I built a five-figure side hustle in college — now I’m turning it into an app marketing agency
Turning in college papers was easy. Working with startups valued at millions — not so much. In this article, I’m going to cover my journey from student freelancer to agency owner in three sections: freelancing, education, and my next endevour, Apptuitive.
Freelancing
I started freelancing on Upwork the summer after I graduated high school, because I couldn’t find a “real job.” Sadly, every Best Buy sales associate position in NYC was taken.
The first gig I landed on Upwork was a $7.50 creative writing gig. I thought nothing of it other than it’d be great to get more writing projects. But little did I know my next project would change my life.
An app developer approached me and asked if I could write questions and answers for his new “House of Cards” trivia app. I have never watched an episode in my life, but I took it on because $50 is the equivalent of $1k to a 17 year old. I binge watched a few seasons in a couple days and knocked out the project. The developer gave me a few similar projects and I made a couple hundred bucks — more than I could’ve made at a “real job” in the same time frame.
I didn’t realize it then but that same developer/client single-handedly introduced me to the world of apps, freelancing, and business. I dug through a few exchanges in hopes of finding jaw-dropping content, and I did:
I most likely took his advice with a grain of salt back then, but that one e-mail was game changing.
Growing on Upwork
With every month that went by, I applied to more projects and kept experimenting with small gigs. Keep in mind, I fell into the freelancing side hustle around the time when app development was just starting to become more popular.
I went through a lot of trial and error when it came to figuring out what I was actually great at. Social media management, for example, was a miss. I’m more than capable of handling that type of work, it’s just that it’s time consuming and requires a lot of effort on the founder’s part — something that founders don’t want to deal with.
After taking on my first hundred projects, I slowly started to realize that organic app marketing was my thing. Anything along the lines of writing in-app content, branding, press outreach, App Store Optimization, and just telling people their app is dumb — is my territory.
The trick to making money on Upwork is specializing in 1–3 specific areas within one specific niche. And having the reviews to back up the work.
Most freelancers sign up and say they’re “website developers” or “content writers,” but so does everyone else. The problem is, is that no one can differentiate them. Instead of going the generic route, I put myself in my ideal clients’ shoes and asked myself what exact keywords would I be searching to find me?
After I nailed my skillset, I distinctly positioned my profile and clients started coming to me — not the other way around.
Once the work was complete, I’d ask for detailed feedback. So instead of having a profile stuffed with the average “great work” review, mine had reviews that looked like this:
As the quality of my work improved and as I started investing more money into premium tools like Grammarly, I increased prices — kind of. I definitely struggle with the whole “charge more thing.” There’s one part of me that always feels bad for charging more, but then there’s another (smaller) part of me that wants to smash open every client’s piggy bank because I know my worth. I’m still working on finding that happy balance so don’t quote me yet.
Reaching Top Rated Status
Becoming a Top Rated freelancer is hard. Here are the complete list of requirements:
- A current Job Success Score of 90% or higher
- First hire on Upwork was more than 90 days ago
- Maintained Rising Talent status or a Job Success Score of at least 90% for at least 13 of the last 16 weeks
- A 100% complete profile
- 12-month earnings of at least $1,000
- Up-to-date availability
- An account in good standing with no recent account holds
- Activity on the platform in the past 90 days
But I managed to maintain the coveted rating for over two years now. It definitely gave me a competitive advantage and in all honesty, you can’t have an extremely profitable freelancing Upwork career without it. Even though it’s just a pretentious title, the little blue badge instantly tells clients you’re “better than the rest.”
Education
While I was grinding away at freelance work, I was also pursuing higher-education. Education took shape in different ways and I’m glad it did, because if I only relied on college, I wouldn’t be where I am today.
Internships
I held three different internships because I wanted to learn the ins and outs of the tech industry and because I’ve always wanted to work in the city.
The first internship I held was at Fueled. I worked in the company’s Soho office for three months handling the marketing team’s backlinking efforts. On the surface, it was grunt work, but the actual skillset development came from listening to hundreds of podcasts and videos on content marketing in the background.
