This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hello, Side Hustle School listeners. Welcome back. My name is Chris Guillebeau. Here with some unexpected advice for you today, courtesy of today's story. And that story is about a Spanish language Bible app that generates 1 million downloads and makes a lot of money for a guy who was an accountant and had no idea how to design apps, at least when he was getting started.
I mentioned unexpected advice. Let's start with some of my advice first. I always encourage people, don't think about the next greatest tech thing. Don't think about something super innovative. Think about something that people use every day or they would use if they had it.
Now we've looked at that in some different ways before, but the unexpected advice comes from Trevor, who you'll meet in a moment. Trevor says, don't try something new. Everyone's always telling you to look for the new thing. Try something that's very old. Well, more on that in a moment.
This week, we're also asking listeners to share what prevents you from moving forward and making progress when you get stuck. This is something I know a lot of people struggle with and it's been very insightful to hear your calls and emails on this topic. Let's hear from someone right now. [Music]
Hi, this is Rhonda Waterhouse, owner of Daisy Yoga Studio and Daisy Yoga Designs, and also co-owner of Flip for Yoga, a new side hustle for me making yoga cards for people to practice yoga at home. The thing that gets in the way of my progress with my side hustles is fear.
Ironically, I have a fear of both failure and success. What I have found that helps me is ideas from the book, "The 12 Week Year." This book helps to break down your ideas into goals. I use six-week goals instead of 12-week goals because I found 12 weeks was too long for me. But having these daily goals helps me to stay on track when I feel like I'm getting overwhelmed. - Hey Rhonda, thanks for the call.
I love how you're doing multiple projects, starting new things. And I appreciate the recommendation for the book as well. It's called "The 12 Week Year." And I also like how you've modified it to suit your needs as well. I haven't read that book myself, but I almost feel like I would relate better to six-week goals or perhaps monthly four-week goals, whatever. So thank you for sharing that and all the best with your hustle.
[Music]
Trevor McKendrick teaches business finance and helps to grow B2B software companies. He actually began his career as an accountant, but quit his job to move to Utah when he got married. At first, he found only part-time work. He had extra time during the week to fill with something else. It was during that time he unexpectedly built his own software company when he discovered an opportunity to take something low-tech and pretty simple and get paid for bringing that to people's iPhones all over Latin America and to Spanish speakers everywhere.
As he wondered what he would do with that extra time, he knew he had to make money. He couldn't live on only that part-time income from his job. And he decided to make something for which he was positive there was already demand, the Bible. Now, whatever your thoughts on religion, it's probably fair to say that Christianity, along with the other major world religions, is gonna be around for a long time. However, as smart as Trevor is, he's also a modest.
He says he only came to that conclusion, which seems obvious in hindsight, because of how he found the opportunity in the first place. He found that opportunity not by going to Sunday school, but by looking through the list of top-ranking iPhone apps. And his tactic was simple. Pay attention to this, it's really key. His tactic was to find high-ranking apps that were poorly made or had bad reviews.
And the reason that both qualities were important is because he thought if an app was making money, which you could tell by looking at the rankings, but had consistent bad reviews and a poor user experience, there might be an opportunity there. Trevor knew Spanish from having lived in Mexico for two years when he was 20. And sure enough, as he perused the app store, he noticed a handful of Spanish-language Bible apps that had bad reviews, but were ranking relatively well in the book category. This indicated to him that it might be a good test of his theory, apps that were clearly selling, despite the fact that users seemed unhappy with them. He didn't know for sure how much of a gap there was or how big the opportunity would be, but he dove in feet first and ended up doing very well.
How well is very well? Well, I'll tell you. Startup costs to make this project were about $1,000 all in. Trevor is very frugal. This includes making the app, getting his LLC set up, and so on.
I'll tell you exactly how he made the app in just a moment. So startup costs $1,000. His first 12 months in the app store, he did $70,000 in profit. Pretty amazing return on investment. Spend $1,000, get $70,000 back within a year.
