Thoughts on side-gigs

The seed:
A side-gig is meant to be a low gain, low stress thing. It should be something you can easily outsource/automate. In fact, being easy should be the highest priority. If anything doesn’t meet first criteria, the second shouldn’t be bothered. I crank up a lot of source code on my full time job, don’t want to do that for my side gig.

Benefits:

Having a different type of side-gig means a different part of your brain gets activated when you’re working from your home office. It also means you’re not putting all of your eggs in one basket.

Example:

Transcription and video editing for example, pretty much fit the bill. You can start the biz on your own. At first you’ll be slow but you’ll get familiar with various English accents and the overall process of transcription/close captioning. Once you have a reasonable income you can reinvest (after paying you a 15% of your full time salary), you can start putting cash aside to hire virtual assistant(s) to automate parts of the process.

Expansion:

I believe that the transcription expert should be a separately dedicated person. S/he would provide the transcription which would be then used by the video editor to add subtitles to videos. We do need better software tools for the closed captioning though. Techsmith Camtasia is not good enough IMO.

I being a software developer will have an opportunity to software products tailored to the needs of transcription people and video editors who add closed captions to videos on regular basis. Although, that’s a very far-fetched possibility and I don’t want it to be on the list. Smells like a short sighted office rat.

Instead, I would love to get a VA who could work as a BD and find work our little business machine.

Family matters:

Begum(my wife) doesn’t have to play a role in this plan. But, I do believe she needs to be able to support herself and the family even if I’m not there. She also needs to do something beyond the household, it will comfort her mind. She will have a purpose of life other than bearing and raising children. It’s going to come with a decent income as well, which will give her some freedom of choice.

Office or no office?
In the end, I believe I don't need an office where people could come to work. Instead, everything can be outsourced to guys & guls who can work from home(or anywhere else they can get the work done for that matter). If Wordpress do it, why can't a small video editing shop? Instead of spending money on buying the computers & air conditioning, I think we should pay them well and invest in collaboration tools(work software, company website, file sharing services, get together, project management software). Maybe we could facilitate a few people through co-working spaces sometime in future. Like, when the power cuts get worst in summer.
I will get myself a couple gigantic screens though and setup a home office for myself. 

PS: The author has been there, done that. I used to work through freelance portals like ODesk(now Upwork), Elance, and Freelancer for developing Android apps and Windows desktop software. Took a start in video editing through Fiverr. 

PS2: This is not a morning journal entry. Just putting it there so that it will be easily traceable in the future.