Last week, we introduced the idea of building a business that brings in an extra $1,000 a month. We talked about why a smaller goal can sometimes make starting feel a lot more realistic and why a successful business doesn’t necessarily have to become a huge business.

But if you read that article and thought, Okay, great. But what exactly am I supposed to sell?—you’re probably not alone.

For a lot of people, coming up with the idea feels like the hardest part. We tend to think a business idea needs to be clever, completely original, or something nobody else has ever thought of before.

Usually, it doesn’t.

Some of the best businesses in the world solve problems that have been around forever. People want to save time. They want things to be easier. They want to learn something they don’t know how to do. They want something made, fixed, organized, planned, explained, or handled for them.

A business idea doesn’t have to be revolutionary. It just has to be useful to somebody.

When we think about ideas for a small business or side hustle, we usually come back to three pretty simple questions: What do you know? What can you make? And what can you do?

You probably have more answers to those questions than you realize.

Most of us underestimate what we know because it feels normal to us. The things we’ve done for years don’t always feel particularly valuable because, well, we already know how to do them.

But imagine you’ve spent 20 years working in a particular industry. There are probably things you understand almost automatically that someone just entering that industry would gladly pay to learn.

The same thing happens outside of work. Maybe friends are always asking you to help plan their trips, organize their homes, fix their computers, take photos, work on their cars, create invitations, choose paint colors, or figure out some piece of software.

If people keep asking you for help with the same thing, that’s worth paying attention to.

And then there are the skills you use at work every day without thinking much about them—writing, design, bookkeeping, organization, sales, research, photography, project management, social media, product development, or dozens of other things.

You may not think of any of those as a “business.”

But someone probably has a problem attached to each one.

That’s usually where we’d begin. Not with the huge question of What business should I start? but with a much smaller one:

What problem could I solve for someone?

That shift matters because suddenly you aren’t trying to invent a company. You’re trying to find one person who has a problem you know how to help with.

Maybe someone hates planning vacations and would happily pay you to organize an itinerary. Maybe a small business owner needs help keeping up with social media. Maybe someone wants to learn a skill you’ve been using professionally for years. Maybe people love something you make and would rather pay you than learn how to make it themselves.

The fastest way to make an idea feel more real is to stop thinking about the business and start thinking about the customer.

Once you do that, you can start asking a much more useful question: What would solving that problem actually be worth?

This is one of our favorite things about the $1,000-a-month idea because the math forces you to think differently.

Suppose you create a $20 digital guide. To generate $1,000 in revenue, you need to sell 50 of them every month. If you offer a $100 service, you need ten customers. If you provide consulting for $250, four clients gets you there. And if you create something worth $500, you only need two customers.

Same $1,000 goal. Very different businesses.

Selling fifty things every month is a completely different challenge from finding four consulting clients. Working with ten local customers looks different from selling a digital product to people you may never meet.

None of those models is automatically better than another. The better choice is the one that fits your skills, your time, and the kind of business you actually want to run.

There’s another part of the math that’s easy to overlook, especially when you’re first getting started.

Revenue and profit are not the same thing.

We’ve sold physical products for years, and physical products teach you that lesson very quickly. If you sell something for $20, you don’t necessarily have $20 in your pocket.

There’s the cost of making or buying the product. Then there might be packaging, shipping materials, postage, payment processing fees, advertising costs, marketplace fees, returns, and all the other little expenses that seem to show up along the way.

Services are different. You might have far fewer expenses, which can mean better margins, but the product you’re selling is often your time.

Digital products can be created once and sold repeatedly, which sounds great—and sometimes it is—but people still have to discover them. You still have to market them. You still have to convince someone they’re worth buying.

Every business model has a tradeoff.

That’s why we wouldn’t automatically chase the idea that sounds coolest or the one everybody seems to be talking about online. We’d start with something we could realistically imagine doing.

Think about how you’d prefer to spend your time.

Would you rather work personally with a handful of customers and charge more for your help? Would you rather create something once and try to sell it repeatedly? Do you enjoy making physical things? Would you rather offer a service locally where you can meet people face to face?

There really isn’t a correct answer.

There’s also no prize for choosing the trendiest business model.

If you hate being on social media, building something that requires you to post five times a day probably isn’t going to feel like freedom. If you don’t enjoy dealing with customers one-on-one, a consulting business might become exhausting pretty quickly. And if packing boxes makes you miserable, you may not want to build a business that eventually has you shipping fifty orders every Monday morning.

Which brings us to a question we think people don’t ask often enough.

It’s easy to romanticize a side hustle before there are actual customers involved.

Maybe you love baking, so selling cakes sounds like a fantastic idea. And it might be. But loving baking on a Saturday afternoon is different from being in your kitchen at 11 p.m. because twelve cakes are due the next morning.

Maybe you love photography. That doesn’t automatically mean you’ll love having every Saturday booked with client shoots.

Maybe woodworking is how you relax. Would you still enjoy it if twenty people ordered the exact same table and all wanted it by the end of the month?

None of this means you shouldn’t turn something you enjoy into a business. Plenty of people do, and love it.

It just means it’s worth thinking beyond the first sale.

Don’t just ask whether you can make money doing something. Ask whether you’d still like doing it when somebody is paying you to do it on a deadline.

That little question can eliminate a surprising number of business ideas before they become expensive mistakes.

If we were starting a new $1,000-a-month business from scratch, we’d probably make the first version as simple as possible.

One skill. One type of customer. One offer.

Not ten products. Not three social media accounts. Not an elaborate website with twenty pages. Not weeks spent choosing fonts, designing logos, and trying to decide whether the business name should have an ampersand in it.

Just something useful that somebody is willing to pay for.

Because an idea becomes a lot more interesting the moment someone actually opens their wallet.

You can always make it prettier later. You can add products, change your website, refine the offer, raise your prices, or completely change direction once you’ve learned more.

At the beginning, though, we’d rather know that someone wants what we’re offering.

So now we have the beginning of an idea: find something you know, make, or do; connect it to a real problem; decide what solving that problem might be worth; and make sure the business model actually fits the life you want.

Next week, we’re going to take it one step further.

We’re going to talk about how we would actually start a $1,000-a-month business if we were beginning today.

Not someday. Not after six months of planning. And definitely not after designing the perfect logo.

Just start today.

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