Side Hustler Gets Paid to Run 7 Ultramarathons on 7 Continents

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Hey, Side Hustle School community, welcome back. This is Chris Guillebeau. Got an interesting story for you today. It's about a side hustler who gets paid to run seven ultra marathons on seven continents. It almost sounds impossible.

Well, what does it mean to do the impossible? This person is someone who undertakes a series of big challenges. He endorses what he calls cold shower therapy. He enjoys doing things like flying around the world to run these ultra marathons, sometimes in desolate places. And he funds these pursuits through a series of side hustles.

We'll focus on one of them today, an app to help injured people complete their physical therapy exercises. This came about through the recovery process for an injury that he had. And he thought, you know what? There's probably other people out there with the same struggle. He's also gonna give us two key pieces of advice for anyone out there thinking about making an app.

This impossible yet true story is coming right up after the shout out to our sponsor. [Music]

Joel Runyon lives a life of his own design. He focuses his mission on doing things that seem impossible. He creates side hustles to support that mission. The formula is simple.

He tosses an idea out there. If it catches enough interest, he turns it into a hustle. If it makes enough money, he turns it into a real business. If it doesn't, he moves on and tries again thanks to what he calls his short-term memory and positive view of failure. That's how Joel has started at least half a dozen successful projects over the past six years.

And his current side hustle, at least one of them, is an app called MoveWell. Until Joel left his job a few years ago, he was managing marketing campaigns for a well-known outdoor company. He enjoyed the work but longed for something more purposeful. So he created a blog called Impossible designed to test a series of experiments on himself. He was tired of backing down from challenges that seemed impossible, and he wanted to see if he could attract a following of others who felt the same.

The plan worked and the site became an active community that takes on fitness and mindset challenges on a regular basis. Joel's other side hustles and companies have sprung from this one. For example, a while back, he wrote a blog post about the paleo diet and lifestyle. That post got a disproportionate number of visitors. So following the interest of his audience, he wrote a meal planning guide called Paleo Meal Plan.

This became its own community and source of passive income for Joel, earning five figures a year. As you might expect if someone with a blog called Impossible, Joel likes taking on things that seem extremely difficult. One item on that list was to run seven ultra marathons on all seven continents, raising money to build seven schools. He called it the 777 Project. And what happened next served as the motivation for the Move Well app.

He was in Patagonia for the first of his seven ultra marathons and at mile 26.2, the 25 mile an hour winds shifted and literally swept Joel off his feet and down the hill. He rolled his leg past his ankle, badly injuring himself. Still, he stubbornly finished the race, which made things worse. And the doctors told him to take six months off. Back home in Chicago, Joel discovered something about himself and physical therapy.

He performed well when his rehab coach was right there with him. But in between sessions, he would forget all about it. He wondered if other people had that same issue. And he also wondered if an app could help. Then he wondered what if he created an app that could serve as a mobility coach?

What other people wanted to, he decided to find out. He and a friend who designs apps for a living created the workflow in a couple of hours. Then they hired a programmer they knew to turn the design into an actual app, which took several weeks. The app featured video of trainers doing routines complete with voiceover instructing users how to do the moves correctly. Joel's role was to identify the problems users faced and the routines they would need to become more mobile.

He tapped the CrossFit community to find trainers who could make the videos in exchange for exposure. It didn't take long for him to find everyone he needed. He himself wrote the script for the voiceovers since it's language he uses every day. The guy who did those voiceovers got paid with a $200 gift card. In fact, the only equipment they needed was a camera and a mic.

They had access to a gym through CrossFit. And from idea to launch, it took Joel about 10 weeks to get the first version of MoveWell to market. But how much does it cost to actually develop an app? Well, like a website, you can spend $100 or you can spend $100,000. It really is a huge range depending on what you want and who you hire.

In Joel's case, he funded the project for about $2,000. And that went to programming the app, doing the video editing, and some early advertising. The first revenue model for MoveWell didn't work. It was a one-time purchase for $0.99 or a premium version for $2. Once Apple took its 33% cut, there wasn't much money left.

So Joel and his partner switched things up. They changed to a subscription service. Some routines are free. And then you pay a small monthly fee of just $2.99 to unlock other routines. New routines are added every six months.

And adding those routines gives them a chance to be out there talking to more people, which increases the number of users and therefore the monthly revenue. The app has been out for two years and currently brings in about $1,000 a month in net income, a nice amount of extra cash for sure, but not really a sustainable business. Interestingly enough, even though MoveWell brings in the smallest amount of revenue of any of Joel's ventures, it has the biggest number of followers. He says the project is in this awkward in-between place of growth, and he's trying to figure out what to do next. He thinks that they can get the app to earn $4,000 to $5,000 a month, they can scale it further and turn it into a business with its own team.

Right now, he spends about 10 hours a month on the app, and that's mostly doing interviews to spread awareness. He says there's no need for customer service because the app is pretty bug-free. However, one challenge is making sure the app still works after Apple does its operating system upgrades. Those can get problematic and make a mess of things pretty quickly. As you may have noticed, whenever your phone updates, all the apps need to be updated as well.

It usually takes a few hundred dollars to fix with each update. The best part of this hustle for Joel is user feedback. People have used the app to get rid of pains they were told would take surgery, drugs, or a huge amount of money to fix. And his advice to anyone else who wants to create an app as a side hustle is twofold. First of all, use a subscription revenue model.

Learn from his early mistake. It's going to be really hard to make money on $0.99 an app, or $2 an app, whatever it is. There's a reason why more and more of these apps are going to a subscription model. It's because those low-price purchases just aren't sustainable, at least for a lot of them. And second, make your app as low-tech as possible.

Don't try to make something that does it all. Design it to do one simple thing. I think that is great advice for anyone who wants to make an app, so do take it to heart. And by the way, Joel finishes what he starts. In the beginning of 2017, after pausing to heal his ankle, Joel returned to his 777 project.

He ran five ultramarathons in just three months and then finished up the seventh one in April, raising $193,000 to build seven schools. Stay tuned for his next impossible mission. I have been a friend and fan of Joel for a long time. I can tell you that he's legit, he walks the walk, or in this case, I guess, he runs the ultramarathon. And I've also admired his approach to building these kinds of projects.

It's kind of unique the way he does it, because he has this hybrid approach of starting very simply, just like we encourage people on the show to do every day, he doesn't spend a lot of money, he's not afraid to fail, but then when something actually takes off, he does put resources behind it, and he creates systems. So he turns it into something that's more sustainable. In the past, he's had several projects that earn six figures or more every year. I wanted to look at one of them that's still getting underway, so that's why we focused on the MoveWell app. But the point is, he knows what he's doing.

Oh, and by the way, iPhone users may want to check that out in the iOS app store. We will link it up in the show notes as well. Those show notes are online at sidehustleschool.com/381. That's for episode 381. Come stop by if you'd like to learn more about Joel or that app, or just the process of making apps in general.

And don't forget, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Hope you enjoyed this impossible story. I'll be back tomorrow with another one. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.