This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hello, what's up? Welcome back, this is "Sidus Will School." My name is Chris Guillebeau, excited to begin a brand new week with you. And you'll never guess what today is. It is, in fact, National Take a Chance Day. That's right, this is correct.
Now listen to this. Most of us have unaccomplished goals or dreams. What if this was the day to take the chance to make them happen? Even if it is just the first step toward that goal, it will be one step closer than before. National Take a Chance Day, even if you're listening to this later, maybe still take a chance, why not?
Pursue that unaccomplished goal or dream. Perhaps it could be a side hustle. Perhaps it could be something else. That's fine too. But in the side hustle world, like what I'm here to talk with you about, today I've got a great story for you, a really strong story.
It has to do with this guy who creates a solution to the major problem of email deliverability. Now this has become an increasing problem over the past few years. We're always talking about email lists, how you should build your email list, how that's such an important way to reach people. And it is. But over the past few years, it's actually been getting harder and harder to reach people who have signed up for your list.
So we're not talking about spamming people. We're talking about those who have actually signed up. They want to hear from you, but then their email client, whether it's Gmail or something else, puts your messages in a promotion folder, puts them in the spam folder, otherwise does not actually deliver your message to the people who want it. Like I said, it's a major problem getting worse and worse. Now one solution, at least one partial solution, is to use Gmail as a mass email sender.
Okay, so when you use Gmail as a mass email sender, you're not using something like MailChimp or ConvertKit or many of the other services. You're basically sending mass email that looks like a very personal message that comes from Gmail. So it can be a lot more effective, but how do you do that? Because Gmail actually doesn't provide that as a solution, at least not as a turnkey solution. So today you're gonna hear about it.
You're gonna hear about a tool known as GMass, which just so happens to have been invented by today's featured story. After looking for a way to send these kind of group emails using Gmail, this web developer stumbles on more than a million dollars a year in recurring revenue. Again, more than a million dollars a year. And yep, it is a side hustle, by the way. This is not a huge company.
It was started by one guy. And once again, this revenue is recurring. Not just a one-off success, although that would be awesome too. You wanna hear all about it? Well, stay tuned.
Let me say a quick thank you to today's sponsor and I will bring you the details. [Music]
Web developer A.J. Goyle was working a new business, but he hit a major roadblock. He was creating a service called WordZen, where people can get their emails proofread and edited. And A.J. wanted to build a team of editors.
But he found that getting in touch with them and sending email blasts to people in his contact list was hard. Whenever he needed to create a new email chain in Gmail, he'd have to search through his database each time, which for someone who had spent the last 15 years of his career building email marketing software was tedious and frustrating. A.J. felt there had to be a better way. So using that experience as a web developer, he decided he would create something to make life easier for himself and perhaps others.
He admits the timing was fortuitous. As he became aware of this problem, Google had just released the API for Gmail, which is a fancy way of saying developers could now access the right code and build third-party apps to integrate with their email service. This made the job of creating the tool much easier. While making it, A.J. focused on keeping everything as simple as possible.
He just wanted to be able to send mass email through Gmail, so he didn't aim to add any extra features that would add time to the creation of the tool. He knew what his problem was, and he thought he knew how to solve it. The clarity of vision allowed him to use his time wisely and efficiently. Now, to be clear, it wasn't a small amount of time. A.J. spent about 200 hours creating the code
for his JavaScript Gmail plugin, working around his day job long into the evenings and weekends. At some point, to reduce the workload, he brought in the help of a contractor he hired through his network of developers. This helped him to focus on the tasks he was good at and delegate anything he couldn't do himself or felt that someone else could do better. When his tool was complete, A.J. called it gmass, and he sent it out to some of his friends.
He didn't think much about the commercial value of the tool at first, that is, until everyone came back to him with really positive feedback. All of his friends loved the gmass tool and wanted to know if they could pass it on to their friends. Realizing there was a market for this kind of tool, A.J. began to look at how he could package and deliver it to clients. He made a basic website and hired a designer to create a logo along with some basic templates for that site.
When it came to pricing, A.J. admits he isn't a pricing expert. He had no idea what to charge for the product, but he knew he wanted it to be a service that was billed monthly. He finally decided on three options, a minimal package for $6.95 a month, a standard package for $8.95 a month, and a premium package for $12.95 a month, so $7, $9, and $13, just about. To market the tool, he tried a few different things.
In September 2015, A.J. added his new tool to Product Hunt, a popular website for people looking to buy software. This helped him to generate his first initial sales. He's found his biggest success, however, with guest blogging for sites in the email marketing industry. He writes about mass emailing problems and includes a link back to the gmass site in his author byline at the bottom of the article.
Because of this strategy, he shows up highly in Google searches for a lot of popular terms and phrases. Among other things, he has published the world's only article on how to manage Craigslist accounts by posting through Gmail. These price points and marketing tactics have come together to help gmass generate extremely high levels of revenue. I don't use that word lightly. How high are we talking about?
