The pandemic has induced a radical economic shift in products and services and a loss of income for millions of people. For anybody seeking additional income, more control, and a way to express your uniqueness, a side hustle is a low-cost approach to experiment.
If this is you, I suspect you want to start generating income quickly. This article summarizes a few recommendations to accelerate your journey to income based on my experience as a side hustler.
This article shares five recommendations for anyone that has an excellent idea and wants to accelerate their journey to side hustle income.
The February post, “How to Find Product-Market Fit for Your Career “, is helpful for those of you that need a mental model to identify a target market and shape a career path that radiates your uniqueness.
My recent post, “Career Challenge #2: Design an Offer for Yourself and Side Hustle “, provides some tips on how to take an idea and translate that into a compelling product offer.
#1 – Read Chris Guillebeau’s Books
Master side hustler, Chris Guillebeau, has written the playbook through his series of books on the topic. I highly recommend Chris’ latest book, The Money Tree: A Story About Finding the Fortune in Your Own Backyard, which delivers the key points through a story that most of us can relate to. The lack of money is causing issues in our lives, a day job that is not bringing out the best in us, and we need to find a way to make money quickly. I ordered the book but did not want to wait, so I also purchased the audiobook. Last week I set off for a long hike through the woods listening to the story narrated by Chris himself. The audiobook is fantastic.
I recommend his book, Side Hustle: From Idea to Income in 27 Days. I repurchased the book in 2017, and it accelerated my side hustle by following the 27 steps he outlined. The book also gave me a lot of good ideas for my website, including writing an origins story, designing offers, and securing testimonials. Executing the easy and actionable steps of this cookbook will reduce your time to market and improve the likelihood of launching a product that customers want and need.
#2 – Learn from the Side Hustle School
Chris Guillebeau’s Side Hustle School website and podcast is a treasure trove of ideas and tools for people who want to learn how to create and grow a side hustle business. Each day covers a real-life story of someone who has realized success and how they did it. There are over 1,200 examples as of the time of this post. After listening to some of these stories, I can’t help but think that “if they can do it, anybody can!”.
The “classroom” is new in 2020 and provides weekly instruction intended to take people through the end-to-end process of envisioning, building, and launching a side hustle.
#3 – Learn from Chris Live Each Day
Join Chris Guillebeau’s YouTube channel for a live stream Monday-Friday at noon US Eastern to get a daily dose of side hustle wisdom.
There is a “question of the day”, “lesson of the day” and “daily challenge”. Each episode is recorded so you can start from the beginning if you missed the start two weeks ago!
#4 – Technology for Small Online Businesses
A website is an essential capability to monetize your idea. I have used WordPress with many different themes for over 10 years. This site uses the “Extra” theme from Elegant Themes, and it’s simply amazing, given the ease of use and customization options. The product is unreal for the money, the docs are thorough, and the support team is friendly and responsive. With purchase, you get the Divi, Extra themes, and plugins for email marketing and social sharing.
See the technology I use and recommend to help you save time and money.
#5 – My Offer for People Who Need Help ASAP
If you have an excellent idea but need the expertise to accelerate the work required to get your business operational, look no further.
As a person with a day job in product management, I know the effort and expertise required to design a compelling offer, acquire and configure the technology, and target offers to the right audience across various channels to generate sales. The technology hurdle alone is often what stands between the idea and income. Learn more about business coaching to help you start, scale, and automate your small online business.