How to Transition Your Side Hustle to a Day Job - Strategies for Success

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season of Building Better Habits. We are Building Better Developers. We are Develop-a-Nor. I am Rob Broadhead. I'm one of the founders of Develop-a-Nor. So one of the founders of, actually the founder of RB Consulting, where we go out there and we really just, we work with you and with technology and with your business. We try to marry technology and business through integration, simplification and automation to help you figure out sort of like guides through the technical forest that is out there. What are all of the things that are out there? And there is a lot. And how can those best serve your company? And how do we find the right product for you, the right people for you, the right approach for you? And not only today, but six months and even six years or 60 years down the road is like, how do we help you use technology and build that for today and for the future? Now, good things, bad things. I, although I live in a basically warm climate, I do like a little bit of cold. That's why I'm where I'm at. It's like a little bit of cold, like a week or two. So it finally got cold and I was like, cool, I can actually like wear my wintery type stuff. That's a good thing. The bad thing is, is the first morning I got up and had to go to work super early, everything was frozen over and I had to go out and I didn't have to scrape because I'm lazy. I just put the heat on on the car and then like took a little extra time reading my mail before I actually pulled out of the drive. But that would be the bad thing. I had to actually scrape the car. As far as habits go, one of the things that has been, it's interesting that it's like, it's almost like the circle of life of developer is I've been doing a lot of code reviews and a lot of sort of like looking over and actually not only like just other developers work, but even some of my own stuff. I've like gone back through some old projects and I've been like dusting some stuff off and moving things around and stuff like that. And part of that is really has been looking at a lot of these things and even some where there's some some problems here and there that I've, you know, there's like some bugs or a challenge or some logical thing that I'd never just addressed and have really been in a break it down kind of mode. And now part of it is, is a lot of what I've been messing around with lately is Python, which is very suitable to take a very big product or problem and turning into a lot of little solutions and then just rolling them all up and then boom, you're done. And it really has been fun. Actually, it's been amazing to me how fast and productive I can be breaking that stuff down even more so because now I'm starting to dabble a little bit more in like I'll call it boutique AI kinds of stuff because I can throw something out there and I know that you know, I could write this code and probably 10 minutes, but I also know that AI can write it in 10 seconds basically. So I can throw it out there and say, give me a function that does this. It's like, boom, there it is. And then, oh yeah, I need to add these three things. Cool. And I'm done and I'm moving on. And it allows me to take that big thing that would be too much and it would just be too much of a pain to deal with. Now I have essentially my little helper elf of like, write this little thing for me. Boom, done. Okay, I'm going to take this, I'm going to tweak this. I can push it out there. Awesome. I'm ready to go. And it's, you know, along with all of the linters and stuff like that, it saves a little problem there because most of that stuff is already lint free in a sense. And so as long as I know what the heck I'm doing with it, which I do because it's a small enough problem, it's really easy to like to vet the code and say, yep, that makes sense. Or if it sucks, which sometimes it does, it's really, it's, there's enough of it written that it makes it easy to go fix that and go, oh, this thing doesn't know what it's talking about. This is what I need to do. Change these three variables. Boom, done. Bada bing, bada boom. Bob's your uncle, as they say, and you're off and running. So really a big fan lately, really have been embracing the whole take something big, turn it into tiny little chunks and then solve those problems. A problem that I cannot break down is Michael, who sits across the internet from me and he's going to introduce himself not in little chunks either. He's going to have, it's a big introduction. Hopefully that has set the table properly for you. So give me that big introduction, my friend. Hey everyone. My name is Michael Molloch. I'm one of the co-founders of developer building better developers. I'm also the founder of Envision QA where we take those big problems and we help you break them down within your software. We help you improve the quality of your software through test driven development, be it unit test, integration test, regression test. We help you figure out how to get a test environment going to where you are writing code faster, more solid code, less bug free code or more bug free code to ensure that the software is polished. And it will speed up the process entirely. Good and bad. Good. Wife has finally been able to take the trip she's wanted to take to go see her sister-in-law. The bad, it has taken three months for us to finally get her from the initial trip idea to getting it, getting her on the plane and finally out there. And unfortunately California is on fire. So it's an interesting dynamic going on