willing to spend to get better at a hobby.

BEN: Yeah no one wants to pay that much money to get better at table tennis whereas people are paying infinite amount of money to make more money.

SAM: Yeah if you’re a law firm and you’re already making millions and you want to make some more millions maybe you’re willing to spend whatever.

BEN: So probably turning your hobby into a business isn’t the best way to get super rich or start like a – I doubt many really successful businesses were started because it was a hobby and they turned it into something, but it doesn’t mean you can’t make a decent living out of your hobby.

SAM: Yeah and there are the odd outliers where someone has started a business from a hobby and it’s become huge and one of the biggest in the world hmm but that is not the norm. That is not how most businesses work.

BEN: I mean what about jiu-jitsu because I’m a bit surprised that you haven’t turned jiu-jitsu into some sort of business opportunity. Like how long have you been doing jits?

SAM: Four years.

BEN: And in Sam Priestly years that’s a very long time. Either I am expecting you to quit and start doing something else, or surely by doing something for four years you would have started some kind of wacky side hustle ignoring it but you’ve just been training and competing but I’ve not heard you say anything about it really.

SAM: And I do I do have a bunch of ideas, they’ve been sitting in the back of my head for a while. Let’s talk a little about jiu-jitsu first and how it’s different to table tennis. So they’re both not spectator sports and by that I mean that the way the industry and table tennis and brazilian jiu-jitsu works is it makes money off the participants in the sport, the people actually playing it.

BEN: Yeah like the Premier League makes all its money from people watching on TV doesn’t it? Which is not true of jiu jitsu or table tennis.

SAM: No one I know wants to watch jiu jitsu, even the people that do it. But that people who do jiu-jitsu has a reputation as a sport, a hobby that the people who do it spend a lot of money on, so the clubs are very expensive, the clothing is very expensive. People spend a lot of time on it, compare it to table tennis where if when I was a member of a table tennis club in London I was spending 20 quid a month or something whereas when I joined my Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Club in London it was a hundred and fifty quid a month.

BEN: Yeah they really milk you in jiu-jitsu. When I went to watch you in that tournament they were like are you competing. No alright well you got to pay 10 pound to come in. They’ll find anyway to milk a bit more cash out of you.

SAM: And even the tournaments about a hundred pounds. And people will do that every week.

BEN: People keep on moaning about table tennis tournaments costing like 40 50 quid.

SAM: And there’s this thing that judo is very similar to brazilian jiu-jitsu but the price structures are completely different so if wanted to do judo it’ll cost me maybe three pounds to do a session, if I drop in Brazilian jiu-jitsu club I’ll spend 30 40 quid for the session. It’s completely different even though they’re very similar, but that means that there is quite a lot of money in it and there are therefore a lot of people who are making money out of the hobby. Whereas with table tennis you’re one a few people, there aren’t that many people who’ve managed to turn it into a successful business.

BEN: Well I mean because the sports a very different sport so the people that do jiu-jitsu are all in. If you asked 100 people on the street, like when did you last did you jiu jitsu, everyone would say never but if you asked that with table tennis everyone would say oh yeah I’m really good I did that last month. So with table tennis you’ve got a super broad market of people that don’t actually know what they’re doing and don’t really care that much about table tennis but might by like a few if they you know want to play on holiday so you’ve got a really broad but thin market with a few people that take it seriously whereas jiu jitsu you don’t have the broad thing at all. There’s no one who’s like oh yeah I kind of enjoy that every now and again, like it’s not that kind of sport is it.

SAM: Yeah and there’s also a thing in jujitsu, there’s quite a small community and there is quite a hierarchy of built structure, so if you’re a black belt that kind of gives you the liberty to go and do what you want, so I as a blue belt wouldn’t be able to get away with doing instructional videos on YouTube or something like that or starting a club.

BEN: Because people are like what’s he doing? So actually on that, say you wanted to start like a clothing company. Would people do the same thing and be like why is blue belt starting a clothing company he’s only been doing a couple of years. So actually the belt thing is quite important.

SAM: But people have made it work by being a lower belt and doing something like that. Earlier I mentioned this guy who started a gi brand and he was able to make it work as a lower belt okay but generally they want to know your lineage, they want to know who you are associated with and getting people to buy a brand that isn’t linked to a black belt would be quite difficult.
BEN: And the good thing about the black belt structure thing is that it shows that people aren’t just a chance that he’s like popped up because it shows they’ve been doing it for a long time.

SAM: To get a black belt people know you’ve been doing it about 10 years and not just ten years once a week ten years three or four times a week.

BEN: Alright are you gonna tell us some of your business ideas or are you going to keep these under your hat.

SAM: So they all come from this idea that I don’t need to be a black belt to do it so there are a lot of YouTube tutorials and videos from black belts showing you how to do certain moves you know and in jiu-jitsu there’s hundreds of moves and all the top competitors are kind of inventing their own ones and then putting them off in tournament and everyone kind of wants to know you know how to do that move and they’ll make a video of it or they’ll sell a video course on it. But the problem is a lot of these black belts are so far beyond an amateur they can’t really remember what it’s like to not be able to move fluidly or not be able to, so on their videos they’ll show you it and they’ll make it look really easy and then you try and copy it and you just have no clue. You just can’t do it so my idea for a video series was to go around and find a lot of these top black belts, getting them to do a little tutorial video and then get them to teach me how to do that move okay, so I think I’m at the level where I’m not a complete beginner so it’s not having to teach me the very basics but I’m at probably that level that a lot of people are at and so then showing it really fluidly and then me doing it and them being like no you’re doing this wrong and moving individual things I think will make it a lot more relatable to everyone watching it and a lot easier to learn and it would force the black belt to kind of take it back a step and he’d probably pick up on the stuff he’s doing subconsciously that he didn’t even include in his description that I wouldn’t be doing.

