This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Welcome to Throwback Thursday, our weekly segment here on Side Hustle School, where we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them. I love bringing you these segments. I also really enjoy hearing the updates and working on the stories myself. Now, last week we heard from Nico Mendoza, who sells 3D printing templates. And after he lost his job last year, he actually lost a very high-paying job.
He started taking his side gig more seriously and business took off. In that update, he talked about how losing his job was probably the best thing that could have happened to him because it allowed him to grow this business and, as I said, take it more seriously. Now, today in our latest feature, we'll hear from Maggie Palmer. Maggie is the founder of Peptalker. When I say Peptalker, there's a bit of a play on words there because it's actually Peptalker, like H-E-R, Peptalker.com, there's an app called Peptalker.
When we first featured Maggie in episode 987, Foreign Correspondent launches Career App. Both Maggie and her company are dedicated to closing the gender pay gap and it's working. I mean, maybe not for like every person in the world yet, but the app and Peptalker's programs have helped 60,000 users, mostly women, negotiate a pay raise. She's got some incredible stories along with lots of free resources on her website. And she also has a model kind of like mine where she tries to do most of her work for free.
So very cool app and business and programs, it's all kind of stuff. So what's happened since and also a bit more about the origin, let's hear directly from Maggie and I'll come back at the end to wrap us up. [Music]
My name's Maggie Palmer and I'm the founder of Peptalker. I'm currently in New York City and I was featured on the podcast in episode 987. So I started a business called Peptalker because I was frustrated from my own experience of the gender pay gap.
And I wanted to help other people make sure that they didn't make the same mistakes that I did and frankly get screwed over in the same way that I did. And so I run a company. We work in-house with Fortune 100 clients, training their executives and their leaders on negotiation and understanding the power of having diversity in your leadership pipeline. And then we have a really large community. We have a free app.
We have about 60,000 professional women in our community and we run online courses and programs for them to help support them to get the pay that they deserve and to get the raises and promotions that they're really looking for in their careers. So I was working full-time as a reporter and a producer, making films, they were doing really well, they were winning awards, all sorts of stuff. But I, yeah, I was like, my job was like, I was like, I love it. It's like an eight, maybe an eight and a half out of 10, but I was like, it just wasn't what I was looking for. And it wasn't gonna give me honestly, like the geographic freedom that I wanted and the financial freedom that I wanted.
So when I became so passionate about the issue of the gender pay gap, I wanted to figure out how I could do something to help, but I honestly didn't know if I would ever make money. I knew I would make an impact, but I never knew if it would make cash. So I just like started helping friends and then helping their friends and then their other friend would get sacked while a maternity leave or someone would get promoted and not get a raise and so they would call me and I would just help for free and just like offer advice and coaching based on my own experience, the good things that I did and the mistakes that I made. And it really just snowballed from there. We started an Instagram page.
I taught myself how to code a website using YouTube and it was the worst website you have ever seen. And that's okay because you've got to start somewhere. Obviously I'm appalled by it now, but it was just like the most basic email capture website you've ever seen. And it just like as more people wanted to know more information, I would build it. Someone would say, "Oh, how do I ask for a raise?" So I would build a little document, turn it into a PDF and put it on the website.
I started posting about issues impacting women, professional women at work on an Instagram page and then it just kind of kept growing and growing and growing. So I think the biggest challenge for me throughout the business has been making money. Like I knew what I wanted the outcome to be. I wanted women to get paid properly. I wanted companies to hire more women into senior roles, but I didn't know what the business model would be.
So there's been a lot of trial and error. So the pep talker app is totally free and that's a big part of our impact strategy. We want everyone around the world to be able to have that app on their Apple or Android phone so that they can track their successes and then advocate and negotiate better for themselves. So that was free, but then what happened was that became a lead generator in a way for people who wanted to work with us, who wanted us to come in and teach their companies about the issues that arise when there's a gender pay gap in a business. And then individuals asked me whether I could coach them one-on-one and then people were like, do you have an online course?
And I was like, what's an online course? And so as people would ask us, we would kind of create it. And then they were like, do you do events? Brands would be like, we want to align with these values. We believe in equal pay too.
Can we do an event? And I was like, sure, we can figure that out and do an event. So it's one of those things. We make money through our online courses. We offer a lot of stuff for free, but there are some paid courses and most of our money comes from our corporate clients.
So since I was featured on the show and a shout out to everyone who's followed us and messaged us post the show. I always loved knowing that they came from this podcast. It's so fun. We've launched this really fun thing. Like again, impact is our core value.
And so we've launched these quarterly five day challenges and it's honestly been transformational for our business because, you know, it's grown the community. Like I think we've more than doubled since we were last on the podcast. Our revenue, you know, we were fortunate. We actually, we had a freak out during COVID, but we actually doubled during COVID. Since this podcast, I think our revenues tripled.
So we're doing great, but what's exciting for me is the impact. And so we've structured it so that these five day challenges, we do a know your worth challenge. We do a success sprint. We do one focused on a performance review bootcamp. And so what we've done is we've worked with our in-house psychologists to develop these free training programs that people can put into practice straight away.
So if anyone wants to sign up, they can jump on peptalker.com/challenge. Some people will hate your idea. And sometimes that's the best thing because it'll make you think more critically about what you need to shift in your business model or your idea to make it land better. But I think starting something as a side hustle is such a wonderful way to start because it's like a soft landing. You hopefully still have a salary coming in and you can kind of tinker away at night or on the weekends or in your lunch break and just slowly, slowly, slowly start, right?
Just get one paying client. Can you get someone to pay you two and a bucks a month? 'Cause that's just also gonna help your confidence too, right? And a lot of what we do at peptalker is around imposter syndrome, how to overcome that, how to build that confidence muscle. And when you're starting a business, sometimes it's just overwhelming and there's just like a lot.
[Music]
Thank you so much, Maggie. Thank you for those updates. And also thank you for doing this awesome work. It is so cool. I'm glad the podcast brought you some folks as well.
Hopefully some more people will check it out. Maggie's work reminds me of this quote, "If you build your business around helping people, you'll always have plenty of work." I wrote that long ago in the $100 startup and it's a model that I try to follow myself. Now, as you just heard, Maggie is very interested in impact and does most of her work for free. Again, the website she mentioned was peptalker.com/challenge. So peptalker, P-E-P-T-A-L-K-H-E-R.com.
You can also find their app in the iOS App Store and I believe there's an Android version as well. All right, this was one of our most popular new features of 2020, Throwback Thursday. And as you've heard, since we're halfway through 2021, we are keeping it going. So let me know what you think and who you'd like to see featured. If you have a question, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions.
Thank you so much for tuning in today. I hope you will subscribe or follow, tell your friends and come back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You are listening to "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the "Onward Project."
