Issue #002 | Move Forward Every Week
Helping people discover practical opportunities in a rapidly changing world.
Hey — new numbers just came out, and they say something worth pausing on: side hustles aren’t a fringe thing anymore, they’re close to a coin flip. If you’ve been telling yourself you’ll start “someday,” this week’s issue is a nudge that someday is already here for almost half the country.
Trend to Watch: Side Hustles Just Became the Default, Not the Exception
According to QuickBooks’ 2026 Entrepreneurship Study, 47% of Americans reported earning income from a side hustle this year — and 40% say they plan to start a new business or side hustle in 2026. It’s no longer just a way to make rent, either: the average side hustler pulled in about $2,038 a month for roughly 19.5 hours of work, which comes out to more per hour than the national average wage. Side income has quietly gone from a backup plan to a mainstream financial strategy, and the people getting the most out of it are treating it like a real, structured second business — not a hobby they’ll get to eventually.
Opportunity of the Week: Sell the Side-Hustle Setup, Not the Side Hustle
With this many people starting something new, the fastest money isn’t always in picking your own side hustle — it’s in helping other people launch theirs faster. Most first-timers waste their first month untangling things you could hand them in an afternoon: a simple invoicing setup, a one-page contract template, a booking link, a way to track what’s owed. Package that into a “launch sprint” — one paid session where you set up the boring plumbing so someone can start taking money in week one instead of week six. Charge a flat fee, run it over a single video call, and you’ve got a repeatable offer built entirely around other people’s new-hustle energy.
Tool of the Week: Zapier
Zapier connects the apps you already use so small, repetitive jobs happen without you touching them. Here’s one worth building today: connect your payment tool (Stripe, Square, PayPal) to a two-day delayed step that automatically texts or emails the customer a link to leave a Google review. It takes about ten minutes to set up, runs forever, and turns “I keep meaning to ask for reviews” into something that just happens on its own. That one automation is also a sellable service — more on that below.
Money Move: Nobody Is Asking for the Reviews
Most local businesses know reviews drive new customers, and almost none of them have an actual system for collecting them. They’re busy running the business, so the ask gets skipped, forgotten, or only happens when a customer is already upset enough to leave one unprompted. Offer to set up and manage a simple review-request flow — the kind of automation from this week’s tool pick — for a handful of local businesses on a small monthly fee. It’s not glamorous, it won’t make a highlight reel, and that’s exactly why almost nobody is doing it for them yet.
Resource Corner: Atomic Habits
Atomic Habits by James Clear isn’t new, but if you’re trying to build a side hustle around a full-time job, it’s the right kind of new for you right now. The core idea — that small, consistent systems beat big, motivated pushes — is the difference between a side hustle that survives its first slow month and one that quietly dies on a Tuesday. It’s especially useful for figuring out how to protect one hour a day for the thing you’re trying to build around everything else.
Forward Momentum
- Pick one repetitive task in your business (or a friend’s) and build a Zapier automation for it this week.
- If you don’t have a side hustle yet, write down the one thing that’s stopped you — then spend 30 minutes removing just that one blocker.
- Ask three past customers for a review, by hand, so you can feel exactly how much a system for this would save you.
Final Thought
Almost half the country now has some kind of side income, which means the old excuse — “that’s not really a normal thing to do” — doesn’t hold up anymore. Normal changed. The only real question left is whether you’re building the boring systems now that let you stick with it past the first hard month, or waiting for a version of “ready” that never quite arrives.
See you next week.
— Ron, Northbound Weekly
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