Side Hustle Turned Full-Time Job Disrupts Car Rental Industry

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Side hustle school listeners, greetings, what's up, welcome back, I'm Chris Guillebeau. Excited to tell you a different story today. This is another side hustle turned full-time job story. But of course we're gonna focus on the side hustle side of it. Now I've told you a few different stories of people using the affiliate model to make money.

And the affiliate model is essentially where you get paid a commission for referring a website visitor or a customer or somebody else to a company. And when that person makes a purchase, you get paid a commission. So the most common model is amazon.com, which we've talked about in a few different ways. People building websites that include links to various products on Amazon, and then they get paid when people click over and purchase. Well, there are some other ways to make money using the affiliate model.

Today I'm gonna tell you about one that has to do with car rentals specifically. The car rental industry still has a lot of annoyances. Now annoyances are good for side hustles because if you can solve a problem for someone, you can often get paid for doing it. And today's story is about just that. It's a guy who ends up doing very well using the affiliate model in the car rental industry despite never having worked in that industry before himself.

That story is coming up right after this brief message. [Music]

You wouldn't really expect Jonathan Weinberg to have a side hustle. He had been steadily moving up the corporate ladder for the same financial institution since 1994. But as the years wore on, shockingly, he got bored working for the same financial institution. So he started doing some consulting for an airfare deals website.

He figured that having a little hustle would give him some challenges, allow him to do some different kind of work. But that's all he thought it would be. Now that website he worked for was eventually sold to a subsidiary of TripAdvisor. And during the transition, Jonathan worked with a consultant named Mike who had been brought in to help make the transition go smoothly. Also around this time, Jonathan was visiting his parents and bragging about how he always got the cheapest car rentals by finding the best coupons and discount codes.

His mom said, Jonathan, you should start a business doing that for other people. He was unconvinced. But a month later, when he couldn't get that idea out of his head, he decided to give it a try. Jonathan had never had a business. So he called up Mike, the consultant, and he explained his idea.

And basically the idea is that coupons and discount codes can reduce the price of a car rental, but there's no way for the average person to keep track of them. You could make a car rental booking and then a coupon would come out next week. But unless you were actively searching for it, you'd have no way of knowing that you could save money. So Mike's idea was the service that would track the price over time and rebook for you whenever prices dropped, saving you a lot of money. Jonathan talked to Mike about it.

Mike asked some good questions about testing. The more they looked into it, the more interesting they both thought it would be. And so Mike decided to join in. They founded a website called autoslash.com and began as a partnership with Travelocity. Travelocity had what they called a white label partner program, which basically means they're able to use Travelocity's back end car rental booking system so that they didn't have to create a new system from scratch.

Initially, Jonathan used a spreadsheet to track all the coupons and discount codes, but over time they created and then layered on programs that did all that automatically. And to make things really easy, they didn't have to worry about processing payments since all the money went to Travelocity and then Travelocity paid them a commission, which is why it is an affiliate model. They are essentially referring customers to Travelocity and customers are coming to autoslash because they can save money. The week that autoslash debuted, they had such a big success that it nearly turned into a big failure. Within a few days, they were discovered by a bunch of travel blogs, got a lot of traffic and a lot of bookings, but this meant that the car rental agencies also found out about them and they weren't happy.

Within a few short weeks, the side hustle was essentially shut down because all the major car rental companies pressured Travelocity to remove them from the service. Now that could have been the end of it, but Jonathan and Mike made some immediate changes to their business plan. And the biggest change they made was they found a way to target their service to memberships and groups. They discovered what memberships and groups that customers were a part of so that then they could only apply discounts specific to those customers. This made the car rental companies happy or at least less unhappy.

So they were able to relaunch and got back up to around a hundred reservations a day. Now, even though they aren't processing payments themselves, even though they aren't actually fulfilling car rental obligations, a hundred reservations a day is quite a lot. So this was getting pretty busy. Jonathan was making a good salary at his day job and it didn't make sense for him to quit, at least not at first. So he decided to reinvest his profits and make autoslash stronger.

Over the next 18 months, Jonathan put in more than $30,000 of his own money. Remember, he's only doing that once the business is working. So it's not really startup capital. He's investing in something that's already successful. And one of the major costs was hiring their first employee.

They did that because by the end of the second year, they had booked over a hundred thousand rentals. Now, if you just think about this a bit, the commission they earned from each booking is pretty small. But again, there were a hundred thousand rentals that year. Jonathan really emphasized word of mouth as the biggest driver. He said, there's nothing better than someone booking a car rental and then having their price slashed five times before they actually go and take the trip where they get the car.

They can't wait to tell all their friends and family about this amazing service they discovered. They did try using Google AdWords a few times, but they found they were spending more than they were making. So instead of paying for ads, they decided to just keep focusing on the service itself and let customers spread the word. By the end of 2016, autoslash was serving more than a thousand customers every day. And Jonathan decided to finally leave his full-time job to devote all his efforts to the project.

They now work with multiple booking sites. They have seven full-time employees, plus a couple of contractors. And Jonathan has his sights on expanding their services to help people save in other areas of travel as well. Congratulations, Jonathan, Mike, autoslash team. Such a fun project.

Next time you need to rent a car, maybe go and check them out. Sadly, I am not an affiliate for autoslash. And this story is a great example of how the lack of transparency, or at least the lack of easy access to knowledge, enables a very successful side hustle. If everyone knew where to get these coupon codes and discounts, then it might not even exist. Or if the car rental companies made it easier, then this need might not even exist.

But this information is hard to find, or at least it's hard to keep track of. And not surprisingly, the car rental companies don't want you to save money. So that's why this has grown so much. I hope you enjoyed this story. If you'd like to learn more and check out autoslash, just come over to sidehustleschool.com/188.

As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. I want to hear about your side hustle sometime. I want to support you and your quest for freedom, even if you love your job. I'm Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]