Student Question: Hello Master, I’m 32 years old. For the past few months, I’ve been building a side business — contributing articles to large accounts and magazines, running a public blog, and I’m now thinking about writing a book. My ideal life is to make a decent living through writing, while still having time to pick my daughter up from school, take her traveling, take photos together, and not constantly rely on my parents for help. At my company, I’m a content director, but the internet industry is brutally competitive and overtime is constant — which is why I want to develop my side income.
My side income is currently around 5,000 RMB per month, and it’s inconsistent. I’d like to invest more time into it and find a real balance between work and life. Master, how can I make my side business grow more effectively — and more effortlessly?
Master Chi’s Response:
First — the fundamental contradiction facing most people who do side work is this: you have extremely limited time, and the window of opportunity is short. If you’re investing effort and seeing no progress, most people will give it three months, maybe six, at most a year or two — and if there’s still nothing to show for it, they walk away entirely.
Given that reality, you need to achieve high growth and outcompete others at the same time. So my advice is to concentrate your energy on one thing first. Getting one thing to 90 points is more meaningful — and far more profitable — than spreading yourself across three things and getting each to 70 points.
Second — frankly speaking, whether it’s a side hustle or building a business outright, both involve finding clever angles and seizing the right openings. There’s no shame in that; it’s simply the reality in front of us. Everything from chasing traffic, to refining your product, to closing clients — all of it is about producing results quickly, with low costs and high returns. Your biggest advantage right now is that you have no baggage holding you back.
When I say “seize the right opening,” the opening means choosing a market with strong, real demand. But choosing a large market alone isn’t enough — many big markets with abundant demand have existed for years, and you simply can’t displace established competitors quickly. What you need to focus on is change — specifically, recent shifts that are on the verge of becoming significant. Position yourself as someone participating in that wave of change. Within that space, pick a niche small enough that you can cultivate it quickly, extend your reach, and gradually build genuine influence. That is where real opportunity lives.
Third — today, whether you’re learning a skill or launching a project, there is one deep trap: following the crowd. Don’t pursue something just because everyone is talking about it. Instead, understand the underlying logic behind each project or skill — what kind of money is actually being made here?
Many strategies appear on one platform, and even when that space becomes saturated, the same playbook often works again on a completely different platform. The underlying logic is simple: a product is a bundle of user needs, and user needs are universal. Take selling contract templates on Douyin — house purchase contracts, rental agreements, employment contracts. That exact model works just as well on Xiaohongshu. The platform changes; the need doesn’t.
So you need genuine depth in at least one domain. The money you make comes from three sources: riding a growth wave, monetizing a barrier to entry, and migrating a proven strategy to a new platform. What these three have in common is that they all require you to have real expertise somewhere. The threshold for “real expertise” is concrete: you’ve earned an average monthly profit of no less than 10,000 RMB on a single platform for at least three consecutive months. That’s the bar.