Everything I Did Instead of Starting My Side Hustle
On October 8th I gave myself thirty days to test a small idea: a digital store on Shopify selling Notion and Excel templates. The kind of thing I've been building for our own household anyway. Thirty days, one store, see if anyone buys anything.
A week later, I've barely started. Here's everything I did instead.
We cooked a turkey.
Thanksgiving dinner was at 4:30, and the bird was a stuffed 19 lb turkey (8.675 kg, for the metric half of my brain). It also had to be gluten-free and lactose-free, which in our house is just the guest list. We roasted it at 350°F, and it worked. The turkey sandwiches have been top of some family members' lists and bottom of others', as usual.
That's not nothing. That's a product launch with a hard deadline and a demanding customer base.
Gavin posted a song.
This is the part I actually want to tell you about.
Gavin posted a cover of "No Prospects," and he recorded it on the shoreline at Dogfish Bay, our family's place on Quadra. The water, the shoreline, the island he's known his whole life, and Gavin singing into it.
I won't try to describe the song. You should just listen to it here 
. We love how Gavin is choosing music as one of his favourite self-expressions — this is the guy who wouldn't do guitar when "required" at school! I wasn't thinking about templates afterwards.
There's something about seeing your kid make something and put it out into the world, in a place that means so much to all of us. It made my thirty-day store test look exactly as important as it is.
I renewed the mortgage.
Less poetic, but it took real time. Our renewal came up, and I had the usual choice: lock in a fixed rate, or stay variable.
Fixed rates had gone up again. Most of our other borrowing floats anyway. So I chose the 5-year closed variable at Prime minus the discount my bank offered. Rates might go up. But I'd rather keep the flexibility than pay for certainty I'm not sure I need.
Which, now that I write it down, is also my approach to the side hustle. Keep the option open. Don't commit too hard, too early. It sounds wise when it's about a mortgage. It sounds a bit like procrastination when it's about a store.
I ran the numbers on the "cabin" (Beach House and Bunkhouse).
At some point every family with a cabin sits down and asks what it really costs. I did that this week for the Quadra Island place. Running costs are significant per year, and that's before ferries. Anyone who's done the BC Ferries math knows that "before ferries" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Then there's internet. I've been weighing Starlink against Mascon (Telus), which is the kind of decision that sounds small until you're the person the family calls when the video won't load. I need our builder and electrician to help find a better, unobstructed spot for the satellite (difficult in a coastal forest) before switching one off. In the meantime, I've downgraded the Starlink service level to reduce monthly costs.
Running a household is its own small business. There's revenue (sort of), costs (definitely), suppliers, customer service, and a board of directors that sits around the dinner table and votes on turkey sandwiches.
I built a team of bots.
This is the most ironic part. To free up time for the store, I set up a team of AI assistants. One for email, one for money, one for documents, one to help prompt me to write posts like this one and remember what I've been up to, and one to keep the rest of them in line.
And they helped. We're replacing carpet the family cat has ruined in our Vancouver townhouse — their help managing quotes and replies to the vendor has been a godsend. They helped with everything except the store.
To be fair to them, that's not their fault. The store needs me to decide what to sell, and I haven't.
So where does that leave the side hustle?
It's still there. The thirty days aren't up yet, and I haven't given up on it.
But looking back at the week, I think I already built something. A system for us: the gluten-free, lactose-free Thanksgiving plan, the mortgage choice that keeps our options open, the cabin numbers, and the bots that keep it all from falling through the cracks.
Maybe the real template was the household system I built along the way.
Now I just have to figure out how to sell it.