With 5 Income Streams, $142K/Month from Amazon, This Woman Warns Against 3 Side Hustle Mistakes

Side hustles have become widely popular since the pandemic with about 39% of the Gen Z working on a side hustle, as per EY. With soaring costs and high inflation, more Americans are looking to make extra money. However, side hustles can be difficult to navigate, especially for those who are just starting out. Thus, to help out hustlers, Harvard-trained educator, and founder of Mind Brain Emotion, Dr Jenny Woo shared some crucial insights with CNBC Make It.

Woo was inspired by a class project and her personal struggles, to launch a side hustle selling card games on Amazon. Her games aimed to help people build “human skills” like emotional intelligence and critical thinking.

After completing her Ph.D., Woo branched out into other hustles and today she has five income streams. She speaks at schools and businesses, teaches an online course about EQ, lectures at the University of California Irvine, does freelance business consulting, and she still sells the card games, Mind Brain Emotion through her site and on Amazon which is $142,000 a month alone, as per the report.

Here are the 3 Mistakes that She Wants Hustlers to Avoid

1. Settling for Subpar Service to Save Money

Dr Woo says that side hustlers should ideally work with fellow side hustlers to collaborate and save money while growing their business. However, working with another collaborator who is striving to grow, may result in unpredictable service.

Sharing an example, Dr Woo said that she parted ways with her social media manager and SEO vendor last year who were both solo entrepreneurs aspiring to turn their side gigs into agencies. She says the collaborators handed her business to new recruits who knew very little about her industry, thus, she had to let them go.

She said that staying with underperforming collaborators cost her money as she did subpar business even during the peak season. “As much as collaboration can be beneficial, it’s crucial to be diligent about who you hire,” Dr Woo said in the report.

2. Over Relying on Networking to Grow The Idea

As a solo entrepreneur, Dr Woo applied and was accepted to incubators at Harvard, UC Irvine, and USC, where she got access to top executives and advisers. While she took advantage of the knowledge pool, she was often left confused and overwhelmed. Dr Woo says while the opinions and advice were well-intentioned, she found the advisers to be projecting their own ambitions and mistakes onto her.

Thus, she advises hustlers to bring skepticism and feedback in such to avoid being swayed by the ideas of others. “I’ve found that relying too much on external validation diluted my vision and slowed my progress,” she told CNBC Make It.

3. Making the Product Too Complicated

Dr Woo says she had major issues as she spent a lot of time researching and developing flashy product features. She thought of including augmented reality components and more just to add the wow factor. However, this ended up confusing her users and added more pressure on her to develop better products.

“This will not only slow you down, but it will also inflate your costs”, she says in the report. Thus, now that Dr Woo has already launched a dozen products and has heard plenty of pitches from aspiring entrepreneurs, she advises people to not complicate things.