The Credit Card Side Hustle No One Talks About - Ep. #300

Chris Koerner (0:00)

Meet Colin, 26 years old, running a business that most people have never even heard of. What does he do? He helps and shows business owners how to squeeze more out of money they're already spending on credit cards that they already have. He charges $875 for a single phone call, and he made $231,000 doing it last year, his first full year. And guess what? A few months before he started this business, he knew nothing about the space. But a couple hours in chat, GPT later, he's an expert. So if you like helping people, working from home, prompting AI and making a bunch of money, you're gonna love it. Hey, please just take half a second and hit subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you're listening to this right now. It would really mean a lot. All right, Colin, well, why don't you tell us who you are and what you do?

Colin Stroud (0:42)

Yeah, thanks for having me on. I'm super excited to be here. Colin Stroud and I am the founder of a business called Go Somewhere. And effectively, I'm a credit card rewards consultant. That doesn't mean a lot to a lot of people. What I tell my grandma is that I am a travel agent for people with points.

And I spend all day every day doing two things. One, helping business owners create credit card strategies or earn a ton of points. These people that are spending a ton of money, I help them put together credit card strategies. Number two, I help people book trips with these points that they're sitting on. I mean, people every day sitting on millions of points and I help them turn those points into pretty awesome trips. That's what I do full time. Been full time about a year and a half now and having so much fun doing it.

Chris Koerner (1:27)

Okay, what were you doing before this?

Colin Stroud (1:30)

Yeah, I'm 26 years old. Before I was doing this, I was trying to figure out my career. I was bouncing around, started in insurance and then had two jobs in nonprofit fundraising. None of those I was like super passionate about. It was just kind of, I needed a job. I was married young, had a baby, I needed to figure something out. And so this started as a side hustle for about maybe 15-ish months before I was able to go full time into this.

Chris Koerner (1:55)

Okay. Now, what did you see out there in the marketplace to tell you that this actually could be a side hustle?

Colin Stroud (2:01)

It was very clear to me that people love credit card points, credit card rewards. It's this massive industry. And it was also very clear that people are so confused about how to use them. I mean, people have so many points and there's all these nuanced fancy things you can do with them.

It's kind of like extreme couponing almost. And I just kind of started talking to people about it and realized, oh, people have no idea all those cool stuff you can do, all these amazing deals that are out there. So maybe I could help them and maybe they would pay me something. And I was right about that. And it turns out there's really just a huge market for that, in my opinion.

Chris Koerner (2:35)

Are you paid in cash or in points or how are you compensated?

Colin Stroud (2:39)

You know, I've asked for points before from people and they've almost always said no.

But yeah, almost always paid in cash. For all my services, I charge flat fees. So I say, yeah, this is what you want. This is exactly how much it costs. I keep it really simple.

Chris Koerner (2:53)

OK, why don't you just like break down what your average customer looks like with regards to who they are? Let's say a small business owner, I'm assuming. How many points they have and what you charge them and what you're able to do for them for that fee?

Colin Stroud (3:07)

Sure. Like I said, the two main offers, I'll just break those two down super quickly here. Offer one is basically a business owner consulting package. I charge $875.

It's a one-time package. So we sit down for a 75-minute consult call. We look at their personal spending, their business spending, put together the unoptimized credit card reward strategy. That can be kind of detailed, kind of complicated. I write that out for them and then I help them implement it either just through email, text support. That stuff's pretty simple. And then I say, I'll plan your next big trip for you. So they earn a bunch of points and then they call back in three months and they say, we want to go to Italy, we want to fly in business class. Can you find us a deal? I go and find it for them and that's the end of our engagement. So it's very simple, just a one time fee. And then the second part of the business is simply just that trip planning portion. Anybody on the Internet in the world could come to my website, fill out a form and it's free to fill out the form. And if we can help, we charge them a small deposit to get started. And they say, we've got 500,000 points. We want to go to Italy in business class. Same example. We'll help them find a deal and help them book it. Once it's booked, we charge a flat fee. That's typically three or $400.