Snippet 15: How To Start A Side Hustle (Patricia Bright)
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Hey friends, welcome back to the Deep Dive Snippet. This clip is part of my conversation on the podcast with Patricia Bright. And we're talking about how people in their early 20s or early in life at any stage, to be honest, can start a side hustle. And what are the steps that that person should take to try and make it in this kind of make money on the internet side hustle business entrepreneurship type sphere? Let's say someone is listening to this. They're like, you know, mid early to mid 20s. They've got a job and they want to do a business on the side to make that $8,000 a month or whatever to supplement their income.

How would you approach that? Do you have a method, a system, a process? So, I mean, I would...

tell people to use the skills that they currently have knowledge they currently have tools that they currently have. So if you know something, so say someone I know who's really good at Excel, well just either help people build Excel templates or sell Excel templates. Like this is something you can already do. That's where I would start off and then looking at scaling that or pricing it higher. That's what I would tell most people to do. I wouldn't tell them to go and invest in a product

and spend loads on inventory without testing a model first, because I think that's really expensive and actually hard to like make happen. But I just say, use what you've got.

like if you've got a spare room, rent that out. Why you would have a spare room? I don't know, but something like that. Or if you like animals, why don't you start pet sitting or something or dog walking? So loads of dog walkers make like a ton of money 'cause they like dog walk 10 dogs for like 50 pounds a day. They can make like 500 pounds a day. Is that the right math? - Yeah.

They can do that, right? And even for instance, I'm working with a cake decorator and someone who does balloons and decor and like, you know, I'm paying her 500 pounds and it's something I can't do, but she's really good at it. She loves it. So there's ways that people can make money from things that they are good at doing already. Yeah.

Yeah, it's like that Venn diagram of the things that you're good at, the things that you like and the things that there is a market for. Exactly. And I remember when, you know, my, you know, I like to think of it as my origin story when I was 18 years old, got scammed out of my life savings when buying a MacBook off of Gumtree. And I was like, right, I need to make this thousand pounds back because I'd saved up for like years and years to get to that point.

And I was like, all right, what's the list of things I'm good at and the things I like doing? And on that list was teaching. On that list it was like making websites. And on that list was I did reasonably well in med school entrance exams to get in. I was like, cool, what if I combine teaching with the med school entrance exam so I teach people how to get into med school and then I make a website for it that markets it nationally? And that was the thing that made my business successful. And, you know,

I just think a lot of people are like, hey, I'm going to learn day trading completely from scratch. And then I'm going to make loads of money because I found some course that does it. It's like, it's really hard to compete in a market where you are not already good at the thing. Exactly. So step one is to get good at something. And if you're already good at something, then find a way to make money off the back of that if you can. Exactly. If not, it's you're fighting a losing battle or you recognize that it's not going to be fast.

So if you wanna be a day trader, you're gonna spend three years or two years dedicated to learning it entirely fine, but you might be broke and lose loads of money during that period of time. But you can get good in like three years, right? 10,000 hours and all that jazz. So if you're willing to put the work in to get it good at something that's lucrative, fine, go ahead and do it. But I think most people have got abilities within themselves now to do something.

What about the whole people who decide they want to become a creator because it makes money and they see people like you and me being open about some of our numbers. They're like, oh, I want a slice of that pie. It's not scalable or sustainable if you don't want to do it. So when I started, there was no money in it. So I did these videos for three years without making a penny. I didn't know you could make any money in it. I was just doing it every single weekend after exams, after interning, like,

every Saturday I would just come and make videos because I loved doing it. And I didn't see it as a business at all. I do think that if you wanted to come in strategically, I'm not mad at that. Like if you're strategic and you're like, I'm going to make money as a creator and this and this and this and this is what I'm going to do. Fine. Execute your plan and see what happens. Yeah. I think it's like a,

It's the way we teach this in our on our course is sort of this there's kind of two approaches to being being like a youtuber for example There's uh, the archaeologist. There's the architect. So an archaeologist is like cool. This looks good I'm going to make a video a few videos here and then okay didn't really enjoy that Let's find another one make a few videos there and eventually they'll stumble on something that's like oh I enjoy this people are getting it's getting views and life is good And that seems to be how most youtubers start off just still making videos here and there until they stumble on their niche

And that's probably still what I'd recommend for complete beginners who don't know how to make videos because it takes a while to get good actually making videos. But if you are A, already good at making videos or B, you just want to treat it like a business from day one, then approaching it more like an architect is potentially a strategy where you analyze the market, you build out your plan. And then once you've got a clear idea of what your plan is, then you execute on it. Right. And so there have been quite a few channels that have decided to

For example, create content in the finance space where the CPMs are ridiculous. Because they're like, oh, there's a clear business here where you make content about books. You need about 50 times the amount of views to get the same amount of money. So like, why not just make one finance video rather than a whole year worth of books videos to get the same amount of money? And it becomes like a business decision at that point.