# How to Turn Side Hustle into Main Hustle ## Метаданные - **Канал:** My Amazon Guy - **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzIb3I0HIAQ - **Дата:** 20.03.2026 - **Длительность:** 13:28 - **Просмотры:** 235 - **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/17403 ## Описание Are you wondering how can someone turn a side hustle into their main hustle? Steven Pope, founder of My Amazon Guy, shares his personal entrepreneurial journey from employee to owner, an truly inspiring story of creating nearly 500 jobs since 2018. He details how he mentored an employee, John Aspinall, in content creation, leading to John's remarkable linkedin personal branding success and significant linkedin lead generation. This journey showcases effective strategies for how to grow on linkedin and build a powerful personal branding. This video explains how employees can transition into ownership through side hustles and skill-based work. It covers cash flow, business models, content creation, and why most people fail when quitting too early. Learn how long-term planning, problem solving, and income control shape sustainable business ownership. #EntrepreneurLife #SideHustleTips #BusinessOwner #CareerChange #SmallBusiness ----------------------------------------------------------- ## Транскрипт ### Employee to owner mindset shift [] How do you go from being an employee to becoming the owner? My name is Stephen Pope and I'm the founder of My Amazon Guy. And in 2018, I went from being an employee to becoming an owner. And since then, I've created almost 500 jobs. Uh, one employee that worked for me was named John Aspenol. I taught him everything I knew about how to make content and he became the CTR king on LinkedIn. He has over 25,000 followers and he makes over a quarter million dollars today. Hopefully much more than that in the next year as he starts his new ventures with Aspie and some of his other fun things that he's up to. But in any case, uh John was an employee. He had been making six figures working for me as an account manager selling account executive that is selling uh Amazon services as an agency to other uh Amazon brands. and he closed probably 150 200 different deals uh working for me and I paid him a commission. Now over time uh he decided to work at other businesses and then slowly but surely he became his own boss and it's only recently uh several years after exiting my Amazon guy that he's now full-time working on his own stuff. I've been mentoring him along the way. He's been making lots of great content and as you can see from some of his content and his history and some of the things that he's up to, he owns Ecom Ghost. Uh he helps people with their CTR and many other fun things. So ### Side hustling before quitting [1:35] one of the things that made John really successful at making that transition was treating it as um part of his main job initially or sidehustling it for a lengthy period of time, multiple years, and then finally going full-time. What he found out though is that he's really only interested in two things. One, he liked the idea behind CTR, that's click-through rate, and two, he really liked uh content generation. So, tying both those together, he created uh ecom ghosts. He also does coaching and services on creating images and other designs for Amazon sellers as well as for their content. So, it took him um a long time to pick that topic and go allin on it. So, when you're trying to figure out how to transition from just being a full-time employee over into becoming your own employer, one of the most important things you do is to side hustle first. It's very difficult to make this transition. So, you need a lot of income in the bank. Um, so working nights and weekends, Alex Hermoszy style, if you will, where you're workaholic is one of the smartest things you can do. Now, there's a lot of different types of businesses that you can create, but I think it's really important to do something that's in within your current skill set. So, for ### Picking a business based on skills [2:50] somebody who works in ecommerce, you might open up an Amazon FBA uh brand that's within your own skill set. Uh for John it was content creation after creating a lot of content for his employer u Allah my Amazon guy as well as creating content for Pikfu and other things that he was involved in. Uh and then it just really expanded from there and John is really fascinated with AI and he's constantly testing every single AI element out there. Um, and AI is gonna is going to come a long way before it becomes as usable as the hype suggests it is. But for John, he keeps finding um the latest and greatest, whether it's Gemini Nano Banana or using Comet as a web browser, Allah Perplexity, and getting rid of Chrome. And you know, he was using all of the alternatives to Chat GPT. And Gemini, you know, if you don't know, has 30% of the market now and is honestly the best AI tool. Uh, as well as, you know, so many other things that keep coming out. And so your obsession becomes the easiest side hustle. Uh, having