Brainstorming the side hustles
Where to start?
Whether you call it brainstorming or whether you call it ideation you still have to start somewhere. If we were in our day jobs, there would be a nice conference room or innovation space with lots of coffee and post-it notes.
But we’re in our house, in our study and staring at a blank whiteboard. We did have coffee though (and post-its just in case). Somebody wrote “SIDE HUSTLES” in big, bright letters at the top of the board.
We had more coffee. The board was still blank. How the heck had we done this in other situations? There were no ideas. We had never been so empty brained before. Perhaps the question was too big.
Brainstorming is a group creativity technique by which efforts are made to find a conclusion for a specific problem by gathering a list of ideas spontaneously contributed by its members.
Brainstorming, Wikipedia, 30 January 2019
Actually getting some ideas from brainstorming
Instead of a blank page waiting to be filled with side hustles we should start with what we had already tried and stopped doing. Making that list would hopefully spark some ideas.
So we talked about the children’s books, the body jewellery and the giftware. The eBay selling agent and the bath bomb web shop. Sadly we remembered that we still had squid-zillions (official business term) of stock items in boxes in the garage. We tried to forget that we still owned some of these domain names.
All of this was written on the whiteboard. Recorded there too were the reasons that they had failed and what we learned from doing them. We realised that the web shop hadn’t failed, we’d just let it die because the day jobs got in the way. That was idea 1.
We made some tea and joked that we’d watched so many episodes of Homes Under the Hammer that we’d be experts by now. Property went on the board and we talked about flipping and buy-to-let and Airbnb.
We talked about preferring a passive an income stream as possible and agreed that buy-to-lets might work. If we could find the cash to buy property in the first place. That was idea 2.
A side hustle is an additional job that a person takes in addition to their primary job in order to supplement their income.
Side Job, Wikipedia, 30 January 2019
General chit chat sparks side hustle ideas
We were running out of ideas and had spent the whole afternoon talking. Reminiscing about our adventures in side hustles and thinking up new things that might (wouldn’t) resurrect them. We talked about the blog and how “socials” could be monetised. We joked that YouTube was where all the money is – especially since it’s the only one we use. That was idea 3.
We had been in that room for 4 hours (2 comfort breaks). We decided that 3 ideas were enough to start and went off to pursue our hobbies. Separately, in case your were wondering.