How can I have a side hustle when I don't want to pay for anything?
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I've been reading various entrepreneur books and blog posts0. One thing they all emphasise is that success often comes from finding a problem that you yourself would pay money to solve.
And that's a problem for me. I don't tend to want to spend money solving problems.
I'm not claiming to be a hermit, but I find it weird just how little cash I'm willing to part with to improve my life. So I'm stuck trying to work out what services I would pay a small business for.
For things like basic electrical and plumbing work - well that's what YouTube tutorials are for.
I could spend money on a cleaner each week. But I bought a robot vacuum.
Perhaps a personal trainer would help me get fitter? But the thought of someone shouting at me to run faster is anathema to me.
When it comes to software, I'd rather write my own or fiddle with open source. I'm aware this means I value my time poorly.
I buy and read a lot of books. I'm not sure reading a lot means I'd be any good at writing. And I'm not sure what I'd write about.
The nearest I can get to, I suppose, is online grocery delivery. I pay for someone1 to trudge through a supermarket on my behalf.
I'm not desperate to start a new business. But I am flummoxed. What services do you wish you could pay someone for?
@Edent Thank you for the wonderful word 'flummoxed'. I had never heard it before. 🥰
Rachel says:
I pay for a trainer at times. This is not to get aerobically fit - i can do that, it's specifically for strength and conditioning moves. I also pay for DIY services...I'm not that inclined to learn how to knock down or build walls. and i hate painting! for all these, i pay for convenience
@Edent - totally feel this myself. I think maybe a way to look at it is that everyone chooses to spend money to solve different sets of problems, and something that might not be a 'problem' for you might be something that lots of people want solved for them. For example, I tend to dislike making things to sell, because my default assumption is that everyone likes to make things themselves like me, and it's easy. But in reality, they don't, and would rather buy it.
@Edent
I’d consider paying for a news site that summarizes the news, so that I spend as little time as possible to get informed. I’m not sure something like that exists, and I don’t really know why. Whenever a news site has a subscription, it’s for more content. But I don’t want to read more, I want to read less. The real value is getting informed quickly.
@Edent
They are very short sighted because for the Anglosphere's tech people nearly ever need is already over-served.
Also, often you're willing to pay for it because you don't enjoy it or aren't good at it and you wouldn't be the right person to create a great business around it.
We have too many products for the micro convenience of the tech community and a large amount of needs completely under-served still out there, because the people with the skills to come up with solutions for billions are busy building yet one other iteration of an unnecessary service for people like themselves.
"I'd rather write my own or fiddle with open source. I'm aware this means I value my time poorly."
You don't value your time poorly, you enjoy figuring stuff out! It's a trap I fall into a lot too. A displacement activity, often, on the way to harder work.
Can some of your figuring out become a hustle? Or something that allows more people to "fiddle"?
@Edent
I've heard this advice as well, probably from the same blogs and books you got it from. It didn't work for me either
Only later did I realise that the skills I have that others value are by definition my skills: I don't have to pay for them, so obviously I won't.
The advice that helped was to go out and find online communities of people who do pay for stuff and figure out how my skills can help them. Takes a lot of trial and error but seems to work okay.
@Edent I have one, but it's quite specialised: software which retrieves financial data from the SEC Edgar website and formats it in a standardised way. My coding skills are not up to this, I have a method that works through an intermediary, which is not ideal (because the intermediary might go away). Financial people pay a lot of money for this -- the market is already served, but at a high price.
Proactive Paul says:
the two sure fire businesses that people do not want to handle themselves are death and taxes
I knew an accountant who quit tax work at PWC to go and set up business as an undertaker, proclaiming that he would make more money that way
DinoNerd says:
In one of your examples, you paid for a tool to make doing a task easier, rather than for a human to do the task for you. If it didn't already exist, you might have had a great future as the inventor and supplier of the robot vacuum cleaner .
I'd also look at the software you write. I doubt that you think that MS Office or Apple's iWork would be perfect for your needs, but instead spend hours convincing Libre Office to do exactly what you want, i.e. to better imitate the commercial tool you prefer. More likely, it's the other way round - the commercial product would do the job, but never be quite right, and you wouldn't be able to fix it. Maybe the product you create for yourself would be preferred by lots of other people, and they'd be willing to pay you for it. Instant side hustle.
Or maybe the side hustle would be creating and customizing software for others, i.e. bespoke software for those who find the commercial offerings inadequate, but lack the talent or time to create or adapt their own. (I suspect that in practice, you'd have to charge far more than most could afford, and those who could afford you would likely be on a first name basis with executives at the commercial companies, so able to influence the companies to make the changes they desire. But I could be wrong.)
As for what I want: bespoke software I can afford.
Failing that, software guaranteed to never change its UI once I've learned it, with no forced updates except perhaps security fixes. (Even if the UI is the worst, least intuitive or efficient that I can imagine, it's better than one with random changes every 6 months or so.)
Ideally stable software with the kind of UI I prefer - no requirement whatsoever of memorizing icons and distinguishing between them. Failing that, a printed manual complete with pictures of all the icons, pictures with names for all the untitled screens, etc. etc.
As I was nearing retirement, I tried to drum up interest in an open source project to create such software - I couldn't very well do it all myself - and got crickets, except from potential users. Since I couldn't do it all myself, I decided not to try. Maybe you have more and better contacts than I do.
Ideally such software would do any needed syncing peer-to-peer rather than to the vendor's part of the cloud.
Meanwhile I'm learning to use various open source packages, in the hopes that I can customize and fork them, importing only changes that keep them compatible with the latest hardware. It's rather a fools game - there's just too much that would need to be held stable - but can probably be done in a small way for a few key packages, if not the whole operating system. But I don't want to do this; I want to buy the non-existent product.
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