Jenny Woo, a 42-year-old ex-corporate consultant and Montessori school administrative director who lectures at the University of California, Irvine, operates an online emotional intelligence course and works as a freelance business consultant, has learned valuable lessons from her four streams of income, which have taught her how to initiate, maintain, and enhance side hustles.
Woo also operates a side hustle called Mind Brain Emotion, where she develops emotional intelligence-focused card games. With a collection of 11 games covering topics from relationship skills to job interviews, she sells these products on Amazon, which, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It, generated one million seven hundred ten thousand dollars in revenue last year, averaging $142,700 per month.
According to Woo, the success of her side hustle can be attributed, at least in part, to a three-step process she followed: continuously test your idea after launching it, utilize feedback to guide your next project, and repeat this cycle.
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The Idea of Iteration
Woo's initial game aimed to assist teachers and children in grasping the fundamentals of emotional intelligence. Before listing it on Amazon, she tested it in local schools for three months. Upon observing sales, rather than updating the game, she continued researching and testing, using the feedback to develop new versions tailored to various topics and audiences.
Woo emphasizes the importance of iteration. Despite fears of making mistakes or becoming irrelevant, she advises not to be afraid to reinvent oneself.
Prioritizing Reinvention over Perfection
Creating iterations of her card game and listing each new version as another product for people to buy followed a familiar pattern for Woo, where she changed careers multiple times and reinvented herself at each juncture.
During her career, Woo has held various roles, such as training managers at Deloitte and Cisco, working as a personal trainer, venturing into school administration when her children reached preschool age, and managing a side business called PropMama, specializing in party decorations.
Mind Brain Emotion was founded in 2018 while Woo pursued her master's degree in education at Harvard University. She explains that she often changes things up out of both personal and professional necessity. When she feels bored, she seeks to learn something new and then finds a way to monetize or share it with others.
Many of these changes originate from Woo's personal experiences. She became a fitness trainer while training for a marathon, and she started designing party decorations for her children's events because she wanted to enjoy the process.
Woo is not alone in advocating for reinvention over perfection to build a business and increase revenue. Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator frequently advises founders to develop "minimum viable products" and launch them swiftly to the public to gather real-world feedback from paying consumers.
Tessa Barton, co-founder and co-CEO of the photo editing app Tezza, emphasized to CNBC Make It in January that "Done is better than perfect."
Barton also noted that you learn so much more by just getting stuff out, emphasizing the value of feedback from social media users. With her business bringing in twenty-six million five hundred thousand dollars in sales last year, she stressed that being on social media, people share what they like and dislike, allowing you to continuously improve and reduce the fear of launching new ideas.
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