As of 2018, gmass now makes over $1 million in annual revenue. Again, all from a simple Google plugin that initially began with only one feature. And AJ is not the only one experiencing great results because a lot of his users have written in to tell him how his extension has helped them succeed in their goals as well. One user credits it with helping him to not only fully fund his Kickstarter campaign, but actually getting him to almost three times his initial goal. Another user, a first-time author, used gmass to get more than 100 Amazon reviews.
Again, this is group email that looks pretty personalized because it's coming through Gmail. So it has a much higher deliverability rate. People tend to give it a lot more attention. AJ keeps a lot of customers thanks to the simplicity of his tool, but also because he continues to develop it and add new features that bring value to the audience. He started with just that one feature, but over the past three years, he's added scheduling, reports, link tracking, personalization, and 11 other features to make the tool more robust and valuable.
Looking ahead, he plans to just keep doing this. He wants to keep creating more and developing the tool. And although he makes such tremendous revenue from the project, AJ will continue to work on his main project, WordZen, and run gmass on the side, at least for now. Of course, if he ever wants to do something different, he has the freedom and the opportunity to do so. That's what the right side hustle is all about.
Okay, so there are several things to take away, perhaps, from this tremendous success story. Now, first of all, I just want to say this is not something that everyone can do, okay? And if you're listening and you're like, "Wow, this guy was a web developer, so of course he could make it," like maybe one in 15 stories on the show require technical skills. For the most part, we are not talking about programming stuff, coding stuff. We are talking about using the skills you already have, okay?
So for you tech folks, let's just start with that. If you do have these kind of skills of web development, your skills are valuable. In this day and age, they are tremendously valuable. The challenge you face is how to kind of look beyond the technical skills you have and say, "Okay, what is a problem I can solve?" I know I'm kind of good at doing what I'm told, or if I have an assignment, I can complete it. But I need to work on getting a vision for something that's gonna truly be commercial.
And to be commercial, ideally it should be something that's helpful, which is exactly what AJ has made. So for those who are technically minded, that's your challenge. For everyone else, okay, well, this is just another example of someone using the skills that they have to create something that is helpful to make a process easier, and in some cases, create real relationships. That is what the right kind of email tool can do. So, okay, you're probably not gonna go out and become a programmer.
Again, like I say in all the other stories, what is your experience, what are your skills, what is your area of expertise, perhaps an area that is different from what you do for your day job, perhaps an area that is different than what you went to school for if you went to college, university, or however far you made it in higher education. As a side note, that's another thing I love about this process because we feature people who have PhDs. We feature people who dropped out of high school or never went to college at all. I don't mean to suggest that higher education is irrelevant. What I'm suggesting is that everybody's an expert in something, okay?
So it's really important to figure out, okay, what am I an expert in? What am I actually good at that other people are gonna appreciate? And then lastly, among many other smart decisions, I think AJ was also smart in his recurring revenue pricing. Like I've actually used another tool kind of like this. I don't think it has as many features as GMass.
So I might actually go and check this one out myself, but this other tool that I've used, it's actually worked fine for me. It just doesn't have all the features. But it has a one-off license fee. I think I paid something like $30 or $40 for it. And if we assume that most people continue to use the tool, or at least enough people continue to use the tool that the math kind of works out, then obviously it's better for them to continue paying for it, which is exactly the way that he set it up here, AJ's project.
And he also chose several different price tiers, which I believe were something like what, $7 and $9 and $13. I am a little bit surprised that the range in those price tiers is so narrow. Like between seven and 13, it's a pretty narrow range. If he wants to price something as low as $7 a month, I'm a little bit surprised that the high end is not $25 a month or $30 a month. That's just my outside kind of comment.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if he raised his prices a bit and still had just as many customers. So in other words, he would be making even more money. But of course, he certainly doesn't need my advice because hey, one little Gmail plugin that's doing a million dollars a year, can't complain about that. Also remember, it started as a side hustle, no outside investment, no long business plan. In other words, it very much fits the model that I try to tell you about each day.
In case you don't pick up on it, in case it's not obvious, this is quite different from the Silicon Valley model. This is not the startup model. This is not the Shark Tank or the Dragon's Den model. This is a model of independence, autonomy, again, using the skills you already have, focused on creating opportunity, more choice that you can do what's important to you. That is a value I try to pass on to you each day through the stories.
I hope you enjoyed this one. As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. If you'd like to learn about this tool or anything else I mentioned, I think I talked about Product Hunt, maybe a couple of other resources. We're gonna link all that stuff up for you on the show notes page. That page is at sidehustleschool.com/478.
And most of all, I hope you'll do one thing today, big thing, small thing, whatever it is, to get closer to your goals, perhaps your unaccomplished goals or dreams, like I mentioned at the top of the episode. What if today was the day to take the chance to make that happen or even just take that first step? That's the encouragement I'll leave with you today and I will be back tomorrow. This is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.
