How to Launch Entrepreneurial Projects as a Busy Parent

What projects to take on and how to get them done as a parent entrepreneur.

Working on side hustles becomes much more challenging with a baby or young child in the house. As parents, we’ve got very limited time — and energy — to work on our entrepreneurial pursuits. So we have to make the most of it.

That means being selective about what we choose to work on and making consistent progress each day. Although juggling parenthood and entrepreneurship is no easy feat, it can be done.

In this newsletter, I’ll share my perspective — as a stay-at-home mom who’s also hustling to get projects out the door — on how to validate ideas and launch projects as a busy parent.

What should you work on?

What you choose to work on comes first. You may work really hard toward something. But if you’re working on the wrong thing, then you’re not going to get the results you’re after.

I learned this lesson the hard way when I co-created a skill-planner with my husband. We worked really hard for over a year, and sunk a ton of time and money into it. But the results were dismal. As it turned out, we were working hard on the wrong thing.

In retrospect, we would’ve reconsidered this planner if we had a set selection criteria about what projects to take on. Instead we jumped on the idea without carefully thinking through whether or not it was a reasonable one to pursue. Although we lost time and money, we learned a valuable lesson: have a set of criteria to help you determine which projects to pursue.

Now I run through a checklist of items to help me determine what projects to take on. It’s helped me to launch several entrepreneurial projects as a parent in short order, including my latest one: an ebook, Problem-Solving for Programmers.

1. Pick a topic you know well

Writing an eBook on problem-solving may seem random. After all, I write a lot about babies and even created baby-related resources last year. And then there’s the skill-building planner. The commonality is that I choose things I know about. That’s what you want to think about first when choosing an entrepreneurial project: pick a topic you know well.

Activities for babies is one topic I know. I’m a parent and find value in playing and doing activities with Hayden. However, I had a problem: as a first-time mom, I didn’t know what activities to do with him as he got older. I wanted simple activities I could do with Hayden organized by age all in one place. But I couldn’t find it.

2. Identify a problem you’re trying to solve yourself

And that’s the second thing to think about: identify a problem you’re trying to solve yourself. Think about what’s missing, what you could use yourself, or what would make a process easier. My problem resulted in a solution that I created, Learning Babies: a free website that provides simple activities for babies organized by age.

3. Reduce pain

Ideally, the problem you’re trying to solve lessens the pain. That’s the third point to consider when thinking about entrepreneurial projects to take on. People are often more than willing to use or buy something that’ll reduce pain. This is where the skill-building planner fell short. It’s nice to have. But people can get along just fine without it.

My later projects have hit pain points.

Learning Babies reduces the pain of searching everywhere for activity ideas for babies. Problem-Solving for Programmers reduces the pain of solving problems, which is hard to do but absolutely essential for programmers to learn and get good at. Getting better at this skill is a must. Now there’s a resource, born out of my own need, to help in that process.

4. Give yourself a short timeframe

Once you have an idea in hand, then think about how quickly you can get it out the door. This is the fourth point to think about. Ideally, you can get launch your product within a few weeks, instead of six months or years. Here, too, we missed the mark with our skill-building planner. It took over a year to create and publish, and the sales were less than desirable once we finally launched it.

We could’ve prevented such heartbreak and saved a lot of time in the long run if we’d started small. That’s why I follow author Jim Collin’s advice to “ fire bullets, then cannonballs.” In other words, start small and test the idea. It’s a lot quicker to launch a simple, small project than a large, complex one.

This mentality is useful to apply as parents, given the demands on our time (and energy!). You could spend months or years creating something people don’t want, which is what happened with our planner. That’s why it’s better to fire bullets first before launching a cannonball.

Problem-Solving for Programmers is a bullet. I didn’t include everything about problem-solving. This 80-page eBook contains seven approaches programmers can apply to the problems they solve. If it takes off, then there’s certainly a lot more to say about the problem-solving process. It may turn into a cannonball. But right now I’m still testing this idea. It’s still a bullet.

How to find the time?

Now that you’ve got an idea you can run with, the second challenge as a parent entrepreneur is finding the time to work on it.

First, get your baby or toddler on a routine. Keep in mind that a routine is not a strict by the minute schedule. Rather, it’s a structured daily rhythm. As I’ve written in previous newsletters, babies thrive on routines. And so will you. Everyone wins when there’s some sense of predictability in the day.

Hayden follows an eat, activity, sleep routine. Once he wakes up from his nap, he’ll eat. Then, we play. Then, I get him ready for his nap. He knows what’s coming up — and so do I. I use his nap times to work on entrepreneurial projects.

But the real key to getting entrepreneurial projects out the door is to get up before baby gets up in the morning. And you’ll know when baby will wake up if he’s on a routine. Use this time to get something done.

That’s exactly what I did to write Problem-Solving for Programmers. Hayden wakes up at 6am. So I got up early to work on my eBook. I worked on it for about an hour each day, every day.

To make the most of this time, each evening before bed I identified one thing I wanted to get done the following morning. This concrete objective helped me to hold myself accountable and to use that hour effectively. In the course of a few weeks the book was written and edited. And, to be quite honest, I really enjoyed it. I savored that hour of solitude before the busyness of the day began.

This morning hour has proven to be essential. Even though Hayden follows a routine, sometimes things don’t go as planned and the daily rhythm is disrupted for one reason or another.

No matter.

I still got one hour of work first thing in the morning. I still made progress. And that’s what you’re after as a parent-entrepreneur: make progress each day. That’s what you’re after if you’ve got little ones in the house.

The incremental progress you make toward a project accumulates and eventually results in the big strides you’re after. Just show up and work on the right project each day. It’s that simple, and that hard.

I write about entrepreneurship and parenting on my newsletter, Entrepreneurial Parent.

Originally published at https://entrepreneurialparent.substack.com on January 5, 2023.