This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Welcome, welcome. Welcome, first of all, to Side Hustle School, the daily podcast brought to you by myself, Chris Guillipo, and our amazing team. Welcome as well to a brand new month. This is episode 1521 going out on the 1st of March, the year known as 2021. Now here's a question for you.
How many online services do you pay for? So it's kind of like how many browser tabs do you have open? It's almost like, I don't want to think about it. I'm paying for so many different services these days and that's the new way. You're paying $5 a month, $10 a month, $25 a month for all kinds of stuff, perhaps a lot more than $25 a month, especially if you've got a Cytosil, you got a business.
There's all kinds of business expenses that are all done on this recurring payment model now. So just imagine what a small or medium sized company pays, especially since a lot of these services have scalable pricing, which is really good for them. It means that the more you use them, the more you pay. So as a company grows, if it's using more data, if it has more users, whatever the group or the metric is, those bills really start to add up. I remember a couple of years ago, the WDS team and myself, I run this event called World Domination Summit and our team was using Slack to communicate.
Slack is freemium like a lot of these services and so you have a free version and then you can eventually upgrade and pay them a lot of money. And it was interesting because the free version, at least at the time, had a lot of features and we had like our core team was using it and all of our volunteers for the actual event. So we had more than 100 people using this free service. And at a certain point, we started to kind of run into storage issues and basically you had to pay to upgrade and I was like, okay, well, we've been using this, how much is it gonna cost to upgrade? And we looked into it and it was like four or $5,000.
And I was like, wow, I can have it for $0 or $4 or $5,000. If there's nowhere in between, I think we're gonna stick with $0, like whatever features we're compelling, we're probably gonna find a way to do without those features. So that's the business model of these kinds of companies. And our listener today has the responsibility of monitoring this budget item, not just for one vendor, but for all vendors on behalf of his employer. And so monitoring this and keeping up with it and trying to get the cost down, look at competitive situations, et cetera.
This is a pretty valuable skill, valuable skill, important responsibility, especially as more and more services operate on this recurring payment model. So he is wondering, his question, which you'll hear in a moment, what he can do to monetize it outside his job. And I really liked this idea. I thought it was quite interesting. It's an example of a function that wasn't needed before.
And so therefore it's not clear at a lot of organizations who's supposed to be paying attention to it. With that said, let's see what can be done. Quick message from our sponsor, and then you'll hear from Darryl. [Music]
Hi, Chris. My name is Darryl and I live in Brooklyn, New York.
I enjoy your podcast and I've been a listener since your "100 Side Hustles" book. I work as a software engineer at a small company. One of my responsibilities is to review the monthly bills of the cloud services we use for our online infrastructure. I audit them and provide advice on whether to keep, upgrade or downgrade services or switch to competing products. My question is, what's the best way to start a side hustle that provides this type of advice on cloud services for other businesses?
There's lots of competition between providers of their cloud services and keeping up with their offerings is a lot of work. How can I get businesses to trust me if I don't have much experience doing this outside of my current employer? Thanks for the show and any advice you can give on this topic. - Thank you so much, Darryl. Appreciate you calling in.
Hopefully we'll get a chance to hang out at a future book tour. And I really like this idea. I'm not sure I have all the answers or all the direction for it, but I took some notes. So hopefully we can get Darryl in a good direction. And I see this as a one-off service or perhaps for a larger company, maybe it's a retainer to review charges on an ongoing basis.
But for a one-off service, let's say, here's kind of how I envision the pitch. Sometimes thinking clearly about the messaging, like what is your actual offer is going to lead you to some other steps that you might normally think would come first. So the pitch I envision more or less is most small and midsize businesses in the, whatever it is, industry, that's where Darryl's gonna fill in the blank or perhaps another listener. So in this industry, they're paying too much for cloud services and they just don't know any better. Like the teams are often small and stretch thin.
They may not realize what the alternatives are. Also the finance people may not know enough to understand if the software development team is overpaying for unneeded plans or capacity perhaps. But I do, like I have experience doing this. This is Darryl's pitch. Like I understand this, I've done this for my employer.
And so I kind of see the key promise here is the audit will pay for itself, right? Like if you're gonna do an audit, a one-off service, it's got this fixed price. I mean, in an ideal world, you would also get a percentage of the savings. So I would look at the industry of medical claims appeals, that's a more established field that might have some best practices. Perhaps Darryl could borrow from as he attempts to help companies save money, but whatever it is, the audit will pay for itself.
It's like, you're gonna hire me to do this audit for $1,000 or whatever the price might be. And I guarantee that you're going to save at least this much. So that to me is pretty compelling. Last but not least, Darryl mentioned trust. So I think as part of it, as part of your pitch, you're like, I have a confidentiality clause.
You know, like I have to come in and look at your books, you know, to be able to do this, perhaps have a conversation or two with people, you know, don't worry, everything we do is gonna be confidential. I'll even sign an agreement to that effect. And then perhaps also some testimonials, right? And that's where he's going to have to have some initial client relationships. I don't know if it's possible to get a testimonial from his employer or not, but at some point, you're gonna have to have some social proof of like, I know that I can do this.
All that to say, it's not necessarily a simple thing, but if we're looking at ideas and opportunities, definitely a lot of value here. He clearly has the experience and he's also noticing, hey, you know, there's probably other companies, if I'm doing this in my company and nobody had that function before, this is probably something that's much bigger than just my company. So I think it's really interesting, as I said, I'd love to know what happens, keep us posted, Darryl. And listeners, if you have a question or comment of your own, just come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. Thank you so much for listening.
We're gonna keep bringing them to you throughout the year, along with updates from other listeners as they launch their projects. All right, that's all for today, but do come back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
