Side project / side hustle for established professional in SF

November 26, 2023 9:37 PM

I have been working developing a side project / side income to support my full time income as a design leader and capability builder at leading biotech here in San Francisco. I

have a flexible but set hours and a relatively high degree of extra mental bandwidth to support the needed mental bandwidth to help support getting the side income stream going. Without going into my background or skillset some of guardrails:

- Interested in generating the maximum amount of revenue in 12 -24 months
- Ideally able to manage the business remotely (but could be location dependent)
- Could leverage emerging technology like AI
- Bias toward tech solutions

Could be something as mundane as a food truck (have others do sales), or weird as an egg carton printing business, or on demand t-shirts, or an info business, like repackaging and reselling public domain info.

Love to hear your suggestions?

posted by specialk420 to Work & Money (5 answers total)

All your listed ideas are great (high risk, high capital investment, saturated market) ways to lose a bunch of money over 18-24 months.

The highest return is going to be putting a bunch of time into a job search to find a higher compensated position in your field.
posted by rockindata at 5:15 AM on November 27, 2023 [7 favorites]

Can't speak to your other ideas but the history of food service is littered with the failures of people who had no idea what the business was about thinking it was a great way to make a lot of money quickly. Most food service ventures fail within the first year, startup costs are high and margins razor thin, don't imagine that if you don't have the right background you would be an exception - especially if you are outsourcing the work. You don't just need spare mental bandwidth, you need time and a lot of it.

Even people with multi-generational experience, good starting capital, and a high work ethic get ground into the dust in that business. Ask me how I know.
posted by Ardnamurchan at 6:21 AM on November 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: A lower risk approach that ticks your boxes would be, put yourself out there as an AI consultant for small businesses. Every business owner out there is hearing about AI and trying to figure out how to apply it in their business. Larger businesses have staff or can hire staff to work on this. Smaller businesses (think $1 million in sales or less) have a harder time doing this inhouse. (Also smaller non-profits.) So, develop a consulting approach that starts with a survey of the business and what opportunities for AI applications it may have, and then move on to an implementation plan, which could include your continuing services to them .
posted by beagle at 9:08 AM on November 27, 2023 [4 favorites]

Response by poster: @beagle - thanks love the suggestion (actually confirmation as its on my concept map) ... for @ardnamurchan and @rockindata, the food truck suggestion is an example of how wide a net I am casting at this point. Using a design thinking / double diamond approach I am trying to have as many ideas as possible at this point across the entire constellation possibilities.

I have an acquaintance who makes over 200K / year on the side repackaging publicly available investment info for example, another who does over 100K selling corndogs on the weekend, another favorite example is young woman who bought an egg carton printing business with a bank loan and now is making 6 figures - https://www.eggcartons.com/

If anyone else has cast the net wide suggestions, please share, I'd love to see this thread help others get their side hustle going.
posted by specialk420 at 10:57 AM on November 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Mod note: Comment removed. Please keep your answers helpful to the question and refrain from sarcastic or belittling comments, thank you.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 7:35 AM on November 29, 2023