right now. Habits. So very similar to what you've been working with. So I've actually been working on improving my skills and breaking things down. Interestingly enough, you mentioned AI. So one of the fun things I've been playing around with AI a bit is with doing code reviews and trying to figure out code complexity, trying to figure out if what I'm working on is too big, too robust or even too small. I've been kind of playing around with AI and taking a code chunk and saying, Hey, is there a better way to break this down? Is this too complex? And sometimes the responses have been very interesting. Like I get very cool broken down code. Like this makes sense. Why didn't I think of this the first time? And then other times I get this gobbledygook. I'm like, good God, I hope no one puts this in their code. It looks right. It works, but it is the wrong approach entirely to trying to put out a piece of solid software. And this is very important, especially around testing, because if you're working on trying to figure out unit tests, how to test your code, if you are not a developer that is solid at writing tests, doing unit tests, like Rob said, you take that small chunk of code, throw it in the AI and say, Hey, write me a test. Nine out of 10 times it will give you a solid test that you can take and drop in. But something I ran into just recently was the test it generated, they all passed, but they all passed wrong. Like the tests themselves were all set up to. So I was testing some happy pass for like APIs. So for and and testing and you would expect a 200. Well, it gave me the test based on the code I sent it. It basically gave me all the tests to basically say, oh, 300, 303, 304, three. None of them were 200, but they all passed. And I'm like, oh, good. I'm good to go. And I'm like, wait a minute. And I'm looking at it. I'm looking at it. I'm like, nope. Went back. There was a bug in the software, which AI didn't know any better. It's like here, sure. Your test looks like it does this. Here is the test. The test were right, but wrong. So all I had to do was change the response codes to what I expected. The right test pass, the wrong test failed, which made me go fix the code. All the tests worked and boom. It was just one of those where it's like, Hey, this actually was a good learning process to figure out how AI worked and to fix my test. And sorry, that was a little bit long winded. I'll send that back over to you. So I want to talk this episode about, it's hard to figure out how to put this to words, but we're going to essentially say it's along the lines of going from a side hustle to a day job is converting your side hustle to a day job. And the challenge is related to it because we've talked about side hustles a lot. Then we've talked about getting your first job, your first project, your first customer. Some of the things you can do. We've talked about things you shouldn't do. Like you don't want to cut your rates too much. You don't want to, you know, like just sort of like, you know, do a losing proposition. And then you end up in a long-term project where you can never make any money out of it or it's never useful. You don't want to do something that you hate because you're going to suck at it. And then your first one's not going to give you a good reference, things like that. But this is sort of that next step is there is, and this is something that I've sort of come to my mind as I've talked to a lot of people that do side hustles of varying sorts, developers and then also non-developers is that there is a, I think what we have in this in this gig economy, even as I think this starts to become more apparent, is that you have a, you have like a primary job, whatever it is, and it may or may not be the one that makes the most money. And you have this secondary job, your side hustle. In a lot of cases, what happens is that the side hustle is not treated with the respect that it deserves. And so the work you do for the side hustle is basically like, I'm just doing that for money. I don't really care. That's cool if it's just a side hustle. But if you want that to turn into your day hustle, your full hustle, then there are things that you need to do. And we've talked about your brand and vision and focus and things like that. And that's where we get into it. And that's the short of it is basically is that when you get to a point where you say, hey, I want this to be, I want to go down this path and become a real business. I want to work on what my business is going to become. You're probably going to spend some time like a vision and a mission statement, and you're going to think about your brand. And probably if you do it right, you're going to spend some time having marketing material and content and a focus in your sales that says this is what I provide, because that's how you're going to win customers. You're going to say to the customer that wants A, B, and C, I happen to be the provider of A, B, and C. I'm exactly the person you want for that. And that is what your focus needs to be. And this is something that is near and dear to our heart, me and Michael in particular, as you can see, even develop and or over the years has gone all over the freaking place and then it is sometimes wandered back and then it's gone all over the place and it's come back. And that's what we've tried. We're trying to be in a come back and more focused kind of approach, which I think we've done pretty good for the past few years. We're, we're narrowing this stuff in and honing some of these things in. And that's what you need to do in order to find some success. Because