Starting a Side Hustle #thewagproject
With the start of a New Year comes opportunity and perhaps the pursuing of a passion in the form of a business venture. It is the era of the start up 🙂
Here’s a reflection on how my good friend Zoe and I followed a creative yearning and co-founded LaunchPad Media in 2016 to help people uncover and build an authentic online brand. We share our story to help inspire others to start a side hustle if right for you.
Where it all began #thewagproject
Whilst I was on maternity leave with baby Ethan in 2015 and Zoe was having a break from the corporate world we would meet for walks and have inspiring creative conversations. We discovered we had a mutual passion to help people realise their potential and appreciate their value.
What emerged was a set of varying corporate experience and a complementary set of strengths. Zoe, a creative techy with a passion for web/design and me with a love for writing copy and strategizing social media. So how to keep our minds active and make use of our skills whilst enjoying a lot of beach time in Sydney’s beautiful Spring/Summer?…
We decided to put our skills to use and help my husband Owain with his online brand in the build up to the 2015 Ironman World Championships – #thewagproject was born.
We had a lot of fun engaging with the local community whilst helping Owain secure long term sponsorship arrangements, build a meaningful online following, create an aesthetic website and organise a successful send-off event raising money for charity.
Following this, I went back to work in January 2016 and although we didn’t progress with another project, we kept the creative conversations going. In June when I went down to four days a week at IECL it gave me space to start thinking about the creative side hustle again and Zoe was in a position to collaborate.
Launchpadmedia organically emerged
Perhaps meant to be, an opportunity arose through the network to combine our skill set to help a Senior Executive with his online presence leading up to a TEDx talk. The seeds of Launchpadmedia were formed.
Since then, we’ve had the pleasure to collaborate with multiple leaders/coaches/entrepreneurs to translate their face to face presence into meaningful online brands through creating an online identity. This includes co-creating purposeful, aesthetic web presence and a social media voice / imagery. Triggers for initiating an online brand include having a big speaking event coming up, launching a new brand or executives transitioning out of corporate role to start their own venture.
Having started as a passion goodwill project the #thewagproject then evolved with a goal of getting some extra lifestyle money ‘wag money’ for treats such as manicures (hence the blog title image), blow dries, massages etc with Ethan’s expensive daycare fees and Zoe’s more sporadic contract work. We recently reflected it has been great to start our venture without taking it too seriously (whilst still being professional and wanting to do a good job) without any core income pressure.
Our tips for starting a side hustle:
- Don’t overthink things and just have a go – as one of my mentors said ‘learn by doing’
- Start with a low pressure pilot project
- Think about something you enjoy that helps people
- Come up with a guiding charter and keep checking in on it – for us this includes making sure that we’re learning and having fun
- Believe in your own gold, this is possible!
We truly believe everyone has a unique gift in this world which can be uncovered through a coaching approach and then translated into a meaningful digital brand.
Dani Matthews 
fantastic read!