Software Engineer Scavenges For Profits

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[Music]

Welcome to a brand new week. It is almost the last week of the year. I think the following week has something like two straggler days, but this is basically it. We're gonna be in 2020 before we know it. I'm so excited about all this stuff we've got planned.

I hope you'll join me. And I hope you are keeping your wits about you during this holiday season. All right, and now for today's story. A decade after he attends a photo scavenger hunt, a software engineer tasks himself with finding a side hustle that develops into much more. This is a slow burn success that illustrates two points.

Number one, sometimes these things take time. It's not an overnight success. Sometimes it can be a matter of months or years, which is why it's always good to start your project when there's not a ton of urgency. Start your project before you need it. But then secondly, even though it's true, sometimes these things take time.

Mostly they require you to take action. And when I say that, I don't just mean, get started. I mean, yes, you should get started. But what I mean is often, if there's a long period of time before something works, at some point in that process, something changes. So it could be month three or year three or something else.

But during that time, whatever that is, the person figures it out, makes a change, and that's what causes it to take off. So you can accelerate the process a bit if you can figure out what that is. Oftentimes we can decode things and say, okay, this was the key action that inspired the real change. So more as we go. He also learns a key lesson for this kind of work.

His best clients aren't just friends of friends or random strangers who want to go on a scavenger hunt. It's a different group entirely. And you'll hear more about that as well as how he built this project to a good full-time income in the story. [Music]

It was more than 15 years ago when Chris Germain attended his first photo scavenger hunt. That of course was a different time with no smartphones, less internet access, and a reliance on good old pen and paper.

Needless to say, the hunt was lo-fi in analog, but also a lot of fun. In fact, Chris enjoyed it so much that he wanted to arrange a hunt of his own. A photo scavenger hunt challenges groups of people to get outside their comfort zone and explore the real world. They complete tasks from a list and take photographic proof to go along with it. The tasks might include things like take a photo of yourself in a candy shop, or wear a stranger's hat.

But Chris never did figure out a way to make it work, so he sat on the dream for a decade. That's right, 10 years. In that time, he built a career as a software engineer. It was his interest in technology, along with the rise of smartphones, that inspired him to revisit his old idea of creating a photo scavenger hunt, but with a tech-enabled twist. It turned out that all this time he'd been overthinking it.

He was trying to plan a dream scavenger hunt, but he should have been building a good enough scavenger hunt to see if anyone would actually be interested in paying for it. He devised a very simple way to conduct a hunt with a smartphone without having to go to all the trouble of building an app. It went like this. He would give each group a list of items and a code corresponding to each one. When they took a photo of something on the list, like take a picture of having a thumb war with a police officer, for example, they would email it to a unique address with the item code as the subject line.

Chris then wrote a program that would scan the email, extract the picture, and use the code to assign the correct team. He could then log in, judge all the photos, and notify the players who won. He tested this concept by planning hunts through meetup groups and his own social connections. For a while, the only people who showed up were friends or friends of friends, no one outside that network. Chris wasn't worried.

He enjoyed the process and ran his hunts on a casual basis, at least until a life change made him reassess. That change came when Chris unexpectedly lost his day job as an engineer. Instead of stressing out and frantically trying to find a new job, he took the opportunity to consider what he really wanted for his life. Was it staring at a screen all day or taking a chance on finding something that he might enjoy more? His job had paid well, six figures, and he was frugal, so he had enough savings to last him a couple of years.

Instead of looking for a new job, Chris decided to ramp up his scavenger hustle. Now, it didn't work right away, in fact, because the lack of income bothered him more than he thought it would. And not earning that good salary while transitioning into building a business was a tough adjustment. So he took on consulting work on the side as often as he could. In hindsight, he now views this as a mistake and feels like he could have used that two-year window more effectively.

Still, he found time to work on the business now called FrogQuest. For months, the only clients Chris was able to pick up were from his second tier network. And while they paid, it wasn't lucrative enough to live on, not by a long shot. But a stroke of luck was about to turn things around. You see, at the end of each hunt, the guests would meet in a bar and Chris would play a slideshow of the best photographs.

This often involved laughter and boisterous behavior, which led to others asking what all the fun was about. One time, one of those people was a manager from a local business who asked Chris to run a hunt for their team building day. It was his first corporate client and it brought in a good payday. It also highlighted the fact that businesses were the perfect clients. They paid well, booked in large groups and required far less organization.

So Chris hoped to find more of them. To do that, he positioned himself on Yelp in the team building category and asked customers to leave him reviews. That's when the business began to grow. As Chris started to make real money from FrogQuest, he'd let go of outside consulting work and focused on turning it into a real business. One of the things he invested in was building an app to replace the email method he was using for over five years.

And his app helped him scale. Chris could set up hunts, but didn't actually have to be there to run them. He could facilitate through the app from a remote location. This has helped Chris grow FrogQuest into a moneymaker that allows him to keep working on it full time. Last year, he earned $60,000, not as much as his old six figure salary, but more than he needs to live on and with a much improved lifestyle.

While it didn't happen in a flash, Chris eventually took the perfect picture. [Music]

Are you waiting for technology to catch up or are you just overthinking something? I really liked this part about how he thought he was waiting for some big technological advancement, but in reality, there was an alternative. So are you waiting for something to happen externally or are you just overthinking it? Are you waiting for the perfect time to arrive or are you just deferring your dream?

And are you ready for a new year? Because ready or not, it's coming up in just over a week. I hope you'll use the rest of this year well, but no matter what happens, we've got a new year coming up, a new chance for all of us. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Today's show notes, including links to FrogQuest are at sidehustleschool.com/1087.

That is 1-0-8-7. Thank you so much for listening. My name is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]

From the Onward Project.