This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hello and welcome. This is episode 465 of Side Hustle School. I'm your host, Chris Guillebeau. Got a great story for you today. It is about an exercise app.
Well, specifically, it's about a guy in North Carolina who creates an exercise app. This app encourages fitness while helping sick kids. Pretty interesting concept. He's basically built this kind of negative reinforcement model where if you use this app and you don't work out, you don't meet the self-defined fitness goals. By self-defined, I mean you set your own goals.
And if you don't meet those goals, then you have to make a donation. He initially creates this app for his own motivation and then realizes that there are a lot of folks out there who struggle in maintaining their workout routines. And his journey in creating this app was also a little bit interesting. He learned some lessons along the way that I think are gonna be applicable to a lot of people, especially anybody interested in creating an app, or not just an app itself, but anything similar, comparable, basically any kind of resource that helps people accomplish their goals. So I'll tell you about that.
And also, today is National Equal Pay Day. This is a pseudo holiday, of course, but it's a more serious pseudo holiday than National Donut Day, for example, as meaningful as National Donut Day can be. Each year on a Tuesday in April, National Equal Pay Day brings awareness to pay discrepancies between women and men around the world. Tuesday represents how far in the week a woman works to earn as much as a man doing the same job. So not even different jobs, but the same jobs.
Now, this is probably not news to a lot of our listeners. And I also realized we can't solve every problem in the world here with side hustle school. But I do very much believe in starting a side hustle, of course, in creating more than one source of income, creating your own security. And one of the ways you can achieve a quality is in creating it for yourself. And saying, you know what, the world isn't fair.
Like we absolutely need to correct that. We need to change that on a macro level. But I'm also responsible for myself. So I'm gonna change that on a micro level. If I'm not being paid what I'm worth, what am I doing about it?
Or even if I am paid what I'm worth, like what am I doing to create that security for myself that will allow me to do what's important to me? What will allow me to take risks? What will allow me to pursue a big dream? And for everybody out there, men, women, anyone who's working on a side hustle, I know that you're in pursuit of that. So I just wanna cheer you on as always and say, you know, go for it.
There's a whole community of people doing this as well. You're not alone. And we're all working on something that is important. All right, that's my pep talk for today. So I will say thank you to today's sponsor.
And then I'll bring you today's story. [Music]
Our resolutions to get fit sometimes fizzle. Those twice weekly trips to the gym can slow to twice monthly slogs. For some people, they might even turn into an occasional walk to the corner store for beer. In North Carolina, Justin Anwanyu saw that the shine of his successive new routines, whether yoga, kickboxing, CrossFit, something else, started out well, but fell away when he couldn't maintain his commitment to the workouts.
The initial weight loss he achieved didn't inspire him enough to establish an unbreakable fitness habit. He knew the problem wasn't the workouts themselves, but his lack of consistency in committing to them regularly. Multiple canceled gym memberships frustrated him to act. So he designed an app to hold himself and later others accountable. Justin is a full-time software engineer.
So he knows that technology can solve problems. His Lazy Jar app comes out swinging. If you miss your weekly fitness goals, you'll lose weight in your wallet. Lazy Jar works by tracking a user's steps, calories, miles, and minutes of physical activity via a Fitbit. Users set a weekly goal for those matrix and a financial penalty they must pay if they fail to meet those goals.
The app sends out reminders on Wednesdays and Sundays to sync fitness goals before Monday comes. Monday is the deadline. If you don't meet your goals, you pay up. Justin knows that users are only cheating themselves if they set up weak health goals in the program, but if they want to, they can do that. So how did he make this app?
Well, he and his business partner slash brother used a pre-made app theme from a site called ui8.net. Then he found a developer on Fiverr to code the program. And Fiverr is known for products and services that cost $5 each, but this actually cost a bit more than $5, it was $7,000 to be precise. And yes, we'll come back to that in the commentary. Stay tuned.
That includes cash recently spent on rewriting the app for the iOS and Android platforms so that it will work on the Apple Watch and Android devices as well. Finally, Justin spent $50 on a Facebook ad. Now I mentioned $7,000, Justin experienced a lot of back and forth with the coder that was frustrating 'cause he felt the developer was much more interested in getting paid than in building the app to his expectations. So for his next app, he'll use a platform like Reach or Ionic that allows a program to be written once and then easily deployed to other platforms. As always, I'm gonna link up these resources in the show notes page for those who are interested.
