⏱️ Basic → Grow → Optimization

The time-recipe for a successful part-time business

Hey Part-Time Creator,

Welcome to a subscriber-only edition of the newsletter. Every week, I tackle a burning question about product growth, productivity, work, and communication, so you can learn how to apply the findings to your part-time thing. Let’s dive into this week’s newsletter.

For more visit: Part-Time Creator Club :)

Read time: 5.3 minutes

---

How do you *actually* work on your part-time thing? (A framework for making it happen)

I’ve been building part-time online for the last 4 years— aka 2 hours a day(ish).

It’s been 4 years of trying, testing, and re-designing those 2 hours to figure out what works, here’s everything I know about using your time wisely for 2 hours every morning (or evening) to succeed on the internet).

We’ll tackle this question in 3 steps:

• Step 1: How to think about building

• Step 2: Figuring out your roadmap

• Step 3: Your working week

Hopefully, this way of thinking about things is useful.

The background

When you work for yourself part-time, you have very limited time to do all the things everybody else is doing in 8+ hours a day. If you’re a full-time creator, you have the luxury of having all day every day to build your thing. When you’re just starting out (or if you want to keep your 9-to-5), you have to squeeze all those things into a maximum of 2 hours a day so you succeed, you must start with how most people fail.

Businesses built by creators (so usually teams of 1), often fail for three reasons:

• It takes too long ⏱️ — You’re building but it’s taking forever, you get little to no feedback that this thing is going anywhere, and it’s soaking up your time so you decide to throw it in the bin and do something else.

• You lose motivation 🏃 — If you build for yourself, in your spare time, you have to have high levels of motivation. Nothing is riding on this. If it goes wrong it doesn’t matter because you’ve got a day job, low stakes can destroy your motivation.

• You lose confidence 👌 — One thing you’ll find if you build part-time is that you will battle those voices in your head. There’s no team to bounce ideas off. There’s nobody really to help you through it. If you lose confidence, you lose motivation and you end up jacking the whole thing in.

So it’s your job to figure out how to use the resources and time you have available to solve the most important problems to deliver the most meaningful impact. That is how you increase your odds of getting feedback, remaining confident, and can be rest assured your building the ‘right’ thing.

Time

Likely, you’ll have a maximum of 2 hours a day to work on your part-time business. It’s your job to figure out how best to use that time to bring about a meaningful impact.

When you work for yourself, you don’t have anyone telling you what to do, you don’t have anyone holding you to account or putting in deadlines. What you do have, is the freedom to do what you want. With that comes the obligation to hold yourself to account. Which will come with its challenges.

Your first job is to understand how you will use your 2 hours a day to produce the level of profitability you want.

Things that work for me:

• Power hours 🔋 — Spend the first 2 hours of the day doing my most important tasks (we’ll come on to that later). Those hours I’ve got noise-cancelling headphones on and focused on one thing.

• 1-thing to-do list ☝️— I (try) to stick to one thing on the to-do list per day. That means usually the most important thing to get done today goes on the list and nothing else does until it’s done.

• Worrying journalling 📖 — One thing that steals most of my time is worrying (about basically everything) so I try to write down the stuff I’m worrying about so it’s captured and I can work through it.

Resource(s)

Many digital tools can act as resource enhancers. In other words, you don’t need to hire a whole team to do a thing (I likely will never hire anyone to help me with the stuff I do on the side) instead, I invest in tools and learn stuff.

• Canva to design imagery 🖼️ - The best advice here is to build a template for your designs. Spend your time on that. Get the template right then everything can mostly be duplication.

• Hypefury to schedule content 🗓️ — This can help you deliver scheduled content across platforms to save you time cross-posting, schedule and forget about it.

• Loom to record 🎥 — If you need to record videos on a hosting system, Loom is an easy-to-use cost-effective tool.

• System.io to build a website 🔗 — You a build website and host your products on tools like System.io for a fraction of the price of something like Kajabi.

You don’t have to outsource everything. Instead, you can look for opportunities to save yourself time by utilizing automation and assistant tools.

Problem(s)

When you are starting your part-time business, you have to find the most impactful customer problem, that you are best placed to solve. It’s your job to find it, articulate it, and stamp it to your desk so you know exactly what you are there for and what you are trying to do.

Best way to go about finding your problem:

• Write a timeline over the last year (month by month)

• Write five categories: work, relationships, home, responsibilities, hobbies

• Then write down every problem you’ve faced in the last 12 months (you might need a big sheet of paper)

Here are some examples from my life:

• Pet insurance is confusing, costly, and takes ages

• Finding a car that fits all my criteria is hard work

• My to-do list at work is basic and I always forget things

• The house gets messy because I forget in the week and then have to do it at the weekend

• I lost motivation to post content across lots of social media platforms

• YouTube soaks up too much of my time

You see from there, hey presto, there are a handful of good problems to go about solving.

Solution

Finding the problem is one half (a big half) of the equation. The next is to solve it. It’s your job as a part-time creator to build the solution better than anyone else can. A solution that satisfies the customer and builds credibility.

Best way to go about building your solutions:

• Test by understanding the market

• Create a ‘front-end’

• Run experiments

• Create minimum viable products

The question is… how do you do all of this when you are starting from scratch? Simple, you start with the easy lift stuff. So, let’s say you’ve got a product idea, the key is to not start working on it right away, instead, your first question should be: ‘is there a market for this?’ How do you know? Well, you look. Go and see if you’re solution or a solution like there is out there, see how popular it is, see if there are opportunities for you to improve it. If so, it’s a good sign.

Then work on the front end to see if something has legs. For instance, let’s say I want to solve my YouTube Problem, so I create a mock-up (a front end) that looks like this and see if people like it.