How to Start a Side Hustle in Just 2 Weeks

Side hustles are all the rage right now. And why wouldn’t they be?!

In our current crowd-sourced economy, it’s easier than ever to earn a little income on the side in your downtime! Most of us struggle to pay the bills, plus pay down debt, plus save for a rainy day, plus save for retirement. A side hustle could be the perfect solution to finding the money you need to improve your quality of life now and into your future.

But how exactly do you start a side hustle? That’s what we’re tackling today.

I’m a bit of a serial hustler myself. I’ve started multiple niche sites, sold stock photos online, freelanced as a virtual assistant, managed investment properties, wrote an eBook, and launched a subscription product. All with mixed degrees of success. I even turned one side hustle, real estate content writing, into my primary source of income, allowing me to work from home on my own schedule.

But back to your side hustle.

Have you read Side Hustle: From Idea to Income in 27 Days by Chris Guillebeau? It’s an interesting read with daily tasks designed to help you launch your new side hustle (whatever it may be) in just 27 days. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in side hustling!

However, as I was reading the book, I noticed that a full week was devoted to choosing your side hustle idea. And another full week was devoted to measuring performance and making adjustments. So, if you already know what your side hustle will be, you could really just be 2 weeks away from launching your new side hustle!

So, following some of Chris Guillebeau’s outline for launching a side hustle, I’m going to show you how to start a side hustle in just 2 weeks!

Disclaimers: Some hustles take longer to start than others. Some hustles can be started in just days but then take a little time to cash flow. Every hustle is different, but this basic framework applies to most. And I still recommend buying Chris’ book. You’ll get a solid overview from this post, but Chris provides a lot more detail and that post-launch support that’s so valuable to a new hustler. Also, Chris’ first book, The $100 Startup, is also well worth a read!

Week 1: Planning Week

The first week is going to be pure planning. Choosing your hustle, crafting your offer, and lining up the systems to help you sell, deliver, and get paid.

There happen to be 7 steps in my version of the planning week. You could take 1 task per day, but you may find that the first 3 assignments are easily handled in a single day. So you can speed up the process or spend a little extra time on the more complicated steps that follow.

Step 1: Choose Your Hustle

Naturally, your 1st task in how to start a side hustle is to choose your side hustle. Even if you already have an idea or 2, you might want to check out our list of 25+ side hustles perfect for real estate pros. Not only do these hustles provide a new stream of income, but they also expand your real estate business at the same time, helping you to earn a side income while you increase your brokerage leads.

In an ideal world, your hustle will:

• Truly serve your clients and prospects; start with their needs
• Diversify your income so you have some protection against changes in the real estate market
• Not take an unreasonable amount of time to start (though of course, they will all require some investment of time)
• Be fairly inexpensive to test and to start
• Be managed relatively easily

Now, if your goal is to start a side hustle completely separate from work (something to escape your day job instead of add to it), consider one of these 20+ Weird Ways to Make Money from Savings and Sangria.

One word of caution: choose only 1 hustle! Those of us with entrepreneurial inclinations tend to try to start multiple projects at the same time. And that rarely goes well! Focus your efforts on getting a single hustle up and running before trying to add another.

Step 2: Niche Down

Now that you have decided on an idea, focus on the niche market you’ll offer your idea to.

Wait, why are we choosing a niche? Why not cast a wide net to catch as many leads as possible?

The simple answer? Competition. With the Internet enabling crowd-sourcing and extremely low barriers to entry, competition has skyrocketed!

If you’re promoting your side business online, you’re competing with every other similar business for those few spots on the first page of the Google search results. You’ll never be able to outrank Realtor.com when people google “realtor”. But you could outrank Realtor.com when people Google “Geneva listing agent”. And it’s better to be found by the 100 people looking for “Geneva listing agent” than to not be found by the 10,000 people looking for “realtor”.

This is the case with most side hustles. If you’re selling stock photos, for example, you’re competing with photographers from all over the world. To be found in the sea of competition, you need to become the go-to person in a specific niche. Maybe you specialize in laundromat photos (so laundromat owners have stock photos to use on their websites and in their advertising). If you market yourself to a specific niche, it will help your target market find you.

So, who do you want to serve? Can you niche down by interest? gender? occupation? age? geography?

Don’t write a generic investment eBook. Write an investment eBook specifically aimed at helping 20-something women purchase their first long-term rental properties.

Step 3: Create Your Offer

So you’ve chosen your hustle and your niche. Now it’s time to drill down into exactly what you can offer your niche through your hustle.

To illustrate creating an offer, we’ll use an example. Let’s look at Valentina, who’s decided to make money on the side with New Home Photo Shoots.

You might think Valentina’s offer would be something like, “I offer a one-hour new home photo shoot session with 50 images for $250.” But does that make you want to rush to book her? Me either.