During my second internship, I took the information I learned at Fueled and applied it to App Partner’s content marketing efforts. I worked at App Partner for a little over a year creating content for the company blog and other publications, as well as handling some sales and client facing work.
The blog grew exponentially within that year because the quality/quantity of the content produced increased every month. And of course, I don’t take all the credit — Jeremy Spence and the App Partner team made it possible to have valuable content to begin with.
Even though it was an internship, it felt like a real job because I put everything I had into it. I learned more about app development, marketing, and business there than I did during my four years of college.
While I was working at App Partner, I took on another three month internship at The Next Web. I wrote an entire piece on my experience there, but to summarize:
TNW graciously worked with my insane schedule, so I worked three hour night shifts after my App Partner commute.
I knew stepping into a journalist role would be different than my normal marketing gig, but it felt like getting thrown into the deep end of a swimming pool with one floaty. Every article was new and had to be written concisely at a fast-pace — the exact opposite of content marketing. I loved every second of it though.
While I was there, I covered Apple’s 2017 WWDC, new apps, psychological studies, and the latest tech news. Not to mention, I also learned a lot about pitching the press, which is a service I now offer.
Free content
I learned a lot by taking advantage of free information. I probably went through six different pairs of headphones in four years because there would always be a podcast or video playing in the background everyday. Not to mention, the library was my second home.
I ran some numbers for kicks and giggles and I read approximately 104 books, listened to 172,800 minutes worth of podcasts, and watched 1,500 videos.
At this point, I’d like to think I have a tiny Ivy League education. I’ve listened to more Stanford, Harvard, and Cornell talks than any normal 21-year old should.
But I’d like to take this moment to acknowledge my real college professors — Gary Vaynerchuk, NYU Professor Scott Galloway, Nir Eyal, Seth Godin,Whitney Wolfe, Tim Ferriss, SOPHIA AMORUSO, Benji Hyam, Rand Fishkin, Al Ries, and Jack Trout.
College
College was a pain, it felt like more of an obstacle than a stepping stone. The learning materials were outdated and useless, coursework was busywork, and every professor was a sign of God testing my patience.
Nevertheless, I was able to graduate debt-free while juggling a full-time workload thanks to my parents, scholarships, clients, and taking a more unconventional route:
- I didn’t go to an expensive school.
- I found cheap 3-credit alternatives (CLEP, ALEKS, Saylor, Study.com)
- I was able to avoid studying for the most part by doing “outside the classroom” work.
- I recycled essays and homework content whenever possible.
Overall, I’m extremely grateful for the opportunity I had to attend and finish college.
Apptuitive
Before I started pursuing marketing, I was actually a Music Education major. My plan was to teach classical guitar for a living. Never in my life would I have thought I would be telling rich white guys their apps suck for a living.
We specialize in organic app marketing and branding because I believe there’s more to making an app successful than throwing money at advertising. In the wise words of Seth Godin:
“..it’s pretty clear that the marketing has to come before the product, not after. …In fact, just about every successful product or service is the result of smart marketing thinking first, followed by a great product that makes the marketing story come true.
If someone comes to you with a ‘great’ product that just needs some marketing, the game is probably already over.
My goal is to work closely with every single founder, understand their vision, and do my best to bring their vision to life in a practical way. Here are a few services we offer:
- Branding/Product: We help figure out what would make someone use this app over that app.
- Concept Validation: This is just me telling people their ideas suck.
- App Store Optimization: We help apps rank higher in the App Store.
- UX/UI Design: We make apps pretty and easy to use.
- Press Strategy: We figure who founders should pitch and what to say.
- Copywriting: We make sure there, their, and they’re are used right.
Apptuitive is the culmination of my college career and the beginning of a new journey. I have no idea what the future holds, but you’ll definitely be hearing my name a lot more.
Inquiries: Carissa@apptuitive.tech
(If you tell me you have a billion-dollar app idea, my eyeballs are going to roll out of my head.)
