This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Today's featured storyteller works full time in marketing operations. They spend a lot of the weekday elbow deep in HubSpot. HubSpot is a tool, a database, customer relationship management, et cetera. But after watching his realtor friend drown in a sea of duplicated contacts and unread followup tasks, he realized something. Real estate agents don't need a six month tech overhaul.
They need a three hour rescue mission that makes their phone ring tomorrow. That is in fact what real estate agents want to release. That's what he discovered. So he packaged that rescue as a flat fee CRM cleanup sprint. CRM of course, meaning customer relationship management.
In a single morning session, he logs into the agent's HubSpot portal or maybe it's some other database, I'm not sure. Merges duplicate leads, tags contacts by their buying stage, writes an automated, hey, just checking in email and builds a simple dashboard that shows who's hot and who's gone cold. And he does this all for, I think it's a few hundred dollars. He'll tell us about that. He's gonna tell us how he got this idea, how he made it happen, how he in fact made his first thousand dollars because you're on Side Hustle School.
This is part of our segment known as First $1,000, how somebody goes from idea to income. So I'm excited to bring you this story. I'll be around at the end for a few words of wrap up, but mostly I like to get out of the way and pass the microphone to our featured Side Hustler. [Music]
I live in spreadsheets and workflows, but most of my friends sell houses. Last spring, my friend Claire called, panicked.
She just realized her HubSpot list had 4,300 contacts, half with no phone numbers, dozens duplicated three times over. Open house visitors from 2019 were still marked hot. Deals were slipping through the cracks. I logged in on Zoom and spent over an hour decluttering, dedup tool, bulk property edits, a quick inactive over 12 months tag. Claire's face lit up when her contact count dropped to an accurate 2,700.
The next day she texted, that hour saved me a week. She was thrilled, but it was also a light bulb moment for me. That weekend, I wrote a one page offer called, three hour CRM cleanup sprint for realtors. The scope was crystal clear. My service would merge duplicates, tag every contact by stage, whether lead, active buyer, past client, build one automated followup email that sends on day seven, and create a dashboard with new leads, past due tasks, and birthdays this month.
The price was $250, no hourly overages, and a done by lunch promise. I posted the offer in a local real estate mastermind Facebook group and asked Claire for a testimonial. My pipeline went from chaos to clear in three hours flat. Her screenshot of the shiny new dashboard did the selling for me. Within two days, two agents booked.
By Friday, I filled the fifth slot. All sessions happened the following week between 7 a.m. and noon. Real estate quiet hours. I shared my screen on Zoom so agents could watch the cleanup happen live, which not every agent cared about, but was cool for the ones who did.
Seeing duplicates disappear in real time, that built instant trust. Here's what each sprint looked like. Hour one, run HubSpot's native D-tube, then manually merge stragglers. When the agent watched, I asked quick questions. Does Aunt Joan really need three tags?
So decisions took seconds. Hour two, bulk edit stages. If a lead hadn't replied in 90 days, it dropped to cold. Buyers under contract moved to closing. Hour three, draft a friendly check-in email and set a simple workflow.
New lead, day seven follow-up, task for a phone call on day 10. We finished by adding a pie chart widget to the dashboard that showed hot versus cold contacts. Visual proof of progress. I had almost no cost for this business since it was built on my existing expertise. After those first five sessions, two agents referred colleagues from other brokerages.
I now cap myself at three sprints a month, so it stays fun. The script never changes and neither does the payoff. By lunch, the agent's CRM is cleaner than their glove compartment and I pocketed $250. If you've mastered a platform that others fear, whether it's Shopify, MailChimp or HubSpot, remember the magic is in tight scope and rapid results. I don't think this would have worked as well if I hadn't been so specific.
Thanks for letting me share my story. [Music]
Well, this is a pretty clear description of people who have a problem. These agents are constantly trying to contact people and I'm sure it's like a sales process, but also like an upkeep, maintenance, customer service process as well. A little bit of both, you're prospecting for future sales, you're kind of keeping current things warm. It's a whole like dashboard sort of situation basically.
So if you can pay a couple hundred dollars or I think it's, what was it, $300, then this person's gonna make your life a lot easier, hopefully gonna bring you well over $300 worth of value and that's why the business has been able to work. So well done, sounds great to me. Listeners, let me know what you think. If you have a question and update about your hustle, anything else, you can also access a notes page for every single episode directly on the website, sidehustleschool.com. This was episode 3,222.
New episodes every day, thanks for tuning in. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
