Solopreneur vs Side Hustler

Over the past year I've spent a lot of time reading posts from people on X. Many of them include advice from very successful "solopreneurs". I myself am more of a side hustler. You may be wondering what's the difference? Well to me the difference, one I think I underestimated, is that I have a full-time job that takes up at least 50 hours of my week and more in energy. Many of the successful solorpreneurs do this as their full-time livelihood. While there is a lot of overlap to building "side projects" and those project that solopreneurs create I'm realizing there are also important differences.

For one, solopreneurs tend to talk about successful B2B SaaS business with recurring revenue. Which is a great target! However, many of those same businesses require extensive marketing efforts to be successful and are often in very competitive fields. As a side hustler you tend to move a little slower as you are less in control of your time. These types of apps (Logo creators, boilerplates, video creators, etc) tend to require a lot of time and marketing that the side hustler may not have.

From my own experience, side hustles, especially those that need to generate small monthly returns can sometimes come from "long tail" type projects and may be monetized in other ways (ads, affiliate programs, sponsorships). My personal history as a side hustler has shown a track record of smaller projects being more successful. Take www.TVFoodMaps.com , a side project of a much more complex app I tried to talk to market. TVFoodMaps has generated $400,000+ in revenue(mostly advertising) over 11 years, many of which almost no time was spend working on it. More recently http://www.BarGPT.app has generated a steady stream of revenue (~$100 / month) and with recent SEO growth I think advertising is almost ready.

On the other hand, any of the larger projects I've tried have been unsuccessful. I feel as a side hustler the momentum needed is hard to gain and even harder to sustain. Plus the pace at which you can innovate and respond to feedback isn't quite what it needs to be for these types of applications. Of course, this is a broad statement and there are exceptions.

The main point of all of this is as you reach out to learn from the larger community there are sub communities (solopreneur or side hustler) that have there own nuanced characteristics which may make some advice better than others. Good luck on your journey.