189
5 min 53 sec

Lost & Found: How Lost Property Helps a UK Woman Find Her Side Hustle

Tanya-Jane Park wasn’t looking for a side hustle when she went to a popular music festival, but when her friend lost her handbag, she managed to find one anyway.
Developer Hustle Power of Observation Service Unique Ideas Web Development

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What It's About

Lost property helps a UK woman find her side hustle.

Business Model
Service
Skills Required
Resourcefulness & Business Savvy
Complexity
Medium
Profit Potential
Medium

Words of Wisdom

Glastonbury's lost and found was based on email submissions of items and was technically difficult to navigate. Tanya felt there had to be another, more efficient way of handling the problem, so she decided to give it a shot!

There are plenty of opportunities to improve upon inefficient services or products, but like Tanya, you need a fine tuned Power of Observation in order to find them.

Fun Fact

Did you know more than $47 billion worth of items are lost every year, with the average person losing nearly $100 in property every year? That’s a big market of highly motivated people!

Notes from Chris

Episode 189

On her annual pilgrimage to Glastonbury Festival in 2014, Tanya-Jane Park checked her social media feed to see that one of her friends had posted that she’d lost her handbag containing all her belongings while inside the festival.

Trying to be helpful, Tanya recommended that she report her bag to the official lost and found service, and set about finding out how her friend could do it.

On her return from the festival, Tanya took it upon herself to find what other options were out there and saw there were relatively few to choose from. And some of them seemed older than some of the bands she’d seen on stage just a few days ago!

It was here that she came up with the idea for ReclaimHub, a cloud-based lost-and-found management system.

Using only this method of organic traffic—and a little word of mouth—they were able to generate enough users to get feedback and finally launch the paid version of their product in May 2016. Since that time they’ve been able to generate £6,000 in revenue.


MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

  • ReclaimHub: Learn more about how Tanya and Rob's widget works on their website
  • Glastonbury Festival: The festival that Tanya's friend lost her purse at and where Tanya found her side hustle
  • Google Cloud Platform: Tanya and Rob used a simple Google Cloud Infrastructure site that they built themselves, they put the first iteration online so that people could use it for free
  • Freelancer & UpWork: If you're interested in creating an app or widget but lack the skills to create it yourself like Tanya, here are a couple of resources you could use to find someone to help you create it!
SEE ALSO:

Inspiration is good; inspiration combined with action is better. Now get back to work!

Yours in the revolution,

cg-sig-newsletter


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Resources

CREATE YOUR ONLINE STORE

Create your online store with Shopify using an exclusive discount for Side Hustle School listeners. For a limited time, get a free 21-day trial and a 10% discount for a whole year.

Many Side Hustle School listeners are building sites using Shopify's easy-to-learn platform. Try it free today!

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GET YOUR FIRST 1,000 EMAIL SUBSCRIBERS

Social media is nice, but building an email list is still the single best way to get customers and clients for your hustle. It's not hard to get started—sign up for a 30-day trial and join the list-building challenge! You’ll be up and running in no time.


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Quote of the Day
"For me, side hustle ideas come to be when I identify a problem or issue that needs solving, I then think about what can be done to fix the problem and identify how this can be monetized."
—Tanya Jane Park #SideHustleSchool

Sponsors & Gratitude

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To infinity and beyond,

Chris Guillebeau