The app is designed to give 80% of the user penalties to St. Jude's Children's Hospital and then 20% back to Lazy Jar. And deciding on his percentage, Justin wasn't confident that people would appreciate the idea of him keeping the bulk of the money, but over time he's realized that he's offering a service and he deserves to be paid, so he's gonna adjust that split. We'll come back to that as well. When the app was first released, some people were skeptical.
In fact, he heard some radio DJs in his local area of Raleigh, North Carolina mocking the concept. Getting that coverage, even negative coverage, was good because the app was being talked about. At the same time, he was receiving lots of positive comments from users. In fact, one of his favorite things was hearing from someone who actually had a customer support issue. She was experiencing some problems with the app, but at the same time she said she wanted to get it fixed because she designed her weeks around Lazy Jar.
Now this app is new. It just went out in October of last year, but the company's already making $500 a month from users who head back to the couch rather than to the exercise bike. Their user base continues to grow. They've been mentioned on TechCrunch, LifeHacker, and Product Hunt, not to mention Side Hustle School now. And as you may have surmised, Justin has learned a lot along the way.
His learning is both technical and psychological. In fact, learning about how the human psyche processes interest and desire has been one of the product's side benefits. He's seen how it takes a fair amount of social proof from other users' experiences to get people to try the app. However, influencers can sway a skeptical audience. Lazy Jar's initial problems with development costs and lost time have made Justin vow to do it differently next time.
Even though he's a software engineer, his expertise is in network protocols, not app building. But now he's learning more about apps themselves. He advises developers to make sure their initial version is distilled down to core functionality. First, gather as many potential users as possible and then try to leverage them for viral growth. Before Lazy Jar, he and his brother worked on another app for three years, and it didn't go anywhere.
Lazy Jar took four months, and despite the challenges, the brothers gained a lot of insights from having users try out the first version, which provided a lot of feedback for the second version. So far, so good, but here's the big question. Is Justin still missing his workouts? Has the app worked for him, or has he programmed in a cheat code? Well, we're not certain how much Justin is paying back to Lazy Jar, but according to him, he's feeling stronger and healthier than ever.
Awesome, congrats to Justin. If you out there are struggling with your workout routines or struggling with being consistent, maybe you wanna check out the Lazy Jar app. And just a couple of comments from me. Justin mentioned that 80% of the user penalties go to St. Jude's Children's Hospital, and 20% come back to him.
I think that's noble, but I also think it's totally reasonable and fair to adjust that split a bit. Like he has actually developed this. He's the owner of it. It's out there helping people. So of course, he needs to recoup his startup costs, which I'll come back to in a moment.
And while $500 a month is good, it would be nice if he could do more than that. Now, speaking of startup costs, I thought this was funny because he found a developer on Fiverr, which if you go to fiverr.com with two R's, like Fiverr, you see all these services available for five bucks. Well, in Justin's case, he ended up paying $7,000. And just to be clear, it's not like he thought he was paying $5 and then the bill was actually $7,000. This was obviously a long process of development work and lots of different stages, checks and balances along the way.
So he didn't just wake up one morning and see a $7,000 charge he wasn't expecting. But it's also fair to say his expectations were not met in that process. And $7,000 is a pretty expensive lesson, of course. But if you compare this experience to his first one where he and his brother worked on something for three years and it never went anywhere, this one took four months. It's already making $500 a month.
Maybe it's more like an investment. And the third time around, he's gonna do even better and spend less money in the first place. I guess that would be the third place, but you know what I mean. And last, here's something that was interesting from our notes. I didn't actually talk about this in the episode, but one thing I wondered was like, what about a reverse incentive?
And I've actually heard of this before. Maybe you have to, or if you place a bet with somebody and if you lose, you have to donate money to a charitable cause that you don't believe in. Or some organization, political party, whatever that you don't like. And it seems like that might be the more common model, like to keep up your workout. If you don't work out today, you're gonna have to give money to something that you hate.
So we asked him about that and Justin had an interesting answer. He said, "Yeah, we did think about that, "but we refused to do it. "We felt that there was nothing to gain "by donating money to organizations we don't believe in, "even if it was as a form of negative reinforcement. "We prefer knowing that even when the user fails, "some good comes from it." I thought that was pretty cool. I never actually thought about that twist on that concept before.
So good for him for figuring that out and making sure that if you've got this app, you're either gonna work out more, or if not, you're gonna give money to a cause, a charity that's helping sick kids. Which hopefully is something that everyone can believe in. Well, speaking of routines and commitment, I hope that you enjoyed this story today. I hope you do one thing today that gets you closer to the goals you believe in. As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better.
Today's show notes, where I'm gonna link up all those resources I mentioned are at sidehustleschool.com/465. I'll be back with you once more tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.
