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Today, in 10 minutes or less, you’ll learn:

• ⚒️ 5 side hustles that I’ve launched to generate over $100,000

• 🧠 4 lessons I learned from my side hustle successes and failures

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🛣️ My $100k Side Hustle Journey

A few weeks ago, I was invited to speak by the Berkeley Club of Singapore.

I shared my journey to making over $100,000 from my side hustles taking 10 hours/week.

I uncovered my successes and failures.

In this newsletter, I’m going to recap my side hustles and 4 lessons I learned building them.

Side Hustle #1: Tea e-commerce + tea tasting service

Full-time:

In 2013, I started my tech career in San Francisco. I turned down a Google offer to join a startup doing marketing. Later, my manager gave me the opportunity to internal transfer from marketing to product management.

I joined Dropbox as a growth product manager to learn from the best in the industry, helping grow the business through its IPO.

On the side:

My friend and I started a tea e-commerce, selling sampler tea boxes for people to try new loose leaf teas. We took 6 months to ship our first product. (Don’t do this.)

Vitamins vs painkillers:

We quickly learned that demand wasn’t there. Outside of a handful of repeat customers buying the boxes as a gift for friends. So we shelved this product after selling ~50 units. Tea sampler box was a vitamin.

Then, I tested hosting local tea tasting events. This service generated more buzz than I expected.

I unintentionally uncovered a pain where San Francisco tech professionals felt bored and lonely. They had disposable income but desperately lacked social, novel things to do. Tea tasting was a painkiller.

Side Hustle #2: Career coaching

Full-time:

In January 2019, I quit my full-time job to take a travel sabbatical.

For the first four months, I enjoyed work-free travel. I volunteered on tea farms, took surf lessons, and joined a Mandarin intensive program.

Then, I missed working. So I decided to experiment with a side hustle I had considered for years: career coaching.

On the side:

Back in San Francisco, I did a strengths exercise and discovered several of my peers thought of me as a coach.

Meanwhile I was also very curious about careers. In my 20’s I loved to discuss nerdy career books like Startup of You or So Good They Can’t Ignore You. And so I combined my strengths and curiosities.

In June, I joined Hireclub, a coaching marketplace platform. I took my first intro calls from Osaka, Japan. I recall feeling nervous and made tons of mistakes (more on this later). But despite this, I felt myself growing. So I kept going.

In July, I got my first paid client. Then a second. And third. Initially, the money wasn’t lucrative. But I got hooked on the magic of making money online on my own schedule.

While traveling to 10+ countries, I grew to over 30+ 5-star reviews and moved off the platform to start a private practice. This enabled me to customize my offer and charge higher prices (more on this later).

This was my first experiment with carving out an independent portfolio career.

Side Hustle #3-#5: Consulting, advising, affiliates