MFA Student Trades Pen for Keyboard

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

[Music]

Hello, my friends. Welcome to Silenceful School. Today is episode 775. For those listening in real time, it's also Valentine's Day. If you're listening later, I hope you had a good Valentine's Day.

Maybe you covered your head under the blankets and woke up the next day and you're like, "Okay, great, February 15th, here we are." I believe it was Lily Tomlin who said, "If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?" All right, that's all I have to say about that. Totally different question for the day. What happens when a creative writer sets out to build software that competes with Google? Now, the answer to that question may sound like a story that doesn't end well. Creative writer sets out to build software that competes with Google.

He basically retreats, goes back to writing his short stories. But in this case, it actually does end well. It ends so well, in fact, that he goes away earning $12,500 a month in recurring income. That means money that's coming in each month, $12,500, at least at the time of this recording. Who knows, maybe it even grows as it goes along.

So in this story, the creative writer becomes a programmer, little transformation act there, MFA student trades pen for keyboard. Stay tuned, here's a shout out to our sponsor and then on with the show. [Music]

Justin Hunter didn't plan on becoming a coder. An account manager by day and writer by night, he was also enrolled in a master of fine arts program pursuing creative writing. As the program was winding down, Justin noticed that he had built up quite a body of work.

This made him a little nervous as he had stored all of his creative work, all of his essays and writing on Google Docs. And he was worried that he could be locked out one day. He considered going back to Microsoft Office, storing files locally on his computer, but he decided that wasn't a great option either. Like many of us, he'd grown accustomed to the convenience that cloud-based storage offered. He looked around for alternatives to G-suite that would allow him to own his own data, but realized that no such software existed.

And that's when he decided he would build an app for his own personal use. Most creative writers don't set out to do such things, but Justin had been honing his programming skills for a while. 20 years earlier, he had taken a computer class in middle school. Although he was amazed by the wonders of programming at the time, he never seriously pursued it. Much later, when he decided to build an in-browser game for his son, coding began to make more sense.

He was motivated by the sudden breakthrough, and began to experiment by building small apps. Unbeknownst to him, he had put himself in a perfect position to start his side hustle. In the summer of 2017, Justin created the first version of a product he called Graphite. He had chanced upon Blockstack, an app protocol which allows developers to build apps where users own their own data. Up to this point, he had never entertained the thought of Graphite being used by anyone other than himself.

There was no bigger purpose or any grand plan. But as he built the app and shared each iteration with the Blockstack community, people in that community noticed. They encouraged him to continue building and to release it publicly. This was the first hint that anyone else might actually be interested. In March 2018, Justin launched Graphite publicly.

At this point, the app was free for all to use. A key issue was figuring out how to get customers to pay. Always that critical issue. Eventually, he designed a form of team-based collaboration, allowing users to securely and conveniently collaborate across an entire organization. And unlike G Suite, Graphite allowed people to easily encrypt and share files with an entire team.

When he released a premium version of that app, he priced it at $20 a month and almost immediately closed his first customer. Justin remembers that event well. He took his wife out to dinner to celebrate. The sale would not come close to covering that single meal, but he was still proud of the milestone. As his product gained popularity, Graphite gained more paying customers.

The revenue generated from those customers was still fairly small, but here's the interesting part. Because of how well his product had been designed, Graphite consistently garnered top ratings and reviews. This made the product eligible for the Blockstack App Mining Program, which I had never heard of before. So here's how it works. Funded by Blockstack, a company which aims to build an open source and decentralized internet, the App Mining Program rewards the best app developers, and they reward those developers in money, sometimes a lot of money.

And for Justin, he's now earning an average of $12,500 in monthly payouts. This has given him the bandwidth to further develop Graphite, so he no longer needs to worry about marketing or rushing an inferior product into the hands of users. And looking ahead, he knows that customer needs are more complicated than he originally envisioned. After all, his initial plan was to merely solve his own storage problem. He now has to build in additional features to serve a wider audience.

But he's committed to the process because the App Mining Program has allowed him to focus on refining the app and its business model without having to rush to market. Moving forward, he hopes this will eventually become a project he can work on full-time. And to those who wish to do something similar, Justin's advice is to remember, no one is gonna tell you that it's okay to build something or that you should build something. You just need to decide for yourself without worrying about your qualifications or without knowing every step along the way. And then, just like he did, you need to go out and do something about it.

[Music]

So I had not heard of that Blockstack App Mining Program before for any of our programmers, coders out there, anybody who's inclined to be a programmer or coder out there, just like Justin, he was a creative writer, and learned to develop and apply some new skills along the way. Maybe you wanna go and check that out. We will, of course, link it up in the show notes. And then also, I often encourage people to look at small problems. Like, if you see something out there that's annoying or small, maybe you can find a solution for it.

Well, this is a pretty big problem. And here is a creative writer who's essentially taking on Google in a way, providing something that is more secure, where it's really clear that users own their own data, which is unfortunately not clear with some of these big companies like Google, Facebook, et cetera. So good for him. It'll be interesting to see what develops as he moves forward and goes to market, and hopefully keeps getting that recurring monthly income, which is, of course, substantial and amazing. So congratulations, Justin.

For everybody else out there, remember the art of love is largely the art of persistence. That is a Valentine's Day/side hustling quote by Albert Ellis. I think it's true in lots of ways. The art of persistence isn't mysterious, yet often rewarding art form. So consider that today.

And if you wanna check out the show notes, where I'll link up everything I mentioned, including this app, as well as that program, just go to www.sidehustleschool.com/775. That is for episode 775. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back again tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau.

This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]