How tight constraints revealed that my most marketable skill was one I had been using for years without noticing.
As a laboratory technician, options for generating additional income are limited. While being a lab tech is a job profile that’s both fulfilling and fun, especially in research, it doesn’t involve many skills that lend themselves well to personal entrepreneurship. While most carpenters can set up a small personal workshop in a garage or a shed, I can’t exactly run medical diagnostics in my kitchen, and setting up a lab of my own is prohibitively expensive. I just don’t have access to that kind of capital. Career options as a worker within a lab are also limited, and as a salaried employee taking on more work does not come with an immediate financial reward either. So if I want to improve my financial situation without changing jobs, I need a side business that fits strict constraints:
- Flexibility. My wife and me both work full time, and not just do I value family time very highly, but as every parent knows, throwing a grade schooler into the mix means our schedule is both busy and often unpredictable.
- Low setup cost. I do not want to create another hobby project to sink money into. This business must carry itself from the start, so a high up-front cost is a hard no. Investments can follow once the concept has proven itself to be viable.
- Simplicity. This is somewhat of a derivative of 1) and 2), but the last thing I want is management overhead, a constantly ringing phone, or unexpectedly bloating costs. So absolutely no outsourcing, only my own work for any and all tasks.
- Low space requirement. I live in a rental flat and don’t have any extra room to set aside for work. Whatever business I need must fit on my desk and be able to cleanly stow away in a box at the end of a day.
This is a low number of requirements, but they are very strict. For cost, I set myself a budget of 100€. If I can’t generate a first revenue on that, the idea is dead. Space and time requirements are more difficult to solve; The space requirement leaves pretty much only processes I can perform at my desk and/or computer, and the time flexibility constraint means processes mustn’t directly involve customers/clients. I really don’t want to deal with scheduling appointments and calls any more than absolutely necessary.
What this means is that my business must be based on a deliverable. Something I can prepare when I have the time, and then sell; either a product, be it physical or digital, or a service that can be independently performed and then handed over once it’s done.
Skill (selection) issue
So that’s my options very much narrowed down. Very, very narrowed down. In fact, that leaves almost nothing. I was stuck at this point for quite a while. I kept mulling over my most developed skills and tried to think of how to monetize them, but that kept leading me towards teaching. I’ve been a language tutor as well as a coach for swimming and martial arts, and I do well at both. But both involve either a fixed schedule or worse, dealing with clients and juggling appointments, so breaking the two top requirements. All the rest of my skill-set is geared towards science and lab work. And no matter how good you are: There is simply no DIY-market for genetically modifying yeast or running a biobank for tumor samples.
One evening I was again pacing that same mental hallway when family duties called: I had to go help my daughter get ready for bed and return to thinking about this after I read her her bedtime story… wait a minute. Here finally was a moment of realization: I do have another skill I had completely overlooked. In fact I’ve been honing different aspects of this skill since early childhood, but never fully connected the dots: Singing as a kid, dabbling in beatboxing as a teen, imitating creature noises from movies and games for fun, and most recently and most consistently, reading to my child. I’ve been doing that every day, without fail, since she was barely a year old. That’s almost ten years of daily voice work, with plenty of range in characters, voices, and sounds.
Better yet, this is absolutely doable equipment-wise. Recording requires little more than a microphone.* I already have a computer, and I one skill from the lab that does transfer is the ability to quickly familiarize myself with complex and niche software tools. Best of all: When I’m done recording, a mic and cable easily fit in a box and store away out of sight. Green check marks on all of my requirements — This really might be the solution.
Expectation management
Of course, I don’t claim to be anywhere near the level of a professional voice actor, and a cheap USB-mic in a bedroom will result in noticeably lower-quality recordings than a professional studio, devoid of background noise and with several thousand dollars in equipment.
But that’s okay; I don’t have to land a gig lip-syncing a blockbuster movie or narrating the audio book of a bestseller right away. Realistically, I think I have decent chances being hired for the narration of promotional videos for technical companies, or for educational content. Sure, that market is shrinking rapidly due to AI, but I’m sure somewhere out there is a company that appreciates a human speaker who knows how to pronounce terms like N-nitrosohexamethylenetetramine.
Setting up
Finding a microphone was easy. My local craigslist-equivalent had plenty of options, so I researched some models and paid 10€ on a USB “streamer” mic. These are not high-class mics, but they beat any internal microphone or headset by miles, and they are somewhat tuned for vocal recording, being aimed at the “streamer” market.
What I quickly learned is that cheap equipment is unforgiving; correct usage makes a world of difference. I’m sure most of us made that experience with mobile phone cameras: Where an expensive one will let you easily shoot even in poor lighting conditions, a cheap one will get you washed-out, over- or underexposed and blurry pictures unless you know exactly how to compensate. Since I don’t have the budget for a microphone that has the equivalent of several lenses and great auto focus, I have to offset that disadvantage by learning the proper technique.
So I learned about mic placement and sound reflection. I learned what a pop-filter is for, which distance to keep from the mic, which posture to hold, how to reduce noise and sibilance (“de-essing”) in post.
Once I got started sinking my teeth into the subject matter, and playing around with the tools and software, my brain started to bubble with ideas. Commissioned voice over work is the most straightforward option, but there is no need to restrict myself to simple voice recordings. Any and all sounds can be recorded. Sounds can be edited, layered, composited and designed. They can be bundled as libraries and put up for sale for game, film or sound designers. There is an entire market for recordings of everyday objects called “Foley”, named after the guy who basically invented sound effects in the 1920ies.
Recording a vast number of various sounds and offering them for sale as curated libraries also opens up a potential avenue for scaling a recording business: Those sound libraries are digital products that can keep generating sales indefinitely, even long after all active work on them is done. Building up a catalogue and simply keep adding to it, aiming for a classic long tail distribution. This is a nice perspective but also takes a long time to get going, and requires much better equipment. So away from fancy ideas, back to harsh reality: First I need revenue.
First cont(r)act
At this point I have a microphone, I know how to record, now all that is left is to find a client. With this clear focus, the next step naturally emerges: Building a presence. That can be broken down into three tasks: 1) create a brand identity, 2) create a matching homepage, then 3) create a demo-reel showcasing different vocal styles.
To attract clients in a shrinking market with lots of competition, a professional appearance is essential. Giving it a visual identity that didn’t look accidental was what I tackled first. I considered names and created a first sketch of a logo during a lunch break, iterated through what didn’t work, and eventually built the final vector logo along with color schemes and web-essentials like a favicon. That process yielded a surprising number of insights, which I’ll cover in a dedicated story focused on the visual design.
*to nobody’s surprise, this later turned out to be a slightly naive assumption, and eventually led to me going down the rabbit hole of building my own microphone. But that is another story and shall be told another time.