It was so good, he almost got thrown out of the temple. And he was like, it's not my fault. Your disciples keep downloading the app. But wait a moment. How did he actually make that app?
Well, interestingly, Trevor did not follow my advice. I hear from a lot of listeners who want to make an app, and I tend to discourage that. If you don't have a background in development or coding, it's not the easiest thing in the world to make an app, at least one that's gonna look good, work well, and be competitive. So I tend to steer people in a different direction, obviously, depending on what the topic is, what their vision is, and so on. But as I said, Trevor took the opposite perspective.
So Trevor went straight to upwork.com, and he hired a guy from Romania to make his app for $500. If you think something could go wrong there, you're right. In this case, the app got mostly finished, but not quite. So it could certainly be worse, but I will say this is a common problem with developers. The guy gets the work 80 to 90% done, and then he says, well, it's almost there, but I've got other stuff I gotta work on.
Sorry, see you later. Not altogether uncommon. So what did he do with this 85, 90% finished app? Now this is pretty interesting. I think what most of us would do is one of two things.
We would either go out and hire another programmer, try to find somebody to fix it, give it to them and be like, well, it's mostly done, but we're missing these few things. Or we might think, it's almost done. Maybe I can learn to do the rest of this. Like I'm no coder, but maybe if I spend enough time, I can figure out how to do 10% of the work or whatever. So Trevor considered both those ideas, but then he chose a third option.
Instead of hiring somebody else, and instead of learning how to make the app and complete the unfinished tasks, he decided to learn enough about the making of the app to where he couldn't really complete the features that weren't there, but he could take them out. He could remove the source code or anything that referenced those features. So it was as if they never existed in the first place. For example, when he first designed the app, he had an idea that there would be this social sharing component of it. Well, that never got finished.
And in his 90% complete version of the app, there were some references that said, click here to share this or whatever it was. So instead of learning how to figure that out, he figured out how to take out all those references to sharing. So that as I said, it was like the feature never existed in the first place. Pretty smart, I thought. And he did that so that he could embrace the value that I talk about every day on the show, take action, put things out in the world, find a way around whatever obstacles you're encountering, and then see what happens.
Well, as I said, the app did very well. He charged 99 cents for it at first, and a month later, he added an audio book version for $5. And in each case, he did very little marketing. But because he had found this gap between bad apps but people who wanted them, he quickly surpassed those bad apps in the rankings and began seeing dozens, sometimes hundreds of downloads a day. As time went by, he had some other experiments.
He tried making a free version of the app, then licensing content to sell materials direct to users. And that worked out okay, but because Apple took a 50% commission on those sales, his profit margins were much lower. Trevor eventually sold this business to a bigger company when his revenue was consistently around $8,000 a month after Apple's commission. He's now hoping to replicate this success with another project. And by the way, as I told you in the beginning, Trevor has some advice for you.
He says, don't try and do something new. The vast majority of successful businesses are not reinventing the wheel. For example, think about advertising agencies. They've been around as long as advertising itself, but new ones get started all the time. Well, I think the Bible is even older than most advertising agencies.
So obviously that advice has worked well for him. And maybe it's something you should consider too. And if you're interested in doing something in a similar industry or with a similar book or topic, there are a lot of resources in the public domain. Obviously, if you're using a new translation of something that very well may be under copyright, but there are lots of very old texts that anyone can use in any way, including putting them up for sale. So don't look for something new.
Think about something that's helpful, useful. That little tactical tip is interesting, even if you don't want to make an app, which as I said, I don't think you necessarily should. The idea of looking through the rankings is really interesting. You could do this with books as well. You could do this on other sites, TripAdvisor or Yelp.
What are the places that continue to be popular, despite the fact that they have bad reviews? Maybe there's something there. Well, as always, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. If you follow this concept just like Samson, you're sure to bring the house down. To find the show notes for today's episode, go to situssleschool.com/165.
I'm Chris Guillebeau, this is "Sidussle School." [Music]
