College Student Hacks Into $40,000 A Month Side Hustle

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

College student hacks into $40,000 a month side hustle. When the student found himself in thousands of dollars worth of debt, he made a simple $40 investment that would go on to transform his life and reach tens of thousands of people around the world. Welcome to Side Hustle School. Chris Guillebeau here, your host. Excited to bring you today's story, but also have a new book out.

It's called Time Anxiety. It's about the fear of running out of time, about how do we decide what to do next? How can we free ourselves from deadline dread, chronic rushing, all those kinds of things that just weigh us down. I've been working on this book for a long time. I'm so thrilled to have it out in the world.

timeanxiety.com. You can order the book from any retailer. I'm also doing events across the country. You can find dates and details on that website as well. But of course, on with the show because that's happening too every single day, of course.

And this particular segment is part of a remix. Some of our best stories from 2017, 2018, going all the way back there. If you happen to be listening then, well, we've got some updates. And if you were not listening in 2017, well, it's completely new. So as noted today's story, it's about this college student.

He creates a series of courses on the topic of ethical hacking. So he's basically a computer programmer showing people how to hack systems for good, as opposed to the other kind of hacking. He goes on to earn five figures in net income each month from these materials. He's just doing fabulously well. He was several years ago when we first featured him and he's still going strong.

It's just incredible story. So I'm gonna bring it to you in just 30 seconds. Quick little shout out to our sponsor. Stay tuned. [Music]

For college student and self-described ethical hacker, Zaid al-Qarashi, everything seemed to be going according to plan.

His website teaching Arabic speakers how to ethically hack was making decent money. He was doing well in class. He even had some cash left over to buy himself a nice car. But then he encountered a challenge. Going to school one day, the engine of his car blew out and left him with no way to get to college for the coming months.

This topped off with a few other financial commitments, left Zaid in dire need of $4,000. So it's not exactly money that a college kid has lying around in his dorm room. To help solve the problem, a close friend recommended that Zaid take a look at the website Udemy website and platform. They had thousands of people looking for courses like Zaid's and he could reach many more people than with his current website. Zaid thought this was a great idea.

He'd already created all the material for his ethical hacking courses. He just needed to translate the audio from Arabic to English. He dubbed over it kind of like a Hollywood movie using the free iMovie editor that came pre-installed on his MacBook. Now I should point out that Zaid doesn't make his money teaching people to hack like the bad guys you see on the news. Instead, Zaid relates what he does to martial arts.

So if you were to learn kung fu, for example, you could use it to either defend yourself or to go out and hurt people, okay? And black hat hackers would use their kung fu skills to steal your identity while you're using the free wifi at Starbucks. But white hat hackers like Zaid use their skills to hack pre-approved security systems and help them improve their online defenses. All right, so back to setting up the course. Because Udemy charges no fees to upload a course and works on a profit share basis, Zaid was able to create and upload his courses with minimal costs.

In fact, he invested just 40 bucks. It was like 20 bucks on a basic microphone and $20 on a screen recording program. Sales took off right away. Just kidding, they were actually really slow. The first few months after uploading his course, Zaid saw virtually no sales.

He admits he's not great at marketing. He wasn't sure how to get his course out to an English-speaking audience, but he managed to get some initial sales through Reddit and Facebook. And once he began to see some of those sales, Udemy stepped in to help, which was awesome. Noticing his potential to become a top instructor, Udemy distributed his course to more people through their marketing boost program. And by the way, if you're looking to use that platform as well, you can request to be part of it.

You just wanna make sure your courses are strong and well-received by those who've taken them so far. After getting promoted by Udemy, Zaid saw his sales spike. He also made another course and then another, and this was key because the students and the sales kept coming. Zaid made more courses. He was up to eight.

They sell for 50 to $200 each. And what does it all add up to? Well, at the time of the first podcast, he had 90,000 students. Now he has more than 800,000 students. Isn't that an incredible number?

And just to be clear, these are not free students. At the time we featured him, he was earning $40,000 a month in total course sales. He also stopped selling his Arabic courses to focus full time on an English speaking audience. So what advice does he have for you or me or somebody else out there who wants to do something like this? Well, first thing he says is to experiment a lot.

Brainstorm ideas, try multiple ways to solve your problem. By testing a few methods, you can see what performs well. Then you record the results and refer back to them to help solve future problems. Looking to the future, Zaid is working to expand his courses into even more languages, why not? And is in the process of turning one of his flagship courses into a book.

He also upgraded from that $20 microphone to have his own recording studio. He bought some higher quality equipment to help him produce even more valuable courses to his huge numbers of online students. And this was all from the goal of earning enough cash to fix his car. [Music]

All right, as I said, some pretty amazing results for Zaid's courses. And just to be clear, does every Udemy course or every online course see these results?

Definitely not, but it's also not a fluke. There are dozens of others just on Udemy alone and pretty much on every platform that sell in the tens of thousands a month. Or even if it's selling in the thousands of units, just imagine how much money that is. And these courses are selling for usually 10 to $20 at the low end, 50 to $200 in the middle range, sometimes more. So he's not the only one.

And we featured lots of stories over the years of people doing this. Also Zaid's topic, hacking, you're like, well, computer programming, that's a really hot topic. Sure, but we recently had this story about a woman baking bread. We've had other stories about all kinds of topics, some of which might seem kind of boring or basic, but yet they're meeting a need, providing a solution to a problem. There's something that lots of people are interested in.

So don't worry about following a trend or trying to find the hot topic. Focus on being useful. Focus on being useful and helpful. I'm gonna leave you with that today. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better.

As I said, I'm on the road for a couple of weeks. Would love to see you somewhere. And please check out the new book. I encourage you to buy at least one copy. If you enjoy the podcast, I think you'll like the book.

It's called "Time Anxiety" available from any retailer. Just go to timeanxiety.com or wherever you like to shop. That's all for now. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

- From the Onward Project.