27 Part Journey to Starting a Side Hustle — Day Twenty
When you’re beginning a new hustle, you don’t usually know which approach will be the most effective. To find out, try different things and keep a record of results
Boy is this hitting me hard right now. I’ve spend the last couple days looking through hundreds of videos, analyzing how what works/doesn’t work for the style that I’m trying to go for. It is OVERWHELMING how difficult this is for me. It makes me not want to start since I literally have no idea where to even start. I thought I had a general idea about how I wanted to approach this, but after watching all these videos and other resources, I feel like I’m back at square 0.
What scares me the most is that the ideas that I’m seeing online are very advanced. I feel like the bar to enter this space is pretty high and I don’t know if I have the creative skillset required to enter. I know I have the technical skillset but I need to create projects that will be engaging, fun, and valuable. The only thing that kind of makes me feel better is that all the services that I saw online were expensive. They also required a lot of not readily available materials. One of my initial goals is to make the projects easy, utilize readily available items, and most importantly, cheap. The packages I was looking at ranged from 20 to 30 dollars a month. Sure, the projects are sophisticated and advanced, but I think there is a bigger market on the budget side. But, the human greed part of me wants to cater to those end users as they have more spending money.
Here’s what I’ve learned so far. I need to essentially have 4 different parts to this service I’m trying to create. I don’t think that I can have all 4 right out of the gate, but my goal is to have all of these in place within 2020.
When I close my eyes and envision the service I’m trying to create, here’s what I see.
- A website broken by age/grade. Depending on age/grade, you’ll find projects that are appropriate to that group. Now, here’s where things get tricky. I don’t think it’s enough to just have projects. The whole purpose of what I’m trying to create here is to offer something that students/educators don’t have today. And thus this is where my cogs get stuck. I can’t visualize or figure out how to figure out this problem. I keep saying I’m going to come back to it, but I just don’t have an answer just yet.
- The next part is to have accompanying videos for each project. This part will be hosted on Youtube and embedded on my main site. From here, I want to create three different styles of videos. 1 video as an overview of the project. 1 video as a step by step tutorial of the video that breaks down concepts and instructions that are clear, fun, and enjoyable, and 1 video that helps break down technical challenges that one might face while doing the project. This video might also include what if scenarios that would challenge users to go above and beyond.
- The third part is to create my site so that you build on projects. For example, if I want to teach how friction works, I’d want to build some sort of a project that has the user build something that slides against sand paper or something like that. But, when I teach the principles of thrust, I want to reutilize that existing project and build on it. I want to extend the principles learned in the first lesson and see how they get impacted by introducing propulsion to the mix. I don’t know, I’m just spitballing here and I have no idea if what I just explained makes sense.
- Finally, and this is probably the scariest part will be offering up everything aforementioned in a package that can be purchased and shipped directly to the end user. Rather than going out to source all the material, users can purchase everything directly as a kit.
After watching so many videos and resources yesterday, I’m just overwhelmed with how to proceed. But I know that if I sit on this, I’m never going to get anything going. So, here’s my challenge for today. I‘m going to create an outline for my curriculumn. I want to record videos, but I don’t think I can record/contain the content I’m shooting for, if I don’t have the backbone for my service laid out. After writing it here, I think I have a bit of clarity with respect to how I want to proceed. Let’s see how this goes. I’ll be posting on social media my progress today.
Thanks for reading again today. As we are on the eve of the holiday break, I can see that not many people are reading today. Nonetheless, I’m sure I’ll get some traction once people get back to work. For now, I’ll keep on writing and keep on documenting my thoughts and journey as I go from an idea to a finished product before the end of the year.
