Читать книгу Side Hustles For Dummies - Alan R. Simon - Страница 36

Remember Sandy, who rediscovered his childhood sports memorabilia? He noticed that baseball cards, football, and basketball cards, along with all sorts of sports memorabilia, suddenly became wildly popular at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many people were working from home, and many others unfortunately lost their jobs (but fortunately, millions of them started side hustles!). Overall, people were at home much more than before and had a lot of time on their hands, as well as surprisingly flexible work and personal schedules. For whatever reason, lots of people either discovered sports cards and collectibles for the first time or, as with Sandy, rediscovered their long-forgotten collections.

So, it’s settled: Sandy has selected his topical area and is going to start a side hustle related to baseball cards primarily, but also including other cards from football and other sports along with other types of sports collectibles.

But exactly what kind of side hustle is this?

Sandy could, under the general umbrella of “sports cards and collectibles side hustle,” focus on any of the following:

 Just baseball cards

 Baseball, football, basketball, and soccer cards — but basically only sports cards

 “Game-used” memorabilia, such as uniforms and hats, or balls and baseball bats

 Autographs

 Old sports books, almanacs, yearbooks, scorecards, and similar items

But wait! Sandy isn’t even close to being done with his narrowing down and filtering. He decides to focus on baseball cards. But what kind? The baseball-card world is divided into different eras:

 Vintage (basically, older cards from before around 1980)

 The so-called “junk wax” era from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s

 Modern and ultra-modern cards that came after the “junk wax” era ended

Sandy decides to focus on vintage cards. However, stop me if you’ve heard this before, he still has some more narrowing-down to do! He could specialize in:

 Individual cards

 Cards for specific baseball teams

 Unopened packs and cases of old cards (yes, they still exist)

 Complete sets for a given year

Even if you don’t know the first thing about baseball cards and sports collectibles — and don’t care in the least about them, either! — you probably get the idea. Of course, Sandy isn’t limited to only one particular subcategory, or sub-subcategory, or sub-sub-subcategory, or…. But Sandy’s chances for side-hustle success go way up if he hasn’t cast too wide of a net. Whether he plans to buy and then flip (sell quickly) vintage baseball cards, start a podcast about jumping back into the sports collectible hobby, or provide advice to other returning collectors to help them get the most value when they sell their collections, the more focused Sandy is, the better off he’ll be.

Sandy can also head right for the techie world for his sports collectible–related side hustle by focusing on non-fungible tokens (NFTs), a hot new area in the sports marketplace (as well as the art world and other areas of society). An NFT is a unique “digital asset” (basically, an online image, audio clip, or video) that uses blockchain technology to essentially make that digital asset behave as if it were a physical “piece of something” that is actually owned by someone. Sandy obviously doesn’t have any NFTs stashed away in those cardboard boxes up in his attic, but as he jumps into a sports-collectible side hustle, he absolutely could find something interesting and potentially lucrative related to NFTs.

If you don’t have a clue about blockchain or NFTs and you’d like to learn more, check out Blockchain For Dummies, 2nd Edition, by Tiana Laurence (Wiley) or NFTs For Dummies by Tiana Laurence and Seoyoung Kim, PhD (Wiley).

Sandy began his side-hustle planning the right way: by first selecting some area of interest and then narrowing that area down. No matter what your side hustle is going to be, you’ll almost certainly find yourself following the same narrowing-down steps. Table 2-1 shows a few different side-hustle topical areas and then, for each one, some of the underlying narrowed-down subcategories.

TABLE 2-1 Side-Hustle Topical Areas and Example Subcategories

Side-Hustle Topical Areas	Example Subcategories
Beauty and appearance	Haircutting and hairstyling, women’s haircutting and hairstyling, hair blowouts, manicures and pedicures, eyebrow microblading, laser hair removal
Health and exercise	Outdoor biking, stationary biking and spinning, hiking, weightlifting, resistance training, martial arts
Home-design services	Furniture layout, kitchen remodeling, home exteriors, backyard design, firepits
Fashion	Women’s clothing, vintage women’s clothing, jewelry and accessories, vintage jewelry

Even if you’re doing the “just something to earn extra money” version of a side hustle rather than trying to monetize an interest or hobby, you still need to do at least a little bit of narrowing down. Suppose you’ve decided to do some gig-economy delivery service. Do you want to also do shopping and then deliver what you buy at the supermarket or at other stores? Maybe you just want to pick up food from restaurants and deliver the food to homes, with no shopping involved. Making this particular decision will help you decide between, say, an Instacart side hustle versus doing something with DoorDash or Grubhub. Or you may want to just deliver packages for Amazon.

You can “package up” as many different side-hustle ideas as you have time for or that make sense for you. You aren’t even limited to ones that are closely related to one another, such as baseball and football cards, or hair and eyebrow microblading. Be careful not to spread yourself too thin, especially as you’re first getting started in the world of side hustles.