Find Your Side Hustle Idea: 5 Steps To A Winning Business Idea

1. Welcome To Class: Hi there. Welcome to class. My name is Ben. I'm a side hustle coach. I love talking about side hustles. And one of my favorite things is to talk about how to actually find, start and grow your side hustle. Today, I'm really excited to chat through five things that you should consider as you're evaluating your side hustle idea, a lot of us have great ideas. But when you're thinking about starting it as a business, it's extremely important to run through these five things. I'm so excited that you decided to take this class. I am a side hustle expert. I have a few of my own side hustles, including a photo booth rental company, a successful Etsy shop. I teach here on Skillshare, and I have a couple of other businesses that I run that are fairly successful and I love talking about them. One of them is a side hustle coaching business. I have a podcast where I talked about side hustles. It's called side hustle Davis. I'm just like a big side hustle person. I love talking about starting businesses and really turning your creative ideas into realities. And so I really wanted to build this class just for people like you who have an idea or maybe you don't quite yet have an idea. And you need a little bit of structure to make sure that the idea that you are going to pursue is going to be successful. That it's going to actually make you money, which is really important as you start a side hustle, that it'll actually be worth your time. Because a lot of times, you know, people start site households and not, they're not always successful. But there's a lot of ways that you can turn an idea into a successful idea. And that is really what this class is all about today. So I hope you will join me. I hope you will follow along and listen to these five ways that you can evaluate your idea to really understand if it's going to be worth your time and if it's going to make you a lot of money or make you the amount of money that you're aiming to make. If you're interested in following me here on Skillshare, I would love that. I teach all about side hustles. I teach all about things like Etsy, social media strategy and just general business strategy as well. I would love for you to be along for the ride. So as you're taking the class, if you like what you see, please click the follow button. I would love to have you along in my little community that I have here on Skillshare. I really do want to get into this class. I hope you will enjoy it. I think you will. Honestly, I think it'll be really helpful for you and I will see you on the other side. 2. Passion For Your Idea: All right, So thank you so much for clicking into this class, for joining. I'm really, really excited for you to be here today. What we're going to really do is talk through five things that you should consider as you go about starting your side hustle. Whatever your idea is, we're going to talk about five ways to really evaluate your idea to see if it's good, to see if it will actually make you money and actually be worth your time. So the first thing that we're gonna talk about here, this is category number one and something that I think is extremely important as you start any side hustle or any business, is really your passion for the idea. How passionate are you about the business that you're going to be able to start? Before you even start your side hustle, you should double-check that you're actually interested in the work that you will be doing. One thing you want to avoid is digging yourself into a hole where you have to do all this work that you hate. For me. I started a lot of businesses that I'm really passionate about, but I've also had experiences starting businesses where maybe I wasn't so passionate about them or maybe it required too much work that I wasn't enjoying. And it's really, really important that you as the side hustle or as the entrepreneur can understand for yourself, how you're going to create a business that you're actually passionate about. And one thing that we know foreshore is that if you're not passionate about your idea, the likelihood that it'll grow, the likelihood that you will have fun doing it, the likelihood that it will be rewarding and meaningful is very, very low. And so it's really important that as you build a business that's going to grow, as you build a business that is going to make you money, that it's something that you actually enjoy doing. Another reason this is important is because it's really important as you advertise your business and as you go about growth, to be able to always talk about your business and to share with the world why you're so passionate about what you do. If you're not passionate about your idea, it's not gonna be very spreadable. You're not gonna have a lot of word of mouth or anything like that. What I'd like to do is tell people to take out a piece of paper and actually do a little exercise to help you figure out what you're passionate about. And one of the things that you can do is you can do it as a journal prompt. You can do it as a bulleted list, but answer these questions that I have here up on the screen. What do you do in your free time? What do your friends go to U4 is one of my favorites because it often uncovers things that we are not always aware of as skills that we have. What do people compliment you on? What do you actually enjoy about your day job? What websites or accounts do you follow regularly? Are you following fashion accounts? Are you following party event planning accounts? And then what do you, what did you do for fun in school? What is it that fires you up as a person? These questions can really, really help you to understand yourself better as a person. And just doing this exercise can be really, really helpful as you start to think about what kind of business you want to start. If you already have a business idea, do a quick pause and get strategic and understand for yourself. Am I passionate about this thing? The other thing that I'll say about passion, is it great to have passion for an idea? But you can get creative about what you're passionate about. So for example, if your idea is to wash cars for money, you don't necessarily have to be passionate about washing cars. Maybe what you're passionate about his customer service. Maybe