In the last 6 months, my good buddy Thomas and myself generated over $100k in revenue from our paid investing course (alongside his investing blog, which is a membership subscription).
Over 85% net profit went into our pockets, since it's a lean operation.
Here's 4 quick lessons I learnt for anyone who wants to start a profitable side hustle based around your passions or knowledge:
Oh! before that, just some background:
- We did this with pure organic traffic and zero spent on ads.
- We have no plans to scale this nor become full time investment coaches or trainers. We both have main gigs that we're working on apart from this, and we want to keep it that way.
- This is purely a side hustle born out of love for teaching and listeinng to our own voices lol.
Lets go.
1. Start with time commitment you are able to commit to. Instead of goals.
Most people who start a side hustle start with how much income they wana make. I recommend the opposite.
We did it the other way and asked ourselves:
"Okay we only wanna commit a total of 20 hours to this project. Combined. So what can we create that takes only 20 hours max?"
This got us thinking in terms of constraints.
Forced us to be scrappy and keep things at a MVP level.
We ended up generating this with only 20 hours of prep time put in. Not too shabby imo.
Build your side hustle around your ideal lifestyle. Not the other way around.
2. Build an audience first
Before we launched this, we spent months building an audience on Twitter.
Wrote a post almost daily to get a following. Interacted with the community there. Shared ideas and built authority.
This is crucial when you wanna start a side hustle around passions or knowledge or expertise.
You need an audience. We both used Twitter because that's where our audience is. But it can be IG or Tiktok or Linkedin or Facebook. Doesn't matter.
The key is to have an audience that knows you.
It gives you a lot of optionality afterwards in terms of what you wanna market them.
3. The product must be able to create itself
As a side hustle, the key here is limited time.
Because you likely have a main job apart from this. (so did we)
So the topic has to be something that we're so knowledgeable about that it can almost write and create itself without much research or study.
The content for our investing course was created in just a few hours because this is something we do almost everyday ourselves. So we didn't need to spend extra time to put together the material.
If you find yourself having to spend a lot of time researching and putting the content together, then it’s NOT optimal. Cut the scope or niche down further.
4. Think small
This is counter intuitive. but important.
Most people start a side hustle thinking of firing their boss and have having big goals of makinng 5 figures and stuff.
Don't do that.
Start with small goals because the contsraint you have here is time and energy.
So we intentionally set ZERO goals for ourselves and purposely priced our product to be affordable and easy for most people to get in.
We didn't do any upsells or stuff on the backend because the goal is NOT the maximize income.
The key is to prove the concept first and see whether people will even pay us for it (which they did!)
And if we want, we can optimize it later.
But if we had aimed high and wanted to do something big, it would have slowed us down and the launch would have been much slower. And if it flopped, it would have been more painful too!
All in all, here's some stats if you're curious:
- we went from idea to launch in 1 month.
- We met once on zoom for 2 hours and the rest was all whatsapp communication. We both hate long meetings.
- We spent 10 hours preparing the landing page and design.
- We spent another 5-6 hours preparing the material.
- And then 12 hours to conduct the actual LIVE class.
IN SUMMARY, here’s the key mindset to make a side hustle work:
Do NOT aim to maximize your income. Instead, focus on protecting the downside.
Repeat after me - protect the downside. protect the downside. protect the downside.
For a side hustle, the financial cost is usually low.
But the time and effort cost can be high. Along with your morale if it fails.
The key is to keep the commitment so low such that even if it fails, you didn’t lose much time and can try again.
Basically I asked myself “If we both spent 20 hours on this in total and made nothing, is it a loss I’m okay with?”
And the answer is yes. So we went ahead.
That's it. Keep it lean and scrappy. I hope this helps
Max
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