Rehearsal App for Actors Earns $500,000

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A rehearsal app for actors earns $500,000. That's our story today. Welcome, friends. Welcome, Side Hustle School community. It's Chris Guillebeau, your host.

Something that I really believe is we are all entrepreneurs no matter what we do for a living. In other words, everybody is ultimately responsible for themselves. I try to be careful about not using that word, the capital E, entrepreneur word, too much. It implies all sorts of things. Lots of our folks out there are like, I don't wanna be a startup founder.

Maybe you even have a job that you like, but you also like the idea of creating financial security through a side hustle or a small business. So ultimately, we're all trying to make something for ourselves to have our own independence. So essentially, entrepreneurship is about creating projects and sources of income, which is the point of the show. And today's story reinforces the fact you can do all kinds of things without being quote unquote qualified or without taking a lot of that capital E entrepreneur risk. In fact, the story is about a radio host and acting coach who is unsatisfied with the iPhones built in voice recorder.

So he makes an app to help actors rehearse. It goes on to be downloaded more than a hundred thousand times and earn half a million dollars. Sounds like a pretty amazing outcome. I'm excited to share this story with you and hopefully give you a point of inspiration along the way. That detailed story is coming right up.

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David H. Lawrence, the 17th, and yes, that's correct. The 17th wanted to be an actor ever since he was a teenager acting in his high school's theater productions. Although he scored the lead roles, he didn't feel confident about turning acting into a career, at least not directly. So instead, David went into radio.

He started in music, progressed to talk shows. His shows grew and changed with time. He would talk about politics or tech. He worked his way all around the country, eventually ending up in Washington, DC. Now that was fun for a while, but after 16 years, his mind drifted back to his childhood dream.

So at 45 years old, it was time to move to Los Angeles. The best part, he wouldn't have to be a starving artist. David could do his radio show from anywhere in the world. And in his spare time, he could work on building his acting skills as well as doing voiceover work. And that's where our story is gonna pick up because on the acting side of things, he had booked a consistent role on NBC's "Heroes" as the puppet master.

His success there led him to be contacted by another NBC show. They were interested in him auditioning. So David was like, "Awesome, this is great." But he only had a couple hours to prepare. Normally, he would record an audio file of his scene partner's lines, then upload it to iTunes and rehearse with it until it was memorized. But in this case, he had no time for it.

So instead, he sat in his car and recorded the lines on the built-in iPhone app called Voice Memo. You might've used this app. It's good for making voice memos, but it wasn't so great for David's purpose because it had a fatal flaw. There was no repeat feature on the app. Now, normally this would be okay, but David needed to rehearse on the drive to Paramount Studios.

So as he weaved in and out of traffic on the 101, he tried in desperation to press the replay button over and over without getting into a wreck. David couldn't believe there wasn't something as simple as a repeat button. He scoured other available apps to see if there was any that had that function. He found only one, and in his opinion, it sucked. He knew he could do better, and so that's what he did.

He made an app called Rehearsal Pro. This app was gonna help his fellow performers learn their lines without fidgeting with that built-in voice recorder. Since David didn't have the skills to create the app himself, a friend recommended a developer who happened to be a fan of NBC's Heroes. That developer agreed to make the app on a revenue share basis, which turned out to be a pretty good choice for him, and soon they were all set. Once they got ready to launch, they released Rehearsal Pro in the app store.

As luck would have it, they were chosen to be the app of the day. Now this is pretty wild. On their very first day, they would get tens of thousands of downloads, or so they thought, because here's where a little snafu comes in. When people registered on the app, they had to put in their email so Rehearsal Pro could communicate with them. And as it turned out, Gmail has a built-in limitation that can only send so many outgoing emails in a day.

Most of the time, that maximum is 500. And so they hit 500 downloads within the first 45 seconds the app was released. They had to move fast to get the service back up and running so they could take full advantage of the exposure. They found a better solution with GoDaddy and were soon back up and running. Now in the beginning, that app was not a subscription.

It was just a one-off payment. That's how apps used to work. They had 162,537 downloads. At something like $3 each, the app made $500,000 since release. So that's pretty incredible on its own.

But David didn't stop there. As time went on, he grew Rehearsal Pro along with another side hustle, a voice acting training course called VO2GoGo. I think I'm saying that right, VO2GoGo. From each of these projects, David himself earns $200,000 a year, his choice to create side hustles relating to his industry also helped him to make leaps and bounds in his career field. 'Cause all of a sudden he's making more connections with people involved in acting.

He gets to discuss his creation with powerful people in the industry. And along with these incredible networking experiences, David now has a front seat to the evolution of acting. He could observe trends, see what's getting more popular. And of course, his work allows him to hone his craft while he's getting paid. I mean, the benefits just go on and on, right?

He credits part of his success in performing to his previous experience in business. Learning to think entrepreneurially is a highly valuable skill, no matter what you do with it. I mentioned that David's name was David Lawrence the 17th. He actually added the 17th to his name to distinguish himself from all the other David Lawrence's that were a part of the Screen Actors Guild. He got the idea because he popped up 17th on IMDB for David Lawrence, because everybody else had the same name.

So he was like, I'm gonna be the only one who is the 17th. Again, we are all entrepreneurs, even if you love your job, even if you're doing like a hybrid sort of life where you're working for yourself for a while, then working for others, a company, an organization, whatever it is. The whole point of Side Hustle School is that there's something you can make for yourself. And I want to leave you with that today. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better.

It's been my privilege to make this show for you for a long time. But of course, the archives, the complete archives 3,200 plus episodes are available for free on sidehustleschool.com. That's all for now. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to "Side Hustle School." [Music]

From the Onward Project.