4 Steps to Make Progress on Side Hustles

I've found something interesting this past week. Each action we take in life, each goal, hobby, business we start has the same structure as a startup.

I restarted a side YouTube Channel, QuinnTalksMoney, that I work on during my nights and weekends. By trying to hit 200 subscribers by the end of January, I realized that my strategy should be the same that you'd expect for a high growth Silicon Valley startup.

↓ I've detailed the 4 steps below ↓

Tell me what similar experiences have you had that relate to the life of a startup in the comments.

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1. Define your niche and solve a problem.

I've been lucky enough to spend the last 6 years at TINT. Not only has this experience been the time of my life, but I've understand the necessity of defining your market early on, and ensuring that you are solving a problem and bringing value to customers.

This goes for any side hustle that you hope to start. No matter how small or seemingly insignificant it might be.

Spend time figuring out where are able to bring value, and then validate this with people in your network to ensure that you are able to provide what people are expecting.

2. Create a product that brings value

In my case, I'm creating videos and content. They are FAR from being Hollywood production quality (as you can see above), but the content and what I'm saying is my product. If I am not bringing value, then the audience will leave and my "startup" will fail. So the top priority is to bring useful insights via YouTube videos. The studio lighting can come next month!

I'm fully in experimentation mode right now and just having fun while I get into a routine and groove with creating content at nights and on the weekend. The video above I created in 2 hours after getting my invite to Clubhouse App.

This should be similar with your life as well. As a sales person, or a customer success manager, or a chief of staff, if you are not bringing value to the customer, your company, or your executive team, you will likely see less success. Define what challenges exist, and find ways to fill that void and provide a solution.

3. Friends and Family Round! Build loyalty and confidence.

For almost all startups and businesses, you have to start with a friends and family round. There is a very obvious reason for this. They know you, they trust you, and....they want to see you succeed. Also, they usually willing to put their money and efforts behind you...before you have anything to show for it. They take a risk in you.

Too many times in my life I have tried to do things alone building a side hustle or achieving a goal. Not only does this decrease the likelihood of success, but it wastes valuable time.

Engage your friends and family to get feedback, and give you the confidence and traction you need to have a slightly more legitimate offering.

For my few videos I would ask my wife to leave our house while I filmed because I was so embarrassed about messing up. All I was doing was talking to a camera in an empty room, but it was so difficult (and still is).

After I posted my 10th video, you start to get comfortable speaking into a camera. Step out of your comfort zone a bit and your confidence will continue to grow and snowball.

4. Expand your reach and grow

Once you've tapped all your friends and family (and have thoroughly annoyed them!) it's time to broaden your reach.

I'm not quite at this stage yet, but next steps will include:

• Expand to other social networks - Every social network has different content forms. I'll find ways to bring value on other platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and maybe even TikTok.
• Collaborations - Find other creators that are in a complimentary niche. Collaborate on content to tap into each other's networks.
• Review analytics and make adjustments - Don't worry about this too much before Step 4. Get in your groove, put content out there, and then review analytics to find trends and improvement areas.

Pivot and Iterate

Yes, this will be inevitable. As we get started with anything there are a million pieces of information that we just cannot know right now. So always be open to adjusting your model to find what works.

If you make 10 pitches to a client and no one wants to learn more about your product, well it might be time to change your script. If I make 50 videos and the only people watching them are my wife and mother, well then I might need to adjust my content to have a wider appeal :P

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My main takeaway from this short journey so far has been that enjoying the process with patience is essential. There is absolutely NO WAY that I will be able to hit my goal of 100 videos posted to my channel in 2021 if I am burning myself out, talking about topics that bore me, or focusing too much on view, likes, etc. etc.

Yes, I ask people to like and comment in my videos, but that is honestly the least of my worries. My biggest concern is that I'll sit in my cold garage into the dead of night creating videos that I don't care about, and that my audience (tiny right now) has no interest in.

So let's have fun and build our life goal startups!

And because Step 3 is important...here's the link to my YouTube channel, QuinnTalksMoney, so you can subscribe haha!