✈️ Side Hustle: From $0 to $1M

Welcome to First Class Founders, your favorite destination to learn the best growth tactics for founders & creators one week at a time.

Here's what we've got for you on today's flight:

• 🤖 Using ChatGPT for Ideas

• 🍰 Creator Revenue Pie Chart

• 🤑 How to Make Your First $1M

• 💲 Best Side Hustles Ideas from $0

• 🤗 Your Life Experiences as a Goldmine

We're closing the gates — we're cleared for take-off!

✈️ Episode Itinerary

Do you currently have a side hustle? Or, do you WISH you had a side hustle?

How do you make your first million dollars from it? Today's episode is on exactly that - how to make your first million dollars from your side hustle.

On this episode, we'll cover how to CHOOSE a suitable side hustle, how to BUILD your side hustle, and finally, how to MONETIZE your side hustle.

Let's dive in...

How To Turn Your Side Hustle Into a Million Dollar Business

In this episode, you'll learn:

• What is a Side Hustle? (2:11)

• Your Unique Life Experiences Are a Goldmine (3:42)

• What Can You Teach Others? (4:28)

• James Clear, Ryan Holiday, Nick Huber, Justin Welsh, Justin Moore (5:22)

• Figure Out a Niche You Can Own (6:11)

• Build in Public (9:36)

• Build a Tribe that Trusts You (13:32)

• How to Collaborate with Other Creators to Grow Your Audience (15:49)

• Make it Your Mission to Serve Your Tribe (17:25)

• Gathering Feedback & Earning Referrals (19:49)

• Ask Me Anything (22:55)

👍🏻 Recommendation:

Kevon is a good friend of mine. (And past guest on First Class Founders!) He is generously offering a free Build in Public Bootcamp.

This free event is offered only a couple times each year. The last event in September had 217 attendees!

Secure your seat before it's too late.

🥨 Growth Snack of the Week:

In-flight service time! Here, I share bite-sized growth snacks (read: hacks) building my audience for First Class Founders. 

Snacks are meant to be tried and shared. If you do try them, please tag me on Twitter and let me know what you think!

Side Hustle Ideas Brainstorm:

Today's podcast episode is all about side hustles. So, let's have some fun this week!

Let's go through an exercise, together, to help you brainstorm your next side hustle idea.

I asked on Twitter what the best side hustles to start for $0 are:

Here are a few highlights:

• @gracellence: "Podcasting is a huge opportunity to establish credibility, build your audience, and lead people to your services or courses... podcast listeners are HIGHLY engaged!"

• @jeffperez_jr: "Consulting calls. Have a niche skillset? Hold free calls to find out what your audience needs help with. Then eventually start charging a fee for those calls."

• @MinHustler: "Blogging, Printables, Self Publishing, Print On Demand."

• @victor_bigfield: "Template Notion, Coaching."

• @JannisBetschki: "Creating websites for others. So many low-hanging fruits. Just think about all the doctors, hairdressers, restaurants in your area. How many of them have (good) websites?"

• @mattbarkercopy: "I think consulting. If you have a skill/set of knowledge, you can talk about it online (for free) and teach it to people on google meet (also free) and record and send them the call recording (also free). You can get paid about £1,000/hour if you’re in the right market."

Well done, Crew! 👏🏼  Amazing list of side hustles here.

Side Hustle Ideas from ChatGPT:

Now, I'm taking this exercise a step further... by asking ChatGPT, everyone's non-human best friend:

Here's the list of side hustles our AI friend gave us:

• Online Tutoring

• House Cleaning

• Virtual Assistant

• Delivery Services

• Freelance Writing

• Sell Crafts on Etsy

• Dog Walking or Pet Sitting

Here's the problem. It gave us a list of everything including offline side hustles. So, I asked ChatGPT to give me a list of only online side hustles you can start with $0:

Here's the list of side hustles ChatGPT gave us:

• Dropshipping

• Online Surveys

• Online Tutoring

• Content Writing

• Virtual Assistance

• Affiliate Marketing

• Social Media Management

Now, we're cooking. Hopefully this exercise has your creative juices flowing!

Since most of us are content creators, for the sake of our next exercise, I'm narrowing our list of side hustles down to:

• Podcast

• Newsletter

• Digital Course

• Coaching Clients

• Premium Subscription

Reverse Engineering $1M:

Since this week's podcast episode is titled, "How To Turn Your Side Hustle Into a Million Dollar Business", let's do some math together to see how we can achieve this:

To get to $1,000,000 / year revenue, you need $83,333.33 / month in revenue.

