Q&A: "I made a bet to start a business in one day…"

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Well, this is a fun one today. Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name's Chris Guillebeau. So glad you're tuning in from wherever you are in the world. Now, as I said, this is a fun episode.

Not that they're not all fun, 'cause they are all exciting and fun and engaging. But today, a listener made a bet with a friend that they can start a business and get at least one paying customer in a single day. So, as I said, pretty cool, huh? Let's take that bet and see if we can help. Question is, I made a bet to start a business in a day, 24 hours, what should I do?

What should I do next? How do you make that happen? Detailed question and my answer coming up after this quick message from our sponsor. [Music]

Hi, Chris, this is Fred. And I've been listening to the show for a couple of seasons.

Thanks for all the great stories and advice. My friend and I are always talking about different business ideas, and we recently made a bet. My friend said that I wouldn't be able to start a business in a single day, and naturally, I said I could. Here are the parameters. I can think about my idea and plan things out for as long as I want.

But once I start doing any actual work on it, I have 24 hours to land a paying customer, or I lose the bet. So, what should I do? How would you approach this challenge? [Music]

Well, Fred, I love the challenge. I'm so glad you accepted it, and I will accept it together with you.

So, what are you gonna do? How are you gonna approach it? First things first, you need an idea that can be executed in a day. You also need to find a buyer in a day. So, as you said, you got some parameters there, and I think parameters or constraints can actually help a lot, because many, many ideas won't fit these parameters.

So, you gotta think about, okay, what will fit? Obviously, anything in the gig economy, right? Which is what a lot of people think about when they think about a side hustle. Oh, you know, a side hustle is driving for Uber or Lyft or being a task rabbit, something like that. Now, I don't generally recommend that.

I think most people can do much better than that. I'm trying to help people create assets that can, you know, eventually earn passive income and all that kind of good stuff. But, you know, if you're trying to do it in a day, something like that could work. Anything to do with reselling, you know, clearly you can buy something online today and resell it today. You might not make a ton of money.

You might not find the best arbitrage opportunity in the world or even a really good one, but that's not the goal. Your goal is to start the business and to have a paying customer in a day. You could offer to resell somebody else's stuff, like somebody else's clothes or computer gear, anything that they don't need anymore, but they don't wanna go through the hassle of selling. And you do that for a commission, of course, a percentage. You know, we've had several stories like that in the archives.

I think anything that's sold through an existing network, like your Facebook account, putting something up on Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist or Gumtree or, you know, whatever the platform or network is in your area, that way you don't have to create a bunch of new assets, which might take longer than a day. And you also have like built-in traffic, like people are using those platforms already, because it is possible to create a profile, you know, fill out that profile, create a listing, put that listing live and have it sold within day one. Like that's totally possible because of the built-in traffic because of what those platforms provide. Now, one final thought here, because some of that's kind of simple, it could also be something that's delivered in the future. So, you know, you've got a lot of time to think about the idea.

You just have 24 hours to work on it, you know, before the clock stops. So you can't write a book in a day, for example, but you could probably write a helpful guide or a detailed report in a few weeks, like maybe even less. So what you do in this situation is today, you could offer that guide or report for sale, you know, an early bird sale with a disclaimer that it will be delivered in 10 days or whenever it is. Nothing at all wrong with pre-selling like that. In fact, it can save you a lot of work if no one buys it.

But in your case, of course, someone will buy it because you're gonna overcome the challenge and win the bet with your friend. Fred, good luck, let us know what happens. Listeners, if you've got questions or side bets, whatever the case may be, sidehustleschool.com/questions, we'll continue to feature them throughout the year, new episode every single day. My name's Chris Guillebeau, this is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

From the Onward Project.