Sandy isn’t even close to being done with his narrowing down and filtering. He decides to focus on baseball cards. But what kind? The baseball-card world is divided into different eras:
Vintage (basically, older cards from before around 1980)
The so-called “junk wax” era from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s
Modern and ultra-modern cards that came after the “junk wax” era ended
Sandy decides to focus on vintage cards. However, stop me if you’ve heard this before, he still has some more narrowing-down to do! He could specialize in:
Individual cards
Cards for specific baseball teams
Unopened packs and cases of old cards (yes, they still exist)
Complete sets for a given year
Even if you don’t know the first thing about baseball cards and sports collectibles — and don’t care in the least about them, either! — you probably get the idea. Of course, Sandy isn’t limited to only one particular subcategory, or sub-subcategory, or sub-sub-subcategory, or…. But Sandy’s chances for side-hustle success go way up if he hasn’t cast too wide of a net. Whether he plans to buy and then flip (sell quickly) vintage baseball cards, start a podcast about jumping back into the sports collectible hobby, or provide advice to other returning collectors to help them get the most value when they sell their collections, the more focused Sandy is, the better off he’ll be.
Sandy began his side-hustle planning the right way: by first selecting some area of interest and then narrowing that area down. No matter what your side hustle is going to be, you’ll almost certainly find yourself following the same narrowing-down steps. Table 2-1 shows a few different side-hustle topical areas and then, for each one, some of the underlying narrowed-down subcategories.
TABLE 2-1 Side-Hustle Topical Areas and Example Subcategories
| Side-Hustle Topical Areas | Example Subcategories |
|---|---|
| Beauty and appearance | Haircutting and hairstyling, women’s haircutting and hairstyling, hair blowouts, manicures and pedicures, eyebrow microblading, laser hair removal |
| Health and exercise | Outdoor biking, stationary biking and spinning, hiking, weightlifting, resistance training, martial arts |
| Home-design services | Furniture layout, kitchen remodeling, home exteriors, backyard design, firepits |
| Fashion | Women’s clothing, vintage women’s clothing, jewelry and accessories, vintage jewelry |
Even if you’re doing the “just something to earn extra money” version of a side hustle rather than trying to monetize an interest or hobby, you still need to do at least a little bit of narrowing down. Suppose you’ve decided to do some gig-economy delivery service. Do you want to also do shopping and then deliver what you buy at the supermarket or at other stores? Maybe you just want to pick up food from restaurants and deliver the food to homes, with no shopping involved. Making this particular decision will help you decide between, say, an Instacart side hustle versus doing something with DoorDash or Grubhub. Or you may want to just deliver packages for Amazon.
Taking Your Side Hustle to Market
You’ve selected your side-hustle topical areas to focus on, and you’ve decided what sort of side hustle to do (providing a service, selling something, delivering content, or monetizing an asset). Guess what: Your decision-making still needs to march ahead! Now you need to decide how you’re going to take your side hustle to market and how you’re going to reach prospective customers.
You could
Go to market totally on your own.
Leverage an online marketplace.
Join a multilevel marketing (MLM) organization.
Going to market on your own
You can start, build, and run a side hustle that is structurally identical to a full-time business. Breanna went down this particular side-hustle road for her online boutique. She built a simple website and Shopify store and is doing her own social-media marketing. She lined up her suppliers and set aside a spare bedroom in her house to serve as a warehouse and shipping area. She processes customer orders as they come in and then packs and ships each outgoing package herself.
Breanna’s brother Brian is also in the side-hustle game, but he has taken a different route than his sister did. Brian is a software engineer who wants to do a little smaller-scale contract software development for his side hustle. So, whereas Breanna is selling physical products for her side hustle, Brian is providing a service for his.
But other than the product-versus-service and fashion-versus-tech differences, Brian’s side hustle is very similar to Breanna’s. He also built his own website and has been doing online targeted ads to drum up business. Basically, Brian’s side hustle mirrors that of his sister in terms of going to market as a microcosm of a larger business.
Leveraging an online marketplace
Rather than try to market and advertise your side hustle totally from scratch, you can get a head start by posting your services on an existing online marketplace that’s widely known and that your potential customers frequently visit to find providers for what you’re selling.
Keith is a software engineer at the same company where Brian works, and he also wants to start a software development side hustle. Keith, however, doesn’t have the patience to set up his own website or to do his own targeted marketing on social media to try to find business.
Instead, Keith lists his services on Fiverr, an online marketplace where people and businesses come to find contractors for software development, video