BEN: I think that sounds like a good idea but would the black belts be up for doing that, I guess is the question.

SAM: Yeah I think they would be yeah.

BEN: Because they’re not getting anything out of that if you’re putting it up on your channel you’re getting all the revenue from that.

SAM: And I probably wouldn’t be able to get the top top black belts, but there’d be enough of them that I’d be able to.

BEN: And then so now we’ve established that this business might be feasible, will it make any money by how many views do these videos get because if you’re gonna go all the way around the country and these videos are gonna get like 10,000 views yeah that’s like just not worth doing is it?

SAM: Well not that many really, you’re talking 15,000 20,000 at the top end and maybe if I get someone really successful then I’d get a lot more views.

BEN: So probably the money it would make wouldn’t justify the effort

SAM: Probably not from a strict business point of view. There might be other things I could do so I quite like the patreon model where I would do one move with the person and then they maybe show me one or two more kind of additional points yeah I would lock behind like a subscription table type thing.

BEN: Yeah that could work because then it’s more like a membership structure isn’t it. As long as people think that the content is valuable to them they’ll give you 10 pound a month.

SAM: To access the extra little bit.

BEN: Whereas strict YouTube.

SAM: I don’t think just the adverts on YouTube would work, oh and the other thing I liked about this is I’ll actually get to learn all these good moves.

BEN: And yeah like a side benefit.

SAM: Yeah it would give me a good excuse to go and get like a private training session from some of the best black belts in the world. How cool is that?

BEN: Like when I was interviewing people for the table tennis podcast I did like, it gives you an excuse to talk to some really good coaches or top players and you learn a lot from doing that and make connections that you wouldn’t otherwise have, purely from the fact that I want to talk to you because I have a podcast and they’re like oh you’ve got a podcast ok fine I’ll talk to you whereas may be otherwise they wouldn’t have done so yeah it’s like a nice cover way of meeting people. Alright so that is idea number one.

SAM: Idea number two is I drive to go to training four times a week, so a 20-minute drive each way and I listen to a lot of podcasts and are quite a few jiu jitsu podcasts out there but they are all kind of interview star stuff but what I want is I want something to get me into like the training mindset on the way down so that could either be like mindfulness type stuff or it could be kind of describing techniques through audio okay and obviously audio is a subpar way of learning something like jujitsu because you really need to be doing it physically and visually but audio does help and talking through strategies or ways you transition between different moves or problems that are happening, it’s something I would definitely listen to because currently now I’ll just listen to an interview with some black belt and they could give me some interesting tips in that video but most of the time it is just talking about how they got into it and banter and they kind of gossip around it. So that’s the second idea.

BEN: Sounds like a cool idea but probably even less likely to make money.

SAM: Yeah this is the thing and I’m pretty busy at the moment and that’s the problem so neither of these ideas are high enough on my list of ideas I want to do that I’m gonna do it so I think it’s quite unlikely that I’ll end up doing one of these things yeah maybe when I get a bit better, we’ll see. Alright so let’s conclude quickly, so Ben is obviously a big believer that you should turn your hobby into business because it’s worked well for him.

BEN: Well depending on who you are. I actually quite dislike the advice of like oh I did it so go for it like yeah quit your job and actually you say that to the majority of people and they’re just gonna like mess up their lives and lose their money.

SAM: Quit their job and blunder.

BEN: Yeah by all means try and turn your hobby into a business around doing like getting a stable income and if it gets a point where it looks like it’s gonna work then go for it.

SAM: It’s not like you quit your coaching to write a blog.

BEN: No I did all that on the side for a couple of years while I was getting money from coaching because like people say oh I need to quit so I’ve got more time to do it but like you don’t like no it’ll grow slowly over time so do it around what you’re doing even if you’ve got like a boring office job.

SAM: But I think regardless of what business you’re starting, you should treat the business as a different set of skills something you need to learn.

BEN: One thing I’ve learnt from doing this is that annoyingly people want stuff more than knowledge even though what they need is knowledge not stuff.

SAM: They’d rather pay for a better bat than the actual training.

BEN: So more actually enjoy and care about doing is giving people the knowledge and the skills and information they need to get better at table tennis.

SAM: I think there’s probably a culture thing behind that because in jiu jitsu, this week I spent $400 on online videos to get better at jiu-jitsu.

BEN: But you’re not the average person.

SAM: But the reason I think is because that seems to be the way the culture has gone so this guy released a video, I think it made $80,000 in the first hour of releasing this video course. It’s gone from being something that nobody did they thought it was a waste of money because you could get everything for free on YouTube to actually being something a lot of people are doing now.

BEN: Yeah and actually from the Brazilian Jujitsu people I’ve met they do seem to be a more entrepreneurial clued up yeah learning a bunch than most sports.

SAM: That’s probably to do with it being all in. They take it very seriously.

BEN: Who made this video that made loads of money I’m assuming someone famous or really good.

SAM: So there’s a site called BJJ fanatics that releases loads of videos and then yeah this guy is someone who’s quite famous, hge just won a really big tournament but that’s not the videos I bought. I bought ones from someone else, I bought ones from his coach who also has a video series so there is quite a lot of room there but you know you got to be some of the best and you got to be a fairly big name, you got to be known as an expert. Alright well we’ve gone off on a little tangent. Thanks are coming on Ben.

BEN: Thanks for having me.

SAM: And goodbye. Well thanks for listening, I hope you found that useful and if you want to hear anymore from Ben what I’m gonna do is link to all the stuff he’s up to on the show notes page which you can find by going to Sam Priestley dot com and clicking on the podcasting tab and if you have any feedback for me then please drop me an email hello out Sam Priestley dot com thanks for listening.