This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
What's up, what's up. Welcome to Side Hustle School. So glad you're out there. Thank you for tuning in today. Today's episode is part of our feature we've been doing all year called Your First Thousand Dollars.
As you might guess, it's all about how someone made their first thousand dollars. It's been our most popular new feature of 2022 and it's been fun to do it all throughout the year. Thank you for everybody who's been a part of these stories, who has sent in submissions or just anyone who's enjoyed listening to them. It really takes all of us here. So how did this person get to that point of making that first thousand dollars, not their first hundred thousand dollars?
That's what we'll do next season. Just kidding, probably gonna stick with a thousand dollars because I have learned once you begin to earn real money, the steps required to go to the next level are often much easier than that first real paycheck. So with that in mind, I'd just like to give a brief introduction and get out of the way. Today's feature comes from Daniel. Daniel is a programmer who was already working on one side hustle when he stumbled upon another.
So let's hear the story from him. Pretty interesting project here. He's making a difference in people's lives and he's making money. So that's two good things. All right, over to Daniel.
[Music]
Hey, this is Daniel and I'm pleased to report on the story of my first thousand dollars. I'm a coder and I've been working on an app for my main side hustle, but it's gonna take a while. So in the meantime, I wanted to do something a little different. I've thought a lot about the classic advice of solving a problem and it's led me to gain this idea. I help people get back their locked accounts.
This typically involves Facebook, but not always. These days, lots of people get hacked. It's all too easy to make a mistake and when it happens, you lose access to the account. Even once Facebook or another company has cut off access to the hackers, the account doesn't always go back to that person it belongs to. So that's the problem, but my solution, well, it's all about helping people regain access to a social account that's been locked.
At first, I thought that getting an account back would be a technical problem. That's why I was so interested in it. Interestingly though, I learned it was more of a social problem, at least in terms of convincing Facebook to look at it. It's hard to get account reps to care. And of course, some people are trying to scam them, so you have to be persistent.
Over time, I've developed a couple of relationships that I call upon to help me with difficult cases. I try not to do that too much though. To find those customers, I browse through other social accounts and look for people posting about being locked out somewhere. I contact them and I offer my services. Speaking of scammers, this can be difficult because they usually get pitched by a bunch of different people, some of whom just want their money or the seed phrase of their crypto wallet, which is even worse.
But since lots of people are locked out or hacked all the time, I'm getting about one in 20 who become a customer. It's not a bad ratio. It only takes me a few seconds to reach out. I charge $97 and people only pay when I'm successful. But so far I've helped 15 people, so that's well over $1,000, easy as.
I'm not sure how long I'll keep doing this, but it's fun and it pays well, and it makes people happy to get back into their Facebook or Instagram accounts after being stressed over the problem. So who knows? Maybe this will turn out to be my main hustle. [Music]
Thanks so much to Daniel for telling us about his first $1,000. In fact, his first 15 clients.
And he didn't actually mention this in his update, but it is 15 clients all in one month. So this is the first month he's been doing this. And charging $97 each time, he's helping people. It seems like a perfectly reasonable fee. I actually got hacked a year or two ago.
It was locked out of some of my accounts. It was really stressful. I would have been happy to have paid Daniel to help me get my account back. Instead, I had to wait like two weeks and try to talk to lots of different people. So while I wish hacking wasn't a thing, I am glad that Daniel's out there 'cause it's probably not going to end.
So probably good that he's still there. All right, that's it for today. If you have a question or an update for us about your hustle, sidehustleschool.com/questions. Gonna keep working on new episodes for you every single day. You can subscribe, follow, wherever you like to listen.
My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the "Onward Project."
