Side Hustle Stack: Platform-Based Work Opportunities

Hi readers,

Sharing something a little different today: I built a product!

It’s called Side Hustle Stack: a directory of platform-based work opportunities. Unlike traditional job boards, Side Hustle Stack promotes flexible work opportunities that have lower barriers to entry, ranging from gig work and side hustles to platforms that help people start small businesses.

While COVID-19 has spurred many people to seek out independent work, helping to boost employment in an otherwise fragile economy, for many workers, platform-based work can feel opaque and hard to find. What platforms map best to a certain skill set or life circumstance? What are average earnings and how many people are making money? Side Hustle Stack surfaces it all.

This website is a joint effort by me, Brandon Handoko, and Lila Shroff. And in true future-of-work fashion, we built it entirely (as our side project) on no-code tools including Notion, Airtable, and Super.

Our Goals For Side Hustle Stack

What do we hope to accomplish with Side Hustle Stack?

• Help people do more meaningful work. Platform-based work is no longer just a temporary side gig, done temporarily to make ends meet. As prominent journalists move to Substack and record numbers of creators join Patreon, we want to contribute to a world in which people can earn money doing whatever they love. Part of that process is decreasing the friction for matching workers to platforms where they can easily get up and running. Passionate about fitness? Cooking? Video games? Side Hustle Stack has it covered.
• Support the rise of micro-entrepreneurship in the time of COVID. The pandemic has exacerbated economic insecurities for millions of Americans, but the platform economy has the potential to unlock prosperity for millions of workers. In Q3 2020, Fiverr’s y/y registrations rose almost 50%, Etsy’s y/y revenue doubled, and applications for self-employed businesses rose at the highest quarter-to-quarter rate on record.
• Address COVID's unequal gendered impact. In September, 865K women dropped out of the workforce, 4x the rate of men. The pandemic has resulted in an unequal gender impact as women leave the labor force to assume caretaking responsibilities, and women are disproportionately represented in industries hardest hit by COVID. Platform work can represent an accessible, flexible alternative for women.
• Provide transparency into labor practices. One researched tool in the fight for the labor rights of platform workers is online forums that celebrate community and communication. Our database provides an organized space for workers to leave honest reviews on working conditions and genuine feedback for other workers.
• Empower creators. While Charli D'Amelio just hit 100 million followers on TikTok, the majority of creators are making do with much smaller audiences. A number of the platforms in our directory are intended to help emerging creators build their brands, grow communities, and manage multiple revenue streams.

We’ll also be publishing updates periodically (newly added platforms & job opportunities) at this newsletter: sidehustlestack.substack.com

Check it out and let me know what you think!

-Li

This article was first seen at: https://li.substack.com/p/introducing-side-hustle-stack