This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
The chicken and egg question of online marketing and community building is whether you should sell products and services right away, or begin developing, nurturing, fostering a community and a group of followers first. What should you do? Because ultimately you want to do both, at least if that's your objective. And the answer, of course, is usually it depends. But the good news is you can often find the best specific answer for any particular project.
Unfortunately, I think that's the case for today's caller. This listener wants to start a community called Business Mind Hack. Which comes first? A series of paid monthly challenges, that's his business objective or at least one of them, or the community itself? He also has a question about sending his readers and followers to other resources.
What's the best way to do that? Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. We're going to deal with that chicken and egg question in just a moment. Hi Chris, this is Ylan from beautiful sunny San Diego, California, and I've been listening to your show for the past two months.
A buddy of mine actually told me about your podcast and I've been thinking to launch my own online business for a couple of years now and finally have been inspired to take action by listening to Side Hustle School, so thank you. My side hustle is called Business Mind Hack and really there are two elements to it. The first is to learn and hack the great minds of business owners and online influencers such as yourself and learn their strategies in business, life, finance, health, and self-development and then provide these hacks in a concise free format on my site. And the second is to create free and paid short monthly challenges with the community we grow and the business owners in all these life fields and then provide accountability and support. My two questions are which aspect of my business should I focus on first, the free blog offering or the paid challenges or actually can I do both.
I know you are a big advocate to provide free value and to grow your subscriber list, but it'd be nice to make money in the meantime. My second question is what is the best method to refer my audience to outside resources without copying or infringing on someone else's content? Again, thanks for all that you do and I love the new format and interactiveness of the new year. It has helped me a ton and thanks again. Have a great week.
Elon, thank you so much for the question and congratulations on moving forward with your side hustle idea. I'm so glad that the programming stories have been a good little boost in that way. So let's kind of dive into your question and you actually had two questions, but I'm going to focus more on the first one. This whole thing about, you know, chicken and egg, can I do both, etc. I mean, ultimately, I'm sure you can do both, but let's just assume that you can only do one for the purposes of this answer.
So as I said at the top, like when people have this question, you know, broadly speaking, generally speaking, there's not a single answer for it, but the specific answer, you know, for each individual project can often be found by looking at the nature of the project of what you're trying to do with your service, your product, etc. Perhaps the guiding question to find that answer could be something like, are you trying to establish yourself as an authority for a certain subject or topic and grow your following in that space? Or not? And if the answer is yes, then I think that clearly points toward doing everything you can to gain that authority and attract people to your message. Ultimately, that's going to be far more important than whatever one off product you could sell.
And if you don't care about that, you know, which is fine, you don't have to, but I think it's perfectly valid to focus on your products or services and then go in search of the audience. But in this case, based on what we've heard from Ilan, I believe the clear answer is community first. And I also think it will end up being frustrating if he's trying to sell something to a non-existent community. It doesn't mean that he has to wait forever, of course. When I started my blog, it was maybe about six months or so before I sold my first product.
And then when I did, I had this community, this it was a small community, but it was active and growing. And so when I launched that first product, I got a strong response to it. And from there, I continued focusing, you know, the majority of my time, 70% on writing for free and helping people wherever I could, and then maybe 30%, you know, approximately on developing more products. So there's more than one way to do everything. But if your ultimate goal is to grow your authority in a particular space, I think starting with community development is more important.
And then just briefly on the second question, if I understand it correctly, you know, what's the best method to refer your audience to outside resources, you know, without infringing on someone else's content? Well, again, maybe I'm misunderstanding. But if you're just saying, you know, hey, everybody, go and check out this, you know, this book, this podcast, this blogger, this YouTuber, this, you know, whomever, whatever it is, then that's great. You know, that's fine. You have nothing to worry about.
And ultimately, you're helping that person. I do get emails sometimes from people who say, you know, I really enjoyed your book. Is it okay if I tell someone about it? So I always find it'd be kind of a strange question. And I'm like, yes, that's great, you know, but also you don't need my permission.
So maybe you're asking something else, but that's my quick take on that. Most importantly, go and start on that community development. It doesn't mean you have to do it, you know, at the expense of developing a product or a service for sale like that series of monthly challenges. But I think ultimately, it's going to be more important to cultivate that community of followers. All right, listeners, if you've got a question, just come to sidehustleschool.com slash questions.
We'll be featuring them throughout the year, along with updates from other listeners as they launch their projects. This has been episode 1142. As we close out the week, we've got a new classroom episode coming tomorrow, a whole set of stories, question and answer and more coming next week. Thanks so much. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
This is Side Hustle School. From the Onward Project.