something within your current skills allows for that transfer. Now, sometimes ### Content and CTR as leverage [4:05] you need to be doing the side hustle in uh, you know, w without visibility, right? You're keeping it a secret. And so creating content as a secret doesn't work. So you'll have to figure out what's going to work without giving up your main hustle while you work on the side hustle because an employer typically doesn't want you being tired when you come to work. They don't want you working on a side hustle. I know I don't want my own employees working on a side hustle, truth be told. Um, but I'm creating this video to help people out there who might be in corporate America and they're nineto-fivinging their jobs and they're wondering how to get out of the rat race. Well, becoming an entrepreneur really only works for about, you know, 15 to 20% of the population. And of that percentage of the population, uh, about half of them can only be a self employer. So what I mean by that is they can really only hire themselves, maybe one assistant, maybe two tops, and it's very hard to scale. So you also need to know like what type of business uh environment you want to run. You may not know what business you want to run, but you might be able to describe the environment. Do you want to work online or in person? If you're an extrovert working in person a lot ### Choosing the right work environment [5:20] easier, right? Do you want to attend conferences? shake people's hands? You want to have in-person meetings versus a super introvert like yours truly allah Steven Pope. I do not like going to conferences. I don't want to spend my time on an airplane and traveling. I prefer to create content and do things online. And so I found a business model that works for me. Allah servicing uh people's Amazon brands as an agency as a service model. And it worked out very well for me. But I used to teach chess lessons in person growing up between the ages of 12 and 21. That was my main source of income. Made thousands of dollars as a teenager teaching chess lessons in over 50 elementary schools in the state of Utah. Uh and I helped Schoolhouse chess get on the map. Helped write a lot of the curriculum and did a lot of fun things. That was in person. Uh nowadays you can get a chess coach online. However, there's not a lot of money in it. Uh, and so as a teenager I was making bank, but as an adult, it's really hard to be a full-time chess instructor when you can hire an international master for 50 bucks an hour versus, you know, a lot of other things that I can do. As an Amazon selling coach, I can charge $500 for a 30 minute meeting. The economics just don't scale in the world of chess or other gaming things. So, you have to figure out like, okay, uh, what's the ### Why some businesses do not scale [6:40] environment going to look like? What's the model going to be, you know, looking like? Uh I was toying the other day with whether I wanted to be a political commentator and then I realized that nobody makes money doing that and the risks were very high and you know the polarization of the country and all that other stuff and so I started pivoting more so towards how to make generic business advice which is why I made this video today because I'm talking about uh things that could get me into a bigger vehicle and for you as you try and figure out how to be a self-employer um know that cash is king because the second you run out of cash, your side hustle is over and you're going to be begging to go back to work for your own business. So, you got to be very careful about cash flow. Uh some businesses require cash to start. A lot of SAS bros out there going in the venture capital route and trying to raise money and have no income for one, two, three years. It's very difficult to do that. So, if you're in college or you're a teenager, much easier to do it at that stage versus, let's say, you're a middle-aged man trying to be your own self-employer for the first time. Your risks are at the highest peak. Very difficult for you to transition, get off those golden handcuffs, and start working for yourself. Can it be done? Absolutely. Because is it going to be harder than ### Cash flow and risk reality [7:55] the teenager? Yes, it's going to be considerably harder. So, you need to identify a problem, figure out how to solve it, then charge money for it. Uh it's by the way easier to solve problems for rich people versus poor people. Uh and so you only need one to 10 clients when you're servicing the elite and the rich versus hundreds of clients when you're servicing a more general population. So figuring out your um what you want to be around you in your system, figuring out your business model, figuring out who your customer is going to be, and then diving in. A lot of people will sell things on eBay. uh go to garage sales and then hawk it on eBay or go to uh you know discount stores like Target and then sell it on Amazon or sell uh discount toys after the Christmas rush. There's a lot of different side hustles that you can