How to choose your sidehustle

So in my last blog post, we spoke about why you should start your side hustle now.

Now that you've decided to go ahead with it, what should you actually do? 
Well, there are a few places to start, but we always like to begin with personal and professional goals.

Define your goals

A well-defined goal will let you say no to a lot of ideas fast. And saying no is the fastest way to focus. 

Is your goal:

To add to your income?
To replace your income?
To gain experience?
To learn new skills?
To change your job?

Being honest about your motivations is important. Why are you side hustling? (A question I have longed to ask the artist Rick Ross about). And don't worry if you've got lots of reasons. Having many motivations can help you to narrow down your search. They're not exclusive. It's fine to want to follow your passions and want to get paid.

Once you know your goals you should set timeframes, and have regular check-ins with someone who'll keep you accountable. This will help you know whether you are closer to achieving your goal or further away.

Know yourself

So it's time to do a little bit of soul searching. 

What skills or opportunities do you have? What opportunities can you leverage to achieve your goals? These could be hard skills like programming, design, or finance, softer skills like networking, selling, or listening or you could just have spare time – a very underrated opportunity.

A consultant once asked me: What's your superpower? What do you like doing, that you're also good at, that people also think you're good at?

Great question, huh?

It's also key to know what you don't want to do and why you don't want to do them. Sometimes, it's not about the thing you're doing, but where or how you're doing it.

Market need

Not all side hustles (or businesses) have to be a new thing. In fact, depending on your goal and motivations, they sometimes shouldn't be. There's merit in trying to find an innovative solution to new problems. Some customers like new things. I'm definitely an early adopter of all the things. But, it can also mean that explaining what it is that you do can take time. People might not understand the value in it, and so will hesitate to pay for your services.

Some markets express a desire for a need and that need is unlikely to shrink that much even as more people enter it.

Great examples are babysitting, dog walking, burger joints.

You can never have enough good babysitters, dog walkers, or burger joints.

I'm also putting emphasis on being good. If you're handy with a camera, you can have a profitable side hustle being a good photographer for corporate events.

In some situations, the key thing is to find markets where there is a need for your particular skills where customers are paying. Study a few different markets that you're interested in a see how you could provide value. Find out who the decision-makers and buyers are in the market and find out what they're spending money on.

And the best way to do this is to ask.

Talk to people and see what they say. If they express frustrations that you could solve with your skills (or time), that's a good place to start because there will be lots of people like them.

Build an audience

There's also another tried and true tactic. Build an audience and try and figure out how to monetise them later. This is usually a little slower and depends on criteria you may not be able to control. It's risky.

Startups used to try this model in the early 00s and lots of them went bust as they had no real business model. And the same thing is happening with influencers on Instagram.

There are lots of platforms that help you build and monetise audiences around any topic. In 2020, your best bet is to get paid to solve a problem and to build an audience at the same time. Audiences are defensible and help build your reputation, but they take longer to grow.