This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
It's good to try new things. It's normal to make mistakes, but what if you try over and over and it's still not working? What then? Well, I think you probably need to look for a fundamental flaw or error in your process. Today's featured case study tried more than two dozen projects before finding the right one.
It's good that he kept going, at least after making some much needed adjustments, because he eventually doubled his income, replicating the income from his day job with his side hustle. He's eventually gonna go full-time with this. He did so by using what he called the introverts marketing method. Intriguing. Welcome to Side Hustle School.
My name is Chris Guillebeau. Stay tuned for engineer parses his way to 2x income after fathering twins. [Music]
Courtney Farquharson was desperate for a change. He'd been a software engineer for years and work was taking a toll on him. He earned good money, but his work-life balance was non-existent.
In short, he felt dissatisfied, stressed, and unhealthy. Things got even more complicated when he became a father to twin boys. Throw a lack of sleep into his already hectic life and something had to give. So he decided to start a side hustle with the goal of eventually escaping the rat race and having more time to be present with his young family. His odds of success didn't seem particularly high, because this wasn't the first time Courtney tried side hustling.
In fact, since 2006, he had launched 25 projects, including everything from a social network to an e-commerce store. They all failed with only one earning even a single dollar. You see, Courtney described himself as a one entrepreneur. He'd had dreams of making it big and building a company, but up until now, he'd been unable to make even a small second income. He knew what the problem was.
He loved to build things, but he wasn't introvert at heart. He felt more at home coding with headphones than talking with people. This translated into hundreds of hours spent building products, but never going to the trouble of finding customers. He would finish something, lose interest, and then hop on to the next thing. This time, however, he was playing for higher stakes.
Those stakes were his own wellbeing and that of his family. He committed himself anew and took a mental step toward the great unknown. And this time Courtney didn't start with an idea, he started with a business model. He wanted to build a SaaS or software as a service. A SaaS is a program run on the web that customers pay a monthly fee to access.
You probably already know some SaaS products like Dropbox, Slack, Salesforce, there are many others. It's a popular business model because it has recurring revenue. To build a successful SaaS product, however, you need to solve a real problem for people, something they need fixed time and time again because otherwise they'll stop paying. Extensive research shows that it's undesirable for customers to stop paying. So to find a suitable problem, Courtney looked into his own past as a software engineer and one particular thing stood out.
Several years earlier, his company dealt with a client who wanted to email documents to a special address. Then they wanted the information from that email extracted and added to their internal systems automatically. This is commonly known as parsing email. For example, a restaurant may have a system to manage takeaway orders, but orders come in via email through their website. So instead of manually reading the email and entering the order into their systems, software could do it for them.
It could parse the content and then add the order automatically so the chefs can get cooking right away. It was a complex problem which Courtney helped to solve, but what really stood out was the price tag. The client had paid over $2,000 for that solution. Courtney figured if they'd pay that much once, there must be customers out there with the same problem. They might pay a monthly fee to have it solved.
So he got to coding. As a husband and father, he was busy. This meant there were only small windows in his day to hustle, but he'd made the commitment and that meant finding the time. He carved out an hour before his work day and then a couple more hours after his kids went to bed. He was fortunate in that his skills provided him with the knowledge necessary to build the project himself.
After a few months, he had a very basic version of his product. He called it Parser with a double R at the end. So like Parser. But now came Courtney's Achilles heel, marketing his new creation. He wasn't comfortable cold calling or blanket pitching.
So he decided to look for a marketing channel that wasn't so confrontational. Eventually he settled on the Microsoft Flow software marketplace. This is similar to Apple's App Store, but for business automation software. And it was here that Courtney found his first customer. He engaged heavily with that customer.
He answered every question, had a Skype call with him and even a one-on-one webinar to showcase the product. After going back and forth for days, Courtney woke up to a $50 notification from his credit card company. That customer had signed up for a package. And that package, even though it was just $50 a month, was more than he'd made on 25 side hustles combined in the past. To celebrate, he and his wife hired a babysitter, took the night off from parenting and enjoyed a nice meal.
He said it was the best night they'd had in ages. Before long, another customer came knocking, then another and another. Courtney began to find common use cases among those interested in his product. Things like scanning email for invoices and adding the details to accounting systems or adding business leads to Google spreadsheets were the most common. So with that knowledge, he turned to what he called the introverts marketing method.
That marketing method is none other than SEO or search engine optimization. He had content created around keywords related to the most common use cases. Things like how to send invoice details and send email to FTP. The idea was that potential customers would be searching for these things. His site would show up in Google and then they would sign up online, all without him having to do too much communicating with them.
This enabled him to spend more time to do what he does best, coding, and less time doing face-to-face selling. It worked, at least eventually. There's a concept in SaaS products known as the long, slow ramp of death. And this concept is that growth can be incredibly slow in the beginning. Each customer is worth only a small amount, but in time they can add up to something great and sustainable.
For Courtney, that period was nearly two years. During that time, his revenue grew and he turned Parcer into a self-sustaining side business. He knows that each month he'll have revenue coming in. He doesn't have to constantly chase new customers. As of right now, Parcer is generating monthly income in the low five figure mark, which coincidentally almost matches the income provided by his day job.
But Courtney isn't quitting work just yet. His plan is that if he can grow revenue another 25% in 2019, then he plans to quit the job and move to a shared workspace. He'll be able to dedicate more time to Parcer and hopefully grow things even faster. But for him, the money is not the only value. The total value comes from his persistence and achievement.
He views Parcer as the culmination of a 12 year journey to launch a successful side project. Because of his willingness to keep experimenting, he now has significant recurring income and the ability to make more of his own choices. [Music]
So if at first you don't succeed, definitely keep trying, don't give up, but also be willing to change things as you go. I have so much respect for someone who tries 25 projects and those projects don't work out, but eventually that journey leads him to the one that does. I think a lot of people might be able to skip some of those steps.
I don't think you have to have 25 failed projects in a row, but good for him for seeing it through. And I think a key point here is that when he finally had the one that worked, there were two things. One, he had this urgency. He had this pressing need, which was very different from, oh, it would be nice to have some extra money. This is a situation where I've gotta make a change in my life, like I really have to make a change.
My wellbeing is suffering. My time with my family is suffering. So therefore they are worse off. I really need to do something. So the first thing is that urgency.
And the second thing was he began to play more to his strength. His strength is in coding and building the project. He's not a salesperson. He doesn't want to do that. So instead of focusing on sales, he focused on building the right product and on customer service, providing great service to the customers who did come through and also asking himself, could there be another way to attract initial customers or leads?
And once he figured out what that was, looking at those common uses and then building content around that so that people would be searching for different stuff and come to his site, it's not like he could just sit back and do nothing, but the point is he had built this foundation. Once he has customers, he has the recurring income. So a lot of it going forward actually is passing, which of course is the goal. That's what's amazing. So anyway, congratulations to Courtney.
Good luck with that goal of 25% improvement and perhaps quitting your job this year. Listeners, I hope you enjoyed this one. If you want to check out the show notes and learn more about parser yourself, just come to sidehustleschool.com/754. That's for episode 754. Don't go anywhere.
Be sure you're subscribed. Much more is on the way. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
