This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
If you're looking for your next side hustle, maybe it could be organizing someone's email. That's what today's caller is wondering about. Inbox zero for hire, perhaps. Can organizing someone's email become a real side hustle? In this episode, we're gonna look at whether paid email cleanup, and just, I guess, personal organizing in general, can be a viable side hustle.
How to land the kind of clients who will actually pay for it. By the way, email overload is a silent productivity killer. There are people out there who have 5,000 or more unread messages. Others are too busy to even delete promotions. All those emails you get from every restaurant you ever visit or anything you sign up for, they get your email and you're on a newsletter for life.
What if somebody could swoop in and tidy it all up and set you on a path to digital peace? That's the goal, at least that's the idea, the benefit behind this side hustle idea proposal. But she's not sure if it's a real business or just a digital chore that people don't value. This is actually something we've seen work before. It's essentially a specialized version of virtual assistants, and the key is finding the right clients.
So let's look at all of that, see if we can be helpful, get her on the right track, and hopefully somebody else out there as well, her detailed question and my answer coming right up. [Music]
Hello team, this is Eva from Fresno, California. I'm the kind of person who actually enjoys organizing things, especially digital clutter. A few friends have asked me to help sort their email inboxes, and I realized this might be something more than just a favor. I'm thinking about offering a paid inbox cleanup service, archiving old emails, setting up labels and filters, maybe even ongoing maintenance as a subscription.
Is this a legit side hustle idea? I know it's kind of niche, but I feel like busy people would pay for it. If so, how do I find the right clients and price for something like this? [Music]
All right, Natalie, this absolutely can be a viable hustle, and in fact, we have featured someone on the show who did exactly this. I forget the episode number, but they helped executives, authors, startup founders manage digital overwhelm, starting with inbox cleanup, but evolving into broader digital organization.
'Cause ultimately, it's not only the inbox that contributes to overwhelm, that's certainly a big component of it, but there's probably some other things as well. It could be calendar, it could be other inboxes. It's not just email, we all get messages in lots of places these days. It could be wherever you keep notes. Do you use Notion?
Do you use Evernote? Do you use some other tool? And of course, we all have lots of different apps and software, and we might have analog methods as well. Like there's all sorts of platforms and areas and spaces where notes and information go. So that can be very overwhelming.
Now, as a side hustle or as a business, like your trick is twofold. Your challenge is to position it not as a chore, but as a productivity unlock. I think this is important, it's an important tip for getting more value, like being able to charge more. It's not just like, oh, I'm gonna take out your trash. I'm going to create a space that allows you to thrive, to do more deep work, to do more of what's important to you.
That's the kind of message that you want to present. And then accordingly, you need to find high value clients who feel this pain acutely and can afford to pay for the fix, 'cause not everybody can, right? So to consider what you're really offering, you're not just cleaning up email, you're giving people time, clarity, and mental space. And so then if you target people whose time is worth a lot, I think executives, entrepreneurs, consultants, that becomes a more premium service. I think that's the direction to go in.
So you could offer like a flat fee inbox reset. You're charging a few hundred dollars maybe a bit more for a full cleanup, could be a couple thousand dollars depending on how busy the person is, how much data you're dealing with. But I think it's more important to then upsell a monthly maintenance plan, which could be hundreds of dollars a month where you check in, keep things tidy. As you build trust, some clients may ask for help managing other digital administration tasks. So it is definitely a real service, not just tidying email, solving a problem that's constantly in people's faces, but rarely addressed.
And if you can specialize in a specific type of client, then most likely you're gonna be able to carve out a niche that's much more profitable than trying to offer it as a general service. Last but not least, this is a very high trust kind of service, just having access to someone's inbox and private communication. So you need to reassure clients with clear boundaries, data privacy practices, maybe even a confidentiality agreement just to make it really clear that you are a trustworthy and reliable soul. All right, Natalie, good luck. Let us know how it goes.
Listeners, if you have a question, sidehustleschool.com/questions. We'll continue to feature them throughout the year, along with updates from other listeners as they launch and grow their projects. The podcast comes out daily. It's always completely free. My name's Chris Guillebeau.
This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
