How to Have a Happy Hustle Book Summary - How to Have a Happy Hustle Book explained in key points

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How to Have a Happy Hustle summary

Name: How to Have a Happy Hustle
Rating: 4.5 (126 reviews)
Author: Bec Evans

Bec Evans

The Complete Guide to Making Your Ideas Happen

4.5 (126 ratings)

28 mins

Topics

Entrepreneurship Small Businesses

Table of Contents

How to Have a Happy Hustle
Summary of 10 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 10

What’s in it for me? Learn how to create a startup, and have fun in the process.

Have you ever heard stories about startups and wished you could start one, too? Many people yearn to leave their day jobs and strike out on their own, but doubt that they’ll be able to come up with a good idea for a startup, much less figure out how to execute it.

Stories about successful startups usually make it seem like their founders are geniuses who are struck by divine inspiration. But in fact, anyone can come up with a good idea if he’s prepared to put in some time and hone skills like creative thinking, empathy, and resilience in the face of failure.

In these blinks, you’ll find a step-by-step guide to creating your own side hustle or startup, including everything from strategies for coming up with a good idea to ways to pitch to potential investors.

In these blinks, you will discover

why doing fieldwork is vital for every entrepreneur;
how to escape your inner critic; and
why quitting can be the most courageous thing you can do.

Last but not least, in Blink 10, you’ll also find an exclusive blink crafted by the author herself, covering content not found in the book!

Your most annoying problems can be a great source of inspiration.

Usually, problems are something from which we want to run away. Who wants to sit and dwell on everything that’s wrong with life and the world? No one. If you’re looking for the next brilliant startup idea, though, you’re going to have to come to terms with problems. Believe it or not, they’re actually the best place to find inspiration.

Finding great ideas means becoming a problem seeker, analyzing frustrations as you go about your day, including the things that trip you up at home, on your commute to work, or online.

For example, one British businesswoman was getting dressed one morning when she accidentally ripped her favorite pair of jeans. She was mortified – replacing them would mean hours of tedious shopping. She couldn’t easily buy online because retailers’ varying sizing models made it impossible to know what would fit her. Looking for a solution to her problem – one shared by millions of women – led her to start an innovative website dedicated to helping women find clothes that actually fit them.

It’s not just current problems that can provide inspiration, though – you can also look to the past. That’s how Anurag Acharya found the inspiration for Google Scholar. Remembering how hard it was to access academic articles when he was a student in India, he created a search engine that specifically looks for academic publications, benefitting scholars all over the world.

Of course, not all problems are created equal. You can create an inventory of annoyances, from burning your toast to finding Excel spreadsheets hard to navigate. But how can you know which you should focus on?

Well, choosing the perfect problem is both systematic and intuitive. It helps to take a step back and evaluate each problem against objective criteria, like whether you have the expertise necessary to tackle it, whether there’s a big market for the solution, and so on. But ultimately, you should trust your intuition. If the problem really excites you, go for it!

Once you’ve chosen a problem, write a problem statement – something that sums up the problem and who’s affected by it in as specific a way as possible. The more detailed you are, the more clues you’ll have about how to solve it, giving you a valuable road map for the work ahead.

To identify your audience clearly, you have to go out and get to know them.

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.

To find a solution to your problem, practice divergent thinking.

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.

Choose a solution, and get it into the world – fast.

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.

Test your product on the right users.

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.

Master the art of the pitch.

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?

Cultivate a growth mindset and be prepared to fail.

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.

Grow your target market by understanding your community.

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.

Gather emotional and financial resources to support your hustling.

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.

A blink from the author: the era of the side hustle.

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.

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What is How to Have a Happy Hustle about?

How to Have a Happy Hustle (2019) is an empowering guide to making ideas happen. Puncturing the mystique surrounding successful startups, Bec Evans reveals how anyone can grow an idea into a business by starting small, thinking creatively and getting feedback from their target market. Most importantly, by focusing on the process of testing and building an idea, connecting with people, and learning from mistakes a happy hustle redefines success to include personal growth, fulfilment as well as financial gain.

How to Have a Happy Hustle won the Startup Inspiration category at the Business Book Awards 2020.

Who should read How to Have a Happy Hustle?

Women who’d love to get into tech but have been put off by the macho culture
Aspiring startup founders who lack the confidence, time and money to get started
Innovative thinkers itching to introduce their ideas to the world
Busy professionals keen to build their entrepreneurial skill set

About the Author

Bec Evans is a former head of innovation whose side hustle became a startup. As well as running Prolifiko, she's a writer, speaker and coach. She helps busy people find the time for creative side projects and coaches budding entrepreneurs to make their ideas a reality.

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