Ep. 3198 - Q&A: “I went viral, but now I can’t meet demand!”
Side Hustle School
Chris Guillebeau / Onward Project
4.8 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 3 October 2025
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A viral spike is great—until it breaks your capacity. Today we map a four-step triage plan to pause the chaos, satisfy customers, and turn overwhelm into long-term buzz.
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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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You know that customer reviews can have an enormous impact on your business. And you probably know this as a customer as well. When you go shopping for something, don't you look at the reviews? You might even filter them by star rating. You might see what people like, what they don't like. So if you want to have good reviews, if you want to have great reviews, it really helps to automate your process. And that's something our longtime partner, ShipStation, can help with. |
| 0:21.5 | They can grow with you. |
| 0:22.6 | They can help you deliver five-star customer experience with industry-leading scalable |
| 0:26.7 | features. |
| 0:27.7 | Wow your customers and get rave reviews with cheaper, faster, and better shipping. |
| 0:31.8 | Upgrade to ShipStation today to get a 60-day free trial at Shipstation.com. |
| 0:35.8 | Just use Code Hustle. |
| 0:36.8 | There's no credit card or contract required. |
| 0:39.4 | You can cancel any time. Shipstation.com code hustle. |
| 0:46.0 | Lemonada. |
| 0:50.7 | In some ways, it's every maker or creator's dream to go viral. |
| 0:59.6 | Like you imagine your business just gets a ton of orders all of a sudden, or your video |
| 1:03.9 | takes off and gets millions of views in a short period of time. |
| 1:07.2 | Well, that can be great, but it can also create lots of logistical problems. And that's exactly what we're going to hear about in today's episode. It's a really fun story. This side hustler is sewing in her living room. And then all of a sudden, she gets 500 orders and a five-day shipping promise that is basically impossible to meet. She goes from having a small number of orders to all of a sudden |
| 1:28.6 | one of her videos blows up and then everybody buys stuff and then she's like, well, what do I do now? |
| 1:33.9 | Because this is a very manual labor intensive process. So let's break down what you might do in this |
| 1:38.8 | situation or what she can do. How can you keep buyers on your side and hopefully turn what seems like an impossible cue into a |
| 1:46.2 | wait list that fuels the next stage of growth, or at least hopefully gets her over this process. |
| 1:51.4 | Again, good problem to have, but it's a problem. So what do you do when you get this huge, |
| 1:55.6 | huge spike of orders and you can't actually meet demand? That's today's scenario. |
| 2:00.0 | Detailed question from Valerie and my answer |
| 2:02.3 | coming right up. Whenever you go to buy something online, most likely there's something you do. |
... |
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