GROWTH IS ABOUT TRYING THINGS.
This is where my side hustles and fun projects will live forever. I love learning through doing. So I’ve tried a bunch of things.
- My First Side Hustle
- The Weight List Blog
- Coaching Diving
- The Diver Guy Youtube Channel
- Personal Finance/ Business Community
- Print on Demand
- The Ached Body
Much is learned when you are willing to fail. So keep building.
1.My First Side Hustle
Flipping Furniture
Inspiration: Ryan Pineda From Youtube
He said he was making 8,000 a month from flipping couches in Las Vegas and I thought I could do that in my free time while diving and doing school full time. So I bought a trailer, trailer hitch for my car and went on market place to find my first couches. One thing that I really learned from this 2.5 year side hustle is that I need to put more money into something if I want to scale faster. I have always been super conservative and just put in the bare minimum, but if I really want to see crazy compounding then I need to test the idea and then dump money into it if it is successful.
I shut the couch flipping down right at the beginning of senior year because I was getting tired of it. It was really great to give me my first capital to trade with and get some extra fun money for anything I wanted to do in school.
2. An attempt at blogging
The Weight List
Inspiration: Sam Parr, founder of “the hustle” which is a daily email newsletter. He speaks really highly of learning how to be a great copywriter and how it changed his career trajectory. So naturally, I wanted to learn about copywriting.
The best way to learn is to actually do it. So I wrote an article every day for 100 days. Along the way I wrote about SEO and read about copywriting from the greats like Joe Sugarman, Claude Hopkins, David Ogilvy and I read the boron letters by Gary Halbert. This skill can be applied to a lot of areas of business like cold outreach, general marketing, direct marketing, advertising and so much more. This side hustle didn’t make any money but it really laid out the foundation for my future (I think). This sent me on my journey of copy writing and marketing.
3. An unexpected gig
Coaching Diving
Inspiration: Maria (my old coach) called me and asked if I was interested in coaching. I wasn’t planning on it, but it was a low stress job and was going to be good money for me.
I didn’t really want to coach after I finished diving. I thought that it might be something I do for fun in retirement or later on in life, but a job opened up at a local D3 college and a bunch of high schools in my area needed help as well. It became an amazing stacking opportunity to coach very few hours and collect from many different places. And it still allowed me to focus on the learning I was doing and eventually the job search I would go on at the end of 2022 and beginning of 2023. In the first 3 months it made about 12k and that ended out the year of 2022. will continue it this year (2023) and we will see where it ends up.
Hi, I am back and it is October of 2024… I stopped coaching diving at the beginning of the year because I wanted to move and I wanted to spend time on other projects more than it was worth the mental load. With that off my plate, I could dedicate more time to trying out new ways to make money and explore my curiosity!
4. trying youtube
The Diver Guy
Inspiration: Shaan Puri “guy mafia. There is a movement on twitter of the “xyz” guy. it is a way to build a brand that is anonymous and still builds authority in a space. So, what do I know better than anything else… Diving.
I knew there was nothing like it already on Youtube and I realized that there was a huge gap in the market for something that brought a young athlete from beginner to expert in a dive. I am not sure it will ever be a killer youtube channel because it is such a niche sport so it isn’t super brand friendly and adsense are probably going to be very low, if anything at all. The one thing that does work is 1 on 1 consulting. The issue is, my main demographic is kids that probably don’t have money. There are some older viewers though and at the time of writing this, one person has booked and completed a private session.
At the very least I am having fun seeing the comments and knowing that I am helping people so it has been pretty cool.
I will build out this channel until I complete a long list of how to videos. I love advancing the sport and helping people younger than me.
I was able to monetize it based on watch time within a year of starting it, but youtube has kept me from making any money off of it. I also monetized it by creating an online product where people could send me their diving videos and I could give tailored tips for them! It never generated a lot, but it has been my first taste of generating even 100’s of dollars from an internet business.
This let me know I was on the right path (in a horrible niche… but this is more of a passion project anyways)
5. Building a small community
Personal Finance Club
Inspiration: Sam Parr with Hampton, Tiger 21, Bigger Pockets real estate meetups, and others.
As I write this, I live in the saratoga/albany area of upstate NY. It is my hometown and I moved back here to save money by living with my parents and spend time with old friends. One thing that I realized is that I have grown in a way that most of my old friends haven’t. That is totally okay and I don’t think it is good or bad in any way. We are just different now and we have grown in different ways.
I don’t have any people around me that are into personal finance and entrepreneurship, and investing etc. These are topics I think about a lot right now and I needed people around me that are like minded. So, I made some posts about it on reddit and a couple people reached out and I started organizing regular meetings with them.
We met for many weeks and have slowly fallen out of touch as schedules became busy. They are still friends and I am sure we will get back together at some point!
6. trying etsy
Print On Demand
One day I was watching youtube. The rest was history.
They say to never start a undifferentiated commodity business. So an Etsy print on demand business is a great idea right??? Probably not. But I was still intrigued.
I don’t want to say what the store is called quite yet. I picked a niche that I think could work and have updated new designs periodically as inspiration strikes. A “Hell Yeah” goal would be to see 5,000 in revenue per month.
More to come!
7. A Niche Pursuit
The Ached Body
Inspiration: Backlinko, Niche Pursuits, Nick Gray
I feel more confident about starting a blog/website that is about owning a niche that I know a lot about. There is a wide open opportunity that I think I can own the space for. It is going to take a while to build out the content. But even if it doesn’t work. I will learn a lot of valuable lessons.
More to come!