This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hello, my friends. Welcome to Side Hustle School. This is your host, Chris Guillebeau. Excited to welcome you back with an exciting story. This one features an EMT, an emergency medical technician who learns to build apps.
He does this completely as a side project, just like the vast majority of our stories. Keeps his day job, but still manages to earn up to $15,000 a month from this side project. Not a bad gig to have on the side for sure. And today, by the way, also is National Sorry Charlie Day. You're probably wondering what this is.
Well, according to the people who make these things up, this day encourages us to think about the times we have been rejected. Whether that rejection has come from a potential romantic partner or by a college, a company or an organization that we hope to work for, or something entirely different, we've all been rejected. We've all been turned down. National Sorry Charlie Day, which could probably be renamed, but I do like the concept, gives us an opportunity to reflect on how we survived the rejection and what we learned from it. I think rejection can be a powerful tool in helping us gain strength.
We can also gain empathy as we realize, like pretty much everybody's been rejected one way or another. Most of us multiple times, most of us significantly. So don't let rejection stop you today or any day. I'm gonna say thank you to today's sponsor, then I'll be right back with that story about the EMT who learns to build apps. [Music]
iPhone applications, or apps, aren't usually the first thing that comes to mind when you think of emergency medical technicians.
But Phil Scarfey in New York City has always looked beyond the ambulance for inspiration. Whenever he went to work, he would spend any downtime dreaming of ways he could make his life easier. When I say easy, he wasn't looking for an easy way out, by any means, he was just looking for ways to simplify an already hectic life. One day Phil might focus on looking at the latest gadgets, the next he could spend searching for productivity hacks. But no matter what, his attention usually wandered back to apps.
App development had been an interest of Phil's ever since he studied computer science during his freshman year of college. Eager to take his classroom learning into the real world, he created an app that showed what the dining halls were serving for meals each day. Words slowly trickled out and eventually reached the Dean of Students, who notified the college, who then bought the rights to the app in one lump sum payment. Nice work, Phil. That success showed him the potential of coming up with app ideas.
Career-wise, he eventually decided to become an EMT, so he could help people facing their worst situations. But he never let go of his love of computer science and app development, especially creating solutions to make his day-to-day life easier. After he'd spent years quietly developing apps for his own personal use, Phil's friends began to make suggestions. And eventually they made some friendly requests of what they'd like to see in their own phones. It was at this point that Phil began to come up with ideas to make other people's lives easier.
This led to a new side hustle, Pioneer Applications. Since he already knew what he wanted to do, Phil began with researching his competitors to see how they were presenting themselves to the market. He noticed that other developers had a habit of being a one-off service, and they weren't always friendly. So to differentiate Pioneer from the competition, he designed a one-stop shop that works with customers on their ideas, gives them helpful feedback, helps them launch, and then fixes what breaks. Because when it comes to apps, they always break.
Pricing was initially a challenge for Phil. He wasn't sure what he should charge or how much clients would be willing to pay. It took a few months and some trial and error, but he found his sweet spot of offering either one fixed price or a monthly number of hours to ongoing clients. Pioneer is digitally based, so startup costs were minimal, at least when it comes to financial costs. After six months of spending just about every minute of free time on his side hustle, Phil decided to bring in other developers to share the workload.
'Cause this project took off quickly. He now has clients like Buzzfeed and the University of Massachusetts. This is all while he continues to maintain the day job as an emergency responder. Responding well under pressure is critical for that day job, but that calm resolution also helps him balance the job with a side hustle that now earns more than $15,000 a month. Most of that money is reinvested into marketing or building other applications, but Phil takes home $6,000 of it in profit.
So $6,000 a month on the side and the business is growing, all while keeping that day job. So what about you? Say you want to make an app. Well, Phil has a couple of tips for you. He believes that pre-launch day hype, like creating waitlists based on referrals, finding a public influencer in your target market to endorse your app, and having a solid marketing plan can all help you move up in the app rankings.
Also, once you have an app, make sure to publish frequent updates. This gives your users something to look forward to and it helps to show them that you care about their experience. He said lots of people think if they put an app on the app store, people will just find it and it will become a top 100 app. Unfortunately, most of the time, this isn't true. So before launching, have a plan on how you're gonna spread the word.
This obviously must be tailored to who your target market is and where they can be found. Phil says his app building side hustle has been one of the best experiences in his life. While he's happy with Pioneer's success for now, at some point he may want to go full time and take the business to the next level. In the meantime, he'll continue to balance his day job with building apps that make people's lives easier. It's not a competition.
It's not a game of phones where a different character dies every week. In fact, you might say everyone can have an appy ending. Too much? Well, it was a good story. Congratulations to Phil.
Here's a riddle for you. How can you tell which one of your friends has the new iPhone X or whatever the latest iPhone model happens to be? The answer is don't worry, they'll make sure you know. Everybody likes to show off their new phone. All right, so I wanted to mention this thing about making apps because I famously said, famously, infamously, whatever it is, in the first season, I said a couple different times that if you don't know how to make an app, you shouldn't make an app.
And the reason I said that is because I think there was a season where pretty much everyone I heard from wanted to make an app. They would come to me for some advice and I would say, okay, you think you should have an app. Why is that? Like, why do you think that's the right solution for whatever problem you're trying to solve? And they would basically say, well, I want to have an app because apps are cool.
And I would say, okay. Just curious, have you ever made an app? Have you ever coded? Like, are you a programmer at all? And more often than not, people would say, nope, never done that.
So the reason why I say don't make an app if you don't know how to make apps is really just to encourage people to focus on what they already know. It's not that no one should go out and make iPhone or Android applications. It's that you're gonna probably be more successful if you focus on the experience you already have, the skills you have, the things that people ask you about, all that kind of stuff. So I'm not trying to tell people not to make apps, of course. I just want to make sure that people are doing something that they're gonna be the most successful with, or at least that have the most potential for them.
But in this case, of course, the guy has the skill and he has the passion and it's something that he wants to do. And he wants to ultimately make people's lives easier, like we talked about. But his solution or his way to do that, his strategy is through iPhone apps. And obviously it's going really well. And maybe eventually this industry will change, but at least for now, this time, probably the foreseeable future, if you have these kinds of skills if you have some programming skills and you could probably apply those to learning app development, it definitely can be a rewarding endeavor, like you heard here and like you might hear in some other stories.
But if something doesn't work out or you get rejected, remember today is National Sorry Charlie Day. So don't let that rejection stop you. There's gonna be a better idea for you somewhere. That is my hope, but it's also my belief. That's why I keep bringing you these different stories every day in hopes that something will resonate, in hopes that you'll be listening and say, "Oh, you know what? That's what I want to do."
Or maybe that gives me another idea that helps me kind of think through this problem I've been trying to solve. Do let me know if we're doing that. Let me know how we can serve you better as well. We're gonna keep improving Sodasil School as the year goes along. If you'd like to check out the show notes for today's episode, just come to sidehustleschool.com/461.
You can also get a free Five Steps to Hustle course there. If you have a comment or question for the show, just give me a call on the Hustle hotline. That's 844-9HUSTLE. You can leave a little voicemail. That number is 844-948-7853.
Thank you for listening. I'll be back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau for Sodasil School.