what you're passionate about is marketing and you love marketing. This idea of washing cars. Maybe what you're passionate about, honestly is just the money that you know you can make by starting in car washing business. Get creative with your definition of passion, because you don't necessarily have to be passionate about the exact thing. A lot of people in their day jobs are in their side hustles. They're able to find a way to link up and be passionate about what they're working on without necessarily having to be passionate about the exact work that they do. Although I will tell you, it helps to be passionate about in your actual idea and the actual work that you're doing. Number one, it's really important to be passionate about your idea. Passionate about your business passion about your products and services. That is my number one tip. As you build and grow your side hustle. Let's move on to the next one. 3. Startup Costs: The next one here is startup costs. And this is something as a side hustle coach. I see very, very often people messing up here. Because when they want to start a business, they get really excited, which is an awesome thing. They get really excited. They go out there and they start to spend all this money on the business without thinking about how, how much it's gonna take to break even or how much they're going to need to make to get that money back. And so what I would love for you to do is as you're starting your business, just take a moment of pause and understand for yourself how much does it actually cost to start this business? Really, really think about those startup costs as you start and grow your business. Now in order to understand for yourself what your startup costs should be, do the math. It's really important that you actually get out there. You gotta calculate again a piece of paper, whatever it is, and do some math. So if something, if your business costs you $1000 to start the business and you're gonna be selling items for $10, you should actually know how many items you're going to have to sell to break even on those, on those costs. So if something is $10 and it costs $1000 to start, you're gonna need to sell a 100 items to break even. So really just thinking for yourself, is that realistic? Do I have it in me to sell a 100 items? If not, think about lowering your startup costs, think about increasing your price so that your revenue is higher and you have to sell fewer items. It's really important to think about what it's gonna take to actually break even on your startup costs. I see this a lot of times with things like Etsy stores or other businesses where there's a lot of supplies needed in order to start your business. And maybe you're spending money on packaging and maybe you're spending money on beads. If you're making jewelry or whatever it is, you're spending money to get a license or to hire someone to make your website. Really get careful about what those costs are and try to, try to see how much money you can make before you start spending money. One of the best tips I've ever seen shared online. Really, starting to starting your business with as little money as possible. This is something that I did with one of my businesses, is how little can I spend to actually start this business? Then once you actually make money, you start to reinvest that money into the business. But when it comes to startup costs, it's really important to keep those as low as possible, or at least make sure it's realistic that you can pay them off as quickly as you, as you plan to or that you want to. Keep started costs low. Let's go to the next item here. 4. Product Market Fit: Okay, so this one here, this is number three, product market fit is actually extremely important in any business. So it's really important that you, as the business owner, as the creator of your products, as the doer of your services, that you have an idea of what your product market fit is. Product market fit is really making sure that what you're selling is something that people are actually in the market for. Is there a market for what you're selling? Sometimes people have really fun ideas, exciting to execute on and they're exciting to talk about. And they're exciting to post on social media about. But they don't actually making, they don't actually end up making very many sales. This is because people aren't actually in the market for what they're selling. So think about if there is a customer out there who will pay for your product or service, if there aren't any real customers actually do some work to examine why that is. It might be time for a different idea or it might be time to tweak your idea a little bit. There's plenty of ways that you can actually get to the place where you actually have product market fit. Oftentimes, you're not going to get it necessarily on the first try. So when you're thinking about product market fit, there's three things that I want you to do as you're building your idea, as you're evaluating whether this is the idea for you. But the first thing here is to look at what similar businesses are doing. If you are selling mugs on Etsy, It's great idea to look at what other mugs are selling on Etsy, what other mugs or pricing on Etsy? Figuring out what other businesses are doing. Because if other businesses are selling what you're trying to sell, the likelihood is that you will also be able to sell the item. But you got to do that research first. So if you're selling T-shirts, go out there and see what other people are buying when it comes to T-shirts, see what other people are searching online about t-shirts. And that's a good way to figure out if there's a sense of product market fit. The second thing here is to get feedback from five friends. This is something that I think is really, really, really important as you're starting your business and as you're evaluating your business idea, getting feedback from five friends will be extremely valuable to you. The other thing that you can do to get feedback is to distribute a survey. You can create a survey on Google Forms or any other survey making website. And you can distribute a survey asking people what they would be interested in when it comes to your idea how much they would be willing to pay, things like that. A lot of people, this is something that I really want you to understand