Are Transcription Side Hustles the New Best Thing in 2024?

With so many side hustle ideas out there, how can we keep up with them? In this one, Matt goes over a new idea around transcriptions. Is it better than other ideas or just another way to waste potential time and money?

There are tons of people out on social media giving business advice. Some of it is good advice, but most of it isn’t good. In this series watch CapForge’s owner react to different advice videos. He’s an expert in all things business and has 20+ years of experience under his belt. Some of the things he reacts to might even surprise you! 

Video Transcript: 

Business Advice Video: 

Remote jobs you can do at night time. and this one’s gonna pay you $3,000 a month. so you’re gonna start off by going to dailytranscription.com. And then you’re gonna scroll all the way to the bottom and click on ‘Become a Freelancer’. they’re looking for freelancers to work between 10 to 30 hours per week. And they will pay you $45 – $66 per hour of material. So let’s work out the math. On that if we’re working 15 hours a week at $55 per hour that comes out to $825 per week. Times 4 that would make us $3,300 per month. 

Matt’s Review:

So here’s my thought on this. If this was legitimate. What I could do is go and sign up under my name. And then I could turn right around and go on to the Philippines job board and find somebody in the Philippines who could do my work for me, for let’s say five bucks an hour, and do just as good a job as I would do doing transcription. And I get paid 55 and they get paid five and I keep the 50 dollar difference. And then I sign up another one, and another one, another one. And pretty soon I have a business making $100,000 a month from this company who’s paying for transcription services. Wait. You see the problem with that? Right? First of all, why wouldn’t this transcription company just go straight to the Philippines themselves and pay five bucks an hour instead of 45 to 60 or whatever the number was? And second, if they had unlimited transcription work available, something doesn’t make sense, right? Why haven’t they already filled these jobs? How can they have unlimited number of people signing up and paying – getting paid to do transcription? Who’s doing it now if this unlimited number of jobs isn’t filled? Like it just doesn’t, it just doesn’t make sense in general that this is a legitimate thing. And third of all, why hasn’t she thought of this? If she knows this job site and it’s legitimate, why isn’t she arbitraging this opportunity herself and making, you know, 50,000 $100,000 a month doing it herself instead of sharing it on her Instagram channel, her TikTok channel, whatever she’s on? So the whole thing just doesn’t really add up as a business. As a business owner, it doesn’t make sense. And it doesn’t make – so the business isn’t gonna really pay for this, how is this a real opportunity? It just doesn’t make sense. So if it’s really there and you can go to the site and do that then I would do that. Go sign up for the job get your 50 bucks an hour and then hire somebody in the Philippines to do it for you. But my suspicion is this isn’t a real thing. There’s either an upfront cost to apply to be a transcriptionist, or there’s some other catch where they don’t really pay that and you don’t really make that. Cause otherwise again it just doesn’t make sense.