When you’re starting a small business as a side hustle, there will be many details that you can potentially invest your money in, from packaging to shipping to marketing materials, and it can be hard to determine what is and isn’t worth it. This post will help you ask the right questions about your business and determine what investments are worth it when it comes to your business goals — after all, you worked hard to earn and save your money, so you want to spend it wisely.
E-Commerce or Physical Location?
One of the biggest decisions you’ll make for your business is whether or not you need a physical location for it or if you can make your business centered in e-commerce. You can always do both, but you should make sure that you’re thinking through your options and determining which one is more cost-effective. Rent in a retail space can be expensive in certain areas, for example, so starting your business mainly online might be a better way to build a base for starting a physical shop location.
You might also consider being mainly e-commerce and doing pop-up shops when it’s possible, such as on weekends or for a few weeks at a time. The pop-up shop market is very popular right now and has a market value of $50 billion, so if you choose that option you’re playing into a potentially profitable marketing strategy.
How Will You Grow?
Growth is a big factor when it comes to starting a side hustle. In order to make enough money for your side hustle to be worth it, you’ll need to think about what your path to growth is exactly. If you’re a service-based business, how will you get more clients? If you sell products, how will you increase your sales?
Think also about possible barriers to your future success and brainstorm on how to counteract them. This will help make sure that when these possible problems come up you already have some strategy ideas to help you figure out what you can do to counteract them.
What Internet Service Do You Need?
If you’re running a business that uses the internet for anything from communicating with clients to making sales, you may need to upgrade your internet. This can be especially important while growing your business since you can’t have your internet crashing while trying to work — it will cost you time and, in turn, money. If you’re using cloud-based applications for any of your work, you’ll probably need to upgrade your internet at a certain point as well. Medium and large businesses use 300 to 400 cloud-based applications, so if you dream of growing to that size, you should probably take a look at what your internet can handle.
What is Your Niche?
Before you really start diving into how to build your side hustle business, you should start to think about what niche you’re filling with your products or services. Your niche will determine the kind of products you make, the services you offer, and who you’ll be targeting your products at. For example, if you’re creating affordable and sustainable clothing for 20-somethings, that is your niche, but you’ll also need to find something that is special about your company to set it apart from other similar businesses. Maybe you use certain special materials or you have a different angle to your marketing or production than others in your market. Whatever your niche is, you’ll have to capitalize off of it when you’re marketing your products, so you’ll want to make sure that you have a reason that you’re different from other businesses.
What About Website Design?
In today’s market, you need a good website whether or not you have a physical storefront or not. A website can help show your potential customers what your business is about, introduce them to your team, show all of your products available for purchase, or any other multitude of information that you may want to share with them. There are many services that will make designing your website easier, but you can also have a professional create and design your site for you. Whatever you use, you should make sure that your site works on desktops as well as on mobile sites since a recent survey showed that 57% of users won’t recommend a business if their mobile website doesn’t work well.
Do You Need Other Employees?
When you’re first starting a side hustle business, you may not need other employees right away. For example, if you’re making and selling jewelry, it can likely be a one-person production for some time. However, as you start growing, you may need employees or contractors to help with things like shipping, managing orders, or product design. Think about the cost-benefit analysis of bringing other employees into your business, and remember that even if it’s your business, you don’t have to do everything alone.
You should also consider whether you’ll need to hire contractors for things like legal agreements and contracts or your taxes. Until your business is relatively large, these things will likely need to be done by outside contractors or services.
Is Your Goal to Quit Your Day Job?
What is the goal of your side hustle? Is it to expand your savings account? Is it to have more money for trips or state of the art technology? Is it so that it can one day not be your side hustle and instead be your full time job? Whatever the reasoning is, you should make sure that you run your business with that end goal in mind. The way that you run a business that you plan to keep as a side business while growing your larger career and a business that you want to eventually be your entire career is very different.
No matter what your business goals are, you should make sure that you’re asking yourself these questions to figure out how exactly you can make your business succeed while no losing any money to it.
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