This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Well, a few days ago, we talked about pharmacy cards, basically a side hustler who had this idea of creating pharmacy cards. In fact, they'd already made this product to help pharmacy students memorize drug names and so on. And so we talked about how they can get a little bit closer to reaching their ideal customer. Today's listener has an intriguing idea. They want to help memory retention.
So basically anybody who needs to memorize stuff with this tool or this, I guess it's more of a skill called spaced repetition. It is a tactic. It's something you can apply when you're trying to learn different information and have it actually retain in your mind. You know, a lot of us learn things and then we forget them later. So spaced repetition helps you reinforce the learning that you've acquired.
So their specific ideas is to use outsourced tutors from other countries. And you can think of it as Upwork meets Udemy. So Upwork is a service or a platform where you can connect with different skill providers, vendors, designers, developers, and so on. Udemy is a course platform where you can learn anything. So Upwork meets Udemy.
Let's talk about it. Is this a good idea? Or maybe not just, is it a good idea? But what do they need to do next? How can they create what they call a working model?
So love the framing of this question. I'm going to pass it to our listener in a moment right after this quick shout out to our sponsor. [Music]
Hi Chris, this is Kim from Tampa and I've been listening to the show for a couple of years. I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but if you want to learn something, spaced repetition is the most single important habit you can use. It's essentially the flashcard technique where you review a series of items over and over until you're confident you've retained the info.
Ideally, you vary the times that you do the review and once you finish a particular deck, you return to it every so often just for a refresher. Anyway, here's my side hustle idea. I'd like to use overseas tutors to help people with flash study sessions using this technique. It's a lot like Spanish or another language with a foreign speaker by video call. Didn't you have a story about that once?
My question is, how would I validate the need for this idea and how could I put together a working model? Thanks for any advice. - A few years ago I went on this learning kick and was trying to learn all kinds of stuff that I never learned in school like world history and some programming stuff and I don't know, some other topics which I have now forgotten and it's ironic that I've forgotten what those topics are because I was using this tool called spaced repetition. I'm just kidding a little bit because I did actually learn a lot of stuff and still have some of that information. Spaced repetition, basically it's this habit of re-reviewing items with a time interval in between them and so as our caller said, you mix up the times, you do the review and after you've finished a particular set of content, then every now and then you go back to it.
So that's spaced repetition. You could Google and learn more but let's talk about the business idea. How do we create a working model? There is a story from our archives that I think would be good to listen to or read the notes from. It was episode 1012.
So you can just go to sidehustleschool.com/1012. This guy built a Spanish language learning platform that connects learners from the US with tutors in Mexico and other Spanish speaking countries. So you could look and see what he did and our caller today wants to do some version of that but just not necessarily focused on language learning. So I think it's often helpful to look at those who have gone before in a little bit different market, like something that is adjacent and try to figure out what were the steps and missteps that that person, that guy, that woman, that person did to get going. Now as for validation, I think there's just a huge amount of interest in learning how to learn and getting better at studying productivity talk like on TikTok.
There are big channels on YouTube with tens of thousands of people watching simultaneously and they're just studying the whole time. It's like good to do something together. So I definitely think there's a market here but of course we wanna get more specific with that and then figure out, okay, how do I actually like match people and create the platform for this? Some AI tools could be helpful with it as well. But the first thing I would do is go back and see what this other guy did with liblingua.com.
That was his platform. Hopefully that gives you a good start. Listeners, let me know if you have a question or something you're trying to work out or a success or a challenge. It's always welcome, sidehustleschool.com. You can also access all of the previous episodes, all 3,450 previous episodes for free at the website and of course new episodes out every single day.
Thank you for being out there. Thank you for being part of the community. Please continue to listen. I'll be here. My name's Chris Guillebeau.
This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
