193: From Fired to 6-Figure Side Hustle: Building Businesses That Give a Damn
What does it take to go from getting fired at 27 to building a 6-figure side hustle? If you ask Colin Macintosh, the answer might surprise you. It's not the flashiest strategy or the biggest budget. It's something a lot of businesses have stopped doing altogether, genuinely caring about the people they serve.
Colin is a CTO recruiter by day and side hustle entrepreneur by night. He got fired at 27, and somewhere between the pink slip, the margaritas, and a movie he'd watched, an idea was born. That idea became Sheets and Giggles, a eucalyptus bedsheets brand he built, scaled, and exited. But this episode is really about what came next.
Dirt Cheap Compost is exactly the kind of side hustle I love most; simple, low cost, profitable, and scalable. No complicated tech stack, no outside funding. Just a real problem, a real market, and a flyer tucked inside a Halloween pumpkin.
Sheets Resume is a different kind of story. An AI-powered resume builder doing thirty thousand resumes a month that sounds like an overnight success, until you find out about the years old Reddit post driving all that traffic.
In this conversation Colin and I cover:
- The lessons from Sheets and Giggles that shaped everything that came after
- Why raising venture capital was a treadmill he'll never step on again
- How a $40K compost business was built with flyers and a seasonal pumpkin campaign
- How a Reddit post written in 2018 became the foundation of a 6-figure side hustle
- The customer experience rule that turns buyers into your most powerful sales people
Colin genuinely gives a damn; about his customers, about the problems he's solving, and about the people he builds with. And as you'll hear today, that's not just good character ... it's good business.
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Need a little (and sometimes big) push to start and stay focused to grow your side hustle? Dive into my online Masterclass: How To Turn Your Thoughts Into Wanted Things.
For the full show notes head on over to the home of Side Hustle Hero. https://www.sidehustlehero.com/193
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