4.8 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 14 August 2025
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
In this week’s Throwback Thursday segment, hear how a side hustler who ran a profitable online stationery business for five years made the difficult but deliberate choice to shut it down.
Side Hustle School features a new episode EVERY DAY, featuring detailed case studies of people who earn extra money without quitting their job. This year, the show includes free guided lessons and listener Q&A several days each week.
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0:00.0 | A big thank you to ShipStation, our long time partner. If you run an e-commerce business, you already know the best way to be successful is to keep your customers happy. And you can do that by automating shipping tasks, managing orders in one simple dashboard with ShipStation. Lead your business into the future with smart features and automations that boost efficiency and save you time. |
0:21.4 | In fact, over 130,000 companies have grown their business with ShipStation. |
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0:35.3 | There's no credit card or contract required, and you can |
0:37.8 | cancel any time. That's shipstation.com code hustle. |
0:45.1 | Lemonada. |
0:49.8 | How I knew it was time to quit my side hustle. |
0:57.6 | This is a really interesting segment we've got for you today. |
1:00.7 | Interesting episode, I should say, in the segment known as Throwback Thursday. |
1:04.7 | For this segment, we take a look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them. |
1:09.0 | In this case, the transition is quite dramatic. |
1:11.7 | We're going to hear how a sidestler ran a profitable online stationary business for several years, |
1:16.9 | but then made the difficult but deliberate and intentional and ultimately correct choice to shut it down. |
1:23.5 | You know, your side hustle, the one you started with doesn't always need to be the one that you end with, |
1:27.3 | right? So let's hear the story from Morgan. She's going to tell us a little bit about how this business came to be. We first featured her, I think, more than a thousand episodes ago, several years. And she's made a big change. So I think somebody out there needs to hear it because, as I said, it's okay to change, grow, evolve, transform, adapt, and so on. Let's hear how she did it. I'll have a few words to wrap up |
1:48.8 | at the end, but let's pass the microphone to Morgan. |
1:58.9 | Hi, this is Morgan. And when I opened my online stationary shop, I wasn't thinking long-term. I just wanted a creative outlet. I love designing notepads, planner inserts, and printable stickers, and selling them on Etsy seemed like a fun experiment. The experiment worked. Within a year, I was selling across multiple platforms, |
2:19.4 | at C, Shopify, and eventually a few small wholesale accounts. My products landed in local boutiques, |
2:26.5 | and I had regular customers who bought every new design I launched. Financially, it was solid. |
2:32.0 | I was making 3 to 5,000 per month in revenue with about 40% margins after materials, packaging, and platform fees. |
2:41.7 | It wasn't a full-time salary, but it was a nice supplement to my day job. But here's what people don't always see. |
... |
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