On this edition of Stretching Your Dollar, Corey William Schneider talks about how he made exploring the city a full-time job by founding the New York Adventure Club. 

<div class="block">On this edition of Stretching Your Dollar, Corey William Schneider talks about how he made exploring the city a full-time job by founding the New York Adventure Club. </div>
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Wake Up With Cheddar

Stretching Your Dollar: How Exploring NYC Became a Full-time Job

And welcome back, everyone. I'm Baker and I'm in a and it's time for stretching your dollar. Yes, indeed. Our next guest turned his passion for exploring New York City all into an event, organizing businesses that he says valued at a million dollars. So here to share some of his pointers on how to get your side gig off the ground. We're joined by New York Adventure Club founder, Corey William Schneider. Corey. Good to have you here. Thanks. Thank you for the invitation. So you had an entirely different career in marketing. When you launched your side gig, it began in 2014 with a Facebook event to connect other New Yorkers here. So how did this all happen? Yeah, it was actually the Facebook group was just for friends. Only a third group of 30 friends. And I uh figured if I put a group together, uh it could encourage them to explore the city and I just post pictures of myself going around. Then uh 100 strangers joined that Facebook group. And then all of a sudden, I was catapulted to figuring out how to expand this and really try to make it as easy as possible for people to explore the city. I'm loving these pictures. You're looking at New York Adventure Club offers some pretty unique experiences in New York that a lot of us native New Yorkers don't even know about. Like the secret eats of certain areas. Tell us more about that of Chinatown, attending a private Japanese tea ceremony. Why do you decide to tailor the business with New York or specifically in mind? You know, there's a lot of uh companies and organizations focused on the first time tourist. And if you're here for the first time, you should go to the Statue of Liberty, you should go to the Empire State Building, but no one was focusing on people who lived here or had visited more than once. And you know, it's a city full of rabbit holes and uh wanted to position the company and the organization to really connect the dots and make it as easy as possible to uh explore. And you've, by the way, expanded beyond all that. Now you're offering virtual events that are now open and available to pretty much everybody. Now, now let's talk about why you wanted to go the virtual route. Now, that was the big pivot during COVID lockdown, all of the in person events were starting to shut down. So I had some decisions to make either wait it out or try to figure out what a virtual event for New York Adventure Club meant. And uh worked closely with all the event partners and try to figure out, you know, we had all these great in person tours and events. How can we convert them to virtual? So we had a lecture, lectures are the easiest, but then you had wars and then you had uh you know, tea ceremonies or wine tastings and how do you convert that? And so starting in around May 2020 that's when things really took off because everyone was locked inside and looking for interesting things to do from their computer. And so, and Baker mentioned New York Adventure Club was a side gig for you for years. Now, your company is making money. You guys are organizing events. When did you first start seeing profits for your company, Corey. Uh you could argue right? In those initial events, uh each event was profitable but not that much money. It definitely wasn't something I was going to start doing full time, but it wasn't until I started to do it full time in 2016. Did I start to sustain myself? And then during the pivot to virtual where we could have audiences of over, you know, thousands of people watching from their computer and it didn't uh you know, you didn't need as many people behind the scenes to, to run it. So with the minute we have left here for our viewers who maybe want to make a side gig out of things and passion projects. What tips and advice do you have for them? Definitely. Uh Well, first you really have to be dedicated to it. It's gonna be, it's, it's a lifestyle. Uh you're gonna be working on it every day and if you can dedicate as much free time as possible to it, it will grow and you'll get, you know, uh more, more followers and more people who uh want to be a part of it. I love this idea too. Thank all the ideas now are going through my head of what we should be doing. All right, thanks to Corey William Schneider, founder of New York Adventure Club.