as a side hustler, as an entrepreneur, maybe as an artist, maybe as a non-profit organizer. Lot of people, this is very real. A lot of people are very afraid of getting feedback. Um, and the reason that they're afraid of getting feedback is because there's a sense of rejection, There's a sense of failure that might come from getting feedback, especially if it's from your friends. And I totally get that, I totally get that. It's really sometimes difficult to ask for feedback on something that means so much to you. But I'm telling you here and now without feedback, you may never know if there's a fit with your target demographic. So it's really, really very, extremely important that you as the entrepreneur or have your finger on the pulse of what people want when it comes to your business. Now there is another caveat here where sometimes people don't know what they want until they see it. One thing that you can also do, You don't have to be so hesitant on waiting until you start, until you get feedback. You could actually just put something out there and get feedback after you put it out there. That's one way of doing it. If you're like me, you're very creative and sometimes even impulsive, and you just want to get something done as quick as possible and launched. If you want to do that, that's totally fine, but just have the understanding that it might not be a success story. The first round, you've got to iterate, you got to change things, you got to improve things and definitely ask for feedback. So product market fit is one of those things that's just extremely important as you go to start and grow your side hustle. Let's move on. 5. Pricing Potential: This one I'm really excited to talk about because I feel like it doesn't get a lot of airtime. But this is pricing potential. It's really, we're talking about money here where it's just really important when you're talking about a side hustle. One of the things that I always like to tell people when they're starting a business, a side hustle, a creative project is that you have to make sure your sheer clear on what your goals are is your goal to get popular on Instagram? Is your goal to better the world or is your goal to make money and have a little bit of extra money every month coming in that you can spend on your bills and different things. It's really important to know what your goals are. And I want to say here, if your goal is to make more money than it's really important that you pay attention to what your pricing is. As you probably know, profit is revenue minus costs. You need to make sure that at the very least, your revenue is higher than your cost. Because that will make it, make sure that you're actually making profit on your business. That's where setting your price comes in. Makes sure that you're able to make the money that you want or need on your business idea. If you're setting out to start a side hustle, because you want $200 a month. It's really important that you're paying attention to your pricing and your revenue and your costs to make sure that you're actually making that $200 profit. Sometimes you even need to think about taxes depending on what your business is and how much you're making. So it's really important that you as the entrepreneur are setting your price in a way that serves you and actually gives you the profit that you want or need. When you're thinking about doing this, try these things. Look at what other businesses charge for similar products and services. So if you're trying to choose your price for your item or for your services, you want to be competitive, but you also want to make sure you're charging enough to where it makes sense in the market. If you are if you're selling car Washington again, I'm just stuck on the car Washington idea, I guess today, it's really important that you understand what your competitors are charging. If your competitors are charging $20 to wash a car and you're charging a $100 to wash a car, you need to understand that you might not get as much business as the people who are getting $20. However, if it costs you twenty-five dollars to wash a car, for whatever reason, You better not charge $20 or else you're actually going to lose money. And if you charge $25, you're gonna be just basically washing cars for free. So think about how many dollars do I want to make in order to in order to meet my goal when it comes to revenue and when it comes to profit. Calculate your costs also to run the business and ensure that you can charge more than that. So like I just said, you need to make sure that whenever you're charging is more than whatever the costs are. This requires you to be extremely aware of what the costs are of running your business. And don't forget to include things like website costs or your listing fees if you're running on our website or your transportation costs or anything like that, every cost needs to go into this formula to really help you understand how much it costs to run your business. If you are charging more than you're paying to run the business, then you're gonna make a profit. Now, the other thing is to make sure that your profit margin is high enough that it's worth your time and your energy. And we're gonna get a little bit more into this in the next slide. But the profit margin is basically the difference between what you're spending on running the business and what you're making on running the business. In the car, Washington example, if it costs you $20 to make rent to wash your car and you're charging $25 to do it, then you're gonna make a $5 profit margin because 25 minus 20 is $5, you're actually only making $5 when you wash that car. Don't get into the mindset of thinking that you made $25, you did not make $25, you made $5. So that's really, really important to just understand what the word profit margin means. And you've probably already, you probably already know that, but I just wanted to explain it just in case anybody was unclear, really making sure that your profit margin is high enough that it's worth your time. Let's go to the next section here. This is the final one. 6. Required Time & Effort: Required time and effort is something that is a huge lesson that I've learned when it comes to finding, starting and growing your side hustle. What am I talking about here? So basically one of the most important