How to pick your side hustle (as a PM)
Four steps to building a successful product
Hey, I’m Colin! I help PMs and business leaders improve their technical skills through real-world case studies. For more, check out my Live cohort course and subscribe on Substack.
Today we’re going to dive into something non-technical – side hustles. I’ve recently talked to a lot of product managers who want to launch their own products using AI. Having built more than a dozen products while working full time (most making $0 in revenue, 2-3 doing slightly better than $0, and one or two products that really took off), I thought I could offer some advice.
I’m going to walk you through my (opinionated) framework on how you should launch your side hustle. Let’s dive in!
Distribution → Customer → Solution → Delivery
Whenever I’m considering launching something new, I always work through this framework:
Distribution – How will people find me?
Customer – Who will I serve? What problems do they have?
Solution - How can I (uniquely) solve their problem?
Delivery – What’s the best packaging for this channel?
Each of these steps is a stage gate for the next. I must have a clear understanding of my distribution channel before I even start to think about my customer.
Distribution
This approach already goes against most conventional advice, which tells us that you should start with your customer. I think this is true if you have a clear marketing strategy and the resources to execute on it. For most of us, this isn’t true – you probably lack time, money, or expertise.
By starting with a distribution channel, you immediately limit the scope of who you might serve and how you’ll market to them. You want to solve one problem, for one customer, through one channel. By using an existing distribution channel, you don’t need to figure out how to find every customer – some of them will find you.
Typically, a good distribution channel is a marketplace. Examples of distribution channels include:
Substack
Shopify app store
Udemy
Maven
Airbnb
Youtube
When selecting a distribution channel, you want to pick one that has minimal products for your niche and many products available for adjacent niches.
For example, there are many popular product management Substacks (100k+ subscribers), and only one or two popular product management Youtube channels. Given Youtube is 100x the size of Substack, this tells us there probably are not a lot of PMs looking for product management content on Youtube.
Note: Social media is not a distribution channel, it's a marketing channel. Youtube is unique because you can get paid for creating videos, whereas most LinkedIn creators make $0 unless they sell a product off platform.
Customer
Once you’ve decided on a distribution channel, you need to pick a customer.
You should be able to answer questions like:
Where do they work?
Why are they on the marketplace / distribution channel?
What is their budget?
How are they hoping to feel after they buy from the marketplace?
What is their most pressing problem?
It’s important that you pick a customer who has a real, recurring problem that they are motivated to solve.
You should target a solution that does one of the following:
Makes your customer money.
Makes them feel better.
Saves them money.
This list is in descending order of value to most customers. Also, you should only sell products to people or businesses that have money, it makes everything easier.
Over time, I’ve learned to prioritize problems based on the strength of the customers’ emotional needs, rather than practical needs. I’m sure you think there’s many products out there that aren’t worth their cost. These products are probably providing some emotional value – just not to you.
A great example of this is Peloton. This is a premium bike that costs thousands of dollars, requires an expensive monthly membership, and has tons of features most people don’t need. And still, customers provide rave reviews not based on the price, or the features, but on how it makes them feel.
Peloton has positioned themselves as a premium, high quality brand. Many of their customers are not worried about spending $3000 on a bike if it makes them feel better. By offering a full solution (bike + classes + community), Peloton reduces emotional barriers by increasing confidence that the solution will actually work.
Overall, your goal should be to identify what practical and emotional needs will be met when someone buys your product. Your positioning should show them how your product can help transform them into the person they want to be (for this very specific problem!)
Solution
Now that we have clarity on who our customer is and how we will distribute our product, we need to decide what to build.
Great solutions leverage the unique background or skills of the team building them. Ask yourself – why am I the best person to deliver this solution? If you have a clear understanding of how your unique perspective lends itself to solving a customer’s problem, you’re likely on the right track.
For example, I’ve launched 3 courses on Maven. Two were successful and one flopped.
Structured Decision Making for Product Managers was my attempt at communicating common thinking patterns I’ve used to be more successful – things like divergent & convergent thinking, how to write an effective decision document, and navigating tradeoffs. I don’t think the course topic is a bad idea. In fact, many successful courses on Maven touch on similar ideas. But there was no clear answer as to why someone should learn these skills from me.
Compare that with Technical Foundations or AI Prototyping, where I have shipped SaaS products multiple times solo, worked on highly technical products, and have built great rapport with my engineering teams in every company. It’s clear that I have a unique message to share on technical topics.
(By the way, I never launched One Month MicroSaaS but am thinking about reviving it now that AI coding tools have improved. Let me know if this sounds interesting to you!)
Delivery
Delivery is how you actually package your product – live course, recorded course, SaaS, downloadable template, etc. A lot of work goes into producing high quality products, so it’s even more important that you have a strong thesis for your distribution, customer, and solution before you start on delivery.
It is critical to match the expectations of customers who reach you through your distribution channel. Each channel has its own unique vibe and rewards specific types of products. For example, the most popular Udemy courses have 20+ hours of content for $30 or less.
When thinking about how you’ll deliver your solution, start by finding the three most successful products that serve the same customer as you. Observe how their solution works – is it long form, short form? Video, software, books, physical goods? How do they talk about the product? What do their reviews focus on? Your goal is to mimic the patterns you see to simplify decision making for your customers.
Let’s walk through my Substack as an example. When I started, I looked at publications like Lenny’s Newsletter, Product Growth, and Byte Byte Go as serving similar audiences. These publications all focus on long form content, with some short articles or podcasts. They publish 2-3 per week. Their content focuses on providing expertise on a very specific topic in each post (from their experience or a guest’s), and reviews/feedback focus on quality as a distinguishing factor.
The easiest way to grow my Substack is to build a product that matches the expectations of this audience by mimicking these patterns. Sometimes, I make content that doesn’t match my audience's expectations and it always performs worse.
This isn’t to say you shouldn’t have a unique perspective or spin, but going against these patterns will make things more difficult for you at the beginning.
Putting it all together
Launching a successful side hustle as a PM requires careful consideration of four key elements:
Distribution - Start by identifying your distribution channel. This decision will shape everything else about your product:
Look for channels with minimal competition in your specific niche but high concentration of adjacent products
Make sure there's proof of similar products succeeding
Customer - After deciding on distribution, define your customer:
Focus on customers who have money
Figure out how you will satisfy both practical and emotional needs
Make sure your target customers already using your chosen marketplace
Solution - Your solution should leverage your unique skills and experience:
Build something that aligns with your expertise
Make sure you can clearly articulate why you're the right person to solve this problem
Focus on solutions that make customers money, make them feel better, or save them money
Delivery - Package your solution in a way that matches marketplace expectations:
Study the three most successful products serving your customer
Match the overall format, style, and pricing of successful products
Focus on quality as your differentiator
Getting Started
List 3-4 marketplaces where you already spend time
For each marketplace, identify:
What successful products look like
Who the customers are
What problems they're trying to solve
Map your unique skills and experiences to these opportunities
Choose the intersection of marketplace, customer, and solution where you have the strongest thesis
Remember: Your goal isn't to build the perfect product - it's to build something small that solves a specific problem for a specific customer through a specific channel. Start there, learn from your customers, and iterate based on what works.
this is excellent (DREAM - Distribution, Rules, Everything, Around, Me)
Love the 'distro' focus. My challenge is how to get the answers to the Customer and Solution questions.