Side hustles are businesses that can be run in your spare time.

Time, however, is limited and no one wants to spend all of their spare time running their side hustle. This leaves little room for living, like spending time with family and friends, or necessities like chores and taking care of your health.

When I think of the essential components of running a side hustle, they are:

• Offering (a product or service)
• Marketing
• Sales

You need an offering, either a product or service, that provides value to someone.

You need to market your offering, such as through word-of-mouth, social media, or ads.

You need to generate sales such as through building a sales pipeline, upselling or cross-selling if you have multiple offerings, or partnering with other businesses.

The rise in service-based side hustles

Service-based side hustles are often the “go-to” because you already have a skill that can be provided. It’s usually what you do in your 9-to-5 job, like graphic design or coding. It can also leverage a skill learned outside of your day job, like driving for Uber.

Service-based side hustles have a low barrier to entry because anyone with that skill can start to offer it. You’ve likely already spent a lot of time building it up, through education, training, and working.

All that’s left to do is marketing and sales.

As a solopreneur or side hustler, you spend your time providing the service. This leaves little time for you to focus on marketing and sales.

It’s one of the reasons freelancers generally face the challenge of running out of clients. They spend all their time working for their existing clients and don’t have time to look for new ones. They might not even be good at marketing or sales, so the client acquisition stage becomes a dread. This was a major reason that discouraged me from pursuing freelancing as a side hustle.

If you have a 9-to-5 job, this is equivalent to spending your time working, and then you get laid off one day. You’re essentially forced to brush up on your interviewing skills to market and sell yourself to another employer effectively. But that can be a real pain if you’re not good at playing the interview game. And from my experience, it’s not a fun game to play.

Buying back your time

Very few people that I know, mostly in tech, continuously interview throughout the year. It may not be vigorous job hunting, but it keeps their interview skills up-to-date and puts their name out there to potential employers. If they ever get laid off from their job, they’ve already got a leg up on people who are starting their job hunt from scratch.

It’s because they’re playing the long game.

They’re not looking for a job right now; they already have one. But if they become jobless, whether due to layoffs or by choice, they’ve already invested the time into finding their next one.

Now a freelancer could do the same thing, but when juggling a full-time job, freelancing as a side hustle, and constantly marketing yourself, all on top of maintaining your lifestyle, it can lead to burnout quickly.

The case for a digital product side hustle

My current side hustles are service-based and I’ve been thinking a lot about how to protect my time.

With a digital product side hustle, the challenge shifts to developing a product that is valuable to the market and potential customers are willing to purchase. This is easier said than done, but spending the time upfront can be rewarding by buying back your time later.

Another route to take is dropshipping, or reselling existing products online. This takes away the time needed to create a product, but identifying the right products in the right niches also takes time. On top of that, you’ll have to market yourself in a sea of other drop shippers, all doing the same thing.

Some might say dropshipping is oversaturated, but so is freelancing, ridesharing, food delivery, and even dog-walking. Saturation is a sign of competition, which means there is a demand for that product. That’s a good thing.

I’ve thought about dropshipping, but I don’t have any interest in doing it. I want to sell a product that I’m proud of creating, that might help someone out.

A side hustle without passion or interest won’t get you very far. It might work out short term, but you’ll be missing that drive to keep going. If I’m not being fulfilled at work, which I don’t think is necessary, then I’ll turn to my side hustle to fill that need.

What’s stopping you from starting?

Digital products are becoming much more popular. People want to pay for knowledge or to learn something from an expert.

What’s something you can sell online that someone can use or learn from, using the skills and knowledge that you have gained from your day job?

People get hung up on what to sell. It’s not as easy as saying, “I’m a UX designer in my day job, so I’ll start providing design services to clients”. That’s an easy transition.

The product doesn’t have to be new or innovative, but it needs to have some sort of market appeal or competitive advantage. Some questions to consider are:

• What value does your product offer?
• Does it save the customer time?
• Is it cheaper than the alternative?
• Is the quality higher?
• Does it enable customers to do things they can’t already do?

And so, if you’re a UX designer in your day job, some ideas that come to mind include:

• A beginner’s guide ebook to getting a job in UX design
• An online course that teaches the fundamentals of UX design
• Templates that save people time, like icon libraries or mockups
• Memberships or subscriptions to a design community

These ideas leverage the skills and knowledge that you’ve gained through your 9-to-5 and turn them into a digital product.

It doesn’t have to be perfect either. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from working in tech, it’s that the earlier you release something, like a product or feature, the quicker you can get feedback from the market and continuously iterate to improve it.

This will help you understand what your product is missing, what needs to change, if it’s priced properly, or if there is even a demand for it. It’s better to learn this early on and pivot to something else.

But if you spend all your time trying to make your product “perfect”, you’re missing out on feedback that can help you grow your side hustle.

There’s no right or wrong

With a service-based side hustle, you’re trading time for money, so your side hustle has a cap on how much it can make. Since your time is limited, you can only spend so much time doing your side hustle before you run out. This may work for people who are content with the amount of hours they put in and how much they can earn from their side hustle.

But if your goal is to separate your time from your income, then a digital product side hustle becomes much more scalable. Your product can sell even when you’re asleep. Your ability to earn money becomes independent of your time.

And that’s my next step in this side hustle journey.

For a while now, my side hustles had started to feel like part-time jobs, which I guess they technically are. But after thinking this through a million times, I’ve decided to just start building a digital product and see what happens. I won’t go into too much detail for now, but this has reignited my enthusiasm for having a side hustle.

Although my main reason for side hustling was for the extra income, unlike my 9-to-5, I have full control over where I take it. So my main goal is to just have fun with it and step outside my comfort zone. After all, what’s the point of running a side hustle if you’re not going to enjoy it?