So what should Valentina’s offer look like?

Valentina’s Hustle: New Home Photo Shoots

Her Niche: Millennial buyers in West LA

Her Offer: Capture the excitement of your home purchase with a professional photo shoot session in your new home! For just $250, you’ll get a one-hour session and 50 high-resolution digital images of this life-changing event to cherish forever. You’ll also receive full ownership of the images so you can use them to announce your move on social media and to print on your New Address Postcards. Session slots are filling fast, so reserve yours today!

Let’s break down that offer into its parts so you can recreate it for your own hustle:

• Promise: Open with a promise to your future client. What will they receive? As you’re crafting this promise, think about what the client actually wants out of your product or service. Why do people want pictures taken of themselves? To capture the moment. It’s the classic drill-and-the-hole. People don’t buy a drill because they want to own a drill. They buy a drill because they want to make a hole. Make sense? What will your audience value about your hustle?
• Price: Your offer should contain the price, but you can work it in where ever it feels most natural. Some people like to list the price toward the end, and that’s perfectly fine. Also, for right now, the price is something of a place-holder. We’ll do a little more research later in this “how to start a side hustle” process that could change your opinion on how to price your offer.
• Pitch: Your pitch should clarify what’s included in your offer. It doesn’t have to be a complete list of all the features and benefits, but it should outline the basics and highlights.
• Push: End with a call-to-action. Why does the person seeing your offer need to act right away? Create a sense of urgency with the last sentence of your offer.

Step 4: Choose Your Platform

Now, how are you going to host your offer?

“Host”? That’s quite a modern, tech way to put it. It just means how are you going to give your future clients access to your offer?

There are 3 standard platforms for hosting your offer: an online marketplace, your own website, or in-person.

Option 1: A Designated Online Marketplace

Online marketplaces are simply websites that match buyers and sellers. And they are springing up everywhere to help create a smooth transaction between side hustlers and their clients/buyers.

Here are some of the most common:

• eBay: for new or used products
• Amazon: also for new or used products plus self-published eBooks
• Etsy: for handmade goods and digital products
• Udemy: for online courses
• Task Rabbit: for local tasks (building IKEA furniture, home maintenance, yard work, etc)
• Fiverr: for online tasks (graphic design, writing, digital marketing, etc)
• Upwork: also for online tasks, but the freelancers tend to be more specialized on Upwork than on Fiverr.
• Uber/Lyft: local transportation services
• Tutor: specifically for tutoring services
• Rover: specifically for pet services
• Airbnb: for renting out bedrooms and apartments
• Vayable: for providing local experiences to tourists
• Multiple stock photo sites: specifically for selling stock photos

Whatever your hustle, you may want to do a little research to see if a marketplace already exists. You will need to pay commissions out of your earnings to the marketplace, but that’s the price you pay for the simplicity of the transaction and easy access to your target market.

Option 2: Your Own Website

If a marketplace doesn’t already exist for your offer, or if you would prefer to cut out the middleman and sell directly to your customers, you may want to use your own website.

As a real estate professional, you should already have your own website (it’s vital for anyone who wants to be competitive in the current market!). So if your new side hustle is real estate related, you could simply add a page for your offer. If your side hustle is unrelated to your real estate practice, or if you don’t already have your own site, you can build a professional website, with hosting for 3 years, for just a couple hundred dollars.

I chose this route for my content writing side hustle, and it’s paid off! Instead of just offering my real estate writing services through Upwork, which starts at really low rates and takes a sizeable commission, I built a quick website on my own for right around $200. Then I marketed my site on social media and with a few cold emails to engage clients who were looking for higher-quality writing than they could find on Upwork or Fiverr.

Shameless Plug: If you need a blog writer for your real estate blog, I’m currently accepting new clients. Check out my site at www.michelleclardie.com!

Option 3: In-Person

Lastly, if your services will be performed in person, you may not need a marketplace or a website. You could simply advertise locally and through social media and facilitate the transaction in person. If you’re offering home maintenance services like painting, cleaning, landscaping, etc, you could employ old-school marketing like flyers and signs to handle your business without an electronic platform instead of going through Task Rabbit or building your own website. But I think you’d still need to promote your services online via social media or even just Craig’s List to get the word out.

Step 5: Line Up a Payment System

Lining up a system to receive payment for your offer seems like a no-brainer. But this is a more complicated task than you’d expect it to be.

You’d be surprised at how often a hustler receives interest in an order only to realize they don’t know how to actually accept payment. Cash? Who carries cash? No one uses checks anymore. Do you have PayPal? Does your client/customer have PayPal? Do you want to accept bitcoin?

