This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Weekend Workshop, launch before you're ready. Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name's Chris Guillebeau. This segment is all about helping you learn the key steps to a new side hustle in 2025, one step or concept per week. It includes activities, examples, and more.
And of course, it's all free. We're using the book Side Hustle from idea to income in 27 days. That's my book, I wrote it, but you can have access to it too. It's available wherever books are sold. And even if you don't have a copy, I'm taking you through those key steps along with listener stories throughout the year.
And today's episode comes from day 17, which is all about publishing your offer. And as I titled it, launch before you're ready. Morning objective today is to learn why and how to launch your business before everything feels perfect. And basically, if you're waiting for it to be perfect, you're never going to launch. So inevitably, you will launch before you're ready, but you might be able to do it much sooner than you think.
A lot of people get stuck in endless preparation. They're just waiting for everything to be exactly as they hope before they begin. And obviously, since that's not possible, you want to get a few things right and then just move forward because then you can adjust from there. Now the story or the example comes from Steven Peterson. He is a software developer who spotted a problem.
He was living in San Francisco. He was commuting. And he noticed that San Francisco Bay Area commuters, of which there are many, and they are tech savvy, they had no easy way to check traffic and transit updates in one place. So when Apple announced their first iPhone app store, this goes back a while, Steven had just two weeks to submit something if he wanted to be included in the launch. Now, despite having a full-time job, he used a sick day to hack together a basic version of his transit app.
It wasn't perfect. The interface was rough. It crashed a lot, had some bugs, but it also solved a real problem. And Apple accepted it for the launch. I guess every new app coming into the first version of the iPhone store had some problems.
So here's the crucial part. Steven knew his app wasn't perfect. He could have waited until he had time to polish everything, but instead he launched what he had and then he improved it based on the experience, based on real user feedback. And that decision changed his life. At the time I wrote about him in the book, "Side Hustle," this simple app was bringing in more than $7,500 every month, $7,500 a month.
So there's a couple of reasons why you should launch sooner rather than later. Well, I guess for Steven, it was 7,500 reasons every month. But for all of us, you'll get real feedback from actual customers. You'll start learning what really matters versus what you think matters. They're not always the same.
And you'll begin making money while you improve. So then you're basically getting paid to iterate, which is a lot better than just iterating for free. So the alternative is spending months perfecting something that people might not even want. All right, you get the idea. We're gonna take a quick break when we return how to choose a launch date and move forward even in beta mode, which includes a cool trick that you can steal from Google.
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So the hardest part of launching a product is not technical, at least not usually. Much more often it is psychological. Like we fear criticism, we fear rejection, we fear failure or just looking foolish. But the reality is nobody's paying as much attention to your launch as you are. In fact, most people just don't care and that's okay.
Like there's some value in accepting that. So if you're not ready to do a full launch, consider this stepping stone process, which is to launch in beta mode. It just kind of signals that you're still improving things while letting you start serving customers right away. And my favorite example about this is Gmail, maybe use Gmail, I do. Been using it for years, just like millions of people.
And Gmail was actually in beta for five years, five of those initial years with millions of users. It's like a joke because obviously it wasn't really beta if they have millions of users and also for five years, like isn't that supposed to be a limited thing, limited time, limited user group, but they just never took off that beta label at least for five years. So if they can do it, you can too, right? Just say that this is a test. Say that this is your first iteration and more to come.
Kind of lowers the pressure. You also might want to start with a small group rather than announcing to the world, begin with a limited number of customers who can provide feedback and you can try testing one piece at a time. Instead of launching everything at once, release individual products or services as they are ready. So your action exercise, we always have one of these each week. Your action exercise is to choose your launch date for your next project, whatever your next project is, if it's a new product or service, if it's the next version of an existing product or service, choose your launch date ideally within the next few weeks, let's say, right?
And then jot down, like what is the minimum viable version of your offering? Like what is the basic version of that offering? Who are the first three customers you'll contact? Like if you're gonna try to reach out to people and pitch, who are those first three people and what specific actions will you take tomorrow to move toward launch? What are those baby steps that can get you closer to this reality of having the product out in the world or the service, whatever it is, and being in beta mode, if that's what you want to call it or something else, whatever it takes to get you across the finish line.
And remember, perfect is the enemy of profitable. So the sooner you launch, the sooner you can start improving based on real world experience. And as I say, each week in this series, it's better to have a simple idea you can start right away than a brilliant idea that never launches. Hey, that's the tagline for the whole series, but it's especially apt for today, right? Launch before you're ready.
That's all for this week. Thanks for listening. New segment in this series coming out one week from today, but of course, new episodes every single day of the podcast. We've got some questions and answers coming up, a case study, a story about dog ice cream that's coming up three days from now. And of course, much more.
You can always listen for free. My name's Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
