This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey, hey, what's up? Welcome once again to Side Hustle School, season six, year 2022. This is episode 1828. Our episode numbers have almost caught up with the year. Amazing, never expected that when I started with episode one, January 1, 2017.
However many days ago that was. Oh wait, I know exactly how many days ago it was. It was 1827 days ago. Whether you have just joined, you've been listening all this time, thank you so much. Got some awesome stuff planned for this year.
I am eager to get underway and bring you lots of stories from interesting people. I'm also working on some stuff myself, including an online course that I have been preparing for three months without talking about. Very little mention of it whatsoever, just because I wanted to put it together and make something that is truly substantive. So I'll say more about that soon. It's very different from everything I do for Side Hustle School.
So more on that at some point. For today, we've got a listener with a cool project of trying to monetize a year of side hustles. So he's inspired and conveniently he's started preparing for this during the holidays so that he's ready to go now. Or he might be, let's see. Does his idea need to be narrowed down a bit?
He actually wants to do 40 different side hustles this year. So perhaps it does need to be narrowed down, but let's consider. Also, what is the monetizable path to this sort of project? It's interesting because presumably a collection of money-making projects makes money by nature, right? But what is the value of the collection itself as well as the shared journey?
So that's what he's trying to figure out just as we begin a new year, how to monetize a year of 40 side hustles. The detailed question and my answer coming up after this quick sponsor message. [Music]
Hi, this is Brett from Illinois and I've been listening to the show for three months now. I recently came across some blog posts that listed numerous side hustles you could try, such as 100 side hustles to try or 63 side hustles for 2021. It got me thinking, I wonder how many of these side hustles the authors have actually tried.
Then the idea hit me. In 2022, I'm gonna try 40 side hustles. My goal is to make at least $1,000 per side hustle. I know this sounds pretty ambitious, but I have a pretty solid list and plan of how to accomplish this. My first question I have is, have you ever heard of someone trying something like this before?
I've done some research and have not seen any documented attempts of something like this done in the past. My second question is, how do I monetize this process? My guess would be to start some sort of social media blog or YouTube following, but what do you think would be some of the best ways to monetize this process I'm about to go through? How do I turn my pursuit of 40 side hustles into a side hustle of its own? Thanks, and I look forward to hearing about any ideas that you have for me.
[Music]
Hey, Brett, what's up, man? Thank you so much. This is awesome. Excited to follow your journey this year. So let's get into some real talk here.
Yes, a number of people have tried this, in fact. So Brett definitely isn't the first. We've seen a number of projects just through the archives of our own show here. People doing something sort of like that. And I do think if you Google, you can see various live projects of like here, the X number of side hustles or the X number of businesses, or a good friend of mine actually did 50 jobs in 50 states a number of years ago.
So there's lots of things like that, but that's okay. Like that's all right. Like I wasn't the first person to go to every country in the world, but some people still found it interesting to follow me. I don't think you have to be first. You just have to be interesting and consistent, right?
So how to monetize it? Well, again, real talk, I would say build the following. Build the following, don't sell anything. Don't worry about that right now. Maintain the purity of the project while you're growing the audience.
Because again, hopefully you're gonna be making some money. You're gonna make $1,000 minimum for each one of these side hustles. So I would not worry about trying to like right away, turn this into some sort of coaching or consulting or sell a guide on how to start the 40 side hustles. I would not do that at all. I would say your whole quest, your objective here is to be a storyteller and to cultivate interest, recruitment, loyalty, all of that.
And it's gonna take a lot of time for you to just actually do the side hustles. Unless your side hustles consist of gig economy work, like driving for Lyft or whatever, if you've listened for a while, you know that's not where the real money is. So I think you're gonna be best served by some more creative projects, which will of course take more time and energy. So I don't know that you have the energy to monetize the project in addition to all the different, 40 different side projects, right? I think the monetization comes later.
Build the following first. Anyway, Brett sounds pretty organized. So I'm curious to see what happens. If he keeps it up, we will check in with him a few times along the way. Brett, get to work.
We're watching. Listeners, check out Brett's big project at... Oh, wait a second. I don't actually have a website here. It's because he didn't tell us.
We asked him in a follow-up email a few different times. And he hasn't got back to us because no doubt, he was busy preparing his 40 projects. So Brett, I know you're busy with those 40 projects that start this week, but let us know where we can find you so that we can in fact follow you. All right, good luck and listeners, if you've got a question, if you're starting something of your own, let me know what's going on and be sure to include a website if you have one. Come to sidehustleschool.com/questions.
We'll continue to feature them throughout the year. It's going to be a big year. Lots of updates from listeners as they launch and grow their projects. I'm excited to bring it to you. I hope you will keep tuning in.
New episode every day. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
