This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
An iPhone app tracks weight loss progress. Welcome friends. Welcome back to Side Hustle School and welcome to Throwback Thursday, our weekly segment where we get to hear updates from somebody that we featured a long time ago on the podcast. Last week we heard from the phenomenal fungi business, a tag team duo, Shannon and Dave, I believe, that were selling $20,000 in mushrooms and mushroom merch, tinctures, and well, I don't know, just all kinds of stuff. That was last week, episode 3,337.
Before that we had the spreadsheet seller who was making, I think, six figures a year and a side hustle selling spreadsheets to Etsy sellers. All kinds of fun businesses here. That's why I love making the show for you all the time, every day, in fact. Today we're gonna hear from this guy. He's a developer in the UK.
He makes an app to help people with weight loss goals. As mentioned, his name is Louis. What has happened since we first had him on the podcast? Let's hear directly from him. You're gonna get the update straight from this developer.
I'll come back at the end to wrap us up. [Music]
My name is Louis and I'm from the UK. My side hustle is called The Progress App and I was featured on episode 738. My side hustle is a weight loss tracking app which kinda goes beyond the scale and it helps you track your progress by tracking your measurements and your photos and things like that. So it really helps you stay motivated and stay on track when you're trying to lose weight.
Often the scale can be very misleading, especially for women, and it can go up and down and not really give you an accurate picture. And so what I found is that if you take your measurements, like with a tape measure and your photos, you can get the whole picture and you can see your progress. It really helps you to stay motivated and stay on track. I was gonna get married and I wanted to lose a bit of weight before getting married for the wedding photos. And I read about this kinda method of tracking yourself, tracking your measurements and everything.
And at the same time, I wanted to learn how to make iPhone apps. And so I thought I'm just gonna make this app for myself just as a kinda learning project. And after I'd done it, I thought, well, I'll just put it out and see whether anyone likes it or whether anyone's gonna use this. And they did. And so I've been working on it ever since basically.
It's mainly been just kind of slow and steady growth is kinda boring, but it's just, this is kind of how successful businesses can go, I think. And so revenue has grown not in a consistent line, but it's grown every year, some years more than others. I've taken on a VA to help me with customer support and things like that. And I've been trying to grow progress incrementally basically, which just as much as I can, which is me. In terms of more general challenges, I think I'm kind of very happy working on my own and not having to kind of manage other people and things like that.
But I'm at the point now where I really feel like I should do that and start to grow into more of a, quote unquote, real business. But that's a big challenge. It's kind of a big step to take on a new person and be responsible for paying them and finding programmers is hard and things like that. So it's just a big step that I'm not facing as head on as I should be, I guess. And the strong advice I would give to someone would be to learn to code.
If you're not a coder or you've never done coding, it's a lot easier than most people think. And the programmers like to pretend that it's very hard and it's easier than people think. And especially these days, there are like so many resources. I can recommend, there's a project called Hour of Code, which you can Google and it's kind of geared towards kids. But I've done the things and they're really fun and they have like Minecraft and Star Wars and these kind of theme games that teach you programming.
And even if you never use the programming for a side hustle, it's just such a useful skill. And you could start maybe doing freelancing as a side hustle, or you could use it to improve processes in your current job or at home to give yourself more time. It's a very versatile skill. So yeah, I highly recommend it. [Music]
Awesome, big thanks to Lewis for sharing those updates.
And he mentioned a Coding Resource Hour of Code. I also recommend if you're interested in this, you check out Code Monkey and Code Combat. These days, there are lots of different ways to learn to code, including with AI, so many coders, programmers, using AI tools. Of course, there's still a lot to learn even when you're using these helpful tools. So I'm really grateful to Lewis for helping us with this segment.
I am grateful to you, our listeners. Thank you for being out there. Lewis's app is called Progress App, by the way. I'm not sure if it's in the US App Store as well, but presumably it is, Progress App, check it out. Of course, every single episode has notes, pages, resources, references, and so on, all available on the website, sidehustleschool.com.
You can download or stream each episode to your heart's content, always free. New episodes drop every day, also free. Thank you once again. That's all for now. My name's Chris Guillebeau.
This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the "Onward Project."
