Growing up and adulting comes with the joy of having various obligations. For example, doing your dishes, paying rent instead of buying toys or blowing money on stuff you don’t need. Anyway…

At the end of 2022 I managed to secure a nice place in the town I grew up in. Being able to live close to friends and family again was a great prospect. However, this also meant that a big part of my (future) earnings must be going towards paying off my mortgage.

Overall, I’m happy with my decision to move into a bigger place with a nice little garden. But still, seeing things (watches mainly) online and on social media that I’d like to purchase makes things difficult. If you’re the owner of something, in this case, a house, it comes with the responsibility of upkeep. Not the most fun, or cheapest, thing to do.

After another evening of online shopping, I decided it was time (pun intended) for another watch, the Omega Speedmaster. A purchase I’m still really happy with, but, it did raise the question:

Was this a responsible decision? And, how can I acquire my next watch in a more sensible way?

So, this encouraged me to start looking for ‘side hustle’ opportunities. But first I had to come up with a set of requirements. This is to make sure this does not affect my day-to-day work, and that ‘it’ can either grow or be handed over if needed.

Requirements

My next venture has to meet the following requirements:

  • Be flexible, no fixed day or timeslot is needed to perform
  • Be doable from home
  • Be cheap (below 100,- to get going)
  • Be related to wrist-watches (to keep myself engaged)
  • Have the possibility to grow (e.g. into a full business or in another direction)
  • Be measurable (are ‘things’ going somewhere?)
  • Easy to hand over to someone else (get acquired/option to sell the business)

This short list still gives me a lot of flexibility, and ‘it’ was still unclear.

The idea

Having a background in ICT/Cyber Security, quickly leaned towards going with something technical. The first thing that came to mind was to start a webshop (e-commerce), however, I do not have a degree in marketing or sales + without a reasonable prior upfront investment for stock, repairs, insurance, etcetera, this is not something that meets my requirements. However, it might be something for the future once things gain traction.

This also logically resulted in starting with an approach of ‘traffic first’ and ‘monetization later’.

I came up with the following short execution plan:

  • Buy (one or several) domains that match my niche
  • Set up a mailbox, hosting, traffic monitoring and website framework.
  • Write blog posts about watches, with matching keywords.
  • Setup affiliate marketing
  • Fine-tune and adjust where needed

What’s next?

Of course, affiliate marketing isn’t “as advertised” - and requires a lot of forced writing for others about a fixed set of products (with the sole purpose of generating a click/sale). Maybe I was too quick to judge, however, more about this in a couple of blogs time.

But first, the initial execution of the idea: Getting the blog up and running.