start. Tik Tok shop is pretty hot right now as well. Um but it's category dependent. Beauty, other cosmetic type products do really well on Tik Tok. You know, some other things won't do as well. Um, you look at a guy like Dude Wipes. Uh, Sean creates this company off a meme, if you will. Uh, where he sells wipes for men to wipe their butts and ### Solving big problems for fewer clients [9:10] he's now got a billion dollar company as far as I can tell. Uh, and he's taking some market share from toilet paper. Uh, you know, this is a sector that has had no innovation for decades in the US market. Uh, beday might be coming in, but they still have nothing on toilet paper. You get the idea. So solving a big problem with a big market is, you know, you're going to turn your side hustle into a main hustle very fast. Whereas if you solve a small problem or you're just a you're just, you know, kind of an intermediate party all selling something on eBay that they can find at Target or other stores, then you're just selling the convenience factor. Uh but there's a lot of ways to do that. Um a lot of people ask when they become their own employer, do I need a business website? email? I would go ahead and do that. I think the cost to do that is so cheap nowadays. You can get a domain um from NameCheep or GoDaddy for less than 20 bucks a year. Uh you can spin up AI to create said website in less than five minutes. A lot of people don't realize how easy it is to do that these days. Uh and then all that design work, you don't even need a designer. You can spin it up in the code inside of AI. It won't be perfect. It's not going to look great, but it'll be good enough for a side hustle. Uh and then you don't even ### Using AI to start faster [10:25] need to hire an employee until you have clients or customers. So you can side hustle for a very long time uh trying to build that up. Although the content piece is the easiest way to scale something as a side hustle. Again, if you have to keep that secret, it's very understandable, but it's going to limit you quite a bit. So just keep that in mind. A lot of people will take the risk of just being public with their side hustle until their employer finds out. And it usually leads to a very complicated or complex or difficult talk. uh some of them end up getting fired and they go all in on their side hustle. So, you just got to be um diligent on what you're thinking. But if you're so put out at the corporate world right now that you don't care if you get caught, pretty good sign. Go ahead and just do it uh and create that content. But keep in mind, uh it's very difficult to go back after you start this. Uh but the side hustle time frame, I think, is very important for people to understand. It's one to four years, one year minimum. some businesses and depending on your model, they could take up to four years to come online. So, this is not a short-term turnaround. Very rare for people um to be able to go day one and make it work. However, I did ### Real timelines for side hustles [11:35] go all in on my side hustle. Um but I'd been I guess I really didn't though because I was side hustling for three, four, five years. I got laid off and then I just magically turned my side hustle into a main hustle and was making $43,000 a month by day 90. And so, I had it ready to go. So, a lot of times you could be creating that side hustle for the day that you get laid off and then you just turn it to your main hustle. Um, but that's very rare um to be able to go quick like go full-time and have it pay the bills when you turn the spot on. So, just be cautious about making it pay your bills that quick. So, like an Amazon business for example, it's very hard to pull cash out of that the first year. it's more realistic two, you know, two, three, four years in to be able to pull cash out of that side hustle. So, it could be more of a long-term play. While you have those golden handcuffs on and you're putting 10, 20% of your salary into your side hustle to buy products and and opportunities, uh, that's very common for that to happen. So, those are just some of my initial thoughts on how to go from being um employed to becoming yourself employer. some books that you might appreciate. Rich Dad Poor Dad is ### When to go all in [12:45] probably one of my favorites for this particular topic. Um, I particularly like the quad that he builds out where, you know, employed, self-employed, employer, and then business owner. And and it's very hard to transition between quads um of your business environment. And especially to go from being an employer to being a business owner, that's probably the hardest one because um you own the business, you you're working in it, but it's very hard to not be working in it and for it to continue to run. And that's kind of the transition point um that I've been at in the last couple of years with my Amazon guy as I've built it out. Um but here's some other videos that you guys might want to watch next related to running your business. A lot of general business advice you can find here.