Game on! Seahawks Fan Kicks Off Six-Figure Sports App

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

Longtime listeners may know that I'm no expert when it comes to sports, and in particular American football. By not being an expert, I mean I don't know much about it at all, but I do know that sports fans are eager and loyal followers of their teams. Today's story features a Seattle Seahawks fan who kicks off what goes on to become a six-figure app. And faced with the possibility of not being able to enjoy his favorite football games, this fan creates an app to solve the problem. Four years in, it earns him a full-time income.

Last year, it was something like $75,000. This year, he's on track with that six-figure number in exchange for 30 minutes of work each week. So 30 minutes of work to maintain a project he started years ago that is still bringing in a fantastic income. So even though I'm not a huge football fan, I'm a fan of this story. It's such a smart idea. And not

only was it a smart idea, the guy I'll tell you about actually did something with it. Because you know what? A smart idea without execution doesn't get you very far. Thankfully, he took it all the way to the end zone. So here's a quick thank you to our sponsor, and I'll tell you exactly how it works.

As Seattle native John Nguyen can attest, moving to a new city can come with interesting challenges. Being a new grocery store, updating your mailing address everywhere, and of course, figuring out how to navigate rush hour traffic. But for John, it wasn't until you had to relocate to San Carlos, California that he became acutely aware of a whole new kind of complication. One that would eventually lead to a lucrative side hustle. You see, John was a big fan of the Seattle Seahawks, and San Carlos was smack dab in the middle of 49er country. That is, I believe, the San Francisco 49ers, if I'm not mistaken.

Which meant that it was much more challenging to tune into the games that he loved. Now there were some options to pay to stream the game. But who wants to do that? You don't want to pay to watch sports. He knew that a better solution would probably come in the form of an app. But he'd been burned on this approach before. This wasn't the first time

he'd considered creating an app. Before this, he had the brilliant idea of creating what he calls an Instagram for videos style app. This goes back a few years before Instagram started doing Instagram for videos. It was a great idea, but poorly executed. Looking back, he can identify the mistakes he made. They included spending too much money upfront

to essentially handcuffing himself to an overseas developer, since he didn't know how to make apps himself. Every time Apple updated its operating system, he had to shell out more money to the developer to make changes. Long story short, he blew roughly $5,000 on development, and the app never ended up seeing the light of day. This time, he decided to follow a different game plan. He tracked down everything he could to learn how to program himself, from YouTube to GitHub. The internet was his offensive playbook. Thankfully, he didn't

have to build the app from the ground up. He cobbled it together using some free published app templates that he found from developers on GitHub. And his app idea was simple. It just needed to be something that would allow users to stream a particular radio station. From there, it doesn't matter where you are in the world, you can still listen to your favorite sports games, just like a local. Now, this solution came about because of both

an opportunity and a problem. These days, any radio broadcast has a digital stream to it, and you can find that stream as a URL. From there, all you have to do is connect to it. The challenge and therefore the problem is that big games will be blacklisted by their local stations, so you can't stream online. But the solution, the one that John followed, is that there are usually sister stations somewhere else out there that will carry the game. For example, since John's favorite team is the Seattle Seahawks, he initially turned

to KIRO, the station he used to listen to the games when he was living up in Seattle. But he discovered early on that they do blacklist all the games on their streaming feed. Fortunately, he didn't have to throw in the towel because their sister station up in Alaska was still streaming it. Now, just in case this sounds a bit sketchy, John says that it's perfectly legal for the public to stream radio stations. That's what he's doing. If the station in

Seattle doesn't want people listening online during the big game, but another station chooses to carry it, well, there's nothing wrong with showing people how to listen to the other station. And the best part is that the feed is available all the time. So John doesn't have to go in and update the app whenever game time rolls around. It's just always there. And when games are not in play, users can tune in to other sports talk radio playing on the station.

