This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Most people think of Google Forms as a pretty basic survey tool. I've used it a number of times. I think it's great, but also pretty simple and basic. It's helpful, it also doesn't look that great, and that's usually fine. But today's throwback Thursday feature, he decided that limitation was optional.
Basically, he's a school district IT specialist, and by night, he's poking around with these little tools and trying to make them better. So after some trial and error, and an infamous weekend that he'll tell us about, he discovered he could graft timers, conditional logic branching, even pop-up configurations and CSS, a bunch of custom stuff, essentially, onto any form. So suddenly, this platform, which is pretty basic, can now run timed quizzes and onboarding flows, just all kinds of other cool stuff. And Google Forms is free, at least I think it's free. I don't think I pay for it.
Well, it's either free or low cost. I'm pretty sure I don't pay anything for it. Anyway, this guy shows a demo to a nonprofit director, and she pays him $200 to trick out her form setup. And then within a couple months, he's booking evening Zoom sessions, also at $200 an hour teaching small businesses how to upgrade their form. So basically, he'll talk about how he made this idea happen, how he got going.
I reverse engineered Google Form Hacks. That's what we're gonna call it. He is a tinkerer who finds a way to make money from his skill, his story, coming up. And I'll be back at the end with a few words of wrap up. [Music]
My day job in IT at a large high school involves untangling Chromebooks and forgotten passwords.
So I live inside Google Workspace. One afternoon, our principal asks for a student leadership election form that hides question two until kids answer question one. Google Forms can't do that out of the box, but I knew app script might. After a couple of coffees, I had a conditional logic workaround. If a student picked run for office, a hidden section slid into view, otherwise the form jumped straight to the thank you page.
That tiny victory started a weird obsession. Over the next month, I learned to inject custom CSS for logos, add a countdown timer and trigger email merges that looked nothing like Google's default receipts. I documented each trick in a messy Google Doc labeled wizardry. Then a friend of a friend ran a grant making nonprofit and needed an online application portal. Fast, cheap, but branded.
I sent her a Zoom link, shared my screen and rebuilt her existing Word templates inside Google Forms using some of the scripts I'd written. Along the way, I dropped in her logo, swapped the purple header for their teal gradient and set a timer so late submissions auto closed at midnight Eastern. We finished in 52 minutes. She insisted on paying $200 and my hourly rate was born. I posted a single line on LinkedIn, making Google Forms do things Google never intended.
DM if your survey needs a glow up. Two small agencies bit within a week. One needed a stylish client onboarding form. The other a timed aptitude test for interns. Each booked a two hour block.
By the end of those sessions, I was $600 up. The sprint to $1,000 came courtesy of a university professor who wanted a self-paced lab quiz with branching hints and instant scoring. He'd been paying a service for it, but of course Google Forms is free, at least after paying me to customize it. Three hours of work, $600, instant PayPal payment, total site income, $1,200 in a few evenings and one weekend. The secret, if there's anything, is limiting scope.
I promise only three things, conditional logic, custom branding and an optional timer. Anything beyond that becomes phase two. Because the jobs are bite size, I finished before my kid's bedtime, send a loom walkthrough to the client and never touch the project again. Clients love that the finished form lives inside their Google Drive. No new platform, no extra logins.
I love that I'm selling knowledge, not pixels. The code sits in a reusable library, I paste it, tweak a few variables and watch the aha moment on Zoom and the button changes color to match a brand deck. Could Google someday add these features and kill my project? Probably, but that's okay. And maybe by then I'll have reverse engineered the next hidden corner of workspace.
Until that day, I'll keep turning boring purple forms into money and bedtime stories. [Music]
Hey, thanks Steve, I appreciate you sharing this story. Definitely an interesting thing. Whenever there's a tool that a lot of people are using, like I'm pretty sure, I was gonna say millions of people are using Google Forms, I don't know if it's millions, but lots and lots of people are using Google Forms. A lot of people are using this tool, but it's basic.
It reminds me of the story of the guy who wrote the user manual for Evernote. Now here in this case, we don't have a user manual, we just have kind of an upgraded series of tools or features with this platform that the guy has created, but obviously it has worked out for him. And maybe he'll go on to do something else. Probably not a lifelong side hustle here, but it's a lifelong skill that you can turn into a lot of different side hustles and other projects, maybe even a full on business at some point. Who knows?
Listeners, let me know what you think, who you'd like to see featured from our archives of thousands of episodes. I'm so glad you're out there. I've been making the podcast every day for 3,200 plus days, the complete archive, the catalog of back catalog episodes is available at sidehustleschool.com. And of course new episodes, wherever you'd like to listen. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the "Onward Project."
