Ask HN: Side Hustle FOMO and Burnout

I am sure lots of you have seen all those videos/tutorials/articles about side hustles and how they've developed 5-6-7 income streams, etc.

As current standing, undefeated, unified, undisputed World Champion of Spreading Oneself Too Thin (and failing a lot as a result) my opinion is that these people are simply lying. Look hard and I bet you'll find most such claims are accompanied by something for sale, where the "something" is some sort of "information product" which purports to help you "make big money fast" or something along those lines.

To a first approximation, assume that nobody is actually managing 5-6-7 income streams... at least not where more than 1 of them actually amounts to anything. The ones claiming to do so are probably just trying to hustle you.

Is there an outlier here and there? Sure, probably. Is that realistic? Hell no.

The only regard in which it makes sense, IMO, to pursue that many projects simultaneously is when you're just exploring the search space in a manner akin to pouring water into a container and finding the low point by observing where the water pools. That is, put attention into many projects early but as soon as you see which one which shows evidence of being the best, aggressively prune the others and put all of your attention behind the winner. Maybe you have to iterate a few times and narrow things down in chunks, but still, the goal should be to get to a place where you "put all your wood behind one arrow" so to speak.

The fact that I haven't earned a dime from any of the side hustles so far and gave out lots of money for ads is making the things even more frustrating ...

It's a minor nit, but I'd encourage you to stop thinking in terms of "side hustles" altogether. Calling it a "hustle" implies something of low value, which merits low levels of attention and discipline, and depends more on lucky circumstance than anything to succeed. I'd suggest thinking in terms of building a business, and envision scaling it as far as (it can go|you want to go) possibly to the point of being acquired or having an IPO. But that's just my opinion...

My advice to you is to simplify and focus on one thing at a time. From the post, seems like you are doing too much.

Grill yourself hard on everything you do. "Why do I need a landing page?", "Why do I need to build this feature?", "Why do I need all these social pages?"

I've been there. The videos and posts you saw online probably didn't help either. Often time I have so many ideas and things I wanna try after watching them, but very shortly, I realize I don't have time for those. Just do 1 or 2 things well consistently to start, once the small wins come, you can build and compound on that.

Remember, you are solo and it is a side hustle.

"Grill yourself hard on everything you do"

A lot of the techniques that trend go out of fashion really fast too. Waitlists and Product Hunt are actually signals of bad products today.

A lot of these products spent more time in marketing than dev. Some of the AI stuff out there is literally a paragraph put into a wrapper app that calls a single API and doesn't even handle fallbacks.

Most of these advertise the same way, write the same landing pages. A consumer spots it pretty quickly as a scam. Many are not scams, but because they replicate the style of scams, they get unconsciously flagged as one.

Social media promotions are on average, negative, as in you'd get more users by just sitting around and thinking on how to get users, then some idea just clicks.

One of my startups got a ton of traffic just asking blogs if we could use their content, and they were so proud of it that they linked to the site. Then with all these blogs linking to us, it ranked top on Google for the keywords we wanted. It wasn't taught in a book and it's not replicable elsewhere (VCs hated it) but most of these marketing techniques are obvious if you don't crowd your brain with social media posts.

I'm a firm believer that you can only dedicate yourself to effectively doing a few things at a time. I have a big side hustle and a tiny side hustle. I switch between them to avoid getting burned out.

If you try to do too many things, they're going to be low quality, and fail even if the idea is good. So focus on a single idea, take it to a validation stage, and see what happens. Keep working on it with dedication or kill it.

I've got a couple of projects that make money, and the answer is: years of consistent work.

You might see the odd "overnight" project launch to millions in revenue in one go, but they've been putting in work for years, building trust, delivering value through free articles and videos before getting that win.

More and more, they aren't doing it alone, there are teams that can handle these launches now.

Consistent work about something you care about more than most people! The motivation has to come from pure passion because the rewards show up much later than the work.

Thank you for all the responses!

They were very encouraging!

I think I am trying to do so many different things simultaneously out of the fear that if I concentrate on just one, there is still big chance for it to fail.

So I am trying to diversify and in my mind raise the probability of something to succeed.

The secret ingredient is lying.

Their whole job is to induce envy and FOMO, and use that to sell you something.

Successful businesses usually start with the desire to fix a specific problem that you are very knowledgeable about. It's rarely a just-add-hustle recipe sold by an influencer.

this.

if someone is selling course on x, where x is forex trading or dropshipping, that fucking means they suck very bad at it and they instead make money on the fools that buy their courses.

Don't believe things you read/hear/see on the Internet, particularly if they come from people who make an income out of spreading said message. Internet is the snake oil salesman's paradise, particularly when it comes to personal/business advice.

On the contrary, some of the best advice out there comes from people who make income from it.

Hell, I used to teach stuff for free via blogs and FB and such and I would get ignored. Then suddenly I did classes and do "tax deductible certifications" out of the exact same advice and everyone takes note. On HN, the same costly advice even gets downvoted.

> particularly if they come from people who make an income out of spreading said message

I often come across so-called financial wizards, or people who will tell you how to get your house in order so you too can be rich and live a work-free lifestyle, and the thing that seems to have provided their wealth is their business of telling other people how they got their wealth.

The ones that come to mind immediately are Dave Ramsey, Robert Kiyosaki, and Tim Ferriss.