So this is what his app does. It allows them to connect to the right radio station. And when his app was ready for kickoff, he had to figure out the price. He knew that there were a lot of users out there who could benefit from it. He wanted to make it affordable for them, but also worthwhile for him to build and maintain it. He set his initial price

at 99 cents, since a lot of the apps in the store were priced that way at the time. And the launch of that first app, Game Day Pro Football, could not have come at a better time. It was the first Sunday of the NFL season in 2014. But shortly after kickoff, he had an influx of email complaints stating that the app was not working. He was worried that he had fumbled the ball, but a quick look at his website showed him that was not the case. He just had so many downloads that his basic hosting

plan was overwhelmed. One quick hosting and server upgrade later, and he was back in play. When he checked his stats the following day, he discovered that he had made nearly $500 in that one day. And by the end of the first month, he had made $2000 more. Following the initial success, he decided to play around with a few things. He added on some additional

features that would allow users to check team scores and standings, and he upped the price to $199, just $2, to see if people would still be interested. The downloads went down slightly, but he was still making more than he did in the weeks prior. So there's a really great lesson there. Sometimes you can raise the price, and you'll sell to fewer people, but you can make more money. Now, here's what's really cool. The nice thing about all this is once he laid the ground

work for that first app, it was easy to take it, duplicate it, and then use it for other markets as well. So soon he had an app for pro baseball, one for pro basketball, even some for college sports. Then to extend even further, once he saw those apps doing well, he realized that team fanaticism could likely work in his favor too. So he started making city-specific apps tailored to those audiences. In a city like Boston, you've got the Red Sox, the Celtics, the Patriots. In Dallas, you've got the Cowboys and the Mavericks,

etc. Clearly, I'm just reading from a list here since I have no idea what these teams are. Here's the part that I care about. Four years later, John has roughly 20 sports apps out there, keeping his fanatics tuned in to their favorite games. Although this was a hundred dollar startup, he brought in $25,000 his first year, $75,000 last year, and this year his income is expected to break six figures. Pretty fantastic results for a project that

only takes about 30 minutes of his time each week for customer support. Here's what John says he's got some advice for you. He said radio is not a new concept, but the spin that I put on it is different, and that's where the value is. Don't try to reinvent the wheel. Make whatever you're planning so simple that you're able to lay out the specs with no more than five different features. Moving forward, John is focused on building more apps to connect

people to the sports and news that they love. And as he's proved with the 20 apps he has on his scorecard now, where there's a fan base, there's also a side hustle sitting on the bench, just ready to get in the game. Awesome. What a fun story. Six figures almost from this app or series of apps now, but each app is basically doing the same thing, just branded in a slightly different way. And now on track to do six figures this year. Fantastic.

And looking at my notes here, which do contain a long list of sports teams, they also include another quote from John that I liked, wanted to share with you. He says, if you want to do something like this, remember, you don't need to invent something new. You can absolutely take something old and deliver it in a modern way. Radio is very old school, but yet people still use it on a mobile phone. So I hope you like the story. I hope you found it inspirational.

And I hope it also gets you thinking, what is it that you can do? Inspiration with action is better than just inspiration. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/667 will add links to some of John's apps. And also I want to give a special shout out to a very good friend of mine, Gretchen Rubin. You have probably heard me mentioning Gretchen before.

She is a partner of side hustle school. In fact, the show is part of the onward project and imprint that was founded and curated by her. And today just so happens to be the 10th anniversary of the happiness project. Now, 10 years ago, Gretchen published a book called the happiness project, which went on to sell something like 2 million copies. I remember getting a first edition of that book all those years ago. And now this week, there is a new

edition a special 10th anniversary edition of the happiness project out. You can check that out at your local bookstore or wherever you shop for books online. Of course, there is an audio book version as well. So with that, I will sign off, I'm going to go work on my own little happiness project. And I'm also going to get ready for tomorrow's episode because you know, it never stops. But that's okay, because I feel fortunate. I'm glad you're

out there. And I hope you'll join me again tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is side hustle school.