You should have an idea of what your goal is for starting a new business. Do you want a side hustle to supplement your ‘regular job’? Do you want to leave the corporate world behind and just start your own thing head on? Are you comfortable with a small ‘lifestyle’ online business that you can own fully and pays your bills with a little left over, that hopefully grows gradually over time? Or do you have an aggressive, take-over-the-world growth plan, where you need to raise funding from institutional investors with the aim of hopefully becoming a ‘unicorn’ billion dollar-valued company? Each of these have different implications, different lifestyle choices, different expectations for ‘success’.

For me, and this business, I do hope to start and scale a sustainable business, possibly in the seven-figures at some point (year 2 or 3?), which would give me the personal financial freedom to control my destiny. If it can replace my six-figure salary, help pay for my kids’ college and allow some decent future savings for retirement, I’m at a good place. I’ve always had an entrepreneurial bent and have been pretty comfortable with the lifestyle that goes along with it – that is, higher risk, higher reward, not a steady paycheck, sometimes more headaches dealing with employees, taxes, health insurance. On the flip side there is greater upside for financial freedom, as long as you are okay with rolling the dice on yourself, and the unpredictability that life brings. Man, I am almost talking myself out of it!

This is why I have embraced a ‘side-hustle’ mentality. I believe it is okay to test the waters with a new venture, see if there is that ‘product market fit’ and if it can scale, and then at a later point, quit your day job once the startup can sustain you. This allows you to de-risk to a degree, allowing you a steady income stream as your new business to birth and then crawl, and then run. If things don’t work out for whatever reason, there is that 9-to-5 that you can fall back on.

On the contrary, there are naysayers that will point out that if you are not fully invested personally in your new company, it is destined to fail. You gotta be ‘all in’. I think this point of view depends on the venture. For sure, if it is a VC-backed company, there are stakeholders that expect full commitment, and the expectations are higher for the business to scale faster and higher, or bust. That’s different from a lifestyle business, that in my mind is just as if not more rewarding, that can allow for some flexibility and accommodation of approach.

That is exactly what I have done.

In 2019 my wife and I started a new ecommerce business called Hey Dewy. We started it while I had a full-time job, she had the flexibility to jump in while juggling our two kids. Five years later, it is a seven-figure business that we are now positioning to sell for a tidy return. Meanwhile, my existing employer is going out of business and I will be out of a corporate job in a couple months. Without the possibility of a backup business and potential windfall, we would be in a much more difficult situation. (stay tuned for a more detailed story around ‘how I built a seven-figure ecommerce business’).

So side-hustler, go for it! All-in entrepreneur, take the leap!

WHAT I WORKED ON TODAY:

• Setting up email capture using WP’s default service. It seems very rudimentary and you can’t brand the emails; so contemplating using a plugin. However, that requires me to upgrade my WP account to a Business Plan ($25/mo. instead of $8)
• Cleaned up some of the footer and side rail templates so it is specific to me
• Continue to familiarize myself with the WP content platform. There is a bit of a learning curve, but a lot of it is pretty intuitive. Haven’t yet needed to reach out to my graphic designer friends for favors!

THINGS UPCOMING:

• Develop a ‘launch plan’ to start communicating to the world and drive traffic
• Find the discussion forum platform (e.g. Circle, Thinkific) that can integrate seamlessly with WP
• Put a content calendar together to map out future posts