Weekend Workshop: Choosing Your Best Idea

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

[Music]

All right, welcome back to the weekend workshop here on Side Hustle School. This new segment for 2025 is all about helping you learn the key steps to a new side hustle. And you get one step or concept per week. Really simple, it includes examples and activity. And of course it's all free.

So today we're gonna talk about choosing your best idea. And we use the book "Side Hustle" from idea to income in 27 days as our text. It's available wherever books are sold. But I'm also just gonna take you through the key steps here along with those stories and examples. So today's episode comes from day six, which is all about choosing your best idea using a tool called the Side Hustle Selector.

I'm not sure how I first came up with this, but it's been one of my favorite tools over the years. We've heard from a lot of listeners who have used it when trying to narrow down ideas. And the point is, if you've been listening for a while, you know that there's no shortage of ideas. There's all kinds of things you could do. So how do you in fact narrow it down?

That in fact might be the real skill. So our learning objective here is to learn to systematically evaluate different business ideas to find the one most likely to succeed. Now, when I say systematically, I don't wanna scare you off, it's actually pretty simple. It's actually not that complex. But the point is when you are excited about starting a side business, it can be tempting to pursue the first idea that comes to mind.

And not all ideas have equal potential for success. Just like successful companies carefully evaluate different opportunities before they choose to invest resources, you also need some way to assess your options. So perhaps think about how online dating platforms work. Like they don't overwhelm users with endless choices. They try to help people find compatible matches using algorithms and specific criteria.

And we can apply the same kind of approach to evaluating business ideas. So the side hustle selector, it helps you evaluate ideas across five key areas. I'll tell them to you quickly and then I'll define them. Those areas are feasibility, profit potential, persuasion, efficiency, and motivation. So fairly self-explanatory, but feasibility is how quickly could you start?

Profit potential, is there a clear path to making money? And just to note on there, if you don't have a clear path to making money, this is not a good side hustle idea. So you can just kind of take it off the table right away. Persuasion is, do people want this right now? Like, is there an urgency to it?

And this can be optional, but the best ideas tend to solve immediate problems or fulfill desires. Efficiency is basically about time and effort. And then motivation, I think this is really important. People don't always think about this, but motivation is important because your personal interest often predicts long-term success. And then also life is short.

So why would you work on stuff you don't care about? So you always want to ask, are you excited about this idea? How excited are you compared to other ideas? So let's look at how this works in practice. Imagine somebody out there wants to start a business teaching cooking skills.

And they've got two different ideas or two different approaches they could take. There's probably more than two, but let's just use two for the sake of a simple example. One idea is in-person classes, like teaching small groups in their home kitchen. It's got an initial investment equipment and supplies. It's also limited by physical space and schedule.

The other idea is an online cooking course where they could create video lessons that could be purchased and accessed anytime. There's a one-time investment in recording equipment and unlimited potential reach. So here we can see the strengths and weaknesses of each approach becomes clear. And I don't want to say necessarily that the online course is always better just to be clear because you've got an investment for both of them. And it's true that the online course has unlimited potential reach, but there could be some benefits of the in-person classes that you don't achieve from online.

The whole point is by looking at these criteria, it shows you the implications for time commitments, scalability, and potential returns. And you can do this with multiple ideas. So you just consider them all with those criteria. We're gonna take a quick little break here. When we come back, I'm gonna give you another example of how this breaks down specifically for this cooking example.

And of course, you can use this in any other example as well. Stay tuned, coming right back. [Music]

All right, so the Side Hustle Selector becomes a powerful tool when you apply it across different business ideas, not just for one, but you want to look at more than one idea. So you go through your ideas and you apply a simple high, medium, or low rating for each criterion, okay? So with this cooking business example, for the in-person classes, you could say it has medium feasibility, like it requires some setup, but it uses your existing skills.

It has medium profit potential, like it's limited by space, but there's a good hourly rate. It has high persuasion, because people value personal instruction. The efficiency though is kind of low, because it requires you to be there for every class. And your motivation, let's say, is medium. Like you are excited about it.

It's not the greatest idea in the world, but you would enjoy doing it. And now for the online cooking course, feasibility is medium, like it requires some editing skills. You gotta go get that video equipment, learn a bit about how to use it. The profit potential, however, is high, because it's an unlimited student capacity, right? You could reach, you know, so many people.

Persuasion is medium. Persuasion is medium. There is a good bit of competition. There are a lot of options already available. Efficiency is high.

Like you create it once, you sell it repeatedly. And let's say for this example, that your motivation is, you know, basically the same. You know, it is medium. And once you've done this, you can kind of rank these ideas. You know, again, you could have more than two, and it will often show you an idea to eliminate, to take off the table.

It will show you the shining example sometimes, like, oh, why would I consider any of these other ideas when this is the clear winner? And if nothing else, you know, if you have four or five ideas you're looking at, you can usually get it down to two. And then you just kind of decide, right? You just choose for yourself. You know, go with your gut instinct at that point.

But just being able to narrow down ideas is helpful and important. So the notes page for every weekend workshop includes an action exercise. The exercise here is to take your top, let's say two or three or four ideas, and evaluate them using this framework. And just make a little table with your ideas listed vertically, and those five criteria. Remember, it is feasibility, profit potential, persuasion, efficiency, and motivation.

There's more about this in the Side Hustle book. And when you do this, just kind of see if any idea scores consistently high across multiple criteria. Again, see if one idea can be eliminated. See which category showed the biggest difference between your ideas. If you're trying to make money, which I am encouraging you to do, if one idea has high profit potential and all the others are low, I mean, that might give you a direction to go in.

And then also, does your evaluation reveal any obstacles you hadn't considered? Just by doing this exercise, you're gonna get a lot of information. It will help you to make decisions based on what is important to you at this time. And maybe it's not important to earn maximum profit right now, so you value some of the other criterion higher, and that's okay too, right? You always have to do what is best for you.

And as always in this series, I wanna remind you it's better to have a simple idea you can start immediately and a brilliant idea that never launches. Thanks for tuning in today. It's Chris Guillebeau, your host of Side Hustle School. I'm excited to bring you more episodes coming up every single day this year. It's always completely free.

Hope you'll tune in again tomorrow. [Music]

From the Onward Project.