This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Let's talk about a plan to build and sell chatbots. This is a fun one. We're gonna try to help a computer science student launch a chatbot creation side hustle. What a wild world these days. I'm sure you've encountered chatbots if you have been on websites and the website's like, "Hey, you need some help, come and talk to me." And you're like, "Oh, it's a cool person here behind the screen." And you're like, "Actually, it's not a person.
It is in fact a chatbot. It is AI technology that is enabling helpfulness or maybe not, right? Sometimes you talk to these things and you don't actually get the answers you need. And it's just like a way of delaying your communication with a real person. But ideally, a good chatbot is actually gonna be able to answer questions and in fact be helpful.
I think one key point is not every business needs to have a chatbot because some businesses are gonna be better with that than others. But let's talk about it. Jason is a computer science student from the University of Texas at Austin. He's got some experience and he's eager to start this side hustle. How does he do it?
How does he go from his knowledge and experience to helping small business harness the power of chatbots? How does he price his service, market his offering and all that? Let's see what we can do to be helpful in a short action-packed episode. As always, you're gonna hear Jason's question. And then my answer after this quick message from our sponsor.
Thank you so much for being out there. Thank you for listening. [Music]
Hello, my name's Jason and I'm a computer science student at the University of Texas in Austin. I have experience building chatbots and working with AI prompts. And I'm interested in creating custom chatbots for small businesses to improve their customer service and lead generation.
I'm wondering what tools and platforms I should use to build and deploy these chatbots and how I can price my services competitively as a student freelancer. Additionally, I'm looking for advice on how to market my chatbot services to small businesses and demonstrate the value that they can provide. So what steps should I take to launch and grow this tech-focused side hustle? [Music]
All right, Jason, let's talk about chatbots, building chatbots and AI prompts to start your side hustle. In terms of the tools and platforms, I'm not an expert in that.
I have used mini chat that has been helpful to me. No sponsor relationship. I have just been a customer mini chat, but there's also chat fuel, mobile monkey. Some stuff works directly with Facebook Messenger. There are probably many other platforms that I'm not familiar with, but perhaps Jason is or somebody in this field.
So you have to kind of figure that out as for what the best platform is, but in terms of pricing and marketing, that's what we tend to focus on. For that, I guess how much does it cost to deploy and host a chatbot? What are other businesses paying for? Especially if you're focused on small businesses, what do they pay to do this? I guess also not just what are they paying, but what is the value that you are providing?
How are you making their life and their business better? Are you increasing their revenue? Are you reducing their customer support costs? It's always important to base your pricing on a value that you're providing, as opposed to just the amount of time that's involved or the hard cost of hosting. You want to choose a price based on value wherever possible and try to educate your customers and clients because then that makes them happy as well.
And in terms of marketing, well, you got a range of options. You can make a portfolio website. It's important to kind of show off some of what you've done, the chatbot projects, even if you've just been making them for yourself or kind of as tests, that's okay, as long as they work. This could be something that's good on Upwork. Businesses are going to Upwork all the time to look for help with their website and various tools and such.
You could develop targeted content like infographics, blog posts, videos, that could be a lot of work, but the right kind of content could be helpful to generate leads. You could partner with other freelancers or agencies like digital agencies that are building websites and doing web development. That might actually be one of the things you could do to quickly get into this field because they have existing clients and you're like, "Hey, I'm the specialist in chatbots." And so then they just essentially subcontract with you. So mine might start with that perhaps, but the other options can work as well. Jason, let us know how it goes with your technical expertise, drive and commitment.
I am excited to hear what develops. Listeners, I'm always excited to know what you're up to as well, as well as what your challenges are. Feel free to send in a question, sidehustleschool.com. We've got much more coming up. It's always free.
That's it for now, though. My name's Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
