How to Have a Happy Hustle summary

You may have come up with a really great problem that you’re excited about working on. Fantastic! But in order to develop it properly, you’ll need to find out how the problem actually affects other people. 

A persona, a model of your invention’s target user, is a great way to start – especially if your target market is significantly different from you. Evans once visited a team of software coders who were designing a game for middle-aged women with children. In order to make sure they were designing with the user in mind, the young male coders developed a persona called Barbara. They then tried to put themselves in Barbara’s shoes, constantly imagining what her life might be like and what her preferences might be. It worked. For example, instead of their original ideas to add gunfire and explosions to the game, they decided Barbara would prefer fireworks and popping champagne corks.

Too often, we think that for any given problem there’s a single, perfect solution out there just waiting to be discovered. The trouble is that this kind of thinking stifles creativity, which then makes problem-solving much harder! 

The truth is that there are many possible solutions to virtually every problem, and in order to find the best of them we need to be creative and generate as many ideas as we can. Comparing these solutions then sharpens our thinking and makes us less likely to cling to any one of them. Working like this, allowing our minds to roam free and explore creative solutions that might not be obvious at first, is called divergent thinking.

There’s nothing quite like the rush of invention, and along the way, you may find yourself getting really attached to the ideas you generate. Ultimately, though, you’ll have to choose just one.

That can be tough, and it means that you’re going to need to change modes. Start analyzing each idea with a critical eye rather than a creative one. To get some perspective, make a list of the criteria that you'll use to evaluate your solutions. Make them as objective as possible, and designed to assess whether your idea will work as a business. For example, if you want your business to deliver craft coffee to office workers, then useful criteria might include considerations such as whether or not you can realistically keep the coffee hot. You could consider the competition, too; might a bigger enterprise like Uber Eats muscle in on that corner of the market? This is an exercise in cold-heartedly killing your darlings until you’re left with an idea that is both exciting and workable. 

Ever heard of the Harry Potter series? Most people have; the books are now unquestionably a worldwide phenomenon. But they nearly didn’t even make it to print. J. K. Rowling’s first book was rejected twelve times before a publisher gave a few chapters to his eight-year-old daughter to read. She was so desperate to know what happened next in the story that he knew the book had the makings of a hit.

It’s essential to test a product with the right target users if you want to know its real potential. Doing so saves you valuable time, and money, too – after all, there’s no point in creating something unless your target audience wants and needs it.

If you’ve got a great idea, it’s not uncommon to keep it to yourself out of concern that someone else might steal it. But keeping it to yourself can also be destructive, causing you to miss out on valuable feedback that could help improve your idea. 

Daunting as it might be, if you want to create a successful business, you’ll have to learn to communicate your ideas to others, and to do this convincingly, you’ll need to master the art of the pitch. When you pitch, you share your vision as simply, yet concretely, as possible. Your aim is to persuade and sell the benefits of your concept to an audience. It's essential to practice your pitch on whoever you can: your pets, your family, your buddies at the bar – whoever will listen! Pay attention to visual cues from your audience; are they engaged and nodding along, for example, or do they look like they want to nod off? 

How do entrepreneurs learn how to succeed? It might come as a shock to discover that first, they need to learn how to fail.

Failure is so important, in fact, that in their very first week at the prestigious Singularity University, located on the NASA campus, students are given an assignment requiring them to go out into the world and fail as often as possible. 

Imagine you’re standing in the proverbial dragon’s den, pitching your idea to a panel of steely-eyed investors. One of them asks the question you’ve been dreading: “How big is your market?”

It’s one thing to have a great product that users like, and another to have a product that can attract a big enough market to be profitable. In order to grow your idea, you’ll need to grow your core group of early users and attract a wider audience by finding the right marketing techniques.

Whether you’re doing a side hustle on the weekends or plunging into a full-time entrepreneurial role, you’ll need support to keep going for the long haul. 

First, you’ll need to make sure you have enough money to give your product time to develop and reach the right market. That’s known as having runway – just like an airplane, your project needs enough time to be able to take off properly. 

This is an exclusive blink, covering content that’s not in the original book, but created by the author as a side project to her main hustle.

Side projects are having a moment. With rapidly-changing workplaces, many people juggle their gigs, have portfolio careers, and they self-identify as multi-hyphens.