if you, and it's, it's a challenge because now you're, you know, you're moving from side hustle to real hustle. There is more skin in the game probably, because you're thinking more about this. You're, you're wanting to make sure that this succeeds because now you're starting to think that this is something that I need to like pay my bills to, and I just pay my extra bills, but it'll like put food on my table and some of those kinds of things, and it's also something that you should be thinking this is something I want to do for a long period of time. Not, I could do this for a month or two, and then I'm going to move on to something else. I mean, if you're building a company, you need to be thinking about what is it that you really want to do? What is it that makes you happy? Because there's too much stink and work that goes into this to not be something that makes you happy. And I'm not even talking money. Like you may make a lot of money. You could still be miserable. And there's, you go back to the interviews. I don't know how many times I've interviewed somebody that said, you know, this was my fourth business because I hated the other three and I just wanted to fire bomb each of them and move on. And then I finally found the thing that I liked. Well, this is where you find the thing that you like. Now, if you've spent some time and said, this is my brand, this is my focus, this is how I'm going to market this, then the danger comes once you get a customer. Usually customers are, if you're lucky, the customer is going to be a perfect fit. Usually they are not. Usually they want, especially in the IT world. It's like, let's say you are a web developer. They're going to say, all right, I want you to build my website. And the next thing you know, they're going to say, but hey, can you put a CRM on the backend of this, you know, or, you know, Michael's a tester. I talked a lot about he, you may have noticed in the last 15 minute monologue there, you may have noticed that he enjoys testing. That's something he does. Well, if somebody comes to you and says, I need you to test my software at some point, they're going to say, I need you to write my software as well, or I need you to take my software to market. And it's like, whatever your niche is, particularly in technology, there's always going to be a pull to do whatever's before it, whatever's after it, and then also shift it to like a smaller company or a larger company or a different line of business or something like that. So like if you live, you love doing healthcare stuff sooner or later, going to find the same thing and somebody wants you to do that for trucking and shipping. And it may be the same work. It may feel the same, but it may be something that for you does not. And you don't want to do that because you don't want to water down your brand. Now, I cannot emphasize enough that that is part of what you do when you drift off of whatever your focus is, is you're literally you're watering down your brand. And if you want to, if you want some help, then you read about any book on brand, and especially like the iconic brands, like your Nikes and your, and even professionals like your Tiger Woods is, or your Michael Jordans or some of those kinds of people and, and how consistency is so important to brand. And like you look at the big names, like the ones, the, the one name, people like the Oprah's and people like that, that it's, it all comes down to that they have a brand, they, there's something about them or their company. And that's what they stick to. And that's what we're going to talk about as a habit. Once I throw this over to Michael, because I'm taking up too much room now. It's too much of the air out of the room, but we're going to talk about a challenge and how we can build a habit that we can actually rein ourselves in and get back on our focus. But first I like to hear Michael's thoughts on this, because this is something very near and dear to his heart as well. Yeah. It's very interesting topic, you know, talking about taking that side hustle to a day job, one of the biggest problems that I've seen a lot of people make is that their side hustle is too vague. It's not niche enough. You know, over the years we've had that problem, you know, and we've seen that with development early. You know, we have an idea. It's like, Hey, let's talk about this idea. And then it spawns off this idea. It spawns off this idea. The problem you have, if you're not focused enough, or if you're not niche enough is that side hustle idea. You could spiderweb. It could go many, many, many different ways. And like Rob was saying, you can dilute the brand. But the other problem is if you're not niche enough, or if your side hustle isn't, isn't a product that is competitive enough, it's not something that enough people want, you might not make it just because of lack of. Customers, for instance, if you, if your side hustle is selling golf T-shirts and you do pretty decent, you know, in your golfing community, the problem you have is if you go big, you know, if you try to sell more and more, your competition gets bigger. So if you're trying to take that side hustle and grow it, make sure it's niche enough, or if you're focused enough in an area that you can thrive in, not be suffocated by competition. Now you're going to run into competition in any type of business, but you know, with it, it's very easy. There's so many brands, you know, products people want, people need, you know, almost everyone needs a website. Everyone wants a website, but the problem is, do you want to build a website for everyone, or do you