This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Hey, hey, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. I am so excited to be your host for this podcast, all about helping you create extra income without quitting your job. For the past couple years, we've been doing listener questions and answers several times a week. And I really enjoy hearing about your ideas, your projects, what you're working on,
what's going well, as well as what your struggles are. And with that in mind, today's listener has a lot of experience with meal prepping. You know, those people who prepare all their food, you know, one day a week for the rest of the week, I do that too, or I do my version of meal prepping. Every week, I think, what would I like to order from DoorDash or Uber Eats? And that's not the kind that this listener does, he actually prepares the food. So good for him. And naturally, he's
thinking about side hustle ideas and wondering if this skill can be monetized in some way. So let's see if we can help him. Questions coming up after the break. Hi, Chris, my name is Bryce, and I'm from Santa Barbara, California. I've been listening to the side hustle school for just under a year. And generally, it seems like side hustles are started by people who have a
relatively niche knowledge or skill that they turn into a business. And the one idea that continuously comes to my mind is to somehow turn my habit of meal prepping into a business. So I've been meal prepping five lunches and five dinners every week for several years and have become quite good at keeping the cost low and prepping fast, healthy and tasty meals. I also line up all the completed meals evenly and take a symmetrical and aesthetically pleasing photo and post it on my personal Instagram page. A lot of people enjoy the posts and have often reached out to me asking for advice recipes, and have told me that I should turn it into a business. I really want to start a
side hustle, but I'm not sure exactly what I should do with this idea. I've thought about creating a planning service that involves laying out the grocery shopping recipes and instructions for cooking. But I'm worried that something like this wouldn't be as appealing as a service like HelloFresh. One advantage of this idea is that it can be cheaper. And you can control portion sizes, which for instance is better for those like me who work out five to six times a week and want large portions. The planning service idea is just an example. But I feel that with my knowledge on
the topic, presentation of the food and my desire to create something out of it, there must be a direction that I can take that would be fruitful. Do you have any suggestions for what direction I could take with this? And also any advice on getting started? Thanks. Bryce, what's up? Thank
you for the question. Okay, so here is what I think. And just my honest thoughts here as always, you know, anything could work. You know, often people say, you know, I've got this idea, do you think it could work? I'm like, well, it could work. You know, like we've heard of all kinds
of crazy things that work. But if you want my opinion, it's not so much HelloFresh and those kinds of services that are the competition for an idea like this, that's kind of a different market. The people who would be interested in this idea, you know, they want to do it themselves, they just want the information. So the detailed information, the aesthetically pleasing photos, all that stuff is good. There's just a lot of stuff like that out there. I think that's the
challenge. There are a lot of services that do exactly that. For all sorts of customized diets, there are all sorts of YouTubers, there are all sorts of people providing this information for free. So not to say again, that it won't work. I just think it's tough because of that. And you
know, a lot of people have tried and failed as well. So it'd be really important to do some discovery. I think probably that's a good next step is I would go and look at all those different services, I would go and do some research, and there's probably some subreddits as well. It's totally okay to go into one of those places and post a question and say I'm thinking about doing something like this. You know, what do you think? What am I missing here? Basically the same
question that Bryce just asked me, and you might learn something that way. So I often encourage people to just start, you know, but in this case, like, if it were me, I would want to have some more validation that enough people will pay for it. You know, and that he has a way to reach those people to make it worth it. So definitely a valuable skill for sure. I just don't think it's as simple as saying like, here's a planning service for it. I don't mean to be discouraging
in any way. I want to be encouraging. But I also want you to know kind of like what you're going up against, whenever you pursue any particular idea, always good to understand, you know, what are the obstacles? Why might this idea fail? Not just why might it succeed? But like, what are the problems
here? Like, what are what are things that could be challenges? And I try to follow my own advice and do that as well. Okay, Bryce, good luck. Let us know what happens. Listeners, if you have a question,
sidehustleschool.com/questions, we will continue to feature them throughout the year, along with updates from listeners as they launch and grow their projects. Thank you for tuning in today. I hope you'll come back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.
From the Onward Project.