things when you're deciding if you want to start a side hustle is how much time and effort something will take to be successful. A side hustle should honestly be just that. It should be a side hustle. You don't want to have to break your back making products or providing services unless you're making enough money for what you're doing. If you are going to start an Etsy shop, that's a great thing. But don't necessarily get yourself into a situation where you're gonna be spending eight hours taping things together or building things or drawing. Makes sure that you're putting in the amount of time and effort that is either worth it to you for the money or worth it to you in the sense that you actually enjoy it. I don't want anybody to turn into a one-person factory if that makes sense. If you are making T-shirt prints, think about what it would be like if that was successful. Is it successful? If you're selling a 100 shirts in one order, what would it look like if you had to fulfill an order of a 100 t-shirts and you had to print on each t-shirt, how much time would that take you and also, how much physical effort would that take you? Just think through how much you actually want to physically be working and how much time you want to be spending on your business to fulfill orders or to provide the service that you're providing. There are a couple of things you can try when you're trying to kind of make sense of required time and effort. The first thing that you can do is calculate your hourly pay rate for the time you spend versus the money you make. For example, think about if you got an order, say of a 100 t-shirts, what would that look like? So say maybe you are going to spend ten hours making a 100 t-shirts, which is probably unrealistic. But let's just say you're making ten t-shirts an hour and it's gonna take you attend teach at ten hours to make 100 t-shirts. Now imagine it costs you $15 to buy, make, and ship each T-shirts. So $15 costs. Then maybe you're selling them for 20. So your profit margin is $5. It's going to cost you $1500 to print these t-shirts. And you are going to be making a five-dollar margins. So you're actually going to make $500 because the total cost, $20 T-shirts for a $100, $2 thousand, you're gonna take home $500. You're gonna be working for $500 and you're gonna be working for, let's say ten hours to make these. So you're actually going to make $50 an hour on this deal. Is that worth it to you? Is it not worth it to you? Is that gray? Is it not great? Think through that and decide, is it worth it to you what that hourly rate is? The other thing to consider when you're thinking about your hourly rate is don't just think through the time it takes you to make the products, but thanks for the time it took you to make the sale. Think through the time it took you to make the website, the Instagram page, how much time are you spending actually running the business? That stuff counts to decide how much, how much or how little if you're willing to work for and do the math. That's the big theme here with starting your idea and starting your side hustle is really doing, doing the math. So here's another example. If you spend 20 hours for a $100, you're making $5 an hour because a 100 divided by 20 is five. Are you okay with that? Think through that as you start to design what your business is gonna look like. And then make optimizations and figure out for yourself if you really want to work for that amount of money. So really think about the required time and effort for running your business. 7. Conclusion: So there we have it. We've made it to the end of the course today. I am so happy that you stuck with it and that you learned about these five categories for evaluating your business. I'm curious to know in the comments if you had any epiphanies or if you had any realizations during this course, is there anything about your idea that you decided that you wanted to shift or change or improve. Did you feel a sense of inspiration that you want to actually go out and get some feedback on your idea. That would be really fun for me to know. So definitely leave a comment for the class project today. What I would love for you to do is give yourself a score for these five categories. Again, the five categories are the passion for your idea. The startup costs, the product market fit, the pricing potential and the time and effort. Give yourself a score from one to 51 being you need a lot of work. And five being you're totally there and you're perfect. Give yourself a little scorecard, one through five on those five things. If you have a score that's close to 25, then you are good to go and your idea is really going to work out for you. If you're closer to 0, you might have some more work to do, and you might have some more research and get some feedback and do the little mechanics, do the math, and figure out how to make your business more successful. I really hope you enjoyed going through that and learning about those five things is something that I'm really passionate about. Something that I talked about heavily in my coaching. And I really hope that you got something out of it. Now, if you're interested in following me here on Skillshare, I would absolutely love that. I teach classes all about Etsy, all about social media strategy and business strategy overall. And it's a really fun time, so I would love for you to join me. You can get alerted for my new class. I would, I would absolutely love that. You can also find me on tiktok, Instagram and YouTube at hustle with bed. And I have content there for other fun things and also documenting my lifestyle as a side hustler. I would enjoy if you follow me there, if you want to Instagram message me and just get some feedback on your idea, you're more than welcome to. It's at hustle with Ben. You can follow me and send me a DM. I will reply with some feedback or some ideas for you because I just like to interact with people who take my classes. So definitely give me a follow definitely DME, I would love that. With. Without further ado, I will let you head onto your next class. Give this video a little bit more thought and figure out how you want to move forward with your business in a way that's thoughtful, strategic, and meaningful. With that, I hope you have a great day and even better week and good luck.