Your best bet is to find a way to accept credit/debit cards no matter which platform you’re using. Even the Girl Scouts outside my grocery store now have a little device to accept cards from their iPads.

Now, if you’re using a designated online marketplace to host your offer, they’ll take care of the payments for you. That’s a huge benefit! It saves you a lot of research time and some hassle setting up a payment system on your own.

If you are trying to set up your own system, I have limited personal experience to offer. I can tell you I’ve been happy with Stripe. They make it easy to accept payments on my website via cards and PayPal. But new companies are coming up with better and better solutions all the time, so please look further into it! I recommend reading FitSmallBusiness.com’s article on How to Accept Credit Cards.

Step 6: Design a Workflow

“Workflow” simply answers the question, how will you deliver on your offer once you have an order? If you’re offering a product, how will you deliver the product? If you’re offering a service, how will you provide that service?

Let’s look at an example. If you’re pet-sitting through Rover, your workflow might look something like this:

Again, if you’re using a designated online marketplace, this is pretty much handled for you. The marketplace will arrange the orders and will probably even outline the workflow for you. Designing your own workflow for a side hustle on your own website or in-person might be a little more involved.

Step 7: Decide on a Price for Your Offer

Now that you know more about the logistics of delivering on your offer, you can decide on a price.

Your price will also depend on your platform. Some platforms require newbies to start in a given pay range and allow them to increase after multiple completed projects and good reviews.

Of course there are a million ways to price goods and services. You could offer hourly rates, flat fees, commissions, whatever works for your market. Pricing will be specific to your hustle, your location, and your platform.

While I can’t tell you how to price your unique hustle, I can offer a few general tips:

• Check out your competitors’ pricing
• Start at the lower end of the appropriate pricing range. You want to entice your first customers with low rates so you can gain experience and testimonials. You could even run a launch promotion offering a discount to your first few clients. Then raise your rates to indicate your true value.
• Don’t be afraid to raise your rates periodically to keep up with inflation. Many hustlers are afraid they’ll lose clients if they raise rates. But if you make the increases small and on a set schedule, your clients aren’t likely to bail over a few dollars.

Week 2: Launch Week

You’ve had a week to plan your side hustle, and in Week 2 you get to launch your hustle! There are fewer steps this week, but each step is more involved, so they’ll take a little more time.

Let’s do this!

Step 8: Publish Your Offer

The time has come to publish your offer to the world.

This means listing the offer on your website, your chosen marketplace platform, or your local community bulletin boards.

Don’t feel ready to publish your offer? No one does at this stage. But if you wait until you feel ready, you’ll probably never do it! Does anyone remember the first iPhone? It was far from polished. That didn’t stop Apple from running with it and tweaking the product as needed. So just do it. You can always make adjustments to your offer as you go.

And here’s a funny thing about the pre-publish jitters: in all likelihood, no one is going to see your offer when you publish it. There are just so many offers online that no one takes any notice of a new offer being published. You have to literally push your offer in front of audiences to make them see it. That’s what we’ll do in Step 9 of How to Start a Side Hustle.

Step 9: Promote Your Offer

There are as many ways to promote hustles as there are hustles themselves! Rather than keep you here all day going through the possibilities, let’s just go over 3 great places to start.

1. Post to your social media accounts: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
2. Email your email list. If your real estate clients match your target market for your hustle, notify your email list of your new offering. This would be a great audience to offer a special promo discount to.
3. Write a blog post about your new service. But don’t make it a sales page. Write something that provides its own value to your readers. For example, if you’re starting a home painting side hustle, write about the paint colors that sell homes. And include a single paragraph to let your readers know that your new company offers painting services if your clients are too busy to paint themselves.

If your response to these promo methods is lack-luster, try spending just a few dollars on targeted Facebook ads. That might be the extra push you need to reach more potential customers.

Step 10: Over-Deliver to Your New Clients

Have you ever been promised great things by a company only to find out later that they exaggerated their capabilities to get your business? Like those real estate agents who win a listing by telling the sellers they can get $275,000 for a house that’s clearly not worth more than $250,000? It’s so frustrating!

Don’t do that to your clients or customers. Don’t promise them something great, then under-deliver. Instead, promise them something great, then exceed their high expectations. That’s how you get repeat customers and referrals.

Speaking of referrals, don’t forget to follow up with your satisfied customers to ask if they’d be willing to review/rate your product or service. As you know, testimonials go a long way toward proving your worth to potential future clients.

Get a Small Win!

Great victories are made possible by small wins. Before you move on with the rest of your day, get a small win!

Your Small Win Challenge is to tackle Step 1 of How to Start a Side Hustle. I’m curious to know which hustle you’ll choose. If several people choose the same few hustles, we can tailor future posts to help you with those! Let us know in the comments.

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