This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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How are those new year's resolutions going? How do you feel about new year's resolutions? Well, it is the 14th of January. At least that's when we're making this episode, episode 1475 of Sidus Will School, still going strong in our fifth year. Thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you for everybody who's been listening for a while. And if you've just joined because it's a new year and people are doing all kinds of stuff differently in January and in 2021 in general, well, I'm glad you're here as well. So whatever situation you're in, my goal is to help you make extra money without quitting your day job. That's what it's all about. And ultimately not just about money, but about what does that bring you?
What options, what possibility does that create in your life to be able to do more of what's important to you? That is the guiding mission of Sidus Will School. This is our segment called Throwback Thursday, because fun fact, today is Thursday, where we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved quite a bit since we first featured them on the podcast, now that we have so many archives. Last week, we talked about Marimba Rentals. I loved that episode, Marimba Rentals.
I just love saying it also. This week, we're gonna talk about a popular app to help people with their weight loss goals, because again, New Year's resolutions. This app promises to go beyond the scale. I'll let you hear more about it from Louis. Louis is the British developer who made and maintains the app.
It's called Progress App. And I'll come back at the end of the episode to wrap us up. [Music]
My name is Louis, and I'm from the UK. My side hustle is called the Progress App, and I was featured on episode 738. My side hustle is a weight loss tracking app, which kind of goes beyond the scale, and it helps you track your progress by tracking your measurements and your photos and things like that.
So it really helps you stay motivated and stay on track when you're trying to lose weight. Often the scale can be very misleading, especially for women, and it can go up and down and not really give you an accurate picture. And so what I found is that if you take your measurements, like with a tape measure and your photos, you can see, you can get the whole picture and you can see your progress. It truly helps you to stay motivated and stay on track. I was, I couldn't get married, and I wanted to lose a bit of weight before getting married for the wedding photos.
And I read about this kind of method of tracking yourself, tracking your measurements and everything, and at the same time, I wanted to learn how to make iPhone apps. And so I thought, I'm just gonna make this app for myself just as a kind of learning project. And after I'd done it, I thought, well, I'll just put it out and see whether anyone likes it or whether anyone's gonna use this, and they did. And so I've been working on it ever since, basically. It's mainly been just kind of slow and steady growth.
It's kind of boring, but it's just, this is kind of how successful businesses can go, I think. And so revenue has grown not in a consistent line, but it's grown every year, some years more than others. I've taken on a VA to help me with customer support and things like that. And I've been trying to grow progress incrementally, basically, with just as much as I can with just me. In terms of big challenges at the moment, I've been very fortunate with COVID that COVID hasn't really had any negative impact on my work.
So I'm super grateful for that and feel very lucky. In terms of more general challenges, I think I'm kind of very happy working on my own and not having to kind of manage other people and things like that. But I'm at the point now where I really feel like I should do that and start to grow it into more of a quote unquote real business. But that's a big challenge. It's kind of a big step to take on a new person and be responsible for paying them and finding programmers is hard and things like that.
So it's just a big step, but I'm not facing as head on as I should be, I guess. The strong advice I would give to someone would be to learn to code. If you're not a coder or you've never done coding, it's a lot easier than most people think. And the programmers like to pretend that it's very hard and it's easier than people think. And especially these days, there are like so many resources.
I can recommend there's a project called Hour of Code, which you can Google and it's kind of geared towards kids, but I've done the things and they're really fun. And they have like Minecraft and Star Wars and these kind of theme games that teach you programming. And even if you never use the programming for a side hustle, it's just such a useful skill. And you could start maybe doing freelancing as a side hustle, or you could use it to improve processes in your current job or at home to give yourself more time. It's a very versatile skill.
So yeah, I highly recommend it. - Awesome, thank you so much, Louis. Really appreciate those updates. And one of those coding resources he mentioned was called Hour of Code. I've tried that myself, it's pretty fun.
You can also check out Code Monkey or Code Combat. I think there's a whole bunch of these things now. Those are just some of the more popular ones. In my position on learning to code or making your own app has evolved a bit because in the first year of side hustle school, I used to say, if you don't know how to code, don't make an app, right? Like leave that to developers, focus on your core strength.
Overall, I think you should still focus on your core strength. But it's pretty clear that if we think about the new economy and the world that we're in now and the world that we're going to be in in the near future and foreseeable future and probably the far future as well, coding is and will be a highly valuable skill. So if you're trying to learn something new, even if you don't want to become a professional developer or anything like that, it might be in your best interest to just spend a little bit of time with this. So you're at least familiar with some of the concepts. Again, hour of code, code monkey, code combat.
And there's some others as well. All right, I am grateful to Lewis for helping us out with this segment. I am grateful to you, my listener. Thank you for joining me. I'm excited about this year and I hope you're excited too.
2020 was a wild and crazy year. Fingers crossed that 2021 is going to be a lot different in several ways. But we shall see as the year unfolds. If you have a question, if you'd like to update me about your side hustle, perhaps we'll share something about you on the podcast or you just want to tell me yourself, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. You can also check out the progress app.
That would be Lewis's app in the app store. Just search progress app. I'll be back again once more tomorrow, episode 1476 coming up. Thank you again. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
