THE REAL PATH TO FINANCIAL FREEDOM – THE TRUTH BEHIND SIDE HUSTLES!

Hey guys, Andrew here. I just thought I’d take a second to come out to my garage where I keep my extra bookshelves full of all the books I read, and obviously I keep them next to my lambo… You know, as you do! Anyway, I thought I’d take a second out of my super valuable day to bestow some of the wisdom that helped me get disgustingly rich and afford all these books and lambos. I’ll tell you my secrets to making money online, the secret to financial freedom. You can trust me to deliver the secrets to… oh [censor beep]

I’m.. I’m sorry you had to see that. But, if you’ve seen any one of the thousands, possibly millions of ads and youtube videos selling you the idea of “passive income” or “financial freedom”, there’s a good chance you’ve heard them recommend a few common strategies for achieving the very reasonable goal of being able to support yourself and your family. Actually, let me be clear upfront – this video is not intended to be a slight on anyone who wants to achieve that result. Providing for yourself and your family is the sole thing we absolutely must do with our lives, and in the system we have currently, that’s pretty difficult for the vast, vast majority of people. The people who sell you on this promise of an easy, effort-free way to achieve that goal are the predators preying on vulnerable people, so it isn’t hard to see why you’d like what you hear from them. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make money on the side – I’ve found some success in doing that, and so the point of this video is to share what I’ve learned, hopefully arm you with some critical thinking skills that will help you weed out the unscrupulous grifters, and show you what I feel is the only real way to do this whole “side hustle” thing with any level of success.

So, back to the topic at hand. The gurus will regularly sell you on ideas like dropshipping – basically you set up an ecommerce website and list hot selling items from aliexpress on your site, with a considerable markup of course, then when someone buys from your site, it just forwards their order to aliexpress who ships the product, and you’ve made yourself some easy money! The problem here is that anyone can do this. In fact, they already are doing it. There are plugins for ecommerce sites set up to explicitly let you do this, which are being used by thousands of sites already. What’s the chance enough people are going to find your basic estore site and buy the thing they could find on 20 different dropshipping websites (or aliexpress for a tenth of the price)? Pretty low. 

One of the other scams Folding Ideas highlights beautifully in his video “Contrepreneurs: The Mikkelsen Twins” – which really dives deep into these sorts of grifts and I seriously recommend watching – is the idea that you pay a very, very underpaid writer a shockingly low fee to write some BS non-fiction book in a month, then pay someone else a shockingly low amount of money to record reading said book so that you can then list is as an Audible audiobook and rake in that sweet sweet passive income. Except, who’s going to listen to a BS book about some random topic? And, more importantly, how are they going to find YOUR BS book about some random topic, over the tens of thousands of other BS books about random topics from other people looking to make an easy buck like you? 

For me, these schemes boil down to: would you pay for the thing you’re selling? No, really. Would you pay for a 2000% marked-up plushie from a random website, or pay to listen to “A Sceptics Guide to Hypnosis”? No, right? Well… why would anyone else? There’s also a bit of a sanity check you can do on the people selling you these ideas – surely if getting books written and narrated or dropshipping products or any of the other get-rich-easy ideas worked, the people selling courses on how to do it would just keep their mouths shut and be doing that 24/7, right? They’d be making bank, why would they bother to spend time making a $4,000 course on how to do what they’re already doing? Unless the idea doesn’t work, and they can make more money selling the courses or even just making youtube videos about it, than they can doing the thing they say makes the money. As Dan points out in the video, the Mikkelsen twins did do the whole use-slave-labour-to-write-books thing, and only once that well dried up did they make a course on how to do it too. 

The key thing I’ve come to understand is really just basic economics. If there is zero barrier to entry – there’s no cost or skill involved in doing the thing – then you have infinite competition. Anyone else can start dropshipping or affiliate marketing, which makes YOUR dropshipping site or content mill blog infinitely harder to find. Hell, that’s what happened to youtube. Anyone can make a youtube channel, but only a lucky few of us actually make any money from this thing, and even less make it big time. Sadly I’m not a part of that club, although this is my full time gig so I’m definitely lucky there. But, the point is, the more people that are doing the same thing, the less chance there is that virtually anyone will make money. It’s a vicious feedback loop, because the people who do make a bit of money can use that money to expand their business, run more ads, which in turn helps them sell more products, which only crushes your chances even more. That’s capitalism for ya! 

There’s a reason why I opened this video with a sketch that looked an awful lot like a Tai Lopez infomercial – because back when I was like 15, I was served one of those videos as an ad. It was pretty late at night, I was on my phone in bed, and he caught my attention enough to watch the whole 30 minute ad. Seriously. I then clicked the ad link and stayed up the rest of the night watching the three hour video that promised me I’d learn the three secrets to making passive income online with little to no money or effort. He’ll tell me them any second now… any second… Ah damn he wants like a grand for a DVD course. Ah well, I don’t have a grand. But, he still got me. The point I’m getting at here is to say that no one is immune to that kind of persuasive language – it’s such a powerful idea, and especially in the place I was at at the time, I NEEDED something like that to lift me out of the position I was in. So I fell for it, hook line and sinker. I don’t think I would have paid for the DVD, even if I had the money for it, but I want to make it clear that it’s ok to be lured by such a tantalising promise. You just have to realise it isn’t what it seems.

