This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey, hey, what's up? Welcome back. This is Chris Guillebeau, your host of Side Hustle School. Today, I'm gonna talk to you about a fitness app that one college student uses to earn an extra $2,000 a month. This just so happens to be National Teach Children to Save Day.
Apparently, this auspicious holiday changes date each year, but in 2018, at least for those listening in real time, today's the day. And if you're not listening in real time, well, it's probably good to teach kids, your kids, somebody else's kids, some random stranger's kids, all about saving, but I think it's also good to teach them how to get paid. That's what Side Hustle School is all about, not just being frugal, not just saving money on your lattes, but empowering you, perhaps, that you can buy all the lattes you want. Okay, now I mentioned something about a fitness app. Okay, so this is an app.
I'm gonna tell you about it in this story. It's an app that actually pays you to get your daily steps in, or any other physical activity. So a lot of people use Fitbit. I use a free app called Pacer. I think Nike has one.
There's all these different apps and devices, wearables, that encourage, or in some cases, incentivize people to be more active. This is a very popular trend. Perhaps you're keeping up with your steps. I noticed that I'm all over the map. I have a goal to do 8,000 daily steps, but some days, I sit in front of the computer all day, and I do 2,000 to 3,000 steps, which isn't great.
But then I go for a long run, and I do 17,000. I don't really do much in moderation, but that's the story for another day. Today, I'm gonna tell you about the app, and I'll also tell you how this 23-year-old college student makes over $1,000 a month, often up to $2,000 a month as a fitness coach with many of his leads coming from this app. It's a brave new world out there, folks. Stay tuned.
I'll tell you the whole story. [Music]
After making several mistakes working out in the gym, 23-year-old Oliver Anwar realized that the training programs provided by professional fitness competitors were sometimes unsuited for the average person. Oliver would train in the gym with high reps and low weights, but he found he wasn't building enough muscle. Furthermore, he was told to always avoid carbs under the misconception that they were all bad for him. This was despite the fact that he was a small, skinny guy who had trouble gaining weight his entire life and needed all the nutrition he could get to bulk up.
The mediocre results were discouraging, but they forced Oliver to conduct his own research and learn more about the science behind nutrition and training. Studies had shown that there were benefits to mixing heavy weights and volume depending on your goals. Around this time, the practice of flexible dieting was also becoming more popular. This principle suggested that while eating clean all the time would see the best results, it often wasn't effective because for a lot of people, it was too difficult to keep up the effort. A better approach was to eat healthy 80% of the time with cheat meals incorporated into the remaining 20%.
Applying these principles, Oliver saw better results in the next year than he had in the past three. Not only did he gain 17 pounds of muscle, that's eight kilograms for our international listeners, but he also dropped his body fat percentage into the single digits. I'm pretty sure percentages are the same around the world. This was noticed by both friends and family who asked Oliver to put together programs for them. He realized that even though the fitness and nutrition world was crowded, he might have something unique to offer.
After all, he had proven that his plans worked. So with the encouragement of those friends, Oliver decided to start an online fitness coaching business. He had no prior business experience, but there was no downside to taking this relatively small risk. And this small risk paid off almost right away. Within two hours of launching his website using Shopify, Oliver received a PayPal notification telling him that someone had purchased one of his coaching packages.
He hadn't done any marketing besides sharing his website on social media. So he was overcome with joy. He rushed downstairs immediately to tell his mom about his first sale. And that moment of validation provided the fuel to keep going. Besides offering coaching, he published a range of meal plans.
And in doing so, he decided he would offer only personalized plans, which was something that most trainers were unwilling to do since it didn't necessarily scale well. But to Oliver, it was also a chance to stand out in that crowded health and fitness world. All right, so so far, this story is fairly normal. When I say fairly normal, I don't mean it's bad in any way. It's great that this college student's been able to have success and start an online coaching business.
But still, so far, there's not much that's different about it, okay? So what is different? What's different is the use of a third-party app as a marketing tool. I mentioned in the introduction that I was gonna tell you about an app. This is an app called Sweatcoin.
