The fastest growing side hustle that I've ever witnessed... 💯

GM Friends 👋

This week is a little different.

It’s all about diving deep on an experience that I’ve recently been a front row passenger to, and if you take away the key lessons from it, you’ll have a head start to launch your own agency / business.

Let’s jump in 👇️ 

📈 Main Article
🧗‍♂️ Building in Public: The Newsletter

📈 Zero to 5-figure agency in 3 months (and growing…)

This story isn’t Web3 related, but it’s something that I’ve gotten to witness first hand and it’s been inspiring.

If you want to one day start your own agency, this article is for you.

So, story time.

4 months ago, my housemate was in a very tough spot.

For the past few years, he’d been working a job that he enjoyed, but it didn’t give him an opportunity for growth.

He had a full-time job running the social media and events for a Japanese restaurant here in Melbourne, Australia.

Although it was fun and creative, there was zero opportunity for promotion, and he felt kind of… stuck.

It was time to get a new job.

He applied to several marketing positions, but found it challenging to get an opportunity with his experience being limited to specifically social media, in the context of a restaurant.

He was also doing small-scale support to a few other businesses in need of a social media manager, at a relatively low rate for how skilled he was.

It literally took months of applying, but recently he finally got his first break by getting an early-stage position as a content creator at a marketing agency.

This was the first inflection point 🌱

He had now taken on a job with opportunities for growth, increased pay based on performance and a more structured environment where he could learn the broader business of agency driven marketing.

At this point, I was super happy for him.

The job alone was everything he needed to begin accelerating his career.

But then came the second inflection point 🪴

The restaurant position he had worked at previously still needed help with their social media, and they realised how good a job he was doing while he was there.

See, his skillset was executing graphics and strategy quickly and professionally, but the restaurant marketing job also came with a lot of other responsibilities that didn’t maximise his capabilities.

So they offered to pay him to continue doing the core value of what he was doing previously (social media strategy & content), without any of the baggage of the other responsibilities.

If you’re a fan of the 80/20 principle, he was finally able to purely work on the 20% of inputs that got 80% of the results.

He was also able to charge based on the value he was delivering, rather than an hourly rate.

"This is great, a side hustle to boost my income” he thought.

But in no way was starting an agency in his mindset.

A week or so goes by, he’s enjoying his new job at the marketing agency, learning a lot about the professional side of pitching clients, packaging offers and managing relationship with clients.

Then came the next inflection point 🌳 

By producing great content, his previous employer reached out asking if he would be happy to take on another gig for a friend’s business, this time at a much higher rate.

But with a higher rate came a higher level of professionalism needed.

Lucky for him, since working at an agency, he’d seen how to position packages, create a pitch deck and market himself as a professional, rather than as a freelancer.

He pitched the new business, and won the work, getting his highest paying client yet on a weekly retainer for content.

And now, it’s started to really take off 🚀 

By having these two hero clients, and working for an agency, he has so much social proof for the value that he can deliver that now, whenever he’s at a cafe or restaurant, he’s able to pitch himself confidently.

This week, he won another retainer based client, and is scaling his own agency faster than he could have ever expected.

He’s working a full-time job where he gets to learn and become better at what he does, whilst building a side hustle that within 3 months is coming close to paying him half of his full time salary.

So what can we learn from this?

For me, this has been an eye opener. I see A LOT of people try to start an agency in Web3, and they focus on the business side first, and the value proposition second.

What separated my housemate from everyone else is two very simple things:

1. Skillset

2. Social Proof

Let’s start by talking about Skillset.

At the time of working for the restaurant, he felt like he wasn’t learning a lot that he could apply outside of that context.

But what he hadn’t realised is that he had become an expert at food photography and marketing towards getting a result (in a restaurant context this is bookings and exposure).

I see a lot of people who run social media for small businesses think their job is to get a certain number of posts live each week. But to the business owner, that’s not what they care about.

They care about how they are perceived in the marketplace and they care about their business objective (selling their product).

His commitment to quality puts him in a class of his own on both of these fronts, which makes it easier to sell his services to others.

Okay, so what about Social Proof.

What he had done at the restaurant as a content creator gave him the social proof to get the marketing agency job.

Having the agency job whilst having the hero restaurant client gave him the social proof to charge a higher price to his new client.

Having the agency job, hero client and multiple other clients has now given him the social proof to easily get more clients. It creates a positive feedback loop.

And the best part is that he gets to do this all whilst earning a full-time salary and learning about how the business works.

So as I’ve watched this story and personally been inspired by it more than any other realtime entrepreneurial journey that I’ve seen, this is what I’ve taken away from it:

• A lot can change in 6 months. A few months ago he was finding it challenging to get a job. Now he’s killing it and growing rapidly.

• Quality matters more than anything. If your standard of work is higher than the competition, you will find it 10x easier to outcompete everyone else.

• Quality is attained through skills. The difference maker for him was his food photography and understanding of the macro context of how posts play into the strategy of a business. If you want to be able to charge more and attract clients, focus on levelling up your skillsets in a way that gets the results they’re looking for.

• Social proof is the key to scaling. If you don’t have any social proof yet, find someone you can work for free for to get their brand name behind you.

• If you want to grow a business, find a job where you can learn that business from the inside. It’s literally like the reverse of university where you get PAID to learn.

I’m really enjoying watching this journey unfold. If you’re at the start of your journey and are finding it really challenging, don’t worry, opportunity is right around the corner.

To take your next step, start growing your skillset, create social proof and unlock the opportunities that most people miss out on.

Good luck 🍀 

🧗 Started from the bottom now we’re here…

^{If you’re new here, one of the core principles of the content I share is that a newsletter is the most linear and simple business you can start in Web3. It has high sponsorship revenue and can go from being a side hustle to a full-time business in under a year. I am building this newsletter in public, to share the progress each week so that you can be a part of the journey. Now let’s get into it 👇}

This Week:
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✅ Get my first sponsorship: (Complete)

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✅ Create a new internal template: (Complete)

Have a great weekend 🌿

— Alex

Thanks for reading this week’s episode of Grow Faster ❤️

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