We have talked about side hustles for extra income, learning new skills, and exploring passion. But side hustles can also be a way to introduce novelty in your life. That's what made our hustler today start on the journey of part-time indie hacking, and since the summer of 2022, she has

⚒️Built & launched three products

💷 Generated revenue of 500 Euros on the side

😍 Built an audience of 10K+ followers on Twitter

Pauline's journey into the world of side hustles

Pauline Clavelloux is a Data Scientist at IBM, France. She graduated in engineering and has been working in the Data Science field for more than eight years. Over the years, Pauline built small projects that would help her workflows but never opened them up for others.

But it all changed when she joined Twitter in early 2022.

Building an audience & launching the first project

After eight years in Data Science, Pauline had insights & experience that she wanted to share with others. She started writing about Data on Twitter and seeing positive results. People liked her content and started to follow her and ask her questions to help them in their data science journeys. Being on Twitter, she also came in contact with the community of indie hackers. She liked how these people built products and supported each other. She has been building projects in isolation, but the community inspired her to create a business around it.

So she decided to go back to a personal crypto project. She was an active crypto trader but found it challenging to keep track of the changes as per her trading strategies. So she decided to build a tracking system that would alert her when a crypto chart matched her strategy. It was a problem for many traders, so she launched it as Cryptopy.

But the project could have gotten better traction, and she found it hard to reach out to the traders. It was a failure, but it did not deter her spirits.

Building on the AI Avatar trend

The last quarter of 2022 saw breakthroughs in the generative AI space. Image generators like Dall-E & Stable Diffusion were released. The applications became a hot topic, and it started the trend to have AI-generated avatars.

Pauline was on vacation at the time and saw these AI images everywhere. It intrigued her, and she wanted to understand how it worked. She figured it out quickly and decided to build an AI avatar generator with a friend.

They were able to build it very fast and launched Unrealme in November. With the trend everywhere, the project got traction and gendered 500 Euros in revenue.

She knew it was a trend-driven product and would not become something sustainable. Also, the cost of running the product was high, so they decided not to market.

Building and experimenting with side projects

Pauline plans to experiment and build different products in the coming months. She wants to solve various problems and focus on a product that finds the perfect fit. In line with that, she has a blog called About Startup, where she shares stories of founders.

Her recent launch is Twitter Explorer. A Twitter extension that helps to export Twitter account data to Google sheets. It's a solution that Pauline made to solve her problem. When she started on Twitter, she found the UX confusing. She could not find her bookmarks and messages easily, so she made a quick fix. Then as her followers grew, she was not able to know anything about her followers. She would also get messages from people asking her questions, the answers she already had in her tweets. But she needed help finding her tweets quickly. And to solve these problems, she decided to build Twitter Explorer.

The soft launch got a good response, and she plans to market the product in the coming days. So follow her and see how she is building it out.

Huslers Insights of the week

Share your journey on Social: Pauline has been building digital products to solve her problems for some time. But she was never sharing it with others. But getting into the Twitter community inspired her to create a business around them. And sharing her journey and products helped her build a following and get more ideas to build.

Keep an eye on the trends: Side hustles can be fun, and you can build something that does not become sustainable. But only build for trends if it excites you. Pauline did get into the AI avatar trend but quickly realised it was not for her and decided not to spend her time on it.

Pay attention to your own experiences: Getting ideas for side hustles becomes easy when you pay attention to your problems. Both of Pauline’s ideas emerged out of a problem she faced. It also enables you to build a solution that will work best as you know the problem first-hand.

Resources of the Week

Trend VC Essentials reports: Trend VC reports are an excellent resource for understanding any topic in depth. Their reports cover topics such as building newsletters and micro Saas, which can be great starting points for your side hustle journey.

Playbook to build your first GPT-3 product: Are you interested in generative AI and want to understand how GPT-3 works? Try our latest playbook to understand the topic and learn how to build a GPT-3 powered product with no code.

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