And here's how they describe it. Finding the motivation to keep fit is a universal struggle, but what if you are paid to exercise? Well, that's the idea behind Sweatcoin, a free app that turns your steps into digital currency. So these two Russian guys in London, unrelated to Oliver, came up with this idea that incentivizing people to exercise would cause them to, you know, I guess, exercise more. So the app pays users a very small amount of digital currency for every 1,000 steps they take outdoors.
That currency can then be traded for fitness gear, gift cards, and workout classes. If you happen to earn 20,000 Sweatcoins, which is just over 21 million steps, no big deal, right? You can exchange that for an iPhone X. All right, so anyway, this new app is out. And to get sales of his products, Oliver knows that he needs traffic.
Of course, he can market to his friends, but he's gonna run out of friends sooner or later, even though I'm sure he's a popular guy. So how would he get people to visit his site? Well, one of his friends was an intern at Sweatcoin and urged him to take a look. Again, this app pays users virtual currency every time they take action. Oliver decided to offer free training programs on the platform as a means of lead generation.
Many other trainers were on the platform offering advice, but they only gave discounts on their programs, not anything free. Oliver's engagement efforts in that Sweatcoin community paid off since Sweatcoin itself became one of the most downloaded fitness apps last year, with over 5 million combined users on both Apple and Android. Needless to say, this also meant that traffic and sales grew for Oliver as well. Now, Oliver's a smart guy. He realizes that he can't depend on one app or any one source of traffic, so he's working on search engine optimization.
He's working on using Instagram to build a following there. He says that most people try to create a perfect image of themselves on social media, and he thinks that's a flawed strategy. His goal is to build rapport and trust with potential clients so that they can see all of his workouts and all of his meals, see where he's making progress, and also where he has more work to do. Now, considering that Oliver's startup costs were just web hosting and a website theme, which set him back by about 100 bucks, we can safely say that this was a worthwhile investment. Today, Oliver makes up to $2,000 a month, a comfortable amount for a full-time college student.
He's also been featured by his university for the coaching sessions, and he's even managed to lend some public speaking gigs. The side hustle has also helped him get a part-time job at a startup. So, there's no doubt that the skills he's building are valuable, and so are those 17 pounds of muscle and the $2,000 a month. [Music]
So, as I said, what I think is interesting about this story is not just that there was a college student who had an idea. I think that's good.
He has a genuine origin story. He has this challenge, this obstacle that he's able to overcome for himself, and then he's helping other people through the same process. But as I said, that's not totally unique, especially in the world of health and fitness, because there are a lot of fitness coaches out there. There's a lot of personal trainers. What's interesting is the use of technology, how he piggybacked on this other app called Sweatcoin, and he was able to leverage that community while providing legitimate value to them, turning a lot of those users into his own customers.
Now, I don't know all the details of how Sweatcoin works and how personal trainers are able to access it, what they have to give up in order to do that. It sounds like the kind of thing that probably changes a bit as time goes on. It comes out with one model, with one platform, and then they adjust as more and more people take it up. So I think the lesson here isn't that everybody out there who wants to become a personal trainer should go and use this app with the same intention. It is, once again, just to kind of look at the creative process behind how a college student goes from helping his friends with workouts to reaching a whole new audience using an emerging platform.
So there's all kinds of stuff out there like this. If you're doing something similar, if you'd like to do something similar, what is that program, what is that platform, what is that app for you? Or what can you take from Oliver's story and apply to your own goal, your journey? That is my hope with these stories, that you'll hear something and think, "Wow, that's kind of cool, what they did." I may not go and do the same exact thing that they did, but I'm gonna acquire the same skill of observation. I'm gonna develop my curiosity.
I'm gonna develop my willingness to take action on that curiosity. So that maybe three months from now or even sooner, I'll have a story like that myself. That's my goal every day, and I hope that today's story was helpful. Don't forget, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Go out and do something today.
Don't forget to get your steps. Gotta go work on my 8,000. And the show notes for today's episode are at sidehustleschool.com/479. That is episode 479. I'll be back tomorrow with 480.
Thank you for listening. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.
