This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Welcome friends, welcome listeners, welcome community. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School, and guess what? Today, I'm bringing you episode 1,300 episodes. 1,300 days ago, I began this program telling you stories of people all over the world who are thriving in the new economy, finding ways to reinvent their future, build security for themselves, and doing it while they're still working a job.
So it's a very different model than what you might see in other startup worlds, or TV shows, or books, resources, podcasts, which is no knock on those other folks, but I'm just trying to reach people out there who don't wanna take a lot of risk, but do want to make extra money. Not just extra money, but all the things that come along with it, such as the ability to decide for yourself, et cetera. Anyway, 1,300 days and counting. Thank you so much for your support. Today, we're gonna go to India, at least virtually.
Speaking of people all over the world who are doing things differently, this is our Throwback Thursday/Where Are They Now? segment, where we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved considerably since we first featured them. Now, last week's episode was all about a woman in Seattle who cleans up in a home organizing business, donating the items that her clients no longer want to people in need. She's doing very well herself and is closing in on 2,000 billable hours. I love that episode.
If you haven't heard it, it's episode 1293, seven days ago. Now, today in our latest feature, we'll hear from Pardip in India, who originally quit his job for a startup that failed. That would be one of those other models, not what we tend to do here. But then he regrouped with a blog called Cash Overflow that succeeded. He now earns commissions on referring readers to credit cards and insurance products in India.
Now, this market is quite established in the US and other Western countries, but it's not nearly as mature over in his part of the world, which presents challenges, some unique difficulties, but also unique opportunities. So what has happened since we first featured Pardip? Let's hear directly from him and I'll come back at the end to wrap us up. [Music]
My name is Pardip Goyal. I am from a small city in India, Chandigarh.
And the name of my site also is Cash Overflow. I help people selecting best credit card, insurance, and other financial products based in India. When I last featured, it was just a blog. And my vision was just to keep it like a blog. But later on, I found out that this is a really deep problem in India, basically, where people are not financially literate and they are not online.
I mean, people are doing a lot of transactions offline. And by this time, I mean, during last couple of years, there is a lot of internet penetration. And because of that, people were coming online and e-commerce is growing. So there was a need to select the right kind of financial products when someone is coming first time online and they have to use trade cards, they have to buy insurance and all that stuff. So just having a blog was not enough.
So then we thought of creating a product out of it. And now we are working to make it like a search engine, search engine for financial products in India. Indian market is a great opportunity because we have to serve a big, really large audience set. At the same time, this is the biggest challenge as well because affiliate marketing is not so mature in India. I mean, all the banks and financial institutions are, they are not well habitual of passing on these benefits to a blogger or influencers or this kind of thing.
They have not tried out, they have not seen the ROI out of it. So that's the biggest challenge for us, how to educate these institutions where we can do the partnerships and get them on board. The challenge is that banks are not doing things purely online. There is a lot of paperwork happens after we generate a lead for them. So once the lead is generated, they collect the papers, they get the signs and do other offline verification, which takes a lot of time and it's difficult for us to track the leads and to see where the ROI is coming.
So it will take time when things will purely move online the way it is happening in US, UK, and other countries, where if someone is applying online, they can get instant decision of approval or rejection. So that we are waiting for that opportunity to happen. I started cash overflow to try out things, to learn things about content marketing. And my main reason was to do these things, I mean, whatever I will learn to apply that in my startup, which eventually didn't happen. And this cash overflow blog that became popular in India because people like this ROI.
And then I got to know, I mean, this is something really useful that I'm doing. So then I started doing some experiments with fbit marketing and luckily I made some money. And I mean, then rest of the history and we are like keeping it like a main business now. If I look back in the time when I was in IT job, I was earning well, but I was not satisfied with the kind of work that I was doing. So if I have to give advice to that person who is still in some sort of job and they want to get out of the job without taking big risk.
So try out small things, try out things on the side and see if this will work or not. Because I left my job without testing out things and my first startup failed and we lost a lot of money. It was my hard earned money, which I lost in my startup, which I could have saved if I would have tested that small idea on the side. So before taking big decision, it's better to try out small things, try multiple things and see what can work out. - Sometimes people ask me if the content marketing model can work in non-Western parts of the world.
And what I mean by content marketing is essentially providing lots of information, valuable content, helpful tips, tutorials, et cetera, and providing all that stuff for free, but then having something that you charge for or having some kind of revenue model. So in this case, I mean, this is a great example of content marketing in a non-Western part of the world. And in this case, Pardip is making referrals to different companies from which he receives an affiliate commission. Now it is a maturing market over there in the sense that it still has a ways to go, but there are more and more people entering that market all the time, more and more people in need of financial products. And eventually there will be a lot more people providing these services as well.
So it will become more competitive over time, but Pardip was able to be a pioneer in the early days of doing this. And also, even when there is more competition, he'll be established. He has the relationships. He's been doing this all this time. He's been working on his SEO, his email list, and so on.
So he is in a good place. And I'm really grateful to him for helping us out with this segment. It's always fun to hear what people are doing outside of the more commonly featured locations such as the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, et cetera. If you know someone in a different part of the world whose story we should feature, please let me know. Silencefulschool.com/questions where there's a contact page or you have a story yourself, there's a page where you can kind of fill out some information and let us know and we might be able to feature you here on the program.
2020 is our year of interaction. I have been enjoying it. And as I said, so grateful, 1300 episodes and counting. Thank you for being part of the journey. You are the reason we make the show.
I'm grateful to our team as well. Chuck, our producer, Jed Chang, Tina Hart, other folks who work on the program from time to time. So do be sure you're subscribed to come back for more. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.
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From the Onward Project.
