This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Can you monetize a college scholarship database? That is the business idea we're gonna look at today. Obscure college scholarships can be worth a lot of money. They also tend to be really valuable because fewer people are competing for them. And so parents are interested in this data, at least potentially.
We're gonna hear from a listener with a private spreadsheet. She has spent some time compiling this, she edits it. She does her best to make it very helpful and it saves her consulting clients thousands of dollars. So now she's thinking about maybe another step is packaging that intelligence. Could she package this in a different way, perhaps create a different source of income to where she's now selling a product as opposed to providing a service or perhaps in addition to?
So let's talk about how this works, how it could work better and how it might get you thinking about your next side hustle idea. I wanna encourage you to start and pursue and follow up on ideas of your own. So that's how we make this show. Detailed question from our caller and my answer right after this. [Music]
Hi team, Tasha from Tallahassee here.
I'm a part-time college aid advisor and over the past five years, I've collected a spreadsheet of about 500 super quirky scholarships. Stuff like flute players or students who knit. My consulting clients love it, but I keep thinking the list itself could become a product. Parents are desperate for free money leads, yet they hate paying for databases filled with expired links and info. If I turned my spreadsheet into a subscription site, how would I price it?
Keep the data fresh and convince families it's not just another dead link directory. [Music]
Hey Tasha, we often talk about turning a product into a service or a service into a product. This is a very natural logical extension of your brand, especially when you have something that's working and it's working well in some ways, but you also would like to, in the case of Tasha, perhaps you would like more passive income, what you could potentially have with a subscription site or just a one-time product, I think might also be better because the problem with a subscription is when people are applying for college scholarships, they're often looking to do it within a certain window of time and then they're not interested in it after that. I mean, theoretically, they're interested in it for four years, but really it's more like an initial period of time, typically a few months before the first year of college. So let's nail the customer and the price.
I think you're gonna market to parents, market to parents much more than marketing to students, market to parents of juniors, seniors with a good household income. Maybe it costs a hundred dollars or a hundred dollars a year if you're gonna do a subscription. I think that's kind of a rounding error if you can help people earn or save thousands of dollars. And then create a MVP platform in a weekend, minimum viable product. Let's make something really, really simple.
I would include a risk reversal guarantee that basically says, if you apply to 20 scholarships from the list and you don't get any of them, then you'll get a full refund. In other words, you are going to save money. Like you will save money with this product or you don't pay for it. I think that helps a lot. It really increases conversion, just increases the overall trust and confidence in someone making a buyer.
And then maybe it's helpful to have kind of a lead magnet of like an email that goes out, three weird scholarships. That goes out every Friday or something. And you kind of make the point of saying, actually there's a whole bunch more of these. Like I'm just highlighting three of them here in this newsletter, but when you get the whole spreadsheet, you're gonna learn about so many more. Ultimately, parents, the target market, they pay for savings, but also for certainty.
So as you said, it's important to kind of keep that data fresh, make sure the scholarships are still active. Maybe once a month, there's a reminder to just go through and click all the links, make sure they're working properly. Hopefully you can add some as well. Maybe set some news alerts that will help you to not automate, but at least semi-automate or simplify the process of updating the data. And hopefully it's gonna help a lot of people.
Good luck, Tasha. Listeners, let me know what you think. If you have a question, a comment, sidehustleschool.com. You can download or stream the entire archives of the podcast there, 3,213 episodes. Of course, new episodes drop every day, seven days a week, also free.
Thanks so much. My name's Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
