side hustle mental model
Sep 18, 2023
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19 min read
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Hi, i am apri 👋
currently, i am building Closa — a smart discord server with a virtual coworking space for builders to stay productive in building passion projects. In the past 6 years, i’ve spent most of my time working on passion projects & turning them into side hustles. I believe all the great things that shaped our lives today started from a passion project & i believe this is the best way to unlock many opportunities you want in life.
The structure of this page is based on all the puzzles that i’ve collected from my experience over the years working on many passion projects. You can use this page as a little handbook to build & ship your digital product.
This resource is for builders/creators who build things for the internet & want to make $ on software/digital products.
Why i am sharing these resources:
First, i love building passion projects & turning them into side hustles.
Over the years these are by far the most high signal & practical resources that I wish i had when i just starting out.
I want to save you time & i hope these resources help you build the right mental model to navigate & execute your ideas better.
What i expect on each sub-list is you’ll find some set of patterns that will build up to your mental model on how to find ideas worth building, what to build, & grow them sustainably.
This will be a living document that I’ll update periodically.
i hope you find these resources valuable.
The Classic
How to get rich without getting lucky by Naval Ravikant
Essential books
If you have time to read books, highly recommend reading these:
Shipping Ideas from 0 → 1
Things that matter before you start building
Market come first
If you want to turn your side project into a profitable business, the first thing that you want to do is not to start designing or building your product. But to pick a market so you understand whether your idea & the problem you want to solve is worth pursuing or not. It will save you days, weeks, if not months from doing the wrong thing. the goal is to become a category of one, so what you’re working on is not a commodity that competes on price & goes downhill.
How to pick a problem & market that is worth pursuing:
Why the market is only thing that matters by Marc Andreessen
Turning side projects into profitable startups by Pieter Levels
Extreme brainstorming questions to trigger new, better ideas by Jason Cohen
Monetization & Pricing
How to define what to charge & how much you charge to sustain or at least hit ramen profitable:
Positioning
How to position your product in the market so people get it, buy it, & love it:
Craft your one-liner
How to write a one-sentence idea that is easy to understand & helps your idea spread quickly:
How to create a landing page that converts & validates the demand of your idea before building:
Landing page design inspiration:
Validating ideas: look for signal
Consumer
consumer playbook: validating ideas (my takes & experience)
B2B
Building from 0 – 1
Start small & do less really well
When you just starting out you want to start small & keep it simple.
This is how you learn faster, so you can focus your energy on what matters
What I wish I had been told early on in my entrepreneurial journey by Mac Martine
Challenges With The Lean Startup Methodology by Sachin Rekhi
How to build & iterate your product quickly
Design that doesn’t suck
Talk to users
You have two options:
If this is the problem you have yourself & you can ship it in weeks then better launch it quickly & iterate.
but if you have a specific user in mind & want better insights you should talk to users first.
How to talk to users:
Later stage (after launch) — finding product market fit:
Launch & iterate quickly
Most people think of launching as a one-time event but in reality, you can launch anytime again & again:
Prioritization
How to set goals & prioritize your work in the early stage of your product
Grow to 1000 fans
Growth & Marketing
Essentials
If you just starting out & want to learn marketing, i highly recommend reading this, it will save you so much more time than trying to read a lot of articles about marketing:
First 10, 100, 1000
Sales
Distribution
How to generate leads & bring traffic to your landing page:
Content creation
If you’re just starting out & want to build audience, you can learn this first:
Consumer Psychology
Learn about marketing psychology to understand consumer behavior better:
Growth loops
one concept that helps thinking about product & marketing as interlinked parts. This helped me to understand how to grow a product strategically:
Product-led Growth
Retain
Some components that affect your product retention:
Referral
How to Launch a Customer Referral Program in 6 steps (plus examples)
Interesting read:
The pocket guide of essentials side hustle mental model
Pick ideas with sharp problems, niches with purchasing power, easy to target, & growing market.
sharp problems – problems with high frequency (daily).
niche with purchasing power – they throw money to solve the problem instead of time.
easy to target – you know exactly where they’re hanging out.
growing market or at least a normal market that is not declining like newspapers.
Create an irresistible offer that is 3x - 10x better than the current solution to become a category of one.
Validate the demand first before building.
craft your one-liner pitch that is easy to understand, so it spreads quickly.
create your landing page / show design how are you going to solve the problem.
share it with your community / the people you’re offering it to.
Start small & do less really well.
Create a remarkable product. It’s a product that your customers simply can’t live without; they love it so much that they tell their friends, who tell their friends, who tell their friends.
Make your product & marketing an interlinked part. Meaning when a user uses your product at some point in your product cycle they are bringing another user to use it.
Launch fast & iterate quickly.
Set a clear goal for how you’re going to grow & help user success. Review every 1-2 weeks.
Let the user try your product for free / with a money-back guarantee. Confidence is the key to earning trust.
A great onboarding is your biggest investment to make users come back over & over.
Make the time to the value of your product as short as possible. Don’t confuse the user with too many steps.
Market with people, not at them, it means involving them in the process from the start.
Do things that don’t scale—Recruit your early customers one by one. Delight them. Talk to them to understand what’s working & not.
You don’t sell to people, you help people make progress to help them succeed.
Focus on a high-frequency customer that no matter what kind of version your product begins, they will pay & still use it.
Focus on finding one distribution channel that works.
Give a channel time to work. Don’t spread your effort too thin in the beginning.
Put a hard timeline to launch & know when to pivot. Pick a minimum bar to continue working on your experiments:
Keep shipping & launching.
Give it a time. no matter how long it takes to find that one idea that works, don’t forget to have fun & enjoy the journey.