This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
A campaign scheduling tool turns out voters. Welcome friends, welcome side hustle school listeners and community. So glad you're there wherever you happen to be in the world, whatever you happen to be doing today. I hope you're taking care of yourself and maybe pursuing some goals for yourself as well. Today is our segment known as Throwback Thursday.
We're going to hear from a part-time coder who never intended to start a software business, but ended up building a product that now helps local campaigns organize their ground game. So during an election cycle, it's common for small campaigns to be overwhelmed. A lot of stuff happens in a short period of time, and so you need volunteers to be scheduled, canvassing, routes set up. I assume call banks, probably a bunch of stuff, but basically a lot of logistics, and again, it's a compressed schedule. So this guy saw this chaos up close and decided to do something about it, not by running for office himself, but by solving a behind-the-scenes problem that no one else was doing much.
So let's hear the full story from him. He's going to share more about the idea, how he made it happen, what the outcome has been, and so on. I share these stories to get you thinking about your own ideas, what they might be in the first place, and as well, how to take action on them. I always hope you will take action on your ideas, move forward positively as mentioned. So passing the microphone, I'll be back at the end with a quick wrap-up.
I didn't set out to build a business, I just wanted my friend's political campaign to function like a normal workplace. She was running for a city council seat in a medium-sized town in Ohio. The biggest mess was volunteer scheduling. Every week was a nightmare of Excel sheets, long e-mail threads, and texts like, "Oh, wait, I thought you had this covering District 3 today." This was pretty competitive race, and so details like voter turnout really mattered. I'm not a professional developer, but I can hack things together.
So I made a basic web form using Google Forms, tied it to a Google Sheet backend, and wrote a script to auto e-mail reminders. It was rough, but it worked. After the election, another candidate asked if they could use it. At that point, I realized this wasn't just a one-off random thing. It could actually be helpful to people running small-scale campaigns without big budgets.
I cleaned up the tool, renamed it Canvas Pal, and set up a payment method I offered to pricing peers, $2.99 for small campaigns for under 20 users, and $4.49 for others. Payments went through Stripe, and it was just a small project, but I treated it like a real product. When a county party chapter in Pennsylvania asked to license it for eight simultaneous campaigns, I knew I needed to tighten things up. I added user permissions, analytics, and a better UI. They paid two grand for a white label version.
It's now been used for four different states, and I've made just over $18,000 so far. Enough to justify the time I spent on it, but not so much on why I'm quitting my day job. I don't advertise. All of my customers has come through word-of-mouth Slack groups or small e-mail list servers. I could try scaling it further, but honestly, I like it as a small relatively unknown project.
It solves a very specific problem, and the people who run campaigns are the ones who need to hear about it. It doesn't need AI, it doesn't need funding, it just works. I still update it, and at small improvements each offseason, I learned that when you help people save time, it reduces a lot of stress, especially in something as chaotic as local politics, they're willing to pay for it, even if you built the first version on a weekend. Hey, Brad. Thank you so much for sharing this story.
It definitely seems like a helpful tool. Again, a lot of things are happening in a short period of time, and there's a lot of chaos. So wherever there is chaos, there is room for what is the antidote or the response to chaos organization. I guess that is the remedy to chaos is organization, and this guy has found a way to create that in this little microstructure of local campaigns. You can think about that for yourself as well, like where do you notice chaos or disorganization?
Is there a chance to provide organization? What does that look like in a practical sense? Perhaps that is your next idea, and if not, well, maybe it's something else. Let me know what you think, who you'd like to see featured from our archives of thousands of episodes. If you have a question or an update about your side hustle, sidehustleschool.com.
We've got detailed notes pages for every single episode. We've got free resources there. You can download or stream every one of those legacy episodes, and of course, new episodes drop every day, seven days a week. Thanks for being out there. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
You are listening to Side Hustle School. From The Onward Project.
