Are you curious about what it takes to start a side hustle? Vibhor Pandey, a community manager with QUT Entrepreneurship, shares his top three tips for developing a side hustle based on his experience building his own startups.
The term side hustle is in vogue and pulls interesting reactions when used as a conversation starter at networking events. Typically a side hustle is an additional income stream to your current employment, with narratives based around a “start now” mentality. For example, a side hustle may start with a weekend or an after-hours project and eventually becomes a new income stream.
Three things are crucial to create side hustles successfully:
1. Create your mindset stack
Over the years, managing different side hustles, I have developed my mindset stack – tools to create and reconstruct my mindset. An individual’s belief in their capability to perform the task and roles aimed at entrepreneurial outcomes is paramount to entrepreneurial explorations. A set of suitable tools can help you construct your mindset stack and build the optimum level of self-efficacy needed for your side hustles. As an example, here’s what my mindset stack looks like:
2. Be willing to learn from others
The second step that most people are aware of but hardly follow through with is to stay coachable. When we embark on something new, we tend to fall in love with the solution our mind suggests rather than exploring and understanding the problem we set out to solve. When we fall in love with the problem, the right actions happen at the right time because it allows us to tackle our riskiest assumptions first. When we continue to test our hypotheses, we build fascinating insights into the problem space and every decision we make is based on evidence and tested theory. When we stay coachable, we listen to our customers’ stories to validate our entrepreneurial actions and ideas. When you reach out to your mentors, coaches, or idea editors – you will notice their playbook is pretty similar. Most coaches will tell you identical toolsets to transform your thinking and behaviour – all they look for is how quickly that shift in mindset stack (skillset and toolset) happens.
3. Find where your side hustle fits
Where does your side hustle fit in the bigger scheme of things? One can never be free (think in creativity, autonomy, and relationships) or create wealth when living just on a salary – you can earn money, but wealth creation comes from compounding. The compounding of wealth starts when you start making money even when you are asleep, i.e. not renting your time. In any economy, the asset of wealth creation lies with tinkers, hobbyists, and risk-takers.
More about Vib
Vibhor Pandey is a Data Culturist with a decade of international experience in economic analysis, product development, entrepreneurship, and innovation research. He also works as a community manager with QUT Entrepreneurship. For the past three years, Vibhor is building two education technology startups – Grandshake and bizartX – Grandshake tackles the skills problem with young Australians, and bizartX is a community as a service platform for high impact academics.