Experiment With Side Hustles If You Want To Make More Money

The more you experiment, the more likely you are to succeed

I’ve had a fair amount of success with my side hustles over the years. My best side hustle made me over $0.5 million. This success is all down to my willingness to experiment.

I have also had my fair share of failures. When an experiment fails I give up on it and move on to the next one. There’s no point flogging a dead horse.

This is where I see many people go wrong. They start some side hustles with the expectation of making it big. When it doesn’t work out, they refuse to move on because they’ve become emotionally attached to it. Admitting that it didn’t work out is something that they just don’t want to do. They simply have a fear of failure.

Many people are in the habit of bragging to their friends in advance. It’s then even more difficult to admit failure because now all their friends will know about it as well. So what do they do? They just continue and hope for the best.

This just wastes time that they could be spending on a new project that has more chance of success.

That’s why I like to call my side hustle and business ventures experiments.

If you’re conducting an experiment, then it either works or it doesn’t. It’s easier to abandon one experiment and start another than it is to admit that your business failed. There’s always that emotional attachment.

Here are some experiments that I’ve conducted over the years.

1. Buying properties to rent out. Overall this was a success, although some properties ended up losing me money. See my previous post about more than doubling my money in a year on one property.
2. Selling on eBay. This was a minor success, although the profit was too low to be worth my time.
3. An ecommerce business. This was the major success of my life. As mentioned above, this ecommerce business made me over $0.5 million in just 3 years.
4. Buying a recruitment agency franchise. This was a major failure. I lost around $60,000.
5. Building websites to re-sell. Another overall success, although many sites didn’t work out. Flipping these sites earned me $12,000. This all ended suddenly with a Google algorithm update.
6. Building a travel blog. Another success. This website made me around $60,000 over 3 years.
7. Selling domains names. I made $5,000 selling one domain, but most lost money. It’s a tough industry
8. Building another two travel blogs. Both failed.
9. Writing Kindle books. I wrote 8 Kindle books. I’d rate this a minor success. I wouldn’t do it again. Some books didn’t sell a single copy.
10. Writing for Medium. This is my current experiment. It’s going much better than expected so far. I have high hopes for this one. I should make over $400 this month, which is only my second month here.

As well as the above, there are lots of others that I’ve just forgotten about or aren’t worth mentioning. You might like my story about selling flowers when I was 9 years old though.