The 5 Stages of Building a Side Hustle

If you talk to basically anyone anymore, they go on about their job and their side hustle. We’ve reached the point that the average person goes from one job they put up with to one that they like but still have to work at. The “why” a side hustle is necessary is unfortunate, but the growth and enjoyment it can provide is one of a kind.

There are plenty of reasons to have a side hustle aside from just finances. It can provide a more rewarding career path without having to take all the risks of an all-in plunge. It can give you a way to turn hobbies into something more and help you discover whether you enjoy it enough to make it a job. There are even situations where it just gives you something to show you what you don’t want to do.

I’ve found that I tend to follow 5 rough stages for every side hustle I’ve had. I search, begin learning about it, then grow towards the idea, mature my desire, then work to master it. Each step has its own caveats and its own function.

Searching

To embark on a new enterprise you need to know what you want to embark on. On paper, this is the easiest step, but in practice it’s the hardest. If you’re like me, you have a thousand different hobbies and interests which need to be tempered against the needs of family and friends. What can you do, what are you willing to do, and what do you want to try to do? This is easy to answer academically, but much harder in practice.

The searching phase is one of the hardest since you aren’t going to know what you don’t know in the beginning. This is just part of the Dunning-Kruger effect. It’s not that big of a deal if you know it’s easy to underestimate the difficulty of a task without all of the information. A little knowledge is dangerous.

Focus on finding something which looks fun to attempt that also looks profitable without being saturated. Don’t just stop there though, what can you get out of the task itself? What can you learn from it? Will it suit you or who you want to be? Make a wager, if it all falls through, what can you take from the whole experience?

I’m not exactly the most social person, so I’m not going to rush towards a purely social type of hustle. A hustle or hobby which requires some degree of social skills might be a good jump to improve those skills though. Search for what you want to do as well as where you want to go as a person.

Learning

You need to learn about your hobby or sprouting side hustle before you can really push forward. Knowing what you want to do is great, but you need to know how to do it to succeed. You need to amass knowledge.

Learning requires skills and practice to solidify. You can’t grow without the skills to back it. A side hustle isn’t just an idea, it’s a collection of knowledge, skills, and implementation that can be monetized.

Before I wrote my first article, I spent hours reading other essays and researching topics. I read up on SEO and worked to build up a quantity of articles. I wanted to make sure I skipped the worst parts and jumped right in. It wasn’t until I kept writing and writing that I felt I had accomplished or learned anything at all. I took an entire certificate course on marketing to work towards this goal.

As I learned, I learned more about what made me like the subject and what I wanted to do with it. I learned what I could do to monetize my efforts and how to make it more profitable and enjoyable both. I gained skills I can sell, and have sold, to further my primary career. I set the stage to grow.

Growing

Once you search out what you want to do, you need to grow into the role. This isn’t just learning though. Earlier, in the search, we looked for what we wanted to do and where we wanted to go with it. Are you willing to grow to fit the role? Where do you need to grow based on what you’ve been learning? This is the process you start as you either learn more about how to monetize, or actually start to monetize the side hustle.

When I first started writing, I wasn’t a good writer. I had the rote knowledge of grammar and usage and could physically write, but I had not grown to own this role. You need to take the ideal of what you’re aiming to be and try to live up to it. Let your knowledge grow, but make your person grow with it.

I want hard data for anything I do. Emotion and feelings don’t factor in that much (aside from me just wanting to do something). When I look at a task or a job, I look at how compatible I am. I can grow as a writer, I can grow as an analyst, but if you put me in a sales position, I’ll struggle to grow to adapt to the role.

Part of growing into your new idea is knowing when you just can’t cut it. You need to know what is involved before you make that call though. Writing wasn’t my first side hustle, but the others required too much of me that I wasn’t willing to give. Ask yourself how committed to it you are. If you really want it, you can force yourself to adapt and change in ways you can’t if it doesn’t become a part of your very soul.

I want to write, I have grown to be a writer. I can’t say the same of a lot of other things I thought were passions.

Maturing

Reconciling your growth and your knowledge with your requirements to make money off of your side hustle is the maturing you do for your business and side hustle. How far are you willing to go to make it work? What tasks which are out of your comfort zone will you do to make a dime? Where are your lines and how fuzzy or rigid are they? What is the point of all of this?

Even though the name of the game is passive income, you need to think about more than just the side hustle. I burned myself out as a freelancer years ago because I learned and grew, but never matured in the position. A tree that grows too fast and doesn’t mature just bends over and dies. I became obsessed to the point of burnout.

You need to set boundaries. What are you willing to do and for how much? What are the limits of your hustle and what is up for grabs? As you learn more and grow, you’ll know more and more what you like and what you don’t. A side hustle needs to be more than just plain work or you’re just working another job at this point. I love writing, but I also don’t want to be beholden to anyone else when I write. I turned this into a blog and made it work. It’s not beau-coup bucks, but it’s not nothing either.

Mastering

You know what you want to do, you know how to do it, you’ve grown yourself out of your comfort zone and are working towards your goals, and now you have to work to become a master. Mastery is different for everyone. To master one side hustle may mean to be somewhat familiar with dozens of skills, while others require plain mastery of a single skill and a few additional bits to monetize. Each hustle and implementation of said hustle is going to be different.

By this point, you should know what you can do, what you can learn, where you want to go, and how much time you have to dedicate. Now you can focus on mastering the skills to carve out a niche for your side hustle. This helps you cut out the less profitable parts of your business so it can scale, and sets the stage to automate your business to some degree. What’s formulaic? What can be handed off or outsourced off to make your time more efficient?

I focus on more technical writing, though I do other writing for fun. Though I may not be the best writer in the world, I know where my strengths lie and follow them. Offload your weaknesses where you can as well, I know I do.

I can take photos and make content, but my time is better spent on writing. It takes me 2-3x longer to make an image than it does a graphic designer, but I can write faster than some content farms for certain content. Which is going to get me money at the end of the day, the image in an article or the article itself? The image can bolster it, but people are reading my writing because they like something about it or want whatever information it conveys. I stay my lane and offload these pieces of my side hustle to more knowledgeable individuals or to free resources I learned about previously.

As you get better and better, you can either turn this into something more than a side venture, or work on growing another hustle. I like to have more than one income stream going on and try to optimize my safety net. I don’t want to have to worry about something drying up and I’m too ADHD too commit to just one target.

Hustling On

Fixing computers in my spare time just got me a lot of stress and some one off payments. Once I learned to search for what I wanted, learn about it, grow into the role, matured in how I handled myself in my hustle, and began to master the hustle, I bought my freedom from the (side) job I didn’t want. If you follow these steps, you can build a hustle you enjoy yourself.

The steps seem common sense, but I see plenty of people doing things they hate in their free time because they can’t or won’t grow, or can’t or won’t learn. Some just won’t mature and learn to say no or learn to play to their strengths. You may not need a side hustle, but it can be amazingly fun when done right. If you don’t need the money or care about turning a hobby into money, more power to you, but for the rest of us, we might as well go all in to making it the best it can be.

Featured image by salutfromparis from Pixabay

Categories: Productivity
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