This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
What if your expertise with a simple software tool could eliminate years of debt and transform your family's entire financial future? That's exactly what Brett Kelly discovered when his Evernote guide generated over $120,000 in its first year, proving that digital expertise can create a life-changing income. Welcome friends, welcome community. My name's Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. This segment, Weekend Workshop, it's all about helping you learn the key steps to a new hustle, one step or concept per week.
It includes activities, examples, and more. And of course it is all free. We're using the book Side Hustle from idea to income in 27 days. That's available wherever books are sold, including an audio version. And for the first half of the year, we went through the 27 steps in the book.
Now in the second half, we're looking at more detailed case studies so you can hear and understand how people apply the framework. We've been talking a good bit about software tools this week. I just realized we had a question a couple of days ago from a freelancer who was wondering about using AI and whether he had to disclose that to his clients. And then the Throwback Thursday episode was about another guy who created a software tool or a spreadsheet tool basically, that now runs on autopilot and pays his rent each month. This story now goes back a good bit, I believe about 15 years before AI, at least before AI was what it is now.
And it's about the software known as Evernote, which is still around, not nearly as popular as it once was, but I used to be a big user of Evernote, which was note taking software. And this guy, Brett Kelly, he was living the classic middle-class struggle in Southern California. Despite working as a skilled software developer, he and his wife had a lot of credit card debt. They were just managing the crushing cost of living in pretty expensive place. And so their survival strategy was brutal, but necessary.
Brett and Joanna, that was his wife, worked opposite schedules, trading off childcare with nothing more than a quick high five as one of them left for work while the other returned home. So it was a little bit stressful, they were exhausted, just felt this financial pressure. And for years, Brett had watched friends and colleagues launch side projects. Some of them quit their jobs entirely, others established reliable extra income, but Brett remained on the sidelines. He was convinced he didn't have the right idea or the right skills to join them until one day, right?
There's always this moment of transformation. His breakthrough came from recognizing a gap in something he used daily. He was a big user of Evernote, that popular note keeping software. And he noticed something surprising. There was no user manual.
There actually was no manual to help people maximize the tool's potential. Now this software was free and powerful, and you could learn it pretty simply, but most users barely scratched the surface of its capabilities. And Brett was like, well, you know, I will document every tip, trick, and advanced technique that I've discovered through years of intensive use. So it wasn't about creating revolutionary new knowledge, it was about organizing existing expertise that most people didn't have time to discover on their own. So that's what he did.
He threw himself into creating what would become Evernote Essentials. He obsessively documented those features, he made detailed screenshots, he wrote comprehensive tutorials, and the finished product was 90 pages of solid practical content. And unlike some digital products that rely on large fonts and wide margins to inflate the page count, Brett's guide was densely packed with genuine value. Now he kept refining it and improving it. And finally he was like, okay, ready to go, gonna have to let go of perfectionism and launch this guide.
Sometimes done is better than perfect, especially when perfect never actually arrives. So let's take a quick break when we return. What happened when Brett launched Evernote Essentials? [Music]
Now before he actually launched Evernote Essentials, the guide, Brett made a deal with his wife Joanna that would define their family's future. The deal was if the guide sold at least $10,000 worth of copies, she could quit her exhausting restaurant job and stay home with her two kids full time.
Brett estimated it would take months, possibly longer to reach that goal. $10,000, right? It seemed ambitious, but also achievable given the time and effort he had invested into creating something valuable. Well, 11 days after the launch, Brett's PayPal account crossed into five figures. He immediately took a screenshot on his iPhone, made it his phone wallpaper.
And less than 24 hours later, Joanna submitted her two week notice at the restaurant. Now that initial success was just the beginning. Sales of Evernote Essentials continued generating at least $300 a day, projecting annual revenue of more than $120,000 for what had essentially been a side project. And because Brett owned the product completely and delivered it digitally, nearly every dollar of revenue was profit. If this had been a traditionally published book, Brett would have earned only about $18 a day in author royalties.
Instead, he kept the entire $300 that arrived in his PayPal account each day. Now this story goes on and Brett ended up actually working for Evernote later. He was able to get a job with them while continuing to sell the guide on his own and keep the profits, which was a pretty incredible arrangement. But in short, we can say the success of Evernote Essentials eliminated Brett's family debt and financial instability completely. And more importantly, it gave him and his family lifestyle freedom that they had never imagined possible.
So why did this work? What might you take away from the story? Well, I think the transformation worked because he identified this clear distance between what people wanted to accomplish and the resources available to help them. Evernote users wanted to maximize the tool's potential. There were a lot of people using this software and the comprehensive guidance didn't exist.
And then second, he created real value rather than superficial content. Like those 90 pages of detailed instructions were actually very helpful. You could read a few pages, learn a couple of things and all of a sudden you're organizing your information better, right? Better, faster, easier to access and so on. And he also priced it at 25 bucks.
So it was a modest investment that could dramatically improve productivity, making it an easy decision for lots of professionals. Can you still apply this model today? Yes, you can, absolutely. This approach works for any software tool system, anything that people use, but don't fully understand. It doesn't even have to be something technical.
The key is identifying the gap between basic functionality and advanced mastery. And then you make the bridge that helps people cross it. So it could be just about anything. Maybe ask yourself, do I have knowledge about something? Is there something I'm really good at, really geeky about?
And other people use this thing or they like this thing, this hobby, this category, this industry, this tool system platform, whatever it is, but they don't like it as much as I do or they're not as into it as I am. And I could show them some things that would make their life better and help them use this in a more effective way. So if you've got an answer to that, that could be your first or your next side hustle. Your everyday expertise could be somebody else's desperately needed solution. I'll leave you with that today.
And as always, it's better to have a simple idea. You can start right away than a brilliant idea that never launches. Thank you so much for tuning in today. I hope you'll continue to listen. The podcast is always free.
My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
