This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Well, I always love the creative ideas that our listeners bring to me. This one is fun. I haven't heard of it before. I mean, I've heard some variations of it, but we've never actually talked about this. If you happen to want to watch NFL football games, I'm not a huge football fan, at least American football.
I'm not a huge fan myself, but obviously this is big entertainment, you know, multi-billion dollar industry. And it costs a lot of money to watch the games, at least if you don't have a cable subscription. If you want to pay for it on YouTube, it actually costs something like $300 to $400 a year, which just seems expensive to me, but again, you know, everybody's got a thing, right? If you're into football, you're willing to pay for it. So here's the thing, our caller Tony, he has found a way to essentially get 50% off discounts for these expensive NFL subscriptions.
He doesn't say exactly how he's done it, but I believe it, like people are able to find these things from time to time. And the trick is, it's not just like a coupon code or something that you could find online. It's something that he is, that is, it is pretty secretive, basically, at least that's my understanding from his question. So he's wondering, you know, what do I think about this? How can he go about selling this?
You know, how do we navigate the gray areas here, especially when there's some profit on the line? So I'll give you my take on it, of course, but let's hear about Tony's discovery. Quick little shout out to our sponsor and then his message. Hello, I'm Tony Cullen from Sarasota, Florida. By exploiting a loophole I stumbled upon, I've found a way to get people free subscriptions to NFL games on YouTube, a package that usually costs $350 a year.
I see an opportunity here, but I want to navigate it carefully. How can I advertise this service without attracting too much attention and possibly getting shut down? I'm a fan of your book, The Money Tree, and I respect the ethical standards you promote. So I'm also wondering about the legal implications of this. Just in advance for your time.
All right, Tony, this is a tricky one for me. And let's just begin by separating the legal implications from the ethical implications. So I can't really advise on legal risks, only to say that there probably are some real legal risks here. So you know, if nothing else, you want to be very careful with that. You know, you might want to actually consider a different idea.
But again, that's a bit outside my purview. I would say if it scales, if you are actually able to like have a lot of customers and people start noticing it, then most likely it would be a problem. And so that's not usually the best side hustle to get into. Although again, I respect, you know, the ingenuity of it, I just heard a long podcast about some of the early video game consoles like the PlayStation One, PS2, the Sega Dreamcast, and people who were selling like modded chips for those consoles, you know, to allow people to play different games that weren't licensed, you know, through the proper development process and so on. And it was a really interesting story.
And they were doing something that, you know, they really believed in and felt like customers should have the right to modify their own gaming console that they had paid for. But not surprisingly, the gaming console manufacturers and the developers felt differently about that. So that's going to be a difficult battle to win in the long term, especially against like a major corporation or, you know, in Tony's case here, the NFL, right? So we could even like leave the ethical question aside and just say practically speaking, it's going to be difficult to do this, you know, for a long period of time, at least at scale. So Tony, I would say take this, you know, intelligent thinking that you have and this ability to look for loopholes and to find solutions for people and perhaps find another way to apply it.
What else could you do like this that's not going to risk the ire of the NFL and, you know, all of the resources that they have access to and coming against somebody who is basically discounting the service when they don't want to do it? You always got to think like short term versus long term. And sometimes it's okay to just do a short term project. Not everything has to be like, here's my long term business I'm going to do for 10 years. But I'm also a fan of saying like, what could go wrong?
And normally the answer is not much could really go wrong, right? If it doesn't work, it just doesn't work. But in this case, or something like it, there are some real things that could go wrong. So I don't know. I don't know, Tony, maybe find another idea.
Just my two cents. But again, congrats on finding the loophole. I do respect that listeners if you have a question or some experience of your own side of social.com/questions will continue to feature them throughout the year along with updates from listeners as they launch their projects. I'm such a fan of everybody out there who's starting things, trying things, experimenting. I'm cheering you on over here, excited for much more to come.
My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.
