719: $1,000 per Postcard: The Every Door Direct Mail Side Hustle

The Side Hustle Show

Nick Loper

How To, Entrepreneurship, Business, Education

4.7 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 22 January 2026

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What if you could turn every mailbox in your neighborhood into a $1,000 payday? That’s exactly what Rachel and Dalton from Big Sky Automation have been doing with Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) postcards. Here’s the idea: the Postal Service lets you deliver a postcard to every home on a mail route for about $0.25 apiece. You can use that to advertise your own business — or you can do what Rachel and Dalton do and sell that exposure to other local businesses. By stacking multiple advertisers onto a single oversized postcard, they spread out the cost, create an affordable local advertising product, and keep the difference as profit. They’ve mailed 20 postcards in about seven months, so this isn’t a one-off experiment. In this episode, they break down exactly how the model works — and why it keeps businesses coming back. (Want to learn how to do this in your own area? Check out their free mini course at CommunityCardPlaybook.com) Tune in to Episode 719 of the Side Hustle Show to learn: how the Every Door Direct Mail side hustle works how to sell it to local businesses how to make it repeatable and scalable Full Show Notes: $1,000 per Postcard: The Every Door Direct Mail Side Hustle New to the Show? Get your personalized money-making playlist ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! Sponsors: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Indeed⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ – Start hiring NOW with a $75 sponsored job credit to upgrade your job post! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Quo (formerly OpenPhone)⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ — Get 20% off of your first 6 months! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Shopify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ — Sign up for a $1 per month trial! About The Side Hustle Show This is the entrepreneurship podcast you can actually apply! The award-winning small business show covers the best side hustles and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠side hustle ideas⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. We share how to start a business and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠make money online⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and offline, including online business, side gigs, freelancing, marketing, sales funnels, investing, and much more. Join 100,000+ listeners and get legit business ideas and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠passive income⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ strategies straight to your earbuds. No BS, just actionable tips on how to start and grow your side hustle. Hosted by Nick Loper of ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Side Hustle Nation⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

Transcript

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0:00.0	A thousand bucks per postcard. This is the Every Door Direct Mail side hustle. So here's the play.
0:08.0	The postal service lets you get in just about any mailbox for about 25 cents a piece.
0:13.8	Now, you can use that to promote your own business, or you can do what today's guests do and
0:18.9	sell that as a service to other businesses. You stack up a bunch
0:23.2	of those on the same mailer to spread out the costs, and you got yourself a creative extra income stream.
0:28.6	They've done it 15, 18, 20 times already, so definitely repeatable, and they're breaking down
0:33.2	how you can do the same in your own area today. From big sky automation.com, Rachel and Dalton,
0:39.7	welcome to The Side Hustle Show. Hey, Nick, thanks for having us on today. We've been doing this for a year or two.
0:45.5	How did you come up with the idea? So we had something similar. It was a larger postcard.
0:51.5	Here, I'll show you what ours looks like here. It's on a six and a half by 12
0:55.4	postcard. When we initially started doing this, we were actually doing a nine by 12 postcard,
1:00.3	which is just a little bit bigger. But the play on that one was that it goes to 10,000 homes at a time.
1:05.8	And when you're doing that, the cost range for the participating businesses is around $600 per mailing.
1:12.6	So we did a couple of those cards. We quickly realized that that price point was not going to go
1:18.2	over well for the participating businesses. If you think about it, you want to do multiple of these
1:23.2	at least one a month, if not two a month, like we currently do. And that was just not really
1:28.3	affordable for the businesses participating. So we said to ourselves, we're actually driving to
1:33.2	the Oregon coast on a vacation, and we were having a serious conversation of how do we keep doing
1:38.4	this, but make it affordable. So we actually decided to scale down on the number of homes
1:43.6	and focus on specific communities within our area. So we actually decided to scale down on the number of homes and focus on specific communities
1:46.4	within our area.
1:48.0	So we're in Missoula, Montana.
	...

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