Start a side hustle?

I should start a side hustle, this seems to be the easiest thing to tackle with a full time job and not a lot of money to begin, right?

Well, here we go again, where do I start? The thought of starting a side hustle does not seem like a very daunting task when you draw it up in your head. I think about Gary Vee and how he is always yelling at us, “sell f***ing anything!” Yeah Gary, thanks. Of course you can sell your stuff, but that is not a side hustle, that’s just spring cleaning or your once a year small yard sale to a make a few bucks so you can afford to go out to brunch with your friends. It seems like we need to break this down and treat it just like a business if we are ever going to make anything of it.

So first, we need to think about what kind of side hustle we are going to do. I am going to talk about what my wife has started and what I am trying to do to help. She currently does macrame and sells it at local maker events, with the new addition of vintage items that she collects around thrift markets and yard sales. So far it is more of a hobby than a side hustle, because it takes up a LOT of time, with very small returns. With the time it takes to make the macrame, do social media, post all of the products online, wrap and ship everything, you almost walk away with a negative profit depending on how much your time is worth and how expensive the item you sold.

So how can we take this hobby and launch it further and to turn some actual profits and then scale? Well, this is where it becomes a challenge. I believe we will need to find a new platform to sell on to help boost our audience. We were also thinking about creating a website to help draw in more customers, but thinking about another cost just seemed too steep with the current sales. We also need a way to see what customers are drawn too, then how to execute the sale. I believe Etsy has this function, but again, they are expensive as well to post and sell from. Ebay seems to be the best still, but they are overloaded with similar products and I don’t believe this niche of a product does well on their platform. It seems that we need to find the right platform and figure out a way to better reach a more broad audience. That is going to be our goals over the next couple of months. I will make sure to check back and let everyone know how that goes and how the progress is going in a few months.

Until next time, thanks for reading and sharing your progress!