Foreign Correspondent Launches Career App

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

I often mention this concept of skill transformation, which is basically understanding that something you have already learned, maybe something you've even mastered through applying yourself to one career, can be deployed, remixed, or transformed in another way to make money for yourself. You can learn how to use a simple bookkeeping and invoicing program. You can and should learn about marketing your services. Anything else you need to learn to operate your cytosol or business, whatever you think of it as, all of that knowledge is easy enough to acquire. But what I want you to understand is that you already possess the most valuable skills that you need to succeed in making a transition from that world of traditional work to the world of the knowledge economy or the free for all world of work that we often look at here on cytosol school.

So skill transformation, hugely, hugely important. It's the first step I would always point people to if they're trying to figure out, especially at like a mid-career level. You actually have some advanced education and experience, but you realize that what you want to do next is not what brought you here. But what do you do? I think you start by looking at your skills.

So in today's story, a globe-trotting journalist builds financial independence through a career coaching app aimed at promoting gender equality. So she's doing well for herself and she's on a mission. Two good things. We're going to call this episode "A Foreign Correspondent Launches Career App." It's coming to you right after this message from our sponsor. As a foreign correspondent and journalist, Meggie Palmer knew about the hardships people face around the world.

Working for outlets like BBC News, the Discovery Channel and more, she could be in Syria one week and in Zimbabwe the next. While the breakneck speed and globe-trotting adventures were exactly what she wanted for a lifestyle, Meggie soon realized that journalism as a career would not lead to the freedom and financial stability she also craved. Her first look at something different came when she appeared on a panel for how executives and marketers can work with journalists. A rep from one of the companies attending came up to her after the discussion and asked if she ever offered media training. Though she had never done such a thing, Meggie had put in a fair amount of thinking and research before appearing on the panel.

Maybe she could use this research to her advantage elsewhere. She decided on the spot to say yes. Her first private training went so well that word spread, as media training from an award-winning journalist was an experience that many companies craved. Meggie continued to build up clients and programs, fitting them in around her travel. Since the only real costs were her time and intellectual property, the business had minimal overhead.

A few hundred dollars went into materials, she made a website, and she was able to start stockpiling profits. However, she ran into issues sooner than she anticipated. The first struggle was when she realized that service businesses run by a solopreneur don't scale well. As much as Meggie tried to balance and batch her time by only offering one media training event a month, her capacity was always dictated by her schedule, and more importantly, her energy. At the same time, she had begun to struggle against the perceptions and career limitations that were placed on her.

She was constantly being sent to interview and research prominent men around the world. Statistically, only 24% of sources and new subjects were women, and as she pushed for more opportunities for representation, she was told to not rock the boat. Knowing that the mindset of traditional journalism, also known as "this is the way it's always been done," was something she was never going to be able to support, she began looking for ways to bring more women into the news. She realized that her mission to get more women on media programs and into e-suites would never work if she was constantly the one who had to provide the training, support, and encouragement. Because, as we'd learned, it just didn't scale.

One night, while talking with a friend about how people can feel disempowered when they don't know how to advocate for themselves, Maggie commented on how great it would be if she could offer everyone a career coach in their pocket. By this time, her old side hustle had grown into a six-figure operation, and it began funding her new side hustle. She enrolled in an entrepreneurial accelerator one night a week with the goal of learning how to grow and run a successful tech business. Maggie had plenty of experience using apps on her devices, but she had no idea how to develop and build one herself. Talking to some other participants about how much work she had done to get everything set up, she admitted that she felt stalled in taking the important next steps.

It turned out she had the same fears and imposter syndrome that many people in her target audience struggled with. How would she be able to afford it? Why was she the person who needed to share this message with the world? One of the other participants was also starting a tech company, because he had a lifetime of experience with programming and development. They decided to collaborate with him helping to code whenever he could, and her offering her advice and insights into the business side of his endeavor.

She had saved tens of thousands of dollars from her first business and poured much of it into coding the new app. As she made more money and set up more training events, eventually starting an online course that could be evergreen and passive, she began to give even more attention to the app. Within two months, she had a minimum viable product, an app that would allow users to input their own milestones and successes for reference when negotiating a salary or a promotion, or to add to their CVs or resumes when attempting to garner more media and attention for their accomplishments. She called this app "pep talker," like "pep talk," but with a "her," "pep talker." Within the first six months of the app being live, it had already been downloaded by a few thousand users. A partnership with Vogue Australia allowed her to build a new email list of more than 15,000 interested people.

The side hustle that got her out of her full-time gig is now the full-time gig that led to her new side hustle. This project will not only make money for her, but also fulfill her greater mission to help women stand up for themselves. So when it comes to that concept of skill transformation, which you can see here going from journalist and foreign correspondent to starting a training agency, and then actually overseeing that agency to where she wasn't the one doing the training all the time, but she began to work with others, and then on to start the app and everything else that she's doing, you can see it begins with this kernel of an idea to provide some specific knowledge transfer. So in her case, it was media training for executives for certain companies, and that was something that was desirable. So she did that.

She got better at doing that. The word spread. She developed other programs. She paid attention, and so on. But it all kind of began with that one initial training.

So if you're in a situation at all, or you're trying to figure out how do my skills transfer, how do I compete, how do I work in the knowledge economy, I just encourage you to think about one small thing. What is the smallest and simplest thing you can do to teach someone something, or to show someone how to do something, or to essentially impart your knowledge? There are lots of different ways you could do it. There's lots of different platforms, etc. But start small and simple, do one thing only, and then improve it.

That's my encouragement for you today. As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. If you'd like to learn more about pep talker, anything else I mentioned in the episode today, just come to sidehustleschool.com/987. We've got the weekly recap coming up tomorrow, and a whole new set of stories all next week. Thank you so much for listening.

My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. From the Onward Project.