How to start a profitable business on the side

In part 1 we’ve worked on defining your true, long term passions. For a business on the side that’s very important because you may be spending some odd hours (after work/school/when the kids are put to bed) in launching your gig. There is no way you are going to keep that up if you don’t have a passion for it.

Next, we have to find out part 2 of the formula: your target group.

Let’s get to grips with reality first: your potential customers don’t care about you. They don’t know you, they don’t know your product and they don’t want to be bothered. That’s a given.

Lots of companies spend a lot of time and effort ‘getting to know the target group’ and from there, making ‘getting in their face’ more effective. That’s not our approach at all. We have some simple metrics to get people exactly what they are looking for without spending a penny.

To get there, here’s a little formula that works better than anything we’ve seen before:

#long-term-passion + #natural-target-group = #fan-funnel

The fan-funnel is our method of reaching thousands of people that want to hear about you. We will get to this in the next part.

First, we need to know our ‘natural target group’.This is a group of people you already know very well. To us, it makes absolutely no sense to get to know a target group you don’t even like. It’s far easier when you already have a great link with them.

Once upon a time we started a business that reaches User Interface designers. The product was great, the customers were great (some big names) and we had great sales. Especially the book we wrote about it became a hit… but we’re not UI designers ourselves so we had to come to the painful conclusion that WE DON’T HAVE A LINK WITH THESE PEOPLE!

UI/UX designers are very clinical and almost scientific. They live in research-land. We are game designers at heart, which is far more creative and ‘loose’. Needless to say, the target group wanted more products from ‘research-land’ that we couldn’t make for them, so the company never expanded.

Before we move on to the next part of the formula, write down your natural target groups in the comments below by asking yourself:

What group of people am I passionate about spending time with?

You can see our results in the comments. Please add yours as well.

In the next part we’ll be explaining ‘Creating a fan-funnel: Reaching thousands that will bug you for your product’.

The Twins

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