Lost & Found: How Lost Property Helps a UK Woman Find Her Side Hustle

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

Side Hustle School listeners, welcome back. This is Chris Guillebeau. I'm curious about the biggest thing you've ever lost. Have you lost your purse, your wallet, your computer, your passport, maybe something else? In my days of going to every country in the world, I used to lose things everywhere.

There is an original iPod of mine somewhere in Saudi Arabia. There's another one somewhere in Ecuador. There's a Nintendo Game Boy Advance I left behind in Japan. But because Japan is such an amazing, efficient country, I was actually able to reclaim it three months later upon my return. Now, none of that tops the time I lost a Land Rover on the beach in Malaga, Spain.

But we'll save that story for another time because today I have a side hustling story for you. It's about a non-profit office manager from the UK who wasn't looking for a side hustle at all when she went to the Glastonbury Festival. But when her friend lost her handbag, she managed to find one anyway. That story is coming up right after this. On her annual pilgrimage to Glastonbury Festival in 2014, Tanya Jane Park checked her social media feed to see that one of her friends had posted that she'd lost her handbag containing all her belongings while inside the festival.

Trying to be helpful, Tanya recommended that she report her bag to the official Lost and Found service and set about finding out how her friend could do it. That's when she stumbled upon a Glastonbury inefficient system. The entire festival's Lost and Found was based on an email submission of items and was technically difficult to navigate. Not to mention the amount of painful data entry work the staff must have to deal with once it was submitted. Tanya felt there had to be another, more efficient way of handling this problem.

Why wasn't a festival of this size taking advantage of it? On her return from Glastonbury, Tanya took it upon herself to see what other options were out there. She saw there were relatively few to choose from. It was then that she came up with the idea for ReclaimHub, a cloud-based Lost and Found management system. But as happened so often, there was a slight problem.

Tanya is a bit of a self-professed girl geek, but she didn't know the first thing about coding or creating a product like this. They weren't skills her day job as a non-profit office manager had gifted her. She knew she needed to find someone else to bring on board. Now luckily, being a geek has its benefits, so she was able to find her co-founder, Rob, by sending out feelers through friends. And by the way, if you're thinking of starting an app or some other cloud-based solution and you don't happen to have a group of tech-savvy friends, you could also try a site like Upwork where you can find an abundance of people who code.

Working in their spare time, Tanya and Rob were able to get the first version of their product up and running in just two months. Despite being a seemingly complex product to create, their startup costs came in at around 200 to 300 pounds for everything, that's just 300 to 400 dollars, because they did all the work themselves. They also started by making the tool freely available for new users, which was a smart decision. Over the next 16 months, they were able to get lots of users into their tool to provide feedback, allow them to improve their code, and fix any bugs before asking users for their hard-earned cash. They delay the instant gratification of getting sales and income to allow them to make greater gains at the other end.

Side note, another great benefit of a side hustle is that sometimes you're not feeling that pressure to have immediate income. So you are able to make smart decisions like that and just invest in your product until it's better and more sustainable. Getting those new users through the door wasn't a huge problem, because with so few solutions around Reclaim Hub quickly soared to the top of Google Rankings for lost and found products. Using only this method of organic traffic and a little word of mouth, they were able to generate enough users to get feedback and finally launch the paid version of their product in May 2016. Since that time, they've been able to generate about $8,000 in income and attract some big names like Sydney International Airport into using their software too.

The tool itself runs on a subscription basis to ensure they generate a predictable income each month. Users pay $180 per year to use the tool and they can add extra users for an additional $50 per year. That gives Tanya and Rob a great incentive to attract larger clients who will bring more users in the future. And speaking of the future, Tanya's plans for Reclaim Hub are to improve the tool based on the feedback from the paid larger clients you're now able to attract. She's also hoping to expand the tool to other languages to give them a much more global reach.

That way she can help more people lose their problems and find their solutions. Side Hustle School listeners don't get lost on the way to your income generating project. It's out there waiting for you to discover. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/189.

You can also sign up for a free 5 Steps to Hustle course there. I've got a weekly recap coming up for you tomorrow and a lot of fun stuff coming next week. Thank you for listening. I'm Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.