Dutch Engineer Sells TableTop Games for Second Income

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

Well, I sometimes talk about video games, my childhood love and also my parental guardians for many of those years. Last week we had an episode about a guy who buys and resells classic video games, ends up paying off a student loan of about $4,000, goes on to make something like I think $12,000 for the end of the year. Well, that's video games. Tabletop games are a whole other genre. We've talked about board games before too, but tabletop games and card style games are a bit different, as I said, a whole other genre.

By the way, welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. I am super excited to bring you these stories every single day of different people around the world who are creating freedom for themselves through the form of a second income. Now in today's story, a Dutch audio engineer looks for a side hustle when he begins to experience headaches that make it difficult for him to do his job. He ends up creating a sustainable second income that allows him to decrease the hours he spends at that day job.

And it's all by spreading the joy of those tabletop games. Naturally, he does so without spending a lot of money and by using the skills he already has. How does he do it? Well, stay tuned. Here's a quick little thank you to our sponsor.

They allow the show to be completely free to you, and then I'll tell you the whole story. Dennis Michels grew up playing card and tabletop style games. He found himself interested in the strategy of the games as well as their collectible nature. It was an enjoyable hobby that kept him occupied for hours on end. But as the game of life rolled its dice, Dennis found himself playing less and less of the games.

His enjoyment never waned. He just found it hard to find the time with so many other commitments. It's not that he lived a bad life. Dennis works as a professional audio visual engineer at a Dutch university. He's well paid, he likes his colleagues, and he enjoys the work.

It's just that he had a simple plan for his life, and when it was working out, he never thought something might go wrong and throw a kink into things. But as the universe reminds us from time to time, the best laid plans can go awry. One morning Dennis woke up with a terrible headache. He put it down to a bad night's sleep and assumed it would wear off during the day after he took an aspirin. He went to work, but the headache didn't wear off.

In fact, it got worse. Over the next three days, Dennis's headache got so bad that he had to call in sick. That was the first of many sick days over the next eight months. He saw doctor after doctor and specialist after specialist, but no one could tell him what was wrong and why the headaches persisted. He began to get desperate and worried.

What if these headaches never went away? He had already taken enough time off the job as possible and was back to working full time whenever he could manage it, but occasionally he still had to call in sick, and that was costing him income. It was also stressing him out. Funny enough, it was the very thing that Dennis used to distract himself that would present a solution. During his time off from work, he became reacquainted with his childhood hobby of playing games, in particular card and tabletop games.

He figured he needed to start working on a side hustle. His goal was to build something that would give him a cushion from having to work a full-time job, a sort of financial safety net. After worrying about his income for a while, Dennis put two and two together. Why not start an e-commerce store selling the things he loved? He called it Good Look Gamer, an online store selling card and tabletop games and accessories.

Dennis decided to build the website himself. He used WordPress as the e-commerce platform, so the only costs were hosting and a custom theme. It was less than a couple hundred dollars total. For the launch, Dennis decided to list a few popular games that could be placed on pre-order. That way he could take money from his customers before having to buy the actual games from the distributor.

He shared his store online and with luck, a few orders started trickling in. He purchased the games from a distributor on release and shipped them to his happy customers. He used the profit to purchase more games to stock the store with additional products. Since Dennis is a gamer himself, he chose only products he thought looked really cool, and he skipped out on the ones he wouldn't play himself. This approach has worked, as slowly but surely more orders began coming in, just enough to encourage him to keep going.

As Dennis sold a few more products, he developed the confidence to expand the range further. He began filling out his inventory based on what the game distributors were offering and often held pre-sell offers for unreleased games to drive new customers. Since he loves gaming, he gets excited when people buy his products or email in asking questions. He says every transaction makes him grateful. So where exactly is he at financially?

Well, this is not a full-time project, but Dennis is making at least 500 euros profit each month. 500 euros is currently just under $600. That money is made from roughly 50 to 100 sales each month. He sells everything from deluxe game sets, where he might make 30 euros, down to individual playing cards for a euro each. Some of his most popular items are single Magic the Gathering cards.

He doesn't make a lot of money from those, but the small purchases to lots of customers adds up. It also allows him to see a high number of repeat customers. So far, the additional income from Good Luck Gamer has given Dennis the confidence to change his working hours from 40 hours a week to 32. Once it grows further, he hopes to plan to transition down to 24 hours a week. The main thing he's learned from this whole side hustle experience is that it's good to have a plan.

That means thinking ahead about what might be next and working to future-proof yourself against any unforeseen problems. So Dennis is looking at it just like that, considering various growth plans. He's already working on two sister websites, one for construction toys like LEGO and one for vintage card games. If all goes well, that should help increase the overall income from what he hopes will be an e-commerce empire and, if successful, one day he hopes to eventually move away from his full-time job completely. So something that is interesting about selling an item like this, or selling items like tabletop games, it's not that Dennis's store is the only source for these items.

In fact, there are a lot of sources for them. You can probably buy a lot of them just from amazon.com or any other major online retailer. In addition to those major "we sell everything" online retailers, you have a lot of smaller ones that are also meeting people's needs all over the world in different ways. Then on top of that, you have all the local stores that sell these items as well. So my point is kind of twofold.

First of all, somebody like Dennis is not going to be able to compete with one of those larger shops. But second of all, there are so many people buying these items, and there are so many different kinds of them and different areas that you can focus on, or different stories that you could tell with your online shop, different ways of building community. It's not that difficult at all for anybody to have, let's say, a small slice of the pie. It's not difficult at all for somebody to do what he's doing and make the $500 to $1,000 a month. Now, at this point, there are a couple different ways he can expand.

What he can do is essentially try to build out that store more, or he can say, "I'm going to take this model of making $500 to $1,000 a month, and I'm going to build out two other stores," which is what he's trying with LEGO, and something for the classic card games. So a couple different options for moving forward at this place. Again, you're not going to be able to compete with a huge retailer, but you don't necessarily need to. I mean, depending on what your goal is, if your goal is to make some extra money, if your goal is to make a sustainable side income, it may not be huge, but it is totally possible to do something like this in all kinds of fields. So we're using this example of tabletop games here, but it could be any number of items.

Ideally, it's something that you're familiar with, you have some expertise in, perhaps you have some passion for, but not necessarily, because this is a model that can be learned and expanded, and a lot of different people can do it in different ways. It's always fun to bring you different ways of people doing it in different places around the world. And listeners, community, awesome people out there, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. We're going to include links to dentists' shop on the show notes page, pages at sidehustleschool.com/684. Thank you so much for listening.

I'll be back again tomorrow. Once again, my name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Sidussle School.