Assuming you publish weekly podcasts and newsletters:

• Podcast → 25k downloads per episode (4x) at $25 CPM (Sponsor) = $2,500

• Newsletter → 100k list with 50% opens (4x) at $25 CPM (Sponsor) = $5,000

• Digital Course → 25 sales per week (4x) at $99 per product sale = $9,900

• Coaching Clients → 10 sessions/week (4x) at $400 per session = $16,000

• Premium Subscription → 5,000 paid subs at $10 per subscription = $50,000

Combined, that's $83,400 in total per month surpassing our $83,333.33 goal.

Here's how the revenue is broken down from our example:

Keep in mind that these are estimates based on industry averages such as $25 CPM and a 5% conversion rate from unpaid to paid subscribers. Your mileage may vary, of course.

The point of this exercise is to help you visualize YOUR path to a $1M / year revenue in your creator business.

You can pull different levers to reach that magical $83,333.33 monthly goal.

Maybe you don't have a podcast or newsletter. But you can get more coaching clients. That's perfectly fine. In fact, your revenue pie will evolve over time as you leverage new opportunities.

Create an action plan to help you get to your revenue goal.

Now, at this point, this will probably no longer be a side hustle, but a full-time gig.

Isn't that a great problem to have?!

Rethinking First Class Founders:

Doing this exercise on my own, I'm realizing now how much of the revenue pie could potentially come from my paid subscribers for First Class Founders.

I'm rethinking how I can add more value to my own growing paid community for First Class Founders, making that my main driver of revenue, instead of relying on sponsorships, which can be unpredictable.

Do this exercise for yourself. You'll see how valuable it can be!

That's it! Try this out yourself and let me know on Twitter what you think! (And don't forget to share this snack with your friends!)

Hope you enjoyed this week's Growth Snack! 😋 

🫵🏼  Your Turn

I love helping entrepreneurs. In fact, I've had a ton of great calls with other founders & creators already:

I'm offering a free growth audit call to identify the bottlenecks in your business. No strings attached.

Here are some ideas on what we could dive into together:

• Email Marketing

• Newsletter Audit

• Content Systems

• Marketing Funnel

• Audience Building

• Content Distribution

• E-commerce Growth

• Customer Acquisition

Let's grow your business. Looking forward to working with you!

✈️ Upgrade: To enjoy the full First Class Founders experience, join our paid membership. See benefits here.

🎛 Metrics Dashboard

I'm building First Class Founders in public. So each week, I share my numbers exclusively through subscribers of this newsletter only. Enjoy!

Podcast:

• 90-Day Downloads: 10,429

• 30-Day Downloads: 2,020

• 7-Day Downloads: 599

👍🏻 Recommendation: Thinking of starting a podcast? I recommend Buzzsprout.

Newsletter:

• Subscribers: 1,630

• Open Rate: 40.1%

• Click Rate: 8.0%

👍🏻 Recommendation: I love Beehiiv for my newsletter. If you sign up using my affiliate link, you'll get a full year of First Class Founders Membership ($99 value), free. Just shoot me an email.

💺 Passenger of the Week

Jens Lennartsson is a good friend of mine killing it in the newsletter growth space.

If you're writing a newsletter, do yourself a favor and subscribe to his (newly branded!) newsletter, Hot Mail.

I love his new branding and his audience will be intermediate to professional email newsletter operators giving actionable advice. What's not to love?!

Here's the pitch:

"The newsletter your competitors, the government, and your mom don't want you to read. If you never want to worry about algorithms, revenue, or growing an audience again. Get weekly, actionable step-by-step instructions for building a newsletter strong enough to invade a small country."

You can subscribe here.

💬 Final Word

I turn 37 on Monday. Crazy how each year flies by faster than the one before!

For my birthday, I just have one wish:

Help me reach 50 five-star reviews on Apple Podcasts! 🙏🏼

We just need 23 of you — can we do it?

It takes 2 seconds and it would truly mean the world to me. THANK YOU! 😁

Lastly, big thanks to my fellow creator friend Alex Llull who plugged me into his newsletter The Steal Club last week!

Yong-Soo Chung — Serial Entrepreneur, Podcaster