I think that brings us nicely onto the whole “true way to make money” thing, and to explain why I, a tech reviewer, am making what so far has been a non-tech related grift-busters video. The way you make money is to offer something of value – for regular employment, you exchange your time, skills and labour for money. Pretty simple. When selling a product, you have to be selling something that someone else values more than the money in their bank account. And the case study here is my open source testing tools. I created these because I had a need for them, and no one else was selling what I wanted. So, I learned more about electronics – and cleared out the cobwebs on my A level Electronics knowledge too. I learned about how to design circuit boards and how to get them made. I learned how to write the firmware the microcontrollers needed to run the tests, and how to write the software needed to process all the data. I learned how to solder everything together. I learned how to model the cases in Fusion360, and 3D print them. I assembled them, and started selling and shipping units worldwide. It’s worth noting that a normal individual would hire people to do at least some of the things I just mentioned, but seeing as I’m very much on the spectrum and love making stuff, I did it all myself. 

The key thing to note though is that it took a lot of work. Like, it took me a year to go from “I’m gonna make a response time tester” to having OSRTT on sale. It took me another six months to redesign it and create the newer Pro version. It took me something like a year to make the latency tool – and FIVE PCB REVISIONS ahhhhhhhhhh. It took hundreds – actually probably thousands of hours of work to make these three, and I’m planning on making a colour testing tool too so that’s probably another six months of work on the weekends and in the evenings. The point is it’s hard work. But I made something people find valuable. Valuable enough that they want to buy them – hell, Apple (yes, that Apple) is a REPEAT CUSTOMER. AOC and Philips have bought something ridiculous like 8 tools in total (seriously what are they doing with them??), and hundreds of people around the world are using them in their work. I’m incredibly proud of that, and proud of all the hard work and dedication I put in to make these things a reality. I’m even getting the next OSRTT Pro design manufactured – at least all the surface mount components, I’ll still be soldering a couple of through hole components here at home and then assembling and validating them before shipping. That’s a big step too.

To set your expectations, you’ll likely have to work pretty hard just to find enough information to gather all the knowledge you’ll need to make your idea a reality. For the response time tool, I read PHD papers, the VESA spec, hundreds of reviews and consulted with incredibly knowledgeable people like Simon from TFT Central and Tim from Hardware Unboxed. There isn’t going to be one easy source of information, and there is going to be a lot of trial and error both in making your product, and actually running the business. A good three months of the year or so I spent making the first response time tool was testing. Testing the device, but also testing monitors to get a better understanding of what edge cases I could expect to need to deal with out in the wild. Then I’d write some code to try and handle that case and test again. That’s likely going to happen whether you’re building an electronic device or running a pressure washing service. There’s going to be trial and error, and a whole lot of learning. 

The takeaway from these tools is – if you want to make money by starting your own business, you need to be selling something people think is worth paying for. Dropshipped crap or Avon lipstick isn’t that. Find something you are interested in and passionate about, learn more about it and see if you can find a niche that isn’t being filled. A problem that could do with being solved, and then make the solution. It isn’t going to be as easy as just setting up a website and forgetting about it, but it’s much more likely to give you some actual returns on your investment, and honestly it’s going to be more rewarding too. Also, if you happen to want to see a video on how to make electronics, let me know in the comments and I might just get to that too. 

I’ve been trying to make various products for near on a decade at this point. Solar batteries, energy producing heatpumps, video games, a national technology show – I got pretty far with that one too – but it was only when I found an idea for something I personally needed that I found any success. I needed a way to measure response times on monitors, and the idea of buying a £1000 oscilloscope and £500 photodiode and then doing every transition manually didn’t sound all that appealing to me. So I made a tool that for a tenth of the cost automates the whole thing. I figure that if you create something you need, there’s a good chance there are other people like you who’d need it too. If you’re just creating ideas for an imaginary target audience, it’s really hard to pour your soul into making the thing, only to find out that the target audience is non-existent. 

It’s worth pointing out that this whole side hustle thing isn’t going to be the right fit for everyone. I’ve been able to dedicate basically every waking hour to running my youtube channels, Locally Links, and making these open source tools, but that’s because I don’t have kids, I have an amazing wife who can pick up the slack for things like cooking and cleaning when I’m hyperfocusing on a programming problem, and I don’t know the meaning of work life balance. It’s up to you to decide if you can take on the sort of time and energy commitment that running a business entails. I know that isn’t what you probably want to hear, but I don’t have a course to sell you, so I’m willing to be honest. 

In short then, the key thing that every other “financial freedom” “passive income” “side hustle” guru seems to ignore: you have to make something people are willing to pay you for – whether that’s a product or a service – you have to make something of value. That’s it. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk…