Why You Should Dollar Cost Average Your Side Hustle

I never would have though investing advice could so perfectly apply to growing a side hustle.

I saw this post on Linkedin the other day and thought it was genius:

The idea of dollar cost averaging is you forget trying to time the market and invest the same amount of money each month/week/day, regardless of market conditions.

This, historically, has shown to get better returns than trying to strategically buy and sell.

In the context of business, I’ve found the most success once I started putting in a consistent amount of time into my side projects, regardless of how well they were doing.

It’s been almost a year since I started uploading once per week on YouTube, and in that time I’ve had a number of videos bomb, along with some successes.

When I saw the largest amount of growth was once I picked a date and time to show up each week. It’s not been explosive but the graph says a lot:

I no longer pay that much attention to the views each week because I know across a long enough time horizon things will go up.

I spend quite a bit of time on YouTube each week but I think a more applicable example will be my programming journey.

I started learning to code when I was 14 after starting an HTML/CSS course on codecademy.com

From then until I was 17 or 18, I took a number of courses and built a whopping two projects. Neither were complicated or worth talking about.

I learned practically nothing in that time because I spent all my time watching tutorials and never worked on a real project that I was excited about.

I realized the time I had wasted right around when I was 18 and started to re-learn programming without relying heavily on tutorials.

I managed to get out of “tutorial hell” but I still wasn’t learning much because I never game learning to code the time.

I always told myself I “didn’t have time”.

About 3 months ago I was journaling about some of my goals for the next few years and one of them was to launch a software product.

When I thought about what I’d need to be doing to get there the obvious answer was “code a little each day”.

I challenged myself on whether I actually didn’t have time and started putting 30 minutes into my calendar right before my first meeting of the day to work on some side coding projects.

That has probably been the single best decision I’ve made since starting my YouTube channel nearly 4 years ago.

Within the first month of having these daily coding blocks, I managed to learn more about programming than I had in the last 3 years prior.

I did this by choosing a single project that excited me - a boilerplate web app that had login/logout functionality, a settings page, dashboard view etc.

The reason behind the idea is less important than the fact it was something I was excited about and put a little times toward each day.

Since then I’ve managed to increase the average amount of time I code on these side projects each day to 1-2 hours.

I’ve still managed to upload every week and nothing fell apart.

Spending 30 minutes to an hour each day on a side project will make much more of a difference than having occasional 4+ hour sessions any time you get a random sense of motivation.

I would expand the timeline from that linkedin post to 36 months.

I believe that if you choose one project to work on and put a small amount of time towards it nearly every day, you’ll be amazed at where you are in a few years.

My new website

I spent most of my free time last week re-building my Framer website in Next.js and had a ton of fun. I wanted to move it over for extra flexibility and I’m really happy with how it came out.

View it here

The Tools I Use for Software Development in 2024

I’ve been having a lot of fun making more development-focused videos and think it’s a style I want to continue improving. This one is me talking about nearly every tool, app, and site I use for building projects.

Things I’ve found interesting

links to valuable stuff I thought was worth sharing

Why I Love Being a Software Engineer - This video sums up why I love programming so much. I built an admin page on my site where I can bulk create shortlinks, something that the link tool I used to use didn’t have. Having the ability so solve your own projects makes it so addicting.

Storylearning Case Study - I’ve been reading a guy named Olly Richard’s newsletter for around a year now but just got through the case study he wrote about his online language-learning business. It’s 117 pages of pure gold where he talks about everything he does in terms of marketing, hiring a team, etc. He sends it completely for free when you sign up to his newsletter.

The empty calendar system. - A very good video from Oliur. He talks about spending your time more thoughtfully rather than hustling for the sake of hustling. His daily schedule is waking up naturally, going to the gym, then coming home to work for as long as he feels like. I’m not quite at this point but I think this is my dream day.

Nailing Your First Launch - The most valuable video I’ve ever watched about creating and launching digital products. It’s a talk from the creator of TailwindCSS who’s created a few eBooks and courses around development and design. I’ve most recently read his book RefactoringUI and it was great. I’m working on a new web development digital product business and this is something I’ll be coming back to.

Have a great week.

Cole

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