Welcome to Fully Baked, our Sunday newsletter where we validate one of our previous ideas at a pace Dario Amodei would probably disapprove of 🏎
In today's edition:
💡 Turning other people’s side hustles into your main hustle
🔬 We validated this idea - here’s what we found
🚀 The go-to-market playbook for this service
🤑 What the unit economics look like
⚔️ How the competitive landscape looks
❓ Our verdict: is this a go or no-go idea?
Let's goooo 🚀
🛍️ “Side-Hustles-as-a-Service” Agency
Your bit on the side
Name.com Domain: Sideventure.com
👤 Source: We're going all the way back to edition #1 for this idea, throwing it waaaay back. Time to see how it's aged.
❌ Problem:
We’ve all heard of SaaS, of course, but what about “SHaaS”? That’s right, we’re inventing a new acronym today. That’s because these days everyone wants a side hustle. Whether you’re a college kid looking to make some cash on the side, or even an executive at a big company looking to build something for themselves, everyone wants their own thing.
But take that well-paid executive - say they want to launch a software business or a little golf accessories brand, where are they going to find the time to do it? Well…why not build a service that offers to do it for them? Here's the idea.
✅ Solution:
Build an agency that launches side hustles for busy executives, taking them from an idea to a fully functioning business in a matter of months.
Start in a single niche, like software or e-commerce, and on behalf of the executive you set up their business, create the product and run the day-to-day operations, while the executive approves the important decisions and funds the business.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Product demo
🎣 The Email That Almost Worked on One of Us
A few weeks ago someone on this team got an email from one of our partners. Right name, right context, arriving the week it would have made sense. It was phishing. We caught it, but not by much, and not because anyone was being clever that morning.
That is the part worth sitting with. We write about this stuff every day, and it still nearly worked here.
Bitdefender catches phishing, fraud and ransomware automatically, before anyone on your team has to make that call. Get 60% off your annual subscription, courtesy of Half Baked.
🔬 Our Validation Process
🖥️ Desktop Research
Plenty of people want a business of their own. In a 2005 QuickBooks survey of 3,000 US adults, 54% were thinking about starting a business, although only 17% said they intended to move forward. There’s a sizeable gap between having the idea and getting started.
They don’t all want to hand in their notice either. 33% of those considering a business planned to run it alongside another job. Among existing side-hustle business owners, 40% were motivated by being their own boss and 27% found self-employment more fulfilling than their day job. The appeal goes beyond just extra cash (which high-ranking executives have a ton of…).
📨 Outbound Research
We reached out to 50 executives on LinkedIn asking whether they had any interest in starting a side hustle. Five replied, all saying that they were working on something or wanted to do something alongside their jobs.
Of those five, two said they would be interested in exploring a service that helped them develop and launch it. That would give us two potential follow-up conversations from just 50 approaches.
🚀 Acquiring Customers
👥 Early Customers
Start with executives in an industry you understand. Someone with years of experience in recruitment, logistics or hospitality might already know a problem worth solving and the first ten people to call about it. Reach out on LinkedIn around that expertise: “Is there a business you’ve wanted to build but never had the time to start?”
Build referral relationships with executive coaches and professional communities. Give them a concrete offer to introduce: a short, paid project that turns a rough idea into customer research, a prototype and a product launch.
📈 Scaling Acquisition
Publish case studies showing the journey from idea to first customers. Include the budget, time required from the executive and what happened after launch. A working product is useful proof. A working product with paying customers is much better.
Turn successful projects into repeatable offers. If you’ve launched a small subscription tool for one industry expert, reuse the process for the next. Over time, build separate software and e-commerce packages with the right specialists behind each.
🤑 The Economics of This Business
🏷️ Pricing
Validation sprint: $2,500. Refine the idea, speak to potential customers, test a simple prototype or offer, and produce a launch plan. Sometimes the best outcome is deciding to stop before spending another $15,000.
Build and launch: from $15,000. A tightly scoped first product, website, payment setup and initial customer-acquisition test. For software, that means one core problem solved well. For e-commerce, it could mean a small product range and store. Advertising, inventory and third-party costs sit outside the fee.
Ongoing support: from $2,500 a month. A defined allowance for maintenance, customer support and growth experiments. Agree who handles the daily work before launch, with larger development projects priced separately.
🧮 Unit Economics
Illustrative launch: $15,000 revenue, with $6,000 in specialist delivery, $2,000 in project management and $1,000 reserved for revisions. That leaves $6,000 contribution, or 40%, before acquisition costs.
Illustrative retainer: $2,500 a month with $1,200 in direct delivery costs leaves $1,300 contribution. Ten retained clients would contribute $13,000 a month, provided their workloads stay within scope.
The number to watch is delivery hours per client. At an assumed blended cost of $75 an hour, another 80 unplanned hours would wipe out the entire $6,000 launch contribution. Scope the work properly, including your own time.
⚔️ The Competitive Landscape
🏷️ Primary Competitors
Thoughtbot: Already helps founders research and shape software businesses. This shows that validation and product development are established services. Serving executives who intend to keep their day jobs needs to change how you deliver: fewer meetings, clear decisions and a practical operating plan.
Doing nothing: The business idea stays in the Notes app and costs nothing. This is a serious competitor. Make the first commitment small enough to consider, with a clear budget and an honest picture of the involvement required.
🎯 The Gap
The positioning we’d test is a launch team built around the executive’s limited availability. They bring the idea, industry knowledge and funding. You organise validation, delivery and the first customer tests, with one weekly update and clear decisions for them to make. Software or e-commerce can both fit, provided the team has a repeatable way to deliver the chosen model.
✅ Go
We’d give this a Go for a small pilot. The tools exist, adjacent services exist, and there’s a clear offer to test with people who have money to spend and something they want to build.
We’d lead with small software businesses built around the client’s professional expertise. That gives you a specific problem to investigate and potentially a route to the first customers. E-commerce can sit alongside it where the client has a strong product idea and the team can handle the operational work.
The condition is proving that executives will pay enough for the service to work. Sell one validation sprint, measure the hours and only recommend a build when the research justifies it.
That’s how their side hustle could become your main business.
👋 That's All Folks
Before you go, a quick public service announcement:
Looking to sponsor Half Baked? Just fill out this form and we'll get back to you ASAP.
See you soon,
