Young Analyst Turns College Debt Into $100k Profit

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

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Side hustle school friends, listeners, welcome back. This is your host, Chris Guillebeau. Excited to bring you episode 286. Now, a couple of days ago, we had dessert goals, or we talked about dessert goals. Today, let's talk about savings goals, savings and investments.

Today's story features a young marketing analyst who's struggling to pay his student loans, like so many graduates, until he came up with a system for paying with his spare change. Now, this system has helped not only him, but a lot of people. He turned it into an app and has made more than $100,000 from it. Naturally, I'll tell you all about that, and I'll also talk a bit about when it's best to make an app, and when you should probably think about making something else. All of that is coming right up today.

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Like many college graduates, Christian Zimmerman found himself struggling to get a grip on personal finance. Despite having a good job at a tech startup as a marketing analyst, making payments to his credit cards and student loans was proving to be tough. He knew there had to be an easier way to put money toward his debt without crippling himself each month. At his job, his nickname was The Plug because he knew how to hustle his way out of any problem. And he decided this struggle wasn't gonna be an exception.

See, Christian had an idea for an app that rounded up the spare change from his monthly purchases and put them toward his debt. So if he spent $9.70 on a book, the app would round it up to $10 and put the extra 30 cents toward paying off his loans. Kind of like having a piggy bank for your spare change, but this way you can't forget to use it. Not long after his initial idea, Christian received a notification about a pitch competition called Plug ATL. Since the name was similar to his work nickname, he took it as a sign.

He gave his idea the name Coins, spelled Q-O-I-N-S, prepared a pitch and entered the competition, looking to get a bit more validation for his idea. Unfortunately, he didn't win, but spending so much time on the idea and seeing the positive response of the people he talked to about it gave him the motivation he needed to run with it. The next step was to bring the idea to life, which he did with the help of his friend Nate, who also became a co-founder. Christian and Nate are firm believers in doing the work yourselves, even if it doesn't look great at the start, so they chose to do all the design and coding work in-house, figuring it out as they went along. Perhaps because they were working on their own, it took four months of development to bring the app to a browser-only beta testing stage.

This was an important step because it allowed the Coins team to get feedback from their customers and potential customers before launching to a wider audience. Now, here was their marketing strategy. In order to bring the first users on board and build hype around their new product, Christian focused on building relationships with personal finance bloggers. He'd simply reach out to them by email, let them test the tool, and if they liked it, they could recommend it to their audience. If not, no hard feelings.

Many bloggers were happy to share their reviews, which allowed Coins to build up its email list. Another four months later, after working out some more bugs, Coins was ready to launch with the first edition of the app, open to anyone with a US checking account and access to the Apple App Store. So how do they get paid? Well, Coins works on an automated payment system. They charge a small fee of $2 a month that's automatically deducted from the amount of debt payments you make.

So if you're a user and you round up $70 a month of debt savings, they would deduct $2 and send the rest toward paying off your debt. The first few months were rocky as they struggled to build traction and had to release new versions of the app when things weren't working well, but they kept going and focused on making small, important improvements. And because they've set up a recurring revenue structure and the majority of people who begin with the system keep using it, over the past year, they've actually been able to make more than $100,000. And they're hoping to do much more going forward. Christian and Nate recently got Coins accepted into an accelerator program, and they're looking forward to seeing where it takes them next.

They also have the benefit of seeing the real change they've made to many people's personal debts and the potential this tool has for the future. It seems like an investment that's paying off even before you round it up. [Music]

So this question continues to come up a lot in all the side hustle book events I'm doing. A lot of people have ideas to make apps. Now, whenever somebody tells me they have an idea to make an app, I always ask them about their skills, not just their passion, because making an app is not easy.

At least making a good app and maintaining it is not easy. I often think there might be a better solution, a better format or medium for a lot of people. So I think you should make an app if you have the skills or if your project is best suited to an app or both. And what I mean by this is if you're a web developer, you like to code, that's your thing, then that's great. That's the skill you already have.

What you need to focus on is content. Like what is the purpose of your app? How is it gonna change someone's life? Why is it gonna be different or stand out from the millions of apps out there? I don't actually know if there's millions of apps, by the way, but there's a lot of them.

So if that's your background, that's what you need to think about. Or if you're not a developer, but your project idea really is best suited to an app, like something like this. Then maybe it's worth kind of going down that road and figuring it out, investing in the process, perhaps hiring someone. But otherwise, if you just have a general idea, you might wanna ask yourself, is there a different way I could do this idea? At an event the other day, I talked with someone who had this idea for an app that would help people select gifts.

You would connect it to your calendar and contacts, and you would get reminders a few days in advance of somebody's birthday that was coming up along with some suggestions for that person. And I thought this was an interesting idea, and it could very well be a good app, but it also might work well just web-based or email-based, which also requires some technical skill, but a bit less. So when it comes to making an app, if that really is the best way, don't let me dissuade you. But if you don't know how to make that and there's some other way you could do it, maybe think about that. That's my suggestion for you.

As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is better. I want you to do what works best for you, of course. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/286. Thank you for listening. Got another great story coming up tomorrow.

I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]