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1-Page Summary of Side Hustle
Do the Hustle
Chris Guillebeau believes that people can enjoy the rewards of entrepreneurship without taking on all the risks and expense. He suggests starting a side hustle, where you have your regular job while pursuing an entrepreneurial project. The trick is to come up with a business idea that demands only a manageable investment of time, money and labor.
People around the world are making money from side hustles. For example, a woman in Pennsylvania earned $40,000 over three years by promoting various products on Pinterest. A man in San Francisco made an extra $7,500 per month from an app he created that delivers information about traffic conditions in the Bay Area. Another person quit his job as a university employee to teach guitar lessons because of his side hustle income.
The author cites the stories of people who were able to achieve their goals in 27 days. His strategy is that you can follow in these examples by devoting each of the next five work weeks to a specific goal:
Week One: Build a Stock of “Viable Business Ideas”
Guillebeau believes that you can find the seeds of good ideas everywhere. As you go through your day, look for common problems and needs that remain unmet. For example, if you see a person walking a dog, consider how he or she might be busy and could benefit from a dog-walking service. Analyze other everyday activities in the same way to come up with business ideas. Your business ideas are likely to fall into three categories: You can sell a product, offer a service or act as middleman (i.e., connect buyers and sellers). Collect ideas with these traits:_ _
Ideas need to be feasible and profitable. People should focus on ideas that they can set up quickly, as well as ones that are likely to bring in money. These ideas should also have a short learning curve so people don’t spend too much time developing them before bringing them to market.
They are persuasive. It’s important to know when an idea is the right one for people to buy into. Guillebeau offers a plan on how to find that idea and persuade others of it. In the first week, come up with three ideas that may not seem like world beaters but could be tweaked into something great later on.
Joe Maiellano had the idea of creating his own brand of gin, but he found that it would be too expensive to start a distillery. He thought about how else he could go about selling gin and decided to create a Homemade Gin Kit so people could simply make their own gin at home. The author suggests brainstorming strategies for overcoming or sidestepping obstacles in your business ideas.
Week Two: Select the Best Idea
The author suggests that you should rank your ideas from 1 to 5 in five categories: feasibility, profitability, persuasion, efficiency and motivation. You should do this by estimating the costs and benefits of each idea. For example, if you think an idea will be profitable but it requires a lot of work to implement then it may not be worth pursuing.
If you have a similar idea to someone else’s, find out what makes your product or service different. You should be able to summarize that difference in one sentence or two. It should be easy for the customer to understand and give them an unmistakable benefit. Don’t try to please everyone; design your product or service around a single ideal customer. John Lee Dumas, who produces the Entrepreneur on Fire podcast, advocates this approach by writing about his imaginary listener who desperately wanted his kind of show.
Meredith Floyd-Preston was a teacher who wanted to start her own business. She considered several options, such as offering personal consulting or coaching, running workshops, or writing curriculum guides. After careful consideration she decided that the best option would be to write curriculum guides because it would consume less of her time and have greater profit potential after each guide was published.
