This YouTube video (Nate Tilley) explains a three-step framework for turning a side hustle into a main source of income. Key recommendations: secure a financial safety cushion (speaker recommends ~six months of living costs; his target was $50,000 saved over two years), reduce overhead aggressively, validate that the side hustle can match current income (or that additional hours would), and confirm income consistency (sustained revenue for ~six months) before quitting a job. The speaker illustrates these steps with personal examples (starting online fitness coaching, converting $4,000/month of donations into paid clients, living cheaply while saving).
Questions this video answers
About six months of living expenses (speaker example: $50,000 saved over two years).
$50,000 (saved while earning $50,000/year over two years).
About $4,000 per month (20 friends paying $200/month).
20 friends × $200 per month each.
Chapters
In this video, I'm going to walk through the three step process of going from side hustle to main hustle. So first things first, I'm going to define a side hustle as a main hustle that has not gained enough size to support you financially. And this is an important delineation because if you just try to make side money, then to me that's a distraction from what your real main hustle is, which is probably your career. If you have a career or you have a job, then I'm a big advocate of. The reason you should have this job is because you're trying to learn and earn. And it should be probably geared more towards learning than earning learning, especially in the first decade. Once you have some of those learnings, if you want to just make your own money, then you take the skills you have and you have to make your side hustle really your main hustle. And my objective here is to, number one, first secure your family financially, which means live underneath of your means with just the income from your job. Your side hustle will also hopefully start making some income. Once I have a certain amount of savings for me would be like six months of living is what I would feel comfortable with before starting my next thing. And it's exactly what I had when I started my gym. I see 50 grand from my consulting job over two years, living far under my means, only making 50,000 a year in order to have a safety nut to make the next step, I'd say $50,000. And for me, I lived on less than that. Just do the math on your own. The next step is that I need my side hustle to at least match my income from my current role. Now, is there an exception to that? If for some reason you're only able to work on your side main hustle four hours a week and you're doing half of your income as you're doing in your 40, then I would look at that ratio and be like, well, in four hours I'm making half of what I make in. If I had the other 36 hours back to add to my four, would I be able to match that? If you can use logic and say yes, then I would say I'd feel comfortable making the jump. But if you want to be safe, which many people were trying to make this jump, which is just so you know, the single hardest jump in all of entrepreneurship is going from the safest thing, which is a job, to being 100% eating what you kill. Some people are really easy for it. It was not easy for me. So I want to stack as many things in my favor to make that the lowest risk possible. That's when I started an online business and I got 20 of my friends to pay me 200 bucks a month each. When I started my side Hustle, I actually started a charity project where I got all my friends to pay me 200 bucks a month to do their fitness and nutrition programming from home. And I donated all the money they gave me. It was about $4,000 a month at one point when I decided to transition to my main hustle, which is just going to be fitness. I didn't even start my gym yet, but it was enough that I could live. I just said, hey, would you guys mind paying me instead of the charity? All of them said it was fine. And I transformed $4,000 a month of charity to $4,000 a month of income. And that's how I was able to quit my $50,000 your job for a $50,000 a year online business. And that's what actually gave me my living expenses when I started at my gym, while investing stuff into hiring more people, buying more equipment, things like that that I couldn't afford. In the beginning, the phase three there was that I had seen that they had sustained the level of donations for a six month period. And then when I asked them to go to for payment, that was my big risk and they said yes. And so then I felt confident that I sustained this level of income from my side hustle for an extended period of time. And that ultimately gave me the confidence to jump into the new thing. And to be fair, I actually moved locations during that period of time and dramatically cut my overhead. So like I was saving really aggressively. But when I wasn't sure the money was going to come in, my rent was first zero because it was just the gym. But before that, just when I got to California, I just rented a bedroom from a guy that I met at the gym for 400 bucks a month. And he wanted me to live there because he wanted to get fit. He gave me that discount and that's, I mean, use what you got, right? And so I would meal prep every Sunday with him. And so he got a little bit of value from that, which I got to have a discounted payment. And sometimes he chip in on groceries for my food. Like I've maintained my relationship with that guy for a decade now. Some of those early people who help you out, I think it's always worth remembering that. And so for my first phase of saving up, I saved $50,000 making $50,000 a year over two years, which means I was living on like a third of what I could possibly live on at that time. Because I want to save up this nut to go all in on the thing I wanted to do. Now. I didn't know how sustainable that was. And this is probably something you might not have thought of is that I want to sustain that level of income for six months. All right? This is like orders of risk. You have savings, you've matched your current income, you're living below just one income, which means you're banking three quarters of what you're getting paid probably. And then three is that you've shown that it's reliable. Because if you just month you match your income, you quit and then the next month you drop back down to zero or one quarter because you're doing gig work or whatever, that's going to be really stressful. It's going to affect the work you do, it's going to affect how you sell and honestly it's going to affect every other aspect of your life. And so I would want to see consistency. What side hustle do you pick? I want the side hustle to be something that I have a high likelihood of success with, which is something that I have some sort of experience with. One of the easiest things to do is take whatever you're doing in your current role and start doing that as a contractor, 1099, etc. Do those companies have the most enterprise value? No, but you can make some money and learn some basic skills in business that you would have no other opportunity to learn. You'll learn how to hire people, you learn how to fire people, learn how to have hard conversations, learn how to drive initiatives, you learn how to market, you learn how to sell to get new business. You learn how to contract an invoice, you learn how to process payments, learn how to set up an llc. There's lots of things that you have to learn just going 0 to 1 now, if you have a longer time rise and do that, you'll figure those out as you go. But I would say that you don't need to be perfect on the first pick, you just need to be directionally correct. And the first direction is I'm going to be an entrepreneur. So if you make the first jump, you've already taken the biggest jump in the right direction of what you ultimately want to do. It is very, very, very rare that long term entrepreneurs first business is their last business. Look at every single person that you look aspire to and look up to in the business world, with the exception of Zuck and Bezos, the thing that they started is not the thing that was their biggest thing. Andy Frisella had some direct response brick and mortar store thing and he was like painting lanes in parking lots. I think Ed Mylett was like selling insurance stuff. I was doing personal training online. What you start with is not what you're going to end with, but give you the stepping stones that are necessary to get to the higher leverage opportunity. In my opinion, one of the bigger mistakes people make is they try and go to the big leagues before they're ready and then they fall flat. Are you willing to do the basics? Because realistically, I'm probably not Bezos, I'm probably not Zuckerberg, and you might not be either, and that's okay. And so you don't necessarily need to model their path. You can model one that decreases the risk. Because Bezos had a Wall street finance job at a hedge fund, he didn't need to worry about money. And if he quit, he could go right back to the hedge fund and make probably a million dollars a year. Zuck was a Harvard grad dropout. What could get a job if it failed at any top tech company immediately. And if you don't have those prospects, you need to be, in my opinion, a little bit more respectful of the risk that you're taking on. And if you're a kid and you can live at home or you can live with four buddies, do that. If you can get your living expenses to be so little that you can cover it with part time work, like if you can bounce at a club on the weekends for two days and you get the other five days back, I think that's a net win. But the biggest part of this is like how much overhead do I have to cover in my life that I'm burning hours on the thing I don't want to do long term to do the thing I do want to do long term, massively cut your overhead so that you get as much of your time back to invest in the thing that you want to do most.