want to build a website? Do you want to build a brand for instance, like launching businesses? Or do you want to build a website for photography and be a photography expert and build websites specifically for photography? You know, you can niche down further and build your side hustle to something that can be a business. Case in point, I just rebranded my entire business last year and went from being a business, a consulting business of the internet of things, doing literally any type of job that related to computer, be it, you know, DevOps, be it network administrator, be it software administrator, building websites, you know, every other month there was a different customer coming to me for a different type of product. And the problem is I had no one product that I could tell anyone, yeah, Hey, I'm the guy for the, you know, yes, I can do that, but where can I give an example that like I had too many, my portfolio was too big. So the thing is you have to kind of peel back the layers and get to something that you can put on a single sheet of paper, a single marketing brand and say, Hey, this is what I do. This is what I'm good at. And if that is what you want to do, if you want to take your side hustle and be that, that is what you want to do. You want to say, Hey, this is who I am. And I, you know, if you need this, I am the person for you. And so you basically take that side hustle and you say, all right, I'm ready to step into this. I'm ready to quit my day job. I'm ready to, you know, do this hands down. Make sure that your side hustle is something that you can hold up and say, this is who I am. You know, talk about, we've talked about branding, make sure you stand out, make sure that your brand meets your message. If it meets your message, go all in, stick to it and stay on course. Yes. You may get other people to come to you and once in a while it's okay to maybe step out of your lane a little bit, especially if you do need to pay the bills early on, but stick in your lane. Don't go down too many side paths because if you do, you're never going to get to be the expert in that industry, the expert of your product, and you're not going to basically excel where you want to go, you're going to be too split. You're going to be too diverse. So pick one thing, stick to it and be the best of the best. And that is going to make you excel and hopefully take your side hustle to your day job. And that's sort of the, that takes me to the, the habit building part and what's eventually going to be the challenge is first, why you're refining who you are. Well, you're thinking about what it is that you provide. I think as you do this anywhere that you say, I do this and this, pick one. You do not do this and this and this, you pick one of those and you go down that path. That's how you're going to refine it. For example, I have over the years and it's, it can be very difficult over the years, I have had dozens of software and languages that I could do something in. And at one point I was like, I want to be, I want to focus on certain types of software projects in, as far as languages and environments. And when I started going down to, you know, instead of, I can do Java and I can do Python and I do C sharp and I can do PHP and I can do blah, blah, blah, blah. And I can do all these languages. I realized, no, I want to ship, I want to shrink those down because it helped because the market was if I did a Ruby on Rails project and the next person I come across does it wants to do a Java spring project, then that Ruby on real doesn't do squat because I haven't defined it right now. That's where I can look at it and say, okay, what's really not about the language, which was key. So that's one of those is like, Hey, I don't really care about the language. I'm going to do whatever language it is. And so that's one of those things where you sort of like roll it back and say, okay, I didn't, I don't want to go down that that is not part of who I am. I don't care what the technology is. And now you look at it and say like, okay, well now where am I at? Well, maybe I'm, I'm building software or I'm designing software, or I design the look and feel of software, or I deploy software, or I test software, or I like to maintain software, or I do software. I write applications that automate something, or I write applications that help sell something or that help track sales. What you can do is you sort of, wherever you go and you say, I do this and this. Drop one of those off, cut that out, pick one. And if that takes you down a path that gets you to where you can like follow all the little choices you made and say, yep, that is me, then you're good. If not, then roll yourself back up and then find it. How do you define this? So you can figure out exactly what is it that you do? Like it really is getting down to a laser focused niche. Now the side, second part of this is once you get a project, once you have a customer is when they say, here's what I want you to do, but there's just this little piece that's really, that is what you need to do. That is what your brand is. Then I challenge you there to look at how do I not do the other stuff? Now you could just say, I'm only going to do that. You may do something where you say, Hey, this is where my, my strength is, but I have some other people and I'm going to sort of farm this out and you work some arrangements and you have some agreements and business partnerships and stuff like that, where you're like, Hey, I'm going to be this person. I'm going to let you guys do this stuff because this is what I want to do. This is where I'm at. And then when you get done, and this is a key to this, when you get done with any project, think about it as a reference. If you were going to write a one-pager on the project that you just completed or the product you completed, or what you did, the service you provided to your customer, how are you going to phrase that? Because the project, if it's a whole bunch of extra crap that you don't need, then you shouldn't even be doing it. You're wasting your time. But more importantly, that's going to have you focus on like, what is it that I want out of this? How do I need this to work? Because I want this to be something that I can say, yep, this is yet another success of my company, of us doing the thing that we do. And so it does come back to, just as we talked to all our customers and we always say the why, what is the why about it? And this time you're going to flip it a little bit and say, why did I take that project? What is it that I'm expecting to get out of it? Now, if you took it just for the money, then it is a write-off. It is in the longterm, all you're doing is you're just bandaging your way into it. But if it's something that you took it for a reason and said, this is why I liked that project, then go back to get to your like first principles of that. Let's do that. And then how do I, you know, basically I want to jettison everything else. That's not that because that's where I want to go. That's what I want to add to any extra work I do. I hope I'm getting paid a ton of money for it because it's not actually contributing to the future of my business. And you see this in big businesses all the time where they will take an entire portion of their company and cut it off, split it out because it doesn't actually promote their brand and the direction that they want to go. Now we've, I was going to toss it back to Michael, but we've gotten a little long, so I don't want us to go, I don't want us to get too terribly long. So I'm going to go right into the challenge and the habit here. The challenge I have, this is, this is like an advanced challenge. So I'm going to apologize right now. I'm doing it, but I think it's very useful. And I think you'll find it is the kind of thing that can take you for not only being a better developer, but a better business owner and executive and some things like that and manager and leader. The next seven days, look at what you are doing for your, your job, essentially or what you're doing today, particularly if it's in your side hustle, you know, or if you run your own company or your own company, look at what you're doing. And each day take one thing that you don't like that you find is not part of what you want to be or what you want your company to be and spend five minutes. Just thinking through what, if I could move that onto somebody else, and I'm not saying go out and hire like an entire team of people, but I am asking you to think about what if I had an employee that could do that? How would I hand that off? Because this is something that is a lot of times the hardest part about growing, particularly when you come out of a side hustle, when you come out of it, like solopreneur and, or very small company is that as you grow, you've got to find a way to take the stuff that you've always done, that you've never had to document, that you've never had to communicate to anybody else. Cause you just, you do it and it's just something you learn. And find a way to hand that off to somebody else. Because once you go through the work of being able to cut something like that off and pick it up and put it over on somebody else and say, here you go, go do it, you'd be amazed at how freeing that becomes. It does go back to the four hour work week and the whole idea of like automating processes and sending stuff out to other people and doing all of those things. But this is a little more personal and it's a little more about what do you want to do? What do you need your company to become? And then how do you take all the things that muddy the waters and find a way to get those out of the way so you can have a, you know, a pristine pond that looks down on your brand moving forward. That is the challenge that I have for you is do that every day. Take a few minutes, pick something and then think through how would I hand that off? And maybe it is starting a little, you know, little blog or a little document or something like that of like, Oh yeah, I need to track this information or I would need to contact somebody about this or I would need to, you know, whatever it is, because that eventually maybe will be your backlog of items that you need to do so that you can grow your company to the multi-billion company that we know everybody is going to eventually have. That being said, we are not yet a multi-billion dollar company, so we can't send you billions of dollars to say, send us an email. So we're just going to say, please send us an email at info at development.com. Let us know how it's going. What are your thoughts? What are your suggestions for the next season? As we are coming up on that, as always, you can leave us comments. Contact is a hundred different ways, whether it's out on X, whether it's on Facebook, whether it's development or.com on the contact form, whether it is feedback on the developer or channel on YouTube or out on the podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts. That being said, I'm going to now take a deep breath and then say, have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to building better developers, the developer nor podcast. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success.