Building A Six-Figure Side Hustle That Actually Gives 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 that Colin tells us is doing thirty thousand resumes a month. That sounds like an overnight success, until we find out about the years old Reddit post quietly 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 turned buyers into his most powerful marketing tool 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, that's not just good character. It's good business. 00:00 Opening Quote 00:33 Intro 02:00 Welcome Colin — Sheets and Giggles 04:30 Top 3 Lessons from Sheets and Giggles 07:00 Customer Experience and Why It Matters 11:00 Branding and Finding Your Voice 13:30 Dirt Cheap Compost — How It Started 16:30 Selling to Compost Colorado 18:30 The Farmers and the Mission 19:30 Educating Customers and Keeping It Simple 21:00 The Pumpkin Flyer Campaign 25:00 Sheets Resume — From Recruiter to AI Founder 28:30 The Reddit Post That Started It All 31:30 Building With a Non-Technical Co-Founder 33:30 Using Claude to Launch Websites 39:00 Juggling a Full-Time Job and a Side Hustle 42:30 The Art of Pitching on Stage 44:30 Colin's Best Advice for Side Hustle Success 48:30 Outro Need a little push to start and then stay focused to grow your side hustle? Dive into my online Masterclass: https://courses.joanposivy.com/p/turn... If you like what you're hearing, you can give it a caffeinated thumbs up. We'd really appreciate it! Here's how: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/sidehust... For the full show notes head on over to the home of Side Hustle Hero. https://www.sidehustlehero.com/193 Connect with Colin: https://sheetsresume.com/ https://colindmcintosh.com/   / colindmcintosh   Connect with Joan: https://www.sidehustlehero.com/about/   / joan-posivy-28b936a7     / joanposivy     / posivy   Be a guest on the show! https://www.sidehustlehero.com/guests...