This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey everybody, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. This is your host, Chris Guillebeau. I'd also like to welcome you to Throwback Thursday. This is a segment where we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved considerably since we first featured them.
Today in our latest feature, we'll hear from the founder of a service called Focusmate. I think of this service as being a business built for the Zoom era, even though it started at least a year or two before then. So Focusmate is all about helping people who work alone work productively. Over the past year, I've heard from a lot of listeners in new remote work situations. Many of them have been struggling, others have been succeeding.
Sometimes it's some of both, right? You could be struggling one day and then succeeding the next. It's not so black and white. I think it's also good to remember that you are not necessarily productive during every minute of your job if you are at an office or workplace, right? So you're not a failure if you become distracted sometimes at home as well.
Still, being able to work effectively and productively is a huge need that's important to many people. As I said, Focusmate, definitely in the right place at the right time, helping lots of folks. What has happened since they first launched a couple of years ago? Let's hear it directly from Taylor, that founder. He's now operating at full time.
I will come back at the end to wrap us up. [Music]
I'm Taylor Jacobson. I'm in New York City in the United States and my side hustle is actually my day job now. That's a startup called Focusmate. And yeah, it was on episode 751.
Focusmate is really a community of people who generally work alone from home, who are interested in being more focused and more intentional with their time. And the main way that we do that is two people get paired up for a 50 minute video call where they keep each other company and they hold each other accountable while they each work on their own projects. For me, I had this pain when I started working from home 10 years ago and at the time I was like, oh wow, an office and having people around and structure and a place to go, that provides a lot of support and accountability and camaraderie, all these things that I took for granted at the time. So yeah, now a lot of people have had that experience for the first time and are realizing it can be lonely. It can be really hard to get your butt in the seat.
It can be hard to sort of stave off other distractions. There's a lot of challenges that come with it. The way we just got started was just saying, hey, this is basically a productivity hack. And if you're interested in doing this with other people, just join this Facebook group. And that was really how we started to validate this was something that more than just basically me wanted to do.
And then from there, I was like, okay, how do we make this really easy? How do we use software to make it really easy? And there's many other possibilities in terms of what the product could do to make that experience awesome. But yeah, at first it was just a Facebook group. So we were at 400 weekly users.
Last time we spoke, we're at 4,000 now. So 10 times the number of users every week. My suggestion would be to keep things simple and specifically to really focus on how can I solve this problem? Like getting away from, oh, I'm building a product, right? And we're building software and we have so many ideas of what it could be and what it could look like and what it could do, whatever.
And if you get too distracted by that, I think it can pull you away from just like, are we solving a really painful problem that people have? And how can we do that? 'Cause it might not be software, right? Some of the initial steps throughout the entire journey might not be software. So just really stay plugged into how can we solve this problem?
And it helps that I'm one of our target users, right? But like, think of a moment in the life of the person you're trying to help and like, what's going on? And then how are you gonna sort of participate in that moment to try to change the story for the better, right? So like with Focus Mate, it could be like, I'm feeling really low right now. And, you know, left to my own devices, I would just go get some pizza and ice cream.
But I know that what will make me feel better is if I meditate and actually like, work on this blog post that I'm writing. You know, like, what is somebody feeling? What are they doing? And how are we gonna participate in their lives so that it doesn't become about, you know, moving pixels around and adding new things that do things on the screen. - Awesome, thank you so much, Taylor.
Just a couple of notes I wanted to add myself. I think this is a really interesting service. As I said, you know, built for the remote work Zoom era. You can check it out at focusmate.com. I also thought, you know, you could do this on your own.
A couple of good friends of mine, Jonathan Fields and Clay Abert, they have this, you know, writing session that they do a couple of times a week, I think, where they just get on and they're kind of working simultaneously, but not on the same things, right? So they've kind of created their own little Focus Mate. But of course, this service makes it really easy to facilitate connections and such. They even have a free version where you can do it, I think, three times a week without paying anything. And then also, like this is my other comment, they have some really cheap plans.
Like it just costs $5 a month. And I think what Taylor said, he has 4,000 users now. So if you do the math there, you're like, well, that's a really good amount of recurring income. But just from a business perspective here, I would be shocked if they couldn't make a lot more money just by adding a single premium option, even for $10 a month. So you can keep that $5 a month tier.
Don't take anything away from those people, but add a premium option of some kind, $10 a month, even if it was just seven or eight, $9 a month, like I really feel like $10 a month is reasonable and they could get away with that without any complaints at all. You'd definitely make a lot more money. So just a suggestion there, but I'm really glad it's going well. This segment overall, Throwback Thursday, was one of the most popular new features of 2020. So as you've heard, we're gonna keep it going this year as well.
Let me know what you think and who you'd like to see featured from our archives of well over 1,000 stories. I guess it's well over 1,200 stories, 1,400 episodes so far. If you've got a question of your own, if you'd like to update us about your side hustle, this is a community effort after all, just come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. And thank you so much for joining me today. I hope you'll come back tomorrow.
I'll be sure you're subscribed. My name is Chris Guillebeau and this is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
