This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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We can gain a lot of efficiency in our lives if we spend less time on setup. What I mean is that if you're gonna exercise early in the morning, set out your clothes the night before. Make it as simple as possible so you can just jump right into that. If you're going to write, close down all the other windows on your computer and do that before you actually close it down from a previous session. So that when you open it back up, all you see is your word processor or your writing program and you can get straight to work.
You can apply this principle in lots of different ways. Whatever thing you're supposed to be doing, look for ways to spend less time getting ready to do it, less time working on the periphery of it, and more time on the actual activity. Welcome to Cytosol School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. In today's story, one data scientist and adjunct college teacher in San Francisco was frustrated by how much time it took to get his students set up to learn to code.
Their time was valuable and so was his. Yet he was wasting a lot of it at the beginning of every term, getting to the point where he could actually teach his subject. So he then set out to create a time-saving platform to solve this problem. Not just for himself, of course, but for students worldwide. With startup costs of just $1,000, it's now bringing in a couple of thousand dollars each month in recurring income.
And it appears poised for more growth. But it wasn't easy. He had to course correct as he went along and his initial marketing efforts failed. So what did he learn and how did he turn it around? That's what you're gonna hear today.
In this story, data scientist turns teaching frustrations into recurring income. That story is coming right up after this message from our sponsor. [Music]
Twice a week, when Nathan Rossidi wraps up work as a strategy and analytics manager at a biotech company, he heads over to the University of San Francisco where he's an adjunct teacher. His classes are about technical coding, usually Python and SQL languages, but most of his students are not so technical. And this was a problem because the first thing a student has to do to learn coding is actually set up the software on the computer.
And that's not always easy. Many intelligent students spend days getting everything in order, which starts them off in a negative head space and puts the whole class behind schedule. Nathan knew there had to be an easier way to teach coding without going through this mess every semester. He wanted to be a teacher, not an IT help desk person. He wanted to spend less time on setup, more time on teaching.
One day while immersed in technical support for his students, he remembered an idea he'd had years before. When he was just beginning his career in analytics, he wanted to find ways to improve his coding skills, to make him more prepared for job interviews. He looked all over for a web-based platform where he could practice Python or SQL exercises, but there wasn't anything that was easy to use. There were plenty of coding courses, but they all started from square one and required installing complex software. Definitely not the fast, easy approach to building skills that Nathan wanted.
He never found that web-based app. So now that he was spending a large portion of class time troubleshooting installation issues, it seemed like something the world needed. So naturally he decided he would build it himself. In December of 2017, Nathan pieced together the backend of the platform, which he named Strata Scratch. He found a developer on Upwork and paid him $1,000 to create the front-end interface.
Adding these two parts together, he had a basic working product. To create the actual content, Nathan then wrote a Python script that would scan online interview questions for words like data science and analytics exercise, and he would store those questions in a spreadsheet. He sorted all of them to find commonalities and trends, looking at the exact kinds of questions that companies are asking, then rewrote them in his own words. This meant that Strata Scratch had real questions and exercises from real companies, but he didn't have to worry about copyright issues on the specific wording of the questions. In January, 2018, just a month after he began working on it, he offered the platform to his new students for free.
They liked it right away. It was so much easier to get them learning actual coding, rather than wasting time just getting their computer set up. Nathan knew he was onto something. So he went back to Upwork and hired a virtual assistant. He asked that person to find the email addresses of other coding professors, mostly from university websites and LinkedIn.
He knew other teachers had to be struggling with this too, so he sent out a cold pitch to over a thousand professors, explaining how Strata Scratch was helping him be more effective in the classroom. But the response wasn't what he had hoped. Most teachers weren't interested, and the ones that were were too new to their jobs to understand why his solution was so helpful. It was a disappointment, but he didn't give up. He next asked the VA to collect email addresses for coding students around the country, and he wrote to pitch them.
They liked the idea more than teachers, but his asking price of $20 a month was too steep, especially since they couldn't experience the program without paying. He didn't get any conversions at all. Nathan had to find a different approach, but first he had to identify the problem. He knew his questions and exercises were well-crafted. He knew they could help students and young professionals improve their skills and prepare for jobs.
He just had to find a way to convince them to pay for it. To do that, he had to overcome the objection of whether it was really gonna be helpful or not, and to solve that problem, they needed to be able to try the program for free. With this logical process in mind, he set up a freemium version, a full-featured version of the platform that contained a few of the first modules. This would give interested students a taste of what the full version provided, and it worked. By this time, Nathan was getting some organic traffic to the website, mostly from answering questions on Reddit, and as soon as he launched the freemium version, he began getting daily signups.
After a few weeks, a small portion of those freemium users converted to paying subscribers. That's right, he had real paying customers. He also made a smart decision with his pricing. He had decided to raise his monthly price from $20 to $35, but he also offered a four-month prepaid plan for $75, or just $18.75 a month. Most subscribers chose that option, which increased the amount of his average sale.
In 2018, year one, Nathan brought in just over $10,000. By July of 2019, he had already topped $20,000 for the year, on track to a four-fold improvement. Right now, he's still in build mode, trying to make Stratus scratch as useful as it can be for his current users. He's investing much of his earnings to pay writers to create new modules and developers to upgrade the servers and improve the platform. But with over 500 lessons now in the bank, he's getting ready to switch to scale mode.
That will mean making more marketing content and testing the waters of Google Ads. If all goes well, it won't be long before Stratus scratch is a well-known name in the Python and SQL learning space. And to think, a resource like this didn't exist at all until he decided to build it. [Music]
Awesome, congratulations to Nathan. I love stories of people identifying problems and getting creative about providing a solution that's good for not only the people in front of them, but also lots of other people as well.
It's also interesting to look at the whole process of creating a service like this and to see what didn't work and then how did he turn that around into something that is working. And hopefully we'll continue to work even at a higher level going forward. Now, I took a peek at the website, which he's obviously put a lot of work into, especially with crafting so many educational examples and tutorials, more than 500 lessons on this website now, which is gonna be great for SEO, great for building out this long-term community. So that is spot on, great approach. One small thing I wondered about, or maybe two things, first of all, there's a 17-minute video right on the homepage.
Now, 17-minute video, most people aren't gonna watch that. Now, some people will. I totally get that. If you're committed, you're gonna watch that whole video. So that could be good for those people, but I wonder about for everybody else, like I was just going there to kind of learn about how this works, maybe a shorter video would be better just on the homepage.
And then as people drill in a bit more, then they get to the longer video. Just a thought. And then also, he has such a great origin story of being this adjunct teacher, and the frustration I talked about of spending so much time on setup and less time on teaching. But unless I miss it, none of that is included anywhere on the site. And I think, maybe he thinks, well, it needs to be student-forward, student-facing, focused on the learner.
Learner doesn't care about my story. But as we've seen through different examples, almost a thousand stories so far here on Side Hustle School, a good origin story goes a long way. So unless he has a good reason not to, I wonder if it could be helpful to, especially since his goal is to build community, to share a bit more of that origin story and to have a section more about himself. Just a couple of suggestions. As always, just my two cents.
I'm a big fan of the project, and it's really great to see how well it's doing. Listeners, I hope you enjoyed this one too. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. I fully believe there's something like this out there for you, something where you can take your knowledge, your experience, and find a way to adapt it, transform it into something that is valuable to other people and therefore valuable to you, profitable for you. That is the goal of Side Hustle School to help you create more economic empowerment for yourself.
All right, today's show notes. All right, sidehustleschool.com/991. Come and check out this project, anything else that I mentioned in the episode, along with some free resources. Much more is coming up. I hope you'll join me again tomorrow.
My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
